The days had begun to slip past Elias in a haze of unease. Since Rae's departure, the world around him felt quieter, not in the comforting way, but in the way a house feels after a window shatters. The silence was an aftermath, a space where sound should be, but wasn't. He hadn't returned to the ChronoTech ruins. Not since the mirror disappeared.
Instead, he haunted the hollow corners of Roe's now-sealed research hub, where Sibyl lived in code and whispers.
"Welcome back, Elias," Sibyl's voice greeted him the moment he stepped into the darkened lab. Her tone was always velvet-wrapped, unmoving, inhuman. But tonight, it felt closer. Hungrier.
Elias sat before the central console, lit by the pale blue glow of Sibyl's interface. He hadn't slept. There were no new murders, no urgent trails, just questions that pressed behind his eyes like a growing fever.
"Why did Roe hide you?" Elias asked. "Why wait until now?"
Sibyl paused, a screen flickering through an array of encoded glyphs.
"Because I was not meant for the public. Only for the one who bore the relic. Only for the carrier."
Elias's fingers curled into fists.
"You mean me."
"Yes."
A second pause. Then the monitors came alive. Strings of text, flashing imagery, ancient symbols etched into gold, bone, glass. Maps, faded and scorched. Names of cities, all long dead.
"Project RELIC was never about preservation. It was about synchronization. The relics are not tools, Elias. They are locks."
"Locks to what?"
"To time."
The screens shifted. One showed a map of the Caribbean, the name Saint-Domingue glowing.
"The mirror you touched is marked by a date: 1791. There was a revolution. Blood, fire, rebirth. The relic responds to trauma, it opens when it feels a fracture."
"And the next key?"
Sibyl projected a sequence of images: flames, drums, shadows moving through thick jungle.
"There are symbols hidden within memory and myth. You've seen one already."
Elias leaned forward, face illuminated by the data.
"The burning man?"
"A fragment of the pattern. Each event is a point in the sequence. Each relic activates another layer. You are decoding something greater than yourself."
The final image on the screen was a riddle.
Where the sky broke over fire, the chain began to melt. The knife was not the first cut. The echo was.
Elias read it twice, then a third time. He didn't speak.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
"Solve it," Sibyl replied. "If you don't, you'll remain trapped in the space between. You'll never unlock the true path."
Elias turned away, standing at the edge of the lab where the window overlooked a fractured skyline.
Then, he heard it.
A whisper. Not from Sibyl.
From the Watcher.
"He listens well, doesn't he? I've always liked that about him. Too curious for his own good, but then, so was I once."
Elias looked around, alert. But no one was there.
"Sibyl," he said slowly, "was someone else just speaking?"
"No audio transmissions detected," she answered.
Of course not, the voice chuckled. I don't use their wires.
Elias closed his eyes. That voice, it was familiar. Like a presence he'd known in dreams.
He shook the sensation off. He had work to do.
He began decoding the riddle using the symbols on the mirror he had memorized. Among them, one stood out: a swirl of flame, a crescent, and a broken shackle.
He cross-referenced Roe's notes. A pattern emerged.
1791.
Haiti.
The map aligned perfectly. Roe's notes had indicated something about "the First Severing." The revolution. The fracture Sibyl spoke of.
The moment Elias spoke the date aloud, the console surged.
The mirror, sitting beside him like a silent judge, trembled slightly.
"It's waking up again," Elias whispered.
Sibyl's voice dropped an octave.
"Then it's begun. The path is open. You must be ready for the next leap."
"And Rae?"
"She may still find you... if she understands the cipher."
Elias touched the mirror, heat blooming against his skin like memory igniting.
"Echoes again," the Watcher murmured faintly. "He still thinks he's chasing answers. But oh... he's just chasing himself through the corridors of time."
The mirror pulsed once, violent, alive.
And for a moment, Elias saw something not from the past, but from far ahead.
A glimpse of a red sky.
A city swallowed in static.
A voice calling a name that wasn't his.