The amber light from Mechanicus's trial hadn't even faded when the ground beneath Luna's feet dissolved—not into metal or void, but into ripples.
Like stepping into a pond made of seconds.
She gasped as time itself wrapped around her ankles, cold and slick. The air thickened, humming with a thousand overlapping echoes—laughter, screams, ship engines, lullabies—all playing at once, out of sync. Above, the sky wasn't sky anymore. It was a spiral of shattered clocks, each face spinning backward, forward, sideways. Some showed Earth years. Others bore alien numerals she'd never seen.
A voice came—not spoken, but remembered, as if plucked from her own mind an hour ago, a year ago, a lifetime ago.
"Welcome, Child of Now."
From the whirlpool of fractured moments, a figure emerged. Tall. Cloaked in shifting silver fabric that flickered between youth and age, male and female, solid and smoke. Its eyes were twin hourglasses—sand falling up in one, down in the other.
Temporis.
