After waking up, I showered and got ready before taking advantage of the free breakfast that came with the room. The food was traditional German cuisine, which was satisfying enough, though I was used to the larger portions back in America where everything is "plus-sized" by default. Still, it was pretty good.
Afterward, I headed toward town. I wondered if I should get a motorcycle or some other form of transportation, but the hassle of dealing with the paperwork immediately made me abandon that idea. A simple bicycle should work; that was something to look into later.
By the time I reached town, it was already midday. I couldn't get used to how quiet everything was. Despite living most of my life in the woods, I still occasionally visited towns to buy supplies back home, and the difference was noticeable. Back home, everything was—for lack of a better word—loud. Here, however, there was a sense of eerie calm. It was strange, but maybe that was just my paranoia talking.
Eventually, I entered the library, found a book on runic alphabets, and began translating. When I finally looked up at the clock, it was already mid-afternoon, and I had only managed to translate a single page. Whoever wrote this book had used a combination of several alphabets and, on top of that, created a cipher. The cipher wasn't that hard to figure out—though I wondered why they used the names of Odin's ravens.
Even with the cipher, I was going in circles. Whenever I decoded something, I found that whatever I decoded next didn't make any sense; one minute it was talking about wormholes, and the next it talked about corn, which forced me to start over from the beginning. What the hell does one thing have to do with another? Were it not for the fact that the book appeared to have scientific concepts mentioning the feasibility of time travel, I would have thought that whoever wrote it was sending me on a wild goose chase.
I sighed while rubbing my face before groaning. "A combination of six runic alphabets which together make something worse than gibberish," I whispered after laying my head down. "The only way to properly understand any of it is using a combination of the names Huginn and Muninn as a twelve-digit cipher, but even then, only half of it makes sense. The other half talks about corn and a mixture of how to take care of baby ravens. What did I do for my life to become this?"
I'm heading in the right direction, I think. While it's a pain in the ass to actually understand what makes sense and what is just gibberish, several keywords have been repeated multiple times on the first page alone:
TriquetraThe number 33Adam and EvaThe White DevilThe "world between worlds"The problem I think I now understand is that using the first half of the cipher—specifically Huginn—lets me decode keywords like individuals, places, and concepts. However, whenever I use the second half, Muninn, all I get is gibberish.
Either the cipher is wrong, or someone purposely wrote the book like this. But it doesn't make sense to provide fake information alongside real scientific concepts. Besides, the writing style is strange, as if two individuals took turns writing it. I looked at the piece of paper where I had written the keywords that made sense. I hadn't bothered to write down the rest, since it was all gibberish—perhaps intended to make me quit.
I took the paper card and placed it on the corner of the desk while I focused on the words. There was clearly a connection between the card and the words written on the paper.
"Sic Mundus, Adam, destruction, 1953, 1986, 2019," I muttered while circling the words into a bubble. "Erit Lux, Eva, preserve, 1986, 2019, 2052," I said, writing another bubble, before creating a third bubble in the middle above them both. "The White Devil, false hope, and the end."
I was starting to understand what the words meant. Sic Mundus ("Thus the World") and Erit Lux ("There Will Be Light") seem to be organizations, with Adam and Eva acting as their respective leaders. The White Devil, on the other hand, seems to be a third party manipulating both towards a goal of saving someone, except that it will fail and indirectly lead to "the end". I don't know exactly what "the end" refers to yet; I have a theory, but even for my current situation, it feels too outlandish.
As for the numbers, the most logical conclusion is that they represent years. But if so, why these specific years? What makes them so special?
Getting up from the table, I gathered my things and headed toward a computer terminal. Sitting down, I opened a tab and searched for "Winden" and the year "1953". After a moment, it pulled up a compiled list of newspaper articles.
"Let's see if I'm right," I whispered
Entering my hotel room, I hurriedly opened the bag I'd bought on the way back, desperate to organize the mountain of notes I had compiled during my research. I scanned the room for a wall I could use as a board and eventually found the perfect spot. I tore down the existing painting, set it on the floor, and began separating my pages into piles before grabbing a roll of duct tape to start mapping out everything I'd discovered.
For a moment, I lost my train of thought. When I first started researching the years marked in the notebook, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went. The scary thing was, I still didn't.
Taping another page to the wall, I whispered the headline: "Bodies of two boys found at power plant construction site, November 10, 1953." My lips were dry from running all the way from town to the hotel without stopping. I ignored the discomfort, my mind racing through countless possibilities.
Eventually, I finished and took a step back to survey my work. If anyone walked in now, they would assume I'd lost my mind—a wall covered in taped papers, scribbled notes, and colored yarn zigzagging between dates and names.
I sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the map of madness I'd created. My gaze wandered to the 1953 section. Two dead boys at the construction site. A suspect arrested after attempting to kill another child. Normally, this would just be a grim historical footnote, but the photograph of the killer stopped my heart. It looked exactly like Ulrich Nielsen.
The question was: how did he get to 1953? Was he originally from the fifties and traveled to the future, or was it the opposite? What was he doing there? And more importantly, how did he get there?
This was only the beginning.
I looked at the 1986 section. A woman found dead in the lake; a former chief inspector found dead in his apartment; a power plant worker's corpse discovered in the forest. And then, the disappearance of Mads Nielsen.
"More deaths. Another kid disappears. Exactly thirty-three years after the events of 1953," I muttered, resting my chin in my hand. "And now in 2019, three more kids are gone. On top of that, animals are dying without explanation, just like before."
I grabbed the notebook from the bed and stared at the cover—an Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.
"It's not a circle, and it's not infinity. It's a coil," I realized, the picture finally becoming clear. "Ulrich Nielsen has a family here in 2019, and he lost his brother in 1986. That means he was born after '53, yet he was arrested back then for trying to kill a kid. He somehow traveled to the past—or he will travel to the past."
I gripped the book until my knuckles turned white. "He is born, he grows up, he travels to the past, and he repeats it. I'm stuck in a time loop!" I grunted through gritted teeth.
How long has this been looping? How did I get dragged into this? I had so many questions and zero answers. "Fuck," I breathed, getting up to pace the room. "Okay, think. There has to be a trigger for the loop... but I don't have enough information to even theorize yet."
I looked back at the wall, and one name caught my eye: Helge Doppler. Why did Ulrich try to kill him in 1953? While aggressive, the Ulrich I met didn't seem like a child killer—unless he had a reason.
"If I'm Ulrich Nielsen, and I find myself in 1953 by choice or accident, why would I try to kill a kid?" I muttered. Then, the realization hit me. "Because I know something no one else does!"
Helge Doppler went missing in '53 right after the attack. Could the trauma of that event have turned him into a killer later in life? Ulrich must have figured out that an older Helge was involved in his brother's disappearance in 1986. Driven by rage, Ulrich must have confronted the old man before somehow being thrown back to 1953 to try and stop the cycle at the source.
The theory had holes, but it was feasible—especially if Doppler or someone else had access to a time machine. I needed to keep a close eye on Ulrich. If my theory was right, he would be disappearing very soon.