Splash. Splash.

The water slid down Hazel’s face, warm and grounding, dripping from his chin in a slow rhythm that mimicked his breath. He stared into the cracked mirror above the washbasin, lips parted slightly as though he were about to speak.

Today mattered.

He gave a nervous smile, the kind that fought Its way through anxiety and excitement all at once. Then he whispered to his reflection:

“It’s time—today’s the day.”

Hazel wiped his face dry and shrugged on his father’s worn, military-style coat. It was the only piece of his family he had left—besides the silver bracelet he never took off. A smooth, intricate band that once belonged to his mother. It hummed faintly with dormant Spirit energy, but never activated. Much like Hazel himself.

Today was the Spirit Trial.

Seventeen years had passed since Spirit energy burst into the world like wild lightning. People called it different names—magic, evolution, divine punishment. But Hazel had been born into it. This world of monsters and gifts, of ruin and rebirth, was all he knew.

He’d dreamed of awakening with Ice affinity—a rare and beautiful gift that could control glaciers and weather itself. Not for vanity. For purpose.

Because ten years ago, his parents disappeared on an expedition to Mount Grivahn—a massive, snow-covered mountain steeped in Spirit energy. No one who went looking for them ever returned. Only rumors trickled down: of shifting weather, sudden storms, strange echoes in the air.

Hazel was sure Ice was the key. To climb Grivahn. To understand what happened. To bring them home.

“You’re walking like someone headed to their funeral.”

Hazel glanced sideways to see Nari, pacing up beside him. Short, sharp-tongued, and the only person he trusted more than himself. She was already in full Spirit uniform, the Trial emblem glowing faintly on her shoulder.

“Just trying not to pass out before we even get there,” Hazel replied.

She smirked. “I’d catch you. Probably laugh a little first.”

He shook his head with a grin.

The city of Lyndara loomed ahead, alive with energy. Today, the city’s center—the Spirit Hall—would decide the fates of dozens of hopefuls. The Spirit Pool, a basin of concentrated energy, had never failed to reveal an individual’s affinity. Fire, Stone, Light, Wind, Ice, or something stranger. Everyone had something. Eventually.

Inside the Hall, the line moved quickly. Candidates stepped forward, one by one, placed their hands into the Pool, and awakened.

Hazel watched, heart pounding. Flames erupted around one girl. A boy burst into laughter as his skin shimmered like steel. Another sprouted wings.

Then—

“Hazel.”

He stepped forward. The room felt colder than before, even though no ice had been summoned yet.

He knelt by the Pool and extended his hand, fingers trembling.

The moment his skin touched the surface, everything went quiet.

But nothing happened.

No flash. No transformation.

Just a low hum.

He waited.

A minute passed. Whispers crept in from the corners of the hall.

Then, finally, a subtle glow bloomed beneath the water. Symbols—not of fire or wind—but of gears, clocks, spirals. An affinity unseen in the past decade.

The Elders stiffened.

One of them whispered, “Chrono-thread…”

Hazel blinked, pulling his hand back. “Wait—what did I get?”

Nari stepped forward. “Chrono-what?”

The head Elder gave Hazel a measured look. “You’ve been marked by Time.”

Hazel blinked again, disoriented. “That’s not even an element.”

“It’s rare. Unpredictable. Most don’t survive long enough to master it. It’s… a quiet affinity. Subtle. No fireballs. No ice.”

Hazel’s heart sank. “So it’s useless.”

“It’s not useless,” Nari cut in. “It’s… mysterious.”

He sighed, stepping away. “Great. I got mysterious.”

That night, Hazel sat in his small rooftop space, staring at the stars. The bracelet on his wrist had started to glow faintly. That had never happened before.

Nari joined him, two cups of hot vine-root in hand.

“You gonna sulk until sunrise?”

“I just thought I’d get something strong. Something useful.”

“Time is literally how everything moves,” she said. “Sounds important to me.”

He smiled weakly. “Yeah, but I can’t do anything.”

She held out her hand. “Then try. Let’s see what happens.”

He looked at her palm, then at his bracelet. The silver band shimmered again, syncing with the sigil on his hand. He took a breath, focused.

Everything slowed.

