"Time does not record those who retreat."
— Ancient Inscription on the Broken Dial of Venae Terrae
There was a rumor whispered by the sands, a superstition buried deeper than bones —
that in the heart of Venae Terrae, the earth itself had veins that pulsed with time.
They called this rhythm Chrona, the silent breath of the world. Every mountain, every tide, every heartbeat of a mortal was merely an echo of that ancient pulse. And when the pulse hesitated — when the rhythm of existence skipped a beat — clocks trembled, shadows froze mid-flicker, and memories folded upon themselves like tired wings.
In those moments, someone always rewound.
No one knew who. No one wanted to.
But the stories called him the Rewinder — a man cursed by his own refusal to move forward, condemned to live in loops that even the gods had forgotten to count.
---
The wind moved like an afterthought that day, dragging with it the stench of old rain and unfinished prayers.
In the middle of a ruined observatory stood a man whose hair was streaked silver and night, his eyes mismatched: one calm and oceanic, the other swirling faintly with grains of gold — sand trapped inside a human gaze. He stared at a clock that ticked in reverse, its hands crawling counter to reason.
He didn't speak at first. The silence around him was too aware, like it was waiting for him to contradict time itself.
Finally, he exhaled — a weary, almost amused breath.
"Back again, are we?" he said to the clock.
The clock clicked once. Not forward. Not backward. Sideways.
He nodded, as if it had answered perfectly. "Thought so."
---
The man's name, at least this time, was Arven. In the last loop, it had been Kesh, before that Nai, and before that, something no human throat could pronounce. But names were tokens, not truths. What mattered was the debt.
The Rewinder's Debt.
Arven ran his hand over the dial of the backward-breathing clock. Beneath his fingertips, the metal pulsed like skin — warm, faintly alive, humming with a heartbeat that did not belong to any living creature.
This was the Chrona Core, one of the Seven Temporal Hearts that anchored Venae Terrae's flow of causality. When one cracked, rivers aged in reverse, stars were born old, and memories grew young again.
The last time the Core had failed, an entire continent forgot how to die. Graveyards became maternity wards. Priests ran out of prayers because no one stayed gone long enough to bless.
---
"Ridiculous," Arven muttered, as if mocking the world's broken logic.
He bent down to adjust the fractured gear. "Death should have a queue, not a revolving door."
He smirked at his own joke. It was the sort of humor that only the damned could afford.
Outside the observatory, the world was strangely still. Cities of glass floated across clouds like drifting lanterns. Temples cast shadows upward instead of downward. Monks measured wisdom in seconds rather than enlightenment.
Venae Terrae had long since stopped pretending to be normal.
When time became a resource, morality became optional.
---
Once, the philosophers of the Southern Aeon School had debated for a thousand years — whether rewinding a mistake erased its sin. Their conclusion, engraved into a wall that no longer existed, was simple:
"If guilt resets, virtue loses meaning."
Arven had read that line once. He'd even laughed, genuinely. Because he, more than anyone, knew how meaningless virtue could become when memory itself was negotiable.
He had watched empires reset their betrayals, kings erase the hour of their downfall, lovers rewind a heartbreak only to fall apart again.
Time was not mercy — it was repetition disguised as grace.
And yet, Arven kept winding the world backward. Again. Again. Again.
Because somewhere in the folds of this looping existence was the one hour he refused to forget.
---
A tremor passed through the observatory. Dust drifted upward instead of falling, caught in an invisible wind that pulled toward the ceiling. The world was about to fold again.
Arven sighed. "Three minutes early this time. How polite."
He reached for the Chrona Core and inserted a key carved from bone and glass — an impossible relic that screamed faintly as it turned. Light uncoiled from the mechanism like smoke with intent.
Outside, the horizon bent.
Seconds slowed to syrup. Lightning froze mid-bolt. The sun inhaled its own light, dimming into a pale disc of regret.
And the clock… began to breathe.
Not tick. Breathe.
Inhale, exhale. A sound like metal lungs dragging in centuries.
Each breath rewrote something: a mountain's age, a memory's order, a death certificate.
And as it did, Arven whispered the same sentence he always whispered.
"Time does not record those who retreat."
It was half mantra, half apology.
---
He felt the world shudder beneath his boots — the kind of vibration that meant history was being rearranged. From afar, cities flickered between ruins and prosperity, a slideshow of fate gone epileptic.
A crow landed on the broken window frame beside him. Its feathers were blacker than midnight unlit, but its eyes glowed with faint blue script — a sign of a temporal familiar. The bird tilted its head, speaking in a voice that sounded like overlapping echoes.
"Arven. You're rewinding again. You promised you'd stop."
"I also promised to stop drinking time dust," Arven replied, "but sobriety's for people with linear lives."
"You know what happens when you push the loop too far. The backlash—"
"I know."
