Time did not move here.
Aryan took a step forward and felt... nothing. Not the brush of wind, not the sand of ground. Just the quiet. A stillness so complete it rang in his ears. The sand beneath his feet did not shift, and the massive broken clocks suspended in the void above remained utterly silent. It was like standing inside a memory the universe had forgotten.
He turned back. There was no exit. No Watcher. No doorway. Just that timeless, bone-pale desert of dust and fractured seconds.
This was the first trial.
And it had already begun.
He tried to walk, but his footsteps echoed too loud—like time was mocking his motion. Every movement felt wrong. His wrist still bore the mark of the Law of Time, but the tattoo no longer ticked. It was still. Trapped.
Aryan whispered, "Hello?"
His voice didn't carry. It dropped straight to the ground like it had weight.
Nothing answered.
He kept walking until the nothingness became unbearable. Not from fear—but from how it felt. There was no hunger, no thirst, no warmth, no sound. His thoughts looped in his head like broken vinyl—endless, silent, growing louder only because nothing else competed with them.
What if I'm trapped here forever?
What if I'm not supposed to survive this?
What if I was never worthy to begin with?
He started to run, but the land didn't change. He ran harder. Still nothing. Just more blankness, more glassy sky, more mute sand that didn't shift. He screamed—not from pain, but frustration.
And then…
Something moved.
A figure.
Far ahead. Small. Childlike. Barefoot. And familiar.
Aryan's breath caught. The figure was walking away from him—slowly, softly, with purpose. But he knew that back. He knew the way that posture curved. It was him.
His ten-year-old self.
He chased after the child version of himself, yelling. "Wait! Hey—stop!"
But the child didn't hear. He only walked further into the haze.
Eventually, Aryan caught up. But the boy stood still, facing a void where time itself bent like heatwaves. Aryan hesitated.
Then the child spoke.
"You left us."
Aryan's stomach twisted. "What?"
The boy didn't turn around. He just kept staring. "You left me behind. When things got hard. When no one told you the truth. You stopped asking. You just laughed. Made jokes. Acted like it didn't hurt."
Aryan said nothing.
"You don't want to remember, do you?"
The world around them shifted. Suddenly, they were standing in an old room. Cracked walls. Wooden furniture. A calendar from twelve years ago. And a couple sitting far away—half-shadow, blurry—as if time couldn't decide whether to remember or forget.
Aryan gasped. That was the orphanage.
The one he never talked about.
"Who are they?" Aryan asked, staring at the couple.
The boy—himself—turned around now. His eyes were hollow. "Not your parents."
The pain stabbed deep.
He had always wondered why he looked nothing like them. Why strangers often asked if he was adopted. Why he sometimes felt like a guest in his own house.
Now he knew.
His parents—Rajiv and leela—they loved him. That had never changed. But they weren't the beginning.
Aryan fell to his knees.
He knew it inside in his heart that there was something amiss his whole child felt like he somehow different from others or his parents sometime hides things from him . and know he has to face that truth that was haunting him from his childhood .
"I'm not ready for this."
The boy shook his head. "Time doesn't wait for ready people. It moves. It always moves. That's why you're here. Not to control time. But to face it."
Then the world began to break apart.
The orphanage cracked and shattered like porcelain, and the void returned—screaming this time.
Aryan stood in a voidstorm of glass fragments, clocks melting into gears, and echoes of a child's laughter twisted into cries.
The Law was watching.
And judging.
Aryan floated—directionless—through a endless void of seconds and moments, all flashing front of his eyes like fragments . A scream from his childhood. A laugh from his college day. His mother's voice calling him for breakfast. A whisper of the Watcher saying, "Not all who bend time are spared its weight."
Then...
Stillness again.
He was standing.
On a stone platform.
One word burned into the center: Remember.
The trial was not over.
It had only begun.
---
Elsewhere…
Beneath the ground of Earth, far below Gujarat, something stirred near a chasm that breathed in silence. Around it, beings that did not belong to time began to gather.
One hovered above the void, her eyes glowing like dying stars.
"The heir is waking," she whispered.
Another creature, malformed and cracked like broken armor, replied, "Then the timelines will begin to fracture again. As they did once before."
The chasm rumbled.
And far away, in a still realm, Aryan's eyes opened—bleeding light.
[TO BE CONTINUED…]