The ticking had returned.
Aarav stood motionless in the center of Marlin's Timekeepers. The dusty gears in the antique clocks seemed louder now, each tick a countdown he couldn't read. The Isha with white eyes stood only a few feet away, her smile unwavering, unblinking. Behind her, the other Ishas emerged like shadows stepping from thin air, each expressionless, each holding an object Aarav couldn't identify—some a dagger, others a flickering shard of light, others something far worse.
He stumbled backward. "What are you?"
"We are the Echoes," she said, her voice layered, as if multiple Ishas were speaking through her at once. "She broke the pattern. You broke the tether. Reality is hunting you through us."
"I didn't mean to destroy anything."
Her smile widened. "But you did."
The air around them fractured. A soft hum resonated from the walls as the antique shop began to flicker, like a VHS tape stuck between frames.
Aarav spun around. The door he had come through was gone. In its place, a hallway of cracked mirrors extended into darkness.
"You must find the Echo," she whispered.
"What is the Echo?"
"The part of you that remembers."
Suddenly, she lunged.
Aarav dove aside as her fingertips slashed the air where his face had been a moment ago. The floor cracked from the impact. Time shimmered where she struck, bending inward like a black hole.
Without thinking, Aarav ran toward the mirror hallway. His legs burned, his breath came ragged, but he didn't look back.
The mirrors showed too much.
In one, he saw himself as a soldier in Dominion black, executing a rebel child.
In another, he wore a crown of wires, thousands of faces watching as he addressed a world with no sun.
He passed a mirror where he and Isha held hands, surrounded by children, the sky peaceful. He paused.
The mirror shattered.
A blast knocked him back as shards of glass formed into tiny spectral versions of himself, all whispering at once:
"Find the Echo. Or you become us."
He screamed and swung his arm. The chrono-mark on his skin flared, sending a pulse that vaporized the glasslings. The hallway crumbled behind him.
He kept running.
He burst into a room of clocks.
All broken.
All ticking out of sync.
In the center, a girl sat cross-legged. Blonde hair. Eyes glowing gold. She was humming.
"Are you... the Echo?"
She didn't look at him.
"You named me when you were five."
Aarav blinked. "What?"
"After your father died. You forgot. But I didn't."
She finally looked at him. Aarav gasped. Her face was a mix of every Isha he had seen—kind, cruel, broken, victorious.
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Remember."
She stood and pointed to the largest clock on the wall. The hands were spinning backward.
"Step through it."
"And then what?"
"Then, you run faster than time itself."
The walls behind him cracked. The white-eyed Echoes were coming.
He nodded and stepped forward.
The moment he touched the clock's hands, he was ripped out of time.
He landed in a memory.
But not his.
A lab. Glass chambers. Scientists panicking.
A child stood inside a tube—Aarav as a clone. His eyes open too wide. His mouth forming words before his vocal cords had developed.
"Why do I exist?"
The glass shattered. Blood. Alarms. A voice shouted: "Initiate Seed Sequence!"
Aarav stumbled back. Isha's voice—the real Isha's—called from the corridor beyond.
"You're not just a paradox. You're the Origin."
He chased her voice.
Another memory.
He was older. In a rebel camp. A young Isha was training him. They were laughing.
She looked at him seriously. "If we fail, promise me one thing."
"What?"
"Don't let the Echo win. Not ever."
Aarav turned. The same camp now burned. Isha impaled on a temporal spike.
He screamed.
Another shift.
He stood before the Architect.
His father—yet again.
But this time, dying.
"You think choosing continuity was noble," the man rasped. "But you doomed the multiverse to entropy."
Aarav grabbed him. "Then tell me what to do!"
"The Echo must be undone."
"How?!"
"You already began it."
The man dissolved into golden dust.
He fell to his knees.
Everything spun.
The Echoes were coming.
Then... silence.
A shadow stood before him.
Not Isha. Not Silas. Not Kepler.
A version of Aarav.
But dressed in white. Face scarless. Eyes calm.
"I'm the first," the version said. "The original loop. Before you. Before them. Before the Dominion."
"Why now?"
"Because the Echo you're running from... is her. But also me. And one day, you."
"What do I do?"
"You run faster. Or you turn around. And face it."
The ticking returned.
Louder.
Booming.
The sky above cracked open.
And the real Isha fell from it, unconscious, glowing with Riftlight.
Behind her, the Dominion flagship entered the timeline.
Aarav screamed as everything collapsed around him.