Time doesn't bury things. It waits until you're looking the other way, then exhales them back into your skin.
The wind in Azrael City had changed.
It used to whisper the names of the dead. Now it hummed like something remembering—remembering too much.
Kai hadn't spoken in hours.
Not since Elio whispered the girl's name.Serai.
Her name bled down his spine like a spell gone wrong.He didn't just remember her.
He remembered killing her.
They sat in the safehouse, candles flickering against cracked walls and a map of the city that refused to stay still. Elio stood at the window, watching time twist in the streets—carts from 1820 beside hoverbikes from 3099.
Everything was glitching.Every timeline bleeding into the next.
"Kai," he said, "we broke the seal."
Kai didn't look up. "We broke more than that."
Downstairs, something knocked.
Not once.Not twice.
Three times. Like a heartbeat. Like a countdown.
Elio moved fast, hand glowing with a warding spell.
He opened the door.
No one there.
But there was a letter. Folded once. Dripping water. Smelling like burnt lavender.
He picked it up.
Unfolded it
Elio picked up the letter, fingers trembling.
The ink was alive.
Not metaphorically—literally. It curled across the page like it was remembering how to write itself.
He read aloud:
"The girl you forgot remembers you still.""Serai stands where the flame first flickered.""Come. Or let her die again."
Kai's mouth went dry.
"The Ash Tree," he whispered.
"The one in Fyrna?" Elio asked.
Kai shook his head. "Not the real one. The first one. The seedling we planted before the gods ever found us."
Elio froze.
"You're saying... we created the place time first broke?"
Kai nodded. "I think Fyrna was just the echo."
They left that night.
No lanterns.No weapons.Just the blood-bound ring Kai had never removed and a mirror shard that vibrated whenever lies were spoken nearby.
They took the Clockway Line—the train that moved not through space, but time corridors. It was supposed to be shut down, abandoned since the Loop Wars.
But as they stepped into the terminal—
—time blinked.
The tracks flickered between rust and gold.A conductor with no face tipped his hat.
"Elio," Kai said, heart thudding, "I think we're already inside the loop again."
Elio didn't answer.
He was staring at the other passengers.
Each one had his face.
They sat in silence.
Opposite them sat a version of Kai with black eyes and no mouth.
Next to him, Elio saw a child version of himself—clutching a locket, crying into his sleeves.
And farther down...
A girl.
Silver eyes. Braided hair. Skin like smoke.
Serai.
She looked right at him.
Kai stood.
The train shuddered.
Serai raised a finger—pressed it to her lips.
Then she mouthed the words:
"You let me burn."
The window shattered.Smoke poured in.The train screamed, groaned—ripped itself off the rails of time.
They woke on the platform of a forest that shouldn't exist.
Elio staggered to his feet. "What is this place?"
Kai looked around. The trees weren't trees—they were memories. Each trunk pulsed with glowing veins, images flickering across the bark: childhoods, deaths, kisses, murders.
"We're inside the Seed Grove," he whispered. "Where time takes root."
At the center of the grove stood a girl. No older than ten. Clutching a burnt doll.
Serai.
But younger.
And somehow, still older than them both.
"You promised to protect me," she said.
Her voice wasn't cruel. It was worse.
It was disappointed.
Kai knelt. "I didn't know what I was giving up."
"But you gave it anyway," she said. "You picked him. Again and again. And every time, I was the casualty."
Elio swallowed. "I didn't even remember you until last night."
Serai's eyes flickered. "Exactly."
The trees groaned behind her.
"You're not here to save me," she whispered. "You're here because you're afraid I'll remember what you did."
She opened her palm.
Inside it? A fragment of the original mirror.
The one that split the gods.
And as she stepped forward—
—the trees screamed.
The grove caught fire.
And Serai burned.
Again.
The train didn't stop when it arrived in Ilyor.
It bled into the town like memory does after too much wine—slow, hot, and full of things better left buried.
The platform wasn't a platform.
It was a pyre.
Old wood scorched black. Ash embedded in every crack. The scent of burned flowers and forgotten prayers filled the air.
Kai stepped down, Elio close behind, and both of them immediately felt it—
The ache of recognition.
They had been here before.
In another loop. Another life.
Kai remembered petals drifting through firelight.Elio remembered screaming her name—Serai—into a night that swallowed sound.
The town of Ilyor didn't exist on any map because it wasn't a town.
It was a consequence.
A place where time once folded in on itself, collapsing cause and effect into something ugly and sacred.
A small child ran past them, giggling.
Then vanished.
Elio turned. "Did you see that?"
Kai didn't answer. He was staring at the town square.
At the mirror altar.
Half-melted. Still pulsing with energy.Still screaming in a frequency only souls understood.
The last time they stood there, they had made a pact.
"One loop left," they'd said.
But they broke that vow.
They always did.
They walked toward the altar, the streets empty and too quiet. Dust floated upward, not down.A crow sat on a lamp post, head spinning in full circles, whispering names.
When they reached the altar, it whispered again—
"Choose again. Or lose again."
Kai pressed his fingers against the cracked mirror surface. It trembled.
Not glass. Not reflection.
Memory.
Suddenly, Elio gasped and dropped to his knees.
A flash—a ritual.
Serai, bound in golden thread. Kai holding a dagger of stars. Elio standing back, silent, choosing not to stop it.
"I REMEMBER," Elio whispered. "We sacrificed her... to save ourselves."
Kai looked at him, breathless. "She was our anchor."
"And we burned her."
A tremor shook Ilyor.
The past screamed back to life.
They saw it—the firestorm, the collapsing timelines, Serai's eyes locking with theirs as she vanished into the rift they had created.
"You will loop until you mourn me properly," her voice echoed from every crack.
"Until you choose each other without forgetting me."
Then the altar cracked.
A new path revealed itself—downward. Into the catacombs. Into what they buried beneath time.
Kai stood. "She's giving us one more chance."
Elio, still shaking, nodded. "Then this time... we remember her name. Every time."
They stepped into the darkness—
And the door closed behind them.