Volume One: Truth

 Ace had woken up to complete darkness.

He was anxious. It was not the normal darkness of night, nor inside his room, but it was the absence of light itself that scared him.

He tried to retrace his steps.

All he seemed to remember was fear- intense fear, and that he didn’t want to be there, surrounded by death.  He knew he could go anywhere, if he knew what it looked like, but in a panic, he thought of nothing.

And here he was.

At the intersection of nowhere and somewhere.

Ace investigated the void and felt like something was watching him in turn. He glanced to the side and felt uneasy, like someone or something was waiting for him.

He assured himself that was impossible because nothing was there. It was dark! Nothing to be afraid of, and yet he was still nervous.

He quickly turned around in the same spot, looking for any signs of human life, and stumbled.

When he took a step to the side, everything shifted.

It was summertime, and the air was comfortably warm inside the garden he had stumbled into. Flowers the size of his body surrounded him, and he rubbed their thick stems in awe. Following the flowers through the maze of yellows, blues, and other bright hues, he wandered about and entered a large clearing filled with fountains.

All of them were uniform, made of marble, but they were all turned off, and the water inside them still.

Ace investigated one of the fountains and stared at his own reflection.

For a few moments, his blue eyes and red hair reflected in the murky pool, but slowly shifted into other images. One was people, walking through the streets. The next was a family eating dinner. He considered it was television inside a fountain, but that made no sense. There were plenty of much easier ways to get one's daily dose of cable.

He looked inside another, and Ace saw his friend, Fenton, half-running and half-stumbling, face contorted in determination and exhaustion. Ace jerked away in his own fear.

Once again, the heavy feeling one has when someone is staring upon them settled onto the back of his head. Slowly Ace turned around to be greeted by the resident of the strange garden.

A man in a suit, his dark brown hair long, was sitting at a table, next to the tall hedges, when he was not there before. Ace questioned his own sanity, as the man in the suit was overly friendly, waving at him from afar.

“Welcome back, you’re just in time for tea!”

The man poured tea from a fancy kettle into matching cups and sat at a table made for two, with white doilies. Ace noticed the round glass top held up by a white wooden base of carved animals, most of them birds, as he approached the table. Everything about the garden was ornate from the plants down to the chairs.

He was confused because he could not send himself to a place he had never been, and he had never been here in his life.

“Where am I,” Ace asked.

“Oh, you. This stuff again. All the questions,” said the man. He waved his hand around, as if shooing away a pesky fly. “You’ve been here before!”

“I have?”

"You have. Three-thousand six-hundred and fifty-two times, to be exact. I would figure you'd be tired of this by now, but you haven't given up yet," said the mysterious man, wagging his finger at Ace, as if to chastise him.

Ace gave him a blank stare, as he felt nothing towards this man he had just met.

“Come, come, don’t be a stranger. Come sit with me," the man said.

He gave the table a hearty thump-thump, the tea set clattering from his impatience.

Ace warily sat down with the man, but immediately he felt uneasy seeing his face up close. The man looked very familiar, eerily so. Something was right, but not quite right, like a tiger without stripes.

“Oh yes, I almost forgot to reintroduce myself, since, you know, you always forget,” huffed the man. “I go by many names, but I call myself Wrinkle now.”

“Wrinkle,” repeated Ace. “That doesn’t sound like a real name.”

“How rude! It is a nickname!”

“Sorry…My name is Acheus. I go by Ace.”

“Yes, yes. I know you very well Ace”, exclaimed Wrinkle. “We’ve had so much time to get to know each other from your many, many, many visits. But every time you leave you never remember.”

“How come I never remember?”

“Well, that’s just a side effect. I rewind everything. You get another do over. Friends still alive, another chance at life. You know.”

Ace’s eyes trailed around the table as he soaked in the new information.

"My friends are dead? I need to go back! Send me back," Ace yelled.

“Not this nonsense again. You’ve just arrived this time. We haven’t even discussed the important stuff.”

Wrinkle was still sitting at the table, agitated that yet again he had to explain something he had literally, thousands of times.

“I don’t care!” Ace slammed his palms against the tabletop, “My family and friends need me! Send me back!”

“I can’t send you back. I can only rewind what happened. Since everything is rewound, you never remember.”

Wrinkle spoke softly as he thought of the many times Ace had returned, and wondered how he would be different the next time he returned.

Ace looked crestfallen.

He sat back down, and stared at Wrinkle's fancy, gold and white teacup, wondering how he had made so many bad life choices to end up here, with a crazy man, or ghost, or something.

He just wasn't sure what Wrinkle was and didn't want to stay to find out.

"Sorry. You should just give up. It's a fool's errand," Wrinkle said.

“No, no. Send me back. I’ll do anything. Please.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Wrinkle chuckled. “You do not have to convince me.”

He paused.

“I know you will be back. You always come back.”

The pain in his voice reflected on his face.

