Dawn broke with a crystalline clarity as Ethan, Lily, and Cael stood at the edge of the Accord's boundary. Behind them, the Archive of Variants pulsed faintly, a lighthouse of past and possible futures. Before them stretched the pale fields of the Unthreaded Territories—a realm beyond the Accord's control, where time had splintered too far to be repaired, and where echoes ran wild like spectral animals in a broken forest.
The crimson thread still shimmered in Ethan's mind, drawing him forward. He had slept little, haunted by dreams that weren't his, memories twisted by someone else's perception—Marcus's, perhaps, or something even stranger.
They carried only what they needed: chronogear, resonance markers, and a newly forged tether beacon in case the thread led them too far from stable time. Lily had packed the old encoded maps recovered from the breach, and Cael carried the Harmonizer Sphere—a device capable of temporarily stabilizing fragmented echoes.
As they moved beyond the Accord's perimeter, the environment began to shift subtly. Colors dulled, shadows thickened, and time began to hiccup around them. A butterfly would beat its wings, freeze mid-air, then resume as if the pause hadn't happened. The ground beneath them felt strangely soft, as though layered in centuries of unrealized moments.
"We're not just walking through space," Lily murmured. "We're walking through discarded choices."
Ethan nodded. "This place is like a memory that forgot it was ever real."
After hours of careful trekking, they reached the first anomaly—a swirling nexus of half-built structures from a civilization that had never existed. Stone pyramids hovered incomplete beside futuristic towers of glass, all wrapped in translucent vines of light. A single humanoid figure stood at the center.
Not Marcus.
But someone—or something—else.
The being turned as they approached. Its face was a shifting mosaic of possibilities, phasing between male and female, young and old, familiar and alien. It spoke in a voice that echoed in harmonics.
"You seek the rogue echo."
"Marcus," Ethan confirmed.
The entity tilted its head. "He no longer calls himself that. He is Variance."
"Variance?" Cael whispered.
Lily stepped forward. "Where is he?"
The figure extended a hand, pointing toward a crack in the air itself—a shimmering rift hung like a wound in the sky.
"There. But beware. He has rewritten himself. He remembers being Marcus... but only to spite the truth."
Ethan stepped closer. "And you? What are you?"
"I am the Custodian of Discarded Time. I guard what should not persist."
Before they could ask more, the Custodian vanished, leaving behind only the scent of burnt ozone and the faint sound of ticking.
They crossed through the rift.
And found themselves inside a city that defied logic. Streets curved into themselves, buildings bled history from every window. There were echoes walking beside them—children playing beside ghosts, old wars erupting then vanishing mid-shout. Time had fractured here into a dreamscape of chaos.
And at its center, in a tower of mirrored steel and bone, waited Marcus—or what was left of him.
He stood by a throne made of broken chronometers, cloaked in a garment sewn from split timelines.
"I knew you'd follow," he said with a smirk that didn't belong to any one era.
Ethan stepped forward. "Why?"
"To show you what freedom really looks like," Marcus replied, sweeping his hand to the swirling madness around him. "No rules. No fixed past. Just the purity of endless choice."
"This isn't freedom," Lily said. "It's entropy."
Marcus's eyes narrowed. "Then let it all fall."
The tower shook. Time began to scream.