The Ouroboros: The Man Who Fathered Himself
Inspired by the Netflix TV Show Dark
Some people are born prisoners.
Not locked in gaols, but trapped in time.
Chapter One
Time: 12th November 2040, 23:47
Location: The Ruins of St Cecilia · Chronos Site
Elias Klaus, sixty-five years old, had been waiting in these ruins for twenty-eight years.
He sat beside the twisted metal carcass of Chronos, clutching the pocket watch that had stopped forever at 12:01. It was the only thing his father Simon had left him. The face bore an inscription in Latin:
Tempus Edax Rerum
Time devours all things.
But Simon had got it wrong. Time doesn’t devour, it imprisons.
Above the ruins, the stars burned with unusual clarity. Without the city’s light pollution, the Milky Way stretched across the heavens like an enormous river. Elias had once loved watching the stars, back when Maya was alive. He would hold his five-year-old daughter and point at the sky: “Look, darling, that’s Cassiopeia. That was your mum’s favourite constellation.”
He didn’t look at the stars anymore. They reminded him of eternity, and eternity was his hell.
23:51. Nine minutes left.
Elias stood, dragging his right leg, the one that had been crushed in the Great Collapse, healed and then re-broken through countless cycles. He limped towards the centre of the ruins. There, space began to warp. The air rippled like water, humming with a deep resonance. The wormhole was forming.
He knew he would come. Because he always came.
23:54. A blue fissure tore through the darkness like lightning splitting the sky. Energy waves shook the air, kicking up clouds of ash. A figure tumbled from the wormhole and slammed into the rubble.
It was Elias Klaus, aged thirty-seven.
He wore a scorched lab coat, fresh burns on his face, his hands raw and bloody. He lay on the ground, shoulders heaving, making suppressed, animal sounds of grief.
Old Elias watched him quietly. He remembered that pain. The heart-tearing agony that made you want to rip your own heart from your chest.
“She’s dead,” the younger Elias finally raised his head, eyes swollen, voice hoarse. “Maya’s dead. I watched her... I watched her body dissolve... She looked at me at the end, called out ‘Daddy’... and then she just... just...”
He couldn’t continue. He collapsed again, retching. But there was nothing in his stomach, only dry heaves and anguished moans.
Old Elias walked over and handed him a water bottle. “Drink.”
The younger man took it, gulping desperately, water running down his chin, mixing with tears and dust.
“Where is this?” He looked around, taking in the ruins, the twisted building remains, the massive sphere half-buried in rubble: Chronos. “Is this... St Cecilia?”
“Yes,” Old Elias said. “St Cecilia in 2040.”
Young Elias struggled to his feet, staring at the old man. In the moonlight, he finally saw the other’s face clearly. A face lined with wrinkles and scars, his hair completely white, but his eyes, those eyes, were identical to his own.
“You’re...”
“I’m you,” the old man said. “Twenty-eight years from now.”
Silence. Only the wind through the ruins, like countless ghosts weeping.
“No,” Young Elias shook his head. “No, that’s impossible. If you’re me, then you should know! You should be able to tell me how to save Maya! You should…”
“I can’t save her,” Old Elias interrupted, his voice terrifyingly calm. “I’ve tried. A thousand times, ten thousand times. Every time, the timeline self-corrects. The outcome is always the same. She always dies.”
Young Elias stood frozen.
“You can’t save her,” Old Elias continued, “because her death is part of the loop. If she doesn’t die, you won’t despair. If you don’t despair, you won’t jump back in time. If you don’t jump back...”
He paused, pulling a yellowed photograph from his pocket.
“You won’t exist.”
The photograph gleamed silver in the moonlight. Young Elias took it, seeing a young woman lying on the filthy floor. The floorboards were rotten and warped, gaps between them wide enough to see the earth below, cradling a newborn baby. The woman’s eyes were closed, her face deathly pale. She was dead, but the baby lived, tiny fist gripping a lock of the woman’s hair.
“Who is this?” Young Elias asked, though his voice trembled because he already knew.
