Part 16: Whispers from the Lost Timelines

Weeks after the fall of the Clocktower, Lyn had begun to live quietly — or as quietly as a Watchbreaker could. But the stillness wouldn’t last.

One night, as she walked by the riverbank near her temporary home, she heard it: a ticking. Not mechanical. Not from any real device. A ticking that echoed in her mind.

She turned — and standing on the water’s surface, was Du Hao.

But something was wrong.

His face flickered, as if caught between two frames of an old film reel. One moment it was the Du Hao she knew — brilliant, conflicted, painfully human. The next, a version of him twisted — a man stitched together by timelines that never should’ve met.

“You’re not him,” Lyn said carefully.

“I am,” he replied. His voice was layered — like multiple versions of himself speaking at once. “Or rather… we are.”

A rupture had formed when Lyn shattered the Tower. Fragments of timelines that had been neatly stored and forgotten now spilled into the present — overlapping, conflicting, fusing.

And Du Hao, the original Keeper’s apprentice, had been pulled into all of them at once.

“We were supposed to die in one. Win in another. Betray you in a third,” he said. “Now… we remember everything.”

Lyn felt a chill. “What do you want?”

“To fix this. Or to end it. I’m not sure which yet.”

Behind him, the river began flowing backward. Stars rearranged themselves in the sky. And far off, the silhouette of something massive — a beast of time — emerged from a broken fold in the horizon, screaming without sound.

“We’re not the only fragments, Lyn,” Du Hao said. “Others are coming. Timelines that were never meant to touch — they’re colliding.”

“So what do we do?” she whispered.

“We rewrite the rules,” he answered. “But first… we survive.”