The Escape Code

Ch-14:Through the Clock

It wasn't supposed to work.

That's what I kept telling myself as the air around us began to hum — low at first, then louder, until the air trembled. The blueprint shouldn't have been enough. It was centuries old, incomplete, half-erased. But Zedith read it like scripture, her fingers flying across the cracked console, stitching dead circuits together with copper wire and sheer determination.

And then the clock woke up.

It wasn't really a clock — not the kind you hang on walls. It was a ring, enormous and jagged, fused to the cavern floor like it had grown there. Black metal veined with silver, carved in patterns that didn't make sense to my eyes but made my stomach twist.

The moment Zedith slotted the cube into the core, the world changed.

Light ripped through the ring like molten glass. A sound like grinding stone swallowed the chamber. I stumbled back, but Rowen caught my arm, pulling me behind him. His jaw was set, but his grip trembled.

"This... isn't natural," he muttered.

No. It wasn't.

The ring spun slowly at first, then faster, faster, until the runes bled blue fire. And in the middle — a crack. Not in the ring. In reality.

The crack widened. Not glass. Not metal. Air breaking apart. And through it — colors that didn't exist. A sky that wasn't ours. Fragments of voices whispering through the hum.

A portal. A gate.

"Destination locked," Zedith said, voice steady like steel even though her eyes glowed with reflected light. "Year... 2024."

My chest tightened. That was the year on my father's notes. The one he never explained. The year that kept haunting his journals like a shadow.

"This is it," Zedith whispered. "This is where it starts."

Or where it ends.

Rowen turned to me. "You don't have to—"

"Yes. I do."

Because if I didn't go now, I'd never know the truth. About my father. About why this device existed. About why I felt like every step I'd taken since that night was pulling me here.

The gate hissed open wider, its edges sparking like torn lightning.

One breath. One choice.

Rowen went first. His silhouette stretched and warped as he crossed the threshold, then vanished into a smear of light.

Zedith followed without a word.

And then there was me. Standing at the edge of something bigger than time itself.

I gripped the cube tighter in my palm. The hum deepened, and the portal seemed to lean toward me, hungry.

I stepped forward.

Letting the light swallow me whole.