The corridor spat them out into the open air.
Shaleven's sky was wrong.
Not dark. Not bright.
Just… tilted.
The twin moons hung low, almost touching—far earlier than they should have in the lunar cycle. Around them, the constellations pulsed like heartbeats, shifting places when no one blinked.
Nyrelle stumbled to her knees, clutching her head.
"It's begun," she whispered. "The Convergence. It's not supposed to start for decades."
Ashling still felt the anchor's pulse inside her chest—a double rhythm that wasn't hers alone. Keiran's voice whispered beneath every other thought, not in words, but in sensations: rain on old stone, firelight on scarred hands, the ache of a name unspoken for too long.
Lys scanned the horizon. "We need to move before—"
He didn't finish.
The ground twitched.
It wasn't an earthquake. It was a correction.
Reality stuttered, then reasserted itself, leaving behind gaps—places where a tree had been replaced by a river, or a boulder turned into a flight of stairs leading nowhere.
Nyrelle's voice cracked. "The citadel is pushing itself back into history, and the world is resisting."
From the direction of the Hall of Severance, a low note rolled through the land, shaking their bones. The sound didn't fade—it followed them, threading itself into the air like a persistent thought.
Ashling knew it for what it was: the tether.
The anchor wasn't dormant anymore—it was searching.
"It's calling the rest of him," she murmured.
They moved quickly across the ridge, following Nyrelle's muttered star-charts. But the further they went, the stranger the terrain became.
A forest of petrified trees stood in the path, their trunks engraved with moments—images from lives neither of them had lived. Some of the carvings were still moving.
Ashling stopped at one: a depiction of Keiran, much younger, holding a blade at his side while facing a woman with silver-threaded eyes. The image's lips moved, but the voice was missing, stolen by time.
Lys tugged her forward. "We can't stay here. These aren't just records—they're traps. The Concordium plants them to snare the curious."
They emerged into a clearing—and stopped.
Four figures stood there. Not Echo-Redactors this time. These wore armor shaped like open books, their faces hidden behind mirrored masks. Index Sentinels. The Concordium's keepers of place rather than word.
Their leader raised a spear that shimmered with flickering locations—whole cities, mountains, and rivers sliding along its length.
"Return the anchor," he said, voice steady. "The Convergence will not be allowed to complete."
Ashling stepped forward. "And if I don't?"
"Then the first toll will be collected."
The spear struck the ground.
Somewhere far behind them, in Trenhal Hollow, a church bell rang—though there was no bell in the hollow, and no one left alive to ring it.
Nyrelle's eyes widened. "They've started deleting time."
Lys gritted his teeth. "Ashling—move."
But the Sentinels didn't close in. They only stood, blocking the path, as the bell rang again.
And Ashling realized with a chill what they were doing.
Not deleting time here.
Deleting it there.
Keiran's earliest moments—his first days in Shaleven—were being unwritten.
And if enough of those tolls were taken, the anchor inside her would have nothing left to bind to.
"We break through," Ashling said.
Lys drew steel. Nyrelle readied her runes.
The Sentinels lowered their mirrored masks. Ashling caught her reflection in them—though it wasn't her now. It was her, older, with Keiran's eyes.
And then the tolling stopped.
Not because the Sentinels had finished—
Because something else was ringing back.
From the citadel.
From the Hall that shouldn't exist anymore.
A counter-bell.
Louder.
Calling the missing time home.
The Sentinels staggered. Their mirrored faces cracked. And through those fractures, Ashling glimpsed stars she didn't recognize—constellations from some other age.
She didn't understand them. But the anchor did.
Keiran's voice pressed into her thoughts for the first time since leaving the Hall.
"Go to the River That Remembers."
The path ahead split into a dozen shifting roads. But one of them smelled faintly of rain on old stone.
They ran.