Cosmic Ruler

Chapter 607: XLVI

The Steward pressed forward.

It was not space that opposed them now.

It was time.

No, not time as a force—but time as insistence. This realm had once known chronology. It had been promised a story. But it had been denied resolution. Something had ruptured the tempo. Events began but did not end. Ends occurred before beginnings. Characters aged without memory. Memory returned to scenes never lived.

It was a place of perpetual prelude.

The Steward reached a broken stone circle at the center of the temporal fracture.

There sat a woman.

Or something shaped like one.

Cloaked in layers of overlapping moments—young and old, alive and dying, mourning and rejoicing—all at once. Her face shimmered through a dozen iterations, none of them complete. Her eyes were infinite beginnings.

She noticed the Steward with a shudder of air.

“You shouldn’t be here yet,” she said. “Or… again.”

“I am not bound by your clock,” the Steward replied, voice calm but weighted.

“No one is bound. That’s the problem,” the woman snapped. “The past leaks. The future folds. There is no anchor. No ending.”

The Steward stepped closer. “You are the fracture.”

“I am the pause,” she corrected, bitterly. “The moment the story choked. The timeline that was too complex to be told. They called me Narrat-Nulla. Mistress of the Broken Hour.”

The Steward bowed slightly.

Not in reverence.

In recognition.

“I do not seek to bind your time. Only to witness it.”

Narrat-Nulla laughed.

The sound bent forward and backward, rebounding like light in a shattered mirror.

“To witness implies it’s happening. But nothing here happens. Everything is a start. Everything is about to.”