Dust breathes in the ribs of a ruined temple, each mote suspended as if the world itself has forgotten how to move. A black iron bell lies half-buried in ash, its lip engraved with a single sigil that resembles a circle torn open—an empty zero. When a hand rises from the rubble and touches the bell, the metal trembles like a living thing remembering a name.
Aragorn pushes himself free of broken stone. Golden irises catch the first thin light seeping through a fractured roof. On his wrist, a brand the color of moonless ink glows and subsides, the zero-sigil pulsing to the tempo of a distant heartbeat that is not his own. The air outside is wrong. High above, the sky wears hairline cracks and faint letters drift like shed skin flakes of law, lines written and overwritten until they blur into a pressure at the temples.
Screams draw him through the collapsed nave to the open porch. A street below convulses under a spear of daylight driven down by armored figures whose wings are etched with scripture. The spear rakes a path toward a knot of civilians huddled behind a toppled cart.
Time balks.
Aragorn reaches for a thread that only he can see. It tightens under thumb and forefinger, then yields. The world blinks. For three perfect seconds the spear becomes glass and hangs immobile in the air, light frozen into a translucent tusk. People stumble out of its path, stumbling faster than fear. The moment releases with a soft chime inside his skull, pain rippling behind his eyes as blood pricks his lashes.
The nearest angel turns, visor reflecting his face back at him—a stranger in ash and torn cloak. It levels a blade that hums with vowels older than iron. Aragorn raises an open palm. A small fire gathers there, pale and unwavering, and it does not burn the wind or the stone. It reads. It tastes intention, the will braided into action. When the angel strikes, the flame kisses the blade, notching it where compulsion hides in the stroke, and the brand on Aragorn's wrist warms like a stern nod.
The angel staggers as sanctified engravings spiderweb and flake away. Two more descend, spearpoints shivering with the choir of a unseen court. Aragorn slides, breath measured, counting invisible beats so he can catch the next thread at the last fraction before impact. Again the blink. Again the glassy pause. Again the needle of pain, deeper this time, jabbing behind his right eye. Three seconds. No more. The limit is a wall with his name carved on it.
A man barrels into the melee from a side alley, twin axes already red with defiance. He shoulders one angel through a half-fallen pillar and bellows laughter that sounds like chainmail on a drum. The second angel hesitates, recalibrating for the new trajectory. The newcomer doesn't. He slams his forearm—wrapped in iron plates scored with oath-marks—against the spear and wrenches it aside.
"Nice trick with the sky," the man says without turning, voice hoarse and amused. "Keep doing it. People live when that happens."
"Name," Aragorn replies, because the rhythm of the fight leaves room for only one word.
"Cyrus."
The third angel lands behind them. Aragorn pivots, letting the flame in his palm widen until it is a veil that colors the world rather than scorches it. The angel's strike loses its command, stripped of the intent to dominate, and slides past with an embarrassed hiss. Cyrus's axe meets it on the backswing, and feathered steel shrieks.
Shouts answer their violence from farther down the street—soldiers in lacquered mail, pushing refugees with the flats of their blades. Beyond them, space itself hiccups as an entire building blinks, gone for a breath, then returns one story shorter. It is as if an unseen editor has cut a line and is deciding whether to paste it back.
Cyrus jerks his chin toward an alley. "Safe route. If 'safe' means fewer doors that vanish."
Aragorn nods. The bell at his hip taps his leg, a weight that remembers being sung. Together they herd people into the alley, moving them in bursts timed to the afterbeats of three-second blinks. Twice the bell vibrates without being struck, and both times the soldiers with the choir-scribed wings glance up as if someone has spoken their honorifics directly into the clouds.
An old woman stalls at a gap where a staircase used to be. Half a floor hangs in the air beyond, steps leading up to nothing. Aragorn presses his brand against the torn edge of reality. Letters unravel beneath his palm, their meaning loosening, and for a breath the gap chooses to be a narrow bridge instead of a missing paragraph. The refugees cross. The bridge forgets itself and collapses quietly back into absence.
Pain blooms again behind his eye. He clamps a finger and thumb at the brow ridge until it dulls to a pressure. The rule is carved deeper than flesh: three seconds of mercy; the fourth belongs to backlash.
"Never seen an angel flinch like that," Cyrus says as they move, keeping himself between the crowd and any corridor where the air tastes like a mouth forming a word. "You're not one of us."
Aragorn listens to the city's pulse—the rattle of carts, the patter of fear, the faint scraping of invisible quills somewhere high and cruel. "Once," he says, choosing the smallest truth that will fit in the space available, "I sat where laws are spoken."
"Then stop them speaking," Cyrus grins, savage and bright. "Or at least interrupt them when they say 'kneel'."
They cut through a courtyard where pigeons peck at crumbs that weren't there a moment ago. The far wall wears the ghost of a doorway that refuses to commit to existence. Cyrus rattles it with his shoulder until it blushes into solidity, and they pass into a tunnel that smells of cold stone and candle soot.
Stairs spiral down to a chamber held up by old pillars and older hope. Symbols chalked on the walls shimmer with cheap salt and stubborn accuracy. Families huddle on blankets. A kettle breathes steam on a brazier, and no one looks it in the eye, as if eye contact might invite deletion.
Cyrus ushers the last of the group through and drags a beam across the door. "Welcome to one of the Nexus feeder dens," he says, catching breath. "The big tunnels are farther in. This is where people don't die while they wait to stop dying."
The bell hums in Aragorn's hand. He sets it on a crate in the center of the room. The zero-sigil on his wrist throbs once, twice, echoing the bell in his bones. Runes chalked in the chamber answer, not with piety but with recognition. Something in the geometry likes the bell. Something in the bell likes the emptiness in the sigil.
"Those… cuts out there," a teenager asks from a blanket, voice frayed. "Where the street just—wasn't. What is that?"
"Scissors," Cyrus says, tapping his temple. "Held by people who think they wrote the world and are editing for clarity."
Aragorn looks upward through stone, seeing not with sight but with the memory of having once looked down. The heavens are busier than they should be. Processions of armored clergy measure the city with rods of light. A choir's vowel lengthens into a blade as a tribunal convenes. He tastes the iron in the words everyone is about to be forced to speak.
"Can it be stopped?" someone else asks, smaller than a whisper.
"Yes," Aragorn says, because the word fits into the space fear leaves behind, and because the bell hums agreement.
He moves his hand over the bell's crown. Metal chills his skin. The zero-sigil warms. He wonders whose hand last rang it and why it lay waiting in the bones of a temple with his name sleeping in the dust. He wonders how many pages of himself are missing. He wonders, briefly and without nostalgia, whether heaven will recognize him without the titles.
The bell sounds.
No hand strikes it. The tone grows from inside the iron like thunder rolled small. Vibrations run up the columns, out through the stairs, and into the street. The sound climbs the sky.
Above the clouds, something ancient swivels. Helmets tilt. A thousand quills lift. The wardens of statute turn their faces toward the city, the way wolves turn toward a remembered rival's howl.
Cyrus looks at the bell. "That going to be a problem?"
"It will," Aragorn says, and the three seconds before the next disaster arrive right on time.
— End of Episode 1 —
Key powers this episode: Chronos Bare (3‑second time blink; backlash on overuse), Seed of Judgment Flame (burns compulsion, not flesh).
Focus cast: Aragorn, Cyrus.