Part 22: The Clock Hands Tremble

It started with a flicker.

Lyn stood atop the Observation Spire of the rebuilt Clocktower, watching the sun set for the four-hundredth time since the timelines merged. The horizon looked the same — familiar, peaceful — but something in the wind carried an ache she hadn’t felt in months. Time was whispering again.

Below, Du Hao emerged from the Hall of Threads, face pale. He held a scroll stitched from golden strands — the same material used to repair the fractured flow of time. But now, they were unraveling in his hands.

"One of the sealed gates has opened," he said, eyes locked on hers. "The Gate of Echoes."

Lyn’s heart stopped for a beat. “That’s impossible. We fused the timelines. The threads were woven into one.”

Du Hao shook his head. “No thread stays still forever. Someone… or something… is pulling at the seams.”

They raced down the tower’s spiral staircase, passing through the Chamber of Reflections — a room once used by the Keeper of Time to peer into alternate pasts. The mirrors that lined the walls had always remained dim. Now, they all shimmered with ghost images — flashes of lives that shouldn’t exist anymore.

Children chasing butterflies in dead meadows.

A kingdom ruled by a woman who never lived.

Du Hao pointed at one image — a man holding a Chronoglass. The image flickered, but his silhouette burned like a scar in Lyn’s mind.

“Calren,” she whispered. “He survived.”

Worse — he remembered.

Lyn turned, her voice cold and steady. “We need to seal the Gate of Echoes.”

Du Hao hesitated. “What if we can’t?”

A pause. Then Lyn whispered, “Then we face what we buried. And hope it doesn't remember us more clearly than we remember it.”

The air grew colder. Somewhere, a bell rang — not in the present, but in a memory trying to return.