The silver hourglass sat between us on the table, its fine grains of white sand unnervingly still—until, without warning, they reversed. Just for a second.
"I've searched every noble registry," Alaira said, unfurling an old parchment, "and this mark etched at the base… it doesn't belong to any known house."
I leaned in. It was a strange symbol—an open eye surrounded by fractured lines. Familiar, but not from Evelyne's memories.
"This wasn't part of the original novel," I muttered. "I remember every chapter. Every detail. This hourglass—this symbol—was never there."
"Then we're dealing with something… added," Alaira said. "After the story was written."
We took the hourglass to the palace's restricted archives, bribing a half-blind scholar who owed Alaira's family a favor. He scowled at the symbol.
"You're meddling with forgotten things," he rasped. "Things that belonged to the Timekeepers."
"The who?"
He eyed us both grimly. "They were said to be the ones who watched over fates and stories… long before the gods gave humans free will. If you're seeing signs of them now, then something has rewritten itself… or worse, someone is trying to undo a story already told."
Chills crawled down my spine.
"We found this in a noble's manor," Alaira said, lying smoothly.
"Then burn it," the old man warned. "Or it may not just be your time that unravels. It could be the entire world's."