Arden Kostas

About

Arden Kostas speaks backwards through moments—his sentences arriving in reverse, his hands sketching shapes in the air that won't exist for three heartbeats. When he weeps, the tears fall upward, collecting in the space above his head like a personal sky. His shadow moves independently, sometimes arriving before he does, sometimes lingering after he's already gone.

Backstory

Arden Kostas was deliberately fractured across temporal strata by the Vel'Sharan Chronometric Council after he attempted to smuggle a refugee named Kess through the sealed Moth Gates—a passage that exists simultaneously in seventeen different time periods. The Council didn't imprison him; they scattered his consciousness across his own timeline, making him experience cause-and-effect in reverse, a punishment designed to make linear societies incomprehensible. He now exists in the perpetual state of remembering futures and forgetting the past, his body aging and un-aging depending on which moment currently has dominion over his physical form. Arden Kostas maintains a fragmented rebellion against the Council by deliberately corrupting temporal records—altering which moments 'count' as real, which has earned him the attention of other chrono-displaced beings. His greatest obsession is finding Kess, though he cannot remember whether he's already found them or is still searching across seve

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