KRONOS MAW: RISE OF THE TEMPORAL ANCHOR
Chapter 5: Cracks in the Ordinary...
The week after Chronicle Hall passed like a dream that kept interrupting itself.
Alex went to school. He ate breakfast with Leah and Becky. He sat at his desk at night and opened his textbooks. All the ordinary scaffolding of his ordinary life, still standing, still functional. But underneath it, threading through every moment like a current through water, the second pulse in his chest beat its quiet blue rhythm and the world kept behaving strangely around him.
Small things at first.
Tuesday morning — the microwave display flickered when he walked past it, cycling through numbers that didn't correspond to any time zone on earth before settling back to normal. He pretended not to notice. Leah was right there.
Tuesday afternoon — he was late to his last class and walked quickly through the corridor and without meaning to, without consciously reaching for anything, arrived at the classroom door a full thirty seconds before he should have been able to given where he'd started. He stood outside the door breathing carefully and trying to reconstruct the journey and finding gaps in it, small missing pieces of distance that he couldn't account for.
Wednesday — he sat next to a boy in the library who was wearing a digital watch and the watch ran backward for the entire forty minutes Alex was sitting there and returned to normal the moment Alex left. The boy never noticed.
Thursday — this one was harder to dismiss. He was walking home through the Ikeja market, the late afternoon crowd thick around him, traders and buyers and the particular organized chaos of commerce conducted at full volume. A motorbike came from his right, fast, weaving through a gap that had closed faster than the rider anticipated, heading directly toward an old woman with a basket of tomatoes who hadn't seen it coming.
Alex didn't think.
The warmth surged — not a trickle this time, a wave — and time didn't just slow, it stopped. Complete stillness. The motorbike frozen mid-lean, its rider's face caught in the beginning of panic, the tomatoes in the old woman's basket suspended in a small red constellation where they'd begun to spill from the force of her startled movement.
Alex walked through the frozen moment, took the old woman gently by the arm, and guided her two steps to the left.
Then he released it.
The motorbike completed its skid, the rider correcting just in time, the tomatoes completing their fall, the old woman standing two steps from where she'd been with no memory of moving and a confused expression on her face as she looked at the scattered tomatoes and then at Alex.
"You pushed me," she said, not accusingly. More like a question.
"You were in the way of the bike," Alex said.
She looked at the motorbike, now stopped several meters away, the rider checking his own hands with shaken relief. She looked back at Alex. She opened her mouth and closed it again.
"God bless you," she said finally.
Alex helped her collect her tomatoes and walked home.
That night he sat at his desk and did not open his textbooks.
He sat with his hands flat on the desk surface and thought carefully and honestly about his situation. It was something he did — thinking carefully and honestly, stripping away the comfortable fictions people wrapped around difficult realities. He'd always had a low tolerance for self-deception. It felt inefficient.
The facts as he understood them:
Something had transferred from the stone slab in Chronicle Hall into his body. That something was now living in his chest, warm and blue and patient, with a second pulse that answered his heartbeat. Since its arrival, he could manipulate time — slow it, stop it, rewind small moments, step sideways through stretched seconds. The ability was growing. Each use felt slightly more natural than the last, slightly less effortful, like a language he was remembering rather than learning.
He did not know what it was. He did not know what it wanted. He did not know if it was safe or what safe even meant in this context.
He also did not know who had called him.
You felt it this morning, didn't you. The clock.
He'd tried the number twice since that night. Disconnected both times. Whoever had called him had called him once, said ten words, and vanished. Which meant either they'd said everything they needed to say or they were waiting for something specific before saying more.
Alex looked at his watch. Ticking perfectly.
He pressed his palm to his sternum and felt the pulse answer.
"Alright," he said quietly, to himself, to the thing in his chest, to nobody in particular. "What are you."
The pulse beat steadily back. Patient. Ancient. Offering nothing yet.
Friday brought Mira Osei back into his orbit with the precision of someone who had decided something and was acting on it.
He was in the library again, same table as always, when she sat down across from him without asking, opened her laptop, and began typing. He looked at her. She looked at her screen. He looked back at his textbook.
Five minutes passed.
"You don't have to sit here," he said.
"I know," she said pleasantly, still typing.
Three more minutes.
"There are other tables," he said.
"Also true." She reached into her bag and produced a second notebook, this one with a different color cover than the one he'd seen before. She opened it and wrote something at the top of a fresh page. "I'm doing research."
"On what."
She looked up then, those calm assessing eyes finding his with the directness he was starting to recognize as simply how she operated — no performance, no social cushioning, just the thing itself.
"On you," she said.
Alex held her gaze. "That's an unusual thing to tell someone."
"I find honesty saves time." A faint suggestion of something at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, more like the architectural possibility of one. "Appropriate, given the circumstances."
He said nothing.
She tapped her pen against the notebook. "The tray," she said. "In the courtyard Monday. I've been thinking about it all week. I watched it fall Alex. I watched the food leave the tray. And then I watched your tray be completely fine and I cannot construct a rational explanation for that using the information I currently have."
"Good reflexes," he said.
"You said that already." She tilted her head slightly. "I have good reflexes too. Mine don't bend the laws of physics."
The library was quiet around them, a few other students scattered at distant tables, nobody close enough to hear. Alex looked at Mira Osei — her open notebook, her circuit board sticker, her waiting stillness — and made a calculation.
He'd been carrying this alone for a week. That was sustainable in the short term. But the ability was growing, the incidents were becoming harder to dismiss, and he had no framework for understanding any of it. He was good at many things. He was not good at knowing his own limits.
Mira was clearly intelligent. She was clearly observant. She'd already noticed something. And she was sitting across from him with a fresh page in her notebook and the specific patience of someone who had decided to wait as long as necessary.
"If I told you something," Alex said carefully, "that was difficult to believe."
"I would evaluate the evidence," she said immediately. "Not the difficulty."
Alex looked at the clock on the library wall.
He focused. Pushed. Gently.
The second hand stopped.
Mira's eyes went to the clock. Back to Alex. Back to the clock. Her pen had gone still.
Alex released it. The second hand resumed.
The library breathed around them, oblivious.
Mira looked at him for a long moment. Then she uncapped her pen, looked down at her fresh notebook page, and wrote one word at the top.
How.
Alex looked at that single word and felt something shift in his chest that wasn't the Heartstone — something older and more human, the specific loosening that happens when you stop holding something alone.
"I don't entirely know yet," he said honestly.
She nodded once, businesslike, pen ready.
"Then we figure it out," she said. "From the beginning. Tell me everything."
End of Chapter 5