Time fractured.
It did not stop but buckled, reshaped itself under the weight of Zeirion's ascent. Across the Realms, every hourglass cracked, every sundial shattered. The flow of time no longer obeyed the old gods. It bent toward the throne of dust and fire, to the will that sat upon it.
And in the Citadel Beyond Clocks, a place once sealed from causality, the Chrono-Assembly panicked.
Eighty-seven Keepers of Continuum gathered in spiral formation, each one draped in threads woven from centuries. The air trembled with the sound of ticking hearts not theirs, but those they kept imprisoned within sacred gears. Time was not natural here it was currency, law, and soul.
"He has disrupted the loop," spoke Grand Archivist Selhane, her voice trailing across six tenses at once. "History no longer obeys itself."
"Worse," hissed Keeper Tervin, whose skin flickered with flashes of past versions of himself, "Zeirion remembers things we erased. He sees cracks that were never meant to be seen."
"But how?" asked the youngest of them all, Keeper Vael, who still wept when centuries collapsed.
"Because he is not bound by chronology," Selhane whispered. "He is becoming the sovereign of sequence."
From their great prism of cascading echoes, the Assembly looked into the Stream of Time. They saw its banks flood, its walls burst. Visions emerged.
Zeirion, sword raised against a sky made of clocks.
Aralya, walking across broken timelines, gathering shattered potential into constellations of purpose.
The child born in the Ember-Future, carrying Zeirion's eyes.
And worse still the Black Spiral, that ancient chain of causality long sealed beyond entropy, stirring once more.
"He's not just rewriting the future," Tervin said. "He's unmaking the lock."
Selhane bowed her head.
"Then the Second Sundering is no longer prophecy."
"It's now."
Far from the fractured Citadel, in the living dusk of the Duskmire Expanse, Zeirion stood upon a mirror-lake of memories. Each ripple beneath his boots showed a moment from his long, cruel past kingdoms he had burned, oaths he had broken, lives he had ended in pursuit of the impossible.
And yet beside him, Aralya stood. Unwavering.
"You feel it, don't you?" she asked softly, her voice brushing against the edges of forgotten regret.
"The Spiral stirs," he murmured. "The last lock on the truth."
Aralya watched him, her silver-white hair glowing in the lowlight. "You'll have to choose soon."
"I always knew I would."
"Between what you were," she said, "and what the world needs you to become."
He looked down at the lake. A ripple formed.
In it, a child his son, perhaps, or something stranger smiled back. A promise not yet broken.
Zeirion clenched his hand.
Then the mirror lake shattered, not by power, but by will.
He turned to Aralya. "We go west. To the Spiral."
She nodded.
"But Zei," she said, gently, "if the lock breaks there's no going back."
"I don't want to go back," he said. "I want to go beyond."
And so, with the past cracked behind them, and time beginning to unravel ahead, the Sovereign and his beloved marched toward the final axis of all things.
To the Black Spiral.
To the beginning of something far greater.