The dust of the shattered Altar of Chronos had not yet settled when the world
shifted from a war of timelines to a war of the cradle. The ruins of the
Sun-Drenched Spire, once a testament to Southern majesty, were now nothing more
than a graveyard of bleached stone and cooling embers. The golden hourglass lay
in shards at my feet, its temporal fluid evaporating into the air like the last
sighs of a dying god.
But the silence that followed was not the silence of victory. It was a
pressurized, hollow hush that emanated from the small figure standing in the
center of the debris.
Aidan was no longer the infant I had nursed in the moonlit gardens of the North.
Though his body remained that of a child, his presence had expanded, filling the
ravine with a gravitational weight that made the very air feel like liquid lead.
He stood with a terrifying, upright grace, his tiny feet treading upon the
jagged glass of the hourglass as if it were soft moss.
