Ash drifted like snowfall over the bones of Black Hollow.
Lucien knelt in the heart of the crater where the town had once stood. No buildings remained. No bodies. Only scorched earth and a circle of cracked obsidian where leyline energy still hissed like a dying fire. The crater pulsed with a deep orange glow, rhythmically breathing like the slowed heart of something once alive.
The scent of carbon and forgotten time filled the air. Lucien pressed his gloved hand against the blackened stone. Heat—residual, faint, yet ancient—radiated into his palm. He closed his eyes.
"Fourth Law," he whispered. "Flame is Memory."
Fire, unlike other elements, did not merely consume. It remembered. In its crackle, in its afterglow, it held echoes. The screams of the perished. The clash of magic. The ripples of distortion. All seared into the weave of time like a branding iron.
Lucien inhaled deeply and let his mind sink.
He stood amid the final moments of Black Hollow.
Not as himself, not entirely. More a witness behind the veil.
Shouts echoed. Lanterns flickered across cobbled streets. People ran, drawn to a humming at the town's center—a ripple in the air, like a mirror stretched thin. The ground cracked beneath their feet. Time shimmered, slowed, then jittered forward like a skipping record.
"The leyline's collapsing!"
A woman screamed as her child flickered out of existence, then back in a different place. A clock tower struck midnight over and over again, its bell reversing halfway through each toll. The sky rippled as stars rearranged into new constellations before vanishing altogether.
Lucien's focus honed in on the epicenter.
Vaelor Blacktide.
He appeared as a silhouette of burning void. His body wavered between realities, limbs trailing like smoke, eyes lit with reversed fire—burning inward instead of out. His voice, when he spoke, emerged in backward echoes.
".em llac dluow esalf a morf gninrael ,erif fo wal eht ma I"
Lucien, even within the vision, flinched. The meaning twisted in his mind: "I am the law of fire, learning from a flame would call me false."
The people closest to Vaelor disintegrated in silence, unraveling not into ash, but into possibilities—fragments of futures that never came. A child aged a thousand years in a blink. A guard split into two different selves: one that lived, one that had never been born.
The Chrono-Plague.
Lucien now understood its true nature. Not disease, but paradox. Not magic, but narrative corruption. A virus of causality.
Vaelor turned toward him.
Lucien knew it was only a memory. But even within the echo, Vaelor saw him.
".emit fo llim a no htworg si sihT"
A growth on a hill of time, Lucien translated instinctively. This is a hill of time's will.
The vision fractured.
Lucien fell back, gasping.
The obsidian stone beneath him had cooled. The memory had run its course. But he had seen enough.
For the first time in decades, fear coiled tightly in his chest.
Vaelor wasn't just twisting time.
He was becoming it.
The Chrono-Plague wasn't just a weapon—it was a rewrite of existence itself. What happened in Black Hollow had been an erasure, not a destruction. A clean cut through the pages of history.
Lucien rose, brushing ash from his robes. The wind howled across the crater like a mourning choir.
"No more delay."
He raised his hand, drawing from the crater's residual heat. Fire flared upward in the form of a spiral sigil—a beacon, a mark. He embedded the spell into the earth: a ward of memory, to keep this place protected. If the plague tried to expand again, this sigil would hold the echo in place.
With the last of the ash swirling around him, he vanished.
Back in the Astral Spire, the air was different.
The moment Lucien's boots touched the white marble floor, the Spire responded. Lights flared in synchronized waves, and distant gears shifted with a low rumble.
He made for the Heartchamber.
Deeper than even the Mirror of Realms, the Heartchamber was sealed behind seven magical locks, each linked to a Law of Magic. As he passed each threshold, whispers from the Spire's ancient builders followed him.
"Law of Force. Law of Name. Law of Balance. Law of Memory..."
With a breath, Lucien pressed his hand to the final gate.
"By fire remembered. By time threatened. By truth revealed. Open."
The gate groaned open.
The Heartchamber was not made of stone or metal. It was pure starlight suspended in void, a sphere where floating monoliths rotated slowly. Each monolith bore a symbol: one of the ancient Laws.
Lucien stepped onto the central platform. His voice rang with command.
"Activate Spire Core Matrix. Begin synchronization protocol: Temporal Anchoring."
A voice responded, not with sound, but with sensation.
Confirmed. Warning: Temporal Anomalies detected in the following sectors: Northreach, Hollowdeep, Emberfen. Would you like to engage Countermeasure Mode?
"Yes."
Initiating sequence. Synchronizing with Flame-Law Resonance.
Flames spiraled around him—not hot, not consuming. They shimmered with memory, dancing with faces, voices, lost moments.
He saw Elira again, back when her spark first awakened in the ruins.
He saw himself as a younger man, arguing with Vaelor during their years in the Circle of Nine.
He saw the first time the Laws were whispered into the world.
All memories, trapped in flame.
"I must preserve what was... while preparing for what might never be."
Lucien raised both hands.
"Bring the Fifth Law online."
The Spire hesitated.
Fifth Law remains unproven. Risk of causality implosion exceeds 73%. Proceed?
Lucien's jaw tightened.
"Proceed."
Elsewhere, in the shadowed halls of the Timebound Circle, Vaelor stood at the center of a spiraling time-altar, his body flickering between now and never. Dozens of his acolytes chanted in reverse, their eyes glowing with mirror-light.
He smiled.
"Lucien remembers. Good. Let the war begin where time ends."
He extended a burning hand, and the altar cracked space.
Lucien emerged from the Heartchamber, his aura brighter, heavier, threaded with memory-fire. As he entered the main observatory, his familiars returned.
The Phoenix of Emberfen cawed a warning.
The Falcon of Skyreach wept images of crumbling towers.
The Lion of Stonehowl sent tremors of grief.
And the Serpent of Watershade... had not returned.
"The timelines are diverging," Lucien murmured.
He turned to the great orrery—a mechanical map of Elarion's leylines, floating in starlight. Now, fractures spiderwebbed across it. Not physical breaks—causal ones.
Lucien placed the Spire-crystal Elira now carried onto the orrery's central pedestal.
A beam of blue-white light traced its way southward.
"Elira," he whispered. "Your fire must remember, too."
Time no longer waited.
And neither would he.