Walking towards an abandoned subway station the air gushing out didn't just smell of damp and decay; it tasted of old iron and a sorrow so profound it made Elias's teeth ache. He stood over a sigil, its lines carved not into the concrete but into the fabric of reality itself, a faint silver shimmer the only sign of its power. In his hand, the shard of obsidian pulsed with a cold hungry light.
"It's a wound," a voice rasped from the shadows making Elias spin, the shard held aloft like a weapon. "A scar that never healed properly. You can feel it weeping, can't you?"
Malak emerged from behind a crumbling pillar with his form flickering. He was thinner than he had been a week ago with the little girl.
His celestial light dimmed to a faint ember glow beneath the skin after he help to shield her from the other fallen angels with the effort of staying anchored in this timeline was costing him everything and if Aurdin and Elias fail will get evaporated.
"I feel it." Elias confirmed with his voice low. He didn't lower the shard. Trust was a currency he couldn't afford anymore, not even with the fallen angel who had first shown him the truth. "It's where he fell. Azazel. This is where his essence first bled into our world."
Malak nodded, a gesture that seemed to cause him physical pain. "And where the first of the Veil was torn. They don't just observe, Elias, They feed. They nudge a missed train here that leads to a fatal accident, a whispered doubt in a king's ear that starts a war centuries later. They cultivate suffering because it is the soil in which their influence grows."
Elias's knuckles were white around the obsidian. The memories, not his own but inherited through the shard's cruel tutelage, flashed behind his eyes: a Roman general, his strategic brilliance suddenly clouded by an inexplicable rage, ordering a charge that doomed his legion; a Renaissance artist, on the cusp of a masterpiece, his hand guided by an unseen force to paint a hidden sigil of subjugation into the fresco of a cathedral.
"And I reset it," Elias whispered, the weight of it crushing him. "Every time their meddling reaches a tipping point, every time they are about to step fully from the shadows and claim this world as their own, I… I burn it all down. I always send us back to the beginning."
"You preserve it," Malak corrected, his voice gaining a sliver of its old strength. "You are the circuit breaker. The only one who can hold the memory of what was, and what they have done. The only one who can wield the Shard of Chronos."
"To what end?" Elias demanded, frustration boiling over. "So I can live a thousand half-lives? So I can watch everyone I've ever cared for be unmade, over and over? I saw Clara die in a car crash last cycle.
The time before that, it was a plague engineered in a lab they influenced. She doesn't even remember me. She never will." The image of her, laughing in the sunlight of a timeline that no longer existed, was a physical ache in his chest. His motivation was a tangled knot of duty, guilt, and a love that was, in any practical sense, a ghost.
Malak moved closer, and the air grew cold. "The end is not the reset, Elias. The reset is the means. The end is the Banishing. You have to find the anchor points.
The moments of their greatest intervention is where their essence is most invested in the timelines. You have to be there, at the crux, and use the shard not to undo but to sever. You have to cut their connection one by one until they are too weak to maintain their foothold. Then and only then can you trigger the final reset. A reset with no immortals left to crawl back through."
The plan was insane. It was a symphony of chaos he was supposed to conduct with a broken baton. "And how do I find these anchors? Do I just wait for the world to start ending again?"
"No." Malak's gaze was drawn to the pulsating sigil on the floor. "You listen to the echoes the shard it allows you to hear them. The past isn't gone; it's layered like sediment. Right here, the immortal war isn't a historical event. It is still happening." He gestured to the empty space above the sigil. "Look."
Hesitantly, Elias lowered the shard and pressed its cold surface against his temple. The world didn't just shift; it shattered.
The grime-covered walls dissolved into a blinding, chaotic sky. The scent of ozone and blood replaced the damp. He was standing in the same geographical point, but the time was scorched and bleeding. Figures of incandescent lights and shifting shadows clashed above him. It was not a war of swords and shields but of pure concept that only a being of light would gesture and the very air would solidify into a prison of crystal; a shadow would counter with a wave of absolute nothingness that unraveled the light.
This was not a battle for territory. It was a battle for creation itself. And he saw them, the fallen once luminous, now twisted by a pride that curdled their forms into things of jagged darkness. They were not just fighting the loyalists; they were tearing at the edges of the world, trying to peel reality back and reshape it in their own image.
And he saw the moment. Azazel, a prince of terrifying beauty and arrogance, his wings now torn and bleeding shadow, was cast down. Not by a weapon, but by a unified chorus of will from the loyal host. His fall was not just through space, but through timelines and through the layers of existence. He hit the ground not with a thud, but with a silent concussive wave of wrongness that tore a hole in everything and the first to make a tear in the Veil.
Elias gasped, stumbling back, the vision vanishing as quickly as it came. He was back in the dank tunnel, his heart hammering against his ribs. The echo of the war rang in his bones.
"They are still fighting it," Malak said, his voice thick with a pain that was clearly no longer just physical. "Every manipulation in your time is a skirmish in that first war. A move on a board they never left."
The weight of the revelation was suffocating. He wasn't just cleaning up their messes; he was a conscript in a conflict that predated human civilization. The obsidian shard in his hand felt heavier than a mountain.
"This anchor," Elias said, forcing his voice to steadiness. "Azazel's fall. It's the first and the biggest."
"And the most protected," Malak warned. "His chosen, his direct descendants, they guard the memory of this place. They feel its power. They will be coming."
As if on cue, a low hum began to vibrate through the tunnel. It wasn't a sound one heard with ears, but felt in the soul. A pressure began to build.
A middle age man materialize out of nowhere.
"This man is our most protected from our most protected timeline," Malak warned. "This man is chosen by THE DIVINE, he is the direct descendant of the one who will end this catastrophe, remember, they guard the memory of that place. They can feel its power, yours, the little girls and now his. Heid my words be careful they will be coming fast and hard."
Then Malak disappeared behind the crumbling pillar.