We spent the first hour in a state of suspended shock, the kind of silence that only comes when the world you knew has been erased and replaced by something impossibly vibrant. According to Aris’s calculations, based on the celestial positions of the visible planets and the terrifyingly rapid reverse spin of her mechanical chronometer, we weren't just in a different place. We were roughly one thousand years in the past. We were standing in the era of the First Sovereign—the golden age of the Legends that had been whispered around subway fires for generations.
“We can’t change anything,” Aris warned, her voice frantic, her eyes darting toward every snapped twig as if it were a temporal landmine. “If we interfere, if we kill the wrong person or save the wrong pack, we could erase the enti
