Arthur sat on the front porch, knees pulled to his chest, watching the golden October leaves drift lazily through the twilight air. The laughter of his parents inside was a balm, the kind he didn't dare dream of before. But beneath the warmth of home, unease pulsed like a hidden fault line.
The loop hadn't reset. It had been two days since October 24th. Time was moving forward again.
Yet Arthur couldn't shake the feeling that something—some presence—had come with him.
It started subtly. A flicker of déjà vu at odd times. A hum beneath certain lights. When he closed his eyes, he sometimes saw fractals, shimmering and spiraling like broken clockwork. Most unsettling was the faint ticking he now heard in silence, like a secondhand echoing in the bones of the world.
That night, he dreamt of mirrors. Endless reflections of himself across a corridor of glass, each version of him slightly different—older, younger, angrier, broken. Some reached out. Some turned away. One whispered, "You didn't save them. You only changed the frame."
He woke with sweat cooling on his skin.
The next morning, Arthur took the long way through town. Trees arched overhead in burnt orange splendor. He wandered into the local library—one of the few places that hadn't changed. The musty smell of old pages comforted him, as did the quiet.
He asked the librarian for newspaper archives. October 24th, 2008.
"I'm sorry," she said, frowning at the computer. "Looks like something's off with the digital records for that day. The files are… corrupted. That's odd."
Arthur felt a cold weight settle in his chest. "Can I see the physical archive?"
Half an hour later, he sat surrounded by stacks of bound newsprint. He flipped to the edition he'd seen hundreds of times in the loop. It should've had the crash report. The obituary. The grainy photo of the wreckage.
Instead, the headline read:
TRUCK DRIVER DETAINED IN PLATE MIX-UP; AVOIDED POTENTIAL ACCIDENT
He exhaled shakily. His changes had worked. Still, as he stared at the article, he noticed something strange in the corner of the page—an ad for a local psychic named Madame Halcyra. It was printed oddly, misaligned with the text. Like it didn't belong.
A line in bold script caught his eye:
"Time bends when grief breaks it. Seek the anchor."
He blinked. That hadn't been in the paper during the loops. He was sure of it.
Curious, and with a kernel of dread blooming in his stomach, Arthur jotted down the address.
That night, back home, he tried to dismiss it. But the ticking returned. Louder. Now he felt it behind his eyes.
Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series once quoted, "Every action creates echoes. Every fix, a fracture."
Arthur now feared that while he had ended the loop, he may have fractured time itself.
And something was listening in the cracks.