The explosion wasn't fire.
It was time—compressed, twisted, unleashed.
The moment Kael struck the final blow, the world snapped like a shattered string. The forge roof tore away in a cyclone of burning wind. Ashra shielded her face, her cloak peeling into threads. The Time Legion halted mid-step, recalibrating against the unpredictable pulse.
But Kael stood still.
The blade in his hand—no longer just steel—glowed with the ghost of flame long lost. Its edges shimmered with flickers of memory: a tower falling, a name whispered in the dark, a battlefield lit by twin moons.
He didn't know what the blade was called.
But it remembered.
And in this timeline, that was enough.
Ashra turned toward him, her voice barely a whisper. "What did you forge?"
Kael stepped from the forge's ruin, the blade humming in his grip. "Not what. When."
The nearest Time Legion soldier lunged forward, warping space with every movement. Its arm reconfigured into a spear made of glass and shadow, aimed straight for Kael's heart.
He didn't flinch.
He swung.
The moment the blade connected with the spear, the world bent sideways. Sound became color. The Legion soldier froze mid-strike… then reversed. It moved backward, its attack undone, time recoiling like a wounded beast.
Ashra's eyes widened. "It's happening again. You've anchored yourself."
"I don't know what that means," Kael muttered.
"It means you can bend a second. Maybe two. You're still bleeding time, but you're not fading."
Garron, half-buried in debris, groaned. "You say that like it's good news."
Another Legion warrior charged — this one faster, wielding twin timeblades, their edges cracking with paradox energy.
Kael met it head-on.
Their blades clashed—and the impact sent ripples across reality itself. Trees aged a thousand years in an instant. Rocks turned to dust. A bird overhead split into two versions of itself — one flying forward, one falling backward.
But Kael held his ground.
Because the blade knew this fight.
It had fought it before.
In another thread. Another lifetime.
Ashra moved beside him, slashing her crescent blade in a spiral pattern that opened a rift—a door, temporary and narrow.
"This way!" she called.
Kael hesitated.
"Kael!" she screamed. "If we stay, they'll overwrite you!"
He looked at the Legion — eight left. No time to fight them all.
He turned and dove through the rift.
Ashra followed.
And behind them, the Legion watched.
The faceless commander lowered its weapon and spoke again.
"Sequence 117-A has deviated."
"Activate the Hollowreach Protocol."
Ashra hit the ground first, rolling through the rift into a twilight field.
Kael followed, landing hard beside her. The portal snapped shut with a sound like glass breaking in reverse. Silence fell—dense and waiting.
They were somewhere else. Not just in space—in time.
Ashra coughed, wiped blood from her temple. "We're in a buffer zone. A null pocket between streams."
Kael looked around. The sky was wrong. Purple clouds moved backward. Trees grew and ungrew with each blink. A stag in the distance froze in place—then fractured into a dozen versions of itself, each walking a different path.
He exhaled. "This isn't real, is it?"
"No. But it's safer than real right now."
A flicker of blue light pulsed above them. Ashra tensed. "They've triggered Hollowreach. We need to move."
Kael grabbed her arm. "What is Hollowreach?"
She didn't look at him. "A failsafe. A timeline prison. The Legion uses it to trap anomalies—versions of people who are too dangerous to erase outright."
"So we're the anomalies now?"
She met his gaze. "You always were."
Suddenly, the sky screamed.
It wasn't thunder. It was grinding. Like massive gears turning inside reality. The air vibrated. A black tower formed on the horizon—growing like a spine of obsidian, twisting upward from the earth.
Kael's vision blurred. His blade pulsed with heat.
"That's Hollowreach," Ashra whispered. "It's not just a place. It's where every broken timeline goes to rot. We're being pulled in."
Kael staggered. "Can't we resist it?"
"No one resists Hollowreach."
"Then we fight."
Ashra smiled faintly, bitterly. "You sound like him."
Kael frowned. "Who?"
"The first Kael. The original."
A long silence passed between them.
And then the tower opened its eye.
A single red circle of light flared at its peak. Dozens of thin threads of energy shot outward—anchoring into the fabric of time itself, reeling them in.
Kael tightened his grip on the blade. "Then let Hollowreach see what happens when a memory fights back."
Ashra nodded. "Let's make this version count."
And they ran toward the tower of forgotten timelines.
The landscape blurred as Kael and Ashra sprinted through the bending reality. Time here was thick, like syrup—every step echoed not once but twice, as if the past and the present were struggling to agree.
Ahead, Hollowreach loomed.
