A Paradox Broken, page 1
ALSO BY HUNTER BLAIN
The Preternatural Chronicles
Deliverance: A Preternatural Chronicles Novella
I’m Glad You’re Dead
Dawn and Quartered
Shadow of a Doubt
Moonlight Equilibrium
Mouth of Madness
What the Hell
Holy Sheoly
Those Wonderful Toys
Crack the Sky
Fall from Grace
Memento Mori
Blood and Thunder
Sol Saga
Dawn’s Light
Midday’s Sun
Dusk’s Night (coming soon)
A PARADOX BROKEN
THE CHRONOS PARADOX • BOOK 3
HUNTER BLAIN
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 by Hunter Blain
Cover design by Damonza
ISBN: 978-1-0394-5496-5
Published in 2025 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumentertainment.com
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.”
—Leonard I. Sweet
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
—Albert Einstein
“Our future is determined by our present, just as our present is determined by our past. We are all prisoners of the consequences from the decisions we have made, are making, and will make.”
—Hunter Blain
PROLOGUE
Wild, vibrant lights flowed all around me in tiny, brilliant specks as I floated in a space between time itself. What appeared to be illusionary sand passed through my body like some sort of interactive 3D display at a museum.
I watched as swathes of color harmlessly flowed into my chest and out of my back, as if I were nothing more than a witness to the majesty of the sands of time.
Though the hues ranged across every shade imaginable, I could discern beautiful patterns, as if the individual grains gravitated toward others of a similar contrast, almost like magnets. It was like looking at a coastline from an airplane, with different shades of green and blue making up the ocean before shifting to the rich brown of wet sand; moving past where the waves crested and kissed the shore to where the beach attempted to burn the feet of all who walked upon it, the color shifted to more of a golden hue before eventually meeting up with the green grass that dotted the outlying dunes.
All this is to say that what I was seeing wasn’t just a hodgepodge of different-colored sands mixing into a singular shade, as colors tended to do when combined—especially when placed in an environment of constant motion. Instead, the vibrant schools of grain flowed with one another, resembling a windswept field of tall grass. The full spectrum of colors chased after one another, spontaneously mixing to form new shades like what was taught in elementary school.
Lifting my hand through the sands, I moved to press my palm against my chest, but I froze at what my eyes were relaying to my brain.
My synthetic right arm, which had been replaced after I had accidentally blown off my real one, was now a glowing soft, almost yellowish orange, yet was seamlessly integrated into the rest of my ethereal body, which was a pure brilliant ivory.
Panic tried to explode from behind a dam of shock, but my curiosity reinforced the wall, allowing a nervous, morbid fascination to stay in control.
Lifting both luminescent hands in front of my face, I stared with a furrowed brow as the sands of time continued to flow through my essence. What’s more, I could see past flesh that was now seemingly incorporeal—one glowing hand a bright white, and the other a warm yellow.
For some reason, it reminded me of when Sylvie and I had first bought our house and redone the light fixtures in the kitchen and bathrooms. I had grabbed enough light bulbs from the local home improvement store to change every socket, only to be met with a stifled laughter as my loving wife explained the difference between soft white, warm white, and daylight bulbs.
“Sylvie …” I whispered, feeling my brow smooth as my heart longed once more for the simpler times when my greatest worry was choosing the right color light bulbs from an entire long aisle at The Home Depot.
Something caught my eye, and I lowered my ethereal hands to gaze at what appeared to be an extremely blurry hallway without a ceiling. The walls on either side were tall with what seemed to be shelves stretching down the lengths. Peering closer to the wall next to me, the vibrant sands coalesced into … light bulb packages?
Though I wasn’t standing on a solid surface, I nearly stumbled backward as I closed my eyes and aggressively shook my head in disbelief. Opening them again, I saw the odd hallway had nearly dissipated as clouds of multihued grains appeared to return to an unperturbed stream, not even noticing the changes I had somehow brought into existence.
Looking up, I could make out a clear barrier where the flow of time stayed confined to, reminding me of an aquarium.
With a simple thought, I rose through the stream to poke my head and shoulders out of the surface. What I saw filled me with awe as my eyes traveled the colorful river down its length. To me, it felt like what the Bifröst was described as in Norse mythology.
A feeling of childlike wonder overtook me, and I placed my left palm in the path of the flowing grains, as if I were in a strong river with my arm outstretched to my side just beneath the surface to try and create a perpetual wave. But the sands passed through my body as if I were nothing more than a specter.
