The artifact's golden light sharpened. At first, it had been no more than a warm glow the size of a fist. Now it blazed with brutal intensity. Burning his retinas.
Arka reflexively squeezed his eyes shut. It made no difference. The light pierced his thin eyelids, imprinting the silhouettes of the blood vessels behind his eyes in reverse. His palm thrashed. His body's instincts screamed at him to release the source of heat. But his fingers were rigid. His flexor muscles were completely paralyzed. The three-ringed metal plate only grew stickier, as if it had sprouted microscopic roots that drove straight into his pores.
Hot. Not merely warm. This thing was roasting his bones from the inside.
"Let go..." Arka cursed hoarsely. His teeth chattered violently. "Let go, you bastard..."
He struck his right wrist with his left hand. Hard. The sound of flesh slamming against flesh echoed hollowly through the sealed rooftop air. Nothing happened. The object didn't budge.
The artifact's outermost ring began to spin. Its friction produced a low whine that made Arka's stomach feel as if it were being forcibly churned with a rusted drill. The rhythm climbed. Faster and faster. The black crystal at its central axis convulsed wildly, swallowing the streetlights below the building and vomiting them back out as a spectrum of colors beyond human comprehension. Rotten purple. Mercury green. Glowing gray.
The air around it bent. Literally bent.
The raindrops that had been frozen in midair were dragged along. Pulled by the gravitational force of the metal vortex in Arka's hand. The solidified droplets were sucked in and spun around his body, forming a miniature tornado of liquid glass. The sound was deafening. The shriek of millions of ice needles scraping against one another, tearing apart the oxygen molecules around them.
"I said let go!"
Arka screamed in a frenzy. The sanity that, only minutes ago, had felt smug about successfully subduing time... collapsed in an instant. He wasn't a god. He was just a stupid fly that had accidentally pressed a nuclear launch button. Fear seized the base of his skull. His phobia crept upward. A terror far more suffocating than standing on the edge of a fifteenth-floor precipice.
This thing wasn't merely freezing time. It was chewing through the fabric of reality.
The black crystal pulsed once. With tremendous force. An invisible shock wave slammed into Arka's chest. The air around him shattered into pieces. Like a gigantic mirror struck by a sledgehammer. Fragments of space and time flew everywhere, reflecting visual fragments that made Arka's head feel ready to explode.
He saw Naya laughing inside a black sedan. He saw Rendra spit on the floor of a restroom. He saw his uncle smiling in satisfaction as he held the land deed. The images piled atop one another. Crisscrossing. Playing backward at a furious speed like a broken projector.
The rooftop's smell vanished. Replaced by the scent of wet earth. The smell of hospital disinfectant. Naya's vanilla perfume. Everything crowded into his nostrils at once. His sensory nerves overdosed.
The second and third rings spun in opposite directions. Their whine transformed into an ultrasonic shriek that tore at his eardrums. Above the artifact's center, the vacuum split open. A dimensional hole the size of a dinner plate yawned wide. Its edges were filled with golden lightning that licked wildly at the air.
It wasn't an ordinary hole. It was a maw. A starving cosmic maw.
The temporal vortex began sucking in everything around it. Concrete dust, scraps of asbestos, fragments of rainwater... all of it was pulled in and erased. Without a trace. Without end.
Arka held his breath. His eyes bulged as he stared into the pitch darkness inside the vortex. A lunatic gravity pulled at his eyeballs, pulled at the contents of his skull. It wasn't his physical body being sucked in. His feet remained planted firmly on the wet concrete slab. But his consciousness... his soul... was being forcibly dragged out of his skull.
It felt as if the skin of his body were being slowly peeled from his fingertips to the base of his neck. Pain. A raw agony beyond the definition of any medical term. Like a giant leech being forcibly torn from its host, leaving behind ragged flesh.
"No..." His breath caught. His eyes watered, but the tears were immediately pulled upward and sucked into the vortex of light. "I... haven't..."
The words were hopelessly choked off. The vortex grew larger in a fraction of a second. Swallowing his right hand. Swallowing his arm. Gaping wide as it devoured his entire field of vision.
Light exploded. White. Blinding enough to burn through memory.
Arka felt himself pulled through a narrow corridor made of thousands of clock hands ticking backward. The pull was savage. He was being reduced to a single thread and dragged through the eye of time's needle. His memory of the scavenger by the roadside... evaporated. His anger toward Aunt Mira... faded. His identity was stripped away completely, peeled off sheet by sheet inside the storm that digested his existence.
One second before his consciousness was truly extinguished and swallowed by nothingness, Arka heard a whisper. Very close. Tickling his earlobe in a language he didn't understand. Yet somehow... it sounded like a sentence passed by a universe that had just been awakened.
Then. Total darkness.