Twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years of striving, of building, of believing in a system that was secretly being dismantled beneath his feet.
Twenty-nine years of climbing toward a summit only to find he was standing on the edge of an abyss.
But here, in this impossible place, the God of Time was offering him something that twenty-nine years of mortal effort had never produced.
He was offering him a variable. He was offering him the specific, mathematical possibility that the gap between them was not infinite and that the impossible could be made inevitable if the method was finally right.
Theo stood in the center of Kaeleth's domain, surrounded by the swirling, hypnotic patterns of amber gold symbols that pulsed like the heartbeat of the universe itself.
He felt something stirring beneath his ribs. It wasn't the desperate, clawing hope that had sustained him in his weaker moments.
Hope was fragile; hope could be disappointed. Hope could be broken.
This was different.
