I stood up.

Faced the blank stone wall.

Closed my eyes.

Reesay watched from the cushion behind me, silent, giving me the space to work.

"Think of an event," she said quietly. "Something that defined your life. Something you cannot forget."

I knew one immediately.

I died.

I was twenty years old and I lay in a hospital bed and my sister cried on my arm and I watched the ceiling and then everything stopped. That was the defining event of my life. The thing I could not forget because I had carried it across the boundary between one existence and another.

So what. My Eidolon was death? I was going to manifest some grim reaper energy and spend my life being morbid about it?

I reached for whatever was inside and found the same frustrating almost-something I always found. Present but unreachable. A door I could feel the surface of but not find the handle to.

Nothing happened.

I exhaled slowly.

Patience, Reesay had said. Impatience is what leads to failure.

I unclenched my jaw and tried again.

The woman from the white void.

Her arms around me. Her voice speaking carefully about gods and trades and the possibility of return. She had spoken about timelines. About moving between them, visiting them, the mechanics of existence as something less fixed than people assumed. She had spoken about resetting. About reaching into the current of time and pulling one thread loose and retying it.

Revival. Returning someone to life by undoing the moment of their death.

I'd read something like that once. A story, back home, a character who could give life back to things. I'd thought it was a cool concept and moved on.

I reached inward.

Something stirred.

Faint. Distant. Like hearing a sound from another room and not being sure if it was real.

"Is it helping?" Reesay's voice.

"Kinda," I said.

Stay on it. Timelines. The witch moving between adjacent versions of existence. The idea that time was not a road but something more like water, shapeable, redirectable, if you had sufficient force and understanding.

"Is it helping?"

I opened my eyes and turned around.

Reesay was sitting exactly where she'd been, looking at me with a patient expression. She hadn't spoken. Her mouth was closed. She was waiting.

"Did you just say that twice?" I asked.

She looked at me carefully. "I only spoke once. Just now."

I stared at her.

I had heard her voice asking that question before she asked it. A second before. Maybe two seconds. Clear and distinct, not imagined, not an echo. Her voice arriving ahead of the moment it belonged to.

My heart rate picked up.

Don't lose it. Stay on the thread.

Timelines. Resetting. The witch's power. Time as something that could be moved through in directions other than forward.

Footsteps on the basement stairs.

I looked at the entrance.

Then I heard them again.

The same footsteps, identical rhythm, arriving a second time before the first set had finished.

Svenna appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

"Lunch is ready, you two."

"Thank you my lady." Reesay answered.

"I'll be there in a moment," I said.

My mother went back up.

I was sweating. Properly sweating, the kind that comes from the inside out. I had heard those footsteps twice. I had heard Reesay's voice before she used it. Something was happening to my perception of the sequence of moments, they were arriving out of order, overlapping, the future bleeding into the present by a second or two.

I reached inward and pushed harder this time.

Time. It's time. I know it's time.

"You're sweating, young master." Reesay's voice.

I spun around.

"You were about to say I'm sweating a lot, weren't you."

Reesay went very still.

"How did you know that," she said.

Not a question. Something quieter than a question.

I turned back to the wall.

Heart hammering. The something inside me no longer distant, no longer behind a door, pressing against the surface now, pressing hard, looking for the word. The keyword. The name that matched whatever this was.

What do I carry most essentially.

Time. The weight of it. The theft of it. Twenty years that ended too soon. Every moment in that hospital bed spent understanding what a moment actually was. The hunger of a boy who died knowing exactly what he'd been cheated out of.

Not death. Not revival. Not timelines as an abstract concept.

Time itself. The raw material. The thing everything else is made of.

I opened my mouth.

The words came from somewhere I hadn't consciously reached. Ancient words, pulled up from whatever part of a soul holds the things it knows before it knows them. I wasn't choosing them. I was recognizing them.

"Kchronos," I said. The Greek. The oldest name.

Nothing.

"Aion." Eternal time. Unending duration.

A tremor. Something shifted in the air.

"Zurvan." Infinite time. The Zoroastrian absolute.

The candles flickered though there was no wind.

"Kairos." The critical moment. The instant of change.

The tremor again, stronger.

"Tempus." Latin. Time as a measured thing, time as a force.

The something inside me lurched.

"Kala." Sanskrit. Time and death in a single word.

The air in the basement changed. A pressure, subtle, like the moment before a storm commits to itself.

I felt it. Right there. One layer away.

One word away.

I stopped reaching. Stopped thinking. Let the silence sit for one full second.

And in that silence, from somewhere older than memory, a single word surfaced.

Not chosen.

Recognized.

"Kronos."

The basement went absolutely still.

Then everything happened at once.

The candle flames froze. Literally froze, mid-flicker, the fire arrested in place, the light they threw caught and held like a painting of light rather than actual light. The dust in the air stopped moving. The faint sound of the river outside cut out completely.

Everything stopped.

Except me.

I stood in the center of a frozen moment, breathing, the only moving thing in a world that had pressed pause on itself, and felt something rise through me from somewhere below conscious experience. Up through my feet, through my chest, through my raised right arm, and out.

Through my hand.

A phantom shape emerged.

Not small. Not tentative. It came out like something that had been waiting a long time and was done with patience. Vast, towering in the low basement ceiling, its form pressing against the walls not physically but in the way that enormous things press against a space by simply existing in it. Its shape was humanoid in the loosest sense, assembled from something that wasn't quite solid and wasn't quite light. Inside its form, things moved. Gears that weren't mechanical, the shapes of clocks dissolving into sand dissolving back into clocks. Fractures of light that moved like the hands of something measuring an interval too large to read.

Its hand, enormous, descended and merged with mine the way Reesay's Typhoon merged with hers. Not attached. Continuous. Like my arm simply kept going.

It had no face.

Where a face should have been, there was an aperture. An opening into something that went further back than the space available, that looked like depth without end, like looking through a keyhole into a room larger than the building containing it.

The frozen moment held for three full seconds.

Then the candles resumed. The dust moved. The river came back. The world clicked back into its ordinary sequence like a mechanism returning to its track.

Kronos folded back into me.

Gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving nothing behind but the feeling of it. That afterimage of something vast that had briefly agreed to be visible.

I lowered my arm.

My hand was shaking.

I turned around slowly.

Reesay was on her feet. She had stood up at some point during the frozen moment, though I hadn't seen her move. She was staring at me with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Not the gentle amusement she gave my ambitions, not the patient warmth of our evening lessons.

Something much more serious than either of those things.

"Rhys," she said.

It was the first time she had used my name without the title.

Just my name.

Like the situation had moved past formality without asking anyone's permission.

"I know," I said.

My voice came out steadier than I expected.

I looked at my hand. Still faintly trembling. I closed it into a fist and opened it again.

Kronos. It had a name and I had felt it and it was real and it was mine and it was about time and everything that meant for a boy who had already run out of it once.

From upstairs, my mother's voice came down the stairs a second time.

"Lunch is getting cold."

I looked at Reesay.

She looked at me.

"We should eat," I said.

She nodded once, slowly, still watching me with that new expression.

We went upstairs.