The sky over London remained overcast, wrapped in copper fog that knew no morning. The ticking from the city's clocks sounded like droplets of molten metal falling into a well of memories.
After leaving the Temple of Chronos with an unfamiliar throb pulsing in his wound, Elias Thorn returned to his temporary dwelling—a crooked old attic filled with maps, broken clocks, and a vault of relics he no longer remembered stealing.
But that night, none of it caught his attention.
The Sealed Solar Codex, an artifact he had hidden since the last day he saw Livia, now pulsed faintly inside his worn leather satchel. Like a mechanical heart. Like something awakening from a long slumber.
He placed the Codex atop a rusted metal table and exhaled.
The book looked ordinary at first glance—its outer skin made of pitch-dark material that absorbed light, marked by a thirteen-pointed sun etched at its center. But every time Elias blinked, the symbol seemed to shift. Sometimes a sun. Sometimes an hourglass. Sometimes an Ouroboros consuming itself.
He opened the first page slowly, as if even his breath might destroy its surface.No familiar writing. Only symbols—letters from an alphabet that rearranged themselves each time he looked away.The symbols... knew they were being watched.
His hands trembled.
"Seconds hidden, minutes silenced."
The whisper came from nowhere—his head, or perhaps the gap between the pages.
Then the door below exploded open.
A woman emerged from smoke and burnt wiring—dark crimson hair tied back with an ink ribbon, high-laced black boots, and a tilted journalist's cap.In her right hand: a pen as sharp as a needle.In her left: a half-burned search warrant from The Chronos Mirror.
"Elias Thorn," she said coldly."A name appearing in three different timelines, in three conflicting reports.All ending in a year that doesn't exist."
Elias slowly shut the Codex, hiding it beneath his sleeve.
"Who are you?"
"Lysandra Vale.Truth-seeker. Protocol-breaker. And if you lie, perhaps your undertaker."
She stepped in, surveying the room. Beneath her boots, an old pocket watch shattered to pieces.
Lysandra: 165 cm tall, sharp silver eyes. Her face bore tiny scars—ink alchemy burns.Long black leather coat with a crossed-pen emblem.Around her neck hung an old camera—its lenses turning by themselves.
Elias raised an eyebrow.
"You photograph time?"
"Not photograph. Trap it."Her smirk held venom.
Their meeting bristled with tension.Lysandra suspected Elias was hiding something vast. The Chronos Mirror—an underground paper banned across five major time zones—had uncovered history fragments that seemed rewritten, as if time had been erased and rewritten by an invisible hand.
"We call it the Protocol," she said, tossing aged news prints onto the table."History that can't be tracked, tested, or explained—yet its effects are real.Epidemics never recorded. Revolutions that never occurred.And now—London, fading from reality."
Elias stared, trying to decipher her intent.
"You think this Codex… is the key?"
Lysandra looked at it like one would stare into the sun through blackened glass.
"I know more than I let on."
Elias took a slow breath.
"You don't know what you're chasing, Vale."
"But you do," she replied."And that's enough."
They forged a temporary pact—a cold alliance between two secret-heavy souls.Elias didn't fully trust her, but instinct said he needed someone who knew this hidden world better than appearances suggested.
By the second night, they opened the Codex together.
The early pages grew slightly clearer—architectural oddities, inverted clock diagrams, fragments of a script resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs, layered with temporal distortion.But one page drew their attention:
The final page.
Blank.Pale white. Smooth. Yet it reflected light—as if a glow pulsed beneath its surface.
Elias touched it with the tip of his finger.
Instantly, a burning sensation surged from skin to bone.
He recoiled. His fingertip reddened, lightly blistered.As if scorched by direct sunlight—though night had fallen, and no heat filled the room.
Lysandra watched.
"That's no ordinary page."
Elias fell silent. Then he said, "It is the sun, sealed within words that have yet to be written."
Meanwhile, Elias's pocket watch—which had long been still—suddenly pulsed once, then stopped again. But that single second was enough to shake reality.
Elias's shadow on the wall... moved before his body did.
Lysandra saw it. They stared at each other.
Behind the blank page, they both understood one thing:Time had become aware of them.And it had begun to count down.