Part 17: The Chrono-Beast and the Memory Blade

The fractured sky peeled open like old parchment. From the wound in time crawled the Chrono-Beast, a creature not born, but compiled — made of shattered possibilities and regrets from a thousand futures that never happened.

It moved with jerks and echoes, as though skipping through time every second it breathed.

Lyn and Du Hao stood atop the crumbled remains of the Clocktower’s foundation. Around them, reality shifted like rippling glass. One second, they stood in a city skyline. The next, in a barren wasteland. Then in a place that looked eerily like the childhood bedroom Lyn had long forgotten.

“I don’t know how to fight that,” Lyn said, eyes locked on the thing that once might’ve been a deer, a man, and a galaxy all at once.

Du Hao, flickering between his timelines, held something glowing in his palm. A blade — not of metal, but of memory. “You don’t fight it,” he said. “You anchor it.”

He handed her the blade.

“What is this?”

“The first memory you ever locked away. The truth you were never ready to face.”

Lyn looked down. The blade pulsed with warmth. In its surface, she saw a moment from her past: a tiny, broken watch clutched in her mother’s dying hand. She’d buried that memory deep — until now.

“If you stab the beast with it, it will become one timeline. A single, wounded animal again. Then we can contain it.”

“And if I don’t?”

Du Hao looked at her, steady for once, the fractures in his form slowing. “Then it multiplies. And this entire world becomes a war of pasts that never belonged here.”

Lyn ran toward the creature as the timelines howled around her. The beast screamed — in a language she almost understood.

As she raised the blade and drove it through its chest, time folded inward like a sigh.

The Chrono-Beast collapsed — and for a moment, every timeline went still.