Chapter 4: Versions of Fire

The third breach began the way fire begins underground—quiet, invisible, inevitable.

Duran woke to the sound of glass cracking, but nothing had shattered. It was the air itself that seemed to fracture. Lines of distortion ran like veins across his apartment walls, faint but growing—like hairline fractures in porcelain. The entire world felt like it was holding its breath.

He stumbled from bed, blinking against a strange, reddish hue flooding his windows. The sky was bleeding at the edges.

No birds. No traffic.

Silence, again.

His camera lay on the desk, and this time, he picked it up with reverence, as though holding a relic. He powered it on.

No menu. No battery icon. Just one image filling the screen:

Julia. Standing ankle-deep in water that reflected stars, even though there was no sky above her. She had one hand on her chest, and the other was reaching—not toward him, but through him.

Behind her, the world was burning in reverse. Trees unburned, flames folding inward, smoke sucking back into the air.

And her lips, frozen in mid-word, looked like they were saying:

"Run."

But he didn't.

He ran toward the breach.

The park was gone.

Not empty—gone. The space it had occupied had been overwritten. In its place now stood a flickering collection of alternate versions: sometimes a field of lavender, other times a concrete lot, once even a desert with a single dead tree. They overlapped like projection slides fighting for dominance.

Duran stood on the curb, disoriented.

He raised the camera. Looked through the lens.

And there—only visible through the lens—was the bench. The sycamore tree. And Julia.

She was still.

Waiting.

He lowered the camera—she was gone. Lifted it again—there.

A tear slid down his cheek before he realized he was crying.

He stepped forward.

And the world stuttered.

A pulse of light rippled through the ground, and suddenly the sky twisted into patterns he didn't recognize—fractals of light and darkness blooming outward. He stumbled but kept walking, camera raised, locked onto the vision.

Each step forward through the flickering landscape felt like walking across shattered memories.

He crossed the threshold.

Reality clicked into place.

The bench was beneath him.

The tree above.

And Julia was very real, sitting quietly, as if she'd been there all along.

"I thought I lost you," he said, breathless.

She smiled faintly. "You almost did."

"I saw the picture—the one with the fire—what was that?"

"The third breach," she said. "It's not coming anymore. It's here."

His pulse spiked. "Then we need to—"

"Wait."

He blinked. "What?"

She stood, brushing off her coat, then walked past him. "You can't stop this one the way you did before."

"Why not?"

"Because this one isn't trying to tear time apart," she said, looking up at the distorted sky. "It's trying to erase something. Something specific."

Duran's skin crawled. "Me?"

"No. Me."

They returned to the observatory, but the climb up the ridge took longer than before. The forest surrounding it had changed—trees taller than they should've been, paths that doubled back on themselves. Once, Duran saw his own footprints walking beside his current ones. He didn't mention it.

Inside, the observatory had decayed further. But time hadn't caused it. The decay was wrong—reversed in places, as if mold had been scrubbed backward into clean brick, only to rot again seconds later.

Julia touched the wall, eyes distant.

"This version of the Fold… it wants to remove me entirely."

He stood still. "But you said you were an Echo. Don't you exist in all timelines?"

She nodded. "I did. Until I chose you. That anchored me. It gave me a center. But it also made me visible—to the Fold, to other forces that want time to stay pure."

"So you're being hunted."

"I'm being corrected."

Duran's voice broke. "No. No, I won't let that happen."

He turned, fumbled through the observatory's equipment until he found an old control panel, one covered in dust and scrawled equations.

"There has to be a way to collapse this breach like the last one. Stabilize it."

Julia stepped forward, quietly placing a hand over his.

"You can't close a breach that was opened by choice."

He looked at her. "Whose choice?"

Julia didn't answer.

Instead, she walked to the center of the observatory, where the cracked marble flooring gave way to a spiral-shaped marking—a perfect circle that hadn't been there before. Her boots echoed as she stepped into it.

"Every time you saw me," she said, "you made a choice. You came closer. You asked questions. You wanted more."

"I couldn't help it."

"Neither could I. That's what love is in the Fold: interference. Gravity. A pull."

He took a slow step toward her.

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying we're the anomaly."

Silence settled over them like a snowfall.

"Then let's be one," Duran said finally. "Let's interfere. Let's pull harder."

She smiled sadly. "There's only one way to survive a breach from the inside."

"Tell me."

"You have to stop being a version."

He didn't understand at first. Then it hit him.

"Burn the timeline," he said, the words tasting like ash.

Julia nodded. "All of them. Fold them into one."

"How?"

"By choosing one. Only one. The one we make right now."

They set up the camera again, but this time Julia adjusted the lens. She entered commands into a nearby console that wasn't powered, yet responded anyway. Symbols blinked into life on the dusty screen—some ancient, some mathematical, some neither.

"This device," she said, "it was never just a telescope. It was a temporal fixer. An echo stabilizer. The breach didn't begin here—it anchors here."

She placed a crystal disk into a slot Duran hadn't noticed before.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Memory," she said. "From me. From you. From us."

He stared.

"If we fire the shutter at the right moment," she continued, "it won't just capture light. It'll capture intention. The universe will remember what we choose to be."

"And if we fail?"

"Then the Fold resets everything. I disappear. You forget. The world starts over."

Duran nodded once.

"Then we don't fail."

They stood shoulder to shoulder.

Outside, the sky split into spirals. The wind picked up, whispering their names in languages no longer spoken.

Julia gripped his hand.

"One chance," she said.

"I know."

They pressed the shutter together.

Flash.

Light filled the observatory—hot, bright, searing.

And in that instant—

He saw every version of her.

The girl under the tree.

The woman in the flames.

The scientist on the balcony.

The child reaching through the mirror.

The ghost.

And he loved all of them.

But only this one mattered.

And he said her name—out loud—into the light.

"Julia."

Not a question.

A truth.

And the Fold collapsed.

Not in destruction.

But in decision.

The observatory fell silent.

Duran blinked.

The air was clear. Still.

The crack in the floor was gone.

The walls unbroken.

No spirals in the sky.

He turned slowly.

Julia stood there.

Breathing.

Solid.

Smiling.

"You chose," she said.

He stepped forward.

"And you stayed."

This time, he didn't hesitate.

He kissed her.

And the world didn't end.

It began.