Chapter 148
He let out a breath—shorter than his previous ones, a breath like air escaping lungs that had nothing left to hold.
At the corner of his lips, for the first time since the battle in Heraclea ended, something stirred—something like the shadow of a smile that never quite became one, yet enough for Arya, still seated with his back straight, to finally release the breath he had been holding through his nose with a sound that almost resembled a sigh of relief.
Arya exhaled deeply after hearing Nirma's words.
The breath left his broad chest with a sound more akin to wind escaping from a cave long sealed, and he allowed his shoulders—so long held upright with unwavering discipline even in this nameless room—to lower slightly.
Only slightly, but enough to show that something tense within him since he began speaking of that forgotten matter had finally begun to loosen.
Nirma did not move.
Not even an inch from his position.
But inside his mind—in the space he had long used to store every piece of information gathered across years, centuries, from one fallen civilization to another rising upon its ruins—something began to turn.
Something like a gear he had never realized existed suddenly began to move with a sound he could not ignore.
Five primary archetypes.
A linear belief system.
The foundation of human civilization across most stable timelines.
Those words, on their own, meant nothing—mere arrangements of letters formed by someone who had spent too long in institutions convinced that everything could be explained through their own constructed terminology.
Yet when those words echoed within a memory that never forgot—their first meeting with Ashita and Tegar at the residence of Ioannis Taronites—something shifted.
When Ashita stood in a room lit by candlelight that never went out despite wind seeping through imperfect walls, when she spoke of time and the five great religions, of something greater than the Abnormal they pursued, of something that could not be explained by the logic he had relied upon to survive.
Nirma heard everything without moving his body.
His hands remained resting on his thighs, his breath steady as when he first sat there.
But within his mind, in that same vast archive of memory, something began to move in ways he had never anticipated.
The Temporal Cross-Police airship they had hurled onto the railway tracks toward Psamathia District—
A vessel that should have shattered into pieces, sunk into the depths of the sea, or vanished into untouched fractures of time—had instead landed.
Had survived.
Had carried something to a place he had never imagined.
Jerusalem, July 15, 1099.
The day blood flowed through the stone streets up to ankle height.
The day Crusader forces, claiming to bear God's name, slaughtered Muslim and Jewish inhabitants with tireless blades.
The day history was written by hands still wet with blood that had not yet dried.
And above that dying city—amid smoke rising from burning homes and screams torn from throats that never shared a language—a message appeared.
A message that should not have existed in the year 1099.
A message written in a language not yet born.
A message from something that might have been waiting since before the first human etched sacred words onto stone, skin, or paper doomed not to last forever.
Arya read each line without changing his voice.
His tone remained flat, his rhythm slow—like someone reciting a grocery list devoid of emotion.
Yet between one verse and the next, between sentences twisted and reshaped, there were pauses he never gave when reading ordinary reports.
Pauses like breaths held too long.
Pauses like the realization that what he read was not merely a clever rearrangement of words by some Abnormal mind—but something more.
Something like a threat that needed no raised voice, because its very wording was enough to send a chill from head to toe.
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven—and I am the one who determines that time."
He read the first line—one originating from a scripture written by someone who had once sat beneath the same tree for years, seeking to understand that there was a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to be born and a time to die.
That everything beneath the heavens had its appointed time, beyond the control of any human hand.
Yet in the hand that rewrote it, in the fingers that bent each word from its original meaning, the verse—once a source of comfort—became a claim.
A declaration that time no longer belonged to an untouchable cycle, but to someone.
To something.
To an entity seated upon a throne never recorded in any holy scripture.
"He is the one who gives life and causes death, and He has power over all things—and I am He."
Arya continued.
And for the first time since he began reading, his voice lost its steady rhythm.
It lowered—slightly, almost like a whisper in a space without walls.
And Nirma, listening from across him, felt something akin to the hairs on his neck rising.
Not from fear.
Not from threat.
But from the recognition that the verse just spoken—one carried by a merchant who once meditated in a cave—had been changed into something else entirely.
Changed into a statement not of divine unity, but of something that used the same words with an entirely different meaning.
To be continued…