Part 20: Embers That Refuse to Die

The surface world no longer remembered Calren Vos. But time did.

Every ticking second carried a resonance — like a whisper that hadn’t quite faded, like a thread tugging gently on the edge of a curtain no one realized was still hanging.

Calren emerged beneath the ruins of the Clocktower, standing amidst metal bones and glass ribs of a world Lyn thought she had remade cleanly. Above, sunlight filtered through warped air, refracted as if unsure how to shine on him.

He stared at the horizon, where cities shimmered with the harmony of the new order — a world stabilized by the healing of time. Du Hao’s reforms, Lyn’s recalibrations, The Keeper’s blessing — it all pulsed in balance.

But balance could be tipped.

Calren clenched the hourglass in his hand — the Null Chronoglass — and turned it once. One grain fell.

Somewhere in a garden city, a street clock exploded into cinders. The people screamed. Their memories for the last twenty-four hours vanished like fog in fire.

He smiled.

“They think this world is theirs now. They’ve forgotten that time is not something you own... It’s something you borrow.”

He walked. And as he walked, the seams in the timeline — invisible to ordinary people — quivered at his steps. Buildings shimmered with sudden déjà vu. Children looked up at the sky and wept without knowing why.

He left no footprint.

Only ripples.

Far away, in the new Core of the Clocktower, Lyn stirred from her desk. Maps of stabilized zones blinked. A red glyph pulsed. Something — someone — was echoing outside of permitted resonance.

Du Hao walked in, holding the silver-spined ledger of timeline reports. “Lyn... something just appeared on the Fifth Stream.”

She turned, her eyes narrowed. “We closed that stream. It was severed.”

“It’s reattaching,” he said. “Like it never left.”

Lyn felt it then — like a phantom breath on the back of her neck. A presence she hadn’t sensed since the day everything was rebuilt.

“No,” she whispered. “It can’t be.”

Du Hao looked at her. “Who is it?”

Her answer came not in words — but in the sudden flicker of every watch in the tower, skipping backward for a single, impossible second.

“Calren Vos,” she said.