Birds froze mid-flight. The wind stilled. Nari’s blink hung in the air like a photograph.

Hazel panicked.

And in that panic—his heart racing—he pushed.

The world inverted.

When he opened his eyes, they were no longer on the rooftop.

They were surrounded by snow.

Trees stretched high above them, and thick flakes fell from the sky. There was no city skyline. No lights. Just wilderness.

“Hazel?” Nari stood, brushing frost from her shoulders. “Where the hell are we?”

He stared at the distant mountain, its peak cutting through the clouds like a blade.

“That’s Mount Grivahn,” he said, voice hollow.

“No,” she whispered, turning slowly. “No, no—how did we get here?”

Hazel checked his sigil. The markings had changed. A different pattern—simpler, older.

“We went back.”

She frowned. “How far?”

Hazel looked at the snow patterns, the wild trees—not yet twisted by Spirit energy.

Then he looked at the calendar built into the bracelet’s edge.

“Ten years,” he breathed. “We’re ten years in the past.”

Nari froze. “That’s… when your parents—”

“Disappeared,” he finished.

They both turned to the mountain.

Hazel’s pulse raced. “They’re here. Somewhere.”

The wind carried a distant howl. Not from an animal—but something stranger.

“We can’t change the past,” Nari warned, already sensing the weight of it. “Not without consequences.”

“I don’t care,” Hazel said. “I didn’t ask to come here. But now that we are—maybe we can just… see. Watch. Understand what happened.”

She stared at him, expression unreadable. Then nodded.

“Okay. Then let’s find them.”

The wind howled against the cave walls, whistling through cracks like nature’s cruel lullaby.

Outside, the sky churned a deep gray, clouds bleeding into each other. The storm would hit before midnight—of that, they were sure.

“It’s gonna be a cold night,” Nari muttered, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Not like any other night isn’t on this nearly lifeless mountain…”

Soft chuckles bounced gently across the dim cave, the fire’s amber light flickering as breezes poked through. Nari smiled faintly, but Hazel just stared into the flames, lost in the dance of orange and red.

“I still can’t believe you think your power is useless,” she said, gently, but firm.

Hazel scoffed. “Well, look where the powers you admire got us.”

His voice was sharp with sarcasm, but not at her—at himself. A jagged self-mockery that had become his default. Twelve days on Mount Grivahn had worn him thin. Between near-starvation and freezing nights, the weight of time—literally—was crushing him.

They had survived on whatever small animals they could catch—half-frozen squirrels, hares, and once, a wild chicken-looking bird that nearly killed Nari before she torched it. Her fire affinity had kept them alive: warmth, light, cooked food. Hazel, by contrast, had barely dared to use his abilities since the incident that flung them into the past.

What if he made it worse?

What if they skipped another decade, or tore a hole in time itself?

After a week of trudging through the southern slope, only to find wreckage and snow-swept ruins, they made a hard decision: go around.

The western path was brutal—steeper, colder—but recent storms had reshaped the terrain. Tracks were buried. Caves collapsed. Whatever signs they’d hoped to find had been erased.

“We try the other side,” Nari had said. “Or we freeze to death here wishing we had.”

So they did. And on the ninth day, as snow fell in thick curtains and visibility dropped to nothing, they heard a sound that stopped them both mid-step:

A faint, desperate cry.

Hazel turned first, scanning the wind-beaten cliffside. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Nari said, narrowing her eyes. “It came from below.”

They followed the sound down a sloped ledge, half-sliding, half-falling, until they came across a small hollow carved into the mountain—a place not much bigger than a closet.

Inside was something Hazel had never seen before.

It looked like a wolf, but not quite. Its body shimmered with silver fur that pulsed faintly with blue energy. Tiny, almost translucent wings twitched at its back, and glowing spiral symbols wrapped around its tail like ancient tattoos.

It was a Spirit Beast, freshly hatched.

And it was crying.

“Its egg cracked early,” Nari murmured, kneeling. “It hasn’t seen its mother.”

Hazel stared, speechless.

The beast trembled as she reached for it—then, cautiously, nuzzled into her palm.

The bond happened instantly.

