Chapter Text
The River Never Sleeps
It flows, and flows, from a time no one can any longer remember. A strip of dark water, still and slow, stretching all the way to the horizon, where light and shadow dissolve into one another and become an indeterminate grey. Fog is a permanent fixture here, clinging to the surface of the water the way flesh clings to bone, refusing to lift even when there is no wind.
The ferryman sits at the prow.
He does not row. The boat drifts on its own, carried by the current — or perhaps the current adjusts itself to follow the boat. No one cares enough to tell the difference. He has one leg propped up against the gunwale, an elbow resting on his knee, eyes fixed on the water without truly seeing anything at all.
Boredom.
It is a feeling that has trailed him for a very long time now — so long that he has forgotten what it felt like not to be bored. Every day, someone comes. Every day, someone steps aboard. They tremble, or they go silent, or they dissolve into tears, or they stand rigid as waterlogged timber just hauled up from the riverbed. They board the boat, they disembark, they pass into the cycle of reincarnation.
Again and again.
Forever.
He has fashioned for himself — with evident, unhurried pride — a game, something to pass the time within that tedious loop. Not a game in any ordinary sense of the word. No dice, no cards. Simpler than that, and far more intricate. He need only find one person — precisely one — who possesses everything he wishes to see, and then he will begin.
The criteria are not complicated. But they are not easy to satisfy, either.
He wanted someone who refused to let go. Someone whose hunger still burned even after everything else had gone dark. Someone mad in the truest sense of the word — not mad from losing their mind, but mad from knowing full well and pressing on regardless. A flame that would not die out even when there was nothing left to burn.
People like that did not come along often.
In fact, it had been a very long time since anyone like that had set foot on this river.
It wasn't as though his boat ran short of passengers. But they were all ordinary souls in the fullest sense of the phrase. They arrived in fear or resignation, sat in silence, and disembarked without a word. Not one had ever asked him anything. Not one had ever held his gaze long enough to see what lay beyond it. They came and they went, leaving the river just as black, just as still, just as unchanged as before.
Tsk.
The sound slipped out of him, spread through the empty air, and vanished without a trace.
Irritating.
Not because he was so devoted to his little game that he couldn't bear to go without it. The truth was, he wasn't particularly attached to it at all. It was not a passion, not a calling — only the one thing still capable of puncturing the monotony that wrapped itself around each of his days the way fog wrapped itself around the surface of the river. If it started, fine. If it didn't, that was fine too.
And yet something about the situation nagged at him. He ought to have met someone worthy by now.
Someone whose desire ran so fierce that even this river could not cool it.
Someone truly, genuinely mad.
Someone stubborn enough to be infuriating. Infuriating in the way that made him want to see how far they could actually go.
He had waited. The river kept flowing. People came and went. And that person never appeared.
He had a feeling that the current of fate had shifted somewhere along the way — the way a river, after a flood, carves itself a new channel and abandons the old one, leaving it dry and silent. The person who was supposed to arrive here had not arrived, for reasons he didn't yet know, though he was certain of one thing: it wasn't because they didn't exist.
---
"Yo." A voice sounded from somewhere in the middle of the air.
The ferryman did not startle. He simply tilted his head, slowly, and looked at what had just appeared in his space.
The hourglass hovered there, giving off a faint golden light — the colour of late afternoon sun that had already shed most of its warmth. Its size was precisely right, neither too large nor too small, as though it had settled on this particular form after considerable deliberation. The sand inside moved at an unhurried pace: the grains above falling downward, the grains below drifting back upward, though by any reasonable understanding of how hourglasses worked, the sand ought to have been flowing in only one direction.
He raised an eyebrow at the familiar object with an expression of mild disinterest. The God of Time did not seek him out often. The two of them were not close. They existed on different layers of what mortals called the universe, crossing paths occasionally when the work demanded it, then going their separate ways.
If the God of Time had come looking for him, something had happened.
The lid of the hourglass opened, and the fine grains of sand began to drift outward, carrying with them a faint golden light — like tiny fragments of memory trying to find their way back to where they once belonged.
