Dedication

For my readers. None of my worlds would exist without you.

Prologue

The Observatory
March 2023

DOUG

Waking up after seventeen months in stasis is like recovering from a blunt force trauma to the head. The headache, the nausea, the shakes, the thick fog that steals all sense of place and time, leaving only the vague notion that I’ve been here before. Not just in this room or this place. But in this very moment.

“Douglas, are you all right?” The professor sits behind Chronos’s desk, on Chronos’s throne. The Staff of Time is leaning on a stand at his elbow like it belongs to him.

Daniel Lyon steeples his fingers, watching me across the desk with a wariness that could almost pass for concern.

“I’m fine.” I hide my stasis tremors behind tightly clenched teeth. I want to set his chair on fire. Want to drown him, freeze him, strangle him with my bare hands, but every cell in my body feels weak, my magic spent. And he knows it. He hasn’t even gone to the trouble to restrain me. A single guard—some dickhead I’ve never even seen before—waits outside the door.

A stasis chill takes hold. My back clings to the leather armchair, my Observatory-issued coveralls already drenched with cold sweat. All those months spent in a chamber have my senses cut sharp. The desk light’s too bright, the old man’s blue eyes too penetrating. The musty odors of the antique canvases and moldering books around the room are thick enough to choke me. Under it all, I swear I can taste the rot in the catacombs below us. And something else . . . a faintly fetid reek from an enclosure on a shelf on the back wall—one of Gaia’s terrariums. The strange emerald serpent coiled inside isn’t one of her usual pets. It’s unlike any creature I’ve seen in the Observatory before, and I dig my nails into the armrests, wondering whose magic is trapped inside it. I hope like hell it’s Jack’s.

The snake’s forked tongue flicks over the glass, the glittering diamondlike facets of its eyes shimmering as it watches us. It takes everything I have to drag my gaze from the tank.

“Why was I kept in stasis so long?” Three months would have been long enough to recover, even from the most violent death.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Lyon’s tone is gentle, cautious. As if I’m something fragile, to be handled delicately. And I hate him all the more for it.