"Catch anything good?"
Aaron's brow furrowed as he heard the familiar yet alien voice behind him.
The scene before him was wrong, completely wrong.
A fishing rod was placed gently between his fingers while his body rested against a dock shaded from the sun by a rock formation dozens of meters above him.
Slowly, he began to turn his head to address the mysterious person whom he could only assume stood behind him.
Guessing correctly, he first took in a pair of muddied boots covered in what looked to be a crimson-colored sludge.
Moving his gaze higher, he observed a pair of similarly colored overalls that protected an obviously male person's chest.
Yet, among the various things that Aaron observed, what struck him as odd was at the top of the body.
Blond hair, not at all dissimilar to his own, hanging down with a single streak of blue; eyes of turquoise that shone like the ocean's blue.
"Who are…"
His breath caught, and his skull seared with burning agony.
There was a name that drifted endlessly, one wrapped in layer upon layer of darkness and muck.
I-It's not possible… My memories are…
The man whom the boy recognized suddenly spoke up.
"Y-you can't remember me?"
He paled in the exact same way that Aaron did, all the color draining from the top of his face towards the bottom before vanishing completely.
"N-not good. N-not good at all…"
Throughout the blond-haired boy's life, there was only one man he could consider a coward, a person whom he had looked up to for years, only to be disappointed in the end.
For months, he had forgotten; however, now, for some unknown reason, he remembered that name once more.
Dad.
It should've been impossible; the seal on his memories was far too perfect for such an important detail to slip through.
However, it did, and now, he was faced with this strange, dreamlike world that wouldn't end.
He watched as his father began to chew on his fingernails, a familiar habit to hide his fear, his anxiety of that thing that was said to haunt the Grimstall family.
Aaron recalled his feelings of such a thing: the patience as his father had told him of his forefathers and their sins, the beast that would hunt them, and the prophesied end to their suffering.
Whether it be before or after his adventure out into the sea, he felt his raw, unbridled hatred towards such an ideology.
Bound by fear of some mythical creature? If I die, then I die. I've stood face to face with a being that killed gods for fun.
His anger grew at an uncharacteristically rapid rate, the wooden rod within his hands beginning to crack under the strain.
"D-don't fret!"
Tibb Grimstall called out to his son once more, noticing his uneasy state.
"D-do as we've always done!"
Aaron could practically sense the next words that would spill from his lips, the memory that he was experiencing one of his own after all.
"Run!"
Pure cowardice without respite.
That was what he felt from his father, even after his stories of old, telling of primordial horrors.
His fist curled into a ball, and the rod slipped from his fingers into the sea, making a gentle splash as he stood up.
The boy glared at his father for a moment, thinking, processing almost, before walking past him without a care in the world.
No matter how mad his father made him, he wouldn't hit him, no, not again, not after…
His vision spun, his head burned, and his body collapsed.
…
"Aaron!"
Eleanor's voice awoke him from his endless dream, his eyes instantly taking in the blue sky above his head.
He could feel grass against his bare back, his shirt gone, and his wounds bandaged with some type of slimy substance.
"Why am I…"
Attempting to sit up, pain shot through his shoulders and back, the memories of what had happened in the World Between returning in a flash.
"The Kraken!? Where is it!?"
His gaze locked onto Eleanor's, her gray eyes reflecting something unusually bland, almost pessimistic.
She didn't respond, forcing him to take matters into his own hands.
Quickly, he began to survey the scene, but fell short fast, the stillness of the environment quelling his immediate fear.
There was no wind among the field of flowers that they sat in, nor was there the sound of chirping birds.
The sound of the ocean was uncharacteristically gone, and he couldn't feel an ounce of mana in the atmosphere around him.
Clouds overhead were utterly motionless, their puffy forms frozen in place as if they had been glued on.
Aaron's mind tried to process what he was seeing; the sheer stillness was beyond unnatural.
"I don't know either…"
Eleanor's quiet murmur brought him back to reality, his sore form turning around to view the blonde-haired priestess.
"After we went through the rift, everything changed. You collapsed and wouldn't wake up no matter what I did, and the Ghostship continued to sail straight."
She paused as if unsure what to say next, rubbing the back of her neck apprehensively.
"The Kraken, though… It just stopped…"
The turquoise-eyed boy's brow contorted.
"Stopped?"
