KRONOS MAW: RISE OF THE TEMPORAL ANCHOR
Chapter 3: Chronicle Hall..
He didn't sleep well that night.
Not because of the call — or at least that's what he told himself. He lay in the dark listening to the city's nighttime register, lower and slower than the day but never truly quiet, and stared at the ceiling crack above his bed with the focused attention of someone trying very hard not to think about something specific.
You felt it this morning, didn't you. The clock.
He'd considered the rational explanations. Wrong number. A prank — though he couldn't imagine who would bother or how they'd know. Some kind of scam that opened with an unusual hook to catch attention. People were creative with deception these days.
None of it sat right.
Because the voice had known. Not guessed, not fished — known. The particular certainty in those words had the weight of fact, not speculation. Whoever had called him had called him specifically, about something specific, and that specificity was what kept pulling him back to consciousness every time he drifted toward sleep.
At two in the morning he gave up, sat at his desk, and opened his laptop.
He typed: Chronicle Hall New Lagos.
The search returned a thin collection of results — a mention in a local history forum, a photograph in a heritage database, two lines in a city planning document from 2003. Chronicle Hall was described as a pre-independence era building in the old government quarter, originally constructed as a records archive for colonial administrative documents. It had been partially damaged in a fire in the 1970s, partially restored, then largely forgotten as the city grew around it and past it. The sub-levels, according to the forum post written by someone called HistoryHunter_NG, had never been fully excavated or catalogued.
Said to be haunted by history, the forum post read, with the cheerful imprecision of someone who found the phrase poetic rather than literal.
Alex stared at the screen.
He didn't know why he'd searched it. He'd heard the name before — vaguely, the way you absorb local mythology without ever consciously deciding to — but it hadn't meant anything to him until this moment, sitting in the blue glow of his laptop at two in the morning, feeling pulled toward something he couldn't name.
He closed the laptop and went back to bed.
He was at Chronicle Hall by five thirty the next evening.
The old government quarter sat between the modern city and its own past like a man who hadn't decided yet which direction to walk. The streets were narrower here, the buildings older, their facades carrying decades of weathering with the dignity of things that had survived by refusing to apologize for still existing. Generators hummed behind compound walls. A woman sold groundnuts from a tray balanced on her head, moving through the early evening with the easy confidence of someone who knew exactly where she was going.
Chronicle Hall was at the end of a road that the city seemed to have gradually lost interest in. A large, two-story colonial structure with wide eaves and arched windows, most of them shuttered. The compound wall was intact but crumbling at the corners. The gate — heavy iron, the kind that took both hands — was unlocked, which Alex decided not to examine too carefully.
He pushed it open and walked in.
The courtyard was overgrown, grass coming up through cracked concrete in the particular determined way of things that refuse to stay buried. The main doors of the building were chained, but around the left side Alex found a smaller door, wooden, its lock long since rusted into irrelevance. It opened with pressure and a sound like a held breath finally released.
Inside was dim and smelled of old paper and something else underneath — something mineral and faintly electric, like the air before lightning. Alex stood in the doorway letting his eyes adjust, one hand on the frame, aware on some level that he should probably leave and unable to make himself do it.
The ground floor was a large open space, shelving units running floor to ceiling, most of them empty. Whatever records had been kept here were long gone — transferred, destroyed, or simply lost to time. Dust moved in the faint light coming through the shuttered windows. His footsteps were loud in the silence.
At the back of the room, behind the last row of shelves, he found the stairs going down.
The sub-level was smaller than the floor above, a single long room with a low ceiling and walls of bare stone. Alex used his phone torch, sweeping it slowly across the space. More empty shelving. A collapsed table. The remains of what might have been a filing system, folders decomposed into loose pages, the pages themselves barely holding their shape.
And at the far end of the room, half hidden behind what remained of a heavy wooden partition, a stone slab.
It was set into the wall at roughly chest height, approximately a meter wide and half a meter tall, its surface smoother than the surrounding stone — clearly worked, clearly intentional. There were markings on it that weren't quite writing and weren't quite symbols, something in between, lines that curved and intersected with a geometry that made Alex's eyes want to slide away from them even as his attention kept pulling back.
He moved toward it slowly.
The air around the slab was different. Cooler. And that electric quality he'd noticed at the entrance was stronger here, concentrated, like standing next to something that was quietly generating power. His watch — still stopped from yesterday — began to tick again. He looked at it. Stopped again. Looked back at the slab.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
He should not touch it. That was obvious. The entire situation — the late hour, the abandoned building, the unauthorized entry, the strange stone with its geometry-defying markings — was precisely the kind of scenario that existed to teach people lessons about touching things they didn't understand.
Alex reached out and pressed his palm flat against the surface.
The cold hit him first — not the passive cold of stone but an active cold, reaching, like something on the other side pressing back. Then the light.
Blue-white, silent, total.
It didn't explode outward. It moved inward — into his hand, his wrist, up through his arm and across his chest in a path that felt less like electricity and more like recognition, like something slotting into a place that had always been shaped exactly for it. He felt it reach his sternum and stop there, settling, pulsing once in perfect synchrony with his heartbeat.
Then the world went out.
He came back to consciousness on the stone floor, on his back, staring up at the low ceiling of the sub-level. His phone torch was still on, lying beside him where it had fallen, casting the room in long sideways shadows.
He lay still for a moment, doing an inventory. He was breathing. His heart was beating — steadily, normally, though with something underneath the normal rhythm now, a second pulse, faint and blue-somehow, if blue could be felt rather than seen. His chest felt warm where the cold had settled.
He sat up slowly.
The stone slab was dark. Whatever had lived in it was gone — transferred, he understood without knowing how he knew, into him. The markings on its surface were faded now, barely visible, like words rubbed from a page.
Alex sat on the floor of the sub-level of Chronicle Hall and breathed.
Outside, far above him, New Lagos continued its evening — the generators, the traffic, the ten million lives moving through their ten million moments. The sky was darkening toward full night. His mother would be home. Becky would be wondering where he was.
He stood up, picked up his phone, and looked at his watch.
It was ticking. Perfectly. Each second arriving exactly on time, certain of itself in a way it had never quite been before.
Alex pressed his hand to his sternum. That second pulse — warm and blue and ancient — pressed back.
He walked toward the stairs.
Everything was different now. He just didn't know it yet.
End of Chapter 3