At the city’s heart lay the palace.

  It was less a building and more a mountain carved into form—an immense structure of layered terraces, sweeping stairways, and spiraling towers that rose from a broad, circular plinth. The lower levels were encircled by ring-canals of suspended water, frozen waterfalls cascading eternally from level to level, connecting pools full of luminous, slow-moving shapes that might once have been sacred beasts.

  The main fa?ade opened in a series of grand arches wide enough for dragons to pass through. Above them, reliefs depicted a story: waves rising, stars aligning, a great crystal descending from the sky into the sea, embraced by robed figures whose faces had been worn featureless by time or intent.

  The old man walked up the central stairway, each step echoing softly despite the silence of the waterlocked world.

  Inside, the palace hall was a cathedral of blue light.

  Columns like slender trunks of frozen ocean rose to a ceiling so high it vanished into pure glow. The floor was a mosaic of concentric circles, each ring inlaid with shifting, faintly glowing lines that resembled more a spell diagram than decorative art. Along the walls, alcoves held more statues—kings, queens, scholars, warriors—all gazing inward toward the center of the hall.

  There, raised upon a short flight of steps, stood an altar.

  It was carved from a single slab of deep, midnight-blue crystal, polished to a mirror sheen that reflected the world in subtle distortions. Runes traced its edges, some bright, some dim, forming a pattern that pulsed in slow, heartbeat rhythm with the palace’s ambient light.

  Upon the altar lay a young woman.

  She looked to be in her late teens, perhaps twenty at most, with long hair that spilled over the altar’s sides like a river of pale silver-blue, floating weightless as though the water beyond still touched her. Her skin was luminous, almost porcelain, faintly suffused with the same inner glow as the crystal around her. Fine, delicate features framed closed eyes fringed by long lashes; her expression was calm, unreadable, as if lost in a dream too deep for waking.

  She wore a gown of thin, layered fabric that seemed spun from mist and starlight—translucent veils of pale blue and white that clung and drifted at once, tracing the lines of her body without vulgarity. At her throat, just above her ample bosom, rested a small crystal pendant, shaped like a teardrop, pulsing in perfect synchrony with the runes on the altar. Bands of intricate, metallic filigree encircled her wrists and ankles, not as shackles but as conduits—each etched with tiny sigils that bled faint threads of light into the altar beneath her.

  She seemed unconscious. Or sleeping. Or something beyond either word. The old man knew.

  The old man’s gaze lingered on her for a moment, eyes softening with an emotion too complex to name—sorrow, perhaps, or regret, or a weary fondness.

  Then he looked away.

  Beyond the altar, at the far end of the hall, the crystalline wall thinned into a translucent veil. Through it, he could see the outer cavern—the familiar underwater cave where John clung to the giant blue crystal, trapped in his endless loop of failure and resolve.

  The old man turned toward that direction, staff tapping once against the mosaic floor. His expression settled back into measured focus. He began to move toward the edge of this inner world, where the crystal’s boundary waited—a threshold between this preserved sunken city and the cold practicality of John’s desperate struggle.

  He had taken only a few steps when a voice—clear, feminine, and resonant as a bell struck underwater—filled the hall.

  “Stop.”

  The old man halted.

  The voice came from behind him, from the altar.

  The old man turned.

  The girl on the altar still lay motionless, silver-blue hair drifting, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in the slow, illusionless rhythm of a body in perfect stasis. But between him and the altar now stood another figure—one that had not been there a heartbeat before.

  She looked like the young woman on the altar, but older by a handful of years and infinitely more alive.

  Her hair fell in the same shimmering river of pale silver-blue, but it was gathered in flowing strands that moved as if in a gentle current, even in the still air. Her eyes were the color of the crystal itself—deep oceanic blue shot through with lighter streaks, as if one could fall endlessly into them. Her skin held the same luminous quality, yet warmer, animated from within by will and awareness instead of the pale echo of preserved flesh.

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  She wore a gown that mirrored the altar-girl’s, but fuller, more regal—layers of liquid silk and light that wrapped her in shifting shades of white, blue, and faint green, like all the colors of the sea at once. Around her wrists and throat, the metallic filigree was no longer inert conduit but living adornment, sigils flowing and rearranging in subtle, hypnotic patterns.

  Oceania.

  The blue crystal was where the higher goddess’s mortal remains lay—silent, preserved on the altar. Before the old man stood the real goddess, the consciousness that had once inhabited that vessel and now had returned to the crystal’s heart, materializing a body to mimic the old man’s current state.

  She smiled as he met her gaze and stepped toward him, bare feet leaving soft ripples of light on the mosaic floor.

  “Hello, mother,” the old man said.

  His voice was calm, but there was a softness there rarely heard—one John had never, and would never, witness from this mentor. The stern trainer, the enigmatic intruder of the Trial world, now stood as a son greeting his parent.

  Oceania’s smile deepened, luminous and bittersweet. “What do you intend to do, son?” she asked, tone light but eyes keen. “Will you break him free of his self-inflicted time imprisonment and then lecture him about how time shall not be altered or trifled with?”