“Irene Hart,” Old Elias said. “12th November 1985, late evening. Died in childbirth. That baby...”
“Is me,” Young Elias whispered.
“Is us,” the old man corrected him.
Young Elias stared at the photograph, his hands shaking violently. “No... no, that’s impossible... Simon was my father, he said my mother…”
“Simon was your adoptive father,” Old Elias interrupted. “He found you on the morning of 13th November 1985, during his morning run. You’d been abandoned at the forest’s edge. He adopted you, raised you, and taught you physics. But he wasn’t your biological father.”
“Then who was?”
Old Elias looked at him, sorrow flickering in his eyes. “You are. I am. We are.”
The wind stopped. The whole world seemed to freeze.
“It’s a bootstrap paradox,” the old man continued. “You travel back to 1985, you meet Irene, she becomes pregnant, though you don’t remember this yet, you will. She gives birth to you, then dies. Simon finds the baby and raises him. That baby grows up, becomes you, builds Chronos, loses Maya, jumps back to 1985. The loop closes. No beginning, no end.”
Young Elias sank to the ground. “So... my entire life... is just a loop?”
“Not just your life,” Old Elias said. “Our life. The loop itself. You think you’re making choices, but you’re only executing what’s already happened.”
“Do I have any free will at all?”
“No,” the old man said. “You never did.”
Young Elias raised his head, fury burning in his eyes. “Then I refuse! I won’t go back! I won’t go to 1985! I’ll break this damned loop…”
“Then you won’t exist,” Old Elias said calmly. “If you don’t go back, Irene won’t get pregnant, the baby won’t be born, Simon won’t adopt you, you won’t grow up, won’t build Chronos, won’t come here. But you’re already here. So you’ve already gone back. It’s a paradox. You can’t escape.”
“What about Maya?!” the younger man roared. “If this is all predetermined, then her death was predetermined too? She was only five years old!”
His voice cracked, tears streaming down his face.
Old Elias was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice carried twenty-eight years of exhaustion and despair.
“Yes,” he said. “Maya’s death was predetermined. Because if she doesn’t die, you won’t despair enough to jump back. And if you don’t jump back, you won’t be born. And if you’re not born, Maya won’t be born either. It’s a perfect causal chain. Every link locked to the next.”
“I won’t accept it!” Young Elias stood up. “There must be a way to break this loop! There must be!”
“There is,” Old Elias said suddenly.
The younger man froze. “What?”
The old man pulled a small knife from his pocket, the blade gleaming coldly in the moonlight. “Kill Irene. Before she gives birth.”
Young Elias stared at the knife. “If I kill her...”
“The loop breaks,” the old man said. “Theoretically, at least.”
“Theoretically?” Young Elias frowned. “Haven’t you tried?”
Old Elias was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice carried deep weariness.
“I did try.”
“And?”
“In the... I don’t remember which circle,” the old man said. “Maybe the fiftieth, maybe the hundredth. That time, I made up my mind. I told myself, for Maya, to end all this, I had to make the sacrifice.”
“I jumped back to 1985. I found Irene before she gave birth and killed her. I told myself it was for the greater good. To break the loop.”
“And then?” Young Elias asked, voice tense.
“The blade pierced her heart,” the old man said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “She looked at me, her eyes full of confusion and betrayal. She fell. She died.”
“I waited. Waited to disappear, waited for the loop to break.”
“But nothing happened.”
Old Elias raised his head, a mad light in his eyes.
“I was still there. I still existed. I looked down and saw Irene’s belly moving. The baby was still alive. Even though the mother was dead, the baby was still alive in the womb.”
“I tried to kill it. Tried to kill myself. Tried everything.” The old man’s voice was flat, emotionless. “But a closed causal loop is self-protecting. The universe won’t allow a paradox. When I pressed the knife to the baby, my hand cramped. When I pointed it at myself, I blacked out and woke hours later with the baby already born and wrapped in blankets… my own hands had done it while I was unconscious.”
