Sam stiffened at the sound of the man's voice. It wasn't just the way he said her name-it was the way his words seemed to ripple through time itself, as if a stone had been tossed into a still pond, disturbing every era she had ever visited.
He stepped forward, dark cloak billowing behind him, no breeze anywhere in city square. His face hidden, but Sam can feel the weight of him looking at her. He raises a hand, and the air around them shivers, like reality itself bending to his will.
"Who are you?" Sam demanded, her hand tightening on the stabilizer. "How do you know my name?"
The figure tilted his head to one side, a look of amusement upon his face. "I've known you for a very long time, Sam," he said. "You and I. well, we've crossed paths before, though you may not remember."
Sam's head spun. She'd met thousands of enemies, anomalies, and temporal manipulators in her career as a chrononaut, but something about this man was different - something that felt ancient, timeless. "You're behind the rifts," she declared, more a statement than a question.
He chuckled softly, the chuckle resonating abnormally in the air. "I am time's architect, Sam," he said. "The weaver of threads. The world you know, the timeline you fight so desperately to protect. it's all my design."
Sam's blood ran cold. This wasn't some rogue time traveler or a splintered version of the future. This man-this thing-claimed to have control over the very fabric of time itself. "You're lying," she said, though doubt crept into her voice. "Time can't be controlled. Not by anyone."
Its hand shifted. And then the city around them had changed. The skyline buckled and buildings began to melt like liquid metal as their shapes were reshaped into something altogether alien and alien to recognition. The people who had been running to and fro in fear a moment ago flickered and vanished, and shadowy figures, time-warped and from a world that is unrevealed, took the people's places. The future was no longer recognizable.
"I don't command time, Sam. I am time," he said, his voice resonating with power. "I have been known by many names down the ages. In some times, they called me the Chronomancer. In others, the Eternal One. But you-you may just call me Cairn."
Sam's breath caught in her throat. She had heard the name whispered in the darkest corners of the Nexus archives, a legend so old that it was discounted as myth even by the most seasoned temporal researchers. The Chronomancer, one whose existence is beyond time, a figure who moved through the ages as he willed, shaping events and manipulating history to unknown purposes.
She'd always taken it to be a myth.
He stood before her.
"You don't have to do this," Sam said, her voice firm and even but with a fear smoldering in her chest. "You can't just alter history. The timeline-it's tenuous. If you push too far, it will collapse."
Cairn's eyes gleamed out from under his hood. "Collapse? No, Sam. It will evolve. You and your Nexus cling to your precious 'order,' believing that time must flow in one direction, that history must be preserved. But what you fail to understand is that time is not a straight line—it is a canvas. One that I have been painting for millennia."
Once more, he raised his hand. And above them opened the sky in some great rent, tearing open upon scenes from countless times and ages. Battles at dawn-of-time; revolutions that shaped new nations; glimpses of futures yet to be written: all blurred together and around one another, like interwoven threads of a tapestry.
Sam's stabilizer hummed with warning, its bond to the now growing weak. The tear was destabilizing further and, if she didn't do something quickly, would rip the timeline asunder.
"You're wrong," Sam said, walking forward. "Time isn't yours to control. Every moment, every life-they matter. You can't just erase them because you think you know better."
Cairn's face darkened. "Lives, as if they were permanent-things. As if they held meaning in the scheme of the grand." There was a sting in his voice. "But you, Sam Baxter, of all people, should know better. You've seen how fragile time really is. How easily it can be bent, broken, and rebuilt."
Sam took a deep breath. She knew she wouldn't be able to defeat Cairn in an open fight—not here, not now. However, she did have one thing he didn't: knowledge of exactly what she was capable of.
Before Cairn could say anything, Sam had the stabilizer flipped on, sending a pulse of time-energy right into the rift. The shockwave rippled through the air, and sent the very edges of the rift to flicker and contract in on themselves. Cairn stumbled a step forward, his hold on the surrounding reality faltering.
Sam didn't waste a moment. She ran, diving into the rift before Cairn could regain control. The world around her erupted into chaos as she was yanked through the breach, tumbling through time and space. Fragments of history flashed past her eyes—distant futures, ancient pasts, and moments she couldn't even grasp.
And with that, she landed.