They crossed the threshold beneath the fractal dusk, where timelines crumbled like sand beneath each step. The Fractured Shoreline had revealed only a sliver of its menace; now Ethan's team moved deeper into a realm without name—an inverted echo called the Fold, where no past survived and no future was permitted.
They followed the broken Axis fragments, which shimmered faintly in Lily's instruments like breadcrumbs left by fate itself. Each piece resonated with a unique signature, as though bearing witness to its own theft.
"Readings are overlapping," Lily murmured, adjusting the spectral aligner. "They're not behaving like matter anymore. They're acting like... thoughts."
"You mean intentions," Marcus corrected. "The pieces want to be found. Or they want us to think they do."
Cael scanned the horizon through the scope in his pauldron. "Movement. Not local. Not temporal either. Echo bleed."
"Confirmed," Quoros replied, sending a flare of protective harmonics into the void. "Entities converging. Not aligned with the Accord."
The air vibrated, the landscape distorting into a jagged valley of reversed ruins—buildings collapsing upward, trees growing from fallen ash. In the distance, silhouettes formed: cloaked figures, gliding as if stitched into time's unraveling hem.
"They're not coming to attack," Ethan said slowly. "They're coming to observe."
"Worse," said the Mirrorbind Sister who smiled backward. "They're coming to record."
They made camp near the ruins of what might once have been a monastery—or might still become one. The walls were half-formed, shifting between states. Ethan leaned against a pillar that blinked in and out of his awareness.
"Every second we're here, we become less," Lily whispered beside him. "Less certain. Less fixed. This place doesn't just fracture time. It fractures identity."
"Then we'll hold onto each other," Ethan said. "We are our own anchors."
But deep within, he wondered if his own past would survive this place. If the Ethan that left the Concord would still be the Ethan who returned.
That night, he dreamed of a mirror that showed neither face nor reflection—but only the absence of Ethan.
The next day, they found the next fragment. Embedded in the trunk of a tree made of woven regrets, it pulsed softly in an emotional wavelength. Ethan reached for it—and the world stopped.
He stood in a theater of memories, audience of none. Onstage: his childhood. His mother handing him a clock. His mentor whispering the law of simultaneity. Lily laughing on a hill of broken satellites. And then—
—the cloaked figure, standing beneath an eclipse.
"You don't yet understand," the figure said. "But you will. Every echo is a doorway. And you've opened more than anyone ever should."
Then Ethan was back. On the ground. The fragment in hand. The others staring at him.
"You vanished," Lily said. "For ten seconds."
"To you," Ethan replied. "But to me... it was longer."
That evening, the sky cracked.
Not thunder. Not lightning. A fracture. A colossal seam tore across the horizon as if the universe itself had become a page and someone had begun to turn it.
Out of the rift came sound—like whispers pulled backward through a tunnel. An entire procession of figures emerged. Not attackers. Not allies. Chroniclers. Each wore a mask bearing a different epoch's symbol.
They walked past Ethan's team in silence, heading toward the wound in the world. One paused before Ethan.
"You will forget this moment," it said, "because it is not meant to exist."
Then it moved on. And Ethan did forget.
When they broke camp, Ethan found a final Axis shard in his pocket—one he hadn't placed there. It bore an inscription that read:
"To become whole, fracture willingly."
He stared at it long after the others moved ahead, the shard warm against his skin.
In the distance, the Fold narrowed into a canyon of shimmering thought. Their next destination. Their next danger.
And perhaps, at last, the figure in the cloak.