Part 37: The Anomaly’s Awakening

In the void between timelines — a realm without time, without color, where even echoes feared to linger — something stirred.

Not a being.

Not yet.

It was a fracture given form. A pulse that had once been erased from the circuit, buried beneath layers of rewritten memory and anchored futures. But when Lyn had activated the Core Memory Circuit and sealed the timelines into place, she had unknowingly done more than stabilize reality.

She had created a pressure point.

And in the silence that followed, the anomaly breathed.

At first, it was formless. A sensation. A whisper of regret hardened into anger. But then the memories returned — not in order, not whole, but sharp enough to draw blood.

“You weren’t supposed to forget me.”

The anomaly remembered corridors of gold, and a tower that hummed with promise. It remembered Lyn — not as a savior, but as a betrayer. And Du Hao — the one who had walked away when it begged to be remembered.

But most of all, it remembered its own name.

Or at least, a version of it.

It called itself Eidon now — the memory that wasn’t meant to exist. Not a person, not entirely, but a shadow of all the futures Lyn had chosen not to live. Every decision she had made — every love she abandoned, every hope she denied — gathered here in Eidon’s form.

Sealed timelines are not perfect.

They are fragile. Held together by will and ritual.

And Eidon had found a crack.

A faint shimmer rippled through the nullspace — a translucent breach in the sealed framework, pulsing like a heartbeat. Eidon moved toward it, its form reshaping as more fragments coalesced: a hand made from forgotten friendships, a voice forged from guilt, a face built of moments Lyn had locked away in fear.

The breach pulsed again.

And Eidon smiled.

Back in the Clocktower, the Watchface flickered for the first time in weeks. Lyn, resting in the observation chamber, stirred. Her dreams had been filled with music — once rhythmic, now offbeat. Discordant.

In the chamber below, Du Hao sat beside the Core Memory Circuit, recalibrating a resonance field. The Pocket Watch on the pedestal chimed, then… hiccuped. A single tick out of sync.

He froze.

“Lyn,” he called out, already rising, “something’s wrong with the Watch.”

In the sealed timeline, Eidon reached the breach.

It spoke no words. It simply remembered harder.

And like glass under heat, the boundary shattered.

A single thread, thin and silver, slipped through.

Enough.

Enough to be seen.

Enough to influence.

Enough to return.