A creeping feeling began to make its way through his body; however, he wouldn't give it any meaning unless the girl confirmed it.
"W-well… It seems that for some reason, time has stopped around this island."
The girl said it as if it were the most normal thing in the world, the only hint of unease being the weak stutter at the beginning of her sentence.
"Time… Stopped…"
Aaron's head throbbed with pain, yet he was certain he hadn't misheard her.
And even with the madness she spouted, he couldn't dismiss it as ramblings she had heard in a dream, not after the experiences he had lived before.
When speaking with the Old Man, it felt as if time had stopped, although it's different here…
He looked to the West where the sun had begun to set, yet never quite finished moving across the sky.
Birds floated without support, their wings fully suspended outward as if the freezing had occurred in a singular moment.
Not only with the Old Man, though… When Lord—No, Mr. Thorn first gave that lecture, that abomination in my head did something odd, as if it were altering my perception, or at least, a certain region's perception of time. The same thing happened during Sir Astelion's match in the Lispentine Tournament.
Placing all three previous encounters together, one factor stood out among all the rest, a fact that remained true regardless of their context.
"It's because of me."
Eleanor looked at him with confusion.
"What do you mean?"
Aaron shook his head with a scowl across his face, clearly displeased with whatever he had discovered.
"All of this is connected to that deity inside my head. Whenever something it dislikes is discovered, it has constantly manipulated my perception of time in some way. But, what if it wasn't just limited to my perception? What if it could physically alter the time of a region?"
The blonde-haired girl instantly understood what he meant, her first-hand experience with the god he referred to making her shiver internally.
"So you think that this deity inside your head can directly interfere with our world? Both that sickly Old Man and Death vehemently believe that they can't do such a thing, especially on the scale of altering time. In addition to that, is there even a god that has the Divine Authority of time? Wouldn't that be too powerful?"
Each of her questions increased the bitter taste in the boy's mouth; the answers to every one of them were harder to find than diamonds.
"I've never heard of such a being either. But then again, I'm not exactly known for my stellar memory…"
As he spoke, he jokingly knocked on the side of his head.
Would Penelope know anything about such a subject?
Closing his left eye and listening to the hum of the slumbering blade, he relaxed, attempting to stir the link to the woman inside the weapon.
『W-what time is… Oh, you're awake.』
The sword appeared in his hand, causing Eleanor's eyes to widen in shock, surprised by the sudden tool.
"Are you asking Lady Penelope?"
Having decided to explain the existence of the personified blade to the priestess after she had awakened, there was no doubt she could understand what he was planning to do.
Gently nodding, the boy spoke up.
"You can sense the region around us, correct?"
Pausing, he awaited an answer.
『Not a hello? Not a thank you? Hmph… I would've appreciated this pretty girl's pretty words if not for her scent.』
Deciding immediately not to transmit the first piece of Penelope's message, he smiled weakly.
"C'mon, Pen, work with me here."
There was a long pause before the next flash of color on Ocean's Bane.
『Pen? Hmm… I like it… Fine! I'll answer you! There was once a God of Time, yes; nevertheless, just like the God of Space, he perished. His Divine Authority, though, was primarily consolidated into the core of the World Tree, forming a pseudo-dimension that even the gods cannot enter.』
Summarizing aloud to Eleanor as the blade spoke, he and the girl were left silent as they heard some of the most important history in the universe.
『You and that girlie are stuck in a time-warped pocket similar to his authority. The Sea of Dreams seems to have artificially altered whatever seal was placed over this island and forced it into a strange, limbo-like world. If I were to guess, you are safe because of the Ghostship, that roommate of mine, and me. She, on the other hand, is safe because of her divinity and ghastly sludge. It's probably safe for you to leave on the Ghostship, and after a kilometer or so, you'll break out of the zone.』
After she finished, she promptly drifted back to sleep without another word, leaving both teenagers in complete shock.
"A time-warped pocket? So we're in a separate dimension?"
Eleanor was the one who spoke first, unsure of the answer she had been given.
"It could be… The seal she mentioned could've been placed by that roommate she mentioned, the deity inside my head. However, it didn't predict the Sea of Dreams changing its construct into whatever it is now…"
Aaron turned towards the East, noticing the faint outline of houses.
"Either way, it seems like we've arrived at our destination."
Regardless of the circumstances, a smile crept its way along his lips, the land he had once called home now beneath his feet once more.
"Home at last."