The next morning, Ethan stood before the Council of the Accord, a somber assembly of minds troubled by the implications of the breach. The Starseers, though silent as ever, loomed in the background with diminished glow, as if conserving their energy—or mourning something unseen.
"Time is not just folding," Ethan said, pointing to the fluctuating echo-maps now projected into midair by a pair of Timecasters. "It's reflecting."
"Reflecting?" Bryn repeated, her brow furrowed.
"It's like a mirror has been placed in the stream. We're not just looking at other times. We're looking at another us. Another Accord. Another timeline."
The idea rippled through the council chamber like a sudden wind through still leaves. It wasn't just philosophical—it was existential.
Lily had already begun decoding the reflection. With Cael's guidance and the Pathweavers' calculations, she confirmed Ethan's growing suspicion. The breach wasn't merely a rift in time—it was a contact point with a parallel Accord.
One shaped by a version of Ethan who had taken a very different path.
"I think he never tried to return home," Ethan said quietly, staring at a blurred reflection of himself across a cascade of floating time-thread readings. "I think he stayed in the past and rebuilt the world in his own image."
"And now it's collapsing?" Lily asked.
Ethan nodded. "It's unsustainable. His world's timeline is crashing into ours like a wave meeting a cliff."
They debated intervention. Some in the Accord, including a few of the more radical Historians, suggested letting the reflection collapse. Others, like Bryn and Lily, warned that the feedback could be catastrophic.
"Two overlapping timelines of the same origin can't coexist indefinitely," Bryn said. "They'll erase each other. Or worse—merge unpredictably."
Ethan knew what had to be done.
"I need to go in," he said.
Cael stepped forward. "You can't go alone."
"I must. If this other me is behind the reflection, I'm the only one who can reason with him—or stop him."
Later that evening, Ethan stood again at the edge of the Reflective Pool. The breach was stabilizing—dangerously so. With help from the Starseers, he encoded a frequency that allowed for temporal resonance: a safe passage to the alternate timeline.
Lily met him there.
"You're risking everything," she said.
"I'm preventing everything from becoming nothing."
She handed him a token—a small, etched disk from her family's lineage. "Bring it back. So I know you're still you."
Ethan stepped into the breach.
The world he entered was dimmer.
The sky above was not the azure dome of the Accord but a swirling canopy of red and grey. The architecture was familiar but twisted—brutalist and imposing. Time engines dotted the horizon, churning unnaturally.
And then he saw him.
The other Ethan.
Older. Harsher. Clad in a cloak of woven circuitry, his eyes glowed faintly with residual temporal energy.
"I wondered when you'd come," the other Ethan said. "I've seen your echoes drifting across my world like ghosts."
Ethan stood his ground. "You're collapsing both our worlds."
"I've built a stable reality," the other said. "One without chaos. One where time serves humanity—not the other way around."
"But at what cost?"
"A small sacrifice for perfect order."
Ethan stepped closer. "No order born from fear can endure."
The two men faced each other, twin flames of the same source, flickering toward collision. But as they spoke, as they listened, a strange understanding bloomed.
Perhaps the only way forward was not destruction... but convergence with conscience.
The choice would not be easy.
And time was running out.