Chapter 15: Where It All Began

Chapter 15: Where It All Began

There was no journey. No agonizing tear through the fabric of reality. There was only a shift. A change in state, as simple and instantaneous as a thought. One moment, the void. The next, substance.

She materialized in silence. The roaring static that had been her entire world had collapsed inward, becoming a low, internal hum, the quiet thrum of a well-oiled engine of impossibility. She stood in darkness, on a surface of cracked, cold asphalt. The air was frigid and heavy with the familiar, forgotten scents of damp earth, decaying leaves, and the faint, sour tang of exhaust fumes.

This place was an echo. A memory, etched into the timeline. The community hall car park.

She did not feel the cold. She did not feel the ache of a physical body. She was form without substance, a silhouette carved from the absence of light. She was a stable, coherent thought of hunger and grief.

And she was not alone.

Across the sparsely filled lot, under the lonely orange glare of a single security light, stood two figures. They were points of intense temporal significance, glowing in her new, extrasensory perception like bonfires in the dark.

One was a source of raw, untapped potential. A paradox waiting to be born. It was a shape she knew intimately, the vessel of the original wound. A frightened young woman with her face, her shoulders hunched against a chill that was more than just the autumn air. The woman’s form radiated a chaotic energy of grief, desperation, and a terrible, foolish hope. The Sara-that-was.

The other figure was a blight. A knot of curdled time, reeking of predation and selfish, obsessive love. A paunchy, greying man in an ill-fitting shirt, his posture a calculated mimicry of sympathy. He was a stable, existing paradox, an older, more practiced wound. He was the creator. He was Milton.

In the man’s gloved hand was a third point of light, one so dense and powerful it seemed to drink the very reality around it. A small, metallic pebble. The boomerang. To her new senses, it was not an object but a singularity, a folded, compressed universe of possibility that hummed with a seductive, destructive power.

She watched as the man held it out to the woman. The scene played out in a silence broken only by the low thrum of her own being. The deal was about to be struck. The first domino was about to fall. The cycle was about to begin.

A choice, or something like it, echoed through her fractured consciousness. It was not a debate of logic or morality; it was a war between two fundamental, competing instincts.

The first was a ghostly, vestigial impulse. An echo of the person she used to be. Warn her. Stop her. The feeling was tied to the shape of the frightened woman, a pull of preservation, a desire to prevent the wound from ever being inflicted. The instinct screamed at her to move, to intervene, to shatter the tableau before the pebble could change hands.

But she knew, with an innate, absolute certainty that came from the madman’s book and the very laws of her new existence, what would happen. If she, a stable, self-consuming paradox, were to interact with her own nascent, potential self, the resulting causal schism would be absolute. It would not simply erase a timeline. It would be like dividing by zero. The entire structure of this moment, perhaps this reality, would tear itself apart in an explosion of pure nothingness. Annihilation. The ultimate, final end. The impulse to save was a suicidal one.

The second impulse was far stronger. It was the prime directive of her new form. It was the hunger.

It was focused entirely on Milton.

She looked at him, and she did not see the man who had manipulated her, the monster who had murdered her father and orchestrated her mother’s despair. She saw those things, yes, but only as echoes, as the foundational flavour profile of what he truly was: competition. A rival. And more than that, sustenance.

The memory of being herded through history, of being cultivated like livestock, was not a source of anger or a desire for revenge in the human sense. It was the cold, hard logic of the predator. He had marked her as prey. He had intended to consume her. The cycle of predation demanded a response. He was a source of rich, potent, pre-digested temporal energy. He was a feast. To consume him would be to not only survive, but to grow stronger, to solidify the fragile, paradoxical miracle of her own continued existence.

The two instincts warred within her, a battle between the ghost of a human soul and the reality of a cosmic predator. The desire to prevent the pain versus the need to consume its source.

The memory-shape of Sara reached out a trembling hand. The man, Milton, smiled his gentle, lying smile. The pebble gleamed. The moment stretched, thinning, about to break.

And in that instant, the choice was made. The echo of grief, the one pure, foundational trauma that had survived her transformation, fused with the hunger. It gave the mindless, cosmic need a purpose. A target. A direction. The cycle did not need to be broken by a selfless act of annihilation. It could be broken by a selfish act of consumption.

She would not save the girl. She would not risk everything to warn a ghost who was already doomed.

She would eat the wolf.

A low, guttural crackle, like the sound of a dying radio searching for a signal, vibrated in the air around her. It was her version of a growl. A declaration of intent.

The two figures by the car, poised on the brink of their terrible bargain, froze. The man’s smile faltered. The woman’s hand stopped inches from the pebble. They both turned, their heads snapping toward the deepest shadows of the car park. They couldn’t see her, not yet, but they could feel her presence. A sudden, absolute drop in temperature. A pressure in the air. The unnerving sound of static where there should only be silence.

She took a step, a silent, fluid movement that was less a step and more a localized shift in space. The static crackled around her hands, the black void of her form fizzing with contained, hungry energy.

The hunt had begun.