The gray mist of the rollback did not fall from the sky; it boiled up from the granite flagstones like cold sea fog, erasing the world from the bedrock upward.
Inside the frozen sanctuary of St. Jude, the final frame of Life Eight hung suspended in crystalline stasis.
Sir Cael Ardent’s collapsing body was locked in mid-fall two inches above the chancel steps, the triangular steel dagger buried deep beneath his gorget, the spray of dark arterial blood frozen in mid-air like an arch of red rubies. Across the nave, Lady Signe Lorr’s aristocratic face was dissolving into pale filaments of light, her blue traveling robes shredding into gray vapor as the timeline collapsed around her. High above the altar, the falling chunks of timber and stone hung motionless, caught between creation and oblivion.
Jon Hale stood alone in the center of the dissolving chapel.
The cold was unimaginable—not the chill of winter wind off the northern river, but the absolute, crushing vacuum of the void that existed between unmade days. His lungs burned as though filled with crushed glass, his heart slowing to a heavy, labored thud that echoed in his ears like an iron mallet striking lead.
In his right palm, Jon tightened his grip on the carved caribou-bone stylus.
