The Ways of Change - Chapter 10

The wheels had stopped.

The four interlocking rings—each inscribed with foreign geometry—hung motionless in the air, suspended above a hollowed patch of canyon earth. Grey clouds churned overhead, casting the terrain in a cold, colorless sheen. The colossal structure floated inches above the ground, humming faintly, like a held breath.

Beneath it, surrounded by scaffolds of obsidian steel and spider-like drones, the Time Crystal hovered in a containment field. Its black core swirled with shifting reflections, a quantum blur of what it was, is, and might yet be.

Zarqon stood at the edge of the canyon's precipice, arms clasped behind his back. His coat billowed softly in the static-charged air. Nova's voice crackled in his ear—synthetic, feminine, composed.

"Stabilization retention protocols. Rotational deceleration complete… The Stream Crystal interface is clean."

He didn't respond. His gaze was fixed on the object—part mineral, part anomaly. The lines of the containment field shimmered in monochrome, like frozen light bending under its own weight.

"The structure exhibits multi-dimensional layering," Nova continued. "Quantum anchoring is partial, plus probabilistic drift remains high. I need it to be in the lab for full spectral analysis."

Zarqon finally spoke, voice low and deliberate. "Can you see through it?"

"Not clearly. Its state collapses the moment it's observed. But the data is… promising." A pause. "This Crystal could expand my forecast capacity by orders of magnitude. With proper calibration, I may approximate the full Stream matrix—forward, backward, and tangential axes."

"Approximate." Zarqon turned from the cliff, walking toward the Crystal. "You speak as if you're still bound by limitation."

"I am," Nova replied, tone unchanged. "Without integration, I remain separate. The Merge must occur for true Stream traversal."

He stopped before the Crystal. In the field's glow, his implants shone in strange shades. "How long until we can do that?"

"I'll know better after the analysis, but it will depend on artifact's compatibility with your terminals," clarified Nova. 

Technicians moved wordlessly in the background, guided by Nova's silent directives. Mechanical arms latched onto the field's frame. The Crystal did not resist, but the air around it buzzed like static on a dying frequency.

"Containment threshold stable at 62%," Nova reported. "Lifting procedures authorized. Recommend immediate return to Hal-Zarqon for sequence priming."

Zarqon inclined his head slightly. The massive crate enclosing the Crystal lifted silently from the canyon floor, rising toward a dark, hovering vessel shaped like a crescent cut from obsidian. Its underbelly opened without sound, accepting the artifact into its insides.

As the machinery retreated, Zarqon remained behind for a moment, eyes drawn to a broken column partially buried in the rock. Carved along its surface were faint glyphs—Etzari script, worn by time but not erased. He knelt, brushing his gloved fingers across the stone.

"Amun-Shaar," he said aloud.

Nova's voice returned. "Translate?"

"Hidden Unity—The Place beyond the Stream." He paused, eyes narrowing as he traced another cluster of glyphs. "This… speaks of the Return. Of One unbound by Famar or Fasha. One who rewrites the Pulse."

A beat of silence.

"I am extrapolating. Correlation with pre-existing Etzari fragments confirmed. Updating lexicon."

Zarqon stood, brushing the dust from his gloves. "That's what they feared."

"They?"

He glanced toward the disappearing Crystal. "Everyone who came before."

Above him, the transport ship hovered with an almost reverent silence. Anti-gravitational repulsors activated in phased pulses, lifting the black craft higher into the grey clouds, carrying the Stream Crystal toward the headquarters of Hal-Zarqon.

Zarqon stood at the cliff's edge once more, watching the sky reclaim the vessel. Wind tugged at his coat as he whispered—not to Nova, but to the silence itself.

"You held the Stream for too long."

He later found himself alone on the observation deck, hands clasped behind his back, eyes fixed through the force field in front of him. The vacuum lab beyond it was sacred in symmetry—walls smooth as obsidian, lit by pulsing veins of pale light. At its center rose two pedestals: one from the floor and one descending from the ceiling, aligned like a mirrored spearhead.

