The Timekeeper's Freedom and Past

The Ghost — no, the Timekeeper — had escaped the broken clock.

He thought he was free. But freedom was never simple. He remembered the gray, flat world where he had been trapped — where every mistake replayed endlessly and every breath was an arrow through time. That prison had stripped him of power, yet it had also sharpened him. He had become more than a shadow. He had become direction itself. Now, back in the living world, he turned his gaze toward the Tower. Once it had been his fortress, his crown. The symbol of his triumph. But now he saw it differently. It stood like a mirror, holding both his past and his future, reflecting the wounds he thought he had left behind.

The Tower's True Nature

At first glance, it looked loyal, almost faithful — a dog guarding its master. But the longer he stared, the clearer the illusion broke. The Tower wasn’t loyal. It was proud, manipulative, alive. Its “tail” swung not with devotion but like the hand of a clock, nudging the lives of people below, tugging them as though they were pawns on a board. The Tower was no monument.

It was a prism of time.

A Prism of Time and Duality

Inside, doors were never just doors. A man could enter one and leave through another, changed — obedient, broken, or erased. No one ever saw the shift, because it didn’t happen in ordinary space. It happened in the thin, hidden layer the Ghost himself had once survived — the gray slice between dimensions. That was its duality.

One door for the proud. Another for the broken.

One path for the loyal. Another for the lost.