Chapter 164
He stopped, and for several seconds, nothing moved, nothing spoke, because something in the air had changed.
Not the temperature, not the wind, but the weight of the words that had just been spoken—a weight that made Tegar feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up without knowing why, a weight that made Nirma feel the bandage over her right eye throb harder than before, a weight that made Arya unconsciously shift his wooden staff from one hand to the other because he did not know where else to place his discomfort.
Nirma, who had been standing frozen the entire time, with her left eye fixed on the old man without truly seeing him, finally moved.
Not stepping forward, not backward, but merely shifting her weight from her right foot to her left—a small movement that, to Arya, was a sign that his companion's patience was reaching a limit she could no longer endure.
"I don't understand," Nirma finally said, her voice emerging from behind the veil that still covered part of her face, but this time there was none of the flat tone she usually wore—only genuine confusion, confusion like a child seeing rain for the first time and not understanding why water fell from the sky when no one was pouring it from above.
"I don't understand what you mean by the Ningsih bloodline, by the Great Abnormal, by all these stories about Sinta Melina Ningsih that you keep comparing to both me and Ashita at the same time."
She paused for a moment, her fingers touching the bandage over her right eye—which had been throbbing in an unusual rhythm since earlier—before continuing in a slightly raised voice, not out of anger, but from the exhaustion she had been holding back ever since they first arrived in Medina, ever since a little boy fell from a date palm branch, ever since she realized that everything she had thought was a mission was actually only a small part of something far greater than herself.
"And one more thing," she said, her eyes now shifting from the old man to Ashita, then to Tegar, one after another with a gaze that no longer tried to hide her suspicion.
"Why did you bring him here? In front of us? If this is just to show off—to prove that you have access to information we don't, or that you are somehow superior because you brought a descendant of a family we had never even heard of before today—then I think I've only wasted my time here."
Arya, standing beside her, said nothing, but he shifted his wooden staff from his right hand to his left, a movement that in their shared body language meant:
I'm here, I'm listening, and I'm ready if this turns into something we won't like.
The silence that followed Nirma's question did not last long, because Ashita—who had been standing with an unreadable expression beside the old man—now stepped half a step forward, carefully releasing her hand from her grandfather's arm, like someone letting go of something precious because she needed both hands for something more important.
"Don't leave yet, Nirma," Ashita said, her voice no longer flat like when she first said, "we didn't come to arrest you"—this time there was a different tone, perhaps something that could be called a plea, or perhaps an acknowledgment that she, who had always stood on the opposite side of the same line, realized that the line had never truly existed.
"Not to show off. Not to prove that we are superior. But because there is something important you need to know—you and Arya—before you continue on to wherever your next destination may be."
She turned toward the old man, who returned her gaze with a small nod—permission, agreement, or perhaps simply a sign that the time they had was not as much as they believed.
"This information," Ashita continued, her eyes returning to Nirma with a strange calmness, a calmness like the surface of a lake so deep that it did not need to move in order to appear powerful, "is something you will never find in the archives, something you will never hear from anyone in the Linear Time Police, because even within our own institution, only a handful of people know that this world—the world we inhabit, the world whose foundations we protect—is a world that has already been rewritten at least once, by hands we have never seen and for reasons we have never fully understood."
The old man took a long breath.
Not the breath of someone about to begin an ordinary story, but the breath of someone about to open a chest he had kept locked because its contents were too heavy to bear alone, and now, beneath the gently swaying date palms, he had decided there was no point in keeping a secret if it would die with him without ever being heard by the ears most deserving of it.
"Forgive me," he said, his eyes looking at Nirma, then Arya, before returning to the ground between them, "I started speaking before explaining what it was I truly wanted to say. But this is simply how I am—words often leave my mouth before my mind can arrange them properly, because at my age, I no longer have the time to craft beautiful sentences."
He gave a bitter smile, one that never reached his fading eyes, and then his voice became deeper, heavier, like someone walking through the corridors of time he had never personally visited, yet knew every turn of because he had heard its stories thousands of times from lips that had long since turned to dust.
"The Ningsih family," he continued, "and the Abnormals, existed long before the first explosion that some religions call the apocalypse of the universe, and before the ten-millionth explosion that erased everything, including the civilization we had built over thousands of years."
Hearing that, Nirma felt the bandage over her right eye pulse harder, as if something behind the white cloth were nodding in agreement, while Arya unconsciously tightened his grip on his wooden staff.
Not out of fear, but because he knew the story he was about to hear was not a bedtime tale, but a history written in blood and tears that had never been given the chance to dry.
"Every universe experiences an apocalypse," the old man said, his eyes now wide open, and for the first time, the light within them was no longer gentle—it burned like embers that had never truly gone out despite being buried beneath ash for centuries. "Then comes a period of silence, allowing space and time to gather energy before eventually creating a new universe. And throughout all those cycles, the Ningsih family and the Abnormals have always existed. We were born earlier, alongside several forms of life that would one day become the origin of humanity and the Earth you know now."
He paused for a moment, and within that silence, the wind blowing through the date palm leaves seemed to change its tone—not a whisper anymore, but a long lament that had never reached anyone's ears because no one had ever wanted to listen.
"But in the very first life," he continued, his voice beginning to tremble, "in the universe that had never experienced an explosion, we—the Ningsih family and the Abnormals—were considered pests. Not because we were evil, not because we caused destruction, but because we were different. Our physical forms were not the same as other beings. We were called 'abnormal' with the same tone people use when speaking of a curse."
To be continued…