I just completed my second chronophagy ritual in my current colony and it “healed” the guy’s scarred eye. Everyone was pleased, of course, because he’d been blind up to that point. But he’d gained that scar in a tussle with a megasloth. How does this healing work, I wondered. Then I realized that the the bioferrite he’d been holding hadn’t been an offering but a beacon. What does super-intelligent, artificial planet want with a small lump of metal? In fact, I concluded, my colonist was likely taken and replaced with a younger copy. Is it a construct, a body abducted from another dimension with a copy of my colonist’s mind overlayed, or something else? I don’t know, but so many possibilities fit the Anomaly theme more than “age -8 years and scar removed.” And what happened to my original guy? What horrors awaited him in the archonexus’s maw? I wonder.