Timewalkers Odyssey

Chapter 28: Why?

The Impossible Kitchen

Ryke lay still. Not in repose. Not in peace. Just still. Like a statue unfinished—part man, part myth, part vanishing breath. And Zephora sat beside him. Not as a princess. Not as an heir.

As nothing more than a girl who could not understand why?

The impossible house thrummed with temporal energy, warm and ambient, like a sun with no sky. The kitchen smelled of ionized wood and silent memory. Here, for reasons she could not name, time obeyed. And she hated it for that.

Every breath Ryke took mocked the order of things. Each one came late. Staggered. Weak. But they came. And so she remained.

He had saved her. And now he was dying for it. She barely knew his name. But the thread between them hummed—thin, taut, and alive.

Across the table, the synthetic stood motionless. Juno-7. A machine that spoke in algorithms but watched with something that resembled care. Zephora ignored her presence, not out of disdain but because her attention could not be divided. Not now. Not with Ryke's life measured in breaths that might end at any moment.

The blue energy that permeated their sanctuary pulsed subtly, almost in rhythm with Ryke's failing heart. Four beats per minute, perhaps less. A heart that refused to surrender though it had every reason to stop.

"Stubborn," she whispered, not realizing she had spoken aloud. "Even your death defies logic."

She had been taught to recognize death. A ruler must know its face, her father once said. Must smell its approach before others sensed it. Must meet it without trembling.

But this—this slow refusal, this defiance—she had no training for this.

His hand lay open beside her, palm up, like an unspoken question. The blue veins at his wrist glowed faintly, temporal energy tracing paths through his blood that should not exist. Science had no name for what sustained him. Medicine could offer no explanation.

And yet, he breathed.

She leaned closer, studying his face with an intensity that surprised her. The scar above his left eyebrow. The stubble along his jaw. The slight asymmetry of his lips. Features she had barely registered during their escape now seemed essential, as if memorizing them might somehow tether him to the world.

New Vel-Hadek

She closed her eyes and tried not to see it.

But memory in the void came without asking.

The Sovereign Court of Auris, nestled in the mountains of New Vel-Hadek, had once been the soul of civilization. Riverlight danced on its glass temples. White stone roads stretched like the branches of a great tree—each leading to a hall of law, or art, or worship.

She had been born to it. Bred for it. Trained in the oldest rites of rule.

"You are not a girl. You are the spine of history," her father once said.

"Stand, and the nations stand. Fall and the World falls."

Auris had never surrendered in ten thousand years of record.

It held storms at bay. It endured plagues. It negotiated peace between fire and flood.

She was heir to something more than a throne. She was continuity itself.

The winters in Vel-Hadek shaped its people. Snow that lasted nine months created souls accustomed to patience, to endurance, to finding beauty in severity. Their songs were slow and deep, their dances measured and precise. Nothing in Auris was done without consideration of what came before and what would follow.

Even as a child, she had understood this weight. While other royal children played at war or commerce, she had been taught to sit silent for hours, watching the movement of clouds across mountain peaks. Learning to recognize patterns in chaos. Preparing for the burden of centuries.

"A true ruler feels the past and future equally," her father would say, guiding her small hand to touch the ancient granite of the judgment seat. "Neither weighs more than the other."

She had believed him. Had absorbed the lesson until it became marrow in her bones, blood in her veins. Until time itself seemed a tangible thing she could hold in her hands and shape with careful intention.

Until all that certainty shattered in five impossible days.

The Empire

And then, in less than five days, it ended.

The Empire did not arrive with armies. It simply appeared.

It stood outside their gates with silver silence and technology that whispered through walls. It did not make threats. It did not ask for allegiance.

It executed.

Her father died smiling, they said—because she was watching.

They told her to smile too, and she did. Because the Inflow had been installed the moment his blood hit the marble.

She smiled. She signed. She obeyed.

"It wasn't submission," she told herself later. "It was containment."

But she knew the truth. They hadn't needed her signature.

They needed her face. Her name. Her silence.

The Empire had not conquered. It had simply... replaced. As if Auris had been nothing more than an outdated system requiring an update. The transition had been seamless, bloodless—except for those whose deaths served as punctuation in the Empire's efficient grammar of control.

She remembered standing on the balcony of the Glass Temple, looking down at her people as they moved through streets that looked the same but weren't. The white stone still gleamed. The river still sang. But something fundamental had vanished. An essence. A soul.

"Do you see how peaceful they are?" the Overseer had asked, standing too close behind her. "How productive? We've given them certainty."

She had not answered. Had not moved. Had felt the weight of the Inflow at the base of her skull, a gentle pressure that promised pain if her thoughts strayed too far from acceptable parameters.