My mind flashed to when I had been in the fourth dimension and stuck my finger into the lava that had killed Drew. It’d passed through the frozen-in-time molten rock as if it were nothing more than an illusion. After that, I had drifted through the wall without resistance. But something was different. My body hadn’t glowed then, nor had the scene been made of sand. It had simply been … frozen in time.
I lifted my ivory hand from the stream, wishing I could touch the sand for some reason. Maybe because the sensation of feeling would mean I wasn’t dead?
Like a school of fish swimming in sync with one another, the sands began to swirl around my hand, reminding me of an experiment in science class when I was a teenager. A simple magnet, which I remember looked like it had been in use since the turn of the century, sat on a flat surface as we poured iron fillings around it, creating a brilliant geometric pattern.
The vivid, chaotic specks seemed to organize into a full color spectrum around my hand. It was like the circular rainbows that pilots described seeing far above the clouds after a storm.
With just a flicker of a thought, I willed the blue portion of the colorful disk to spread outward, swallowing the other shades until it looked like my hands were submerged to the wrists in the middle of the ocean just after sunset.
“Am I dead?” I asked out loud as I dropped my focus on the sands, letting them revert back to their chaotic nature before being carried away by the evermoving stream.
I actually don’t know, Tim said inside my head, surprising me, as I thought I was alone in this blizzard of color.
After a few seconds, his words sunk in.
“Wait … what do you mean you don’t know?!”
I mean I have no readings on your body. Which is totally freaking me out, man!
“Freaking you out?! What about me?!”
Okay, okay, okay! Let’s not panic! Tim said, taking a deep breath—which was odd, considering his words were inside my head.
Following his advice, I tried to take in a breath, only to realize that I couldn’t breathe.
Sheer terror burst through the walls of my steadfast determination like floodwaters breaking through a neglected levee. But after a few seconds, I forced my mind to acknowledge that I wasn’t suffocating. My vision didn’t begin to dim, which was always the case whenever I stayed submerged in the fourth dimension for too long. Nor did I grow increasingly exhausted, like someone being slowly put under anesthesia.
“Tim?” I asked aloud.
Ye—Yes, Andrew?
“How am I able to speak if I ca n’t breathe?”
I, um … I-I don’t know! This is all beyond even my comprehension.
Something tickled at my focus, and I followed the faint path to land my gaze on my right arm, which persisted in glowing a warm yellow, as if mimicking the sun. Continuing to follow the notion that was forming into a full-blown conscious thought, I bounced my eyes to my ivory left arm. But the different glows weren’t what was interesting any longer—there was no Clepsydra.
“T-Tim?”
Yes? my increasingly nervous AI companion responded.
“Where are you?”
Where … am I? Wh-What do you mean? I’m here … right?
“Can you see me?”
I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but I can only see what you see. I-I-I can’t change perspectives!
“And do you see what I’m looking at? Or rather, what I’m not looking at?”
Hmm? What do you—OH MY SCIENCE! Where am I?! he shouted, on the verge of losing his artificial mind. He even began taking ragged breaths, perfectly mimicking the all-too-human emotion. My Clepsydra is—is—is gone!
“Yet here you are,” I both noted and reassured. “Rather, here we are …”
We floated in silence for an indeterminate amount of time—if time was even a factor wherever we were. The colorful sands continued to flow through my body as if I wasn’t there, and a realization came to me.
Lowering my arms, I looked forward, saying as much for myself as for Tim, “I think we are moving through time.”
It took Tim more than a few seconds to process what I was saying, and to his credit, he managed to pull himself back from the verge of what I could only describe as virtual insanity.
Interesting, he mused, though I could still hear the stress in his tone. You are suggesting that we are the ones moving through this 3D representation of time instead of it flowing around us as we stand still.
“One way to find out,” I said, holding up my right hand in a universal gesture of stop.
On cue, the flowing river of time slowed before ceasing entirely, leaving behind a colorful path that appeared to stretch forever into the distance.
01 … Tim drawled in amazement. How are you doing this, Andrew?
“I—I have no idea,” I said as something in my periphery taunted my gaze.
Shifting my eyes through the river I was submerged to my chest in, my mouth dropped open as I saw literal countless other time streams that were just as unmoving as the one I currently found myself wading in. Each was poised at precise intervals, with colorful rivers to either side, above and below me. Looking up and to the right, I could see mesmerizing symmetrical personifications of time lined precisely one in front of the other. It reminded me of driving past fields of orange trees that had been planted in evenly spaced straight lines.
