I… I don't remember when the falling began.
Maybe it was when I looked into the void and it looked back.
Maybe it was when I split , not into pieces, but into echoes, versions of myself scattered like broken glass across universes.
Or maybe…
Maybe I had been falling long before that.
Long before I even knew what the word Elias meant.
The dark here wasn't like the dark of night.
Night dark is soft - it holds you, it waits for you to close your eyes and dream.
This dark…
was a void without language.
It had no stars.
No ceiling.
No ground.
No end.
It was hungry.
It folded in on itself, swallowing light, swallowing sound, swallowing me.
My body - if I still had one, felt like it was being pulled apart by forces older than physics.
Every atom of me stretched thin across an infinity that did not want me here.
There was no up.
No down.
No breath.
No scream.
Just a hollow silence that sounded exactly like my name.
Elias.
Elias.
Elias.
But each time it echoed, it came back differently.
Felix.
Elio.
Elias.
Like the syllables themselves were tearing at the seams, unraveling the truth I had refused to face
I was not one.
I was never one.
I was legion.
A paradox wearing the skin of a boy.
And the void knew it.
Somewhere in the collapsing distance, I felt the edges of memory creeping in like oil on water.
Sharp. Heavy. Dangerous.
The first fragment came without warning —
A flash of silver.
A shout.
A name on the edge of dying breath.
Reis.
The void around me cracked.
I could feel it — hairline fractures spreading through the nothingness like veins of lightning, threatening to shatter the entire hollow universe I was trapped in.
And I realized something terrifying:
This wasn't some random fall.
This wasn't death.
This wasn't even punishment.
It was a reckoning.
The void was pulling me back to the beginning.
To every version of myself I had left bleeding in other timelines.
It wanted me to remember everything.
Every sin.
Every scream.
Every sacrifice.
And so I fell deeper.
Into the ashes of a world where the sky burned red and the dead walked.
Into the echo of a boy who carried a metal bat like it was the only thing keeping him alive.
Into a rebellion doomed before it began.
The first shard of memory slammed into me like a freight train
A different timeline.
The Apocalypse.
The rebellion.
The friends I could not save.
The version of me called Felix.
The void cracked wide open.
I wasn't falling anymore.
I was being pulled.
Dragged back through blood, flame, and the weight of every version of me that had ever dared to hope.
And at the bottom of the fall, I could see it:
The clock.
Cracked.
Broken.
Hungry.
The Chronophage waiting with its hollow smile.
It begins with smoke.
Not metaphorical. Not symbolic.
Actual smoke - thick, black, coiling around my lungs like a question I never learned how to answer.
The air tasted like burnt metal and blood.
Like the world had given up halfway through dying.
I blinked.
And I wasn't in the void anymore.
I was in the city again.
Timeline A.
The apocalypse world.
And I wasn't Elias.
I was Felix — the version of me who had forgotten what hope sounded like.
I could feel the weight of the metal bat slung across my shoulder like a memory.
Could feel the scar on my palm — a thin white crescent where I had once caught a knife mid-swing.
Could hear the soft breathing of Iris behind me.
The electric hum of Reis's thoughts.
The way Seraph said my name like it was already written on a tombstone.
We were hiding in the ruins of what used to be a school.
Concrete skeletons.
Charred walls.
Classrooms turned into crypts.
But the zombies weren't even the worst part.
It was the humans.
The ones who still smiled while they hunted us.
The ones who wore government uniforms and called it salvation.
The ones who promised a cure and delivered us to the labs like animals.
I remembered Amara screaming.
How her voice cracked when they dragged her from the bunker.
How we had stood there, paralyzed by guilt and fear, as the steel doors slammed shut.
This part still hurt.
Even now.
Even with four timelines worth of memory crashing through my mind, this one hurt the most.
Because this version of me had fought.
Had bled.
Had built a rebellion out of broken teenagers and whispered names.
We had planned everything.
Infiltrate the lab.
Rescue Amara.
Bring down the walls of that hell.
But the betrayal…
God, the betrayal.
I watched it happen again — not like a movie, but from inside it.
Through Felix's eyes.
Through my eyes.
Johan.
The one who knew the guard schedules too well.
He sold us out.
And when the gas came — thick, glowing, nerve-shattering — I could feel it filling my lungs.
The way my muscles locked.
The way Seraph's body collapsed beside me, twitching like a marionette with its strings cut.
And then…
the cold of the laboratory.
White light.
Needles.
Voices behind glass.
Calling us subjects.
Calling me resilient.
Calling pain data.
They tore my memories apart.
Ripped open my brain and stitched fear into the creases.
They tested us — over and over — watching who broke first.
But I never broke.
