The call to summon the Concord Council reverberated through the Archive's corridors like a memory remembered too soon. The Council had not convened in full since the Cataclysm Reconciliation, when the timeline nearly shattered under Marcus's earlier manipulations. Ethan stood in the high atrium of the Accord's Council Spire, dressed in the deep indigo robes of a Prime Steward, the crimson insignia of the Archive glowing faintly at his collar.
One by one, the members arrived. Representatives of each enclave within the Accord: the Chrono-Cartographers from the Equatorial Loop, the Dream Weavers from the Memory Coasts, the Singularity Monks from the Infinite Steppe, and even the seldom-seen Custodians of the Ever-Divergence.
Lily stood at Ethan's right, her presence radiating unspoken conviction. Cael, though technically an archivist rather than a diplomat, remained by Ethan's left, refusing to leave his side.
The chamber doors sealed with a thunderous resonance. The dome above them shifted into transparency, showing the night sky—but not the present sky. Instead, it displayed a rotating catalog of possible futures, flickering with increasing instability.
Ethan stepped forward. "Thank you for coming on short notice. I won't waste your time."
A murmur rippled through the council seats, the hushed anticipation of weighty truth.
"We've uncovered an echo—Event Horizon. A suppressed echo buried in the Blind Vaults. It reveals a future where time ceases to function, where entropy becomes not just a force but a presence."
A chill passed through the chamber. The Custodian Elder stirred. "That echo was deemed too volatile to explore."
"And yet we must," Lily said. "Because one who saw it—Marcus—became Variance. And almost unraveled us."
Another voice, cold and clipped, rose from the north dais. "What you're proposing is dangerous. To reopen sealed threads is to risk everything the Accord has rebuilt."
Cael stepped forward. "And ignoring the warning may destroy more than just the Accord. If this entity—or force—devours time itself, then no echo, no history, no existence is safe."
The argument raged for hours, the council fractured in fear and ideology. Some demanded re-sealing the Vault. Others urged study from afar. But Ethan remained silent until the final round of debate concluded.
Then he rose again.
"I didn't come here to ask permission," he said calmly. "I came here to offer collaboration. Because if this thing is real, and I believe it is, then unity is the only shield we have. If you choose to turn your backs, I'll proceed with only those willing. But history will remember who acted—and who didn't."
Silence reigned.
Then the Elder of the Infinite Steppe stood slowly. "You carry the burden of the Archive, Ethan Temporal. If you say this darkness is real, then I choose to believe you. The Steppe will lend aid."
Others followed. Not all. But enough.
Preparations began at once. The Archive's Central Codex was recalibrated to track ripple divergences originating from Event Horizon. Lily organized a team of temporal linguists to decode the visual transmissions they'd received from the vault.
Ethan pored over everything Marcus had touched—logs, theories, even sketches in the margins of forbidden journals. And there, among the scribbles, he found something.
A name.
"Kalnor."
He whispered it aloud, and the word sent a shiver through the chrono-field around him.
He called Lily and Cael into his study.
"This name—Kalnor—it appears four times in Marcus's notes. Never explained, never defined. But in each place, it's associated with annihilation."
Lily cross-referenced the Archive's deep lexicons. "Kalnor appears in only one other place," she said after an hour. "An echo classified non-verbal. It's... a scream, Ethan. A single scream recorded across eight timelines simultaneously. That's it."
Cael's eyes narrowed. "So Kalnor isn't a name. It's a signal."
Ethan turned toward the memory-thread lattice. "Then maybe we don't need to study it. Maybe we need to answer it."
They built a resonance beacon at the edge of the Blind Vaults—a device capable of modulating signals backward and forward through time. For three days, the team calibrated it with math and myth alike.
And on the dawn of the fourth, they activated it.
The sound that came in reply wasn't a scream.
It was... language.
But not like anything human. More a code of emotion and frequency. Terror laced with recognition. Hunger bound with despair. And within it—a directive:
Return the Axis. Rebalance the Song.
Ethan's blood ran cold. "It's aware. It's not just entropy. It's sentient."
Lily stared into the resonance display, trembling. "And it believes something was taken from it."
Cael whispered, "Then we need to find the Axis. Whatever it is."
They had gone searching for a warning.
They found the beginning of a war.