Time Loop - Blog Posts

The Knight

OC (Duncan Patellio)

Angst, Gore (it’s quite graphic, be warned) if ‘Edge of Tomorrow’-style time looping is not your thing, this may not be the story for you.

Summary: When a knight explores the ruins of an abandoned church, he uncovers a secret that refuses to let him go.

Duncan Patellio stood before the ruin—a bleak monument of despair. The remnants of a once-hallowed church, its charred walls rose like jagged ribs against a blood-tinged sky, while blackened stone arches reached upward as if in a silent plea. The air was heavy with the acrid stench of burnt incense and scorched wood, a bitter perfume mingling with the damp earth and the faint echo of lost prayers. Every shattered shard of stained glass on the cold, ashen ground whispered memories of brighter days now buried beneath endless ruin.

Sent by the king to salvage what little remained, Duncan moved with a measured caution that belied the weight of secrets in his step. His eyes, alert and unyielding, scanned the debris—a scattered mosaic of warped candle stubs, tarnished trinkets, and splintered relics—each piece a muted echo of former sanctity. The silence, punctuated only by the occasional whisper of wind through broken walls, pressed in on him, urging him onward through the forgotten corridors of this desecrated sanctuary.

Then, without warning, the ground beneath him groaned in protest. A subtle tremor rippled through the dust-laden floor—a prelude to betrayal by the very stone he trusted. In a heartbeat, the ancient foundation shattered. Duncan’s world tilted as he plummeted into darkness, the sensation of freefall replaced by a violent, bone-jarring impact as he collided with a bed of loose rubble.

Duncan slammed into the cold, unforgiving ground with a grunt, twisting into a defensive stance in a heartbeat—a move honed by years of silent, deadly precision. His armor scraped against jagged stone as he dropped into a crouch, every muscle taut and alert. The torch in his hand flickered erratically, its quivering light revealing slick, damp walls and a maze of dark, uneven rubble that groaned under the weight of ancient secrets.

Just then, a sharp crunch—crisp and unmistakable—resounded beneath his boot. Duncan’s eyes locked onto the shattered fragments of an egg; its once-smooth, pearly shell was now a spiderweb of cracks, weeping a viscous, iridescent fluid that caught the sputtering light like ghostly tears. The scent of cold metal and decaying matter rose in his nostrils, making his skin crawl with dread.

Behind him, the darkness stirred. A slow, deliberate clicking began—click… click… click—a measured, metallic cadence that echoed through the narrow passage. With each relentless tick, the sound grew louder, more insistent. Duncan’s hand went to the hilt of his sword as beads of sweat formed on his brow, his senses sharpened to every sound.

Then, without warning, the clicking gave way to a horrid chorus. A grinding, scraping noise—SCRRREE—filled the air as if something massive were dragging itself across stone. The sound was interlaced with a sorrowful, keening wail—AWWOOO—that reverberated off the cavern walls like the anguished cry of a damned soul.

Duncan’s heart hammered as he slowly turned, torch raised. Emerging from the inky shadows was a hulking, alien beast—a mass of sinewy flesh and glistening, chitinous armor. Its limbs, grotesquely elongated and ending in sharp, clawed appendages, moved with a deliberate, nightmarish grace. With every step, the creature’s feet scraped against the stone, a wet, gurgling sound that punctuated the oppressive silence.

The beast paused, its head cocking to one side. From its hide, a series of clicking sounds escaped as it advanced. Its eyes, luminescent and unblinking, fixated on Duncan with a predatory hunger. The creature’s gaping maw emitted a low, guttural rumble that vibrated through the ground beneath him, mingling with the relentless drip of unseen water.

Duncan’s breath came in shallow, rapid bursts as he slowly shifted his stance, his gaze never leaving the beast. Every nerve in his body screamed to act, to fight, yet he remained rooted in place, acutely aware of the fatal precision required to survive this moment. He raised his sword, its blade catching the flickering light, and his fingers tightened around the grip. His eyes darted to the shattered egg at his feet—a silent, eerie omen of what was to come—and back to the advancing horror.

The creature lunged suddenly—a terrifying blur of sinew and exoskeleton. Its claws sliced through the stagnant air with a resounding slash, narrowly missing Duncan as he rolled to the side. The beast’s low, mournful wail transformed into a terrifying snarl, each sound a visceral promise of violence.

In that heart-stopping moment, as the alien predator’s form loomed larger in the swirling torchlight, the ground beneath them seemed to tremble with the echo of impending doom. The cacophony of clicks, scrapes, and guttural roars crescendoed into a singular, unrelenting assault on the senses…

And then, with a final, ear-splitting shriek that shattered the oppressive darkness, the beast pounced—its claws reaching out, its eyes burning with a merciless intent…

Duncan barely had time to exhale before the creature struck.

