Chapter 9: The Becoming

Chapter 9: The Becoming

The universe held its breath. The single, piercing whine of tearing spacetime was the only sound left in existence. Milton stood silhouetted against the wound he had carved in reality, a triumphant, manic godling on the verge of his ascension. The two metallic pebbles, one stolen from Sara’s future and one from his own present, hovered inches apart, drawn to each other by a force that defied physics.

“For you, Liv,” he screamed, his voice a distorted ribbon of sound in the temporal gale. “Forever!”

And then, he brought his hands together.

The moment the two artifacts touched, there was not a bang, but an absolute cessation. A single, perfect nanosecond of pure, unadulterated silence that was more terrifying than any noise. The screaming whine cut out. The gale ceased. In that pocket of utter stillness, the fissure between his hands pulsed once, a brilliant flash of anti-light, a blackness so profound it seemed to have its own texture. Then the sound returned, but it was no longer the sound of reality tearing. It was the sound of something being born.

Milton’s scream of triumph began to change. It wavered, then warped, the organic texture of a human voice stretching and degrading like an old cassette tape being chewed by a machine. The triumphant cry dissolved into a high-pitched, electronic shriek, a modem’s handshake with hell. It was a sound Sara knew. A sound etched into her memory, a sound that haunted her nightmares. It was the horrifying, buzzing crackle of the thing from the garden.

His body began to contort. A wet, sickening crack echoed from his spine as it bent backwards at an impossible angle. His arms twisted, the bones grinding as they reshaped themselves into longer, leaner limbs. The constant, subtle tremor that had defined his hands erupted into a violent, full-body vibration, so fast that his form began to blur at the edges.

“What’s happening to him?” Sara’s mother whimpered from behind her, her voice a fragile thread in the rising tide of static.

Sara couldn't answer. She could only watch, paralyzed by a horror that transcended anything she had ever imagined.

The transformation accelerated. The cheap fabric of Milton’s shirt and trousers strained against his changing form before seeming to melt, the colour draining from the material until it was just a uniform, deepening grey. The gloves he always wore, the ones that had hidden his pale, damaged skin, began to smoke and blacken. They split open at the seams, not revealing flesh, but peeling back to show a void beneath.

His skin, where it was visible at his neck and wrists, began to split. The pale, parchment-thin flesh didn't bleed. It cracked open like old paint, fissures of absolute blackness spreading across his body in a spiderweb of pure nothing. He wasn't being consumed by shadow; the shadow was what he was made of. He was turning inside out.

The horrible truth crashed into Sara with the force of a physical blow. The static. The silhouette. The unnatural, glitching speed. The name he had given it—the auditor. It wasn't a monster he was summoning. It was never a cosmic guard dog drawn to her grief. It was a state of being. A destination.

He was the monster.

The thing that had butchered her father in the garden, that had branded her with its claws, was him. A future, more complete version of the thing he was becoming right now. The paradox hadn't summoned a creature to punish him; the paradox was him, a knot of impossibility that could only exist as a wound in time. The degradation she had seen on his skin wasn’t a side effect of using the boomerang; it was the larval stage of this monstrous metamorphosis.

His face was the last thing to go. His cheap-rimmed glasses shattered from the vibrations, falling away to reveal eyes that were no longer human. They were pits of roiling darkness, burning with a cold, obsessive intelligence that was all that remained of the man he had been. His mouth opened, a scream of agony and ecstasy tearing from his throat, but the only sound that emerged was that deafening, soul-scraping static.

Then, the last vestiges of his human form dissolved. His features smeared, his body darkened, his edges fuzzed and crackled until all that was left was what she remembered from her father’s garden: a humanoid silhouette made of pure blackness, a hole cut into the fabric of the world.

The newly formed Chronovore stood for a moment in the eye of the temporal storm it had created. The two pebbles, the source of its unholy birth, were now gone, seemingly absorbed into its very being. It slowly turned its featureless head, and its gaze fell upon Sara.

There was no recognition in that gaze, not in any human sense. There was no memory of the support group, of the car park, of their shared, feigned grief. But there was intent. A final, hateful acknowledgement. It looked at her with the cold, dispassionate malice of a creator looking upon the tool they were about to discard. She was the key. The delivery girl. Her purpose was served. In its abyssal depths, she felt a sliver of Milton's curdled love for his wife, now twisted into a cosmic selfishness that saw all other beings as utterly irrelevant.

With a final, contemptuous glance, the Chronovore turned its attention back to the fissure. It didn't step through it. It simply dissolved, its static-laced form fraying at the edges and being drawn into the tear in reality like smoke up a chimney.

The instant its form was gone, the fissure snapped shut. The sound was sharp and absolute, like the crack of a cosmic whip.

And then, silence.

The temporal storm was gone. The buzzing in the air vanished. The ruined lights of the theme park flickered and died, plunging the pier into near-total darkness, lit only by the distant moon. The phantom crowd of onlookers was gone. The world was still.

Sara pushed herself into a sitting position on the splintered planks, her breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps. She looked around at the wreckage, at her mother who was huddled on the ground, staring into space with wide, unseeing eyes. The cool sea breeze felt alien on her skin.

Her lifeline was gone.

The boomerang he had stolen, the one that tethered her to her own time, had been consumed in his becoming. The path home, the elastic leash that had always been there to yank her back, was severed.

She was stranded. Lost in the past, abandoned by the monster she had helped create. A piece of driftwood in an ocean of time, with the tide going out.