The clocks of Ecliptica never stopped.
They hummed beneath every street, inside every wall, ticking in perfect rhythm with the heartbeat of the Core.
To the people who lived here, time wasn't just currency — it was faith.
Every tower shone with blue light, each pulse a prayer to the Ecliptic Order.
And in the middle of it all, a child was born whose wrist glowed the wrong color.
---
Her name was Lyra Antheris.
The nurses saw the mark first — red as blood, pulsing slow and steady where every other infant's shone bright blue.
They whispered. They called for the priest.
Her mother, pale and trembling, reached for her.
"What's wrong with her time?" she asked.
The priest didn't answer. He only stared at the newborn's wrist, where the digits flickered —
∞ — the same forbidden symbol whispered about in Order reports.
But before anyone could act, the mark dimmed. The priest blinked, uncertain. The digits reappeared, showing a normal count — 7,884,320 minutes.
It looked like a glitch. A malfunction. A harmless error.
Only her mother saw the truth: the red glow still throbbed faintly beneath the surface, like a heartbeat refusing to die.
---
Lyra grew up in the quiet sector of Ecliptica's northern spire.
Her family wasn't rich, but they were loyal — her father a technician at the Life Banks, her mother a caretaker for the Temple of Hours.
She learned early to stay still during inspections.
To keep her wrist turned away when the Scanners passed.
To smile when the priests recited:
> "Time is the Order. The Order is Time."
She smiled, because that's what good children did.
But sometimes, when she lay awake at night, she could hear the clocks whispering things no one else seemed to notice — small, soft voices hidden between the ticks.
---
When she was nine, she followed one of those whispers.
It led her into the sub-halls beneath the Temple, where the air smelled of copper and burning hours.
She found rows of glowing tubes filled with drifting lights — stored lifetimes.
And at the far end, a glass wall separated her from something darker: a chamber full of suspended bodies, each with their ChronoMarks severed.
The sign above the door read: "Residual Purification Sector."
Lyra didn't understand.
Until she saw one of the priests walk in and pour the harvested light into a machine that hummed and released bright, blue mist.
The priest turned toward the wall then — and for one instant, his reflection met hers.
She ran.
That night, she asked her father what the "Purification" chambers were for.
He froze, then whispered:
"Never ask that again, Lyra. If you love us — never."
---
At twelve, the whispers grew stronger.
Sometimes the clocks in her home stopped for a breath when she entered the room.
Other times, her mother's hairpin would rust in seconds if she touched it.
She learned to hide her reactions, to act normal.
But the red light began leaking through her sleeve, faint but visible under darkness.
When inspectors visited for annual scans, her father built a tiny shield — a copper plate bound with a thin coil of chrono-ore. It dimmed her mark long enough for readings to appear blue.
But every year, it took more effort.
The last time the inspectors came, she was fourteen.
The machine flickered, stuttering as if choking on her signal.
One of the officers frowned.
"Strange. Her pulse signature's inverted."
Her father forced a laugh.
"Old equipment, sir. Happens all the time."
The officer stared at him too long before moving on.
That night, her father packed emergency supplies in silence.
"Just in case," he whispered. "If anything happens, run toward the outer rails. Don't look back."
Lyra didn't ask why. She already knew.
---
The "anything" came two weeks later.
An explosion rattled Ecliptica's eastern spire.
Lyra woke to alarms blaring, red lights flooding the street — real red, not her color.
The Order declared a state of lockdown. Rumors said an anomaly had resurfaced in the Ashlands — a boy with no end to his time.
But Lyra barely heard the broadcasts. She was hiding beneath her home's floorboards, clutching the copper shield as soldiers stormed through the neighborhood.
She listened as they dragged her father out.
He didn't resist. He only said one thing:
"She's gone. You'll never find her."
The next sound was a gunshot.
Lyra didn't cry.
She couldn't.
She just pressed her wrist tighter against her chest, feeling the red light pulsing like a scream that had nowhere to go.
---
The weeks that followed blurred into one long nightmare.
The Order sealed the northern sectors, labeling them contaminated by Echo Time.
Lyra survived by stealing food, sleeping in maintenance shafts, and slipping between broken Flow conduits.
Her mark changed again during that time.
The numbers stopped counting down altogether — frozen, unmoving, infinite.
When she finally looked at it under moonlight, she saw faint new lines forming around it, delicate as veins of crystal.
She didn't know what they meant.
But she knew they weren't human.
---
Now, years later, she stood alone at the border between Ecliptica and the Ashlands.
The skyline behind her shimmered like glass — perfect, untouchable.
Before her stretched the wasteland, where clocks broke and stars burned red.
She lifted her hand. The red glow pulsed brighter, answering something far away.
She didn't know what it was, only that it felt alive.
A voice echoed faintly through the Flow — not one of the whispers this time, but something deeper.
A boy's voice.
And then, like a spark catching in her chest, she felt the same pull that Eryndor had felt across the desert.
Two anomalies.
Two broken threads, vibrating on opposite sides of time.
---
Lyra turned toward the horizon.
The sky was bleeding red again, lightning crawling across it in veins of light.
She smiled faintly, the first real smile she'd had in years.
"Guess I'm not alone anymore," she murmured.
And as the first storm wind swept through the glass towers of Ecliptica, every clock in the Core skipped one second — the first missed beat in centuries.