The Sovereign's Will did not land gracefully. It fell from the sky like a hammer of judgment.
Marcus Vane wrestled with the controls of the massive dreadnought. The bridge was a cacophony of alarms.
"Atmospheric drag at 400%!" Marcus shouted. "The shields are burning off! We're too heavy for a soft landing!"
"We don't need soft," Julian stood by the viewport, watching the clouds part. "We just need to not explode."
Below them lay the Silent Sands.
It wasn't a normal desert. It was a vast, blinding expanse of white silica dust, stretching for thousands of miles in the dead center of the continent. There were no dunes, no wind, no rocks. Just a flat, white sheet of nothingness.
And it was silent.
As the ship descended below 10,000 feet, the sensors died.
ZZZ-POP.
The holographic screens on the bridge flickered and turned to static. The radar went blank. The comms dissolved into white noise.
"The jamming field," Skid tapped her useless datapad frantically. "It's not electronic. It's... ontological. The physics down there are wrong. The electrons aren't flowing straight."
"Visual flight rules!" Isolde jumped into the co-pilot seat. "Aim for the dark spot!"
In the center of the white waste, there was a massive crater. It looked like a sinkhole where the world had simply deleted itself.
"Brace for impact!"
The Sovereign's Will slammed into the silica plain, five miles from the crater edge. The landing struts crushed the white ground. A wave of dust rose up, swallowing the ship. The inertia threw them all against their harnesses.
Then, stillness.
The Dead Zone
"Atmosphere check," Julian unbuckled, his nanite arm humming with a low, agitated vibration.
"Breathable," Marcus said, checking a manual gauge on his wrist (analog tech was the only thing working). "But dry. Zero humidity."
They geared up. Julian, Lyra, Zephyr, Skid, Isolde, and Marcus. They left a skeleton crew of freed prisoners (from the ship's brig) to guard the dreadnought.
They lowered the ramp.
The silence hit them instantly.
It wasn't the quiet of an empty room. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a recording booth. The white sand absorbed every footstep. When Zephyr spoke, his voice didn't echo; it fell flat, dead at his feet.
"I do not like this," Zephyr whispered, clutching his staff. "The wind is trapped here. It cannot move."
"This place is a graveyard," Julian said, kneeling to touch the sand.
It wasn't sand. It was Bone Dust.
He looked at the horizon. The white plain wasn't silica. It was the pulverized calcium of billions of ancient sea creatures, ground down over eons.
"The map said the Lost Titan is here," Lyra checked her compass. The needle was spinning wildly. "But there's nothing here. Just the crater."
"The crater is the door," Julian said. "Let's walk."
The Glitch
They trekked toward the dark sinkhole. The sun beat down, reflecting off the white dust, creating heat mirages.
But the mirages were... specific.
Julian saw a flicker in the air. For a second, he saw the Scrapyard. Then he saw the Jungle. Then the Throne Room.
"Is anyone else seeing that?" Isolde rubbed her eyes. "I just saw my garage in the Undercity."
"I see the wind," Zephyr stared at a patch of shimmering air. "Blue currents. But they are not real."
"It's Temporal Bleed," Skid realized. "The static field isn't just jamming radio waves. It's jamming time. This place is a memory leak."
Suddenly, a shape materialized in front of them.
It was a Soldier. But he flickered like a bad hologram. He wore armor from the Pre-Collapse Era—the Harmonic Ascendancy.
The ghost-soldier looked at Julian. He opened his mouth to scream, but only static came out.
KRRRR-ZZZT.
Then, he dissolved into pixels of white light.
"Echoes," Julian said. "This place remembers the war."
The Sinkhole
They reached the edge of the crater. It was colossal—ten miles wide.
And floating in the center of the pit was the Titan.
Titan 00: The Chronos-Keeper.
It didn't look like a warrior. It looked like an Hourglass.
Two massive pyramids of black stone, connected at the tips. The top pyramid floated upside down; the bottom pyramid was buried in the earth. Between them, in the narrow waist of the hourglass, a stream of golden sand flowed endlessly upward, defying gravity.
Surrounding the Titan were floating islands of rock, suspended in mid-air.
"It's not asleep," Marcus whispered, staring at the geometry. "It's... paused."
"Why is it hidden?" Lyra asked.
