Schwieger looked at him. “How easy did you find it?”
Maxwell had no answer for that.
“The moments of their deaths are all lost behind layers of timeline collapse,” Schwieger said. “Like layers of rockslide. None of them can be rescued—but their timepieces, built to survive the collapse of a timeline, still linger in garrets and graves and bank deposit boxes, occasionally falling into the hands of locals such as you and your parents.”
Maxwell took a moment to digest this. “And the Five?”
“The Five considered the Seven selfish and foolish. Left alone, the Five set out to build a paradise. If they could not rebuild the future they had come from, they would build a better one, a heaven on earth. And so they proved over and again that craftwork cannot be successfully executed when one’s onl
