The climb felt endless.
Each step creaked with the weight of time restarting. Gears hammered in deep, uneven rhythms, sending vibrations up the railing and shivers down Nox's spine.
Halfway up, Lucienne stopped.
"Do you feel that?" she whispered.
Nox did.A pull.Like a memory tugging at the edges of his mind, trying to crawl back into existence.
He breathed through it and kept climbing.
The staircase finally opened into a vast circular chamber — the heart of the Spire. The ceiling arched into a dome of glass, revealing a sky swirling with distorted constellations.
At the center stood a massive Hourglass suspended by chains of light. It was shattered, frozen in the instant of breaking — sand suspended midair, neither falling nor rising.
Nox stared.
His chest tightened painfully.
Lucienne whispered, "This is… the Forbidden Hourglass. The first paradox. The hour that never was."
Nox took a step closer.
A voice echoed directly into his mind — familiar, frigid.
Do you remember what you did, Kalo?
Nox flinched.That voice...He had heard it whispering from the Chronovore's maw.
Lucienne didn't seem to hear it. She was studying the chains, tracing glowing runes.
"This entire chamber is holding a moment hostage," she murmured. "If the sand moves—"
"The world remembers," the voice answered through Nox.
He gasped.
The room flickered. Walls melted into scenes — overlapping timelines bleeding through each other.
In one, Nox saw himself — Kalo — working feverishly at a workshop bench, forging something from starlit metal and clockwork glass.
In another, crowds were running, fleeing from spiraling distortions eating the streets.
Then—
A warden stood before him.The same one from the stairs — alive, desperate.
"Don't do this, Kalo! You'll rip us apart!"
Nox — the other him — didn't respond. He clutched a blade shaped from time and drove it into the giant Hourglass.
A surge of cosmic light.Shattered sand.Screams folding into silence.
The vision snapped away.
Nox staggered back. Lucienne caught him, alarmed.
"What happened?!"
"I… I destroyed it," he breathed. "I destroyed this hour."
Lucienne went still.
"Why would you—"
The suspended Hourglass cracked louder, fragments shifting.
The voice told him why:
Because this hour was never yours.It was stolen.From the one who should have been born instead of you.
Nox's heartbeat turned ice.
Someone else's existence…replaced by his?
Lucienne backed away as the air thickened, gravity pulling toward the Hourglass.
A shape formed in the swirling sand — a figure made of glittering grains, a silhouette only half defined.
Lucienne whispered:
"That's an Echo trying to reclaim form…"
The figure raised a hand — sand dripping like unraveling time.
Nox felt it in his bones:
This wasn't just an Echo.It was the erased person.The one whose hour he replaced.
The voice thundered inside him:
To survive, you erased another fate. To exist, you stole a future.
Lucienne shouted through the shaking room:
"Nox — we have to leave!"
But the figure looked directly at him.
And spoke a single word:
"…Thief."
The Hourglass chains snapped.
The Forbidden Hour
began to move again.