  For the first time in a long while, the old man’s face shifted into something almost boyish—a mischievous glint, the faint upward curl of lips that suggested he’d been caught red-handed with some forbidden sweet.

  “You are right about the first part,” he said. “I will break him free.” The spark in his eyes brightened. “But I won’t lecture him about what he cannot or should not do. On the contrary, I will help him.”

  Oceania’s eyes widened, the easy calm faltering into genuine surprise. The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable; there was no deflection, no half-truth. He did not even try to hide his intentions in front of a higher goddess.

  “But gods are forbidden from meddling in mortals’ affairs,” she said quietly, the echo of ancient decrees weighing every word. “And turning back time is unlikely to be… overseen as a small infraction.”

  The old man chuckled softly, not unkindly. “John is no god.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Are you toying with me, my son?” Oceania’s tone was sharper now, though not hostile. “You know he cannot do it on his own.”

  The old man’s smile only grew, a hint more foxlike.

  “Please,” Oceania said, stepping closer, her hand half-lifting as if to reach for him. Concern edged her voice now, cracking the divine composure. “Don’t rewind time for this. Don’t challenge the Law.”

  “The Law,” he echoed, almost thoughtfully. Then he met her eyes, and the mischief sharpened into something older, deeper, harder. “I am not bound by the Law.”

  For a moment, the palace’s glow seemed to dim, as if the crystal itself had heard and flinched.

  Oceania’s expression turned grave, worry etched in every luminous line of her face. “You walk a dangerous path,” she whispered.

  He inclined his head slightly, in the barest acknowledgment. Then, without another word, he turned away from her—the robes of deep blue trailing light as he moved toward the crystal wall that separated this inner world from the mortal cave outside.

  With a single, deliberate step, he passed through it, leaving the drowned palace, the altar, and the goddess behind.

  Oceania remained where she stood, eyes fixed on the place where her son had vanished, concern clouding the ocean depths of her gaze as the silent mausoleum-city around her held its breath.

  The old man stepped through the inner membrane of the crystal and into the outer world.

  The sub-aquatic cave greeted him in absolute stillness.

  Water hung in place, every ripple frozen. Bubbles were suspended mid-rise, tiny glass orbs caught halfway to the surface. Particles of silt shimmered unmoving in the blue gloom. And in front of the crystal, arms locked around it, eyes hard with effort, was John—dragon form half-faded, caught mid-transition, as motionless as everything else.

  Time was not just slowed here.

  It was stopped.

  The old man looked around once, then spoke into the still water, his voice carrying as if through clear air.

  “Show yourself, Aethern.”

  The name rang like a bell through the frozen cave.

  A moment later, the water in front of him blurred, shimmered, and then parted like a curtain. An old man appeared—hunched-backed, robed in layered greys that seemed woven from mist and dust, with a beard three or four times his own height trailing in slow, impossible loops around his feet like a coiled river of white thread. Every strand of hair glittered with tiny motes of stopped clocks and faded suns, and his eyes were ancient, amused, and tired all at once.

  Aethern, god of time.

  “I cannot hide from you anymore,” Aethern said, and chuckled, the sound dry as turning pages. “I overheard what you plan to do, and as the god of time, I shall not allow it.”

  The old man regarded him calmly, hands folded atop his staff. “I don’t want to fight you,” he said. “What if we say… I will owe you a favor?”

  Aethern’s bushy brows rose. The endless beard twitched, as if considering. The old man continued, tone almost casual. “Oh, and don’t worry about you-know-who. I will take the blame.”

  That gave the time god pause.

  He hesitated, eyes narrowing, weighing centuries of consequences in a heartbeat. Threads of frozen causality around them vibrated faintly, like spider silk caught in a wind that could not yet blow.

  At last, Aethern huffed. “Oh, whatever,” he muttered, waving a gnarled hand. “Do what you want—as you always have done. It’s his mess that you even exist, so who am I to stop you from breaking divine Law?”

  His form unraveled into loose strands of light and dust, vanishing into the still water. The cave was once again empty save for the crystal, the frozen currents, and John.

  The old man stepped closer, walking rather than swimming through water, without getting wet.

  With a single, precise gesture, he reached through the stilled moment and laid his hand on John’s—fingers closing around the boy’s motionless ones where they clutched the crystal. For an instant, Time’s frozen grip resisted, like thick glass.

  Then it yielded to him.

  The world did not move—but they did. Reality folded.

  The cave, the crystal, the stopped water vanished.

  The old man and John appeared in the endless white of the Trial Subworld.

  This time, John moved. He jerked, stumbling back a step, partial dragon form collapsing fully into human as if yanked out of a dream mid-roar. His eyes snapped into focus, confusion and lingering urgency warring in them.

  “What—” He looked around at the white void, then back at the old man. “Where did you come from?”

  The old man smiled, that familiar, calm curve of lips that hid far more than it revealed.

  “From where you left off,” he said.