"Because it's dangerous," Julian sensed the resonance. It was heavy, slow, and terrifying. "This Titan doesn't control elements. It controls Entropy. Decay. Time."
"If we wake it up," Skid warned, "what happens to the timeline?"
"We don't have a choice," Julian said. "The Dissonance is coming. We need a Pause button."
The Guardians of the Sand
They began to descend into the crater, hopping across the floating rock islands.
"Movement!" Lyra aimed her rifle.
Emerging from the black stone of the lower pyramid were creatures. They looked like statues made of obsidian and gold sand. They had no legs, just swirling vortexes of dust.
Entropy Stalkers.
"They're phasing!" Lyra fired.
Her bullet passed straight through the Stalker's chest as if it were smoke. The creature didn't flinch. It reformed and lunged.
Its touch didn't cut. It Aged.
The Stalker swiped at a floating rock. The rock instantly turned to dust and crumbled away.
"Don't let them touch you!" Marcus yelled. "They accelerate time! They'll turn you to dust in seconds!"
"How do we kill something we can't touch?" Isolde swung her wrench, but backed away as a Stalker hissed at her.
"They're loose matter," Julian analyzed. "Held together by a frequency."
He raised his nanite arm.
"Zephyr! I need a containment field! Keep the dust in one place!"
Zephyr nodded. He spun his staff, creating a localized whirlwind around three of the Stalkers. The vortex trapped their sand-bodies, forcing them into a solid shape.
"Now!"
Julian fired a Stasis Pulse.
THWUMP.
He hit the trapped Stalkers with a wave of low-frequency sound. The vibration forced the sand particles to lock together.
The creatures solidified. They turned into fragile glass statues.
"Lyra!"
Lyra switched to explosive rounds. BANG.
The glass statues shattered.
"We have to get to the waist!" Julian pointed to the center of the hourglass Titan. "That's the control node!"
The Gate of Yesterday
They fought their way down, shattering the glass ghosts as they went. They reached the central platform—a bridge of light connecting the two pyramids.
Standing at the gate was a figure.
It wasn't a monster. It was a woman.
She wore the robes of the Harmonic Ascendancy. She looked young, but her eyes were ancient. She was translucent, fading in and out of reality.
"Halt," she spoke. Her voice echoed in their minds, not their ears.
"I am the Keeper," she said. "The memory of the machine."
She looked at Julian.
"You carry the blood of the Traitor," she said, sensing his DNA. "Arthur Vane. The man who broke the song."
"I am his son," Julian stepped forward. "And I'm here to fix it."
"Fix?" The Keeper laughed sadly. "Time cannot be fixed, child. Only endured. Why do you wake the Chronos? Do you wish to see the end of the world?"
"The end is already here," Julian pointed to the sky. "The Dissonance is returning. We need the Titan to fight it."
The Keeper's expression hardened.
"The Chronos does not fight," she said. "It resets. If you activate this Titan... it will not shoot the enemy. It will Rewind the world to before the infection."
The team froze.
"Rewind?" Marcus asked. "How far?"
"To the beginning," the Keeper said. "Before the Empire. Before the Rust. Before you were born."
"It's a reset button," Skid realized, horrified. "It wipes everything. All of history. All of us."
"That's why the Emperor hid it," Julian realized. "He didn't want to die. He didn't want to lose his kingdom."
"You cannot use this weapon," the Keeper warned. "To save the world, you must destroy it."
Julian looked at the massive hourglass. The sand flowing upward.
"There has to be another way," Julian said. "We don't want a reset. We want a weapon."
"There is no other mode," the Keeper began to fade. "Turn back. Or be erased."
She vanished.
The floating islands began to shake. The Titan was reacting to their presence. The golden sand flowed faster.
"Julian," Lyra said softly. "If we turn this on... do we cease to exist?"
Julian looked at his nanite arm. He looked at his brother. He looked at the scars they carried.
"If we reset," Julian said, "the Dissonance never happens. But neither do we."
"We need to hack it," Skid said. "We need to change the function. Make it target the enemy's time, not ours."
"Can you do that?"
"I can try," Skid ran to the interface node. "But I need time. And those sand-things are coming back."
Hundreds of Entropy Stalkers were rising from the pit.
"Hold the line!" Julian roared, charging his arm. "Protect the hacker! We're rewriting history!"