When the darkness closed in, the first thing to disappear was sound.
The static rising from Esra’s device, the scrape of Arif’s boot against the stone floor, Ilber’s breathing… They all stopped at once. It was as if the room had silenced not the four people inside it, but the possibility of their existence.
Betul reached out. Her fingers touched nothing. The passage that had been in front of her a moment ago was gone; yet warmth lingered in her palm, as if she were holding someone else’s hand.
“Child,” she said.
No sound came out.
Ilber’s lips moved. Betul couldn’t make out what he said, but she saw the expression on his face: This wasn’t the fear of being unable to explain something for the first time. It was the fear of finding something explainable in the wrong place.
Then one of the stones in the room spoke.
“Betul.”
This time, the voice didn’t come from outside. It rose from within Betul. It was the tone her mother had used when she was a child—soft, but allowing no argument.
Betul turned her head.
The rings around the door had begun to glow again. Three were blue, and one was white. Inside the white socket, a date appeared instead of an image:
“12,000 years ago.”
Arif stared into the darkness. “That date is wrong.”
“In what way?” Esra asked.
“We said five thousand years for the period when Gohan and Niyon lived.”
Ilber picked up the book from the floor. The metal pages had closed, but fine lines moved across its surface.
“Maybe the date isn’t what’s wrong,” he said. “Maybe it’s what we call the past.”
Four marks appeared on the book’s cover. A human hand. A star. An eye. Two interlocking semicircles.
Then a fifth mark formed.
The same eye.
But this time, the eye wasn’t closed.
The blue line on Betul’s chest flared. Pain spread from between her ribs to her shoulders. Her knees gave out. Arif caught her before she fell.
“Look at me,” Arif said. “Where are you?”
Betul tried to answer. The walls of the room were drawing closer together, and the animal reliefs on the stones’ surfaces shifted as if they were alive. A snake raised its head. A vulture’s wings spread across the stone. Then all the figures turned in the same direction.
Toward Betul.
“They’re calling me,” she said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one calling them.”
The shadowless man stood beside the wall. He was no longer shadowless. Beneath his feet was a thin black shape stretching in the opposite direction from the light.
Ilber noticed it. “Looks like you have a shadow after all.”
The man lowered his head. “It doesn’t belong to me.”
“Whose is it?”
“Those who remained here.”
At that moment, a knocking sound came from beneath the floor.
Once.
Then twice.
On the third knock, part of the stone wall cracked. Daylight—not blue light—seeped through the crack. But it was night outside.
Esra restarted her device. Coordinates, temperature readings, and timestamps were tangled together on the screen.
“The device is showing three different times at once,” she said.
Arif frowned. “Which one is right?”
“All three.”
Ilber approached the crack. “This isn’t a time passage.”
The shadowless man looked at him. “Finally.”
“It isn’t carrying time. It’s layering possibilities over one another.”
Betul raised her head. “What does that mean?”
Ilber opened the book’s cover. Between the pages, the edge of one of the previously missing sections was visible. It wasn’t paper; it was a thin, transparent metal sheet. It bore symbols resembling Gohan’s handwriting.
“It doesn’t want to send us into the past,” Ilber said. “It’s bringing us to the point where the past can change.”
“Is that supposed to be better?” Arif asked.
“No.”
The crack widened.
The nighttime landscape of Göbeklitepe appeared before them. But this time, the image wasn’t a single one. The same hill stood superimposed in three different states.
In the first, people carrying torches moved among the stones. Anunaki craft circled overhead.
In the second, the site had been abandoned. The circular structures had collapsed, and weeds covered the stones.
In the third, a massive black tower rose where Göbeklitepe should have been. Blue veins spread from the top of the tower across the world, snuffing out the lights of cities.
Esra held her breath. “Three outcomes.”
“Three possibilities,” Ilber said.
“Which one is our future?”
“None of them. Not yet.”
Gohan appeared within the image. Three separate Gohans walked at the same time. In one, he was leading the villagers into the tunnel; in the second, he was attacking Niyon; in the third, he was kneeling before a stone child.
Betul froze when she saw the child in the third image.
The child looked like her again.
This time, the child didn’t reach out. The child looked at the necklace in Gohan’s hand.
Betul wore an identical necklace around her neck.
“That’s impossible,” Betul said.
The shadowless man’s expression changed. “The paradox has begun.”
“What paradox?” Arif asked.
The man spoke without looking at Betul.
“You didn’t bring the necklace from the past.”
Betul’s fingers closed around the necklace.
“Then what?”
“The past took the necklace from you.”
The meaning of those words grew heavy in the room. Ilber turned the book over. The marks at the bottom of the page were slowly becoming legible.
“An object,” he murmured, “cannot exist before its own cause.”
Esra looked at him. “But it does.”
“Yes.”
“Who made it?”
Ilber didn’t answer.
Betul looked at the child in the image. This time, the child raised their head. Their face held the expression Betul had worn as a child: the silence of a child about to remember something, but afraid to remember it.
