There was no road anymore.

  Casen and Elian walked across what felt like glass memories—cracked reflections of streets and cities that no longer existed. Underfoot, the ground flickered. Sometimes it felt like cobblestone, other times sand. At one point, Casen stepped forward and found nothing beneath his foot for half a second. Then the world caught up.

  "Is this... time?" he muttered.

  Elian kept close. Her voice was low, almost reverent. "No. It’s everything time didn’t want us to see."

  Above them, the sky churned. Not clouds, but moments. A mother calling her child. A soldier dropping his weapon. A boy kissing someone he’d never meet again. All of them looping, fading, restarting.

  The Faultline wasn’t just a break in the world. It was a place where all the broken pieces came to rest.

  Ahead, a structure emerged from the haze.

  A tower.

  It wasn’t tall. Just jagged. Half-formed, like it had been built from thoughts that didn’t finish. Its walls pulsed with ghost-light. Not Return energy, not quite—but similar.

  Elian stepped forward. "This is the core. I feel it."

  Casen hesitated. "So what do we do? Burn it down?"

  "We remember it," a voice said.

  They turned.

  Another figure stood at the base of the tower. Young, but tired. His coat was identical to Casen’s. His eyes? Too familiar.

  "You..." Casen started.

  The figure smiled sadly. "Yeah. I’m you. Or a version that made it farther. I crossed the Faultline years ago. I tried to warn them. I failed."

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  Elian stepped between them. "Then help us. What is this place really?"

  Casen-2 looked at the tower. "It’s the anchor point. The machine buried in memory. The one that triggered the first fracture. Someone turned it on to reverse a moment they couldn't live with. But the cost wasn't time. It was reality."

  Casen approached. "Who?"

  Casen-2 didn’t answer. Instead, he touched the tower.

  It responded. Light surged, patterns unfurling like petals made of data. A door appeared.

  Inside, machines slept. Huge gears. Endless spools of tape. Analog tech that pulsed with living memory.

  Elian whispered, "This isn't science. It's grief. Someone built this to undo pain."

  Casen turned to his other self. "What do we do?"

  Casen-2 stepped aside. "Only one of you can go inside. If both enter, the thread breaks."

  Elian didn’t flinch. "Then I go."

  Casen caught her wrist. "Wait. What if it erases you?"

  "What if it erases you?" she said. "We don’t know which of us is the Anchor. But we know one thing—we met. We were never supposed to. That was the fracture. But maybe it can be the fix, too."

  They stared at each other. Then Casen nodded.

  Elian stepped into the tower.

  Inside, she found a control seat surrounded by panels and handwritten notes. The words shifted as she tried to read them. Languages layered over one another. Names. Equations. One sentence stood out, burned into the wall:

  "Remembrance is rebellion."

  She sat.

  The machine hummed. Screens lit up. One by one, fragments of lost time emerged.

  —Wynn arguing with a shadowed council. —Milo watching a mirror crack without touching it. —Casen, dying, again and again, in timelines that no longer existed.

  And then—

  A hallway. A child.

  Elian saw herself. Alone. Crying. And someone lifting her up—a woman in a white coat. Wynn.

  She gasped.

  Wynn had been there at the beginning. Not just a scientist. A protector. A cause.

  And behind Wynn, the machine. Off. Waiting.

  Elian stood. The tower shook.

  Outside, Casen and his other self felt it. The ground shuddered. The sky turned white.

  Inside the machine, Elian reached forward. Not to destroy.

  To remember.

  As her fingers touched the panel, something clicked.

  The tower pulsed once.

  Twice.

  And then exploded in silence.

  Casen hit the ground hard. When he looked up—Elian was there.

  Whole. Glowing slightly, as if something inside her had lit.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  She nodded. "I saw everything. And now... I think I know where we go next."

  Casen-2 was already fading. "Don’t waste it."

  He vanished.

  Casen turned to her. "Where?"

  Elian looked toward the skyline—and beyond it.

  "We find the ones who erased the world. And we make them remember."