The Cleaners arrived in a flicker of stopped time.

Jarek yanked Kael backward as the air split—a jagged tear, like reality itself had been slashed with a blade. Out stepped three figures in gray suits, their faces blurred, as if someone had smudged wet ink across their features. Their hands crackled with hourglass-shaped weapons, sand spilling upward.

“Timekeepers,” Jarek spat. “Cartographers’ lapdogs. Don’t let the sand touch you.”

“Why?” Kael croaked.

“You ever seen a man die of old age in three seconds? It’s ugly.”

One Cleaner raised its hourglass. The sand inside glowed white-hot.

Tick.

The world slowed. Kael’s heartbeat thundered in his ears, each pulse stretching into an eternity. The Cleaner moved at normal speed—a shark in frozen water.

This is how it ends, Kael thought. Not with a scream, but with a sigh.

Then Jarek’s sword—the shard of nothing—cut through the stillness.

“Run, poet!” Jarek roared, parrying a stream of sand that aged the ground beneath it to dust. “They’re not here for me!”

Kael ran. Or tried to. His legs felt like they were wading through tar. The Cleaners’ presence warped time, thickening the air into syrup. Behind him, Jarek’s laughter cut through the chaos.

“C’mon, clockwork bastards! I’ve died in eleven timelines! You’re not special!”

The streets of Liran’s Hollow (or what was left of them) twisted like a dying snake. Houses flickered in and out of existence, their bricks unraveling into sentences:

Mrs. Elyn’s bakery, cinnamon rolls every Sunday—
—Lyra’s laugh echoing down the alley—
—the clinic where Mom worked, where she—

Kael stumbled. The words dissolved as he touched them, ash on his fingertips.

A Cleaner materialized ahead, blocking his path. Its voice was a record played backward. “Narrative anomaly detected. Purge protocol: active.”

Kael fumbled for the Penumbra Codex in his coat. The book hissed, pages fluttering open to a glyph he didn’t remember writing—a spiral with a blade through its heart.

What do I lose this time?

He pressed his palm to the glyph.

The world ripped.

Memory Fragment: Age 14
Lyra’s hands, stained with charcoal, sketching the Veil’s constellations on his bedroom wall. “See, Kael? The Cartographers say we’re just ants in a god’s garden. But ants build tunnels. Ants bite.”

“What’s the point if the garden gets burned?” he’d asked.

She grinned. “Then you plant a weed. And you make it hurt.”

The glyph ignited.

The Cleaner froze mid-stride, its hourglass shattering. Sand spilled upward, forming a vortex that tore the creature apart atom by atom. But Kael felt it—the memory of Lyra’s voice, her certainty, dissolving like sugar in tea.

The cost. Always the cost.

Jarek appeared beside him, breathing hard. His coat was singed, one eye swollen shut. “Cute trick. How many memories you got left?”

“Enough,” Kael lied.

“Sure. And I’m the King of Never-Was.” Jarek grabbed his arm. “We need to go deeper. The Veil’s thinnest where the Hollow King’s been gnawing.”

“Deeper where?”

“Where else?” Jarek’s grin was a jagged thing. “The Chronophage Abyss. Time’s graveyard.”