Chapter 10: Unmoored

Chapter 10: Unmoored

The silence that followed the Chronovore's disappearance was a physical weight, pressing down on the ruined pier. The air, stripped of the unnatural energy, was suddenly cold, heavy with the mundane scents of salt, creosote, and the faint, lingering ghost of burnt sugar. The world had returned to its normal state, but Sara was no longer a part of it. She was an anomaly, a foreign object lodged in the wrong place and time.

“Mom?” she whispered, her voice raw. She crawled across the splintered planks to where her mother was huddled, a small, broken shape in the moonlight. “Mom, it’s okay. He’s gone. We’re safe.”

Her mother didn’t respond. She stared out at the dark, placid ocean, her eyes wide and vacant, as if the part of her that made sense of the world had been permanently scorched away by the sight of Milton’s unholy transformation. She was a shell, and Sara, looking at the empty vessel of the woman she had broken reality to save, felt a despair so profound it threatened to swallow her whole. This was the result of her grand plan. Not salvation, but a deeper, more profound ruin.

That’s when the pain started.

It wasn't like the dull throb she’d felt after her first trip. This was a spike of hot iron driven straight through the back of her skull, from one temple to the other. A blinding, searing agony that made her gasp and clutch her head. The nausea followed, a thousand times worse than before. It wasn't the simple seasickness of temporal travel; it was a deep, structural sickness, as if her very atoms were being shaken loose from their moorings.

The world began to feel… thin. The solid wood of the pier beneath her palms seemed to vibrate with a low, dissonant hum. The gentle lapping of the waves against the pylons sounded distorted, echoing from the wrong direction. She felt a phantom pressure against her, a cosmic tide trying to sweep her away. Milton had called it a leash, the temporal elastic that pulled you home. He had shattered his. But in doing so, he had also severed hers. She was no longer tethered to anything. She was unmoored.

“Got to… get up,” she grunted, her teeth clenched against the rising wave of pain and sickness. She tried to pull her mother to her feet, but her limbs felt like they were filled with wet sand. Her own body was becoming a stranger.

Her mother finally turned her head, her eyes focusing on Sara with a flicker of terrified recognition. “Your hands,” she whispered, her voice trembling.

Sara looked down. Her own hands were shaking, not with fear or cold, but with the same violent, high-frequency tremor that had consumed Milton just before he changed. A low, buzzing static was beginning to fill her ears, not from the world around her, but from inside her own head.

“No,” Sara choked out, the word a denial against the inevitable. “No, no, no…”

The pressure intensified. The world was losing its solidity, its edges beginning to fray like old film stock. The distant lights on the shore blurred into streaks. The moon seemed to smear across the sky. She felt a colossal, invisible hand wrap around her, squeezing the very breath from her lungs.

This was it. The rubber-band. But without an anchor point to snap back to, it wasn’t a return trip. It was a violent, chaotic expulsion.

The world dissolved.

It was not a journey. It was an annihilation. She was ripped apart and thrown into a chaotic, screaming torrent of everything at once. There was no sense of direction, no feeling of movement, just a nauseating, kaleidoscopic smear of colour and light, of sound and sensation. She saw flashes of impossible things: a forest of crystalline trees beneath a purple sun, the terrified face of a Roman legionary, the cold, silent dance of nebulae being born. It was the raw, unfiltered feed of history, a billion billion moments screaming past her at once, and her consciousness was shredding under the strain.

Then, just as violently as it began, it ended.

She was spat out, dumped unceremoniously onto a hard, gritty surface. She landed on her side, the impact jarring every bone in her body. For a long moment, she just lay there, retching dryly, her mind a scorched ruin. The headache had subsided to a dull, grinding ache, but the static in her ears remained, a constant, low hum.

The air was the first thing she noticed. It was hot, dead, and tasted of acrid chemical dust. There was no salt, no life. She pushed herself up, her muscles screaming in protest, and looked around.

She was in a city. Or what was left of one.

Skeletal towers of twisted metal and blackened permacrete clawed at a sky the colour of rust. The glassless eyes of a thousand skyscrapers stared down at her with hollow indifference. The streets were choked with a fine, red dust and the husks of strange, streamlined vehicles. There was no wind. No birds. No sound but the faint, persistent hum in her own head. It was a graveyard of a world, a monument to a future that had already died.

The shock was so absolute it momentarily eclipsed her fear. The pier, her mother, the life she had been desperately trying to fix—they might as well have been a dream from a million years ago. They were gone. She was here. When was she? The question was a pointless, terrifying luxury.

A new sensation cut through her shock. A sharp, stinging, tearing sensation on the back of her hands. She thought she’d scraped them in the fall, but this felt different. It was a pain that came from within, a feeling of skin splitting under an unseen pressure.

She slowly, shakily, raised her hands in front of her face. The tremor was still there, a constant, buzzing vibration. And on the pale skin of her knuckles, she saw it.

A fine, black line had appeared on her right hand, running from the joint of her index finger towards her wrist. It wasn’t a cut. It wasn’t a scratch filled with grime. It was a crack. A hairline fissure in her own flesh, as if she were made of old, brittle porcelain. As she watched, horrified, a second, smaller crack branched off from the first.

She remembered the pale, fragile skin on Milton’s wrists, the way it looked stretched and thin, like parchment about to tear. She remembered how his flesh had flaked away, revealing the void beneath. This was how it started. This was the mark of the unmoored. The affliction.

The stinging intensified, spreading up her arms. She looked at her left hand and saw another crack forming near her thumb. The skin was pulling apart at the seams. Her body, untethered from its native point in time, was beginning to fail, to disintegrate under the strain of its own impossibility.

She wasn't just lost. She was coming apart. The horror of her situation settled upon her, vast and absolute. She was alone in the ruins of the far future, a ghost whose very existence was a paradox, and her own body had just become a ticking clock, cracking and tearing its way toward the same monstrous fate that had claimed the man who had stranded her here. The static in her head grew a little louder.