“You can’t escape a loop by dying when you’re already part of its structure. Your death would create a paradox, so causality prevents it. Simple as that.”
“I jumped back to earlier timepoints, tried to kill her before conception. But every time, something stopped me.”
“Time self-corrects,” the old man said. “It uses a thousand methods to stop me. Because Irene must get pregnant. The baby must be born. The loop must continue.”
“This is physical law,” his voice turned bitter. “The topological structure of causality doesn’t allow paradoxes to exist, so it enforces compliance.”
Young Elias stared at the knife, then at his older self. “Then why are you still giving me this knife?”
“Because you need to try,” the old man said. “You need to discover for yourself that you can’t do it. You need to experience the pain of that choice. Otherwise, you’ll always wonder. You’ll always think, ‘what if I’d tried?’”
“Now you know. You will try. You will fail. And then you’ll understand,” Old Elias said. “We’re not trapped in the loop. We are the loop itself.”
The old man handed over the knife along with a rucksack. “This is what you’ll need. Medical kit, blankets, and this.”
He produced a small notebook. “You’ll write this tonight, then leave it beside Irene. Simon will find it tomorrow morning, read the contents, and decide to adopt the baby.”
Young Elias opened the notebook, seeing that it was blank. “What do I write?”
“The truth,” the old man said. “The truth about the time loop. The blueprints for Chronos. Your destiny. Simon will spend twenty-seven years studying this, then pass all that knowledge to you. You’ll use it to build Chronos.”
“So... this knowledge is part of the loop too? It has no origin?”
“Yes,” Old Elias said. “The knowledge generates itself within the loop. Just like you.”
Young Elias felt dizzy. “What about Irene? When do I... how do I...”
“You’ll know,” the old man said. “When you meet her.”
He pointed towards the Chronos ruins. “Go. 12th November 1985, 11:47 PM. Irene will be in the abandoned hunter’s cabin deep in the forest. She’s in labour. She’ll need your help.”
“Why is she there? Why isn’t she in the hospital?”
“Because she’s waiting for you,” Old Elias said. “Though she doesn’t know it herself.”
Young Elias shouldered the rucksack, walking towards Chronos. But he stopped at the wormhole’s edge, looking back at his older self.
“Will you... will you always be here waiting?”
“Yes,” Old Elias said. “Waiting for you to return. Waiting for you to live through the next twenty-eight years. Waiting for you to become me. Then we’ll have this conversation again.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Young Elias looked at the old man, at that face carved with wrinkles and despair. That was his future. His fate.
“Is it possible,” he asked quietly, “is it possible that in some iteration, we found a way out?”
Old Elias was silent for a long time. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Perhaps in some parallel universe, a version of us succeeded. But here, in this timeline...”
He didn’t finish. But they both knew the answer.
The blue light swallowed Young Elias.
The old man stood alone in the ruins, watching the wormhole close.
Then he sat down, took out the pocket watch, and looked at the face forever stopped at 12:01.
“I’m sorry, Maya,” he whispered. “Daddy failed again.”
Chapter Two
Time: 12th November 1985, 23:47
Location: St Cecilia Forest · Abandoned Hunter’s Cabin
Time travel felt like drowning.
When Elias tumbled from the wormhole, his lungs filled with a cold, metallic liquid. He collapsed on the ground, coughing violently, spewing blue, luminous mucus. The residue of spacetime itself. Fragments of reality.
When he could finally breathe, he smelt the forest. Earth, pine needles, rotting leaves, and... blood.
He struggled to his feet, looking around. Dense forest surrounded him. Moonlight filtered through the canopy, casting dappled shadows on the ground. Then he heard the moaning.
A suppressed, agonised sound, like someone trying not to cry out but unable to bear it.
Elias followed the sound, pushing through undergrowth, reaching an abandoned hunter’s cabin. The door hung half-open, weak torchlight spilling out.
He pushed it open. Inside, a young woman lay on the filthy floor, back against the wall. She wore a floral dress soaked in sweat and blood, heavily pregnant, face pale as paper. Beside her lay a torch and an almost-empty water bottle.
