Light receded. The vision faded. Ethan found himself lying on the smooth floor of the chamber, gasping. The air was charged with static, and every nerve in his body vibrated as if rewired.
The Gatekeeper's words lingered: You are the test.
What did that mean? Was he being judged? Or was this entire journey a final measure of something greater?
He sat up. The column of light in the center of the chamber had dimmed, its lattice frozen. The pieces he'd used to unlock the interface had melted into the floor, vanishing without trace—as if they had served their purpose.
But one thing had changed.
A new panel had opened in the wall. Rectangular, metallic, faintly humming. A door, maybe. Or a seal.
Ethan approached cautiously. His fingertips brushed its surface, and it rippled beneath his touch.
Suddenly, a thin voice emerged—not from within the chamber, but from his own headset, the one linked to his personal recorder.
"Ethan... Ethan Temporal. If you're hearing this... you've made it further than the others."
His heart pounded. It wasn't the Gatekeeper's voice. This was... human. Tired. Familiar.
"I don't know how long I've been recording. Or if this message is looping through the strata of time. But my name is Ethan Temporal. And I'm you."
The recording continued, haunted by static.
"If you're the test, then I was the trial. I thought I could break the loop. Stop the decay. But every choice I made—every time I tried to fix the timeline—it fractured it more. And then the entity... the one that feeds on entropy... it grew stronger."
The voice wavered.
"You have to understand... the Gatekeeper isn't an AI or a guide. It's a prison guard. And we—we're the inmates trying to patch a wall that was never ours to build."
Ethan stumbled back from the wall, stunned. Was this a recording from a future version of himself? A past iteration? Another cycle in the loop?
"If you're hearing this," the voice said, now solemn, "there's still a chance. But you can't just fix the past. You have to rewrite the origin. Not where the loop began—but why."
The message ended.
Ethan's knees buckled. He knelt on the floor, breath shallow.
Rewrite the origin.
It all came back to the device. The time machine. His creation. Was that where it all began? Or had it merely activated something already in motion?
The humming panel before him clicked. Then it opened.
Beyond it lay a corridor bathed in amber light. Symbols drifted across its surfaces like thoughts, fluid and formless.
Ethan rose. Step by step, he entered the corridor.
What he found inside was not another chamber.
It was a lab.
The walls were lined with crystalline screens, showing fragmented images—moments from history, battles, births, conversations, inventions. One screen showed a younger Ethan, pacing before a chalkboard. Another showed his mother, long gone, holding a newborn wrapped in blue.
"Memories," he murmured.
A console at the center of the lab flickered. Ethan approached and placed his hand on it.
[Temporal ID confirmed: Ethan Temporal, Iteration #12][Warning: Loop instability 73%][Recommended action: Access Origin Core]
Another panel opened. Within it—a small device, no larger than a stone. But Ethan recognized it instantly. His prototype.
The very first one.
He hadn't brought it with him.
It had been here the whole time.
He reached for it, trembling.
As his fingers closed around the device, a surge of energy coursed through him. Images bombarded his vision—alternate timelines, broken Earths, echoes of futures that never were. He screamed, but no sound escaped.
The Gatekeeper's voice returned.
"You are not the creator. You are the consequence."
Darkness enveloped him.
And then—a heartbeat.
Ethan awoke, lying on the sand at the base of the pyramid. The sky was blue. The wind gentle.
Hemiunu was leaning over him. "You vanished," the boy whispered. "For almost an hour."
Ethan sat up. In his hand—the device. But different. Calmer. Inert.
He looked toward the horizon.
The journey wasn't over.
But now he knew where it began.