The idea was a spark in the dark, but the path to a Chronomancer was a map drawn in forgotten whispers.
They returned to the capital under a cloak of grim purpose, heading straight for the Archive of Echoes.
The vast, silent hall, once dedicated to understanding the dead past of Aetheria, now became their war room for saving the living future of two worlds.
They scoured the oldest sections—texts not written on parchment, but on preserved leaves, etched crystal, and memory-stones that grew cold when touched.
The lore was scant and contradictory. Chronomancers were not a race, but a state of being. They were described as
"the weavers at the loom of causality," "guardians of the world's heartbeat," and, more ominously, "the tax collectors of fate."
They existed outside linear time, perceiving past, present, and future as a single, sprawling tapestry they were charged with mending.
The key to finding one, according to a crumbling scroll penned by a Sun Elf mystic, was not a location, but a condition: a "Temporal Echo."
A place where time had frayed, where moments bled into one another, creating a detectable resonance for those who moved between seconds.
"The Glimmerwood," Lyra said, her finger tracing an illustration in an elven bestiary.
It showed a forest where sunlight fractured into a thousand different times of day—dawn, noon, and dusk coexisting in different patches of the same glade.
"It's a place of natural temporal instability. The ley lines there knot around a celestial confluence.
It's said to be… disorienting. Dangerous." "More dangerous than reality unraveling?" Kaito asked dryly, packing a satchel with supplies that included non-perishable food, ropes, and several sunstones for light.
"Differently dangerous," Haruto said, folding a map. His mind was already half in the problem, running through variables.
"The rifts are a violent tear.
The Glimmerwood is a… gentle fraying.
If a Chronomancer exists anywhere we can reach, it will be there, observing the loose threads."
The journey to the eastern border where the Glimmerwood lay was a study in escalating unease.
The familiar landscapes of Esteria began to soften at the edges.
Colors grew more vivid, then strangely muted within steps.
Birdsong would drop mid-trill and restart from the beginning.
They passed a farmer plowing a field who waved at them, and when they looked back a moment later, the field was fallow and the farmer was gone.
By the time they reached the forest's edge, the world had lost its temporal anchor.
One foot was in the cool, dewy grass of morning; the other, a few inches ahead, stood in the hot, dry dirt of afternoon.
The forest itself was breathtaking and deeply wrong.
In one clearing, autumn leaves fell in golden showers under a noon sun, while ten feet away, spring buds swelled on branches under a twilight sky.
The air smelled of all seasons at once—wet earth, dry hay, blooming night-flowers, and winter frost.
"Don't separate," Haruto warned, his voice sounding thin and stretched.
"If time is fractured here, we could step into different moments."
They moved in a tight triangle, staying in physical contact. The forest resisted mapping.
A path would lead to a familiar-looking rock, only for them to pass it and find it ahead of them again.
They drank from a stream only to feel thirstier, as if the water had traveled backward in their bodies.
After hours of tense navigation, they found the heart of the Echo.
It was a small, circular grove where the temporal chaos coalesced into something like order.
In the center stood a single, ancient tree whose bark showed rings that pulsed with soft light.
Beneath it, seated on a root that seemed to exist in both moss-covered youth and polished age, was the Chronomancer.
She was not old, nor young. She was sequential. Her form shifted subtly as they watched: one moment a child with curious eyes, the next a woman in her prime with a stern brow, then an elder with a face like a river-worn stone, and back again.
She was surrounded not by objects, but by floating, translucent gears and clockwork made of solidified light, ticking in a discordant, polyrhythmic harmony.
Her gaze, when it settled on them, was not a look from one person, but the accumulated regard of a thousand observers across ages.
"You are early," the child-version said, her voice high and clear.
"And late," the woman added, her tone analytical.
"You are precisely on time for the moment you chose to arrive," the elder finished, her voice a dry rustle.
The three statements overlapped, creating a chilling chord of temporal dislocation.
Haruto stepped forward, bowing slightly. "We seek the Keeper of Time.
The world is wounded."
"A world is wounded," the Chronomancer corrected, her forms cycling. The child pointed a finger at Haruto.
"Your world." The woman gestured to Lyra and Kaito.
"Their world. The thread is fraying between two needles on the loom.
A violent pull has strained the weave." She was describing the collapse of the Great Silence.
"Can you help us mend it?" Lyra asked, her voice steady despite the unnerving presence.
The Chronomancer's forms stilled for a moment, settling into the elder visage.
The light-gears spun faster.
"I do not mend. I… adjust tension. I guard the flow. Your solution is not to stitch the tear—that would create a weak, knotted scar that would burst again. You must create an anchor. A point of stability in both fabrics, so the tension equalizes and the weave settles around it."
An anchor.
Haruto's mind raced. "An object? A place?" "An object of profound significance to the point of tearing," the elder said.
"It must be a thing that holds meaning in both worlds, for the one who stands at the tear's origin."
Her eyes, deep and timeless, locked on Haruto.
"You are the singularity. The tear exists because you were pulled through it. Therefore, the anchor must be of you. It must be charged with the balanced essence of both worlds—the chaotic potential of this one, the ordered stillness of your origin."
Haruto understood. He reached into the inner pocket of his tunic and pulled out the one object from his old life he had kept: a simple, silver wristwatch.
A gift from his father for his sixteenth birthday. It had stopped the moment he arrived in Esteria, the hands frozen at 10:07 AM.
He hadn't worn it in years, but he couldn't bring himself to discard it. He held it up.
The Chronomancer's younger form leaned in with curiosity.
"A timekeeper that measures only one flow.
How quaint. And potent. Yes. This has weight in both narratives.
Your past. Your present. Its stillness is its strength." "What do we do?" Kaito asked, practical as ever.
"You must perform a ritual at the site of the original summoning in this world, and at a place of equal emotional resonance in your origin world.
The object must be present at both, acting as a tuning fork.
You must charge it with opposing yet complementary energies: pure Light, to represent the ordered laws of your first world, and balanced Shadow, to represent the chaotic potential you embraced here.
When activated in unison, it will create a harmonic stabilizer. The rifts will not vanish, but they will stabilize into fixed, non-destructive points. Bridges, not wounds."
The cost, however, was profound.
"The ritual is interdimensional,"
the woman-form stated.
"To place the anchor in your origin world, someone must cross over. Not through a wild rift, but by using the anchor's nascent resonance as a temporary, stable pathway. It is a one-way journey until the anchor is set. And the pathway will be… fragile."
They would have to go to Tokyo. Haruto felt a surge of vertigo that had nothing to do with the Glimmerwood's temporal shifts. He looked at Lyra, then at Kaito.
He couldn't ask this of them. But Lyra's hand found his, and her touch was an answer.
Kaito gave a single, sharp nod. They had their plan. A desperate, cosmic plan that hinged on a stopped watch, a leap of faith between worlds, and the hope that they could find a place in Tokyo that held the same emotional weight as the spot where Haruto's life had been torn in two.
The Chronomancer's forms began to cycle again, fading into the shimmering air of the grove.
"You have your thread and your needle," the overlapping voices echoed, growing distant. "The stitching is up to you. Be swift. The fabric is beginning to rip."