The name haunted Ethan like a thread pulling through the seams of memory: Kalnor. That a being—or force—with such power had not only reached across time but communicated so viscerally shook him. Even in all his study, all his brushes with alternate realities and anomalous phenomena, this felt fundamentally different.
He stood at the apex of the Archive's Resonance Observatory, staring into the undulating pulses of the activated beacon. Across the spectral readings, faint impressions continued to echo—symbols layered within wavelengths, repeating not in time but in emotion. Anger. Loss. Hunger. It wasn't a scream this time—it was a chant.
Cael entered, holding a crystalline cube etched with decoded temporal glyphs. "Lily cracked some of the structure. It's not linear language—it's fractal. The closer you look, the more meaning it contains. The whole thing is recursive."
Ethan took the cube. "A message that expands the deeper you listen. That's not communication. That's a design."
Cael nodded grimly. "A signature, maybe. Or a blueprint."
Before Ethan could respond, Lily joined them. Her hair was pulled into a hasty braid, her eyes shadowed from sleeplessness. "We matched the energy resonance from the message with a waveform from the old Concord charts—something listed under theoretical relics." She tapped her console. A projection bloomed between them—a device like an elongated spiral gear wrapped around a luminous core.
"The Axis," she said. "Mentioned only once—in a lost echo theorized by the Chrono-Cartographers. Said to be the stabilizing center of all prime echoes. If Kalnor believes it was taken, then…"
"...then someone removed the lynchpin of the multithread," Ethan finished. "And they may have done it before we ever built the Archive."
Cael cursed under his breath. "That would explain the entropy fields. The ripple surges. Variance's madness. Everything that's breaking began after that event."
Lily nodded. "So the real question isn't who or what Kalnor is—it's: Who stole the Axis? And why?"
To find the answer, they turned to an unlikely source: the Dream Weavers of the Memory Coasts.
Dream Weaving wasn't science—not in the conventional sense. It used the unconscious as a tether into echoes not preserved by time but by perception. Some said Weavers could walk into futures that never happened and pull thoughts from the minds of the dead. Others said it was elaborate storytelling dressed as mysticism.
But Ethan had seen the impossible too many times to dismiss anything now.
They arrived at the coast as a storm was dying. The air still tingled with ozone as their skiff touched sand. Great glass towers curved like frozen waves along the shore, catching not light but memory. Reflections in the windows shimmered with scenes that weren't happening in any present.
They were met by Archivist-Matron Nylae, a woman with hair like seaweed and eyes full of lightning.
"We've felt the Axis ripple," she said, skipping formalities. "You've stirred a deep water, Ethan Temporal."
He nodded. "We need to see where it was taken. When it was removed."
"You seek a memory never made," Nylae said. "That means you must dream into the void."
The ritual was simple in description, complex in execution. Ethan, Lily, and Cael lay on crystalline pallets surrounded by mirrored pools. Nylae and three other Weavers sang a polyphonic chant that blurred the air with harmonic resonance.
Ethan's consciousness slipped.
He tumbled through timelines—visions of what could have been, what never was. Alternate histories played like broken records: A world where he never discovered time travel. One where Lily died in the Great Collapse. One where he was Marcus.
Then… stillness.
He stood alone in a realm of ink and stars. Time here was absent, yet memory persisted like gravity. And at the center of this void was the Axis—a device suspended in silence. Intricate, radiant, humming with restrained power.
A hand reached for it.
Not his.
He strained to see the figure. Hooded. Genderless. Ageless. They lifted the Axis, and as they did, the stars began to fall, one by one. A voice rang out—not Kalnor's, but something more human:
"Balance is tyranny. Entropy is freedom."
The Axis vanished.
Ethan awoke with a gasp.
He staggered from the ritual chamber, Lily and Cael following moments later. All three looked pale, shaken.
"You saw it too," Ethan said.
Lily nodded slowly. "Someone chose to break the multithread. Not by accident. On purpose."
"And they did it to destroy Kalnor's prison," Cael added.
Ethan paced the shoreline. "If Kalnor was trapped by the balance the Axis created, then removing it was the key to letting him awaken. So… who would do that? And how far ahead are they planning?"
They looked back toward the sea.
For the first time since the beginning of his journey, Ethan felt fear not just of what might happen—but of who had been shaping everything all along.
The tide receded, and with it, the illusions of safety.
Ethan stared into the deep horizon, the storm clouds forming again.
Who had stolen the Axis?
And more urgently—was it already too late to return it?