The ring opened like a cut glass eye.
They stepped through the Chrono-Gate and fell into twilight: a palace without a sky, columns leaning into impossible vanishing points, a floor that claimed to be marble and then rewrote itself as old ship planks. The air tasted of iron and rain that had not yet fallen. Above them, chandeliers hung like constellations; between them hung doors that looked at one another and sighed.
Loki’s Hall was not a place so much as a personality. It adjusted to the guest. As Sachin, Lara, Markus, and Thoth moved, corridors folded and unfolded around them, arriving behind their shoulders with soft clicks. Their breaths left small puffs of vapor that did not fall but drifted sideways, caught on invisible eddies.
“Welcome,” said a voice like a dozen crisp coins flipped at once.
Loki lounged at the heart of the Hall—a silhouette in a throne of mirrors. He wore a grin like a question mark. Ravens — mechanical and threadbare — fluttered in his wake, each a little clockwork ambiguity. Reflections of the room argued in silence: a copy of Lara that smiled, a copy of Markus that hunched. Loki’s eyes glittered with a thousand jokes.
“You brought your toys,” he said. “A god’s medallion, a smith’s temper, an AI that breathes like a sermon. How quaint.”
Thoth did not answer; his presence simply made the shadows tilt away as if careful not to disturb a library’s dust. Markus’s hand tightened on a holstered device. Lara’s fingers hovered over a field pad, mind already racing.
Sachin stepped forward, medallion low and watch tethered to a thumb in his pocket. He felt the Chrono-Key hum where it slept in leather. When he spoke, he kept the scientist’s calm to steady a head giddy from smoke. “We need the Hour Core,” he said. “We don’t want trouble with you, Loki. We want passage.”
Loki’s chuckle rippled like wind-down gears. “Passage?” he repeated. “You think the Core will stand politely while mortals knock politely on its door? No. I enjoy a good negotiation.” He flicked an eyebrow. “But first—an exchange.”
He rose from his mirror-throne. The mirrors cracked into thin slivers of light and rearranged themselves into a threefold stage. “I will test you, Timewalker. The Hall’s rules are my rules: answer my riddles, or lose what you call a memory. Fail, and you become a reflection here—a polite imitation of yourself to amuse me. Succeed, and I will give you a corridor that leads—eventually—to Othrys’ skirts.”
A curtain of laughter—sad, amused—rippled through the rafters.
Sachin’s throat tightened. Each test now had a price, and the ledger was something he could feel scratching its pen. He looked at his team. Lara’s jaw set. Markus’ eyes were hard. Thoth merely inclined his head, like a man reading the margin of a dangerous book.
“Ask,” Sachin said. “We’ll answer. We have no wish to be trapped.”
Loki’s smile sharpened. “Good. Then consider this a War of Hours. Not with swords—no, that would be crude. With moments. I will throw you three scenes, three choices. Answer what you would do in each and why. If you answer with cruelty or cowardice, the Hall keeps what you value most. If you answer with clarity and mercy—the kind of mercy only risk can buy—then perhaps a path opens.”
He wove his fingers, and the first scene spilled like water across the floor.
It was Sachin’s childhood street: a narrow lane, mango trees, a boy with a broken bicycle. The boy’s face was his own, younger, eager and raw. At the center of the scene, a small hand reached toward another: a friend caught in a drain, water rising.
“You have time for one rescue,” Loki said softly. “You can save the child you love, or you can pull the lever that redirects a flood to save dozens—strangers, nameless. Which do you choose?”
Sachin felt a memory-strain tighten—images he knew like muscle. This was the same moral gear Hephaestus had asked him to test; Loki liked repeating the hammer’s lesson with mischief. He walked forward until the boy’s face blurred into adolescent breath.
He thought fast—of the ledger, of threads and what one act cost elsewhere. He thought also of the gravity of a single human life. If you always saved strangers, your love would crumble unseen; if you always saved your own, the world would rot.
He saw his mother’s laugh as a background note—thin now, but present—and balanced the scales in the same silent calculus that had guided his anvil-strike. He reached—not with his hand but with his answer.
“I save the child,” he said quietly. “Because when you are a scientist you make instruments for the many, but when you’re human you must not allow calculations to erase your heart’s work. One life saved might ripple more than statistics can hold.”
Loki cocked his head as if testing a bearing. “Sentimental,” he said. “Admirable. But worth something? Very well.”
The scene dissolved. The slate of the Hall shivered; one raven landed and pecked at a mirror’s seam, leaving a tiny, bright scratch. Loki’s grin deepened. “Answer two.”
The next scene unfurled like a law in reverse: an elderly man on a cliff who could push a lever that would erase the memory of a massacre from the minds of all who had witnessed it—leave them at peace, but rob the world of the knowledge to prevent such a thing again.
Sachin could feel the weight of historical consequence pressing at the tip of his tongue. Remove memory, you erase motivation to improve. Keep memory, you carry the hurt that breeds courage sometimes, and bitterness other times.
