Lightning split the ash-thick sky, revealing for a breathless instant the crumbling skyline of Core City. The flash cut through the gloom like a blade, lighting up broken windows, half-sunken towers, and skeletal monorails that twisted through the air like forgotten veins. Then darkness returned, swallowing the city whole.
Kael stood at the edge of the old transit hub—a massive, circular structure that had once pulsed with energy and purpose. Now, its roof sagged inward, caved in by the warping of timelines. Chunks of stone and steel floated midair, held aloft by glitches in gravity, spinning slowly like debris in space.
Ash rained silently.
Every step Kael took inside echoed against walls that shouldn't still be standing. Screens blinked with distorted train schedules from decades past. Somewhere above, a long-dead speaker crackled with a static announcement for a train that would never arrive. The hub was a ghost of motion, a corpse with a heartbeat made of static.
Kael's chrono-band vibrated again. Faint but steady. A pulse. A memory trail. He followed it through a corridor warped at odd angles, its floor slightly melted, as though time had run too fast and left the walls behind.
"Echo," Kael whispered, voice nearly lost in the pressure of silence. "Scan for anomalies."
The response came after a pause.
"...Beacon signal detected. Status: corrupted. Probability of temporal rupture: 79%. Proceed with caution."
Kael clenched his jaw. The beacons were supposed to be safeguards—anchors that kept timelines from fraying. But if one was broken, corrupted... it meant someone had tampered with reality itself. Again.
A memory flashed—Dray's golden eyes. The betrayal. The moment Kael lost everything.
He descended to the lower levels. The elevator had long since collapsed, so he moved by foot, each level colder and darker than the last. At Level -2, he found the first body.
A technician. Eyes wide in terror. Mouth frozen in a scream. Skin cracked with blackened veins, pulsating faintly as though time was still feeding on it. Kael looked away.
Time poisoning.
By Level -3, the silence was heavy enough to press against his chest. The corridor narrowed, ending at a large chamber surrounded by observation windows—some shattered, others fogged with frost from a time long gone.
In the center, glowing dimly like a wounded heart, was the Beacon Core.
It stood upright, encased in a sphere of fractured energy that pulsed red and gold. Sparks of future lightning arced from it to the floor, burning holes in reality itself. The air shimmered. The smell was metallic, sharp, like burnt ozone and forgotten memories.
Three figures stood around it.
The first was tall, clad in armor made of fragmented temporal plates—shifting textures from different centuries overlapped on his body like a patchwork of time. His face blurred constantly, never settling on one age or expression. Carth. Once the Shield of the Order. Now... warped beyond recognition.
The second hovered inches above the ground. She wore a deep violet cloak that danced in wind that wasn't there. Her eyes glowed like twin stars trapped in a dying galaxy. Her name had been Velis—a brilliant time-mapper who lost her soul in a mirror universe.
The third was a child.
Small. Silent. Staring.
No name. Just the future written in scars. Her presence felt wrong, like she didn't belong to this moment—an echo of something yet to come.
Kael stepped forward cautiously.
"You shouldn't be here," he said, his voice low but firm.
The three turned to face him.
And then, he heard it.
A voice.
Smooth. Icy. Too familiar.
"Still chasing echoes, Kael?"
From behind the beacon, a shadow stepped forth. His outline flickered, as if he existed in multiple possibilities at once. Chronal energy rippled off him in dark waves.
Dray.
Kael's heart twisted.
He looked... the same. And not. His face bore the same strong lines, the same golden eyes, but now they pulsed with power that felt stolen, not earned. Time had touched him—torn him apart and rebuilt him wrong.
"I warned you," Dray said, circling the Beacon slowly, like a predator sizing up his prey. "The past is a graveyard, Kael. You kept digging."
"What are you doing here?" Kael demanded, lifting his blade.
Dray's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Fixing what you broke."
"You shattered the timelines."
Dray's voice dropped to a whisper. "No... I freed them."
Without warning, the Beacon pulsed. A shockwave surged outward, throwing Kael back into the wall. Dust and light exploded around him. The floor bent upward in places. Windows cracked, then shattered.
Carth stepped forward, his weapon drawn—a massive pulse-axe that split into two with a twist. Velis raised her hands, and time began to stutter around her—Kael saw himself flicker in and out of existence.
Dray raised a single hand. "You can't stop what's already begun."
Kael gritted his teeth. The chrono-band screamed warnings.
"Echo, initiate chrono-shield!"
A blue barrier snapped around him just as Carth struck. Sparks flew. Kael met the blow with his pulseblade, sliding backward but holding his ground. The fight roared to life.
Each strike bent the air. Velis summoned shadows of Kael's past—versions of him that moved like puppets, attacking with cruel precision. The child stood still, eyes locked on Kael. Watching.
As Kael fought, something clicked inside him—a memory half-lost. A room. A fire. A voice telling him to forget.
And far away, across fractured timelines, Aeris opened her eyes.
The Beacon had called her.
And she was coming.