Shattered Time-Chapter 17 – The Echo of Madness

Kael couldn't remember how long he had been standing there.

Time? It had become irrelevant. The world had become irrelevant. The Pulse—the incessant, maddening hum of something... otherworldly, had consumed everything. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every breath.

He glanced around, but there was no escape.

The world—his world—was... fractured.

Shattered glass lay scattered across the ground, but instead of reflecting light, it distorted everything it touched. Figures in the distance twisted unnaturally, like broken mannequins. Nothing was real.

The girl was still there, somewhere. He could feel her presence, a shadow that followed him, but she was always just out of reach.

Her grin, that maddening, cursed smile, flashed in his mind's eye.

"Stop pretending, Kael," the voice whispered again, but this time, it came from inside his own skull. "You know what she is. You know what you are."

The world trembled.

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Flashback—

A hallway, dark and oppressive, stretching into infinity.

Kael walked through it, though he didn't know why. The walls were covered in symbols—distorted symbols, like a language that had been erased from history. And in the distance, the faint sound of her voice, calling his name.

"Kael... come closer."

He couldn't resist. His body moved, drawn to her like a puppet on invisible strings.

The hallway stretched longer, but she was always just a few steps ahead. Her figure—blurred, indecipherable—moved faster than his eyes could follow. Something was wrong.

He reached out—and she was gone.

A man stood in her place.

Tall. Impossibly tall, his form outlined by the flickering light of a distant star. His face, blank as if carved from stone, stared down at Kael. The man's eyes were nothing but deep, endless pits, like black holes.

"She's not real, Kael." The man's voice was thunderous, vibrating through the very air around him.

Kael opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think—could only stare at the void where the man's eyes should be.

The Pulse.

It was suffocating him.

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Kael snapped back to reality—if this could even be called that.

The glass beneath his feet began to melt into a pool of liquid night, swirling with black mist.

A figure emerged from the mist, wreathed in shadows. This time, it wasn't the girl. No, this one was different—bigger. Taller. Cloaked in an aura of darkness that consumed everything in its wake.

The figure spoke in a voice that sent a shiver down Kael's spine:

> "You should've never sought the truth, Kael. The Pulse—it's not meant to be understood."

Kael's chest tightened. The world was closing in on him again, the edges of reality warping like a bad signal on a broken screen.

The figure stepped forward, and as it did, the ground beneath Kael's feet began to crumble. He could see it now—a rift in the very fabric of reality, a tear that stretched across the horizon, swallowing everything in its path.

The Pulse had come from here. From this... tear.

And in the distance—he saw it.

A clock, hanging in the sky, ticking backward.

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Kael stumbled backward, his mind racing.

Time was no longer moving forward. It was being undone.

> "The clock is running out, Kael," the figure said with a cruel smile. "Do you even remember what you lost?"

A flash of memories, now distorted, came rushing back.

His mother—but not the one he remembered.

The one he thought he had lost.

And the one that had been erased from his life.

A pair of eyes—empty, hollow, staring at him with a coldness that he couldn't understand.

His body trembled. The Pulse was suffocating him again.

Was this the price of knowledge? Was this what he had been chasing all along?

Truth. It was burning him alive.

The clock ticked, and with every tick, his past slipped further away. He was losing himself.

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The shadows were closing in, warping reality.

Kael was alone again.

Alone with nothing but the Pulse.

And then, as if guided by fate itself, a whisper broke through the chaos:

> "Find her. She is the key. The girl. She's the only thing keeping you... alive."

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And just like that, he was gone.

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