Night fell gently upon the Accord, blanketing the valley in velvet blue and quiet thought. After the Concord Within had begun to anchor itself in the people's lives, something unexpected stirred beneath the surface of their newfound serenity.
Ethan sat at the edge of the Reflective Pool, alone but never truly so. The ripples in the water flickered with starlight and memory, whispering echoes of voices past. Not all truths had been spoken. Not all wounds had healed. The Starseers were still watching.
It was Bryn who approached him first.
"There's something... wrong," she said, folding her arms tightly across her chest. "I've been reviewing the Pathweavers' latest mappings. The echoes are twisting."
"Twisting?" Ethan asked.
"They bend in on themselves. Like time is looping inward—threads forming knots instead of lines."
A chill slipped into his spine. "How far back?"
Bryn hesitated. "Centuries. Possibly further. And they all converge on a new focal point—outside the Accord's mapped space. A breach."
The word hit hard. A breach meant instability. It meant the past had become volatile again. And worse, it meant someone or something was tampering with the fabric of the timeline.
Within hours, Ethan assembled a small team. Lily, naturally, insisted on coming. Bryn provided the last stable coordinates before the echo-paths twisted. And Cael, a young Cartographer with a rare sensitivity to time patterns, was recruited to interpret the feedback in real time.
The breach was located deep beneath the Ebonwood Hollow, a long-abandoned pocket of forest that time itself had once seemingly forgotten. The land there refused to conform to chronology. Trees grew backward. Shadows reversed themselves. One could lose minutes simply by stepping forward.
As they descended, their time compasses spun erratically. Cael winced every few steps, placing his hand against the soil.
"It's humming," he muttered. "It's trying to sing, but the melody is... broken."
Near the base of a gnarled, ancient tree—the kind that looked older than sunlight—they found the anomaly: a tear in the air, like light struggling to escape the wrong dimension. Around it shimmered fragments of memory: faces, buildings, scenes from long-dead centuries flashing by like shards of a cracked mirror.
Lily gasped. "That's Florence... during the Medici rule. And there—that's ancient Sumeria."
Ethan stared into the breach. "They're being pulled in. Time isn't just fraying. It's devouring."
They would need to act fast.
As Ethan approached the breach, something struck him. The faces he saw—some were familiar. Too familiar. One of them was his mother, as a young woman. Another, his mentor's long-lost colleague. And one—one was Ethan himself.
Not older. Not younger.
Parallel.
"I think someone's built another engine," he whispered.
Lily turned to him. "Another you?"
He nodded slowly. "Or someone who got too close to what I built. This isn't just an echo. It's a collision."
As the team withdrew to regroup, the ground beneath the breach trembled. The Starseers, for the first time since their arrival, turned their gaze away from the people of the Accord.
They stared toward the Ebonwood Hollow.
And their light dimmed.
Whatever lay beyond that breach was not just a threat to Ethan's past. It was a threat to all time.