Before time, there was only stillness — an ocean without color, without sound, without memory. It was not peace, only absence. Then came a whisper — faint as breath upon glass — and from that whisper came two:
Chronos, who moved, and Nyxara, who dreamed.
Chronos broke the silence with a heartbeat. Nyxara shaped that rhythm into meaning — the sound of water, the shimmer of stars, the slow exhale of dawn. Together they danced through the void, the Architect and the Dreamer, and each step gave birth to a world. From their motion rose the Twelve Celestials — sparks of divinity cast off like embers from the first fire.
But as creation grew, so too did longing. The gods looked upon mortals, their mirror and contradiction, and felt something they had never known — envy. Mortals were fragile, but in that fragility, they changed. The gods, eternal and unbending, could only watch.
Chronos, the first to understand the weight of eternity, began to fade along the edges of time. How cruel that the god who created motion could no longer move himself. Each pulse of the cosmos echoed like a sigh inside him.
"Endless," he murmured once, "is another word for empty."
Nyxara, radiant and soft, loved her creations deeply. She painted dreams into the hearts of mortals — love, hunger, fear, hope — the threads that made life worth repeating. But Chronos watched them with weary awe. He envied their chaos. Their grief. Their ability to become something new each day.
And so came the thought that doomed him:
If eternity is perfection, then imperfection is life.
Chronos whispered his idea into the fabric of creation. "Let them die," he said. "Let them change through death. Let time be the river that carries them forward."
He created mortality — the ticking of the clock, the closing of eyes, the withering of hands. He believed it as mercy. The other gods called it blasphemy.
Solara, goddess of the sun, cried, "You have cursed them!"
Tharos, lord of war, raised his blade and declared eternal war upon him.
Morwen, keeper of fate, wove the truth into her Loom and hid it beneath endless cycles of prophecy.
But it was Nyxara, his beloved, who sealed him away. She could not kill him — how does one end time itself? So she trapped him within his own creation: a prison of unending stillness called the Hourless Spire, where seconds do not pass and endings cannot reach. There, Chronos fell silent. The world spun on, deaf to his sorrow.
Nyxara, consumed by guilt, tore herself apart to heal the wound he left behind. Her fragments became the oceans, the sky, the monsters that dream beneath the world's crust. Her name, once spoken with reverence, was buried under centuries of lies.
And time, left masterless, began to rot.
Centuries passed. Civilizations rose and fell like waves, their faiths shifting with the tides of fear. Mortals forgot they once brushed the edge of eternity. They called death a punishment, not a gift. And from the ruins of their endless wars, one child was born beneath a sky choked in ash.
His name was Ari, though no one gave it to him.
He was born in a dying city where bells no longer rang and prayers were traded for bread. His mother perished before dawn; his father was a shadow swallowed by conscription. Ari learned early that silence was safer than speech.
When the armies came, he hid among the dead. When famine struck, he stole from the priests who had stopped believing in mercy. He survived not because of strength, but because time seemed to stumble around him.
He noticed it the day he nearly drowned in a river of blood and rain. The current slowed mid-pull, droplets hanging like frozen stars. He had gasped, clawed at the surface, and time resumed its pace — as if the world had blinked.
From that day forward, the world whispered around him.
Years later, a storm drove him into the ruins of a temple older than any map. The columns leaned like weary giants, the stone etched with symbols long since erased by wind. Inside, among collapsed statues and burnt offerings, he found a single object untouched by decay.
An hourglass, tall as his arm, resting on an altar split by lightning. Its sand glowed faintly, neither gold nor silver — but something that pulsed, alive, like a heartbeat. The glass bled light through hairline cracks, and in that light, shadows moved as if alive.
Ari reached out. His fingertips brushed the rim — and the world stopped.
The storm froze. The dust hung in the air like glass shards. His breath left his lips and stayed there, suspended. Then came a voice, deep and hollow, speaking from within the stillness itself.
"The gods are prisoners of their own eternity."
The words crawled across his skin like heat.
"I am the first, and I am forgotten. Mortals decay. Gods stagnate. But you, little one — you are neither."
The voice coiled around him, familiar and vast, echoing like a memory of something that had never happened.
"Be my keeper," it said, "and I will give you the key to every moment."
He should have run. He should have screamed. But there was pity in him — that soft, dangerous emotion that mortals mistake for courage. He felt sorry for the voice that sounded so alone.
