One Week Later — 2024
The air was cold, unseasonably so.
Peter sat on a hospital bench outside the ER, his arm bandaged, his face pale, eyes hollow. Serina stood a few feet away, staring out into the overcast sky. They hadn't spoken much since they were pulled from the wreckage.
The breach was gone.
The Sentinals were gone.
Arthur was gone.
No one believed them — about the lab, the time fractures, the people in robes, the god that wasn't a god. The news called it a "chemical collapse." They called it a miracle that Peter and Serina survived.
But no one asked how they survived.
And neither of them could bring themselves to explain it.
Inside her coat pocket, Serina kept something — a small metal shard. Part of the machine. Still faintly warm to the touch. It buzzed sometimes, like it was remembering him.
She didn't know why she kept it.
Peter broke the silence.
"Do you think he knew this would happen?"
Serina didn't answer.
He looked up. "That he'd die?"
A pause.
Then she said, quietly, "He didn't care."
She meant it — not in a careless way. Arthur knew. And he still did it. Not for glory. Not to be remembered.
Just… because someone had to.
That night
A news broadcast crackled through a small TV in the corner of an empty bar.
"—scientists remain baffled by the chrono-radiation spikes reported earlier this week. Though the breach site is sealed, analysts believe the pulse carried a message. Audio engineers claim it translated into a single word, repeated over and over—"
Cut to static.
Cut to black.
Then a voice — not loud. Just… steady.
"Run."
At Elsewhere. A place outside of time.
A hallway. Endless.
Dim, flickering lights stretched into darkness.
A single figure walked barefoot down its center — slow, steady, every step echoing like a war drum in a tomb.
Arthur.
But his eyes were different.
He didn't blink. Didn't breathe.
Behind him, shadows moved. Watching. Whispering.
Ahead of him, a door waited. It pulsed like a heartbeat. Old symbols carved into the steel. Symbols that weren't human.
He reached for it.
Stopped.
His hands trembled as they reached for the door.
Not out of fear — not anymore.
But because part of him, deep within the shell he once called Arthur, was screaming not to open it. That last shred of what was still human… still him… was thrashing like a drowning man under ice.
But it didn't matter.
The rest of him — the thing he'd become — didn't ask for permission.
He felt it in his bones, in his blood, in the fire crawling through every nerve: the Rathadium had taken root. Not as a weapon. As a will. And it had chosen him.
His fingers gripped the iron latch.
He didn't want to do it.
But he couldn't stop.
He was still inside — trapped in his own body — watching. Powerless. A ghost in the machine of his own making.
The door creaked open, spilling golden, fractured light from the other side. A corridor of time itself, unraveling and looping endlessly, like veins pulsing through a wounded god.
Arthur stepped through it.
Alone.
No Serina. No Peter. No voice in his ear reminding him who he used to be. That had died back in that lab… or maybe even before.
What remained was no longer a man.
Not even a monster.
It was a reckoning.
He wasn't here to fix time. He wasn't here to save anyone.
He was here to break the thing that broke him.
He moved across realities like a crack in glass — quiet at first. Then louder. Then all-consuming. His name faded from memory, his story warped into whispers. Children would dream of silver-eyed shadows. Historians would call him an anomaly. Survivors would call him the hollow man.
But no one knew why he truly came.
Only that he never stopped.
He didn't hate people.
He didn't love them either.
He just wanted time to feel what it did to him.
And so he walked.
World after world.
Life after life.
Undoing the seams of the universe with every step.
Not the villain.
Not the hero.
Just the echo of something that once wanted to be whole.