The ticking faded.
Ethan stood in the white room, his breath catching on the sterile air. A strange peace wrapped around him, but it wasn't the peace of clarity—it was the stillness before a wave hits. There were no doors, no visible exits, yet he felt the shift—the timeline responding. Somewhere, in the layers of time and consequence, a thread had moved.
Then, reality broke.
The room fractured like glass, and he fell—downward, sideways, into a chasm of memory and light.
He landed hard in sand.
Coarse, dry, familiar.
The sun beat overhead, glaring. Heat returned with a vengeance. For a moment, Ethan stayed still, letting his fingers sink into the hot grains of an Egyptian desert. When he opened his eyes, he was surrounded by stone. He was back—at the base of the pyramid. But it wasn't the same.
Everything was older.
Or rather—ancient in a way that felt… wrong.
The Great Pyramid had crumbled. Not partially—entirely. It lay in ruin, as though centuries had passed in seconds. Weeds burst through the cracks, and the air reeked of decay and absence.
Ethan stumbled to his feet, heart hammering. "What is this...?"
This wasn't where he had been. Not even a distorted version.
This was... after.
A flicker of movement. From the shadows near a fallen stone, a figure stepped forward. Tattered robes, copper-toned skin baked by years in the sun, and eyes—those haunting, wise eyes—stared into Ethan like mirrors.
"Hemiunu?" Ethan whispered.
The boy was now a man. No longer the eager, wide-eyed guide who marveled at stars and secrets. This Hemiunu was hard, wary.
"You returned," the man said. His voice cracked like dry leaves.
Ethan's stomach turned. "How long has it been?"
Hemiunu gestured around. "The Pharaoh is dead. The pyramid lies in ruin. The priests fled when the stars stopped speaking. Time abandoned us."
Ethan shook his head. "That's impossible. I was only gone a moment."
"To the river of time," Hemiunu said, "a moment can last a thousand years."
They sat under the shade of a crumbling arch. Hemiunu brewed tea over a pit fire, his fingers calloused and scarred. Ethan stared at him, wondering how many loops he had disrupted—how many ripples he'd caused just by pressing a button in a chamber that never should've existed.
"The Loop," Ethan said. "Did it end?"
"I don't know what ended, Ethan," Hemiunu replied. "But we were forgotten. The cycles of the sun no longer align. Crops no longer grow as they should. People age strangely. Some children are born old. Others never grow."
Time was sick.
Ethan closed his eyes. The labyrinth had given him a choice—a reset. He'd chosen one memory to anchor himself to. But he hadn't understood the cost.
It hadn't just reset him.
It had erased balance from this age.
"You have to help us," Hemiunu said. "You have to restore what was broken."
"I don't know how."
The young-old man studied him. "You always say that. But you always try."
As night fell, Ethan wandered alone, stepping through ancient ruins that used to be memories. He passed the obelisk where he first deciphered the star symbols. Gone. He passed the entrance to the tomb he once explored with Sahure. Buried.
He stopped before what remained of the interface chamber. It was a crater.
No light. No gate. No device.
Just dust.
He knelt down and brushed his fingers along the edge of stone, finding a single shard of crystal embedded in the earth. Faintly, it hummed.
The Gatekeeper was gone. But the system still pulsed—weak, fractured, but alive.
A voice echoed faintly—not aloud, but within him.
"You are the consequence... but you are also the key."
He clenched the shard in his fist.
"I need to go further back," he said aloud. "Before the pyramid. Before the time fractures. Before the first loop."
A sudden gust of wind answered.
Sand blew in swirling rings around his feet. Time itself, it seemed, was listening.
And then—a burst of sound. Not thunder. Not explosion.
Footsteps.
He turned.
Marcus.
The last person Ethan expected to see.
"Didn't think I'd miss the end of time, did you?" Marcus smirked, stepping out from the haze of sand, his suit torn and caked with dust.
Ethan rose to his feet. "How—how did you—"
"You cracked the loop," Marcus said. "Not just for you. You weakened the walls for all of us." He looked around. "Nice place you've doomed. Charming wasteland. Smells like legacy."
Ethan scowled. "What do you want?"
Marcus raised his arm. In it, a device nearly identical to Ethan's—sleeker, darker, humming with energy. "To start again. But this time, we do it my way."
Ethan's breath caught. "You've built your own gate."
"No," Marcus corrected. "I stole yours. You left the door open."
He activated the device. Time rippled around him.
Ethan grabbed the shard tightly, and it blazed in response. A different light—warmer, older, purer.
"Don't do this," Ethan warned. "The system is broken. You'll tear the rest of reality apart."
"I'm counting on it," Marcus said, stepping backward into a growing vortex. "See you in the beginning, Ethan."
And he was gone.
Ethan stood alone in the ruins of a broken world, gripping a shard of yesterday.
The stars blinked above, disordered, some swirling, some still.
He didn't know when Marcus had gone.
But he knew where he had to follow.
The beginning of time.
The place even the Gatekeeper feared.