I did not feel time pass anymore.
It had been days, or maybe hours, since Drokmar's silhouette vanished behind the stone doors of the Ash Vault. His roar still echoed inside me, not as sound, but as a wound that refused to close. The storm inside me had grown quieter since then , not calmer, but watchful. Waiting, as if it too grieved.
Aurelius led us north, beyond the city's ruins, through miles of cracked highways and fractured towers leaning like forgotten sentinels. Lyren walked ahead, blade drawn, silent as always. None of us spoke much. Words seemed too fragile now.
When we reached the outskirts, the horizon bent. Not curved , bent. The air shimmered like molten glass, folding into itself. Aurelius turned to me, eyes cold and calculating as ever, though I saw exhaustion buried behind them.
"This is it," he said. "My stronghold."
At first, I thought he was joking. There was nothing there , just a ripple in the air and the faint hum of something vast and sleeping beneath the surface of reality. But then the hum grew louder, and the world stuttered. One step forward and the landscape shattered into fragments , towers of gears and clock faces suspended in midair, streams of molten light flowing backward, seconds freezing and restarting like broken film.
We stood on a bridge made of ticking mechanisms that had no visible source. The fortress floated between seconds, an impossible citadel hanging in the space where time hesitated.
Lyren looked around, unimpressed. "You built this?" she asked.
Aurelius did not answer immediately. "Not built," he said at last. "Recovered. Time remembers everything , I merely gave it shape."
I did not understand half of what he said, but I could feel it , the pulse of old power running through the air. Every tick of the mechanisms echoed inside my chest, syncing with my heartbeat.
When we entered the main hall, I finally realized the truth , the fortress was alive. Walls shifted in patterns that resembled breathing. The air shimmered with ghost images: moments repeating, loops of people walking through the same motions. One version of Aurelius stood over a table filled with maps. Another stood by a shattered mirror, speaking to no one.
I turned to him. "How long have you been here?"
He gave a thin smile. "Long enough to stop counting."
We rested there, though rest was a lie. My body recovered, but my mind was caught in endless motion. I kept thinking of Drokmar , of his promise to hold the entrance, of the sound of stone collapsing behind him. I should have stayed. I should have fought beside him.
Aurelius caught my gaze. "Regret is an efficient poison, Kael. It burns through strength faster than time."
"Then why does it feel like all I have left?" I asked.
He did not answer. Perhaps he did not know.
The days , or what passed for them , blurred. In Aurelius's fortress, time did not flow. It folded. Sometimes I would see Lyren sparring with herself in different moments of motion. Sometimes I would wake to find an hour that had already happened, repeating like a bad dream. The storm within me hated this place. It wanted movement, a world it could feel through lightning and breath. Here, everything was trapped between ticks of a clock too vast to comprehend.
One night, if night even existed here, Aurelius summoned me to the mirror chamber , the same place where I had seen him talking to his reflection.
"I have something to show you," he said. "But you will not like it."
The mirror was not glass. It was water frozen in the shape of thought , a surface that reflected not faces, but moments. When I looked into it, I saw the battle at the Vault. I saw Drokmar's last stand. But behind him, shadows moved , soldiers of Varok dragging chains of lightning, relics grafted into their flesh.
"This is how he reaches us," Aurelius said. "Through reflections. Through time's mistakes."
The air trembled. The mirror began to ripple, not with images, but with voice.
"You have hidden well, old tactician."
Varok's tone was smooth, distorted, like thunder played backward. His image flickered on the surface , molten eyes, a crown of blackened metal fused to flesh. He looked directly at me.
"And the boy who carries the storm," Varok said. "Still pretending you understand what it wants?"
My hand clenched. The storm roared in response, crackling through my veins, lighting the entire hall for a heartbeat. The mirror shattered, but Varok's voice did not fade.
"You cannot escape me," he said. "Time bends for me now."
Then the world broke.
Everything froze , the ticking stopped, the gears halted, even the air turned solid. Lyren's breath hung midair like mist. Aurelius alone still moved, his expression tight with panic.
