Part 21: The Chronoglass Covenant

Calren stood at the edge of the Forgotten Vale, a rift carved during the original time rupture — a place that had been sealed, quarantined, and left to decay in the shadows of history. But he knew the truth: timelines never died. They just waited for someone bold enough to open their eyes.

The Null Chronoglass pulsed in his palm, not with light, but with absence — an unbeing that devoured the seconds around it. Trees near him wilted, flowers closed in fear, and even sound seemed reluctant to echo.

He knelt beside an ancient arch of stone — a remnant of a civilization erased when the Tower was first forged.

"Still here," he whispered. "Still waiting."

He placed the Chronoglass into a socket in the ground, and the stones trembled. A buried mechanism, untouched for centuries, roared to life. Gears turned without oil, runes ignited like stars reappearing in a dead sky.

One by one, they came — others, like him, caught in slivers of severed time. Survivors. Mutations. Ghosts of timelines Lyn and Du Hao had tried to cleanse.

There was Sarielle, the historian from Timeline Forty-Seven, her body fused with parchment and ink. Orryn, who remembered centuries in a world that never existed. And Roth, once Du Hao’s closest ally — now a fragmented echo with too many voices.

Calren looked at them with a gleam in his eye.

“We were erased to make their world clean,” he said. “But we still breathe. Still remember. And memory, my friends… is power.”

They nodded. United not by loyalty, but by loss.

He turned to the arch, now glowing with potential. “This is the Gate of Echoes. It connects not to one timeline… but to all that were denied. The ‘clean world’ Lyn built? It’s a cage. Beautiful. Safe. But unnatural.”

Orryn tilted his head. “What do you intend to do?”

Calren smirked. “Not destroy it. That would be too kind. I intend to show its people the truth: that time is not a straight line, but a sea — and they are only floating on a raft.”

He paused, voice like thunder disguised as silk.

“We will drown them in memory.”