Kaelen dreamt of falling.
Not through space or sky, but through time itself a plummet into broken moments and orphaned memories. Around him flickered glimpses of Chronara: her eyes streaked with starlight, her hands outstretched as she whispered into the folds of existence. He was not watching her. He was her. Or rather, experiencing her memory as if it were stitched into his own.
She was hiding something.
A place. A moment. A key.
It shimmered like glass split across three different timelines, anchored to none. Kaelen awoke gasping, the Scroll already opened beside him, glowing faintly with new glyphs.
Delara stirred. "What did you see?"
"A city. Split in thirds. Past, present, and... something that never came to be."
Milae was already on her feet, eyes scanning the horizon. "Ankorel," she said quietly. "It was one of the last cities before the Fracture fully devoured the timeline. It exists, sort of. In layers."
"Chronara left something there," Kaelen said. "Another key."
Ashren shivered. "Three shadows share one crown. Only the true self may enter."
They packed camp without another word.
Ankorel did not rise so much as haunt the desert. Its skyline flickered, ancient towers from long-forgotten dynasties fading in and out of view beside half-built structures from futures that never came to pass. Bridges ended mid-air. Roads led into ghosts of marketplaces.
"This place is wrong," Harnen muttered, clutching his staff tighter. "It's not just time that's broken here. It's choice."
As they passed through the outer edges, Kaelen saw versions of himself in peripheral glimpses—a younger self, still innocent; an older self, weary and bitter. They vanished when faced directly.
The Paratemporals emerged at twilight.
They were not fully visible. Beings made of shimmering fragments, they appeared in pulses, like a heart too scared to beat. Some reached out with hands of memory; others spoke in voices that hadn't yet been born.
One approached Kaelen and whispered in perfect stillness: "You chose not to save me."
Then it vanished.
Delara stepped closer to him. "They're echoes of paths not taken. If we stay here too long, we might become them."
The temple stood at the city's center, a structure that defied geometry. It was built of stone that aged and un-aged in cycles, with doors that were never the same shape twice.
"Only those who face the echo of their unchosen self may pass," Milae read from an inscription that shimmered like oil.
One by one, they entered.
Kaelen's trial began in a hall of mirrors, but each reflection was a timeline. One showed him giving the Scroll to Vorenth to protect his friends. Another showed him refusing the call, letting the war consume everything. A third... a third showed him as something terrifying: cloaked in fire, bearing the glyphs of all keys, but eyes hollow.
"You could be this," said a voice. It was his voice. "A god of tomorrow. The war would end."
"Not in peace," Kaelen replied. "In control."
The reflection stepped through the mirror.
Kaelen did not fight. He knelt.
"I accept what I am not."
The reflection cracked.
The temple shuddered.
Kaelen stepped through.
At the altar, there was no key.
Only a silence. A moment suspended.
He understood.
"This is the key," he said. "A choice not made. A path not taken."
He stood in stillness.
The temple began to collapse.
Delara screamed. Milae reached for him. But Kaelen did not move. He held the moment.
And the city stopped unraveling.
Time steadied.
The Scroll opened in golden light.
The second key was not a word, nor an object. It was a pause—deliberate, reverent. A glyph burned onto Kaelen's shoulder, shaped like an hourglass with a broken center.
The city vanished.
The group stood now on a plain of glass, the temple gone, but the memory remained.
Delara stared at him. "You didn't act. You refused to act."
Kaelen nodded. "That was the only way to change it."
That night, the wind whispered not Chronara's voice, but something deeper. Aeontheus.
Incomplete. Fragmented.
"You are weaving me again."
Kaelen woke with tears in his eyes.
And in the stars above, for the first time in a thousand fractured ages, something aligned.
A harmony long lost.
A second note in the unfinished song of Time.