He smiled, thin and humorless. "That's why it's worth it."
The crow clicked its beak, feathers ruffling in disapproval. "You're not trying to save anyone anymore, are you?"
"Save?" Arven looked at the backward clock, its hands spinning faster now, reality trembling with it. "No. I'm just trying to remember… her face correctly this time."
---
There it was — the quiet tragedy of the Rewinder.
He wasn't a hero. Not a villain either. Just a man with a memory too fragile for eternity and a conscience too stubborn for amnesia.
Every loop began with her death.
Every loop ended when he tried to undo it.
And every time he failed, time itself made him forget just enough to start again.
---
Outside, as the reset neared, the people of Venae Terrae went about their rituals of denial. Merchants sold "seconds" in glass bottles; priests auctioned "moments of enlightenment" distilled from dreams.
Cultivators of the Temporal Dao meditated not to transcend mortality — but to bargain with it.
There were twelve sects who claimed dominion over time, but none truly mastered it.
The Chronarch Monks could pause motion but not thought.
The Tidecallers could rewind the sea but not the sky.
And the Order of Stillborn Suns could freeze an entire battlefield — yet never restart it.
Among them, Arven was an anomaly.
He belonged to none, owed allegiance to nothing.
And perhaps that was why time tolerated him — the same way a snake tolerates the man who milks its venom.
---
"Loop initializing," the crow murmured as the observatory began to crumble backward — stones reassembling into pristine walls, cracks sealing in reverse.
Arven stepped into the forming doorway. "Tell the next me not to waste time talking to birds."
"You know he won't listen."
"Good." He grinned faintly. "Consistency's the only virtue left."
Then, the world inverted.
Colors folded into themselves. Sound reversed like inhaled laughter. The sky turned black, then white, then something in-between that had no name.
---
When Arven opened his eyes, he stood in a bustling city under the twin suns of Venae Terrae — Sol Verum and Sol Vain, the truthful and the deceitful.
One moved forward, the other backward. Between their dueling light, noon was an argument.
People passed by without noticing him. Children laughed, merchants argued over the price of bottled hours, and street magicians performed illusions with bits of frozen time — sparks of reality that made butterflies live for minutes longer.
It was beautiful, in the way a slow-motion collapse could be beautiful.
Arven adjusted his coat, now pristine, no dust from the observatory clinging to it.
He could feel the reset clean in his bones.
He hated it.
Because the loop was perfect again.
And perfection was just another prison.
---
A child bumped into him, spilling a pouch of glowing sand. Time-dust — illegally mined from the veins beneath the city. Arven bent down, picked a handful up, and let it flow through his fingers.
The child stammered, "S-sir, that's expensive—"
"I know," Arven said, deadpan. "I'm holding your tuition fee."
The boy looked horrified.
After a long pause, Arven added, "Don't worry. I'm not a thief."
He handed it back.
"I'm worse."
The boy blinked, uncertain whether to laugh or run.
By the time he decided, Arven was already gone.
---
Night approached — or rather, the version of night where Sol Verum slept and Sol Vain rewound. Shadows lengthened forward instead of backward. In this inverted twilight, Arven wandered into the Clock Bazaar, where traders sold relics that ticked in impossible ways:
a sundial that cast shadows upward, a compass that pointed to when rather than where, and a pendulum that swung only when ignored.
"Looking for something?" asked an old vendor with half his face frozen mid-smile.
Arven tilted his head. "A reason."
The vendor snorted. "Out of stock."
"Figures."
They shared the kind of silence that only two men outside causality could appreciate — long, absurd, almost holy.
Then the vendor said, "You smell like rewound air. Be careful. Time hates being touched too often."
"Time can file a complaint," Arven muttered.
---
As the night deepened, a faint tremor crawled beneath the city — the early signs of Chrona Dissonance. Somewhere, the other Hearts were faltering. Another loop, perhaps. Another fool trying to fix the unfixable.
Arven looked toward the distant horizon where the two suns' light overlapped, and the thin line between today and yesterday shimmered like a wound.
He could feel her presence there — faint, incomplete, a memory fragment stitched to regret.
He wanted to reach out.
He wanted to stop rewinding.
He wanted to forget.
But the debt was not paid.
And time does not record those who retreat.
---
At that thought, he looked once more at his hand — the one that had turned back centuries, resurrected empires, and broken a thousand moral laws. The skin was unaged. The pulse steady. But beneath it, something else beat — slow, defiant, and ancient.
The rhythm of the world.
The pulse of Venae Terrae.
The heartbeat of the Clock that Breathes Backward.
He smiled — not because he was at peace, but because he knew peace was just another form of stasis.
"Fine," he said to the invisible sky. "One more loop. Just one more."
The sky did not answer.
It merely inhaled —
and time began to breathe again.