The outer district of Neotera was always wrapped in a kind of dusk, even at noon. Smoke curled from cracked exhaust fans and vents embedded in the steel walls of floating towers. Everything stank faintly of rust, grease, and broken promises. Above, the rich cities glowed like stars that had decided not to fall. Below, people like Arin clung to the shadows like they were warmth.
It had rained the night before. Not real rain. Just wastewater recycled and dumped from the upper sectors. It coated the streets in filth and made the neon signs flicker. A half-working one near Arin's hideout read: "Glory to Progress."
Progress. Arin snorted quietly, crouched under a collapsed drone frame. The world didn't progress down here. It looped. Same hunger, same fear, same scramble for something edible.
He held a broken piece of mirror in his hands, careful not to slice his fingers. He didn't know why he kept it. He didn't like looking at himself. His eyes were too dark, too tired for someone barely sixteen. His hair was black and shaggy, uneven from his last attempt to cut it with scavenged scissors. But it wasn't the reflection that bothered him. It was the mark.
A strange, faintly glowing circle etched into his inner wrist. Perfectly symmetrical. Always warm. And some nights, when the moonlight hit it just right, it hummed.
"Time is breaking," a voice had once whispered to him. A voice that came not from outside, but within his thoughts. It had happened two weeks ago. Maybe longer. Time was slippery.
He didn't tell anyone about the mark. In Neotera, strange things got you killed. Or worse, handed over to the Corp-Saints or the Memory Collectors. Either way, you disappeared.
A gust of wind stirred the trash piles. Arin froze. Movement. Someone was nearby.
He pocketed the mirror fragment and slipped silently behind a stack of discarded cybernetic limbs. His instincts were sharp. Living on the streets made sure of that.
From the alley's end, a group of three boys approached, older and meaner. Gutterjack, Vren, and Slade. Street gang wannabes with more muscle than brain. Arin recognized the makeshift pipe in Slade's hand.
"Told you he'd be here," Gutterjack sneered. "Like a rat with habits."
Arin didn't wait for them to surround him. He bolted.
He knew this district like he knew the rhythm of his own breath. Left at the tech scrapyard, over the tilted drone wing, through the crack in the fence.
But today, something was wrong.
As he reached the fence and slipped through, he felt it—a tug. Not physical. Temporal. Like reality blinked.
The world shimmered for a second.
The trash piles rearranged themselves. A broken vending bot that had been on its side now stood upright. A dead rat twitched, then scrambled away alive.
Arin stopped, breath caught in his throat.
Had time... reversed?
"Impossible," he whispered.
Behind him, the boys yelled, but it sounded distant. Echoed. Slowed. Like they were underwater.
And then he saw it.
A light. Soft. Pulsing. Not far ahead, half-buried beneath a collapsed wall. A glow that felt... ancient.
He stepped toward it, heart thudding.
As he pulled aside a sheet of scrap metal, he uncovered something he had no words for.
A shard.
It hovered, just slightly above the ground. Smooth, obsidian-black, with a core of liquid silver constantly shifting inside. The moment his eyes met it, the mark on his wrist blazed with heat.
Arin fell to his knees, gasping. Visions poured into him.
A city in the sky burning.
A god with eyes like collapsing stars screaming his name.
Twelve thrones. Empty. Waiting.
He clutched his head, trying to make it stop.
The shard trembled.
"ARIN," a voice boomed, ancient and layered. Not male or female, but both. Time itself speaking.
"YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO BE. YET YOU ARE."
A hand reached for his mind. Not physically, but it felt real. And in that moment, Arin saw his own reflection not in the shard, but in the future.
Blood. War. Betrayal. Glory. And at the end of it all—a choice.
To restore time. Or shatter it.
Then everything snapped back.
The glow faded. The shard dimmed and dropped into his hands, heavy like a piece of destiny.
Behind him, the boys burst through the fence.
"There! Get him!"
But Arin was no longer the same boy.
He turned.
And for a second, as Slade charged, time froze.
Not for Arin.
For the world.
The wind stilled. Dust hung midair. The sound stopped.
Arin blinked. The shard pulsed in his palm.
He stepped aside.
Slade, locked mid-motion, tumbled forward as time resumed. He crashed into the wall with a grunt.
The others stumbled, confused.
Arin didn't wait. He ran.
But this time, he wasn't just running to escape. He was running toward something.
Something bigger than Neotera. Bigger than this broken world.
Bigger than the gods who once ruled time.
Later that night, far above the clouds, in a sealed chamber of the forgotten spire of Chronaelis, a second shard pulsed to life.
A silver-robed figure stirred, eyes glowing with fractured light.
"He's awakened it..." they murmured. "It begins."
From a crystal slab, twelve names lit up.
One of them now burned brightest.
ARIN.
End of Chapter 1