Time had stopped making sense.
We'd spent days—or what felt like days—in the heart of the rift. It had grown familiar, strangely comforting in its bizarre, shifting way. But as we stepped through the last fold, following Evelyn's silent cue, the shimmer closed behind us, swallowing her last lingering gaze—and with it, any illusion that we were still in control.
The air felt different. Crisp. Sharp. Like biting into an apple that had been left too long in the cold.
I was the first to step through, my boots crunching on solid gravel. The portal snapped shut behind us with a quiet ripple, no drama, no theatrics. Just a shimmer winking out like a dying firefly.
We were standing outside the cottage. The same cottage. Same hill, same path. Everything looked unchanged.
But it wasn't.
"Wait… what?" Ambrose muttered, spinning in place. "This is… This is the exact moment we left."
Bobby checked his watch, then his phone. "It's the same day. Same damn minute."
Jacob's voice was hoarse. "No way. We were inside for at least three days."
Ambrose squinted at the cottage, then turned to me. "So either time travel is real… or we just looped so hard we landed back at the start screen."
A silence followed. That unsettling, too-quiet kind. The wind wasn't blowing. No birds. No rustling trees. Just a stillness that wrapped around us like plastic.
Then Bobby's scanner chirped.
We all turned to him.
He stared at the screen. "Guys… the timestamp reset. Not just local. The atomic sync. This isn't our timeline anymore. We're… back. But we're not forward."
"What the hell does that mean?" Jacob snapped.
"It means we didn't lose time," Bobby muttered. "We reversed it."
I felt the chill in my bones now. Not just from the air. From the implication.
We'd returned. Not late. But early.
Before the sirens. Before the node pulsed. Before we ever stepped in.
"Are we… are we supposed to fix something?" I asked aloud, though no one had the answer.
Bobby didn't respond. He was too focused on the readings. Ambrose was pacing.
"I swear," Ambrose said, pointing at Bobby's machine. "If that thing tells us we're stuck in a Groundhog Day reboot, I'm building a time axe and chopping my way out of here."
Despite the tension, I laughed. We needed that. A crack in the fear.
"We need to go inside," Jacob said. "Figure out what's changed. If anything."
As we entered the cottage, everything looked untouched. The furniture, the supplies, even the calendar on the wall—all reset.
Ambrose brushed past the mirror in the hallway. Then stopped.
"What the…"
I turned. There was a glow. Subtle, but unmistakable, flickering just beneath his skin—like a faint halo under his collarbone.
"You're glowing," Bobby said.
Ambrose widened his eyes. "Tell me it's sexy and not radioactive."
Jacob stepped closer. "No one else is glowing."
"Maybe I'm chosen. Maybe I'm a Jedi now. Call me Glowbi-Wan."
But Bobby wasn't smiling.
He pulled out the scanner again and hovered it over Ambrose. The readings spiked.
"You were touched by the node," Bobby whispered.
Ambrose's joke stalled. "Wait. Seriously?"
"That's not all," Bobby added. "This… this looks like a marker. A kind of imprint. Whatever Evelyn did—she left something behind."
I walked over and touched Ambrose's shoulder. "Do you feel any different?"
He was quiet for a second. "I don't know. Like I'm buzzing. Not in a coffee way. More like… like the air around me knows I'm not supposed to be here."
That landed heavy.
Jacob sat down hard on the couch. "This is spiraling fast. We came back before the events even began. We could change things. Fix them. Or screw it all up."
"No pressure," Ambrose muttered.
The siren didn't sound that night either.
And somehow, that terrified me more than all the nights it did.