When she heard the door, she jerked her head up, fear flashing in her eyes. But when she saw Elias, the fear transformed into desperate hope.
“Help me...” She reached out, voice hoarse. “Please... save my baby...”
Elias froze.
This was Irene Hart.
The woman from the photograph.
His mother.
But now, she was so real, so suffering, so... young. She looked only twenty-three or twenty-four, younger than him. Baby fat still rounded her face, her eyes large and, even in pain, possessed a certain innocence.
“I...” Elias’s voice stuck in his throat.
“Please,” Irene began crying. “I don’t want to die... I don’t want my baby to die... I’ve been here... for six hours already... I thought... I thought I could manage alone...”
Another violent spasm seized her, her body arching, a suppressed scream escaping.
Elias’s medical knowledge was virtually nil. He was a physicist, not a doctor. But he could see Irene’s condition was dire. Too much blood loss, her lips purple, breathing rapid.
He knelt down, dropped the rucksack, and pulled out the medical kit. “I’m not a doctor,” he said. “But I’ll do what I can to help.”
“Thank you...” Irene grabbed his hand with surprising strength. “Thank you...”
“What’s your name?” Elias asked, though he already knew.
“Irene,” she said. “Irene Hart. And you?”
Elias paused for a second. “Elias.”
Irene’s eyes suddenly widened. “Elias...” She repeated the name, her voice carrying a strange recognition. “I know that name... I’ve been... knowing of that name...”
“What?”
But another spasm seized Irene, cutting off her answer.
The next two hours were the longest, most excruciating two hours of Elias’s life.
Using scissors, gauze, and disinfectant from the medical kit, he did what he could to help Irene. He didn’t know what he was doing, could only work on instinct and fragments from films. Irene screamed, cried, bled. She gripped Elias’s hand, her nails digging into his skin, but he didn’t let go.
“Tell me,” Irene gasped between contractions, “tell me something... distract me...”
“What?”
“Anything,” she said. “Your story. Why are you coming back?”
Elias didn’t know why she said coming back, but he knew he couldn’t tell her the truth. Couldn’t say, “I’m from the future, I’m the child you’re about to give birth to, I’m my own father.”
So he told a different truth.
“I lost my daughter,” he said, voice low. “Her name was Maya. Five years old. She died in an accident. It was my fault.”
Irene looked at him, eyes full of sympathy. “I’m so sorry...”
“I thought I could change the past,” Elias continued. “I thought I could save her. But I can’t. I can only... keep living.”
“Did you love her?” Irene asked.
“More than my life,” Elias said, his eyes moistening.
“Then she was lucky,” Irene said. “To have a father who loved her so much.”
Another contraction. Stronger this time. Irene screamed, her whole body convulsing.
“I can see the head!” Elias said. “Irene, you need to push!”
“I can’t... I’m too tired...”
“You can!” Elias gripped her hand. “For your baby! Push!”
Irene took a deep breath, then used every ounce of strength.
At 12:01 AM, the baby was born.
A boy. Wrinkled skin, covered in blood, but crying loudly, limbs intact.
Elias caught the baby with trembling hands and wrapped him in a blanket. He stared at this tiny life, at that wrinkled face.
This was him.
This was himself.
“Let me see him,” Irene said weakly.
Elias placed the baby in her arms. Irene looked at the child, an exhausted but happy smile on her face.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispered. “He’ll be a good person. I know it.”
“What will you name him?” Elias asked, though he already knew.
Irene looked at the baby, then at Elias. “Elias,” she said. “I’ll call him Elias. Like you.”
Elias’s heart stopped. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Irene said, her gaze distant. “I just... feel it should be that name.”
Her voice grew weaker. Elias noticed she was still bleeding. A lot.
“Irene,” he said. “You need to hold on. I’ll find help!”
“It’s too late,” Irene interrupted, her voice terrifyingly calm. “I know. I can feel it.”
“No,” Elias said. “No, you’ll be fine…”
“Take care of him,” Irene said, tears falling. “Please. Take care of our child.”
