The coastal town of **Sarween** breathed laboriously, like an exhausted creature beneath a dense October fog. The dilapidated houses, built of sea-stone devoured by salt, loomed like giant skulls gazing from the hills toward the ceaseless waves. Here, where paved roads ended and a realm of unanswered questions began, lived **Adham**—a man who had devoted half a century to writing a single, unfinished novel.
Adham was a paradox: a philosopher clinging to reality's edge, writing about death while fearing his own shadow. His library, filled with works by Nietzsche, Kafka, and Borges, bore witness to his nocturnal dialogues with paper ghosts. Yet his heart remained shackled to one event: the disappearance of his daughter **Yara** twenty years prior, on a night he remembered only in shades of dark red.
That morning, as Adham sipped his bitter coffee, the doorbell rang. On his doorstep stood a woman with a black umbrella, her eyes the color of winter's first dawn. *"I'm Dr. Luma… a psychiatrist. I believe we need to discuss Yara's letters."*
Yara was no ordinary missing girl. Her letters, arriving yearly on the anniversary of her disappearance, brimmed with cryptic mathematical and philosophical symbols, as though toying with reality itself. The final letter contained coordinates leading to a spot in the sea where her body had—*theoretically*—been found two decades earlier. But the new corpse fishermen discovered that morning bore the same scar over the heart, the same DNA… yet the bones were fresh.
*"Madness isn't a psychological question, but a geometrical one,"* Dr. Luma whispered, extending a yellow envelope. *"This arrived at my office a week ago… from you."*
Adham's trembling hands opened the envelope. The handwriting was his. The words were his. Yet he had never written them. The text was the first chapter of his unfinished novel—but with a different ending: a precise account of Yara's disappearance, as if a writer had copied his memories. In the margin, a red-inked note read: *"Time is a closed loop. You are both protagonist and author."*
A faint tremor shuddered beneath their feet. On the shore, the water began receding unnaturally, as though the sea were suffocating. Dr. Luma picked up a cracked stone and carved a number: **20**. *"This is how many times you've tried writing the ending,"* she said, her voice steel. *"Each time, Yara dies. Each time, we return to the start."*
At that moment, shouts erupted from the harbor. A massive white shark—believed extinct for centuries—leapt from the water, swallowing a bird midair. On its back glowed a scar resembling the number **20**.
Adham clutched his head. Scents and sounds blurred—the jasmine perfume Yara loved suddenly permeated the air. Her voice whispered: *"Father, truth isn't a destination… it's a trap we build for ourselves."*
The wind surged, carrying a page from his manuscript. Words melted into the air like tears. Dr. Luma pulled an ancient lantern from her bag, its light an eerie violet. *"Time is running out. Are you ready to see beyond the mirror?"*
On the distant waves, a stone tower began to rise—the very tower Adham had described in his novel thirty years prior, which critics called *"a metaphor for the human mind."* Now, tangible and towering, its walls bore the names of every Sarween resident, including Adham's own, alongside death dates yet to pass.
Before they could react, rain cascaded down, carrying echoes of the past: Yara's laughter, an ancient explosion, the doorbell that had rung twenty years ago on that crimson night. And Adham—the man who had despised fiction all his life—suddenly realized: *reality is the most fantastical story of all*.
This is how the loop begins… once again.