Story 1091: Whispering Epoch

Time had broken.

Not shattered like glass, nor torn like cloth—but rotted, slow and unseen, until it crumbled into madness.

In the world that remained, the Whispering Epoch began.

At first, it was the clocks: their hands spun backward, forward, sometimes freezing altogether. Then came the whispers—tendrils of sound threading through the mist, murmuring in languages older than dreams. People vanished, leaving only their shadows burned onto crumbling walls.

The few who endured spoke of an entity born from the collision of time and nightmare: the Keeper of the Whispering Epoch, a creature neither alive nor dead, its form constantly unraveling and reweaving itself in impossible ways.

Jonas Wren, an exhausted drifter wrapped in layers of tattered cloth and iron charms, stumbled into the heart of the Epoch by accident—or perhaps by fate.