Chapter 1: The End of Time

Time was never meant to be infinite.

Chronos, the weaver of ages, the silent hand that guided the ever-turning wheel, sat at the edge of existence, where time met the void and whispered its last breath. His was a burden that no other could bear, an existence stretched so far across eternity that even memory had lost its shape.

Once, long ago—though such things as “long” and “ago” had little meaning to him—Chronos had moved with purpose. He had been the pulse of creation, the rhythm that gave meaning to all things. Every rise and fall of civilization, every fleeting moment of love and loss, every birth, every death—it had all passed through his unseen hands. The gods feared him, mortals obeyed him, and yet none could touch him.

But now, he was tired.

Not in the way that mortals grew tired—not the fatigue of bone and flesh, not the weariness of muscle or mind. No, Chronos was tired in the way the stars grew weary of burning, in the way rivers yearned to break free from their courses, in the way infinity itself longed for an end.

He stood upon the edge of the cosmos, where time collapsed into a hush, where past, present, and future were not separate threads but a single, tangled knot. The great hourglass, the heart of his dominion, floated before him—its sands unmoving, its glass cracked. A flaw. A break in the eternal.

The first sign that something was changing.

He reached out, his fingers tracing the fracture, feeling the weight of something he had never known before. Possibility. For the first time in eons, something within him stirred—a question. What if time could stop? What if time could end?

It was unthinkable. And yet, here it was. The crack in the hourglass widened.

And far away, across the endless threads of fate, the world trembled in its sleep, unaware that its final hour had already begun.