"Your ancestors built something remarkable," the Overseer continued, his voice pleasant, reasonable. "We're simply... optimizing it."

Later, alone in chambers that no longer felt like hers, she had tried to cry. Had wanted to scream. But the Inflow had denied even that small rebellion.

Instead, she had stood at her mirror, practicing her smile until it looked genuine enough to fool anyone who wasn't looking closely.

No one was looking closely anymore.

A Living Cage

The worst part was that it worked.

For two days, her people stayed calm.

They saw the lie. But they said nothing.

Even the military offered no resistance.

Because resistance meant annihilation. And annihilation was inevitable.

She had become a tool. A mask. A beautiful symbol of surrender.

And then, as her usefulness ended, they elevated her one last time: a tragic hero, dispatched to a collapsing timeline, to "secure the future."

A myth wrapped in martyrdom.

A final performance.

They had given her a choice that was no choice. To die quickly or to accept a mission from which no one had ever returned. To vanish into the temporal void on behalf of an Empire she despised, searching for fragments of technology that might stabilize the very system that had destroyed her home.

"You'll be remembered as a savior," they had promised. "Your name will echo through the ages."

She had wanted to spit in their faces. To tell them exactly what they could do with their false glory.

But the Inflow had been monitoring. Always monitoring.

So she had bowed. Had accepted the temporal compass. Had spoken the words they'd written for her with enough conviction to convince the cameras.

And as they had prepared the portal, calibrating frequencies with cold precision, she had realized the final cruelty: they were sending her away not because she might succeed, but because her failure would make a beautiful story. A princess sacrificed. A martyr to progress.

They would use even her death to strengthen their hold.

The Silent Scream

The Place Between had no shape.

No corridor. No walls. No time.

And yet, it had structure—just enough to feel like memory.

She wandered illusions: golden halls that led to nowhere, voices that belonged to no mouth, reflections of people she never remembered knowing.

"I dreamed of my coronation. Of parades that never happened. Of my father smiling beside a throne he never touched."

There was no hunger, no need to sleep—no pain. And somehow, that was worse. She didn't scream. She couldn't. The Place Between had no air. Only silence. And expectation.

It wanted the old Zephora to forget. To become still like everything else.

"It wasn't a prison. It was the death of questions."

Time had no meaning in The Place Between. She might have wandered for hours or centuries. The elegance of the illusion was beautiful in its own way and terrifying in another.

Without direction, without purpose, she had drifted. Had watched as fragments of memory peeled away like autumn leaves, spiraling into darkness. Had felt parts of herself fading—her name, her history, her reasons for resistance.

And then, a single voice in the expanse called to her. Something so simple, something mundane.

“You dropped your pen, my Liege.” Ryke has called to her.

Ryke remembered her, and she remembered him. Not a story of a long lost friend or a history of shared experience, but a mere moment of freedom clinging to life. Three seconds of shared purpose. Three seconds of complete surrender. Of absolute trust that had saved them all. 

Three seconds had saved Ryke, Zephora, and Juno-7, but for what purpose had they been saved?

The Rescue

She hadn't understood what she was seeing at first. Blue light. A blade made of motion. A severed head rolling like it had never belonged.

Then Ryke was beside her. No words. No introduction. He lifted her with one arm and pushed Juno-7 with the other.

"Run."

That was all.

Not: Who are you?

Not: Why are you here?

Not: Are you worth saving?

Just Run.

And she had.

The blue light had cut through the grayness of the sky like a knife through fog. Sharp. Definite. Real. It had awakened something in her that she thought long dead—not hope, exactly, but its shadow. A memory of what it had felt like to believe in possibility.

His arm around her waist had been solid, warm, undeniable. His voice—that single command—had carried authority without cruelty, purpose without hesitation.

She had not questioned. Had not resisted. Had allowed herself to be lead, to be saved, with a surrender that felt nothing like the submission she had offered the Empire.

This was different. This was choice.

Death had surrendered her. And she had accepted its gift.

Even the Monsters

Behind them, the ruins screamed. One beast dead. Another wounded. And then the third emerged. She'd expected it to attack the zone. It didn't. It killed the wounded one. And fed.

"Even monsters follow rules."

Even predators recognize weakness.

But not the Empire. The Empire had no order.

No pride.

No hunger.

Only inevitability.

That's what terrified her.

Because she couldn't name what it wanted.

The remembrance sent a shiver through her body. The void beasts had been terrifying—all teeth and hunger and wrongness. But they had made a terrible kind of sense. They killed to eat. They eliminated the weak to strengthen the strong. They followed the ancient laws of predator and prey.

And still, they had died from something far worse. Something that had made the very architecture of the void tremble.

