The Heart of the Storm

For a moment, there was nothing.



No sound. No light. No time.



Just a suffocating, endless void.



Clea’s breath caught in her throat as she felt herself suspended in the space between worlds. The shard in her hand pulsed, its warmth spreading through her veins, but it was faint, a fragile glow against the suffocating darkness. The swirling chaos of shattered time had receded, leaving only a quiet, oppressive silence.



Her eyes snapped open, her body frozen in place. The weight of the collapse—the destruction she had caused—pressed against her chest like a thousand crushing stones. She could feel the last remnants of the tower, the last flickers of the creature’s power, all swirling inside her like a storm waiting to break.



The creature’s voice—its presence—was gone.



But something else had taken its place.



“Clea...”



Her heart stuttered. The voice wasn’t the creature’s. It wasn’t even the Keeper’s.



It was her own.



Clea’s mind reeled as the air around her began to shift, the stillness breaking like the fragile surface of a glass lake. The shattered pieces of the tower—of reality—began to reform, slowly, impossibly. But they weren’t the same. Time, the flow of it, was no longer linear. It was fractured, bent, reborn.



A figure appeared before her. A woman, cloaked in shadows, her face obscured by darkness. Her presence felt familiar, but wrong—like a mirror cracked at the edges, reflecting a version of herself that should never have existed.



The woman stepped forward, her voice cold, her words like ice. “I am the one who was always meant to be. The one who should have been you. The one who never shattered the glass.”



Clea’s pulse quickened. “Who are you?”



“I am the part of you that never broke. The version of you who never made the choice. I was always meant to keep the balance. But you—” She paused, a twisted smile curving her lips. “You were always the anomaly. The disruption. You were the one who chose destruction.”



Clea’s stomach churned. She had always known there was something twisted about the tower, something insidious about the creature’s whispers. But now, it was clear. This—this other version of herself—was what she had been fighting all along. The version that never had to face the truth, the one who never took the shard, who never shattered the tower.



She had always been meant to fix things.



But now, Clea understood. She had never been meant to save time. She had been meant to destroy it.



Her mind flooded with memories—visions of the past, of every choice she had made, every step she had taken that had led her here. The thefts. The lies. The running. The endless, empty search for meaning. She had always thought she was fighting against fate, against the structure that had defined her life. But it wasn’t fate she had been running from—it was the truth. She had been born for this moment. Born to break time.



The woman before her—the twisted version of herself—spoke again, her voice a sharp, biting edge. “You were always part of the cycle. The tower was never meant to be broken. It was meant to hold the world together. You were meant to hold it together. But you chose to shatter it, and now, the cycle has begun anew.”



Clea shook her head, her mind spinning. She didn’t understand. “What do you mean? What do you want from me?”



The woman’s shadowed eyes gleamed with an eerie light. “What I want? What you want, Clea. You want to restore time. You want to undo the damage you’ve caused. But there’s no going back. Not now.”



Clea’s hand tightened around the shard. She couldn’t accept it. She couldn’t accept that everything she had done, everything she had fought for, had been in vain. There had to be a way to fix it. There had to be a way to set things right.



The other Clea’s smile grew wider, crueler. “You were never meant to fix time, Clea. You were always meant to destroy it. And now, you’ll see the cost of your choices. You’ll see what happens when time breaks apart.”



The world around them began to shift again, as though the very fabric of existence was warping and twisting in response to the truth. The cracks in reality deepened, the fractured glass of the tower splintering further, until the entire world seemed on the verge of collapse.



“No...” Clea whispered, shaking her head, trying to fight against the crushing weight of the woman’s words. She couldn’t let it be true. She couldn’t let herself be the destroyer of time. Not after everything she had done to stop it.



But the vision of the other Clea, the twisted reflection of herself, did not waver. “It’s too late, Clea. You broke it all. And now, there is no going back.”



The chamber began to shake violently. The air grew thick, almost suffocating, as if time itself was breathing its last breaths. Reality stretched and twisted in unnatural ways, and Clea could feel it—the weight of what she had unleashed, the consequences of her decisions bearing down on her like a collapsing star.



The woman’s voice echoed in the chaos. “You were always part of the storm, Clea. Always meant to be the one to bring the end.”



And then, as the world around her tore apart, Clea understood. She was not the hero. She was not the savior.



She was the storm.



And now, there was nothing left but the end.