The Chronovore's psychic shriek was a physical blow. It ripped through Kai's mind, not with sound, but with pure, unadulterated hunger. His own memories rose up like a panicked flock of birds, scattering in terror. He saw his first day in the Scriptorium, felt Elian's hand on his shoulder, tasted the ink of his first completed manuscript—all of it threatened with immediate, violent erasure.
He scrambled backwards, crab-walking through the grey dust, his body acting on pure, animal instinct. The creature drifted towards him, its shadowy wings beating silently, causing the air to ripple and warp around it. It was beautiful, in a terrifying, cosmic way, a hole in the fabric of the world.
His back hit the trunk of a skeletal tree. He was cornered.
The Chronovore hovered ten feet away, its spectral antennae quivering as they locked onto him. It wasn't just his memories it craved; it was the god-ember within him, a concentrated feast of eons, a story so dense and bright it must have seemed like a sun in this empty land.
*Fight,* a voice, clear and sharp as newly forged steel, echoed in the depths of his mind. It was the Echo, roused from its slumber by the existential threat. *A craftsman does not allow his tools to be stolen. You are my vessel. You will not be unmade.*
"I can't fight that thing!" Kai's panicked thought was a desperate prayer.
*You are correct,* the Echo replied, its tone laced with contempt. *'You' cannot. But 'We' can.*
Before Kai could question what that meant, a wave of incandescent heat washed through him, originating from the core of his being. It was not the gentle warmth of a hearth, but the raging, white-hot fury of a forge. The god's will, powerful and absolute, surged to the forefront of his consciousness.
His fear did not vanish. Instead, it was caged, suppressed under a layer of cold, unyielding purpose. His trembling stopped. His breathing evened out. He felt a sense of detachment, as if he were a passenger in his own body. The hands that pushed him to his feet felt like his own, but the will that moved them was ancient and utterly without doubt.
The Chronovore lunged, its shadowy form dissolving into a stream of static as it sought to engulf him.
The god's will acted. Kai's hand shot out. He didn't reach for the creature itself, but for the dead tree he was leaning against. The moment his fingers touched the bone-white bark, he felt the `[Aspect of Creation]` ignite.
He felt the story of the tree—a seed that had sprouted in a different age, a sapling that had thirsted for a sun that no longer shone, a life that had slowly starved as the world faded. It was a story of decay. Of an ending.
The god's will rejected this narrative. It imposed its own. *That which is broken can be made whole.*
A pulse of power, raw and golden, flowed from his palm into the dead wood. The tree shuddered. Its skeletal branches thickened, the pale, brittle bark darkening to the rich brown of living oak. Tiny green buds erupted from the twigs, swelling and bursting into full, vibrant leaf in the space of a single heartbeat. In a world of grey, a single, impossible splash of green life now stood.
The Chronovore, halfway to Kai, slammed into this sudden, violent manifestation of Order.
The impact was not physical, but metaphysical. Shadowy static met vibrant, living wood, and the two opposite concepts warred. The creature recoiled with another psychic shriek, this one laced with pain and confusion. It had tried to feed on a story of decay and had instead bitten into a story of creation. It was like a creature of darkness trying to swallow a star.
The god was not finished. It saw the world as a workspace, and it had found its first tool. Kai's arm, moving with a speed and precision he did not possess, broke a thick, green branch from the newborn tree. In his hand, the wood felt impossibly heavy, dense with a life it had no right to possess.
The Chronovore, enraged, reformed itself and swooped again.
This time, Kai—or the god wearing his body—did not wait. He stepped forward to meet the charge, swinging the heavy branch like a club.
*A weapon requires an edge,* the Echo thought, and the world obeyed.
As the branch swung, the wood at its tip compressed, hardening and darkening until it was no longer wood, but a sharp, jagged shard of black iron, still retaining the grain and shape of the branch it had grown from. It was a crude, ugly thing—half nature, half artifice—but it was undeniably a weapon.
The iron tip connected with the Chronovore's shadowy form.
There was a sound like tearing silk and breaking glass. The creature convulsed, its form flickering violently. The iron, born of a god of Order and Making, was anathema to a creature of chaos and Unmaking. It didn't just wound the Chronovore; it was actively erasing it.
The creature dissolved, not into dust, but into nothingness, its final, agonized shriek of hunger echoing only in Kai's mind.
And then, it was over.
The immense, driving will of the god receded, sinking back into the depths of his soul. The forge-heat cooled, and the cold, familiar terror rushed back in to fill the void. Kai's knees buckled. He dropped the branch-turned-weapon, which clattered to the ground, once again just a simple piece of wood, the iron tip gone as if it had never been.
He was himself again. He stared at the impossible, green tree, then at his own trembling hands. He had won. He had faced a nightmare and survived.
But as the adrenaline faded, a new, more insidious horror crept in. He reached for a memory, a specific one—the taste of the honeyed tea in the Scriptorium cup from the day before the world had ended. He tried to summon the comforting, familiar sensation.
And there was nothing.
A cold dread, far worse than the fear of the Chronovore, seized him. He tried again, searching his mind for the memory. He knew it had happened. He could recall the event, the facts of it, like reading a line from a history book. But the *feeling*, the sensory detail, the taste on his tongue… it was gone. It was a clean, neat hole in the tapestry of his past.
He realized what had happened. To fuel that impossible act of creation, to bring a dead tree to life and forge a weapon from its branch, the god had needed power. Anima. And it had taken it from the most convenient source available.
It had used his memories as kindling.
He hadn't just defeated the Chronovore. He had become a version of it, consuming his own story to survive.
He looked at the vibrant, green tree, a monument to his victory, and felt nothing but nauseous, hollow dread. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that he would give it all back, would have faced the Chronovore a thousand times over, just to taste that honeyed tea one more time.