The London sky resembled an old manuscript page, partially erased, full of faint scratches from a history that never made it to ink. Clouds hung frozen, unmoving, as though the city's time machine had jammed. The Thames curled beneath an almost organic fog, flowing like a memory with no consistency. London was no longer a city—it was an echo, the echo of something once real, now being rewritten by an invisible hand.
Elias Thorn wandered along the riverbank like a man woken from a dream without knowing when he had fallen asleep. Every step felt pulled by tattered threads of fate. He didn't know why he was at Southbank, only that he had to be. Like every clue in the search for Livia, this wasn't his will, but a reverberation from a decision he had never made.
Not far from the old dock, an old man stood atop a cracked, blackened suitcase aged by time. He wore a patchwork wool cloak and a fedora too large, tilted as if defying gravity. In his hands was a stringed instrument that resembled neither violin nor guitar—more like archaeology from the future. He plucked it slowly, each note sounding like a shard of time falling onto the floor of reality.
Then he sang:
"A child born from the shadow of a broken clock,Will fracture but not fade.Should they touch the page of time,The world shall rewrite… with their blood."
Elias froze. Time froze with him.
The poet looked at him. His eyes were pitch black, like an old well that no longer reflected light. There was no surprise in his gaze, only acknowledgment.
"Fractures can't be erased, Elias Thorn. Only silenced."
Then he resumed his plucking, returning to the mist as an anonymous figure.
Something collapsed inside Elias's mind. The world spun itself like an old projector that refused to stop.
He was no longer by the Thames, but in an old park near his childhood home in the outskirts of Kensington. Only—he wasn't there. Not as Elias. He was present as an observer, without a body, without a shadow.
Young Livia sat beneath a maple tree. Her eyes glowed in the sunset light, her hair braided in two and gently blowing. In her hands was a worn book—the title unreadable, its letters dancing like shards of an alphabet not yet agreed upon by reality.
Elias was supposed to be beside her. He knew it. He remembered this moment.
But there was only empty space. No brother. No sibling. Just cold air, preserving absence as memory.
A woman appeared—their mother. Her face was gentle, her steps calm, and she carried a tray with honeyed bread. She greeted Livia with a warm voice that nearly made Elias cry. But…
Not one word mentioned his name. There was no Elias. Not in voice, not in her gaze, not in this world.
He tried to scream, to call, to weep. But the sound was only a ripple in water long frozen.
And from the depths of that illusion, another voice answered:
"You are a disturbance. An anomaly. A fracture."
Elias awoke at the riverside as if yanked out of a pool of memory. His heartbeat ticked like a clock whose second hand had gone missing. The world around him began to move again, but not naturally. He heard clocks in the distance ticking backward, and a small child sobbing with the voice of an old woman.
His hand trembled.
On his left skin, a faint glow emerged—a symbol formed from the fine veins and pulses of his blood. That symbol… the same as the one he had seen in The Sealed Solar Codex. But now, its shape was like a shattered mirror—reversed, blinking, alive.
He knew, instinctively:
Reality was trying to rewrite itself. And his presence was a correction it could not fit on the page.
He began to understand something beyond the loss of Livia. This world was not his home—or at least, not anymore. He was a blemish on the margin of fate's page. A parenthesis that had never been closed.
And if he did not seek the end of his own sentence, the world might try to erase him completely.
The sky burned with an unnatural dusk. Clouds melted into hues of copper and magenta, like paint dripping over the canvas of the heavens.
Across the river, on an old bridge no longer in use, Elias saw a figure standing still. Too far to recognize, but the silhouette was striking: tall, cloaked in black, and one eye glowing red like an ember.
He didn't move. Didn't wave. Didn't speak. But his presence was a promise. That their time would come. That their paths would cross—whether in ruin, or in restoration.
Elias closed his eyes for a moment.
Then opened them again, and the world felt just a little more cracked.