"He found the breach," Aurelius said. "He is inside the seconds."
"What does that mean?"
"It means time is no longer holding him out."
The walls of the fortress began to distort, shifting between versions of themselves , new, ruined, rebuilt, destroyed , all at once. It was like watching eternity panic. Aurelius ran his hand through the air, drawing glowing sigils that flickered with unstable light.
"Keep it together," I said. "What do you need?"
He laughed, not out of humor but despair. "More time."
Then the storm inside me surged.
I did not choose it , it just moved. Lightning burst from my skin, tearing through the frozen air. But unlike everything else, it moved freely. It did not care about time's paralysis. The bolts danced around Aurelius, striking the broken gears, shattering the frozen air into shards of motion.
Aurelius turned toward me, realization dawning in his eyes. "You are outside it," he said. "Your storm, it does not belong to this timeline."
Before I could respond, Varok's projection reformed , not in the mirror, but in the air itself, drawn from the pieces of light I had broken.
He stepped forward, smiling with something cruel and knowing. "Of course he is outside it. He was never supposed to exist after the sealing."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
Varok's gaze pierced me. "You carry a storm that remembers a world that no longer is. Every time you breathe, you drag the past into the present. You are not a savior, Kael. You are the reminder of a mistake."
The storm inside me flared , not in anger, but in pain. The fortress shook violently, the gears spinning again, grinding through centuries of stillness.
Aurelius moved first. He grabbed a shard of the mirror, turned it into a blade of time itself, and thrust it into Varok's image. The projection screamed, distorting into a thousand overlapping versions before exploding into silence.
Then everything stopped.
Silence. Real silence.
Lyren gasped, falling to her knees. The air moved again. The fortress stabilized, though cracks now ran across its glowing floor.
I turned to Aurelius. His hands trembled, blood running from his nose.
"What did he mean?" I asked. "About me?"
Aurelius looked away. "Later."
"No," I said. "Now."
He sighed and faced me, the weight of centuries in his eyes. "You were not born with that power, Kael. It found you. The storm chose you because it recognized something familiar. Maybe it remembers you from before. Maybe you were one of them once."
"One of what?"
"The Stormbearers," he said quietly. "Those who sealed the gods."
I felt the ground tilt under me. For a moment, I could not breathe. The storm pulsed, as if acknowledging the truth before I could.
Lyren stood, brushing dust from her armor. "Then he was right. Kael is not meant to exist."
Aurelius's voice sharpened. "He is meant to change what exists."
The fortress began to pulse again, the gears realigning themselves. Time resumed its slow crawl forward. Aurelius looked up, his face pale and worn.
"We are running out of options," he said.
Lyren asked, "Where do we go now?"
He gave a hollow smile. "We do not go anywhere."
"What do you mean?"
He looked at the broken mirror, at the gears grinding slower with each turn. "Varok has corrupted the flow. The fortress cannot hold much longer. Time itself is collapsing inward."
Lyren stepped forward. "So what now, tactician?"
Aurelius glanced at me, eyes steady, cold, and burdened with something that looked almost like faith. "Now," he said, "we fight against the clock."
The fortress shuddered once more, the air warping into spirals of fractured seconds. I could feel the storm humming in rhythm with it, like it understood the language of breaking time.
As the gears above began to fall apart, Aurelius spoke the final words before the light swallowed everything.
"We are out of time , literally."
The fortress imploded in silence.
Not an explosion , an erasure. Time folded, swallowed itself, and left only the taste of ozone and light. I felt the world slip from beneath my feet, the storm pulling me through a tear that was neither forward nor backward, just elsewhere. Lyren's hand caught my arm for a heartbeat before vanishing into the blur. Aurelius's figure dissolved into static gold.
Then , stillness.
A plain of endless grey, rippling with memories that had no bodies. The sky was colorless, like it had forgotten what light was supposed to mean. The storm inside me was quiet now, listening, waiting.
Somewhere in that colorless horizon, something moved , a shadow that did not belong to this world.
And for the first time since the storm found me, I realized I was alone.