KRONOS MAW: RISE OF THE TEMPORAL ANCHOR
Chapter 4: The Morning After Everything Changed...
Alex woke up knowing something was different before he could name what it was.
It wasn't dramatic. No surge of energy, no sudden awareness of cosmic power humming through his veins. It was quieter than that — subtle in the way that the most permanent changes always are. Like waking up after a fever has broken. The world was the same world. He was in the same bed, the same room, the ceiling crack still wandering its familiar path above him. But the quality of everything had shifted slightly, the way a photograph shifts when someone adjusts the focus by a single degree.
He lay still and listened.
He could hear the clock downstairs. Not just hear it — feel it. Each tick arriving at him like a small precise tap against the inside of his chest, the second pulse he'd noticed last night answering each one with a faint blue warmth. He counted the ticks without trying to. Sixty per minute. Perfectly even. As though the clock was reporting to him.
He sat up and looked at his watch.
Ticking. Still perfectly ticking.
He pressed two fingers against his sternum. That warmth again — deep, settled, patient. Like something that had been traveling for a very long time and had finally arrived where it meant to go.
Alex got up and went to the bathroom.
In the mirror he looked exactly the same. He wasn't sure what he'd expected — some visible mark, some physical evidence of what had happened in the sub-level of Chronicle Hall. There was nothing. Same face, same dark eyes, same jaw. He leaned closer and looked at his eyes specifically, because in films that was always where the change showed first.
Nothing.
He straightened up and reached for his toothbrush.
That was when the mirror cracked.
Not violently — a single thin line spreading from the upper left corner to the lower right, slow and deliberate, like a signature being written. Alex stumbled back, knocking into the wall, his heart lurching. He stared at the cracked mirror. It stared back, his reflection now divided diagonally into two slightly misaligned halves.
He hadn't touched it.
He stood very still and looked at his hands. They looked normal. But now that he was paying attention he could feel something emanating from them — not heat exactly, more like pressure. A contained energy that was having difficulty staying contained, like water finding the edges of a vessel it wasn't quite sure fit.
He turned the tap on. Cold water. He held both hands under it and breathed slowly until the pressure eased.
Downstairs Leah called his name for breakfast.
"Coming," he said, and was surprised by how normal his voice sounded.
Breakfast was eggs and bread and the comfortable morning noise of Becky existing at high volume. She was arguing cheerfully with a classmate via text message, narrating the argument out loud for nobody's benefit, occasionally looking up to make a point to Alex or Leah that required no response and received none.
Alex sat at the table and concentrated very hard on being normal.
It was harder than usual. Because now he could feel everything — not emotionally, not psychically, but temporally. The kitchen clock. His mother's wristwatch. The digital display on the microwave. All of them sending their little signals, their tick-tick-ticks, and all of them arriving in his chest like taps on a drum. The world was suddenly full of a rhythm he'd never been able to hear before and now couldn't stop hearing.
He picked up his fork and eggs slid sideways on his plate and for just a fraction of a second — half a heartbeat, a sliver of a moment — everything in his immediate eyeline moved in slightly slow motion. The eggs. The steam rising from Leah's tea. Becky's hand moving across her phone screen.
Then normal speed again.
Alex set his fork down carefully.
"You alright?" Leah was watching him with that careful morning look.
"Fine," he said. "Didn't sleep great."
She nodded slowly, not entirely convinced but choosing to accept it. She reached over and put more eggs on his plate without asking. He didn't argue.
He was almost at the school gate when it happened for the first time with intention.
Not on purpose exactly — more like instinct, the body responding before the mind caught up. One of Emeka's crew — a boy called Tunde who served primarily as audience and occasional participant — came from his left with a shove that Alex normally would have felt coming too late to avoid. He'd absorbed a hundred versions of that shove over the years. Head down, keep walking, don't give them the reaction they want.
But this time something in his chest flared warm and blue and time stretched.
Not stopped. Not rewound. Just — stretched. Like a rubber band pulled to its limit, everything slowing to a thick, visible crawl. Tunde's hand moving toward his shoulder. The crowd around them, faces mid-expression, bodies mid-motion. A leaf falling from the neem tree by the gate, suspended in its descent.
Alex stepped aside.
Clean, simple, unhurried. He had all the time in the world because he was, for that single elastic moment, slightly outside of it.
Then time snapped back to normal speed and Tunde's shove found empty air and Tunde stumbled forward two steps, confused, grabbing the gate for balance. He looked back at Alex with an expression that didn't know what it was yet — surprise, suspicion, something almost like unease.
Alex looked back at him with perfect calm.
"Morning Tunde," he said, and walked through the gate.
He sat through two classes without hearing a word.
His mind kept returning to what had happened at the gate — the warmth, the stretch, the effortless sidestep. It had felt natural. That was the part that unsettled him most. Not frightening, not strange, not wrong. Natural. Like a muscle he'd always had but never used, finally flexing for the first time and finding it strong.
During the third class — chemistry, which he normally paid close attention to — he tested it deliberately.
Small. Careful. He focused on the second hand of the wall clock and pushed the warmth in his chest toward it, gently, the way you'd test ice to see if it would hold your weight. The second hand slowed. Not stopped — slowed, moving through each second like it was wading through something thicker than air.
He released it. Normal speed.
He did it again. Slower this time.
Released it. Normal.
He sat back in his chair and stared at the clock with new eyes.
Around him thirty students scratched notes and whispered and existed in the ordinary flow of an ordinary school day, and Alex sat among them wrapped in a secret that was still finding its shape, turning it carefully in his hands like something fragile and extraordinary that he wasn't yet sure how to hold.
He was crossing the courtyard at lunch, tray in hand, choosing his usual corner — the one near the back wall where the shade was good and the foot traffic was low — when he walked directly into someone coming the other way and sent both their trays clattering to the ground.
"Sorry—" he started.
"No it was me, I wasn't—"
They both crouched at the same time to pick up the scattered cutlery and nearly knocked heads. Alex pulled back. The girl across from him did the same, and they regarded each other from their respective crouches with the mutual mild embarrassment of a collision that was nobody's particular fault.
He knew her by sight — she sat three rows ahead of him in physics, always early, always with a different colored pen for different types of notes, which he had noted once with the detached observation he applied to most things. She had a small laptop sticker of a circuit board on her notebook cover. Her name he was less certain of.
"Mira," she said, as though she'd heard the uncertainty. She was looking at him with calm, direct eyes — the kind that assessed rather than performed. "Mira Osei. Physics, third row."
"Alex," he said.
"I know." She began collecting her fallen cutlery methodically. "You aced the Faraday test last term. Mr. Bankole mentioned it when he was trying to make the rest of us feel inadequate."
"He does that."
"Often." She stood, tray re-assembled, and looked at the mess on the ground between them. "I think we've both lost lunch."
Alex looked at the spilled food. Then without quite deciding to, he focused the warmth in his chest and pushed it — gently, briefly, a small careful pulse — toward the immediate space between them.
Time stuttered. Just for a fraction of a second. Just enough.
He blinked and his tray was upright, the food contained, as though the spill had never quite committed to happening.
Mira's tray was still a loss.
She stared at her tray. Then at his. Then at him.
"That's," she said slowly, "a very full tray for someone who just dropped it."
"I have good reflexes," Alex said.
Mira looked at him for a long, quiet moment with those calm assessing eyes.
"Sure," she said finally, in a tone that meant something considerably more complicated than agreement.
End of Chapter 4