“What am I seeing?” I whispered in sheer awe.
If I had to guess based on the limited evidence we have gathered so far, I could theorize that we are witnessing the fourth dimension from the limited perspective of a being that can only comprehend the universe in three dimensions.
“You mean a tesseract?”
Of sorts. Yes.
I leaned dangerously close to the edge, looking down to see an expanse of vibrant streams that were surprisingly simple to differentiate, given the precise space between them.
Maybe because I was simply a human mind trying to comprehend countless universes all around me, I couldn’t help but feel like I was at the very center of it all. Then again, people not that long ago also thought the sun revolved around the Earth.
“What … What happens if I move to another one?” I asked with a throat that felt dry—which was interesting, considering my body appeared to be an incorporeal mass of light.
Um … I’d rather not find out? Tim answered with a nervous, almost pleading inflection.
An electrified fog crossed just under my forehead, and I snapped out of my reverie at the majestic tesseract.
“What were we doing?” I asked, rubbing at the tingling sensation that stretched from temple to temple.
Right! We were heading toward Alison’s lab to find her notes!
“Ali …”
Hearing Tim’s confirmation of our plan, my resolve and determination flowed through my entire being like taking the world’s largest Shop-Vac and sucking up all the stagnant floodwaters of dread trying to weaken the foundation of my mission.
When compared to the sweet angel that made up my universe, the awe of the countless rivers of time seemed no more important than an overabundance of billboards on a highway.
My mind focusing on Alison’s lab, the chaotic assortment of colorful sand around me blurred at mind-boggling speed for several perceived moments before suddenly stopping as if hitting pause on a remote. I said “perceived” because I couldn’t even begin to understand how time worked inside the tesseract—an hourglass that held all the sands of time.
Below where I waded with my head above the stream, I watched as a large box began to form. On instinct, I held the breath I didn’t have and lowered myself until I was standing on the floor of what I knew to be a room. I didn’t recognize it, so just watched as the sands continued to solidify into the beginnings of a cohesive scene.
An oval began to take shape which seemed to move toward what appeared to be a heavily pixelated desk.
Wait! Tim cried out in my head. We aren’t far enough yet!
“Far enough?” I asked before his words registered.
The oval continued to take form, and I knew in an instant who I was looking at.
“Alison …”
My daughter snapped her head in my direction, startling me like a dream bleeding over into reality, where it was impossible to differentiate fiction from the real world.
My focus dropped, and the sands fell away into a swiftly moving blizzard once more, taking my daughter away from me.
“No!”
Andrew. You probably shouldn’t have contact with her. At least not yet.
“W-Why?”
Because your Chronos Scale might interrupt her during this pivotal period.
“Meaning?!”
Meaning she might not have found the potential answers that she left hidden for us, a là the law of unintended consequences.
“Butterfly effect …” I murmured.
Precisely, Tim concurred. If you make contact with her, you could very well change the course of time itself, given your immeasurable Chronos Scale. And she might not leave the hidden research for us to find. At least not in a spot where we would know to look for it.
I thought about what he was saying as the chaotic, colorful sands flowed by and through my body once more.
“She … She was right there …”
Don’t be so glum, Andrew! Tim cheerily said. I said you shouldn’t have contact with her yet. Now, let’s keep moving through time and pray that little interaction didn’t alter events out of our favor.
I forced myself to digest his meaning, beginning to understand what he was trying to get at.
“I’ll be able to see her again …” I said with a spark of hope as I willed myself to move further down the stream of time toward what my baby girl had left for me to find.
If you are able to do the impossible, then yes.
“You, uh … actually sound confident.”
You’ve proven time and time again, pun intended, that you are able to do the impossible. So, at this point, I’m just along for the ride, baby! he said enthusiastically. If I were a betting AI, I’d wager all my chips on you getting to watch your daughter grow up to live the life she deserves. And if I were to be honest, Tim added meekly, I’d like to see you happy, Andrew. Science knows you’ve earned it!
I dared to let a feeling of warmth spread outward from my heart as I pictured a life where I got to watch my baby girl grow into the amazing woman I knew she would become.
“And what about the universe?” I asked, feeling like I shouldn’t but unable to help myself. The warm feeling expanding throughout my core slowed before cooling off as quickly as a fresh slice of pizza placed in front of a shop fan. “I can’t have my cake and eat it too, right?”
What happened to the determined Andrew who wasn’t going to let a simple thing like temporal mechanics and paradoxes stop him? Hmm? Is he home? Can heeeee come out and play?
