The End of Time was never meant to be a destination for the living, only a quiet, lonely antechamber for those who could cross the timestream. Its air was eternally still, thick with the scent of ozone and the subtle hum of epochs past. The floor was an ethereal, star-filled void, and the only constant was the flickering warmth of the single, perpetually burning torch near the grizzled, kind-eyed figure who sat patiently at his workbench.
This figure was the Old Man, and he was the quiet keeper of the gates. He had seen heroes and villains pass through his realm for eons, a silent arbiter of cosmic transit. But today, the silence was broken.
A low, resonant groan, a sound like a distant tectonic shift, reverberated through the void. The Old Man’s head, perpetually bent over a glowing gear, snapped up. His eyes, ancient and wise, narrowed with a rare flash of concern. The nine shimmering portals that hung in the air—each a swirling vortex of color leading to a different time and place—began to tremble. They quivered with a sudden, violent dissonance, their familiar colors shifting and bleeding into one another.
"Something is wrong," the Old Man's voice was a low, gravelly whisper, a sound that rarely broke the peace of his home.
The hero of the era, the one destined to be the keeper of the Chrono Trigger, stood near the portals, the weight of a thousand battles etched into their weary frame. They had come to the End of Time for quiet reflection, for a moment's respite from the ceaseless march of history. But the moment of peace was shattered.
"A new disturbance," the Old Man continued, his gaze fixed on a portal that had, until now, been a stable passage to the year 12,000 B.C. "Not a splinter in the timeline, but something… else. A malignancy. It's not eating time. It's corrupting it."
The 12,000 B.C. portal was the worst. Its beautiful, shimmering blue was now shot through with veins of sickly green and a deep, unsettling crimson. It didn't just flicker; it spasmed, spitting out fragments of bone and dust that dissolved before they hit the starlit ground. The air around it grew cold, and a stench, like a thousand-year-old grave, wafted from its depths.
"I have no record of this place," the Old Man said, his voice laced with a confusion that was more terrifying than any monster's roar. "It’s a timeline that has been unmade, and now something is trying to make it again in its own twisted image. It’s an act of pure, distilled evil." He looked at the hero, his gaze heavy with a final, unsaid plea. "I can hold it back, for now. But I can't enter it. I am tied to this place. You… you have the freedom to go where I cannot."
The hero knew the implicit question. This was not about saving a timeline. This was about a threat to the very essence of time itself. A place of such fundamental corruption that it sickened the End of Time. The hero nodded, a silent acceptance of their grim duty.
"Remember this," the Old Man said, his voice somber as he held out a gnarled hand. "This is not a mission of salvage. It is a mission of inquiry. You may not be able to return. Not once you step through that."
Without another word, the hero took a deep breath, steeling themselves not for a journey through the ages, but for a tear through reality itself. They stepped toward the corrupted portal. The familiar star field of the End of Time gave way to a maelstrom of screaming, impossible colors. The portal did not fold space cleanly; it ripped it open. The hero was flung into a violent torrent of pure chaos. They saw visions of their past flash before them, not as memories, but as shattered, distorted mirror reflections. A flash of a smiling companion with a face that was suddenly skeletal; a memory of a peaceful forest that was now a twisted, bone-white landscape. The journey was a psychological torment, a promise of the horrors to come.
Then, with a shuddering, gut-wrenching finality, it was over. The hero slammed into solid ground with a jarring thud. The air was no longer cold; it was hot, dry, and thick with the scent of dust and something metallic and bitter. They lay on a field of broken stone and pulverized rock. The sky above was a bruised, sickly gray, and sinister, purple-black clouds hung low, threatening rain that smelled of sickness and regret.
The hero looked around, and a wave of despair, not their own, washed over them. It was a pervasive, psychic miasma that whispered of hopelessness and futility. The ground was not just dirt; it was a graveyard. The remains of a hundred different species of life, from human bones to twisted tree trunks and the skeletons of alien beasts, littered the landscape.
They looked back, but there was no portal. No shimmering gate. The air was a blank, impassable wall where the portal had been. The End of Time, their home and sanctuary, was gone.
A shuffling sound drew their attention. A figure, its clothes tattered and its flesh hanging in strips, lumbered toward them. It was a man, once, but his eyes were now pinpricks of malevolent red light, and his jaw hung open in a silent, unnatural scream. He was not alone. Behind him, from the shadows of a nearby rock formation, shambled a pack of creatures: the desiccated, skeletal bodies of dogs, their teeth as sharp as razor blades and their empty eye sockets burning with the same red light. They were beak dogs, but something more. They were hungry for something that could still be killed.
The hero raised their weapon, but the creature-man did not stop. He was not a zombie; he was worse. He was the land’s own puppet, a part of its unholy will. As the hero moved to strike, they felt a sickening pull at their feet. The ground itself was trying to pull them down, to claim them for its growing army of the dead.
But then, from the dust-choked distance, a new sound cut through the silence. A grinding, metallic groan, not of a dying machine, but of a perfectly functioning one. The ground trembled with the force of something impossibly massive moving across the land. The hero, already on high alert, squinted into the gloom.
And there it was. Not an Imperial TIE fighter or a Star Destroyer, but an unmistakably Imperial AT-AT, its four legs stomping through the dust, its armored body coated in a fine layer of the cursed land's grit. But this one was different. It had strange, crystalline growths crawling over its armored plating, and a series of pulsating tubes and strange, organic-looking sensors had been fused to its frame. And it was followed by a phalanx of Stormtroopers, their white armor gleaming unnaturally against the gray, their helmets showing no sign of fear, or life. They were marching in perfect lockstep, their rifles at the ready, looking for something to shoot.
The hero, surrounded by the shambling undead and facing down a fully operational Imperial patrol, realized that this place was not just a desolate hellscape. It was a chessboard, and they had just been dropped into the middle of a game they did not understand. A game of survival against the very land itself. A game against an Empire that had somehow found its way here. A game with no rules, no allies, and no way home. The only question now was how long they could last.