“Our...” Elias’s voice caught. “I will. I promise.”
Irene smiled. A beautiful, sad smile. “Thank you, Elias. Thank you for coming back to find me.”
“I didn’t remember…”
But Irene’s eyes had already closed. Her hand slowly released, her head lolled to one side.
She was dead.
Elias knelt there, holding the baby, looking at Irene’s body. He wanted to cry, but no tears came. He’d already cried himself dry the moment Maya died.
The baby stirred in his arms, making small sounds.
Elias looked down at him. At those eyes that had just opened. Those eyes were grey-blue, clear enough to see through everything.
“I’m sorry,” Elias whispered. “Sorry you were born into this loop. Sorry you’ll lose Maya. Sorry you’ll go through everything I went through.”
The baby stopped crying and just looked at him quietly.
Elias stood up and placed the baby on a clean blanket. Then he took out the camera, took that photograph: Irene lying on the ground, cradling the baby.
Next, he pulled out the notebook and began writing.
He wrote down the blueprints for Chronos. He wrote down the theory of time loops. He wrote a message for Simon:
If you’ve found this baby, please adopt him. Name him Elias. This child comes from the future. His existence is a paradox. In this notebook, you’ll find theories about time travel. Please study it. Please teach this child. He will complete Chronos in 2012. I know this sounds mad. But when you test this baby’s cells, you’ll find anomalous isotope signatures. You’ll find residual quantum entanglement. You’ll know I’m telling the truth. Take care of him. Love him. Because he will endure pain you cannot imagine.
—Elias Klaus
He placed the notebook beside Irene and the baby.
In that moment, Elias suddenly felt a huge pain in his chest: This baby would grow up. Would be raised by Simon. Would study physics. Would fall in love and have a daughter. Would build Chronos. Would lose everything. Would jump back here. Would become him.
And he couldn’t change anything. Because if he changed it, this baby wouldn’t exist. And if this baby didn’t exist, he wouldn’t exist either.
It was a perfect trap.
“Goodbye,” Elias whispered. “Goodbye, myself.”
He turned and walked back into the forest depths.
He knew he had to return to 2012. He knew he had to live through the next twenty-eight years. He knew he had to become that old man waiting in 2040.
Because that was the loop.
Chapter Three
Time: 13th November 1985, 06:15
Location: St Cecilia Forest Edge
Simon Klaus, as usual, woke at six o’clock, put on his running shoes, and started his morning jog.
He was forty-two, a physics professor, a widower. His wife Emily had died of cancer five years ago. The doctors said she was only thirty-eight, should have had more time, but cancer doesn’t care about age.
Simon ran every morning, trying to escape the empty house, those rooms filled with memories. But this morning, he heard crying.
At first, he thought it was a cat. But when he followed the sound, he discovered it was a baby’s cry.
In the abandoned hunter’s cabin, there was a woman’s corpse and a swaddled baby crying.
He carefully picked up the baby. A boy, seemingly just born, the umbilical cord still clamped with a medical clip.
“Good God,” Simon whispered. “Who are you? Where are your parents?”
The baby stopped crying, opened his eyes and looked at him. Those eyes were grey-blue, unnaturally old for a newborn.
Simon noticed a notebook beneath the swaddling. Holding the baby with one arm, he picked up the notebook with the other, opened the first page.
When he read those words, the whole world seemed to stop.
“If you’ve found this baby, please adopt him...”
Simon’s hands began trembling. He read on, about time travel, about paradoxes.
This had to be a hoax. Some madman’s hoax.
But when he turned to the page with the blueprints, he froze.
Those equations... equations he’d never seen before, yet seemed familiar... they solved problems he’d been researching for ten years without a breakthrough:
Quantum corrections to spacetime curvature
Wormhole stability equations
Topological structure of causality
This couldn’t be a hoax, because these equations were too complex and precise.
Simon held the baby, looked at the notebook, then at the forest.
“Elias,” he whispered, reading the name in the notebook. “You want me to name him Elias.”
