They’d appeared shortly before the Flashback—that strange system of storms which had caused so many millions to disappear and that had brought the terrible lizards; that cataclysm which had re-mapped Time itself—opening one by one over a period of weeks, itching and burning like white phosphorous. I suppose in time we would have sought medical help (although it is difficult to credit, even now, after witnessing the Flashback and its impossibilities firsthand, what could have resulted from that); but, as it turned out, Time was something we had not owned and never would—for it was owned exclusively by them: the masters of the lights in the sky. The architects of the storm.
None of which mattered during the Great Collapse, for by then we’d become like everyone else, struggling merely to sur
