# KRONOS MAW: RISE OF THE TEMPORAL ANCHOR
## Chapter 1: The Weight of Ordinary
The alarm didn't wake Alex Wilder. He was already awake.
He lay on his back staring at the ceiling, listening to New Lagos breathe. Six forty-seven in the morning and the city was already alive outside his window — danfo buses honking their impatient rhythms, market women calling out prices to nobody and everybody, the distant thrum of the elevated rail cutting through the humid air like a slow heartbeat. New Lagos never truly slept. It just dimmed for a few hours and roared back louder than before.
Alex didn't move.
There was a crack in the ceiling above his bed, thin and wandering, that he'd been staring at for three years. Sometimes he thought about filling it. Mostly he just watched it, the way you watch something you've accepted will always be broken.
His alarm screamed at six fifty. He silenced it without looking.
The room around him was simple — a desk pushed against the wall, textbooks stacked with mechanical precision, a single shelf holding nothing decorative, just more books and a dead plant he kept forgetting to throw away. His clothes for the day were already folded on the chair. Alex had learned early that if you prepared everything the night before, the morning asked less of you. And Alex preferred when life asked less of him.
He sat up slowly, rolled his shoulders, and caught his reflection in the narrow mirror on the back of his door.
Nineteen years old. Sharp jaw, dark eyes, the kind of face that made strangers look twice and kept looking. He'd been told he was handsome so many times it had stopped meaning anything. Compliments felt like noise — background static from a world he couldn't quite tune into.
He looked away from the mirror and reached for his shirt.
---
Downstairs smelled like fried plantain and burnt edges, which meant Becky had tried to help with breakfast again.
"I told you to leave the stove alone," Leah's voice floated from the kitchen, patient and firm, the tone of a woman who had said the same thing forty times and would say it forty more.
"I was helping!" Becky's voice — louder, indignant, absolutely not sorry.
"You were helping the smoke detector practice its purpose."
Alex came down the stairs to find his mother at the stove rescuing what remained of the plantains while his stepsister sat on the kitchen counter eating a piece of bread with the unbothered energy of someone who had caused chaos and fully made peace with it. Becky was seventeen, small and bright-eyed, her school uniform already slightly rumpled even though the day had barely started. She had a gift for looking like she'd just finished an adventure.
She spotted Alex and her face split into a grin.
"He lives," she announced.
"Unfortunately," Alex said, opening the refrigerator.
"You're welcome for the plantains by the way. The slightly darker ones have more character."
"They're black Becky."
"Character."
Leah turned from the stove and looked at Alex the way she always did first thing in the morning — a quick, careful look, the kind that checked more than just whether he was awake. She was not a tall woman but she carried herself like someone who had decided long ago that the world would not fold her. Her eyes were warm and sharp at the same time, missing very little.
"Eat before you leave," she said simply.
"I'm not hungry."
"Alex."
One word. Just his name. But she said it in a way that closed the conversation completely. He took a plate.
They ate together at the small kitchen table, Becky talking enough for all three of them — something about a girl at her school, a teacher who gave unreasonable assignments, a cat she'd seen on the street that she was seriously considering adopting. Leah listened and responded and occasionally redirected. Alex ate and said little, but his eyes moved between them quietly, taking in every small moment with the careful attention of someone storing things away for safekeeping.
This was the only part of the day he didn't feel like he was watching life from behind glass.
"You have that test today?" Leah asked him.
"Yesterday."
"How did it go?"
"Fine."
She gave him that look again. He almost smiled.
"It went well," he corrected quietly.
She nodded, satisfied, and reached over without ceremony to fix the collar of his shirt. He let her.
---
New Lagos High sat at the intersection of two wide roads in the Ikeja district, a large compound of grey concrete buildings that had been modern once and were now just permanent. Students moved through the gates in clusters, laughing and loud, the morning energy of people who had somewhere to belong.
Alex moved through them like a current through water — present but not quite touching anything.
He kept his head level, his pace steady, his face arranged in the particular blankness he had perfected over years. It was not rudeness exactly. It was distance. A carefully maintained gap between himself and everything else that kept things simple and kept things quiet.
It worked most of the time.
"Wilder."
He didn't stop walking.
A hand caught his shoulder and spun him — not gently. Three of them, upper year boys, the kind who moved through school like they owned the architecture. The one in front was broad and grinning, the grin of someone who had confused cruelty for personality.
"Didn't hear me?" the boy said.
"I heard you Emeka," Alex said flatly.
"Then why didn't you stop?"
Alex looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing, his face giving nothing away. This was the other thing he had perfected — the art of making people feel like their existence had not particularly registered.
It worked, and it didn't. Emeka's grin tightened at the edges, the way grins do when they're covering something uglier underneath.
"Too good to talk to people?" Emeka said. "That it? Pretty boy thinks he's better than everyone?"
Alex said nothing. Saying nothing was usually the safest option — give them no material, no reaction, no fuel.
But safe and painless were different things.
He stood there and absorbed it — the words, the shoves that followed, the laughter from the ones standing behind — with the practiced stillness of someone who had learned that the fastest way through a storm is to become something the wind can't catch. He felt it though. Underneath the stillness, somewhere he kept carefully locked, he felt every second of it.
When they finally lost interest and moved on, Alex straightened his shirt, picked up the textbook that had been knocked from his hand, and continued walking.
Nobody around him had intervened. A few had watched. Most had simply looked away, which was its own kind of answer about the world.
---
He was early to his first class and sat near the window, which was where he always sat. The room filled slowly around him — conversations overlapping, chairs scraping — and Alex watched the courtyard below where a group of younger students were kicking a ball around, laughing at something he couldn't hear through the glass.
He pulled out his notes and uncapped his pen.
That was when he noticed it.
The clock on the wall — old, analog, institutional — was ticking. But the ticks were uneven. Not broken exactly, more like hesitant. Like each second was arriving slightly uncertain of itself, half a beat behind and then suddenly rushing to catch up, as though time in this particular corner of the room was having a quiet disagreement with itself.
Alex stared at it.
He'd noticed things like this before. Clocks behaving strangely near him. Watches stopping and starting. His phone occasionally showing a time that was thirty seconds behind what every other device showed, then correcting itself when he set it down. He'd never mentioned it to anyone. There was no version of that conversation that didn't sound strange.
The clock ticked. Stumbled. Caught itself.
Alex looked away and opened his textbook.
Whatever it was, it was nothing. It was always nothing.
Outside the window, the city of New Lagos hummed and blazed and moved, enormous and indifferent, ten million people going about the business of living. And somewhere beneath all of it — beneath the noise and the roads and the deep old bones of the earth — something ancient stirred in the dark of a forgotten sub-level, patient as stone, waiting for the right hand to find it.
Alex bent his head over his notes and did not feel it.
Not yet.
---
*End of Chapter 1*