Chapter 2
Kian didn't sleep much that night.
The watch sat on his desk, pulsing faintly. He'd checked it a dozen times—no battery, no buttons, no moving parts. Just that faint tick every few hours, like it was waiting for something.
He didn't tell his mom. She'd stopped listening long ago.
By morning, he made up his mind: take it to the scrapyard's back lot. See if the old man there, Grinley, had any idea what it was. Grinley had seen everything—from first-gen bots to alien junk nobody could identify.
The alley behind the scrapyard buzzed with flies and static from a loose wire overhead. Kian stepped through the gates.
Then the air split.
One second he was walking. The next—gone.
No sound. No flash.
Just gone.
Kian's POV
I wasn't falling. I wasn't flying. It was worse than both.
The world shattered like glass, and behind it was... another. The color felt wrong. The air tasted sweet and burned like acid. Gravity twisted sideways, and for a split second, I saw myself—a dozen versions of me—some with scars, some with weapons, one with black eyes.
Then I hit the ground. Hard.
Red grass. Purple sky. And something roared in the distance.
I stumbled to my feet. Where the hell was I?
In front of me, standing like a statue carved into a mountain, was a man in silver armor and robes. Floating.
Behind him: a group of cloaked figures, kneeling. Chanting.
"The Walker has come," one of them said. "And time shall weep."