Theo's spectral armor gleamed under the fractured moonlight as his phantom knights formed ranks in the courtyard.
Before them, the castle's west wall was unbuilding itself, stones sliding backward into the quarry they'd been cut from a century ago.
"Hold the line!" Theo barked, raising his clipboard. "If they erase this wall, they erase us next!"
Sir Clanksalot's spoon-sword trembled as a battalion of dolls marched forward, their porcelain faces cracking into wider, sharper smiles.
"By the Holy Broth," the ghostly meatball knight whispered. "They've got teeth where their eyes should be."
Theo sighed. "Just once, I'd like to haunt something normal."
Then the dolls charged.
….
Cedric barricaded the door with a stack of time-locked soup beans, each one glowing faintly from Lucien's makeshift enchantments.
"Right," he panted, pressing his back against the trembling barrier. "No dolls, no time-rewinding, and absolutely no spontaneous unbaking—"
CRASH.
A porcelain hand punched through the wood, fingers uncurling like a flower blooming in reverse. Evangeline squealed with delight.
Whiskerton unsheathed his claws. "I hate today."
Theo phased through the wall, his ghostly form flickering. "We've got a problem. The Empress is erasing the castle's history, starting with the dungeons."
Cedric paled.
"The what now?"
"Exactly." Theo's clipboard dissolved mid-sentence. "If she succeeds, half this castle will never exist."
…..
In the shattered remains of the clocktower, the prophet worked with his one remaining arm, gears spilling from his open chest panel like metallic blood.
"We're out of time," he rasped.
Selphina kicked aside a broken doll torso.
"You just took the kid's mark! What more do you want?!"
The prophet's brass eye focused on Theo.
"Memory. Ghosts are made of it."
Theo's spectral form flickered.
"Oh no. No, no—"
"Either we borrow your knights' deaths," the prophet interrupted, "or the Empress rewrites all of them."
The silence that followed was heavier than the castle's crumbling foundations.
Then Theo straightened his phantom armor.
"...Do it."
…..
What happened next would later be forgotten in three separate timelines.
The Ghost Brigade's Charge.
Theo's knights undied just long enough to fight, spectral steel clashing against doll bones as the castle's history trembled.
Cedric's Culinary Counterattack.
A pot of temporally anchored onion soup exploded across the doll battalion, making them cry in reverse.
Evangeline's Choice.
The baby reached through the prophet's gears and stole back a single golden thread, her mark flaring to life with a scream that shook time itself.
The Laughing Empress's voice echoed from every broken doll.
"YOU CAN'T REBUILD WHAT WAS NEVER MADE!"
Then the west tower fell for the second time that day.