[Flashback]
The contract had not been signed with the pedestrian formalities mortals clung to for security. There was no parchment to yellow with age, no ink carved from oak galls, and no quill scratching across a table to seal a pact between two desperate souls.
The covenant between Celestina Von Starlight and Kaeleth, the God of Time, was forged in something far more visceral: a convergence of raw intent that pierced the divine framework.
It was binding not because of law but because the universe itself recognized the absolute, uncoerced alignment of two wills.
Celestina had been forty-three years old when she hunted him.
She had not knelt before a gilded altar. She had not wasted her breath on the sanctimonious rituals of the Apostle system, those pathetic displays of incense, spoken invocations, and gathered witnesses that served as little more than theater for the desperate.
