He found the first edge of the condition by accident, as most important discoveries were made.
Her name was Oma the young woman in the settlement who had decided, against the clear wishes of the elders, that the strange pale outsider was interesting. She visited him every morning with food and the barely contained energy of someone who had never been told that curiosity was a virtue only that it was trouble.
She was teaching him the tonal language. He was teaching her mathematics in the dirt floor of his room drawing geometric shapes that made her eyes go wide with something he recognised as the specific joy of a mind encountering a system it already intuitively understood but had never been given words for.
One morning she saw him do it.
Not the cup he had been careful after the cup. But a burning coal that rolled from the communal fire pit toward a sleeping child and his reaction was faster than his caution. He reversed four seconds. The coal rolled back. The child slept on.
Oma had been watching from ten paces away.
Their eyes met.
He felt it immediately something in the pulse changed. Like a frequency shifting. Like a signal being split. For one terrifying moment the Echo inside him lurched, pulled toward something outside, and then settled but differently. Softer. As though a second hand had briefly touched the same instrument.
He understood in that moment that the condition was not theoretical. It was alive and it was already in process.
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He left the settlement three days later. Oma stood at the edge of the village and watched him go and did not follow, because somehow she understood not what he was, not what the rule was, but that there was a rule and that the correct choice was to let it stand.
She was twelve years old and wiser than most dimensions he would later visit.
He walked into the luminescent forest alone and spent six days trying to trigger the dimensional shift deliberately, working on the memory of the feeling the falling-through-silence sensation until on the seventh day it opened beneath him like a doorway in air, and he stepped through it and arrived somewhere entirely different.
He was, as far as he could determine, the only being in any known or unknown universe who could do this.
He decided he would keep it that way.
He decided he would never under any circumstances let another person know.
He was wrong. But that particular mistake took eleven years and twenty seven dimensions to make. And by the time he made it, he was so profoundly, desperately lonely that wrong had started to look a great deal like the only option left.
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