The fear that radiated from Luka was a new kind of contagion, one the nascent city had never felt. It was not the fear of oppression or scarcity, but the cosmic dread of erasure. The gentle, constant light of the Crystal flickered again, and this time, a collective gasp went through the crowd at the Crossroads. The very air seemed to thin, as if something was drinking the reality from it.
"We need to go. Now," Luka said, his voice tight. He looked at Kael, and the unspoken understanding passed between them. The scaffold would have to hold without its architects.
"Where?" Kael asked, his hand instinctively going to the place on his hip where his energy pistol used to be.
The Crystal's consciousness was a maelstrom of calculation. The Echo was a void, but the Hammer, the First Tool, was a thing of profound, focused substance. To find a thing of absolute definition, they needed to go to the place where reality was most clearly written. Not the Aethelburg, which stored history, but the source of history itself.
The Chronos Carillon, the Truth fragment chimed, pulling the name from the deepest archives of the world's memory. The place where time is forged. It is the only record that would predate the Shattering. The only place that might remember the Hammer.
The Potential fragment wove the path. It was not a physical journey through space, but a lateral step through causality. The Will fragment provided the fierce, desperate energy to make the step.
Luka grabbed Kael's arm. "Don't let go."
He focused, and the world around the Crossroads—the worried faces, the humming platforms, the city of newfound hope—stretched, blurred, and dissolved into a torrent of screaming colors and shattered timelines. It was not like the Silver Nexus's gentle probability. This was the raw, unedited footage of existence, and they were swimming upstream.
They landed on a narrow, vibrating walkway that spiraled around a colossal, crystalline mechanism. It was a clock the size of a galaxy. Gears of solidified light meshed with springs of coiled potential. Pendulums of entropy swung in vast, slow arcs. This was the Chronos Carillon, the engine of time. And it was damaged.
A great, jagged crack ran through its central spindle, a wound that corresponded exactly to the moment of the Shattering. From this crack bled not energy, but lost moments, forgotten possibilities, and the psychic residue of every life cut short. The air rang with a discordant, painful chime.
The First Tool struck here first, the Crystal whispered in awe and horror. It did not just break the Crystal of Atlan. It wounded time itself.
Their presence was an anomaly. The mechanisms of the Carillon shuddered. From the bleeding crack, figures emerged. They were not solid, but like afterimages, echoes of people who had died at the moment of the Shattering, their forms flickering with the pain of an unjust and abrupt end. They were the Unforgotten, and they saw Luka and the Crystal not as saviors, but as part of the system that had allowed their erasure.
With silent, collective rage, they surged forward. Their touch was not physical; it was chronological. A tendril of mist from one of them brushed Kael's arm, and he screamed, not in pain, but in disorientation. He was suddenly a child, watching the sky tear open. He was an old man, taking his last breath alone in the dark. He was living a thousand deaths that were not his own.
Luka raised a hand, and the Crystal's light flared. But the Truth fragment hesitated. These were not enemies to be defeated. They were victims. To destroy them would be to complete the work of the Hammer.
We cannot fight them, Luka realized. We have to heal them.
He changed the intention. Instead of a shield, he projected the memory of the Silver Nexus. He showed the Unforgotten the healing of the Weeping Ley, the redemption of the Pale Hunger. He showed them the new city, where their stories were being taught and remembered. He offered them not a return to life, but a place in the ongoing story.
The Unforgotten halted. Their furious buzzing softened into a mournful hum. One by one, their forms stabilized, no longer screaming phantoms, but solemn witnesses. They parted, creating a path toward the great crack in the spindle of time.
At the edge of the wound, the nature of the quest became terrifyingly clear. The Hammer was not hidden in the past. It was embedded in the damage. To retrieve it, one of them would have to enter the crack, to physically interface with the bleeding wound in causality itself.
Kael, still shaking from the temporal assault, looked at the raging storm of lost time. "I'll go."
Luka shook his head. "Your will is strong, Kael, but your body is still anchored too firmly to a single timeline. It would be shredded." He looked inward, at the triad of fragments. "The Crystal is a thing of multiple truths, of boundless potential, and a will that spans realities. I am its anchor. We are the only thing complex enough to survive in there."
Before Kael could argue, Luka stepped off the walkway and into the crack.