He closed his eyes. He thought of Thoth, of record and judgment. He thought of the Chronarchs’ hunger for holes. He thought, too, of the ledger’s logic—erasing suffering today might invite larger suffering tomorrow if the lesson’s lost.
“I let the memory remain,” he said slowly. “Not for punishment alone, but because forgetting is easy and learning is expensive. Pain becomes wisdom if we let it. To erase might comfort, but it kills the seed that prevents recurrence.”
Loki’s mirthless laugh ricocheted. “Noble—grim, but noble. So far you choose life and truth. Third and final.”
The third scene struck him like a personal thunderclap: a gallery of faces—friends, colleagues, a small child clutching a handmade toy—then a door labeled YOU. Beyond that door, a future self sat in a dim room, eyes like black holes, hands ink-stained. Loki’s voice curled with venomous softness: “You can open the door and become the future you who writes warnings into his past—or you can close it and keep the present clean. Which do you choose?”
It was the question that burned. The message in the Key—S.S.—sat in his mind like a splinter. If he opened the door, he might become the desperate echo who had left advice to himself. If he refused, perhaps he spared those faces their future pain.
Sachin’s mind spun outward and inward like a gyroscope. He thought of Hephaestus’ anvil, of the medallion’s burn, of the price already paid. He thought of the future that had left him a note and what it meant to create a conversation with his own will.
He considered again the role he’d chosen—the scientist who would ask questions and the human who couldn’t turn his back on them. He also felt the Bullseye of The Echo: a man who loved but became cruel to preserve that love.
“I open the door,” he said, voice hoarse. “I do not trust certainty without its mirror. If my future self must warn me, then let him have his words. I will be the man who listens—and if he becomes a tyrant, I will fight what I become.”
The mirrors hummed and one fractured with a clean, angelic crack. Loki’s face was suddenly serious—almost, for a breath, reverent.
“You speak like someone who has read his own margin notes,” Loki said. “You choose life, memory, and the dreadful conversation with your future self. These are interesting choices.” He snapped his fingers. The Hall stilled.
“For your honesty, an opening.” Loki stood, motion turning the mirrors into a corridor that skeined out like a ribbon. “And because I am not entirely heartless—I hate boredom—I will make a gift.”
He produced, from the shadow between mirrors, a small, black pebble. “A compass,” he said. “Point it toward certainty, and it will glimmer when lies coil. But it feeds on doubt. It will need your fear to sharpen. Keep it, if you like.”
Sachin reached for the pebble. It was colder than the air and hummed like a held breath.
Before he closed his fingers, the Hall convulsed. Reflections broke their loops and shuddered into shards; the ravens exploded into a thousand tiny clock-feathers that cut the air and reassembled into knives. Loki laughed—an ugly, delighted sound. “Enough talk. You pass the test—but do you pass the trial of action?”
The corridor twisted into a gauntlet. Figures—reflections of themselves—sprang from the walls, half-living, half-idea. They lunged with the logic of an argument, striking against Sachin’s resolve, slashing at Lara’s courage, testing Markus’ steadiness. Time itself became a weapon: a punch would land but be undone a second later, only to repeat with altered consequence.
The team moved as they had learned—science and ritual braided. Lara looped field harmonics around them, softening the blows by fracturing their momentum; Markus anchored their position with brute, human force; Thoth’s chant stitched the sequence into meaning.
Sachin felt the pebble warm and guided him: it winked faintly when a mirror was false, darkened when a thought had been planted. He used both medallion and Key—timing the Key’s spin with a flick of the pebble’s direction—to anchor a ripple long enough for Lara to cast a stasis net. The net trapped the largest reflection and it shattered into shards of memory: a childhood dog he had once loved, a mentor’s patient hand—images that splintered and fell away, gone.
When the dust settled, Sachin sagged, dizzy from the toll. He reached into his mind and found a blank where the dog’s face had lived. An ache formed, small and insistent: grief for an absence he could not recall by shape. He had expected loss as price—he had not expected the personal sharpness of each absence.
Loki watched him with the eyes of a dealer closing a successful trade. “You won the War of Hours,” he said softly. “You paid in memory and came away with a corridor. Keep it close; truth is slippery at sister gods’ tables.”
He gestured and the corridor’s far end unfurled like a map: a line of light that would, if they followed it, wind toward Mount Othrys—toward the Hour Core. “But know this, Timewalker,” Loki added, voice low, almost kind in a way that made Sachin’s chest tighten, “answers you seek will be more expensive than you think. Your future self knows why. Do not hate him for being desperate enough to warn you.”
They stepped into the corridor. The mirrors closed behind them like lids. The Hall whispered and reshaped itself into a hundred small jokes, a palace that would hold memories of their passing and savor them later.
Sachin pressed his hand against his pocket where the medallion and the Key slept, feeling the pebble’s cold and the medallion’s ember. The cost had been paid in private tokens—lost images that ached with their absence. Ahead lay the mountain and the Core, and a future that had already started writing to him.
Heard in his bones, like a distant clock unwinding, came the echo of a line he could not help but remember even as he had traded other things for it: Seek the Hour Core before Zeus wakes.
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