That was also his wife’s middle name.
Emily Elias Klaus.
Was this a coincidence? Or...
Simon looked at the baby in his arms, those eyes still watching him, calm and profound.
“All right,” Simon said. “Elias. If this is fate, I accept it willingly.”
He carried the baby and turned towards town. He didn’t know this baby was his own father. He didn’t know he’d just become part of a temporal paradox. But he knew one thing: he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
Chapter Four
Time: 12th November 2012, 23:30
Location: St Cecilia University · Physics Department Underground Laboratory
Elias Klaus, aged twenty-seven, stood before Chronos, finger hovering over the activation button.
This machine had taken five years to build, using notes Simon had left him, that mysterious notebook Simon had given him on his deathbed.
“This is your destiny,” Simon had said from his hospital bed, voice weak. “Complete it. I know you’ll succeed, because... because this has already happened.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?” Elias had gripped Simon’s hand.
“You’ll understand,” Simon said. “When the time comes, you’ll understand everything.”
...
“Daddy, are you daydreaming?”
Elias turned to see his five-year-old daughter sitting in a small chair in the laboratory corner, hugging her toy rabbit, watching him.
Maya had soft brown curls and the same blue eyes as her mother. Her mother Lily had died in a car accident three years ago, leaving father and daughter alone together.
“No, darling,” Elias walked over, crouched down. “Daddy’s just thinking.”
“Are you thinking about Mummy?”
Elias’s heart clenched. “Yes.”
“I miss her too,” Maya said. “But Grandpa Simon said missing someone doesn’t bring them back.”
“Grandpa Simon was right.”
“But,” Maya tilted her head, “your big machine can make time go backwards, right? So can we go back and see Mummy?”
Elias fell silent. This was why he’d built Chronos. To reclaim what was lost.
“Perhaps, darling,” he said. “Perhaps.”
“Will you try?”
Elias looked at his daughter’s hopeful eyes. How could he say no?
“Yes,” he said. “Daddy will try.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Maya jumped up excitedly. “Can I watch?”
“You can watch,” Elias said. “But you must sit there quietly and not go near the machine, all right?”
“All right!” Maya obediently sat back in her chair.
Elias returned to the control panel. His hands were shaking. He checked all the parameters, all the connections. Everything was ready.
He took a deep breath and pressed the activation button.
Chronos began to run.
A deep hum filled the entire laboratory, like the earth breathing. Static sparks appeared in the air from the superconducting magnets’ magnetic field. At the machine’s core, the artificially created micro black hole began expanding, changing from deep black to ethereal blue.
Spacetime began to warp.
Elias stared at the jumping data on the instrument panel. Energy output stable. Magnetic field strength normal. The wormhole was forming.
“Wow, so pretty!”
Elias’s blood instantly froze.
He whipped round to see Maya had already jumped from her chair, running towards Chronos. Her eyes were fixed on that beautiful blue glow, her face full of wonder.
“Maya! No!” Elias screamed, rushing forward.
But it was too late.
Maya’s little hand touched the edge of the energy field.
In that moment, time seemed to stop.
Elias watched his daughter’s body begin to glow. Her skin became transparent, and he could see bones, see blood vessels, see every cell.
Then she began to dissolve. Her body became light particles, became a quantum cloud, became part of spacetime itself.
“Daddy...” Maya’s voice echoed in the air, growing fainter, more distant.
Then she vanished.
Completely vanished.
As if she’d never existed.
Elias knelt on the ground, staring at where his daughter had disappeared. His brain couldn’t process what had just happened. His heart hammered in his chest, but he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
Then Chronos began to lose control.
Energy output spiked, the magnetic field oscillated, the wormhole destabilised. Blue energy waves expanded from Chronos’s core, devouring the entire laboratory, the entire university, the entire town.
Elias felt his body being torn apart, reassembled, thrown into the torrent of time.
He saw everything.
And in that kaleidoscope of fractured moments, he remembered what happened in February 1985.