"I will," Ari whispered. "If it means you won't be forgotten."
The light surged and devoured him, marking the birth of the Saint of Hours—and the beginning of his tragedy, born from his own pity.
Pain. Then silence. Then the sound of breathing — not his own, but the world's.
When Ari opened his eyes, he saw the temple whole again. The statues stood tall. The air smelled of rain and new stone. He touched the floor, and beneath his hand he felt time — not as seconds or years, but as a living thing.
A heartbeat, vast and endless.
He looked into the hourglass. Inside it, instead of sand, he saw worlds — tiny lives flickering, burning, dying, reborn. His reflection was no longer the boy he had been. His hair gleamed pale as dawnlight; his eyes shimmered with faint rings of gold, each turning in opposite directions.
And deep in his chest, something beat in rhythm with the hourglass.
"Keeper," said the voice — softer now, nearly human.
"Time is yours to command. But every moment you steal must be paid in grief. Every second you give must come from your own soul."
Ari tried to speak, but no sound came out. The air itself had weight.
"You will never die," the voice continued. "You will witness every cycle — the rise, the ruin, the rebirth. And you will know what even I could not endure: eternity in flesh."
The hourglass shattered. The temple fell silent. And Ari — once mortal, once forgotten — walked out beneath a calm and lifeless sky.
Time no longer flowed for him. It bent. It obeyed. It pleaded.
He wandered across ages, saving some, dooming others. He learned to bargain with time — to trade moments, to freeze a dying soldier's last breath or rewind a village before the plague took hold. He called these acts "mercy." Others called them miracles.
The church grew from the awe he left behind. They built temples and named him Saint of Hours. They sang hymns to a savior who did not age and did not smile. Ari never corrected them. Faith was easier than truth.
He created an order — the Ordo Aeterna — to guard time's balance, choosing those who could glimpse eternity without losing their minds. Yet every life he extended weighed on him. The more he saved, the hollower he felt.
Time, after all, always demands payment.
Each night, when the world slept, Ari would stand before his reflection and whisper, "I am still here."
And every night, the reflection whispered back, "For how long?"
A thousand years later, the sky split open again.
The monsters of Nyxara's broken dreams returned — crawling from oceans, swallowing cities whole. War thundered across the continent. The gods were silent, their temples crumbling one by one.
And in the heart of the last empire, a new king rose.
Gilgamesh — the man of gold, the conqueror reborn. His armies burned their way across Aethernis, claiming divine right and mortal dominion alike. To his followers, he was destiny made flesh. To his enemies, a storm is given form.
And to Ari — who watched from the ruins of the old world — he was something stranger. A man who moved through time as though he remembered it.
When Gilgamesh's soldiers came to seek the Saint of Hours, the air trembled. Ari stood in the ruins of a chapel, listening to their approach. Outside, the world reeked of smoke and blood.
He thought, So this is where it begins again.
The door opened. Footsteps echoed. The flicker of torchlight painted the walls. And there — between the shattered glass and the crimson haze — stood the man who should have died a thousand lives ago.
Golden armor. Eyes sharp as morning. A presence that seemed to bend time around him instead of through.
"You're the one they call the Saint of Hours," Gilgamesh said.
Ari turned, slow as the swing of a pendulum. "Titles are heavy things, Your Majesty. They tend to slow down time."
Gilgamesh's gaze lingered, measuring. "Then perhaps you should learn to carry mine."
Ari's smile did not reach his eyes. "Careful, King. Time has a way of breaking what it touches."
"Then let it try," Gilgamesh murmured. "I've broken everything else."
For a heartbeat, the ruined chapel was silent — no wind, no sound, only the echo of a thousand unseen clocks. Then, far beyond the city walls, something shifted. A tremor, small but ancient, rippled through the ground. The shattered hourglass on Ari's altar pulsed once — faintly, like a dying heart trying to wake.
The voice of Chronos, long forgotten, stirred in the back of Ari's mind.
"He carries my mark."
Ari froze. His pulse faltered. And in that frozen instant, he realized: Gilgamesh was not just another mortal. He was something else — something that should not exist.
And for the first time in centuries, time hesitated.
The Saint of Hours felt it — the clock skipped a beat — and in that stillness, the story of gods and men began again.