The Chronoseed emerged from slipspace into a sky painted in the bruised purples and ash-gray hues of a world long abandoned. Below them, Hollowvale stretched—a city of shattered glass towers and rusted gears, where massive clock faces turned slowly, embedded in the skin of buildings, hilltops, and even the dried-out riverbeds.
Marcus peered at the landscape. "Looks like a horologist's nightmare."
"No," Ethan said, tightening his jaw. "It's a time engineer's graveyard."
They landed in what was once a plaza—now overgrown with ivy that blinked, its leaves ticking softly. Time in Hollowvale wasn't still—it was fragmented. Some buildings stood frozen in moments of collapse. Others moved backward, reconstructing themselves before crumbling again.
As the crew stepped out, each of them felt it: their thoughts lagging, their senses unaligned. Lily looked at her reflection in a broken pane and saw herself blink seconds after she had.
"This place is fractured," she murmured. "Chrono-reflex is misaligned."
They moved cautiously through streets where birds flew in reverse and shadows didn't match their owners. Ethan activated the Axis briefly and it spun wildly, then settled on a fixed frequency. "Something's stabilizing the collapse. There's a signal buried beneath the noise."
They traced the signal through alleyways of suspended dust and echoes of past footfalls until they reached the Grand Orrery—once the city's heart and time-regulating nexus. It now loomed like a cathedral made of bone and brass, its inner mechanisms grinding in anguish.
Inside, they found a sphere of suspended energy at the center, spinning slowly. Around it hung seven massive clocks—each set to a different world's time. One ticked to Earth's past, another to the Accord's founding day. A third spun out of sync with everything else, hands twitching erratically.
In the middle stood a man—bent, silver-bearded, eyes glowing faintly with temporal static.
"I am Halven," he said, without turning. "Last caretaker of Hollowvale."
"You're alive?" Ethan asked.
"Alive enough to remember what time refused to forget." Halven turned, and they saw his chest tick in rhythm with one of the clocks. "The city once balanced countless timelines. It kept the threads from tangling. But then we overreached. Tried to pin time like a specimen. It unraveled."
Ethan approached. "Why didn't you leave?"
"I did. Many times. Each time, I returned—to the same moment. This one." He gestured. "The instant before the city's core imploded."
They watched as one of the clocks suddenly reversed, and outside, a building crumbled and reformed in a loop.
"You're caught in a perpetual echo," Lily whispered.
"Yes," Halven nodded. "And it's starting to bleed outward."
Ethan stepped to the central sphere. "We need to stop this. We've seen what these rips can do. If Hollowvale's fracture spreads—"
"It already is," Halven interrupted. "But it can be sealed. You'll need the Chronokey."
He reached into his chest—literally—and pulled out a crystalline device, shaped like a winding key, but pulsing with volatile potential.
"Wind the main regulator back. Not forward. Back. Time doesn't heal by force. It heals by acceptance."
Ethan took the key, approached the sphere, and inserted it into a mechanism beneath. As he wound it slowly counterclockwise, the clocks above flickered. The ticking slowed. The dissonance softened.
One by one, the clocks aligned. Outside, the chaos began to settle. Buildings stood still. Shadows returned to their owners. Reflections caught up.
Halven began to fade, smile serene. "I never wanted to escape. Only to remember. Now… I can rest."
He vanished like sand in wind.
Back aboard the Chronoseed, Marcus looked down at the now-still city.
"What happens to it now?" he asked.
"It waits," Ethan replied. "Until time needs remembering again."
And with the clocks of Hollowvale reset, the crew turned toward the next echo of destiny.