There was no border here. No horizon to mark where the world ended and something else began. This was a place beyond place; a dimension folded into itself where distance meant nothing and time meant everything. Clocks drifted through the void like debris caught between stars, some no larger than a coin, others swollen to the size of dying suns, each ticking to its own private rhythm. None of them agreed. None of them ever had.
Lines crossed the black expanse overhead, threading the dark like veins of light. Some burned a soft, mourning blue before guttering out entirely, snuffed from existence in an instant. Others tore open in a violent red, and where they did, new lines split from the wound and spread outward, spawning threads that had not existed a heartbeat before. It was impossible to tell, watching it, whether the sky was dying or being born. Perhaps it was doing both at once.
At the heart of it all hung the clock. It stretched for millions of miles, its face a landscape unto itself, its hands long enough to blot out entire star fields as they swept past. And slowly — impossibly slowly, given its size — those hands turned.
"The timelines have been disturbed again," a voice said. It came from everywhere and nowhere, unfamiliar and heavy with old exhaustion, the kind of voice that had said the same sentence so many times it no longer bothered to raise itself in alarm.
A second voice answered, quieter, threading in beside the first like a harmony no one had asked for. "What was the reason for the 'again'?"
For a brief moment, the great hands of the clock jolted forward, as if the question itself had startled the mechanism.
"The Order is meddling with it again, as they please." A third voice rolled in low and heavy, a man's voice, and it settled over the dimension the way a storm settles over a valley — total, inescapable. "No matter what we do, no matter what we want, it will never be enough. We Time Masters are expected to delete thousands of timelines a day." The hands slowed beneath the weight of his words, dragging as though the clock itself had grown tired of holding them up.
"They don't understand how the timelines work," the voice went on. "Eighty universes reside inside a single timeline. Eighty."
"And yet the moment we try to fix something," the second voice cut back in — more feminine now, sharper — "one of those universes gets destroyed, and the whole timeline's balance collapses with it."
The hands stopped. Dead still. A crack split across the clock's face, right where the minute hand met the dial, a hairline fracture spreading like frost across glass.
"Can we end the Order's reign?" the first voice asked, and for once there was something almost hopeful buried in the question. "Or is that against the way of time itself?"
The hands twitched back into motion.
"If Time Masters exist to hold the universes and the timelines together," the second voice said, "then that also means we exist to keep the Order in check. By doing nothing." There was no mistaking the bitterness in it now, barely restrained.
The third voice broke through before the silence could curdle into something worse. "Is that the reason behind every death in the timeline? Every unmarked soul lost to it?"
No one answered directly. Instead, the hands lurched into motion, spinning so violently that in the span of a few heartbeats they had leapt twenty-five hours forward, tearing through time like a blade through cloth.
"Another universe, dead." The voice that spoke sounded worn thin, stretched past the point where exhaustion and grief could still be told apart. It was almost too tired to finish its own sentence. "Can you fix this?"
"I'll do it." The third voice again, flat with resignation. "I hate this job. I hate it so much." A second crack bloomed across the clock's face, opposite the first, spidering outward as he spoke.
"Yeah, yeah. We understand." The first voice, light and unbothered, as though it hadn't expected an answer at all. "Maybe you should put some hope in the person of the nebula."
The reaction was immediate and violent.
"We promised we wouldn't talk about him anymore!" the third voice roared, and somewhere in that vast, borderless space, the unmistakable crack of a slap rang out, sharp enough to make the silence after it feel bruised.
"I know, I know," the first voice said, unbothered by the strike, almost soothing. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong. We should hope for the future of this timeline. And—"
"We don't talk about him!" the third voice snapped, cutting the sentence off at the throat. "He is locked away. Do you understand? One mention of his name and our lord will punish all of us for it!"
A third crack tore through the clock's center this time, deeper than the others, and every hand on its vast face swung down and froze, pointing in the same direction, toward the bottom of the dial, like a compass gone mad and finally settling on grief.
"I hate this fucking timeline," the second voice said, breaking the silence with a long, ragged sigh. "I destroyed it."
"You destroyed a whole timeline," the first voice said slowly, disappointment threaded through every syllable. "Again?"