They floated toward the ferryman.
He did not reach out to catch them. He simply let them pass before his eyes, his gaze trailing each thin current with an outward air of detachment, while inwardly he received every piece of information folded within them.
A few seconds.
Only a few seconds, yet it felt as though he had turned through many pages of something far, far longer.
He sat still for a moment after the flow of sand came to a stop.
So something had happened after all. His instinct had not been wrong — the current of fate did not veer off its course without reason.
And the reason was clearer now, though many parts of it remained just out of reach.
"What happened?" he asked. His voice was flat, neither rising nor falling, like the surface of the river when nothing had come to disturb it.
"Well." The sound that emerged from the hourglass stretched itself out by a beat, resonating with a dim, indistinct quality. "A demon used forbidden magic to reverse time. As for why — you've already seen it. To erase our dear little lamb."
The ferryman was quiet for another beat.
Then he clicked his tongue, and this time the sound carried a different shade than before.
"Impressive. The God of Time, and yet such poor management of time."
"Oh, come on." The voice from the hourglass shifted register — not quite irritation, but something that resembled irritation if viewed from the right angle. "You think I wanted this to happen. Forbidden magic of that kind isn't easy to detect. It seeps into the gaps, the ones I cannot stand guard over every single second of every single moment — do you understand? I came straight back the instant I found out. Immediately."
He did not respond to the explanation. The God of Time wasn't wrong. The current of time stretched on without end, and magic of this kind was designed to burrow into blind spots — moments that even its keeper did not have enough eyes to watch. Assigning blame would solve nothing.
And more to the point, there was something he needed to look at more carefully.
"Where is he?" he asked.
The hourglass gave a small tilt — a slight motion, nearly imperceptible if one wasn't paying attention — and the grains of sand that had drifted out moments before, still suspended in the air around them, began to move. They turned, gathered, drawing one another toward a central point in a slow spiral, like scattered fragments trying to remember what shape they had once held.
What formed there was a sphere.
Small. Small enough to rest in a cupped palm. And laced all over with cracks — not the cracks of something shattered and glued back together, but the cracks of something that had broken from within and was holding itself in place by the last force it had left.
Pale golden light seeped through those fractures, not enough to cast any glow, only enough to show that something still remained inside.
The ferryman looked at the sphere. The expression in his eyes did not change, but his hand — almost without his noticing — had extended slightly, one finger angling toward the thing drifting before him.
"Don't poke it." The God of Time's voice cut across, sharper than before. "It took considerable effort just to hold it together in that shape. If it breaks again, there's no saving it."
He pulled his hand back.
His eyes stayed on the sphere. The cracks ran across its surface like a map of something that had endured too much — too much to still be whole, yet not quite enough to have come apart entirely.
A soul damaged this deeply — even resurrection was not a straightforward choice. There were wounds for which death was only the surface, and it was the deeper part, the part that determined what would come back, that was the true cause for concern.
He looked at those cracks for a moment longer than necessary.
And somewhere within the familiar stillness that had blanketed him for so long, something began to stir.
"You came here because you already have a solution?"
Not quite a question — or rather, not entirely one. The answer had made itself plain the moment the God of Time appeared. He simply wanted to know the mechanics of it.
The hourglass tilted slightly, a motion that resembled a nod if viewed from the right angle.
"Yes." The God of Time's voice resonated outward, carrying that characteristic quality of something that existed across multiple layers of space at once.
"The same way gods sustain themselves through human belief. Gather enough faith, and he'll come back. Simple, in theory."
The ferryman did not answer immediately.
Things like faith were... typically a great deal of trouble.
Faith.
That was the origin of most gods — all except the primordial ones, those powerful beings born alongside the world itself, whom mortals had come to revere and call divine. When enough living creatures believed, prayed, or simply held in their minds the conviction that a certain existence was real, that existence would gradually take root and solidify within the world.
Gods were born from that.
Or returned from it.
But applying that same principle to a mortal soul...
He said nothing, yet the God of Time understood what he hadn't.
"No, and there isn't nearly enough time for that — building a new religion is out of the question." A breath, something like a sigh, pushed its way out.
