The world shattered like someone had slammed a fist into glass.
Kalo staggered backward as the workshop door behind him dissolved into floating shards of light. The plaza warped—tiles stretching, cracking, and rearranging themselves into impossible angles. People blurred into streaks, repeating the same motion over and over, trapped in loops like broken recordings.
Time was trying to correct itself.Or break.
He couldn't tell which.
The girl stood in the center of the distortion like the eye of a storm.No Hourglass.No tether of sand or constellation.Nothing that marked her as a being bound to this world's rules.
Just an impossible absence.
"Run," she repeated calmly, like she was telling him to avoid stepping into a puddle instead of an unfolding rift in space-time.
Kalo's voice cracked."Why—what's happening?!"
Her eyes flicked toward the sky.
Something flicked back.
High above, the constellations shimmered—then twisted.A star from the Marrowtail Constellation blinked out.Another fractured into three.
A ripple tore through the air, and Kalo's cracked Hourglass thrashed like a trapped animal, spilling sand upward violently.
Then the sky split open.
A thin ring of spiraling white light unfurled, widening into a jagged tear.From within it, a long, shadow-threaded limb unfolded like an insect's leg composed entirely of time—seconds stitched together into a monstrous shape. Its surface shimmered with flickering scenes: a scream that hadn't happened yet, a falling building, a hand covered in blood.
A Timeline Wraith.A creature born when cause and effect collapse.
The girl's expression remained blank.
"You asked what was happening," she said softly, stepping beside him. "This is your fault."
"What—my fault?!"
She pointed at the cracked Hourglass behind him.
"You are an anomaly. You're pulling consequences from futures that should not touch the present. This wraith is one of them."
The creature turned its formless head toward them, lenses of drifting memory zeroing in on Kalo's Hourglass.
It shrieked—except the sound played backwards, like a scream sucked into itself.
Kalo flinched, covering his ears."What do I do?!"
She didn't answer with words.
Instead, she grabbed his wrist.
The moment her skin touched his, every Hourglass in the plaza—including those belonging to frozen bystanders—reversed direction, spinning backward.
The world blinked.Reality bent.
And suddenly Kalo was standing in a completely different place.
He stumbled forward onto cold metal.
They were now in a narrow alley between two floating buildings—one from the Dawn Sector, glowing gold and pulsing too fast, and one from the Midnight District, dark and frozen. The boundary between them crackled with unstable time currents.
The girl released his wrist.
Kalo pressed a hand to his chest, breath shaky."H-How did you— Did we— teleport?"
"No," she said."I walked us here."
"That was not walking!"
"That's because you don't perceive time the way I do."
He swallowed hard.
"You need to explain. Now."
She looked at his cracked Hourglass again, gaze unreadable.
"All right," she said."I'll tell you three things. Only three."
Kalo nodded quickly.
She raised one finger.
"First: You were never meant to exist. There is no timeline where you are born naturally."
Second finger.
"Second: Something created you anyway."
Third finger.
"And third—" Her eyes hardened."—if the Astrarium finds out what you are, they will unmake you."
Kalo's throat tightened."The… Astrarium?"
"The keepers of fate. The ones who maintain every true timeline."
"And who are you?" he whispered.
For the first time, her expression shifted—a flicker of something like regret.
"My name is Lira," she said."And I'm not supposed to exist either."
Kalo froze.
She continued quietly:
"That's why I'm the one who broke your Hourglass."
A distant clang echoed through the districts—the unstable toll of a bell that rang from three different times at once.
Lira's head snapped toward the sound.
"They found your anomaly," she murmured. "The Wraith is tracking you."
Kalo backed away."So what do we do—"
"We move," she said. "Now."
"But where—"
"To someone who can explain the rest."
Her eyes met his.
"Someone who knows why you were created."