PART 3: THE KNOCK OF MEMORY

The moment the Chronovore appeared, time aboard the train came to a full stop—not slowing, but freezing. Passengers’ breaths hovered midair, a droplet of coffee falling from Lyn’s cup suspended like crystal. But Rivo kept moving.

Because inside him, the Core of Time beat like a second heart.

“I consumed your father’s time,” the Chronovore spoke coldly, the clock hands on its face spinning in reverse. “And now I’ll devour your past—erase you from the timeline.”

Rivo said nothing. His fingers silently turned a gear etched with an all-seeing eye—the final piece of the ancient timepiece. As the gear clicked into place, the earth trembled. Invisible wheels stirred beneath the ground. The train’s windows shattered as if the past itself had been pierced.

A temporal rift opened behind Rivo.

“Lyn, go now!” Rivo shouted.

“What about you?” she cried.

“I have to go back.”

Rivo stepped into the time crack and was pulled back seventeen years—to the night his father vanished. He stood in the old workshop, lit by flickering oil lamps and filled with the scent of metal. At the workbench stood a man carefully soldering delicate clockwork. It was his father—Delvar’s master clockmaker.

“Father…” Rivo whispered.

The man looked up, eyes stern but unsurprised. “You’ve unlocked the core at last.”

“You… you’re alive?”

“No. Not alive—just not fully dead. The Chronovore consumed me. But you can stop it.”

Meanwhile, in the present, the Chronovore spread. Every step it took withered the train car, metal turning to dust. Lyn pulled out a square pocket watch—the last secret weapon of the Chronos Institute.

“This thing only works once…” she muttered, eyes fixed on the time beast.

Back in the past, Rivo and his father rebuilt the original timepiece—The First Clock. It did not measure time, it controlled its very pulse. When the final hand was set in place, a chime echoed across dimensions.

The Chronovore screamed.

Lyn activated the pocket watch. A temporal shockwave burst from the center of the train car, slicing through the creature and freezing it between two heartbeats.

Rivo returned, emerging from dust and fractured light like a falling star.

He looked at the time-creature, now fossilized in the split of time.

“Time does not belong to those who devour it,” he said. “Only to those who cherish it.”

After the battle, the Core of Time was placed once more at the city’s center, turning slowly like a golden heart. The people of Delvar began to feel time—not as pressure, but as a gift.

As for Rivo, he left with Lyn and opened a small clock shop in a town no one remembered, where each watch didn’t simply tell time—it reminded people to live within it.

Would you like Part 4 to explore:

Lyn’s mysterious past?

A new threat from the future?

A betrayal inside the Chronos Institute?