The Causality Compass
The rain tasted of rust and regret. Not the clean, metallic tang of approaching storms, but the bitter, earthy sediment of something decaying. I checked my chronometer – an obsolete piece of tech, yet stubbornly accurate – its luminescent dial casting an eerie glow on the rain-slicked alley.
It read 3:17 AM. Again.
This wasn’t mere déjà vu. This was a loop. A temporal eddy sucking me back to this same grimy corner, forcing me to relive these same agonizing minutes.
It started innocently enough. A cryptic message from a deceased mentor, a recovered artifact humming with latent energy – the Causality Compass. He had warned me: “Do not tamper. Some doors are best left unopened.”
Naturally, I hadn’t listened.
The Temptation of Revision
The compass promised to rewrite the past, to iron out the wrinkles in the fabric of time. To correct mistakes, to avert tragedies. The temptation was too great. My brother… He could have been saved. My wife… She could still be here.
The first jump was exhilarating. A surgical alteration to a seemingly minor event – a missed train, a changed investment. The ripples were subtle, positive. But the second jump… that’s where things began to unravel.
I attempted to prevent my brother’s accident. I succeeded. But in his place, someone else perished. A stranger, yes, but a life nonetheless. The universe, it seemed, abhorred a vacuum.
The Price of Paradox
Each alteration, however small, created a cascade of unforeseen consequences. The timeline became a tangled mess of cause and effect, a chaotic tapestry woven with threads of hope and despair. The rain tasted increasingly of copper, a metallic foreshadowing of the blood I feared would eventually be on my hands.
Now, trapped in this temporal loop, I realized the horrifying truth. The Compass wasn’t a tool for salvation; it was a self-inflicted curse. Each jump further fragmented reality, pushing me closer to the brink of oblivion.
The Impossibility of Escape
The alley cat, a mangy creature with eyes like chips of obsidian, watched me with unnerving indifference. It had seen this before. Perhaps it even remembered previous iterations of this doomed timeline. Or maybe it just didn’t care.
I tried everything. Destroying the Compass only caused it to reappear, shimmering faintly in my pocket. Refusing to jump merely prolonged the inevitable, the minutes stretching into an eternity of agonizing anticipation.
The only option left, the one that tasted of pure, unadulterated failure, was to accept my fate.
As the clock ticked towards 3:18 AM, I closed my eyes and braced myself for the familiar wave of disorientation. The rain intensified, washing away the grime, the regret, the last vestiges of hope.
The Causality Compass spun once more, and the world dissolved around me.
The rain tasted of rust and regret.
