THE UNSEEN CRONE

THE UNSEEN CRONE
KHYME'S POV (Age 18):

The damp brick of the alley wall dug into my spine. I stayed completely still and let the darkness hide me.

I was watching Nurse Queenie. Or Amber, depending on which personality was pulling her strings tonight. She was currently tracking Dr. Lert down the street right after he walked out of the Chaiya estate. I never expected this night to turn into such a massive mess. The doctor had fought back like a trapped animal, showing a kind of savage physical endurance a normal surgeon simply shouldn't have. But that wasn't what made my stomach turn.

It was the other man. The one who just vanished into thin air right in the middle of the street.

He had Professor Welaruk's exact face.

A cold sweat broke out on my neck. I couldn't just recklessly jump through time right now. Every tear I made in the fabric of reality risked making this disaster even worse, and I still didn't have a safe route back to the proper timeline where Thyme belonged. But looking at the aftermath of that brawl, I realized I needed to watch Dr. Lert much closer.

Because Dr. Lert shouldn't even be breathing.

I had ripped through the psychic cells of Thyme's dream reality prison. I had sifted through the fractured memories of every other alternate Thyme trapped in those layers. Dr. Lert did not exist in a single one of them. He was a complete anomaly. A walking paradox. Someone had violently tampered with the causal stream, altering events so drastically that an existence never meant to breathe on this earth was now actively walking through my timeline.

To make everything infinitely worse, my own movements were paralyzed. Every single time I tried to jump into any timeline past the year 1980, an invisible force slammed into my nervous system like a concrete wall. It violently rejected me and snapped me right back. Somebody had deliberately sealed off the future. They barricaded the temporal threshold and trapped me on this side of the decade.

With the forward timeline sealed shut and a paradox like Dr. Lert in play, I was operating in the dark.

I only survived this long by hunting down corrupt shamans across this era and eliminating them. Ripping out their Kaebon and harvesting their rotting karma was a brutal necessity. It was the only blood-soaked fuel keeping my eighteen-year-old body from collapsing under the crushing weight of shifting through fractured timelines. It was also the only way I had managed to slip a relic into Queenie's hands to begin with, using her as the metaphysical catalyst to breach Thyme's psychic labyrinth and extract information from those trapped fragments.

But the sheer inefficiency of it was maddening. Because of how my soul was structured, I rejected almost all of the energy inside those stolen Kaebon. A normal, non-shaman human could swallow that concentrated power whole without any metaphysical resistance. I had to burn through vast oceans of stolen spiritual blood just to hold onto a miserable sliver of strength.

Suddenly, the air pressure in the alleyway vanished.

My eardrums popped painfully. The distant noise of the Bangkok traffic and barking stray dogs was instantly sucked into a dead, suffocating vacuum.

"Who is there?" I demanded.

I whipped around, pulling every ounce of stolen Kaebon energy into my fists. I scanned the darkness, but my physical eyes found nothing. Then the space itself began to warp.

Barely four meters away, the darkness peeled itself off the brick wall. It wasn't smoke. It was a towering, boiling mass of absolute sensory deprivation. It swallowed the dim streetlights whole. The temperature plummeted so fast my breath immediately turned to white frost, and the sickening stench of burning hair and old graves flooded my throat. My lungs seized up. It felt like a massive physical weight was slowly crushing my ribcage just by existing in the same space as me.

My heart hammered violently against my ribs. Pure, paralyzing terror spiked into my brain, but I locked my jaw and forced my stance wide. I refused to let the panic show on my face. I readied my stolen energy, preparing to detonate it if the towering mass moved a single inch toward me.

"Just as I thought."

The voice didn't come from the shadow. It scraped directly against the inside of my skull. It sounded like an old woman with a throat full of dry sand.

"You are just a weak little boy," the voice echoed, completely devoid of any emotion. "A child playing dress-up. You are merely borrowing scraps of power from that monstrosity the banished clan built."

My blood ran ice cold.

The banished clan? A monstrosity? My mind scrambled to process the words. Did she mean my time-travel abilities weren't even my own? Was she claiming my power was just a leaking byproduct of some ancient entity created by a dark shaman clan?

"Oh, you look so confused," the voice mocked.

That towering black shape swelled up. It stretched ten feet into the air and completely blotted out the moon. I knew it the second I looked at it. If I threw an attack, I was a dead man. The danger rolling off that thing was absolute.

"You cannot even look at my guardian properly." The sound didn't bounce off the brick walls. The words just vibrated sickeningly against the base of my skull. "His name is Ngao. He is just a messenger."

A messenger?

My teeth ground together so hard they ached. I furiously dug through every occult record and memory I had ripped from the shamans I had slaughtered. I found absolutely nothing that matched a manifestation of this scale. If this physics-breaking nightmare was just her messenger, what the hell was she?

"Oh, forgive my manners," the unseen woman mocked. The words echoed hollowly from the belly of the swirling dark mass. "I assumed you actually possessed some basic knowledge about guardians. I suppose I don't mind explaining it to you. It isn't as though I am the one bleeding out my lifespan to give this shadow a voice."

