The clock rang again.
A low, haunting tone that didn't echo—it lingered, hanging in the air like a living thing.
Kael staggered back from the water's edge, breathing fast. His reflection was gone. No ripple, no distortion. Just empty water staring back like a dead eye.
The mark on his hand spun faster now. The five concentric circles rotated at different speeds, glowing faintly beneath his skin. With each tick of the lake-clock, the glow pulsed stronger—synchronizing.
Kael didn't know what the mark was. But something inside him did.
Like a muscle he didn't remember building.
Like memory trapped in his bones.
He turned to run—but froze.
The forest behind him had changed.
Where the glass trees had stood moments before, there were now stone statues—human-shaped, faceless, lined in perfect, unnatural rows. Hundreds of them. All facing him.
Kael stepped back slowly.
The air was cold again.
Then—
> crack
A fissure formed in one of the statues' chests. A glowing thread of blue light leaked out, like veins under marble.
Another tick from the lake-clock.
> crack
Another statue split—then another—until a chorus of hairline fractures formed across the forest of stone men.
And they began to breathe.
Not move. Not wake.
Breathe.
Stone shoulders rising. Chests expanding with impossible sound. No lungs. No mouths. Just the cold mechanical inhale of things that remembered being alive.
Kael turned and ran.
His boots skidded on the crystalline ground. Glass leaves shattered beneath him like fragile ice. But the trees never ended. The forest kept folding in on itself, as if he were running inside a maze that moved when he wasn't looking.
Behind him, the breathing statues exhaled all at once.
And from the lake, a new sound: ticking, but deeper. Underwater ticking.
He turned his head.
And saw the lake rippling inward, like the surface was being pulled down into itself.
At its center, the great submerged clock turned.
Its minute hand clicked backward.
And something opened beneath it.
A vertical slit. Black. Endless.
Then something looked up through it.
Kael didn't see an eye. He didn't need to.
His mark burned.
And a word entered his mind—not in sound, but in permission:
> "First Protocol: Memory Reinstatement."
Kael dropped to his knees, screaming.
The world flickered—like reality buffering.
And in one split second, he remembered burning.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
He remembered choking in a sealed white room. He remembered running before, in a different body, with different eyes, smashing a control panel and screaming at someone he couldn't see:
> "If I remember too soon, the Protocol fails!"
And then—darkness.
Kael gasped back into the present.
Blood dripped from his nose.
The mark had stopped spinning. For now.
He looked around.
The forest was still.
The statues were gone.
But now, carved into every tree, was a single symbol: ⊗
He didn't know what it meant.
But the sky above cracked louder.
And far away, behind the next ridge of hills, a new clock had begun ticking.
---
End of Chapter Two