It didn’t just lunge—it detonated forward, a blur of sinew and chitinous plates, its momentum an avalanche of force. He tried to pivot, but it was too fast. Too massive. A split second of resistance, then—

Impact.

The breath wrenched from his lungs as a solid wall of muscle and exoskeleton drove into his ribs, lifting him clean off his feet. The world snapped sideways. A sharp, sickening pop burst through his torso, followed by a white-hot splintering sensation—bones giving way under unbearable pressure.

Then came the wall.

His body struck the jagged stone like a ragdoll hurled by an angry god. The first thing to hit was his shoulder—his dominant one. A sharp, electric burst of pain rocketed down his arm, turning his fingers numb. He heard—felt—his collarbone snap. A brittle, unnatural crack vibrated through his skull.

Then his spine.

His back arched violently, pain exploding through every nerve as something inside him shifted—something that wasn’t supposed to move. His armor crumpled inward, metal biting deep into flesh. He gasped, but the breath wasn’t there. Only agony, only raw, suffocating fire filling his ribs, seizing his lungs in a merciless grip.

His head slammed last.

The world fractured into a storm of black and red—shards of sound and light flickering in and out of existence. A deep, resonant thud reverberated through his skull, an unbearable ringing swallowing every other sensation except pain. His vision swam. He didn’t even realize he was falling until the stone beneath his feet gave way.

The ruin devoured him whole.

He plummeted through collapsing wreckage, tumbling through dust and darkness. His body twisted, weightless and broken, every jerk and jolt another fresh agony. The fall seemed endless, a slow-motion descent into nothingness.

Then—

Impact.

Again.

The ground beneath him was solid—unforgiving stone biting into his knees, his palms, his boots scraping against dust-laden rock. His breath tore free from his throat, ragged and desperate, his fingers clenched around the hilt of his sword before he even realized he was moving. His body was whole. His ribs no longer screamed with broken agony, his shoulder no longer hung uselessly from its socket, his head—his skull—intact.

But the pain was still there. 

His body remembered.

A tremor racked through him, his stomach twisting violently, the phantom ache of shattered bones making him dizzy, nauseous, wrong. He could feel the moment his ribs had caved in, could still hear the snap of his shoulder dislocating, could still taste copper on his tongue from the blood he’d swallowed when he’d hit the wall.

But none of it had happened. Not anymore.

A sharp, brittle sound echoed beneath him.

Duncan froze. His breath caught in his throat. A slow, creeping dread slithered up his spine, sinking its claws into his chest and squeezing until his heart was hammering against his ribs.

He knew that sound.

His gaze dropped to his boot, where a delicate, pearlescent shell lay shattered beneath him, iridescent fluid weeping onto the stone in slow, glistening rivulets.

The egg.

It was whole when he fell. It was whole before. But now, it lay broken at his feet, just as it had the first time, its yolk-like contents bleeding out in eerie, shimmering pools.

Behind him, the darkness stirred.

Duncan didn’t need to turn around to know what came next. He didn’t need to hear the slow, deliberate clicking—the metallic, measured cadence slithering toward him—to know what was there, waiting in the shadows. He felt it. The weight of its presence, the anticipation of its movement, the way the air shifted as it drew closer.

He had lived this moment.

Every breath, every flicker of torchlight against the damp walls, every shudder of his own broken body—he had already been here. Died here. And yet, here he stood again, whole and unbroken, standing in the exact same place, stepping on the exact same egg, listening to the exact same sound crawling toward him from the dark.

Click. Click. Click.

The noise cut through the silence, piercing, rhythmic, steady. It was waiting for him. Just as before.

But this time, he wasn’t frozen.

This time, before the beast could charge, before he could be broken and shattered all over again, before the cycle could begin anew—

Duncan moved first.

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Thank you to @teathepumpkinmoth for the story idea: The knight (insert any name. For this example I'll use the name "sir goobus") sir goobus was sent by the king to the charred skeleton of the church, once a beacon of faith now clawed at the sky like a blackened hand. The king had sent him not to investigate the blaze, not to mourn - "a clumsy lightning strike, nothing more," the royal scholars hath declared - but to scavenge anything of value before the rubble swallowed it whole. as well as any human remains. Whilst he searched, he expected to find warped candles or perhaps a few bits of gold here and there. What he did not expect was for the floor to give way, plunging the knight into a abyss darker then he would realize. With only his dimming torch to light his way, and the way he came quickly smothered in rubble, the knight soon came to find a dark secret buried deep within the church.