Maybe she should be wary. Maybe anyone else would be. Kyle and Istredd would like her to be. Yet, nothing in the flow of the magic, the feeling of the Singularity permeating every iota of the Horizon, gives her any sign that she should be. Even as a photo album of horrors begins to latch onto the edges of her thoughts. Dots that become dominoes that slide into temporal ripples. Bread and milk and. breathing, Sabine leans into the loosed flood.

A virus. Aggressive and remorseless.

Bodies as far as the eye could see.

And yet not everything, not everyone—not quite the child insanity couldn't touch but likened to. There are dashes of light, of Life, of those who survive. A swirling darkness in and under and through it all. Collapsed at a point. Like the Rift. But not. Not a temple with a million faces, only the last a gas station, with a crack where the edge of a God lay sleeping, this was different. A sprawling metropolis, and in its center, instead, within its hidden crack the whitest lightning, where a dark spire of a shape, going up and up meant to dominate the sky—no, worlds—it touched.

Through even that the whisper of light,
of a force fighting back.

Hush, the voice says. But Sabine can't.


There's something almost...familiar...but so far away.
Everything felt effortless and
needed every iota of her focus.

But where are you?
When was all of this?
Was it here? Before?

That doesn't seem right. It doesn't line up with anything on this planet she's read, researched, or allowed to come to her across its time. But there's so much being hidden and held in this place—in all the places of this place.