The Boy

He won't know. How could he? Exactly. The very idea is preposterous. He could guess, certainly - although it is terribly unlikely that he would guess correctly - but for him to know is ridiculous. No, the boy will have no clue what is going to happen to him on this one fateful future afternoon. He will step into the elevator unscathed. He will have not even a hint of foreboding.

Of course, he will know things, that sunny day, that he neither remembered nor cared about anymore. His name, for one. Where he was going, for another. To visit his mother? To see a healer? All he was sure of was that he would be an ignorant, silly child before he encounters the shard. You see, in the boy's past - the boy's past, and the world's future - three important things will happen to have made him what he was.

The first? The elevator will be occupied by the four Unaii. This is no coincidence. The man orchestrated it himself, to make sure his life wouldn't go awry. Because of this, there will be no more Unaii. And the Jiaii will be in the power of the humans.

The second? The fire Unaii will be carrying the Jar of Subconscious. It will contain the fragments of all the lost consciousnesses existent - dreams, and the dreams of dreams, and so on. When the compression of the four elemental Unaii causes the jar to explode, the third thing will happen.

The third thing is that the Jar will split into a thousand fragments, which caused, causes, and will cause time to go haywire in the elevator. Its shards will scatter through time, all over the Hourglass Kingdom, with such force that the Jiaii will feel the tug on their spirits. Except for one shard - one shard will pierce the flesh of the boy's wrist and enter his bloodstream.

And then he was no longer the boy - he was several hundred years behind his life, and he was the Man with the Shard.

And the fate of the Hourglass Kingdom was literally at his fingertips.