Time passed differently now. I felt its shape in my bones—not as seconds stacking into minutes, but as years compressed into a single held breath. The kind of time that only makes sense after you've spent too much of it, or lost too much of yourself inside it.
Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days. Stella had counted them through tears the night I left, as if tallying each could keep it from slipping away. Numbers proved a poor ruler for what lived between departure and return. On Xerion Prime, time moved like honey through crystal—slow, viscous, purposeful. Hours were priced in technique, days in aches that wouldn't leave, weeks in facts I could no longer unknow.
Now the imperial cruiser hummed beneath us while Avalon City gathered in the mana-fused glass—ward towers a touch taller, barrier arcs a shade brighter, the whole city breathing carefully.
