Part 41: The Chamber of First Design

The golden runes pulsed gently beneath their feet, as if each step awakened something ancient buried within the Tower’s core. Lyn led the way, fingers grazing the stone wall, which felt neither warm nor cold—only aware. The spiral staircase curved deeper than any blueprint had ever shown, descending past familiar infrastructure, past the Chrono-Seed level, and into a part of the Tower no architect had claimed to build.

"None of this is in the construction schematics," Du Hao murmured, his hand brushing against etchings older than the Tower itself. "And I memorized every inch of them."

Lyn stopped suddenly. Before them stood a massive door, embedded with a circular mechanism at its center. It wasn’t locked. In fact, the mechanism slowly rotated on its own—sensing them, perhaps weighing them.

She leaned in. “Look at the symbols. They’re pre-Resequencing dialects.”

Du Hao traced one with a gloved finger. “It says... origin echo.”

The door clicked once. Then, soundlessly, it opened.

Inside, the chamber glowed with soft, golden light—like dawn held in stasis. At its heart stood a pedestal, and upon it, a device that looked uncannily familiar: a watch, larger than a normal pocket watch, but designed with similar elegance. It was cracked down the center.

Du Hao approached it carefully. “This looks like the first prototype of the Temporal Regulator. But... that was lost in the first calibration surge. Vaporized.”

“Maybe not vaporized,” Lyn said. “Maybe hidden.”

She stepped around the pedestal, scanning the room. Along the walls were carvings—not just of timelines, but of people. Individuals marked by shimmering lines tracing their temporal signatures. She recognized several.

“This is a memorial,” she whispered. “To every timewalker who never returned. It’s storing their echoes.”

Du Hao stared at the broken regulator. “What if this isn’t just a memory vault? What if this was the original chamber where time was first shaped?”

Lyn turned toward him, startled. “You think this is... the First Design?”

He nodded. “The myth always said the Clocktower was built atop an ancient temporal fracture. Maybe this is it. The true heart. And we’ve only ever accessed its upper layers.”

The room vibrated gently, and from the ceiling, strands of silver light descended. They moved slowly, curling around Lyn’s hands. Each strand was an echo—a vision, a voice, a decision once made or never taken.

One of them whispered: “You chose mercy, and so a city was saved.”

Another: “You looked away, and thus he became the enemy.”

Du Hao reached out, letting one of the strands wrap around his wrist. His eyes widened. “It’s not just showing me what I did—it’s showing me what I could’ve done.”

Lyn’s gaze moved to the back of the room, where another door rested, sealed with a complex lock. As she approached it, the Pocket Watch at her side ticked once—then projected a shimmering key into the air.

She pressed her palm into the projection.

The door unlocked with a deep, resonant chime.

Behind it lay a much smaller room—circular, with a chair at the center and panels that seemed to absorb light. Above the chair was an inscription:

THE THREADMAKER’S SEAT.

Du Hao exhaled. “That name’s only ever appeared in ancient test logs. It was the theoretical interface—one that could rewrite not just timelines, but underlying causality.”

“But it was abandoned. Too dangerous. Too unpredictable,” Lyn said. Her voice was quiet now. “Because the moment one person can rewrite why something happens, not just what... time stops being neutral.”

She sat in the chair.

The room didn’t resist. It welcomed her.

Panels flickered to life, displaying images of the fractured anomaly she had encountered, of Calren in multiple forms, of a Tower crumbling in a timeline she’d never lived.

Du Hao stepped forward hesitantly. “You don’t have to do this now.”

Lyn didn’t answer at first. She was seeing something—visions swimming across her eyes faster than she could process them. Not possibilities. Seeds.

Not memories. Intentions.

“I think this chamber was left for a future where time would begin unraveling from within. Where even guardians like us would no longer be enough,” she said. “This isn’t a throne. It’s a tool of last resort.”

“Then we can leave it sealed,” Du Hao said gently.

She looked up at him. “Can we? The anomaly is waking in timelines we thought erased. Calren may not be our enemy anymore—but something else is leaking through.”

The walls dimmed, the hum fading.

But the seat beneath her remained lit—waiting.

Lyn stood, eyes clearer now. “I’m not going to rewrite causality. But I am going to listen.”

She turned back to the room of echoes.

“Maybe we’ve spent too long trying to control time,” she said. “Maybe it’s time we let it speak.”