The world shook as if it were nothing more than a fragile glass vessel ready to shatter. Dust poured from the ceiling, and the walls groaned like ancient bones grinding against each other. That single gear at the center no longer turned in patient increments—it spun violently, faster and faster, pulling the rest of the chamber's colossal cogs into reluctant motion.
Safaa staggered back, clutching her pendant as if it might anchor her to sanity. The glow had intensified to a searing brightness, casting fractured golden light across the ruins. "Kairen—it's… it's rewriting the hourglass!" Her voice cracked. "The Watchmaker isn't just awakening. He's splitting time itself—two outcomes, two futures, both impossible to escape."
Kairen's eyes narrowed, jaw tightening. His strategist's mind raced, mapping possibilities. Two outcomes. A trap where every choice was accounted for. He spat onto the floor, his voice cutting through the din. "Then we make a path he didn't plan for."
But the Watchmaker's laugh filled the chamber again, curling around them like a noose.
"Every refusal, every rebellion… I built them into the gears. There is no path unwound. Only loops. Only inevitability."
The massive walls lit with glyphs, spiraling symbols etched into stone by forgotten hands. They burned like molten gold, shifting with each tick of the gear. Safaa's eyes widened as she read them, recognition and dread mixing in her expression. "Kairen… it's prophecy. It says one must wind, and one must shatter. Either I merge with the gear to lock it—or you cut me down to break the link."
The words struck like a blade to his gut.
For a heartbeat, the chamber fell quiet. Kairen's grip tightened on his sword. His instincts screamed. Safaa's trembling form, pendant blazing, manuscript twitching—it all fit. The Watchmaker had built her as the fulcrum of the mechanism. The cult, her mother's bindings, the manuscript—it all pointed here. Safaa was the sacrifice.
"No," he said, voice low, dangerous. "Prophecies are just chains written by cowards. I don't follow chains."
But Safaa's expression was different. No longer just fear—there was resolve flickering there. She stepped toward the spinning gear, each movement strained against the pull of its gravity. "You don't understand… I am the chain. I was made for this. My blood, my breath, my very existence—he designed me as the gear's vessel. If I merge, it locks him away. If you kill me, it breaks him free but burns the mechanism. Either way—time doesn't end today."
The choice snapped between them like lightning.
Kairen's knuckles whitened around his blade. He had faced assassins, fanatics, shadows that spoke lies in men's voices—but this… this was different. Here, the enemy wasn't something he could simply cut down. It was her. Or rather, the fate tied to her.
The Watchmaker's whisper curled close to his ear, intimate and venomous.
"Strike her down, and I scatter into eternity. Spare her, and she binds herself into my prison. Either way, she ceases to be yours."
The chamber trembled harder. A gear as tall as a fortress shuddered and groaned into motion, grinding forward like the turning of a colossal hourglass. Sparks rained like falling stars. Safaa's pendant hummed at a pitch that threatened to split bone.
Safaa looked back at him, tears streaking her face, but her smile was steady. "You taught me to be brave, Kairen. Don't waste that now. Let me wind it shut."
Kairen took a step forward, his sword trembling not from fear—but from rage at the very design of fate itself.
And for the first time in his life, he didn't know if the right move was to strike, to save, or to burn the board altogether.