"I didn't say anything."
"Everything you're thinking is written all over your face." Time muttered.
The ferryman didn't continue.
He only withdrew his finger from the side of the boat, his manner so unhurried and unreadable that there was nothing in it to interpret.
The truth was, it wasn't only the ferryman involved in running this game. Several other gods had a hand in it as well.
The ferryman's role was to choose a person, then watch as pressure bore down on them — layer by layer, by layer — until something inside them either fractured or was ground to nothing. He only wanted to watch. No interference, not even a fraction of it.
Unlike the shameless one who merely selected a player and then sat back to observe them being dismantled piece by piece, the God of Time was one of those who ensured the game could proceed without dragging down something far larger in its wake.
Each time "today" repeated — and it had repeated many times, in the way that only those who existed outside the linear current of time could perceive — the God of Time would separate it out.
Temporarily severing the "present" from both past and future, sealing it within its own contained interval — the way a waterlogged sheet of paper might be pressed between two panes of glass so that it could not bleed outward.
The technique was costly. Tremendously costly. But because of it, no matter how many versions of "today" came to pass, the greater current remained uncontaminated.
That was the reason the world was still standing.
But this time, something had broken through before anyone could stop it.
Forbidden magic capable of reversing time was not unheard of in theory, but executing it successfully was another matter entirely. Whoever had managed it would have needed a precise understanding of the blind spots within the God of Time's watch — the transitional moments, the thinnest joints in the chain linking one minute to the next. And they had found exactly the right one.
The result was the sphere, laced with cracks, drifting in the ferryman's space right now.
In the aftermath, the gods of the future had convened. And according to the God of Time's account, the temperature in that room had come almost entirely from a single source.
"You looked like you were about to physically combust. Nobody wanted to stand anywhere near you."
The ferryman paid the remark no attention.
Of course he had been furious.
A plaything that interesting, and he hadn't even had the chance to finish.
How could he possibly allow someone else to ruin it.
They had decided to send time back — to let the one person capable of it go in reverse and mend what had gone crooked. There weren't many other options, and the one chosen hadn't refused, because it was what he wanted as well.
"So." The ferryman spoke, his voice as level as before, though carrying something extra now — not quite interest, not yet, but whatever stood just outside interest's door. "You and the spatial god are planning to tear open a rift in the fabric of spacetime across the sky, and let everyone at this point in the timeline watch his entire journey."
"And once he's revived," he continued, his cadence as even as someone reading a plan off a page, "you erase the memories of every last one of them. Let everything proceed as normal, as though none of it ever happened."
"Yes, exactly!" The hourglass swayed back and forth with enthusiasm — the particular kind that only appeared in someone who had just heard another person summarize precisely what they'd been thinking. "You catch on fast!"
The ferryman did not return the compliment.
He sat still for a moment, his eyes not on the hourglass but on the river beyond, where the dark surface continued its slow, indifferent drift, entirely unbothered by everything being discussed above it.
What a magnificent plan for destroying the world.
Tear open a rift in spacetime across the sky.
Let an entire planet watch one person's journey.
Collect enough faith to resurrect a soul that had been erased from the current of fate.
Then wipe the memory of everyone clean — the way a wave washes away everything written in the sand.
Perfectly normal. Completely normal, by the standards of those who existed at this particular level.
Noticing the ferryman's distant expression, the God of Time gave a light cough.
"We've run the calculations carefully. The probability of world collapse is only around 15%."
"Only." The ferryman echoed, the corner of his mouth lifting by a fraction.
Well. Fine.
He didn't particularly care about the survival of the world. He never had. Whether the world collapsed or didn't was someone else's problem to manage — he had his own part to play, and that part rarely intersected with questions of cosmic consequence.
What he cared about right now was the one he had chosen.
It seemed his little lamb had made quite an impression on the others. Enough that they had agreed to this thoroughly unhinged plan.
Speaking of faith.
He turned it over. Skimmed back through what the stream of sand had passed to him earlier.
Heh.
Didn't his little lamb already have a few devoted fanatics to his name.