The Steward pressed forward.
It was not space that opposed them now.
It was time.
No, not time as a force—but time as insistence. This realm had once known chronology. It had been promised a story. But it had been denied resolution. Something had ruptured the tempo. Events began but did not end. Ends occurred before beginnings. Characters aged without memory. Memory returned to scenes never lived.
It was a place of perpetual prelude.
The Steward reached a broken stone circle at the center of the temporal fracture.
There sat a woman.
Or something shaped like one.
Cloaked in layers of overlapping moments—young and old, alive and dying, mourning and rejoicing—all at once. Her face shimmered through a dozen iterations, none of them complete. Her eyes were infinite beginnings.
She noticed the Steward with a shudder of air.
"You shouldn't be here yet," she said. "Or… again."
"I am not bound by your clock," the Steward replied, voice calm but weighted.
