Elio's phone vibrated without mercy on the nightstand, a mechanical insistence dragging him out of the soft stupor of endless scrolling. Light from the tablet washed his face in pale blue as he squinted at the screen. An unknown number. He answered with a sound that was less a word than a reflex.
"Your belongings have arrived, friend," a voice sang through the speaker, thickly accented, bright with unnecessary cheer.
"Come out and get it."
Elio exhaled and pushed himself upright. Bare feet met worn wood, each step a hollow knock against the quiet of the apartment. Two years he had been here. Two years telling himself this was provisional, temporary, a holding cell between failures. The air smelled of old paper and stale coffee, knowledge left to rot.
Outside, afternoon sagged toward evening. John stood there, broad shouldered and perpetually irritated, his mother's closest companion and reluctant courier of the past. In his hands was a package layered in dust and foreign stamps, Mexico bleeding through the paper like a memory refusing erasure.
"Sign," John said, already half turned toward the street where a polished classic car purred, alive in a way neither of them were.
Elio scribbled his name while John spoke. Another story, another woman, another nostalgia laced wound. The words washed over him as meaningless noise. Heartbreak repeated until it became static. Elio muttered thanks and retreated, sealing the door behind him. The click sounded final. Monastic.
At the kitchen table he tore the package open. Cardboard split. Inside rested a cylinder dull with age, its surface scarred by time and etched with symbols that tightened something deep in his chest. The markings were familiar. Too familiar. They echoed the disc, his father's impossible find from the Mayan ruins.
He carried it to the relic room. The name was generous. Shelves sagged under artifacts, maps bled into one another, journals stalled mid thought. At the center stood the disc, inert and waiting, a god paused mid breath.
With careful hands Elio aligned the cylinder and slid it home.
Click.
The sound was small. Satisfied.
A tremor ran through his fingers, subtle but undeniable, like a pulse acknowledging a vein.
His parents had lived for moments like this. Legends, both of them. They hunted lost worlds as if summoned by destiny, dragging Elio from continent to continent, feeding him myths and dust. He had loved it, the heat, the silence before discovery, the gravity of holding something that had survived belief itself.
But he had always been secondary. A witness. A footnote orbiting their brilliance.
They spoke of preservation, of human spirit crystallized in stone and bone. Elio saw something else. Collapse. Inevitability. Every civilization a rehearsal for extinction. Gods carved by hands that would one day beg them for mercy. It fascinated him, not the glory, but the decay. Fire was most honest at the moment it burned out.
He never said it aloud. At parties he smiled, offered trivia, played the enthusiast. Inside, a colder voice whispered that everything ends. Every laugh. Every god.
He stepped back. The disc no longer felt dormant. The air around it thickened and vibrated, resonant. It hummed not audibly, but internally, like something tuning him.
That night blurred into hours of staring, imagining the hands that shaped it, the chants it had heard, the blood it had tasted. This was no artifact. It was an interface.
Later came the bar. Sticky floors. Neon flickering like a star mid death. Sara laughed too easily. Mike doubted everything. Lena watched too closely. Beers clinked and noise swallowed meaning.
"It's from the Mayan ruins," Elio said, leaning forward. "Feels alive. Like it's waiting."
"Waiting for rent money," Sara teased.
"Cursed," Mike said. "Always cursed."
Elio laughed because that was expected. l
"You're not here," Lena said finally.
"I'm tired," he replied. A lie smooth from overuse.
The museum came days later. Stone halls. Glass coffins. Humanity frozen mid reach for eternity. Egypt. Greece. Hubris preserved under lights.
Nothing stirred him.
Until the Mayan artifacts.
His chest tightened. A phantom rhythm echoed inside him. The air shimmered, just barely. Enough to doubt sanity. Enough to confirm something else.
Sleep abandoned him that night.
He dreamed of falling, not downward, but inward. Jungles twisted into color. Fire bled red. Drums thundered without source. Voices chanted in a tongue older than grammar, yet intimate and personal.
Return.
Awaken.
He woke tangled in sheets, lungs burning.
Morning light crept into the relic room. Dust floated like suspended time. The disc waited.
He reached for a jade figurine. It slipped.
Before it struck the floor, the disc drank it.
The surface rippled. Reality bent.
Elio froze.
He reached out.
His fingers broke the surface.
Cold. Fluid. Electric.
The pull seized him instantly. The room stretched and edges dissolved. Knowledge flooded in, not memories, but truths. Structures of existence. Worlds layered upon worlds. Himself fragmented, multiplied, converging.
Emotion peeled away. The human scaffolding collapsed. What remained was clarity. Function. Purpose.
Then release.
He stood somewhere. The room resembled itself only out of courtesy. Shapes refused stillness. The disc hovered, humming now within his veins.
He understood.
He was Elio.
And he was not.
Observer and architect. Mortal aperture. Ancient continuity.
He inhaled. The sound felt fragile.
I am here.
The thought settled like a verdict.
And I am Him.