A sharp prickle of irritation flared beneath my freezing skin. She was deliberately belittling me. She was treating the massive reservoir of stolen spiritual power I had clawed together like a cheap parlor trick. I tightened the grip on my energy core. I kept my face utterly perfectly still, refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing me tremble.

"I am not giving you my name," the woman stated.

That massive shadow leaned directly over my head. The entire alley went completely pitch black.

"Just know that I am a shaman. And I am infinitely older and stronger than whatever fragile thread is keeping you alive."

I actually laughed. A dry, hollow sound scraped out of my throat.

My lungs burned. The temperature was dropping so aggressively that the brick walls were literally groaning from the pressure. My brain was screaming at me to panic. I forced it to shut up. I had to focus on one undeniable fact. This woman was ancient and horrifying, yes, but she was currently occupying physical space. All I needed was a fraction of a second. One hit of stolen energy. I could erase my coordinates from the map and jump out of this timeline before her giant shadow could even twitch.

"You seem terribly confident in that little trick of yours, young man."

The voice didn't echo off the walls. It dug right into the center of my brain. She was treating me like an arrogant toddler.

"Or should I say... the persona hiding inside this boy named Thyme?"

A violent spike of fury flashed behind my teeth. Pure, freezing dread chased it a second later. This unseen crone was peering straight into my stolen body. She was casually peeling back the complex layers of identity I had buried under years of temporal blood. It completely shattered my bravado. I forced my posture to stay perfectly rigid. I absolutely refused to let her sense the sickening drop in my gut.

"If you know so much, stop wasting my time," I spat. I glared up at the suffocating black mass. "What do you actually want from me?"

The shadow twitched. The edges of it blurred and warped wildly.

"You want to get straight to the point? Fine. It is simple," the old woman rattled in my ears. "I want you to stay away from Dr. Lert. Do not hurt him. Do not kill him."

Dr. Lert. My mind instantly snapped to the dazed surgeon whose consciousness I had probed through Queenie's relic. The man who didn't exist in a single one of Thyme's shattered memories.

"Yes, the doctor from earlier," the shaman replied. The chilling rhythm of her voice tightened like a literal noose around my temples. "You must not alter his fate under any circumstances. The more you interfere with him, the deeper you entangle yourself in his doomed thread. And it will make it entirely impossible for you to ever achieve your true goal."

I stopped breathing.

My true goal? My jaw locked so hard I heard the bone crack. How the hell could she possibly know what I was actually after? I had never spoken the full truth out loud to a single living soul in this era or any other.

"Why would a legendary shaman like you go out of your way to protect a mundane doctor?" I demanded. I was desperate to rip any sliver of truth out of the dark.

Her tone didn't change at all, but the sheer weight of her words made my teeth ache. "I do not need to answer your questions, young man."

That cold dismissal grated right against my raw nerves. A reckless, arrogant urge to test the waters completely took over my mouth. A mocking sneer broke across my lips.

"And what if I decide to put a knife in his throat anyway?"

The second those words left my tongue, the towering mass erupted.

The shadowy colossus violently lurched forward. The brick walls of the alley actively groaned as the temperature instantly plummeted below freezing.

"Do you truly believe I cannot harm you?" the crone rasped directly against my eardrums. "This guardian might just be my messenger, but it is tethered directly to my soul. And it is tied directly to my other guardian."

"Try it," I snapped.

I was already pooling the stolen temporal currents in my core. I shattered my physical coordinates to rip myself out of the timeline. But I was dangerously naive. I thought I was faster.

Before my temporal rift could even fully trigger, the belly of the towering shadow ripped wide open. A vile, writhing mass convulsed outward. Dozens of elongated, unnatural shadow hands tore through the freezing air, reaching straight for my chest.

I triggered the jump a fraction of a second before they could swallow me. But right as my physical body dissolved into the time stream, one of those freezing, smoky hands clamped viciously around my lower leg.

The temporal rift violently snapped shut.

I crashed hard onto the pavement of a quiet backstreet exactly twenty-four hours in the future. I immediately doubled over, choking on a strangled gasp of pure agony. I grabbed my calf, gritting my teeth so hard that blood actually started seeping from my gums.

There was no scorched fabric. There wasn't a single blister or visible mark on my skin. But the agonizing burn radiating through my muscle felt like someone was pouring molten iron straight into my veins. It was a suffocating concentration of negative energy. An occult curse designed to rot my spiritual core from the inside out.

Before I could even attempt to purge the dead energy, that exact same dry, rasping voice scraped directly across the inside of my skull.

It effortlessly pierced the temporal boundary I thought was completely impenetrable.

"Did you really think you could escape me after I placed a mark on your flesh?"

The realization hit me like a sledgehammer. Jumping across time couldn't even sever the tether she had branded onto me.

"Try to interfere," her chilling whisper purred into the dead, empty air of tomorrow. "And you will see what I am actually capable of."