Parallel

Chapter 4: Spaces Between

Chapter 4: Spaces Between

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Deo Margan's POV

...I clicked the button. And disappeared into the folds of the unknown.

They say crossing boundaries leaves you unchanged, but they've never stepped into a rift that doesn't belong to any world at all. The moment I clicked the button on my prototype, not fully aware that it might disassemble me at a molecular level, I disappeared into the folds of the unknown. The sensation wasn't like falling; it was like being unraveled. I was pulled apart thread by thread, thought by thought, until I was nothing but fragments of a self trying to remember its shape.

I'm stuck in the space between two realities. And then, there's stillness. No silence. Not void. Just time slowed down into something incomprehensible. Like a drop of water suspended mid-air, refusing to fall, refusing to disappear. Hindi ko na alam kung gaano katagal na akong palutang-lutang between these realities. A second? An hour? Maybe just a breath?

Or maybe, if my mind is telling the truth, every minute I spent in that liminal field stretched into months of agony. Hindi ako makagalaw ng maayos. I couldn't even breathe properly. I existed, but not in a place where existence meant anything. I was in between. I wasn't in my world anymore, but I wasn't in hers either.

I could hear echoes. Trails of light pulsed like dying signals from distant stars. Images would sometimes flicker through them: a park, a girl, a watch, her eyes. Nishiya. My mind kept circling back to her. She was the last anchor I held onto before the shift. That brief moment when she gave me her name, Nishiya... echoed louder than anything else.

But this place had no doors. No windows. Just my breath, my thoughts, and my desperation. And my watch. It wasn't broken. Not yet. But it wasn't responding either. The device I crafted from scribbled formulas, unstable modulator circuits, and stolen fragments of a lost science sat dead on my wrist. Its once-bright pulse dimmed, blinking erratically. It mocked me.

Still, I refused to give up. Even in the thick of nothing, I tinkered. Over and over, I adjusted the circuits, rerouted energy through the quantum loops, and recalibrated for multiversal resonance. Every time I pressed the trigger again, hoping to break through, nothing. Another failure. And another. Until eventually, my hands shook, not from fear but exhaustion. I couldn't tell if I was aging. I couldn't tell if time was erasing me bit by bit.

But then...A flicker. A frequency. The tiniest shift in the static around me. It was like something in the watch responded to a new signal, something faint but familiar. I held my breath as I twisted the dial again, aligning it with the frequency spike. I pressed the button. And the world cracked open. Light flooded in like a scream.

Not the warm kind. Not the same sunlight where I came from, not the same moonlight-this light peeled away the in-between and demanded truth. The air warped around me, and for a split second, I saw something na dati sa sci-fi films ko lang napapanood. I saw every version of me that tried and failed. Every shift I attempted. Every near-hit. Every moment I thought I'd gotten it right, only to end up in fragments. It's a loop. Para akong mababaliw sa mga nakita ko. Then it snapped.

My feet hit ground... real ground. Damp, solid, and cold. I stumbled forward, breath catching in my throat, as if my lungs forgot what real air felt like. The trees were unfamiliar, but the gravity felt normal. The weight of reality returned. No more floating. I was out. Not back in my world, but not nowhere either. And somewhere, not too far, my prototype watch pulsed. A signal.

It led me like a heartbeat. Subtle but urgent. I didn't know if I was walking or being pulled, but I followed it. My shoes thudded against cracked pavement, park benches and rustling trees. The scent of rain from a while ago hung in the air. And then I saw her...Nishiya.