Liora woke gasping.
She was twelve again.
Her bones creaked in reverse, her hands small, her voice thinner, higher. The aging had reversed, but not like time winding back. More like… her self had been re-stitched, one thread at a time, by invisible fingers.
The remnants of the Librarian's attack still clung to her mind—pages tearing, a scream without a throat, and Kael vanishing in a swirl of ink and nothing. And Bran. Gods. Bran had whispered things that shouldn't exist.
She rubbed her arms. Her veins still glowed faintly with the ink of stolen names.
Someone had tampered with her soul.
She didn't speak of it—not even to Kael, who hadn't looked the same since returning from wherever the masked figure had taken him. His eyes had depth now, as if he'd stared down time and it had blinked first.
They sat in silence at the edge of the city's buried district: Old Luthen. Where clocktowers no longer rang, and the fog refused to leave. Bran crouched nearby, staring into a puddle that didn't reflect him.
Not anymore.
"I'm not real," he muttered again, voice flat. "Not real. Just shadow. Just memory."
"You're real enough to bleed," Kael said.
Bran didn't laugh.
Instead, he pointed.
At the wall of an old station. A door had opened.
No hinges. No knob. Just stone folding inward like paper peeling.
Liora and Kael exchanged a glance. Then stepped through.
Inside: feathers.
Thousands of them. Pale gray and shimmered with soft time-light. They floated in slow motion, resisting gravity, brushing against their skin like whispers. The walls were brass and marble, and gears the size of rooftops turned without noise.
At the heart of it all stood a clock.
Or something using the shape of one.
Its hands spun in directions they shouldn't. One pointed forward, the other downward. Its face wasn't numbered, but marked with sigils—each glowing faintly, pulsing like breath. The center eye blinked slowly, once every ten seconds.
A girl stood before it.
Dressed in black feathers and gold threads. Her eyes were mirrors. Her voice chimed like tiny bells as she spoke.
"You've come for the page."
Kael nodded slowly. "You're one of them?"
She tilted her head. "One of who?"
"The Echo Librarians."
She smiled.
"No. I'm what they forgot to archive."
Liora stepped forward. "What is this place?"
The girl looked to the clock.
"This is the Chronostelium. The heart of lost time. Where moments erased from reality are stored. Where memories go when even the gods forget them."
Bran shivered.
"I dreamed of this place," he whispered. "Before I even existed."
The girl's mirrored eyes flicked to him. "That's because you were born from a lost moment. A sliver that broke off when the world rewrote itself. You are the echo of something the Realms tried to bury."
Kael's hand burned. The mark itched.
"We need the page," he said. "It's the only way to stop what's coming."
The girl laughed.
"Oh, child. The page doesn't stop it. The page unleashes it."
Silence fell.
Liora's mouth opened, but no words came.
The girl stepped aside. The great clock began to toll—softly at first. A bell that rang through the bones of the world.
"Three of you," she said. "Three sigils now awakened. That is enough. The door will open again."
Kael looked to the others. Their reflections in the feathers were older, darker, and in some—missing entirely.
"What door?" Liora asked.
The girl smiled.
"The one behind which the Forgotten God waits."
As they stepped into the chamber behind the clock, Kael whispered to Liora:
"Whatever happens next... don't trust what remembers you."
Liora nodded once.
And behind them, Bran hesitated—staring at the feathers that refused to reflect his face