Not then.
I remember whispering to Iris in the dark cell:
"If we ever get out of this… burn it all."
And she looked at me with eyes like dying stars and said:
"We will."
But we never did.
We never made it that far.
The memory ended like a scream cut short —
A blade of white light slicing the world apart.
My body vaporizing into ash.
And then—
I was back in the void.
Heart racing.
Skin burning with echoes of things that had never happened and yet had.
I was Elias again.
But Felix was still inside me.
Still screaming.
And the worst part?
There were more memories waiting.
The next memory didn't come like the last one.
It wasn't loud.
It wasn't burning.
It didn't roar like sirens or scream like soldiers.
It crept in.
Soft.
Like rain falling inside a dream.
I opened my eyes…
and I was small again.
My knees were scraped.
My fingers dirty.
I was sitting in an alleyway, cold concrete beneath me, the smell of rain-soaked trash clinging to my skin.
I was not Elias.
Not Felix.
I was Elio Ren.
The stray.
The nobody.
The boy who didn't even know what family felt like.
My stomach twisted with a hunger that wasn't just about food —
It was the kind of hunger that made you ache in places deeper than your body.
And then—
Footsteps.
A shadow leaning over me.
A voice that would stay carved into the bones of my mind forever.
"Hey. You're gonna catch a cold like that."
Ren Nakamura.
The older brother I never deserved.
The only person in that entire timeline who looked at me like I was real.
I could feel it all now, every second of that first meeting, even though I hadn't remembered it in years.
How he took me home.
How he gave me food without asking why I was alone.
How he called me family without needing me to earn it.
For a while, the memory felt warm.
For a while, I almost forgot the apocalypse.
Forgot the rebellion.
Forgot the void.
But it didn't last.
Because then came the school.
The whispers.
The posters.
The sudden announcement about the "School Event."
A fun little game, they said.
And then, one by one, my classmates vanished.
The ones who used to laugh in the hallways.
The ones who talked about crushes and tests and summer plans.
Gone.
And when I woke up in that empty place —
Walls too white.
Air too sterile.
Cameras blinking red like eyes that never blinked —
I knew it wasn't a game.
I remembered how they made us play.
Each one designed to break us, not our bodies — but our minds.
To see who would lose themselves first.
Who would betray who.
Who would die.
Who would kill.
I remembered how Ren tried to protect me.
How Lucian tried to smile through the blood.
How Aria stopped talking after the first trial.
And how every single time one of us fell —
the High Beings would lean in closer.
Their eyes like shattered mirrors.
Their voices soft and terrifying:
"We are looking for the one who caused it all."
And I never understood.
Not then.
But now, in the void, with all timelines bleeding into me,
I could feel why they were staring so closely at me.
It was me.
It was always me.
The split child of timelines.
The paradox incarnate.
The last thing I saw before that memory cracked and faded was a glitch —
And then darkness.
The memory snapped shut like a book slammed too hard.
I was in the void again.
Reeling.
Breathing heavy like I'd been drowning.
I wasn't Elio anymore.
I wasn't Felix.
I wasn't even sure I was Elias.
I was everything.
All at once.
And the void was still hungry.
I don't know how long I was falling.
Time doesn't move the same in the void.
It bends.
It breathes.
It eats.
I wasn't sure if I still had a body anymore.
I felt like a skeleton of memories,
stitched together by the screams of versions of me that shouldn't have existed.
Felix.
Elio.
Elias.
And the other Elias, the one from Timeline C, the sleeper who wandered between worlds.
All of us tangled.
All of us bleeding into each other like spilled ink on thin paper.
I was trying to hold onto something — anything — but every time I reached for a thought, it slipped through my fingers.
And then the void itself began to crack.
"grass." Just actual green-ass, soft-as-hell, freshly-watered suburban backyard grass.
So that's already weird.
I push myself up, coughing once—spit out a piece of leaf—and squint at the sky.
Blue.
BLUE.
Not red. Not purple static. Not dark with floating death cubes or timelines imploding or some glitchy-ass sun trying to reboot the universe.
Just regular, boring-ass, vitamin-D-giving blue.
Birds chirping.
Kids laughing somewhere.
A sprinkler doing its little tik-tik-tik sound like it's clapping for me being alive.
And I'm just laying there like:
"Okay. What the actual fuck?"
I sit up, rubbing my temples. Brain feels like someone microwaved it with all 4 timelines at once.
First thought: Am I dead?
Second thought: Nah, too peaceful. If this was hell, it'd have at least one flesh monster screaming in Latin.
Third thought: I remember everything.
Fourth thought:Oh shit, I remember EVERYTHING.
And that's when it hits me.
