The night smelled like iron.
Not blood. Not steel. Something older.
It was the metallic weight of time itself, rusting quietly in the air.
At the edge of the silent village stood the abandoned clock tower—a monument of cracked stone and forgotten gears. Once it had marked the passage of hours for travelers and merchants. Now it stood alone, its face broken, its hands frozen at a time no one remembered.
Most people avoided the tower.
Eryndor did not.
He stepped carefully across the uneven path, boots scraping softly against loose stones. The village behind him slept in uneasy silence. No lights burned in the windows. No voices carried in the wind.
Good.
The fewer witnesses, the better.
Eryndor paused a few meters from the tower and looked up. Even in the dim moonlight, he could see the cracks running through its structure like veins in old bone.
So this is where it began.
The thought lingered in his mind with quiet certainty.
For most people, the tower was just a ruin.
For Eryndor, it was something else entirely.
It was a beginning.
Or perhaps more accurately…
A second beginning.
A faint smile touched his lips.
"The beginning of a journey as a regressor," he murmured to himself.
The words felt strange even now.
Regression was not something people were supposed to experience. Time did not simply allow someone to walk backward through its flow.
And yet here he was.
Alive again.
Standing in a moment he had already lived once before.
Eryndor knelt near the base of the tower, brushing dust from a cracked stone embedded in the ground. Beneath the dirt was a faint symbol—almost invisible unless you knew where to look.
He did.
Because he had seen it before.
In another timeline.
In another life.
Back then he had been confused, frightened, and far too curious for his own good. He had stumbled into the tower without understanding what waited inside.
That mistake had cost him everything.
His village.
His future.
His life.
But now things were different.
This time, Eryndor understood something others could not.
The world was threaded together by something deeper than time.
Something hidden.
Something ancient.
And tonight, if his memory was correct, he would see proof of it.
A low creak echoed from inside the tower as the wind slipped through its broken entrance.
Eryndor rose slowly.
The storm beneath his calm exterior stirred for a moment, but he forced it down. Panic had ruled his actions in his previous life.
That would not happen again.
Cool-headed.
Composed.
Strategic.
Those would be his weapons now.
He stepped into the tower.
The interior was darker than the night outside. Dust coated the floor, undisturbed for years except for faint animal tracks near the walls. Above him, the skeletal remains of massive gears hung motionless.
The air felt… heavy.
As if the tower itself remembered something the rest of the world had forgotten.
Eryndor moved deeper inside.
Then he stopped.
Something shimmered in the air ahead of him.
At first it looked like a trick of moonlight slipping through the cracked ceiling.
But it wasn't light.
It was a thread.
A single, thin line stretching across the empty space of the tower, glowing faintly with a soft golden hue.
It floated there silently, unaffected by gravity, as if reality itself had been stitched together with invisible hands.
Eryndor stared at it.
His heartbeat slowed.
"So it really exists…"
In his previous life, he had discovered the thread by accident.
He had touched it without understanding what it meant.
And the moment he did, something in the world had changed.
A disturbance.
A ripple.
A signal that something—or someone—had interfered with the hidden mechanisms of reality.
Eryndor stepped closer to the thread.
He knew what would happen if he touched it.
Somewhere far away, people who understood these things would notice.
Factions.
Scholars.
Perhaps even beings far older than humanity.
For a brief moment he considered turning away.
Leaving the thread untouched.
But that would only repeat the same helpless life he had lived before.
Eryndor raised his hand slowly.
"Well," he said quietly, "let's see if the world notices this time."
His fingers brushed the golden thread.
And somewhere, far beyond the silent village…
Reality stirred.