The child spoke.
“Your mother came here before you were born.”
Betul’s breath caught.
“Who are you?”
“You’re the one who will say that.”
The image shook. Gohan was trying to choose one of the three possibilities. In the distance, Niyon looked toward the sky with the glowing device in hand. Anunaki craft were beginning to descend.
This time, the event in the past wasn’t merely being shown. It was continuing.
Gohan turned his head. It was as if he could see Betul.
“Don’t close the gateway!” he shouted.
Betul took a step forward. “Gohan!”
Gohan’s face tightened with fear.
“Who are you?”
Betul couldn’t answer.
The child answered for her.
“His daughter.”
Every light in the room went out.
Beyond the image, Gohan dropped to his knees. Niyon reached him. The conversation between the two friends could no longer be heard from the past; it came from inside the room.
“Did you see the child’s face?” Niyon asked.
“I did.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Impossible things don’t wait behind gateways. They build them.”
Niyon turned the device in his hand toward Betul. Its light broke through the screen and reached into the room. It merged with Betul’s blue line.
Suddenly, she saw her mother’s face.
Her mother knelt at the excavation site years ago, fastening the same necklace around little Betul’s neck. But Gohan stood behind the image. He was old, exhausted, and alive.
Her mother had turned toward him.
“I won’t bring her here again.”
Gohan had nodded. “You won’t. She’ll come on her own.”
The image cut out.
For the first time, Betul began to understand the entire secret her mother had kept hidden for years. Her mother hadn’t given her the necklace as a memory. She had entrusted it to her so she could return it somewhere.
“I’m not a key,” Betul said.
The shadowless man answered quietly:
“No. You’re the person the lock remembers.”
A tremendous roar came from above. The ground shook. The metal beams of the protective canopy groaned. Esra looked at her device; there was only one image on the screen.
The dark object in the sky was no longer merely a shadow. Its surface was opening, and enormous interconnected rings extended downward from within it.
Arif gripped his iron handle. “That thing is coming down.”
Ilber looked at the book’s final page. The writing was forming on its own:
“If the past is changed, the future is not born.
If the future is chosen, the past is not erased.
But if both remember the same person, the world loses its own beginning.”
Betul approached the writing. “Who remembers the same person?”
The book’s surface darkened.
Then a single name appeared:
“Betul.”
The three images inside the gateway shattered at the same time. Behind every broken fragment was another Göbeklitepe. Thousands of hills, thousands of possibilities, thousands of children… All their faces resembled Betul’s.
For the first time, the shadowless man was genuinely afraid.
“No,” he said. “Not this soon.”
Betul turned to him. “Tell me what isn’t supposed to happen this soon.”
The man didn’t answer.
A hand reached through the crack.
It didn’t resemble the long finger from before. It was a human hand. Small, dirty, and trembling.
Betul knew who the hand belonged to.
The child whispered again from within the darkness:
“Get us out of here.”
Betul reached out.
Just as her fingers were about to touch the child’s, Ilber shouted:
“Stop! If you pull the child through, the gateway in the past will open.”
Betul didn’t pull her hand back.
“What if I don’t?”
Ilber’s face went deathly pale.
“Then the gateway in the future will close.”
Betul was caught between two times. On one side were Gohan’s people; on the other was the world of the present. She understood that it wasn’t a matter of being unable to save both—it was that saving both at the same time would destroy the same thing.
The child reached out a little farther.
“You remembered us.”
Betul closed her eyes.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t remember you.”
The blue line filled the entire room.
“I never forgot you.”
With those words, the rings of the gateway reversed direction. The three images merged into one. The dark object hung in the sky. The Anunaki craft in the past became unable to move. Gohan and Niyon raised their heads at the same time.
And at the two ends of the world, the same person spoke at the same moment:
“I didn’t open the gateway.”
Betul opened her eyes.
“The gateway remembered me.”
The crack closed.
But before the child vanished, the child placed a small stone in Betul’s palm.
There was a single mark on the stone.
An open eye.
The moment Betul clenched the stone, a thin beam of light descended from the dark object above into the sky. It speared into the center of Göbeklitepe. The entire hill shuddered with a deep sound, as if it had received an answer it had been waiting thousands of years to hear.
The book opened one last time.
In the place where the missing pages should have been, a new sentence appeared:
“The paradox cannot be solved.
The paradox must be lived.”
Outside, people began to scream. Blue veins spread across the protective canopy, and the same lights began flickering on one by one in the distant reaches of the plains.
Ilber couldn’t close the book.
Arif looked at the door.
Esra set her device on the ground.
Betul looked at the stone in her palm.
From inside the stone came her mother’s voice from her childhood:
“Don’t show this to anyone.”
For the first time, Betul understood why her mother had been afraid.
Because the necklace wasn’t a key.
And the stone wasn’t a memory.
Together, they were proof of an event that had not yet happened.
And the name of that event appeared once again on the book’s closing cover:
“The Second Coming.”