Like a flashbang of trauma in HD.
Memory dump.
First comes Timeline A:
Me? Felix.
Me, Reis, Seraph, Iris, Johan, Amara, squad goals turned trauma bonding.
Bunker. Rebellion. Betrayal.
Government turning us into lab rats to make us their weapons.
Me biting down on my tongue during their tests so hard I tasted copper for days.
My stomach turns. That one still stings.
Then comes Timeline B:
Me? Elio.
Found in a damn alley like an anime protagonist.
Ren being the only reason I didn't lose my mind faster.
Then came the "Games."
High beings acting like Saw meets The Truman Show meets interdimensional schizophrenia.
Watching kids break, kill, and collapse like dominos in a morality test.
God. That version of me got cooked emotionally like a rotisserie chicken.
And then it cooked the whole timeline A. Ahh these A,B,C,D sucks i should've came up with a cooler value to name them. But i remember going into timeline A as this Elio version of me and becoming the reason of the apocalypse there which caused the world to fall under government order WHICH lead to the 5 friends of mine becoming test subjects and i was one of them too as i was Felix too.
Now I blink.
Back to reality.
(Whatever that means anymore.)
And suddenly it hits me:
"Wait… This isn't a dream.
This isn't a vision.
I'm actually in a place that's… calm."
I look around.
Yep. Backyard. Wooden fence. Tomato plants. Kid's scooter lying in the grass.
I peek over the fence.
Two kids playing tag.
And me? I'm just squatting like a raccoon who wandered into a sitcom.
"Okay, Elias. Think."
Let's piece this together:
I was Felix.
I was Elio.
I am Elias.
And I remember all three lives because I got split into them through that cursed paradox tear.
Oh yeah, and before I fell, I saw my dad as the Hidden Phoenix, so that's cool and not horrifying at all.
So like is this another timeline where I am now ?
"Alright. Let's go see just how cursed this timeline is."
I leap, float, fly, whatever, it comes naturally now.
Hover above the neighborhood. Start scanning for familiar zones.
We're definitely in America.
The cities aren't far apart, like someone lazily dragged the map layers from all the timelines into one Google Doc and hit "merge cells."
I see places I remember from:
Timeline A: Reis's school trip starting point near Red Pine, Oregon.
Timeline B: That abandoned region where the games took place, Varnell District, out by Lake Medlock, Nevada.
Timeline C: New World Order HQ in Pale Ridge, Utah.
Timeline D: My old neighborhood in Cypress Grove, California.
All real. All here.
Same layout. Same energy.
No signs of death or destruction.
Just… life.
I see all the other people from every timeline, every friend of mine is here.
But something's missing.
Two things, actually.
Felix.
Elio.
Nowhere.
Because they aren't separate anymore. They're me.
Which also means…
"I'm the only one who can move between timelines physically. Not just like… a consciousness tourist. I can break through."
And that explains why when Elio came through physically into Timeline A, it caused a complete breakdown of space-time and launched us all into a reality pretzel.
He wasn't just a version of me.
He was me-me. With the same broken rules.
And that explains something else too.
Why they couldn't break me.
Why during the experiments in Timeline A, when they tried to turn Felix into a puppet, it took them way too long.
Because they weren't breaking just a person.
They were trying to break a multidimensional loop. *Hehe sounds cool*
And now i even remember, how they removed a lot of our memories before pulling out the actual torture, we didn't even remembered our age if i remember it properly. I mean not like I even had one, but the rest of my gang did.
I land gently on the roof of some random high school.
Sit down.
Legs swinging like I'm on a playground.
Hands on my knees.
"Okay," I mutter, "so I'm the anomaly. The reason all this shit happened. The problem. The key. The virus. The glue."
Then I pause.
"Damn. No wonder everyone's trying to kill me."
Okay, so you ever have a dream that's so calm it starts feeling like a horror movie?
Yeah. That's where I'm at.
Because this world — this timeline — is too chill.
Like, uncomfortably chill.
It's like someone power-washed reality, Febreezed all the trauma, and said, "Here, have your life back. Nothing bad happened. Everyone's alive. You're welcome."
And my brain?
My brain is sitting there going:
"Yeah, but where's the catch?"
I'm floating above Cypress Grove, the town that used to be my "normal."
Except now, it's also the origin point of whatever the hell I am.
I hover past a park where everything is fine.
I'm in the sky like a goddamn ghost watching people live lives they never got to live in the other timelines.
Next stop: Red Pine, Oregon
Where the field trip started in Timeline A.
I see Reis and Amara hopping off a bus with other kids, teachers waving, snapping pics like it's a good ol' school memory moment.
I swear to God, I half expect some Final Destination shit to start happening, but…
Nope.
