The drops of blood did not dry. They crawled.
They slipped into the rusted fractal grooves like mercury finding its way home. Golden light slowly exploded from the metal vortex. It was not blinding, but dense and thick. Like a cracked egg yolk at the bottom of a dark pool.
Then... the world stopped.
The roar of the storm wind that had been tearing at his hearing vanished without warning. Just like that. As though an invisible giant had pressed the mute button on the throat of the universe.
Arka jolted. He yanked his hand back until his backside scraped harshly against the wet asbestos. His heart pumped brutally, hammering against his ribs. This had to be the dying phase. His brain must be hemorrhaging from the impact to his tailbone. A pre-mortem hallucination. Hypovolemic shock. His brain was searching for compensation so that dying would not hurt quite so much.
"This is insane..." he panted.
White vapor spilled from his mouth. But it did not rise. It stopped in midair, hanging in front of his nose like a wad of dirty cotton suddenly frozen in place.
He looked up. His eyes widened as far as his eyelid muscles would allow. Above his head, thousands of raindrops were no longer falling. The beads of water hung rigidly in the air, suspended like shards of clear glass nailed to the black canvas of night. Arka raised his trembling index finger and touched a droplet directly in front of his nose.
Hard. Cold.
The water did not burst and soak his skin. The raindrop was solid as resin. It shifted slightly when his finger pushed it, then sprang back to its original coordinates. Gravity had lost its dignity here.
Ting.
A single note rang out from the metal disk on the floor. It sounded like a giant tuning fork striking a copper plate. Its vibrations traveled through the pores of the concrete, climbed into the soles of Arka's feet, and resonated with precise accuracy against the rhythm of his panicked heart.
Ting.
The disk's golden light cut through the crust of corrosion covering it. The thick rust that had bound the object to the old cement suddenly flaked away, crumbling into gray dust that floated against the laws of nature. It drifted slowly upward like a swarm of flying termites seeking a source of heat.
The smell on the rooftop changed drastically. The stench of drain water and rotting copra evaporated completely, replaced by the sharp sting of pure ozone and hot metal—the smell of lightning that had just split a sap-filled tree.
"What... is this..." Arka whispered hoarsely.
His voice sounded utterly foreign. Muffled. There was no echo. The air around him seemed to have suddenly grown dense, refusing to carry sound waves normally. Part of his sanity screamed at him to crawl backward, find the stairwell door, and run from this deranged rooftop. But his eyes remained locked on the disk.
The metal was now completely free of rust. Its form was perfect. Almost impossible. A mechanical artifact the size of a dinner plate, with three layers of rings rotating freely in opposite directions. No engine. No axle. At its center, precisely where Arka's blood had been swallowed, a black crystal pulsed in rhythm with his breathing.
Arka felt naked. He had come to this building to erase himself from history. Yet this object was staring right back at him, dissecting the contents of his mind, dragging out every last scrap of rage, fear, and rancid resentment he had desperately buried beneath the mask of a naive young man. This thing recognized his scent. The scent of a human being shattered into pieces.
Slowly, the gravitational pull around the object began to curve.
The bronze disk rose from its cement cradle, hovering a handspan above the concrete. It spun slowly, emitting a constant whine that pierced his ears.
Without realizing it, Arka's right hand reached out again. An instinct he could not explain guided him. The torn wound in his palm throbbed. The pain faded, replaced by a searing warmth. He cupped his fingers beneath the object.
Heavy. Incredibly dense. Like lifting a solid chunk of uranium with one hand.
The moment the cold metal made full contact with his palm, a jolt of energy slammed into Arka's solar plexus. Lines of golden light spread wildly from the disk, crawling into the pores of his arm like parasitic tattoos carved directly into the muscle tissue.
Arka's mouth fell open. His jaw went rigid. No scream came out.
His eyes bulged as he stared at his own veins, now glowing gold beneath the layers of his pale skin. The searing current rushed toward his chest, binding itself to his heart.
At the same time, the world around him shattered and reassembled itself.
The puddles on the concrete floor began to flow backward. The drops of blood that had spilled onto the asbestos crawled upward against the laws of physics, slipping back into his wound. In the distance, the traffic lights of the capital flickered wildly in reverse polarity. An ambulance siren from the highway below shrieked backward, its sound sucked back toward its point of origin until it became a low hum that pressed painfully against his ears.
It was not only the storm that had stopped. Time was chewing on its own tail, reversing direction at a savage speed.
Arka collapsed onto his side. The scene before him became a vortex of colored lines and nauseating distortions of light. He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched the artifact to his chest like a terrified toddler facing a storm. His lungs refused to expand. His consciousness was forcibly dragged away, hurled through a dimensional tunnel that reeked of copper and the regrets of the past.
He would not die tonight.
Death rejected him outright. And in exchange, the universe had just hurled a far more horrifying curse at him.