Rotham's fingers hovered above the relic pulsing with chaotic energy—the one that offered change, risk, and freedom from the cycle.
He touched it.
Reality buckled.
A silent shockwave rippled through the chamber. The Architect of Silence vanished. The pedestal cracked. And Nexus Zero responded—its walls alive with shifting memories, possibilities unraveling like threads of starlight.
Selin's voice rang out, panicked.
"Rotham! You triggered a rewrite! Entire causal chains are shifting—past, present, future… all changing!"
The map of the galaxy reformed before his eyes. Planets moved. Civilizations reappeared. Others disappeared. A war that had ended centuries ago now never began.
But amidst the change, a dark pulse emerged.
Something else had noticed the rewrite.
"Something's bleeding through," Rotham muttered. "Something that wasn't supposed to exist."
A tear in space opened nearby. From it emerged a figure—shifting, undefined, a living paradox. A being built from contradictions.
It spoke in three voices at once:
"Who dares unwrite the silence?"
Rotham steadied his breath.
"I do."
The entity stared at him.
"Then you are no longer a fragment. You are a Focal Point."
The chamber shattered.
Rotham fell—not physically, but through time itself—dragged backward and forward at once.
He landed hard in a corridor.
Except it wasn't Nexus Zero anymore.
He was on Adra-1, the original station. The prototype. Long believed lost.
But it wasn't abandoned.
Voices echoed. Alarms flared. Something had gone terribly wrong.
The rewrite had opened the beginning.
And now, Rotham was in the past—where the cycle first began.