The air around them surged with power as Nari’s sigil flared to life. The Spirit Beast glowed and let out a soft hum—like a sigh of relief—as a spiritual thread wrapped around her wrist, sealing the contract.

Hazel blinked. “You just… tamed it?”

“Not tamed,” Nari said softly, eyes still locked on the creature. “Adopted.”

They named it Kiro.

Kiro became a steady presence—guarding them at night, warning them of nearby dangers, even scouting small paths they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Nari was protective, almost maternal, and Kiro clearly adored her.

On the twelfth day, while climbing the mid-ridge path, Hazel heard the first sign of danger.

Hooves.

Not the graceful kind.

These were sharp. Heavy. Fast.

The mountain goats of Grivahn were no ordinary animals. Mutated by years of Spirit energy, their horns curved like swords and their eyes glowed with a sickly green light. Territorial and vicious, they struck without warning.

And they came in numbers.

“Hazel, MOVE!” Nari shouted as the first beast lunged.

He dove aside just as a horn smashed into the cliff where he’d been standing.

Kiro leapt forward, barking beams of light, trying to scatter them. Nari formed a wall of flame, forcing some of the goats to rear back. But more came—six, eight, ten.

They were surrounded.

Hazel backed into a corner of rock, heart pounding.

“I can’t—” he started.

“Yes, you CAN!” Nari roared. “Do something! Or we die here!”

He clenched his fists.

The power surged inside him like a storm. The world blurred. His bracelet pulsed.

And time—

Stopped.

The air froze.

Snowflakes hung midair like stars. Goats locked mid-charge. Kiro, mid-leap, paused in a perfect arc.

Hazel stood up slowly, breathing hard.

He moved between the beasts, one by one, gently pushing them aside. Pulling Nari away from the fray. Even guided Kiro down safely to the ground.

He didn’t know how long he could hold it.

Time snapped back.

With a burst of light and sound, the goats slammed into nothing. They stumbled in confusion—Hazel and Nari were gone, the battlefield empty.

From a hidden ridge above, the two of them watched in silence, hearts pounding.

Hazel collapsed to the ground, hands trembling.

“I… I did it.”

Nari knelt beside him, grinning wide. “You just saved our lives.”

Hazel stared at his hands, then the mountain.

And for the first time, the weight in his chest lifted—just a little.

Time wasn’t a weapon.

It was a gift.

Maybe.

The days folded into one another like pages in a book left open to the wind. One blink and a week had passed. Another, and the sun had circled its throne in the sky a dozen times. Life on Mount Grivahn had a strange rhythm—a haunting symphony of wind, snow, and silence.

Yet amidst the chill and the unyielding frost, something was blooming.

Kiro, once a mewling spirit beast, had awakened her Spirit Arcana—nature, of all things. And what life she summoned! Shoots of green curled from stone; vines whispered up cliffs with a lover's touch. Nari, always ablaze with passion, now danced with dual flames—fire and flora. Where her fists once blazed, now roses bloomed in fire-kissed petals. She called it “Verdant Flame,” a fusion spell that curled fire and life into one glorious, glowing spiral.

"You're a walking wildfire with roots," Hazel had teased one morning, stirring a makeshift stew with the hilt of a dagger.

"And you," Nari shot back, twirling a stem of thorns between her fingers, "are a ticking clock with no idea where your hands point."

Hazel smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

Kiro had grown bolder too, galloping across cliffs with wind-whipped joy, her vines snagging berries, her wings rustling like parchment in the wind. Each evening, Nari and Kiro trained under the whispering stars, crafting new ways to layer their magics—living barriers of fire-veined bark, explosive spores ignited mid-air, petals laced with flame.

Their bond had blossomed like Kiro’s wildflowers, yet something darker loomed.

The ogres had started appearing again.

Not with the wrath of conquerors, but the desperation of prey.

Hazel, ever the observer, had noticed their numbers increasing in their treks across the eastern trail. Some were limping, others bleeding, and all bore the look of creatures fleeing shadows not yet born.

"They're running," he had said one morning, peering down a slope littered with half-melted tracks. "We’re in their territory. They’re not hunting. They’re escaping."

But it was Nari who noticed more.

Every time an ogre appeared, Kiro would growl—not at them, but to the east. Always the east. As if the wind carried the scent of something unseen, something unspoken.

