Time broke like glass.
The air in the Hall twisted, bent, reversed.
Stalactites rewound into stone. Dust climbed back to the ceiling. Even the torches above—torches that had burned for centuries—flared backward into whole trees before snuffing out entirely.
And through it all descended the Chrono-Ascendant.
She didn't walk.
She unfolded.
Layers of parchment-thin light spiraled downward, each one covered in the hourglass sigil of the Second Seal. Her throne of chained hours hovered in the rift above, an orbit of clocks spinning backward so violently their faces splintered into nothing.
Every step she took down the air rewrote the stone beneath her feet.
The Hall of Severance was dying before she even spoke.
Ashling staggered to her feet, the vow-thread in her chest blazing hot enough to sear.
Behind her, the heart-anchor pulsed where Nyrelle's ink had shattered the Concordium chains. The last piece of Keiran's soul was knitting itself together, light crawling along veins of quartz, fusing into the waiting fragment at the Hall's center.
But it wasn't done yet.
And time itself was trying to erase them before it could finish.
The Chrono-Ascendant's voice was slow, hollow, cold:
"The Concordium decrees: This citadel is unmade. Its heart erased. Its sins never written."
Ashling gripped the vow-blade tighter. "He's not a sin. He's a life."
"Lives obey the Archive," the Ascendant replied. "All else dissolves."
She raised one pale hand.
Time folded.
Lys vanished mid-step—only to reappear across the chamber a second later, as though reality couldn't decide where he belonged.
Nyrelle's ink dripped upward into her own veins, eyes widening in panic.
The Hall itself bent.
Walls straightened, then reversed into raw stone, then into nothing at all.
The Ascendant was overwriting existence with every movement.
And the heart-anchor was beating too slowly.
"Keiran!" Ashling shouted toward the half-formed figure at the Hall's center. "Hold together! You have to hurry!"
The fragment's face turned toward her—clearer now, human again, eyes bright with a fury that didn't belong to ghosts.
"Almost… there."
The Ascendant extended her second hand.
The Hall's ceiling cracked like thin ice.
Two moons vanished behind a wall of unraveling sky.
If she completed the Seal, the Citadel wouldn't just be gone—
It would never have been.
Ashling moved without thinking.
The vow-thread screamed through her ribs, dragging her forward, blade in hand.
The Ascendant's gaze locked on her, calm as death.
"You would fight time itself?"
Ashling didn't slow. "I'll fight the whole Archive if I have to."
She swung the vow-blade.
The Ascendant caught it with two fingers.
Time stopped.
The swing froze midair. Dust froze mid-fall. Even the heartbeat of the Hall itself faltered.
Only the Ascendant moved freely, her voice echoing through a world suddenly stripped of sound:
"You cannot kill time. You cannot wound it. You can only watch it erase you."
But something else moved in the silence.
The vow-thread burned through Ashling's chest like wildfire.
Cracks split the frozen air where her blade had stopped.
Because the vow wasn't bound by time.
It was bound by memory.
And memory fought back.
The heart-anchor at the Hall's center exploded with light.
Keiran's final fragment fused into it like metal meeting forge-fire, his voice tearing through the frozen air:
"Erase me again, and I'll return louder."
The whole Hall lurched as if the words themselves carried weight.
Time stumbled.
The Ascendant's grip slipped.
Reality jumped forward.
The moons reappeared.
The ceiling slammed back into place.
The walls screamed as centuries of erasure unraveled in seconds.
The Second Seal faltered—
But didn't stop.
The Ascendant raised both hands now, every clock in her orbit spinning faster, harder, desperate to reset before the vow finished knitting Keiran whole.
And at the Hall's center, he finally stood.
No longer a fragment.
Not whole, not yet—but alive.
Eyes burning like twin moons reflected in deep water.