Thunder carved jagged scars across the heavens, and lightning poured from the sky like cracks in the very ceiling of the world. Somewhere far above the city's lifeless lights, on top of a long-forgotten tower, stood a man whose soul had seen too much.
Simon.
He watched the city as if it were a memory about to vanish. His eyes carried the weight of someone who had already lost everything—or someone who knew what he still had was about to be torn away.
Behind him, the silence was broken by slow, exaggerated clapping.Victor Coleman entered—calm, cynical, holding a bag of chips as if this were just another bad movie.
"Seriously, Simon? Still brooding? If this is how the world ends, I hope it at least has a good soundtrack."
Simon didn't answer immediately. The wind whipped around him like whispers of a future already written.
"Something is coming," he said at last. "It's in the ground. In the air. In the way the seconds feel... heavier. We're not moving forward anymore, Victor. We're being pulled... backward."
Somewhere, far from the tower and far from the city's crumbling grip, a cave glowed with unstable power. Energy crackled around it like static from a broken timeline. In its heart, suspended above the floor, floated the Stone—a silent, glowing force that pulsed with the power of something ancient. Something dangerous.
And broken.
Beside the Stone stood the Violet One, a being of motion and raw power. His body shimmered with shifting colors, energy alive within his skin. He was not born; he was shaped—by time, by change, by the Stone itself.
Next to him, the Timekeeper floated in quiet stillness, eyes fixed on a fractured clock that spun with no rhythm. His voice was low, but final:
"The timeline is no longer bending. It's snapping."
From behind them, something moved.
A shadow stepped out of the distortion. Its form was unclear. Its face, unfinished. But the hatred in its eyes was unmistakable—a burning rejection of order, of control, of fate itself.
"Time is a prison," the figure said. "And you've built the cage. No one deserves this power—not you, not the Stone, not anyone. I will break it."
"You will destroy everything," the Violet One growled.
"Exactly."
The fight was instant, violent, and unnatural.The Violet One lunged, shifting mid-air into a monstrous shape, but the dark figure blocked the attack with a pulse of anti-energy that unraveled light itself.
Others joined the battle.A youth cloaked in shadow twisted storms with his hands. Warriors descended with fury. Explosions tore the cave apart. And still, the stranger moved like he had already won.
"This world is built on illusions," he said calmly. "And I've come to erase the blueprint."
The Timekeeper, desperate, did what he swore never to do:He froze time.
Just for a moment.
And in that silence, he sent a final warning across all realities, to Simon and Victor, wherever they might be:
"The Stone is the anchor. If it breaks... everything restarts. Time, life, death... all of it will reset."
But the warning came too late.
The shadow reached the Stone.Simon screamed across time itself.Victor shrugged, still holding his chips.
"Guess we're rewinding, then."
The shadow struck the Stone.
It shattered.
And the universe obeyed.
From the point of impact, the world unspooled like an old film burning in reverse. Time collapsed in on itself. Past, present, and future bled together into chaos. Cities reversed their decay. Mountains unformed. Lives rewound.
All that was, was undone.
And yet...
In the final seconds before the collapse completed, glimpses flickered—like shards of a broken mirror reflecting what was yet to come:Flames. Betrayal. Tears. Faces we've never seen.Simon standing in fire.Victor laughing in a collapsing world.The shadow returning.Again.
Then—Darkness.
Not silence. Not peace.A waiting.
And from that void came one voice, soft and victorious:
"I have returned."
Because the Stone didn't just break time.It reset it.
This is where it all begins.Again