The Past

The past

The shriek of the sirens peeled through the broken night as Wisp dragged Sera across the gravel lot, her boots kicking up sparks. Behind them, the Custodians swarmed like hornets—slick black suits, glowing eyes, and that awful hum that always came before they struck.

“There!” Wisp pointed to the looming shape half-buried in the dirt—a UFO, silver and pulsing faintly like it had a heartbeat of its own. “Move!”

Sera didn’t argue. Her lungs burned, but she ran.

The hatch hissed open at Wisp’s command—she’d sliced the lock before they even got there, her power unraveling digital code like yarn. They tumbled inside just as a blast scorched the ground behind them.

“I can hold the door,” Wisp growled, placing her hand against the inner hull. A shimmer spread from her fingers like an oil slick, crackling against the air as the Custodians slammed into an invisible wall. “But not for long!”

Sera staggered toward the console. Glyphs glowed across the curved surface—alien, complex, like a language spoken by light itself. She didn’t read them. She felt them.

Colors pulsed in her mind. Patterns flowed like rivers made of thought. The ship was speaking to her in memory, in meaning. She just had to listen.

Her eyes fluttered closed.

Red. Yellow. Blue. Pause. Blue. Green. Red.

The pattern burned into her consciousness like a vision, and she slammed the buttons in sequence just as Wisp let out a cry—her shield buckling.

The entire ship sang.

A harmonic tremor rolled through the floor. Light poured from every surface, blinding and cold. The Custodians’ screeches were cut off mid-charge as the ship lifted—smooth, silent, sovereign.

Sera and Wisp collapsed side by side, panting, as the stars bent around them and the Earth fell away.

“…You saw it,” Wisp whispered.

“I didn’t see,” Sera said, voice soft. “I understood.”

⸻

The stars didn’t blur—they folded. Like paper creased by invisible hands. Wisp’s stomach flipped; for a second, up was a memory, not a direction.

Wisp gripped the edge of the control panel as reality twisted around them. “Where are we going?” she demanded, but th ship didn’t answer. It hummed with a mind of its own—focused, urgent.

Sera stood still, her eyes distant, lips parted like she was listening to a voice just out of reach.

“There’s a thread,” she murmured. “A moment tangled wrong. We’re following it.”

Light warped again—and then suddenly, silence.

The ship set down in a forest clearing, unnaturally quiet. The trees were too straight. The air was thick, like breath held too long. A shimmer in the sky hinted at temporal shielding. The year didn’t exist—it was a when that had been hidden.

They stepped out and immediately crouched behind the thick trunk of a gnarled tree. Below them, in a clearing lit by cold beams of Custodian tech, was a metal table. On it, strapped down, was a man—young, gaunt, but radiating something strange and solemn. His eyes glowed faintly gold.

“That’s him,” Sera whispered. “He sees the past. All of it.”

Wisp cursed under her breath. “That’s how they’re tracing resistance movements. They’re dissecting his memory—cutting time out of his head like it’s a file to download.”

A Custodian leaned over the man and inserted something needle-thin near his temple. The man convulsed.

“We can’t wait,” Wisp hissed. “They’re already inside his mind.”

But Sera shook her head. “No. If we move now, they’ll kill him to preserve the data.”

She closed her eyes again. The ship, the timeline, the man—everything hummed at the edge of her perception. Threads of possibility bloomed in her thoughts like roots underground.

“There’s one chance,” she said softly. “But I need him to see me. To look back, and pull me into the memory.”

“What?” Wisp blinked. “Sera, that’s insane.”

“I have to be part of the past now,” Sera whispered. “Just long enough to change it.”

⸻

Sera knelt beside the struggling man, her fingers hovering just above his forehead. The Custodians hadn’t noticed her yet—Wisp’s veil held, flickering like a mirage. But not for long.

“They’re digging into him with machines,” Sera murmured. “But his memory doesn’t live there. It’s deeper. Buried in the folds of time itself.”

She pressed her palm to his temple.

A jolt, like lightning wrapped in ice, blasted through her.

She fell.

Through screams. Through years. Through lives lived and relived. Cities built and destroyed. Blood spilled in forgotten fields. Echoes of every human moment—every regret, every triumph. His mind was a spiral staircase, endless, winding deeper with each heartbeat.

And at the bottom… a door. Locked, pulsing with something ancient and raw.

She heard them then—the Custodians—screaming. Not with sound, but with terror that vibrated through the psychic fabric of the place.

“Don’t open it,” they whispered from the walls of thought.

“You don’t understand what’s inside.”

“We sealed it for a reason.”

“He is not human.”

But she reached anyway. Her fingers found the latch. The man—eyes wide in pain—met hers through the haze. And for a moment, he smiled.

He let her in.

The door burst open, and Sera saw it.

Not a monster of flesh. Not claws or fangs.

But a human being with no fear. The primal, the Bloody Ripper.

A man unshackled from control, from programming, from history itself. A being who remembered every manipulation, every false god, every rewritten truth—and rejected them all.

He had burned down empires in his mind before he was ten. He had whispered ideas into the past—ideas that festered into revolution.

The Custodians couldn’t erase him.

They could only fear him.

And now, Sera carried the memory.

Her eyes flew open. The Custodians turned, their instruments shrieking.

“You touched it,” one of them rasped. “You touched him.”

Sera stood slowly, golden light rising behind her eyes.

“I didn’t just touch him,” she said. “I remember him. And now I know what you fear.”

Wisp’s hand was already on the detonator.

“Wanna run?” she asked.

Sera smiled, not kindly. “Let’s make them.”

⸻

The Custodians lunged—needles extended, logic systems firing, surgical precision honed to perfection.

Too slow.

Sera reached out—not with her hands, but with the thing she now carried inside her. Not the man, not the memory—but the truth of the human monster:

Bloodlust. Fury. Freedom.

She injected it into their minds like a virus.

The sterile room screamed.

One Custodian dropped its instrument and clawed at its head as Sera’s memory-bomb went off—an image of the monster tearing through a crowd, smiling, soaked in gore, loving it. It wasn’t mindless slaughter—it was willful, poetic, a hymn to revenge.

Another fell to its knees, convulsing, trying to expel the imagery. But it was inside—the raw data stream now infected with human chaos: children laughing as they watched empires burn, mothers gutting gods with kitchen knives, poets rewriting the sacred code in blood and ash.

“What have you done?!” one shrieked through a voicebox not meant for panic.

“You’ve desecrated the network! The purity—gone!”

Sera stepped forward, and behind her, the psychic signature of the human monster stood tall—its face ever-shifting between forgotten rebels, assassins, saints, madmen. One moment it was a girl with fire in her eyes. The next, an old man smiling as he poisoned a king.

“You tried to sterilize us,” she said. “Now you get to feel.”

A Custodian’s head exploded with a flood of memories, no weapon, no touch, just too much humanity stuffed into a sterile framework. Painful images of grief, of hate, of joy too deep for algorithms to hold. And always, the blood.

Wisp watched, wide-eyed.

“Remind me never to get on your bad side,” she muttered.

Sera didn’t answer. Her eyes glowed gold, and tears of red ran down her cheeks—not pain. Not weakness. Just pressure.

Too much human.

Too much real.

⸻