The stone tower breathed. Its walls trembled like an exhausted chest, releasing hot breaths laced with the stench of decay and jasmine. Adham and the old man who bore his face exchanged a long look, as if conducting a silent dialogue across fragmented epochs. Dr. Luma, whose body began to fade gradually like a specter in the dawn light, grasped Adham's arm: "This is the only version of you that succeeded in reaching beyond the twentieth loop... but he didn't escape."
The old man laughed with a voice that resembled Adham's, but with an echo as if it came from the bottom of a well. "Escape is an illusion. All I did was replicate the pain twenty times." He pointed his cane toward the tower, where the broken mirrors began to reassemble themselves, forming Yara's face as she wrote on a wall of mist. "The girl was not your daughter... but an idea you tried to extinguish."
Adham felt his feet sinking into the ground that had turned into a quicksand of ancient letters. Dr. Luma fell to her knees, her violet lamp gradually dimming. "You wrote everything... even her disappearance."
At that moment, one of the mirrors shattered, unleashing a torrent of buried memories:
A red night. Adham as a young man running on the beach, young Yara screaming behind him. The sea splits in two, revealing a spiral staircase leading to the depths. A dark shadow lifts Yara like a doll with severed threads. Adham screams, but his voice turns into ink flowing on the pages of his manuscript.
The old man pressed on his cane, and time froze. "Every time you reach this memory, you choose to forget... but today, the cracks in the fabric allow you to see."
Adham picked up a knife from among the falling letters. "Why are you showing me all this now?"
"Because this time, she is with us," the old man replied, pointing to Dr. Luma, whose eyes began to glow with a blue light.
The room turned upside down. Adham found himself in his old library, but the books were written in the language of mirrors. On the table, there was a map of Sarween with marks on the places where twenty children had disappeared over two centuries. Each name was linked to the recurring life dates of Adham.
Dr. Luma stood by the window, her body now transparent as glass. "I didn't come from outside... I am one of the previous victims." She pointed to a name on the map: "Luma Al-Hussein: disappeared in 1923."
The old man pushed Adham towards a mirror that showed Yara trapped in a time loop: disappearing, dying, being reborn as a child in another family, then disappearing again. "You are not the author of the novel... but you are the character who rebelled against his writer."
A violent jolt threw the books off the shelves. On the library wall, a black void appeared, swallowing every word that approached it. Dr. Luma jumped towards it, screaming: "This is the writer's passage... he's trying to erase the story!"
Adham grabbed her hand at the last moment. "Who is the writer?"
"You know him..." Dr. Luma whispered before being pulled into the void. "It's the fear that turned you into your own jailer."
The old man began to decompose into ashes. "The loop is breaking... but the fall is painful."
Adham returned outside the tower, where Sarween now resembled a surreal painting. The houses were melting, the inhabitants moved like repetitive puppets, and the white shark was surrounded by swarms of eyeless birds. In his hand, he found Yara's broken necklace, which began to glow with a warm light.
Yara's voice emanated from the necklace: "The towers are the nodes of time... break them all."
When he looked towards the sea, he saw twenty needle-like towers appearing on the horizon, each bearing a number from 1 to 20. The tower in front of him bore the number 21.
The wind carried a final message from Dr. Luma, written in blue blood: "Find me in the year when time stopped."
Adham realized that the real battle was not against fate, but against the multiple copies of himself who had accepted to spin in the loop. He picked up Yara's necklace and headed towards tower number 1, where the waves began to form into stairs of light.
Thus begins the loop... but with a thorn in the side of destiny.