The silence that followed the collapse of the Great Spindle was not the peaceful stillness of a mountain snowfall. It was the heavy, high-pressure quiet of an iron vault whose air had been sucked out by empty pocket.
Across the four-mile plateau of the northern low roof wall, the swirling whirlpools of time distortion had flattened into inert, powdery grey ash. For seventy leagues to the south, the Melting Borderlands—where stone roads had dissolved into boiling chronological tar and armies had fought through loops of their own dying moments—lay perfectly still beneath the pale slate-grey sky.
Ren Vale sat upon a broken granite top door beam, leaning his forearms against his knees, his breath pluming in the biting sub-zero air.
Every joint in his thirty-one-year-old living frame throbbed with a dull, arthritic ache that had not existed forty-eight hours ago. When he turned his head, the coarse silver hair whipping around his temples felt heavy and unfamiliar against his neck. The ten years of living youth he had surrendered in the watchmaker’s pocket dimension were not an abstract number recorded in a ledger. They were the cold stiffness in his kneecaps, the deepened rasp in his voice. The fine lines of permanent fatigue etched deep into the skin around his silver-grey eyes.
