The capital of Ironspine should have echoed with the rhythmic pounding of forgehammers and the raucous laughter of proud smiths. Instead, it stood still silent, like a statue mid-breath. In the heart of Thrumgard, Queen Freya Stonefist strode down the obsidian stairs of the Great Lift, her cloak trailing behind her like smoke in a void.
All around her, Dwarves stood motionless.
Not frozen ; paused.
A single hammer, once mid-swing, hung in the air, its wielder unblinking. Steam curled upward from forge vents and simply hovered there, unmoving.
Freya's gauntlet tightened. "Chrono-lock," she muttered.
It wasn't natural. Not even dwarven time-runes could do this.
A whisper slithered from behind her.
"You feel it too. Don't you?"
She turned, hammer raised, but it was only Runecaster Myrin, her court arcanist, emerging from a glowing portal that hissed with residual time energy.
Myrin looked ashen. "This is the third lockdown this week. And this time, it wasn't localized. All of Ironspine's inner district was caught in the freeze."
Freya narrowed her eyes. "What caused it?"
Myrin lifted a trembling hand. In it was a black shard of stone, pulsing faintly with violet energy with the same color Alden had described in his last raven.
"Chronoglass," he whispered. "Fused with mirror essence. We found it embedded in a broken gear core beneath the palace forge."
Freya's voice hardened. "The Mirror again."
Far across Eldaris, time was not just stopping it was folding in on itself.
In a Sylvaran village near the eastern borders, children born just days ago aged into adulthood overnight. An elven druid collapsed mid-spell and woke in a memory of the First Blooming, a time no one had lived to witness in millennia.
Queen Selene stood atop her palace balcony, watching a storm churn over the treetops. But the rain it released fell upward streaming skyward into the clouds as if sucked by an unseen hand.
"The veil is fraying faster," said Kaelen, approaching. "The forests are… remembering things that never happened."
Selene turned. "How do you remember what never was?"
Kaelen said nothing.
That night, when the trees screamed in unison, the stars vanished from the sky above Sylvaran and no one slept.
In Solandria's Royal Archive, Princess Elira bent over ancient tomes, cross-referencing symbols she had memorized from the Sanctuary beneath the Fifth Throne. Each text grew older as she worked until she finally opened a book that should not have existed.
It had no title. No author. And yet inside, it described events that had not yet happened.
"The Crowned Child shall speak with the Dead God beneath the Dawnless Sun. And by her hand, time shall bleed."
Her hands trembled. The text shifted even as she read it phrases rewording themselves in real time.
She called for Alden.
They stood together in the deepest vault beneath Solhaven, the original Hall of Echoes, once used by the priests of the Creator to house artifacts deemed too dangerous for destruction.
Alden placed the shard of the Ebon Mirror into its central pedestal. Its surface pulsed violently now, as though aware of what had been found.
"You saw it, didn't you?" he asked Elira.
She nodded. "The book, it's from a future that's fighting to overwrite the present. Velkaron isn't just returning. He's rewriting."
The shard began to hum.
Suddenly, a tear split the air above them.
It didn't shimmer like the earlier rifts. This one cracked violently, revealing a glimpse into an impossible scene:
A war-torn Eldaris lit only by a black sun. A sky filled with floating ruins. And Alden himself, aged and furious, standing atop a spire of glass, wielding a sword unlike any they had seen. One forged of both divine light and shadow.
Beside him… Elira. But her face was veiled in silver, her eyes glowing like stars.
Then...snap....the vision was gone.
Elira collapsed.
Alden caught her. "What did you see?"
She stared upward, whispering:
"I saw the day I kill you."
In the mines beneath Ironspine, the time-freeze lifted with a thunderclap.
But in its place came something far worse.
The air shimmered as miners found echoes of themselves, working alongside them—versions that spoke in different tongues, wore different tools, carried marks of kingdoms that never existed. Some faded away harmlessly.
Others did not.
One such "echo" turned and stabbed a living dwarf through the heart, muttering words in a forgotten dialect—before turning to stone.
Queen Freya arrived just moments later, her hammer glowing with containment runes. "Report."
Myrin wiped blood from his cheek. "The mirror fragments are creating time reflections...versions of ourselves from futures that never came to be. Some are just shadows."
Freya stepped toward the body. "And some are blades."
That same hour, in the eastern sea beyond the edge of known maps, the Ashen Covenant emerged from their self-imposed exile.
Led by a man cloaked in silver flame, they stood before a black ziggurat that had risen from the water like a sunken memory. He held aloft a cracked orb etched with runes older than the stars.
"Velkaron has begun to stir," he said.
One of his followers knelt. "Shall we begin the Offering?"
The man nodded. "Open the Timewound."
With a slash of his blade, the waters parted.
And from beneath the ziggurat, a gate of shifting years began to open, drawing time itself into its maw.