THE CHRONOS ANOMALY

THE WORLD IN REVERSE

In the Age of Reversion—an era no history book could predict—time does not march forward. It recoils.

Children are born as elders and grow younger each passing year. Buildings rise in ruin only to stand pristine centuries later. Empires crumble into existence and dissolve into plans never executed. People say goodbye before they ever say hello. Love ends before it begins. Grief precedes attachment.

The laws of physics do not break; they invert. Smoke flows back into extinguished flames. Rain leaps into clouds. Footprints rise from the sand. Words are unsaid before spoken. And death, the boundary all beings understand, is the first chapter of every life. And within this reverse-spiraling world, only one anomaly moves against the cosmic tide. His name is Eron Vale—the Last Rememberer.

While everyone else experiences their lives from end to beginning, Eron alone experiences reality forward. He ages while others de-age. He remembers while others forget. He learns while others unlearn. Every day, he awakens older, wiser, and heavier with the memories his world has shed.

Where others see the world rewinding into convenience and clarity, he sees it careening toward a catastrophe he has already lived.

What haunts him is not the future he does not know, but the future he does—a future only he remembers. Because time flows backward for the world, but not for him. And that means one thing: The disaster everyone thinks already happened… is still coming.

THE FUNERAL THAT WASN’T

Eron stands beneath a gray sky, out of place among the crowd. To them, this is a funeral. To him, it is something worse—a beginning. The casket rises gently from the soil, lifted by pallbearers whose eyes hold a strange mixture of joy and confusion, their memories being undone even as they carry out their “final” duties. For them, the woman in the coffin is on the path of life. For Eron, she is the love he has already lost and will lose again in reverse.

Her name is Lyra.

He watches her body, lifeless but unmarred, ascend from the earth as if pulled upward by invisible strings. The mourners do not weep here; they un-weep. Tears slide back into ducts, breaths steady, and faces soften with an eerie calm.

Beside the coffin, a man touches his cheek, startled by the tear that seems to have “appeared.” He glances at Eron, confused. “Strange,” the man says. “I wasn’t sad a moment ago.”

Eron’s jaw tightens.

You were, he thinks.

You loved her. You just don’t know it yet.

Lyra’s mother approaches him, her eyes narrowing with curiosity rather than despair. “You knew my daughter…?” she asks—not with grief, but with the curiosity of a stranger meeting someone who seems vaguely familiar.

“Yes,” Eron says softly. “Better than anyone.”

She tilts her head. “You’ll have to tell me about her someday.” You’ll remember her someday, Eron knows. But it will come as beginnings, not endings.

The coffin is placed gently onto a rolling gurney. A doctor signs a rebirth certificate, preparing to deliver Lyra into the world—alive, healthy, and several years younger than when she “died.”

And then it happens. Time stutters, and the clouds flicker.

The ground trembles with a silent pulse only Eron hears.

The Chronos Pulse

The warning.

Eron’s breath hitches.

It is happening sooner than he feared.