Sailor Pluto's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The pale woman was gone, but a clear glass sphere remained on the altar where she had stood. Inside it, swirling light moved like a small caught galaxy. Pluto reached for it and forgot, for a heartbeat, why her hand was moving. The distortion was inside her now. She looked up. The shrine had become something else — a dark tower of obsidian and crystal, an hourglass hovering at its crown, blue fluid bleeding through its seams. Outside, a single tree twisted in the courtyard, branches budding and ancient at once. Time was leaking, and she was leaking with it. Pluto tried to name the bird at her post. The word slipped. She tried to remember the woman's face. It blurred. Her own recent hours were unraveling faster than the shrine's walls. She planted her staff and chose. If time was the wound, she would cut it open herself. "Chronos Typhoon." The blast tore outward in a spiral of green wind. It struck the warped tower, the wilting tree, the sphere on the altar. For one clean second, every clock in the place stopped. The shrine held its shape. Her memories snapped back into order, sharp and hers again. Then the typhoon collapsed inward. The sphere drank the stilled time and pulsed once, bright. Pluto stood breathing in the quiet. She remembered the woman now. She remembered every crack. But the sphere was glowing brighter by the minute — and she understood she had just given the shrine a heartbeat she did not yet know how to feed.