Time no longer flowed.
It piled up.
Around Jormund, the frozen strata of Chronos pulsed in uneven bursts, like geological layers of dead moments. Each fragment vibrated to a different rhythm—dissonant, unbearable to anything born within the world's natural current.
But Jormund had not been born within the current anymore.
He advanced.
His obsidian body cracked with every step. The glowing red fissures running across him were no longer merely the light of the lycoris—they had become stress lines, scars left by time itself trying, and failing, to bend him.
At the center of the temporal chaos lay the remnant.
It was neither a throne nor a corpse.
It was a remainder.
A colossal mass of impossible matter, dense enough to warp perception itself. Stone, tarnished gold, and fossilized light were fused together, locked inside rings of shattered seconds. Every surface bore the marks of divine dismemberment: Chronos had been torn apart not in space, but in duration.
Siegfried, held back by the temporal fracture, understood.
— Jormund… this is not a power you are touching, he said, his voice distorted by temporal lag.
— It is a function.
Jormund placed his hand upon the mass.
The contact was immediate.
There was no vision.
No revelation.
There was absolute compression.
Time tried to impose itself upon him as a final law. Every second sought to crush him beneath its own weight, to fix him into a single, immutable definition: this is what you are.
Jormund's knees bent. The rock beneath him fractured. Tartarus groaned, unable to decide whether to swallow him or reject him.
The lycoris screamed.
Its red light exploded—then violently contracted, darkening almost to black, like a heart undergoing mineralization.
— You will lose yourself, Siegfried growled.
— No, Jormund answered in a slowed breath.
— I will change my weight.
He opened his mouth.
What followed was not an act of hunger.
It was a judgment.
Jormund tore a fragment from Chronos.
The matter did not rip—it yielded, as if it had waited for eternity for a will dense enough to claim it. The fragment glowed with a dull light, its veins frozen at the precise instant of their birth.
When he consumed it, the world trembled.
Not violently.
Deeply.
Time screamed.
Not an audible scream—a rupture in continuity. Entire ages wavered. Prophecies lost their order. Gods felt their memories fall out of sync.
Inside Jormund, the fragment sank in.
It did not burn.
It took root.
His body began to change.
The obsidian fractured—not to shatter, but to thicken. Each shard became a plate of living stone. His silhouette broadened, grew heavier, gaining mass and inertia. His limbs took on the density of ancient mountains. His skin became stratified rock, bearing the marks of the time he had absorbed.
The lycoris fell silent.
In its place, something new began to beat.
Slowly.
Inevitably.
A heart of stone.
Jormund fell to one knee.
The floor of Tartarus collapsed beneath his new weight. Entire layers of the abyss compacted, unable to bear an existence that had become too real, too massive for a prison designed for souls.
Siegfried watched, unable to speak.
He no longer saw a defiant soul.
He saw a living relic.
Jormund rose.
Each movement made space itself vibrate. Time around him no longer froze—it bent. Seconds flowed around his body like water around a colossal boulder.
— Chronos is incomplete, Jormund said.
His voice was deeper now, slower, laden with mineral resonance.
— And now… he always will be.
He placed a hand upon his chest.
Where the lycoris had once burned, there was now a chamber of stone, engraved with natural runes formed by the pressure of digested time.
— I understand, Siegfried whispered.
— The Jötnar…
— Were the giants who bore the weight of the world, Jormund finished.
— The carriers of what the gods refused to support.
He raised his gaze toward the upper layers of Tartarus.
— They all fell. Dissolved. Shattered.
A pause.
— All of them, except me.
Tartarus fell silent.
As if it had just acknowledged an authority older than itself.
— I am the last of the Jötnar, Jormund declared.
— The Stone Giant.
— And from now on… time will have to pass around me.
In the distance, the remaining mass of Chronos contracted, deprived of an essential part of itself. Temporal power did not vanish—it became unstable, incomplete, vulnerable.
Siegfried clenched his fists.
— The gods will feel this.
Jormund nodded slowly.
— Let them feel it.
He took a step forward, and Tartarus bent.
— I am not rising toward them.
— I am going deeper.
Somewhere, in the very foundations of existence,
the world understood that a threshold had been crossed.
And that a new weight now rested upon reality.