"Again?" the third voice echoed, genuinely startled. "He's done this before?"
"Oh, right. I forgot you're still new to all this." The first voice let out a short, humorless laugh. "He's destroyed timeline after timeline after timeline, endless on endless of them, simply because none of them were ever good enough to rival his expectations." As the words settled, the clock's hands began to spin backward, unwinding as though trying to erase what had just been said.
"Maybe you should stop talking about hope and start minding your own business," the second voice snapped, cruelty riding high on every word. "Dumb, hating bitch."
For a while, nothing answered that. Only a long, heavy sigh drifted through the dark, stretching on for longer than a sigh had any right to.
Then a fourth voice broke the quiet — younger, brighter, a boy's voice pitched high with mock cheer. "Do we have any beer around here? I'm parched."
"You and beer?" the second voice said, amused despite itself. "You're still just a kid."
"Even so." The fourth voice didn't miss a beat, playful and razor-edged at once. "If we were to fight right now, I could beat you in an instant. Not a single moment of time would even need to move. I'd have killed you a million times over before you noticed I'd started."
"Calm down," the second voice said, hands raised in surrender that no one could see but everyone could hear in her tone. "It was only a joke."
"Good. That's good." The fourth voice laughed, warm and careless. "It would be such a waste to kill you with my own hands. I'd have to clean up the mess after."
"Hey, drunk hope," the first voice said, turning toward the fourth with something almost fond in it, curious, hopeful for a real answer for once. "How's your timeline holding up?"
The fourth voice sighed, and for the first time all the playfulness drained out of it. "A few hours ago, I had to erase a whole cluster of Demon Lords from existence. Three point four million of them, give or take." On the clock, the first crack sealed itself, knitting shut like skin closing over a wound.
It didn't last. Another fracture opened almost at once, splitting fresh across the dial.
"Again?" the fourth voice said, almost laughing at the absurdity of it. "That was a short-lived peace."
The clock healed the crack a second time, and for a moment its hands settled into something like a normal rhythm, ticking steady and even.
"We have to kill billions upon billions of life forms just to keep the lines in check," the third voice said, quieter now, more contemplative than bitter. "I keep wondering if the sacrifice is even worth it anymore."
"Agreed." The first voice answered gently, the words drifting out like a breeze finding its way through a cracked window. "But denying our purpose now would only make our ending crueler. We should hope for something better in our next life, at least."
"Even so," the second voice cut in, mocking and worn thin at the edges, "we'd only be reincarnated into the same broken body we died in. Our whole existence as Time Masters is just an endless exercise in hating ourselves."
"We should do something," the first voice pressed on, undeterred. "Maybe if the Order of Swords finally awakens his ability to cut through time itself, we ask him for help. When the moment comes."
The response came fast and furious, punctuated by the crack of something being struck. "We shouldn't! You are the Time Master of Hope and Life, and you still think it's wise to put your faith in the Order? Do you have any idea how twisted that is? Even the Time Master of Denial and Order doesn't agree with this, and that should tell you everything!"
The clock cracked again, deep and sudden, and its hands began to spin — faster, faster, a blur of motion that blotted out the dial entirely.
"Another timeline," a voice said, and this time there was no mistaking the alarm in it. "Wait. An alternate timeline has formed. Someone has... changed something." A pause, heavy with disbelief. "A future."
The hands spun faster still, accelerating until they became a shrieking whirl of silver and shadow, and then, all at once, they stopped. The second hand flew clean off its arc and slammed into place at the side of the dial, quivering there like a nail driven into wood.
"This disturbance is too big to go unnoticed," the first voice said, hard with command now, all its earlier gentleness burned away. Overhead, the scattered lines of the sky twisted and coiled together, weaving themselves into the shape of a single, massive arrow.
"It seems," the third voice said, unnervingly calm, "our little friend has gone and done something wrong."
"No shit!" the fourth voice snapped, frustration boiling over at last. "I can't see any of that! I hate you for saying it like I should just know!" It raged on, blind to everything unfolding around it, furious at a truth it could sense but never touch.
And beyond the reach of any universe, beyond the edges of every timeline that had ever been or ever would be, the argument raged on.