The rain hadn't yet washed the blood from Ironhollow's teeth when Jonathan H. Simpson picked up the trail.
Al Capan.
The name tasted like rust and bile in his mouth. A time-demon of the highest yield class—4.3 grams pure, according to the Mind-Wardens' ledgers. Not quite one of the ancient 6-gram abominations that haunted the city's foundation myths, but close enough to turn men into screaming husks.
Jonathan's grafted arm twitched as he turned the corner into Whorl Market. The limb—a grotesque fusion of necrotic flesh and chrono-forged steel—thrummed in time with the demon's residual energy. He'd know that temporal stench anywhere.
"Seen anything unnatural?" Jonathan growled at a memory-vial vendor.
The man's ocular implants whirred as he glanced at Jonathan's warden sigils. "Unnatural? Warden, this is Ironhollow." A wet chuckle. "But yeah. Something's been... *collecting* folks near the old slave yards. Leaves their minds hollow as a gutted clock."
Jonathan's journal burned in his coat pocket. He didn't need to reread his own frantic entries to remember:
*Al Capan doesn't just kill. It unravels you—plucks your genetic memory like rotten fruit and drags your screaming essence back to your ancestors' worst moments. Then it feasts on the terror.*
A child's whimper cut through the market din. Jonathan turned to see a boy—no older than ten—clutching a rusted toy automaton. The kid's left eye was gone, replaced by a pulsing Hue shard.
"You're the Mind-Warden," the boy whispered. "He took my pa last night. Said... said pa owed him a debt from before I was born."
Jonathan crouched, his grafted arm clicking. "Describe him."
"The air turned *wrong* first. Then he came through the walls—all teeth and clock hands. Called himself..." The boy shuddered. "*The Debt Collector.*"
Jonathan's remaining flesh prickled. That matched the patterns. Al Capan always framed its hunts as settling ancestral scores.
He pressed a vial of sedative into the boy's palm. "When the nightmares come, drink this. It'll blur the edges."
The boy stared at the vial. "Will it bring pa back?"
Jonathan stood. "No. But I will."
---
The slave yards stank of old iron and older pain. Jonathan's boots crunched on time-fractured cobblestones as he followed the trail—a shimmering scar in reality that only his Hue-twisted eyes could see.
Then the air turned to glass.
"Jonathan H. Simpson." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating in his teeth. "You're late on your payments."
Al Capan stepped through the fabric of time like a man parting curtains.
The demon was worse than the reports. Its body shifted between forms—one moment a gaunt Victorian gentleman with a pocket watch for a heart, the next a writhing mass of temporal filaments and screaming faces. The only constants were its eyes: twin voids where stolen memories flickered like dying stars.
Jonathan's grafted arm deployed its chrono-blades with a sickening *snick*. "I don't owe you shit."
Al Capan's laugh made Jonathan's fillings ache. "Oh, but you do. Your great-great-grandfather made a deal during the Flesh Revolts. A life for a life." The demon's form solidified into a perfect replica of Jonathan's own face—if Jonathan had been flayed and stitched back together with clockwork. "I've come to collect."
The attack came faster than time should allow.
Al Capan's fingers elongated into razor-sharp timelines, slicing through the space where Jonathan's head had been a millisecond before. Jonathan rolled, his grafted arm screeching as it parried temporal energy that shouldn't exist.
"You're fast," the demon mused. "Faster than your ancestor when I dragged him back to watch his wife burn."
Jonathan's counterstrike was pure fury. His chrono-blades connected, shearing off a chunk of Al Capan's form. The severed flesh dissolved into screaming memories—a woman's voice begging in 18th-century English, a child's cry in some dead dialect.
"Nice trick," Jonathan spat. "But I've carved up worse monsters in back alleys."
Al Capan's smile split its stolen face. "Let's see how you fare... *elsewhen.*"
The world shattered.
---
Jonathan landed knee-deep in a battlefield from Ironhollow's founding era. The air reeked of black powder and ruptured organs. Soldiers in brass gas masks fought beasts made of living machinery.
*Timeline V2. The First Flesh War.*
Al Capan materialized atop a pile of corpses. "Homecoming, Simpson. This is where your bloodline first *bled* for me."
Jonathan's vision swam with ancestral memories not his own. A man who looked like him—same jawline, same fury—signing a contract in human blood.
The demon lunged.
They fought across eras.
One moment, Jonathan was parrying in a 19th-century slaughterhouse, the next dodging temporal shrapnel in a ruined future where the Red Moon had fully hatched. Each clash scattered more of Jonathan's memories—his mother's face, his first kill, the taste of pre-Hue whiskey.
"You feel it, don't you?" Al Capan whispered from three timelines at once. "The unraveling. Soon you won't remember why you're fighting."
Jonathan's journal grew heavier in his pocket. He remembered the boy's hollow eye socket. The vial vendor's warning. *Fuck memory.* Some things didn't need remembering to matter.
With a roar that echoed across centuries, Jonathan jammed his chrono-blades into the demon's chest—and activated the Hue capacitor in his graft.
The explosion of temporal energy sent them both crashing back to the present, Al Capan's form flickering like a broken film reel.
"Impossible!" the demon shrieked. "You can't anchor yourself without memories!"
Jonathan grabbed Al Capan's throat with his flesh hand. His grafted fingers plunged into the demon's chest cavity and seized its core—a pulsing chronology engine made from a thousand stolen yesterdays.
"I don't need memories," Jonathan growled. "I just need *rage.*"
He crushed the engine.
---
The silence afterward was absolute.
Jonathan knelt in the ruins of the slave yard, his grafted arm smoking. Al Capan's remains dissolved around him, each fragment whispering a restored memory as it faded:
*A father reunited with his son. A woman remembering her stolen childhood. The weight lifting from a bloodline cursed across generations.*
Jonathan's journal fell open to a fresh page. His hand shook as he wrote:
[WAT 04:55]
*Al Capan is dead. Its stolen years are returning. My arm burns like a bitch.*
*The kid gets his father back today.*
*Tomorrow, we hunt the next monster.*
He stood, his body aching across multiple timelines. Somewhere, a clock tower struck an hour that hadn't existed before. Somewhere, a child laughed without fear of time-demons.
Jonathan H. Simpson walked into Ironhollow's perpetual dusk—a man out of sync with the world, but finally in rhythm with himself.