She had been unconscious during part of their salvation, her mind unable to process the stress of transition after so long in the Place Between. But she remembered fragments: Ryke's face twisted in determination, the blue energy of his blade slicing through reality itself, the sound—that impossible sound—that had pursued them like judgment.

And through it all, Ryke had defended her. Had shielded her. Had placed himself between her and annihilation without hesitation.

A stranger. A myth. A man she did not know.

Yet here she sat, alive, while he lay dying for choices she couldn't comprehend.

The Synthetic

Juno-7 stood still across the table, her eyes never blinking, her body motionless.

She wasn't grieving. She wasn't watching Ryke for comfort.

She was learning.

And somehow, that mattered.

"I've spent my life surrounded by nobles pretending to feel. But she… she's fighting for it."

Zephora envied her.

Because grief was a storm. And Juno-7 stood above it.

The synthetic's hand hovered above Ryke's form, caught in a moment of indecision that seemed profoundly human for something made of circuits and programming. Zephora recognized the gesture—the desire to connect, to touch, to verify reality through contact—and felt an unexpected kinship with the machine.

They were both observers of something they couldn't fully understand. Both witnesses to a sacrifice that defied explanation.

She watched as Juno-7's hand finally completed its trajectory, synthetic fingers making contact with Ryke's skin with a gentleness that belied their mechanical nature. The blue temporal energy surrounding them pulsed slightly brighter at the point of contact, as if acknowledging the connection.

Zephora wondered what algorithms ran behind those unblinking eyes. What calculations tried to make sense of a man who defied mathematical probability. What equations attempted to quantify the value of a life freely given for another.

Why?

She had been raised to face war—not as a soldier, but as a monarch.

In her youth, she had trained in orchestrated skirmishes—carefully staged war games meant to test resolve, tactics, and the weight of command.

There had been risk. There had been pain.

But never fear.

"No one in those fields would've died for me. They bowed. They obeyed. But they never chose me."

Ryke had.

He had not known her name. He had not seen her crown.

And still, he had run into death with her in his arms and never looked back.

He should not have done that.

And yet… he had.

The question burned inside her, more urgent than her own survival. What kind of person ran toward danger rather than away? What kind of soul valued strangers above self?

In Auris, such behavior would have been analyzed for ulterior motive, for hidden advantage. Nothing was given freely. Everything had a price. That was the way of courts and kingdoms.

But the void had no politics. No gain. No glory.

Only existence or its absence.

And Ryke had chosen her existence over his own.

She recognized her hand atop his, feeling the faint warmth that remained despite everything. The contact made something in her chest tighten—a sensation she hadn't experienced since before the Empire's arrival. A feeling without a name.

"You weren't supposed to die for someone you don't know," she whispered, her voice barely stirring the air. "That isn't how the story goes."

But perhaps that was exactly how the story went. Perhaps, in a universe governed by inevitability and dissolution, the only real choice left was who to save. Who to protect. Who to carry when carrying made no logical sense.

Perhaps freedom existed not in grand rebellion but in small moments of inexplicable sacrifice.

Breath

Ryke's chest rose.

A flutter.

A pause.

A tremor.

Then again.

She didn't gasp. She didn't move.

"I was trained to lead armies. To bear nations on my shoulders. But I would trade all of Vel-Hadek to know, why he was willing to trade his life for mine."

And then she said nothing more.

Because sometimes power meant knowing when silence mattered most.

And in that silence, in that breath that should not have been…

…was the first moment she believed he might come back.

The Connection

The blue temporal energy surrounding them intensified subtly, deepening to a shade that seemed to exist at the very edge of perception. It gathered around their joined hands, pulsing in quiet synchronicity with Ryke's impossible heartbeat.

Four beats per minute. Perhaps five now.

Not enough for life. But more than death required.

Zephora felt something shift within the fabric of their sanctuary—not a physical change but something more fundamental. A recalibration. A possibility.

Across the table, Juno-7 remained motionless, her synthetic hand still resting against Ryke's skin. The three of them formed a circuit of sorts—organic, mechanical, and something else entirely. Something that existed beyond the boundaries of either.

As the impossible kitchen hummed with energy that science had no name for, as time obeyed laws it had no reason to respect, Zephora allowed herself to consider a truth she had long forgotten:

Not everything had a price. Not everything could be quantified. Not everything followed rules of equivalent exchange.

Some things simply... were.

Like breath when breath should be impossible. Like connection when connection made no sense. Like hope in the face of certain dissolution.

She watched another breath fill Ryke's lungs—stronger this time, more deliberate—and felt an answering rhythm in her own chest. Not sympathy. Not reflection.

Resonance.

And in that resonance, that impossible harmony between dying and living, between stranger and savior, between past and future—

She found her answer.

"Because choice is the only thing the void cannot take," she whispered. 

"And you chose life. Not just yours.”

“But all of it."