He had just jumped back from 2040 for the very first time, landing in a filthy alleyway at the edge of St Cecilia. His mind had been full of Maya’s screams as she dissolved, his lungs still clogged with the blue mucus residue of temporal transit.
Half-mad with grief, he’d run through the rain-soaked night and collapsed like a dying vagrant at the back door of a shabby pub.
In that endless, freezing winter rain, he’d encountered a woman equally lost.
The power had failed that night. The entire pub, the entire world had plunged into deathly darkness. He remembered drinking vast quantities of cheap whisky, trying to drown the hallucinations in his head. The woman had sat beside him; he couldn’t even make out her features, only remembered a faint scent about her, like rain-soaked hay. They’d both thought they wouldn’t survive the night, both thought it was the end of the world.
In that lightless attic, driven by alcohol, fever, and crushing loneliness, two desperate shadows had entangled themselves together.
He’d never asked her name. She’d never seen his face clearly. For him, it had been nothing more than a self-destructive release to numb the pain; for her, perhaps it was the only moment of genuine human contact in her long, lonely life.
He’d left before dawn.
Not until this moment did he realise that the first thing he’d done upon returning to 1985 wasn’t to save anyone but to create his own origin with his own hands.
What he’d thought was a chance encounter born of desperation had actually been the universe’s carefully laid trap to ensure his birth.
He’d fled the graveyard of 2040, only to reach across time and dig the very cradle from which he’d be born.
He saw this loop repeated countless times.
Then he fell into the ruins of 2040.
Epilogue
Time: 12th November 2040, 00:01
Location: St Cecilia Ruins
Elias opened his eyes. He lay in ash, his entire body screaming with pain, but he was alive. When he struggled to stand and looked around, St Cecilia had become ruins, all the buildings collapsed, and all life vanished. Only him. Only him alone.
“Maya...” he whispered, voice hoarse. But there was no answer, only the wind through the ruins. Elias knelt in the ash, hands clawing at the grey powder, making animal howls of grief. He didn’t know how long he cried, perhaps an hour, perhaps an entire day. Time had lost all meaning before him.
When he could finally think, the first thing he did was seek death.
He scrabbled through the ruins and found a sharp metal shard, staring at that keen edge. “Maya,” he whispered, “Daddy’s coming to join you.” He pressed the metal shard against his own throat, closed his eyes, and dragged it down hard. Searing pain flooded through him as warm blood gushed out. He felt life draining away, then everything went black.
He woke lying in the same ruins. The same location, the same time, just past midnight. He touched his throat and found no wound; the skin was intact. But his hands still bore bloodstains, dried and brown. “No...” he whispered. “No, this can’t be...” He tried again, this time with a sharper shard, cutting deeper. He died. Then woke again.
He tried ten times, twenty times, a hundred times. Every time, he woke up in the same place at the same time. The wounds vanished, but the memories remained. The pain remained. The despair remained. Finally, he gave up.
He sat in the ruins, looking at Chronos. The wormhole was still open, still pulsing with that eerie blue light. “Perhaps,” he thought, “perhaps I can go back. Perhaps I can change the past.” It was his last hope, and also his greatest mistake. Because when he jumped into the wormhole, he didn’t know he wasn’t changing the past. He was completing it.
When he reached 1985, he discovered the truth. He discovered he was the one who had got Irene pregnant. He discovered he was that baby’s father. He discovered it was all a loop, and he couldn’t change anything, because his every action was already part of the loop’s architecture.
Twenty-eight years passed. Elias grew old, weary and desperate, but he was still waiting, waiting for the next version of himself to arrive, waiting to have that conversation again, waiting for the loop to continue. Because this was his destiny. This was his hell.
He was the ouroboros, the snake forever devouring its own tail. He was his own father, his own son, his own prisoner. And Maya... Maya would die in every cycle. A thousand times, ten thousand times, forever.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Old Elias whispered, looking at the watch forever stopped at 12:01. “Daddy can’t save you. Because Daddy can’t even save himself.”
The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. And in between lies only the illusion of choice.