Time, Noah was learning, had stopped being a thing that happened to him.
Inside Adelaide's dream, months went by. Snow came and went over her imagined Beast World, festivals were held and forgotten, and she built whole new chapters of the Third Scale on paper covered in tight blue script. Outside, on the golden shore, barely an hour passed over her floating body.
And Noah, who stood in both places at once, felt neither of those clocks. His existence was anchored to itself. However fast or slow the room around him ran, his own perception ticked by at its own steady pace, and to him, the whole of those months felt like a few pleasant minutes.
