Part 27 : Through the Memory Forge

The great doors of the Clocktower groaned as they opened—slowly, deliberately, as if the Tower itself sensed who approached.

Calren stood at the threshold.

His cloak of dark thread shifted with time’s distortion, shimmering with fragments of lost histories. Behind him, the timeline rebels waited, their faces a blur of echoes from fractured worlds. Yet he stepped forward alone.

The interior of the Tower pulsed with a golden hue—an unnatural calm. There was no ambush. No defense.

Only memory.

With each step into the core chamber, the air thickened. And then—

The Memory Forge activated.

Light unfolded like petals, and Calren froze as the first vision emerged: himself as a boy, laughing beside Du Hao under a sky untouched by war. It was not a false memory. It was real.

“No,” Calren growled, but his boots dragged forward. The Forge responded to his presence, unspooling the past, not to change it—but to reflect it.

Next came pain: the day Du Hao vanished, called into the Tower, never returning to the boy who called him brother. The boy who bled for the rebellion.

“You left me,” he whispered. “Not the world. Me.”

The chamber pulsed. New memory.

Lyn’s voice now, reaching him from another shard of time.

“You mattered. Even when the world chose to forget.”

Calren staggered. “This is manipulation,” he hissed. “This is mercy disguised as control.”

But then, the last fragment appeared.

Du Hao, standing within memory, spoke with eyes unguarded:

“I feared your power because I saw my own reflection. But I never stopped believing in who you were before the fire. You were never just the weapon. You were my reason to hope.”

Calren clenched his fists. His breath trembled. The power around him warped and cracked as the Forge fed him not guilt—but grief. Not lies—but loss unspoken.

Could he destroy this?

Could he look away?

Silence fell.

Calren turned his eyes to the center of the chamber, where the Pocket Watch floated—its beat missing, its light faint.

He reached toward it.

Not to take it.

But to listen.