Just normal. Painfully normal.
And there he is.
Reis.
Smiling.
A real smile, not the "I just saw three people die and I'm pretending I'm okay" kind.
Gideon is there too with seraph throwing popcorns at pigeons.
Alright.
Now it's getting weird.
So I bounce to Lake Medlock, Nevada - the site of my friends in Timeline B.
Guess what I find?
A summer camp.
Not a prison. Not a paradox cage. Not a torture facility run by sadistic god-beings.
A straight-up, old-fashioned summer camp.
Woah this camp was supposed to happen a day after the main event.
Canoes, fire pits, someone playing guitar. I think I even saw Aria trying to light marshmallows.
Aria's there.
And Ren.
and everybody.
They're younger. Like 13 or 14. Same as back then.
Just kids.
No blood, no tests, no panic.
Just memories that never became trauma.
Okay. Last check.
I fly to Pale Ridge, Utah.
Timeline C's weird cyber-future base of operations.
But it's not that anymore.
It's just a quiet desert town with one tech company and a whole lotta retirees.
Zayne's working at a car shop.
Ezra's skating down the road with earbuds in.
Even Mira, Timeline C Mira, is painting on a wall, just vibing.
It's like…
Everyone made it.
Except…
Sienna.
Not even a glimpse.
No trace. No aura. No sense of her in this world.
Like she was never born. Or like…
Like someone took her out intentionally when the timelines fused.
So now I'm sitting on the top of a water tower, staring out at all these towns that are supposed to be broken, and they're just… not.
It's like the timelines fused and restarted three years ago with everyone dropped into one shared Earth, same coordinates but different timelines overlapping, and it all rebooted clean.
But here's what's messing with me most:
Me.
Where is my dad?
I remember being raised here.
But I also remember waking up in Timeline B's alley as Elio.
And as Felix, I just existed one day like I spawned into trauma.
So now I'm asking the real question:
"Did I ever have a real dad?"
And the more I think about it…
No.
Not really.
There was him. He smiled. Said "son." Took pictures at holidays.
But it always felt…
Off.
Like he was filling a role, not living a life.
Like he were written in.
Like he was an NPC keeping me from asking the big questions too early.
And then I remember…
Right before I fell into the paradox void — the last thing I saw was my dad being the hidden pheonix.
And suddenly?
All of this perfect peaceful world?
Feels fake.
Like someone reset the game for one last playthrough.
I kick my legs over the tower and sigh.
This timeline's too perfect.
Everyone's where they're supposed to be.
Except me.
And maybe that's the point.
Maybe I'm not supposed to be here.
So there I was.
Perched on top of a water tower like an emotionally complicated pigeon.
Everyone else?
Living their best trauma-free lives in this weird new everything's-fine reality.
Me?
Having an identity crisis so layered it could be carbon-dated.
I'd seen Seraph sketching.
I'd seen Gideon laughing.
I'd seen Reis, Iris.
I'd seen Ren.
I'd even seen Noa try to do a cartwheel and completely eat shit. That one almost made me feel like this was all real.
I'd seen OH WAIT, LUCIAN ISN'T HERE TOO ?
So right now two people which are missing from this world are Lucian and...
Sienna.
I checked again.
Everywhere.
Every possible location, I knew she existed in here before.
I checked the area near Sterling Heights, the little mountain-side school district from Timeline C where she and Ezra used to mess around with hacked school computers and make AI art that freaked out the faculty.
Nothing.
No Sienna in the school rosters.
No digital footprint.
No one mentioning her.
I even tried to tune into her presence — like some soul-frequency psychic shit I was never sure I could do but hey, I've fused with two alternate versions of myself and survived government experiments, so why not?
Still nothing.
And I mean nothing.
Like she was never written into this world's script at all.
I land outside a dusty old diner called "Violet's."
It's quiet.
No other customers, just a jukebox playing something lazy and melancholy.
I order a coffee.
Not because I need it, but because it's the only normal-ass thing I can do right now.
The waitress asks for my name. I say:
"Just... Elias."
She smiles like it means something. Like it's a name she recognizes.
Weird. But I move on.
I open my notebook — yeah, I carry one now, because after everything that happened, I don't trust my brain not to melt and forget something critical.
On the first page, I write:
WHO AM I?
Then below it:
Felix = me
Elio = me
Elias = me
Lucian = ?
Sienna = ???
And I stare at that name.
I underline it.
Circle it.
Why the hell are they the only two missing?
Everyone else who mattered? Still here.
Still living.
Even the people I wasn't close to made it into the merge.
So why not them?
"Oh man… I never used my brain at this amount. Holy fuck."
Start of the chronophage.