His name was Kaelen.
He did not know why the stars sometimes whispered to him in dreams, or why every clock he touched ticked backward when he wasn't looking. He only knew that since childhood, time had never quite obeyed the rules around him.
Kaelen was born in the mountain-ringed city of Liorai, a place suspended between time's wounds. There, the sun rose twice a day once in golden fire, and once in cold blue light each casting its own shadow. Locals called them the Morning Sun and the Yesterday Sun, and no one questioned it anymore. Time had been strange for generations.
The city's elders blamed the Fracture Wars old, whispered conflicts no one could fully explain, only remember in glimpses and dreams. Some believed Liorai stood at a temporal fault line, a scar where past and present had split long ago.
Kaelen lived alone on the outer cliffs, above the glowing rift forest called the Ystralyn Verge. The Verge was a labyrinth of trees that changed color and age by the hour, their leaves fluttering with forgotten seasons. Children who strayed too deep often returned older or didn't return at all.
Beneath Kaelen's modest home, hidden in the roots of an ancient cliff-tree, lay the Scroll of Becoming.
He didn't remember finding it.
One day, it had simply... been there. Wrapped in starlight-silk, locked in a glass container that shimmered with runes no scholar could translate. When Kaelen first touched it, the world paused. Birds froze midair. Wind stopped mid-breath. For the span of three heartbeats, all of Liorai held its breath and then time lurched forward again, almost violently.
Since that day, Kaelen had felt watched.
It began with the strangers.
The first came in rags and starlit eyes. She called herself Delara, a wanderer from the shattered isles of Eoskai, where every island drifts through a different century. Her ship, the Tide of Echoes, sailed currents of probability instead of water. She had heard rumors of the Scroll a whisper in a prophecy scrawled in a collapsing library that hadn't yet been built.
"You are the pivot," she told Kaelen. "The fulcrum upon which a thousand timelines swing."
He laughed. "I'm a carpenter."
Delara only smiled. "For now."
She introduced him to the others:
Harnen, a one eyed priest from the Temple of Dust, who remembered the future better than the past.
Milae, a Chronogard exile who claimed to have seen the end of time and survived it.
And Ashren, who was not a man, but a living echo a being made of memory, able to speak only in the words of others.
Together, they formed an uneasy fellowship, drawn to the Scroll like moths to a flickering candle. It was Delara who explained, in fragments, the truth Kaelen had never been told.
Long ago, before empires, before even stars had names, Time was not broken.
Delara spoke of Aeontheus, the soul of Time, and of how it had splintered under its own weight.
"The Aspects were born from that fracture," she said one night by firelight, her voice hushed. "Not gods, but... shards of intent. Each a piece of Time's mind given will."
She spoke of three most feared:
Vorenth the Accelerant, who sees the future as a promise of conquest and scorches the present to reach it.
Mirela the Keeper, who entombs entire worlds in stasis, forever unwilling to let go of what once was.
And Kairon, the Twister of Threads, the jester in the soul of time who does not destroy but rewrites, bending law into paradox.
"They are at war," Delara said, "but not with blades or bombs. Their weapons are... events. Moments. If one Aspect controls the Scroll, they gain the right to shape all futures."
"And what about this Chronara?" Kaelen asked.
The fire dimmed slightly. Even the wind seemed to hush.
"She was the last to resist," said Milae, voice barely a whisper. "The one who tried to mend whatbroke. She made the Chronocosm a sanctuary beyond time. They say she scattered the Scroll's keys to prevent the Aspects from ever seizing it. But she vanished."
"Died?" Kaelen asked.
"No," Harnen replied. "Not exactly. Some say she became the silent center of time, watching. Waiting for a mortal to finish what even she could not."
"And you think I'm that mortal?"
Ashren nodded, and in the voice of a long-dead child, he said: "Only mortals can mend what gods have broken."
They left Liorai three days later, guided by strange stars and prophetic maps inked in vanishing ink. Their first destination: the Everspire of Silvaruun, a tower that existed in twelve different timelines at once, and whose staircases reassembled themselves with each sunrise.
According to Delara, one of the keys had fallen into its heart long ago, sealed by a Chronogard ritual. If Kaelen could claim it, the Scroll might begin to unlock itself.
As they traveled, the world grew stranger.
They passed villages caught mid-death, their people frozen in loops of their last moments. Cities where time accelerated so fast that buildings eroded into sand between footsteps. At one point, they met a traveler who claimed to be Kaelen's grandson born in a potential future where the Scroll had been used to end the war. He gave Kaelen a name: Solaviir, the title he would one day earn.
Kaelen refused to believe it. He wasn't a hero.
But deep in the night, when the Scroll pulsed softly beneath his fingers, he wondered if fate was truly a path, or a question waiting to be answered.
Their arrival at Silvaruun changed everything.
The tower rose from a canyon of lightning, its spires weaving into the sky like the ribs of a broken god. Time bent around it. Delara grew younger with each step. Milae aged a decade before they reached the second gate. Harnen began speaking languages no one understood.
Inside the tower, they found the first key hidden in a paradox. A door that could only be opened by never having been closed. With effort, Kaelen reached into the moment, shifted its flow, and unlocked it not by force, but by intent.
The key was not a thing, but a phrase.
"The past is not behind you. It is the shape you wear."
When Kaelen spoke it aloud, the Scroll stirred.
Its first layer unfurled, revealing glimpses of the ancient war battles across timefractured worlds, Chronara facing the Aspects in a storm of frozen lightning, and a final glimpse: a throne made of moments, empty, waiting.
They were no longer wandering.
The war was watching them now.