No doors. No gates. Just a massive obsidian structure bleeding red threads of energy into the sky. As they approached, Kael saw that the tower wasn't made of stone.
It was made of moments.
Thousands of broken memories, frozen in obsidian: a mother shielding her child from a burning city; a knight falling from a collapsing bridge; two lovers reaching for each other across time, just out of touch.
Ashra slowed. Her hand trembled. "It's watching us now."
Kael squinted upward. That eye—the red orb at the peak—followed their every move. But it wasn't looking with sight. It was reading.
"It's searching our threads," she muttered. "Looking for the version of us it wants to imprison."
"Then we give it nothing."
Kael stepped forward.
And the tower opened.
A seam split across its base, releasing a wave of cold that didn't freeze skin—it froze memories. Kael gasped as flashes assaulted his mind.
A boy in the ruins of a burning academy.
A girl dying with his name on her lips.
A sword made of collapsing stars.
None of it had happened.
None of it had happened yet.
Ashra clutched her head. "It's testing us. We can't hold all these lives at once—"
Kael took her hand. "Then we only carry one."
They stepped inside.
The moment they crossed the threshold, silence swallowed the world.
No sound. No air.
Only echoes.
The chamber within was impossibly vast, yet claustrophobic—walls stretching forever in every direction. Thousands of suspended clocks hovered mid-air, their hands moving out of sync. Some ticked forward. Others backward. A few stood still, weeping soft notes of broken music.
Kael's blade vibrated in his hand. A whisper echoed through the chamber—not in a voice, but a thought:
"This is not your first betrayal."
He flinched. "What?"
"This is not your last."
Ashra looked at him, eyes wide. "Kael… the tower knows you."
"No," he said, heart pounding. "It remembers me."
From the darkness ahead, a shape stepped forward.
A man.
No—a mirror.
It was Kael.
But older.
Colder.
Eyes burned-out. Blade dripping with red starlight. Armor scorched by lifetimes.
Ashra gasped. "It's your future."
Kael stared into his own eyes.
And the future-Kael whispered, "One of us has to die for time to heal."
The air between the two Kaels buzzed with pressure, like the moment before lightning strikes.
Ashra stepped back, her grip tightening on her blade. "This isn't just a vision. He's real. The tower made him solid."
Future-Kael tilted his head, voice hollow yet steady. "I am not your enemy. I am your ending."
Kael raised his sword. "If you're me, then you know I don't surrender."
"I also know you will." The future Kael flicked his wrist—and his blade moved like a memory sharpening into reality.
They clashed.
The shockwave tore through the chamber, shattering a dozen floating clocks. Time bled from the cracks—glimpses of worlds that had never been: Kael standing atop a battlefield of stars; Kael dying alone in a collapsing room; Kael as a shadow, ruling from behind veils.
Blades collided again.
Steel sang.
But it wasn't just strength. They knew each other's moves—perfectly. Every strike met its counter. Every feint was anticipated. Kael was fighting not just himself, but every decision he could have made.
"Why are you doing this?" Kael growled, ducking a slash that left a scar on the air.
Future-Kael didn't stop. "Because if you live, the world breaks. Again."
Ashra shouted, trying to intervene—but the tower responded, locking her in a suspended loop, forcing her to relive a moment from her past over and over: the death of someone she once tried to save.
Kael's blade flashed.
Future-Kael's counter sliced into his shoulder—searing not just flesh, but possibility. For a second, Kael's body blurred. One version of him disappeared.
He staggered. "What… what was that?"
The older version stepped back, breathing hard. "That was your regret. You just lost a timeline where you survived the war."
Kael clenched his jaw. "Then I'll carve a new one."
He closed his eyes.
And listened.
Not to his opponent—but to the blade.
It whispered to him.
A name.
A memory.
"Keryth."
He didn't know what it meant.
But his hands did.
His next strike broke the rhythm. It wasn't a move either version had ever used. It came from another path, another Kael—one neither had lived.
The future self faltered—just a heartbeat.
It was enough.
Kael struck true.
The blade pierced his older self's armor.
And the echo gasped, blood and light spilling from his mouth. He looked at Kael with something between relief and sorrow.
"You... you found the third way."
The future Kael dissolved into ash and time—scattered into the ticking wind.
Ashra fell from the loop, gasping, eyes wide. "What happened?"
Kael knelt, breath ragged. "I beat him."
She looked around at the shivering clocks. "Then why is the tower still shaking?"
From above, the eye of Hollowreach opened wider.
"You killed the echo.
But not the source."
And the tower began to change.