The Dreamer's Gaze
Ages turned. Continents, in their slow, granite waltz, shifted their shapes. Ice advanced and retreated. Humanity climbed from mud-brick huts to cities of crystalline spires that pierced clouds once thought the domain of gods. Through it all, the island of Aethelburg persisted, a constant, unchanging note in the symphony of geological time. The estate was now a seamless part of the cliff, its form so organic it seemed to have been grown, not built. The Wardens of this distant epoch were named Elara and Jovan, their talents refined by millennia of lineage. Elara communicated with the island’s flora on a synaptic level, and Jovan could perceive the gravitational tides of celestial bodies with his bare skin.
They lived in a state of deep, resonant peace, tending to the ra
