The city was too quiet.Riven had learned to fear silence — it meant that time had stopped paying attention.
He walked down a corridor that shouldn't exist, every step echoing twice. The walls shimmered with faint traces of people who were never there — afterimages of the past bleeding into the present. He reached out, touching one. It vanished, leaving the smell of burnt metal.
He could still hear Lira's last words, replaying endlessly:
"You promised me forever, Riven. You just never said whose forever."
The Chrono-Gate's shard pulsed faintly at his wrist. It shouldn't have worked after the last collapse. But it was glowing, alive — almost breathing.And beneath its pulse, he felt something else: a rhythm that didn't belong to the world.
Tick—Tick—Tick—Then silence.
He looked up.All the clocks in the city — street panels, tower displays, even wrist timers — had stopped. Every one of them.And every face pointed to the same moment: 03:17:04.
"The time she died…" he whispered.He didn't want to believe it, but the truth pressed in, cold and merciless. Every time the world broke, it always restarted three minutes after she vanished.The universe wasn't looping randomly. It was anchored to her death.
He tried to breathe, but the air felt too thick — like walking through someone else's memory. His head ached, and images bled into his mind uninvited.He saw flashes — Lira's hand pulling a lever, not his.He saw himself begging her to stop.He saw the explosion, but this time she was smiling as it consumed her.
"No…"He stumbled backward. "That's not what happened. I was the one who—"
The ground trembled. A figure appeared in the reflection of a broken glass wall — his own reflection. But wrong.Its eyes glowed blue instead of red.It moved before he did.
Riven turned sharply. Nothing. Just empty air and the slow collapse of silence.
Then a whisper echoed behind him:
"You're running out of seconds, Riven."
He spun — but the corridor was gone. The world had folded in on itself.He was standing on a platform of glass above an infinite abyss, the city below twisting like smoke.And through the air came the tolling of a single, massive clock — a sound that made his bones hum.
BOOM.03:17:04.
A crack tore through the platform beneath him.The Chrono-Gate screamed — its light erupting, the world folding like paper.
Before everything turned white, Riven saw something impossible:a man — his exact face — watching him from across the abyss.
He smiled. And time began to bleed backward.
.