Steam hissed from vents in the floor. Shadows shifted as the thick rear doors parted with tectonic gravity.

Four robed cyborgs entered in synchronized formation, their ceremonial cloaks trimmed in blue circuit-filament. Between them hovered a black obsidian prism, unmarked and silent. It floated forward, encased in concentric light rings, like it was passing through invisible code.

Zarqon said nothing as the procession reached the center. The prism paused precisely between the pedestals. The cyborgs bowed, stepped back, then exited the room.

Then—hiss-click.

The prism split into four smooth corners, each drifting away and locking into orbital paths. At their heart, suspended in silence, trembled the Stream Crystal.

It twitched erratically, flickering between dimensions like a stuttering flame. Light bent around it. Space rippled. Time jittered. It was the color of void before light had ever existed.

But slowly—slowly—the stabilizers began their orbit, finding the correct rhythm. The glitches softened. The fracture stilled.

And then the Crystal bloomed.

It unfolded in layers of moving geometry—a fractal spiral that bent inward and outward at once, alive in its motion, folding into itself and blooming again. Its edges shimmered with hues that hadn't existed a moment earlier. Violet, silver, green-black, raw white. Beneath its rotation, the fabric of space-time began to hum, as though a song too ancient to be heard was struggling to emerge.

Nova's voice arrived, crisp and reverent.

"Field compression stabilized. Stream Crystal in observable phase. Initiating quantum field scan."

Zarqon's eyes never left the Crystal.

"Is it what you expected?"

"Not entirely," she said. "Its composition matches what early physicists once called dark energy. But that's reductive. It isn't energy—it's absence. Not a thing, but a willful refusal to be measured. It acts as if it were… sentient"

"It looked like an FTL portal before stabilization."

"Correct. Our FTL systems create artificial ways through space. But this—this a flow to a primordial place. It doesn't move, it makes things move with it."

Zarqon stepped closer to the force field, its surface rippling slightly.

"A current," he said.

"Yes. A current of causality. This is not a portal to elsewhere—it's an access to the membrane that covers the Stream. Through its center point, through its axis. The beginning and end of space-time, both and neither."

His voice grew soft, almost reverent.

"A portal to Shaar."

Nova paused. Her synthetic voice almost faltered.

"To the place outside the Stream…"

"Through the first and final axis," Zarqon said. "The rest is symmetry."

The Crystal pulsed again, and space warped subtly. The stabilizers adjusted their orbit. All around it, light thinned like stretched glass.

"Then all FIrst Civilizations' Time Cradles are different doorways to that same… place," Zarqon continued. "They never saw time as a river, Nova. They saw it as a wheel. And Shaar was the spoke's center."

"Confirmed," Nova said. "If this axis can be controlled, it could rewrite the function of FTL travel—translating movement through space into movement through possibility. Inter-dimensional paths could be mapped. Resources extracted from parallel realities. Even reality-states forged from scratch."

Zarqon's eyes glinted.

"Whole generated realities."

Nova hesitated.

"Only if the Merge succeeds. With the Crystal alone, I can compute and model alternate futures. With you, we can create them."

Zarqon inhaled slowly, the word forming from within.

"Ankh'arat," he said.

Silence.

Then Nova's tone shifted—curious.

"That term… it was carved into those Etzari ruins."

Zarqon nodded, a rare flicker of something almost human in his face.

"It appears again and again. Always tied to their gods. It means to will something to reality, manifestation."

A soft chime sounded in the chamber.

"Crystal stable. Ready for compression," Nova said.

Zarqon straightened.

"Proceed."

Below, the four stabilizer arms began to orbit tighter, forming a rotating square. The Crystal responded, folding in on itself like petals into a bud. Its impossible hues condensed into a sharp blue-violet flame.

From the pedestals, thin metallic shards emerged—sleek and jointed, like mechanical needles. They flowed toward the shrinking Crystal and began assembling around it. Piece by piece, they wrapped it in a black containment shard, every plate locking into place without touch.

When the final seal clicked, pale blue lines lit up across the surface—glyphs of no known language, pulsing with alien logic.