Anchor Exit didn't take them home.
Kael landed hard—face-first into a snowbank that shimmered like glass, not powder. The cold didn't bite. It stung like memory.
Myra appeared seconds later, tumbling beside him, clutching a ChronoMap core that had gone dim.
"No response," she hissed, shaking the device. "It's not reading any return threads. This isn't a mapped Anchor."
"Correction," Kael grunted. "It's an Anchor that's watching us."
Above them, the sky was no longer a dome—it was an eye. An enormous, irisless sphere that spanned the heavens, staring silently. Clouds moved, but in loops, swirling into their same position every eight minutes. Kael knew. He counted.
"It's recursive," Myra said. "The weather's caught in a visual feedback loop."
"A sky that watches itself," Kael said, his voice low. "Like it doesn't know what else to do."
They walked through fields of bent trees—every trunk curved backward, growing toward the earth, as if pulled by a reverse gravity that only affected life. No animal sounds. No wind. Just the faint hum of systems out of sync.
Then came the sound.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
From beneath the ground.
Myra dropped to one knee and scraped the snow-glass away.
There, buried an inch deep, were hundreds—thousands—of shattered pocket watches. Their hands spun forward and backward at random speeds, each one frozen in a different second.
"This is a Timeline Graveyard," Myra said. "They buried time here."
Kael reached down and picked up a cracked chronograph with one word etched on its back:
"TRY AGAIN."
Before he could reply, a ripple passed through the world. Not through space—but through meaning. The sky blinked.
A voice echoed—not sound, but structure. A thought delivered as memory.
> "You are trespassing within an Anchor still in draft."
Kael flinched. "That's… a Narrator construct."
Myra stiffened. "An AI?"
"No," Kael whispered. "A proto-narrative entity. The story before it becomes story."
They stood still as the sky began to glitch again. The eye flickered—then split into two.
> "You are not characters. You are deviations."
Kael didn't blink. "We're here because Kaelen said we'd come, didn't he?"
Silence.
Then:
> "He is a reserved slot. You are interruption."
Kael stepped forward. "He said he would collapse the unchosen stories. That he'd flatten the chaos into a clean arc. Is this one of the stories he tried to erase?"
> "No. This is one he started writing... then abandoned."
The wind finally returned.
It whispered in binary.
Kael turned to Myra. "This is one of his failed timelines."
"Why keep it alive?"
Kael shrugged. "Guilt."
They walked toward a crooked hill in the distance, where a tower of melting clocks leaned like a funeral marker. Beneath it, etched into snow that never melted, were three words:
"THIS ONE HURT."
Myra exhaled. "He's not just trying to kill timelines. He's trying to forget the ones that got away."
As they left, the eye in the sky followed—but did not blink again.
Not for a long, long time.