As he stood over the abyss, he noticed his legs were shaking, threatening to give out beneath him. It was a strange sensation, as if his body was reacting to the horror without his conscious consent. He hadn't felt like he'd been standing on that tiny slab for an excessively long time, but the psychological weight was taking its toll. Yet beneath the panic, he realized something strange: he felt no physical exhaustion. His muscles weren't burning from exertion; his brain was simply exhausting itself under the relentless strain of the void.
He crouched down, wrapping his arms around his knees, and took a deep breath. Each second that passed stretched out into an agonizing eternity. Crouched on that floating rock, time lost all meaning—seconds, minutes, years blended into a never-ending blur.
The agony of uncertainty was crushing his mind. He felt as if decades were passing while he huddled there, suspended over the cityscape of absorbed husks. Slowly, his eyes slipped closed. In a sudden, desperate impulse to reclaim control over his fate, he pushed himself off the edge and jumped into the void.
The rush of wind and the sensation of weightlessness enveloped him as he plummeted. For a brief instant, he felt a bizarre sense of freedom, as if surrendering to gravity had freed him from the torture of standing still.
When he opened his eyes, however, he realized he hadn't hit the ground or ceased to exist.
He was still falling—plummeting past the exact same cluster of inverted buildings, over and over again. The impossible architecture was locked in an infinite loop. The same lit windows, the same mechanical shadows, the same twisted roofs flashed past his vision in a seamless cycle.
He tried to throw his weight to the side, kicking frantically to angle his body toward a ledge or a roof. But no matter how he shifted, the wind currents locked him into the exact same downward track. The loop was absolute.
He fell for what felt like centuries. He slipped in and out of a state of shock, his thoughts fragmenting into a jumbled mess as the monotony of the repeating buildings wore away at his sanity.
Just as he felt his consciousness beginning to numb, a shadow detached itself from the upper fog.
He looked up and saw something diving through the loop toward him. Its wings were spread wide—leathery, membranous sails that flexed and rippled as it cut through the air. The creature's body was long, sinuous, and ancient, its hollow eyes fixed intently on him as it swooped down. It wasn't a natural animal; it was an apex terror of the void, a beast forged from the sheer decay of time.
With each repetition of the loop, the creature gained on him. He tried diving headfirst to accelerate his drop, but the creature matched his speed effortlessly. He twisted and turned, but the beast closed the distance, its massive claws reaching out.
Panic seized him, and he began to scream, his voice echoing through the abyss. But with every reset of the spatial loop, his scream was abruptly cut off—silenced as the sky reset and dropped him back to the starting point of the fall. Yet the creature seemed uniquely immune to the reset, slowly carrying its momentum over from loop to loop, drawing closer with every cycle.
Desperate for help, he looked toward one of the passing structures. On the flat roof of a lopsided building, he spotted a person. The figure wasn't a mechanical husk—they were moving with fluid, intentional purpose, stomping around the perimeter of the roof as if searching for a hidden seam in the architecture.
"Help!" he screamed, his voice hoarse. "Help me!"
At first, the figure ignored him. But as he plunged past them on the next loop, shouting frantically, the person finally paused, looked up at his falling form, and cupped their hands around their mouth.
"Our business doesn't align!" the traveler shouted back, their voice echoing cold and clear over the wind. "I'm here for a completely different temporal coordinate than you! Focus on your own anchor!"
The figure turned back to their task, leaving him plunging past into the dark. Reason? Temporal coordinates? The words spun in his head. Everyone here was trapped in their own personal layer of time, fighting their own battle against assimilation.
A sharp screech pulled his attention back upward. The creature was right on top of him now. Its leathery wings blocked out the faint light from the buildings above, and its massive, jagged claws opened, mere inches from his chest. In the next loop, it would tear into him, and he would find out firsthand what happens when the Fold inflicts physical violence.
His heart hammered against his ribs. The claws snapped toward his throat.
And right in that split second, a desperate idea sparked in his mind—a instinct to refuse the scene, to force a stop. He held onto that single, fierce thought, steeled his nerves, and braced for the strike...