"There’s something coming," Nari had told Hazel that night, as they huddled by the fire. "They’re not just running. They’re being chased."

Hazel, tangled in the webs of time, had only half-listened. He was consumed with mastering the delicate essence that thrummed in his blood—Time. Not in the grand, sweeping ways he had imagined as a boy, but in the maddening subtlety of slowed motion, delicate pauses, and stretched seconds.

He would toss a stone into the air, then reach out with his will and decelerate its fall until it hovered like a moon in the breath between heartbeats. Then two stones. Then three.

And every time, the seconds strained against his will like wild horses beneath a thin net of control.

So, when Nari told him she planned to scout the eastern cliffs alone with Kiro, he barely registered the fear clinging to her voice.

She left at dawn.

The wind was cold that morning—the kind that felt like whispered warnings. But Nari ignored them. With Kiro beneath her, they flew low, cloaked in silence. Vines coiled around the spirit beast’s flanks to reduce the wind’s roar. Kiro was a shadow with wings, her pulse aligned with the beat of the mountain.

They rose, higher than ever before, cresting the cliff edge like whispers of light.

And what Nari saw stole her breath.

Below, a slow-moving procession of ogres shuffled like ghosts. They stretched for miles, a river of grey and green limbs, the stench of desperation rising like smoke. They were migrating.

But from what?

Nari blinked and allowed her sight to merge with Kiro’s. A rush of clarity washed over her as the world sharpened—the hairs on a leaf, the shimmer of heat in the snow.

Then she saw it.

Far behind the ogres, a blur. A fog. No—not fog. Something unnatural. The air itself seemed to ripple, a haze of warping wind and mist that swallowed light and bent the snow beneath it.

It was moving.

Slowly.

Inevitably.

And within the ranks of ogres, a scene unfolded like a tragedy scripted in silence. A female ogre stumbled, child in arms. Her mate tried to lift her, panic etched into every heavy movement. The child was passed, hastily, from one hand to another.

She tapped her partner’s arm, a silent plea.

Leave me.

The male resisted, but the haze was drawing close. He bent low, whispering a ritual—the same kind Hazel sometimes muttered in sleep, fragments of forgotten prayers. Then he laid her down and kissed her brow.

When he took the child back, his pace turned desperate.

The fog paused behind the female.

Waiting.

Watching.

Nari and Kiro stayed hidden for half a day. The fog inched forward, but never crossed the ogress. Her body remained untouched, framed in silence, as though the storm honored her stillness.

Only then did Nari turn back.

Hazel had spent the day balancing the universe on the edge of pebbles.

Three monsters had found him, sniffed out the odd trail of magical scents he had left to guide Kiro back to camp. The scent was experimental—he’d tried infusing it with suspended time, so it would linger longer. But the result was a beacon not just to Kiro’s nose, but to every Spirit-touched creature in range.

The beasts lunged.

Hazel bent time.

He moved like a breath in a frozen world, darting past claws and fangs with the grace of a dream. The sword he carried—pried from the cold grip of a fallen Ogre King—sang through the air, slicing in paused seconds.

When time resumed, the beasts collapsed like puppets with severed strings.

His hands shook for an hour after.

So when Nari returned with Kiro, wide-eyed and breathless, Hazel didn’t run to her with open arms.

He screamed.

"WHERE WERE YOU?!"

A hard knock to the head.

"What if you never came back?!"

Another one—to Kiro.

"And YOU—what are you, a spirit BEAST or a brainless bird?!"

Nari stood still, trying not to laugh at Hazel’s fury.

Kiro nuzzled Hazel’s hand in apology, her vines gently wrapping around his wrist.

"We saw something," Nari said quietly, when his rage had turned to exhausted mutters.

She explained everything.

The migration.

The fog.

The mother who stayed behind.

Hazel sat still for a long time, firelight painting his face in shadows.

"That fog," he finally said, voice hollow. "We learned about it in Spirit History. Ten years from now, it devours this mountain. Leaves it empty. Frozen in more ways than one."

Nari nodded. "We saw it. And it’s early."

Silence.

Hazel looked up, and this time his smile reached his eyes.

"Then we’ve got time."