Kael lost his oldest friend. Nobody else remembers there was one.
Timefather opens on an ordinary life in an unimportant village, and spends a long time there on purpose. You need to know Edrin before anything happens to him.
A year in Redgrove
You are Kael. You farm a smallholding outside Redgrove, a day's walk from the city of Eldwyn's Reach and well outside anything that matters to it.
The opening hours of the game are small and stay small. Work that needs doing. Errands that turn into something more interesting than they should have. Trouble arriving from somewhere far away, in the form of rumours nobody in the village can do much about.
And Edrin, who has been your closest friend since either of you could walk, alongside you through all of it. You get a full year with him before the game asks you for anything.
A weapon fires that should not exist
What it does is not aimed at Redgrove, or at anyone in it. Ethea's protector spends the last of his power turning it back — and turning back the day with it.
You wake on a morning you have already lived. The sun is where it was. The work is undone.
Edrin is not dead. Edrin was never born. He has been lifted out of the record so completely that his mother does not look up when you say his name, and the room she raised him in is a storeroom, and the two of you never met.
You are the only one carrying him.
What you do about it
Kael is not a chosen one and never behaves like one. He is a farmer with a missing friend and an unreasonable certainty that he is right about it — which is enough, because it is the only thread anyone is pulling.
Following it takes you off the smallholding and eventually a long way from Redgrove: into Eldwyn's Reach, into the politics of five city-states that have been circling each other for centuries, and toward the one person in Ethea who could have done this.
Everything the game is about — the cities, the factions, the crystal they are all quietly fighting over — you walk into sideways, while looking for someone.
The Timefather
He was born Urabus, a mortal man, long before Ethea kept records. He found the Chronoheart in a ruin and it bonded to him, and he has spent every year since as its keeper and the world's protector — a job nobody gave him and nobody can take away.
He has done a great deal of good with it, and some things that are difficult to call good at all. He is not sorry about most of them. He is also, by the time you find him, running out of time himself.
Yes, I moved the pieces. I always move the pieces. You would too, if you could see what happens when I don't.
Whether he owes you Edrin, and whether you are owed anything at all, is the argument the rest of the game has with you.
It starts with one missing person.
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