Wrinkle made Ace feel uncomfortable, because the more he looked at him, the more he thought that he recognized him. Which would be impossible. He claimed that he never remembered that they met, yet here he was, and the more the conversation went on the more Ace started to avert his eyes from Wrinkle's face.

The familiar stranger rolled his eyes and sipped his tea.

“Needs more sugar.”

Ace was now angry that this man was more worried about his tea than the fact they were stuck in a bottomless void, and then in a garden, and all as if it were a part of the natural order.

“Forgive me. I've forgotten my manners. You should get tea first since you're older.”

“I'm eighteen,” Ace said, “you look older than me.”

"Technically we're both older than we look, sir."

Wrinkle wriggled his nose, and a little teacup appeared, steaming hot and ready. Ace stared at the cup, afraid of what else he could do. He had never seen an ability of this magnitude.

His roommate could control light, his neighbor could fly, the captain of his school's tennis team could pass through objects, but this, this was something else.

“Ace. I can't drink until you've had some,” Wrinkle complained, as though he hadn’t just been drinking his tea. “Please.”

Ace nervously drank some of the tea, and then he himself believed it needed more sugar. With a warm drink in his hands Ace started to relax, and then put some sugar in his tea using a tiny silver spoon. Still, he awkwardly held his porcelain teacup while the stranger who claimed to have met him before held his with ease.

“Why can't you just go back in time and have me remember everything?”

Wrinkle took a tone, the sort someone took when talking to a small child that didn't understand what they had done when they were wrong without trying to sound angry or upset.

"Because you cannot take the memories from one timeline to another! The only way you could go back and keep your memories is if Infiniti took you."

Ace grimaced at the name of the malevolent entity and tried to get the bad taste out of his mouth by taking more sips of his tea, stopping, anxiously putting in more sugar, and now taking big gulps.

“If you do go back with Infiniti, you'll meet your other self, and simply, one of you must die. Paradoxes eventually always correct themselves, no matter how long it takes.”

Ace began to pay more attention as the tone in his voice went from nonsensical to serious.

“The version of you, right here, would be lucky to live. Usually, you just die of an accident when you try to avoid the paradox…and everything begins again.”

“Have I really been here that many times?”

“You've been here so often, that in some reiterations the gods had a betting pool on you,” Wrinkle grinned. “Quite fantastic! Sometimes your personality is different, sometimes you come with a friend. One time you were even a woman!”

Ace tried very hard not to think about the last part.

“You can stay with me," Wrinkle offered. “We can finally get to know each other.”

“I want to go home.”

“Why return? Why go back to the playground of the gods where there are no winners?”

“I am going home.”

Ace glared at the familiar stranger in obstinance, and he wouldn’t be swayed. After a few moments he noticed something not quite right. Looking into his blue eyes, the same eyes he had, and his father had, a strange juxtaposition with his dark skin.

Obstinance slowly turned into disgust and then fear. Different excuses began to form in Ace’s head on how to leave the guest’s garden without causing a scene, but where could he go?

“Don't look at me like that,” Wrinkle spat, his face twisted like someone had replaced the sugar in his tea with lemons.

All semblance of manners and demeanor had fallen away. Wrinkle was always polite to his guests, as many of them had wandered through on accident. None knew how they entered, but eventually he made all of them leave.

 This one, however, was special.

And he wanted him to stay.

“I don't want to be here! I don't want to see his face and hear your voice.”

“Don't say that! Don't you ever say that!”

Wrinkle stood from his chair, bared his teeth and promptly pushed the table onto the ground. His teeth became longer, almost fangs while his pupils shrank. Food, tea, and porcelain shattered everywhere.

 Ace shut his eyes tight, gripped the sides of the chair, and tried to go home, picturing the faded blue couch in the living room with the wallpaper he wasn’t particularly fond of. He waited.

And waited.

But he was still there.

Panic flooded all over his body as he did not know how to leave, and he was stuck inside a strange prison with a madman.

Wrinkle's rage subsided when he saw Ace sitting in the chair and trembling and came to his senses.

"Don't worry. I can fix this. Open your eyes," Wrinkle said.

Ace did as he was told, and everything was back to what it should be. The man was no longer beginning his frightening transformation and was putting his gloves back on.

“I'll send you back,” Wrinkle said quietly. “Just don't come back again, please. This hurts.

His words echoed loud and clear, rippling through the air. Wrinkle’s eyes went blank, a canvas of white, as he cleared his mind and started to rewind the universe for the three-thousand six-hundred and fifty-third time.

Everything around them started to fade and Ace gripped the sides of his chair in fear, not knowing what the familiar stranger would do next. Wrinkle sighed.

“I got all dressed up in case you stayed this time. I wanted to give a great first impression…”

Ace clung onto the sides of the chair for dear life as he fell, the garden no longer real. Helplessly he gazed up seeing Wrinkle get smaller, a speck, and then gone.

In the dark, falling, Ace wondered why the familiar stranger had the face of his father.