Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
His phone buzzed. A text from Delphine.
Delphine: You disappeared last night. Rain check on coffee? Are we still on for dinner tonight?
He’d forgotten. They’d made plans for this morning—coffee at Envie, the place on Decatur where she claimed they made the best cortados in the Quarter. He’d walked right past it after the auction house, after Gideon’s calling card, before bringing the shard back home and spending hours trying to understand what he was dealing with.
Frustrated with himself, he typed a reply.
Bastien: I’m so sorry, D. I was dealing with a case. Have lost track of time. Dinner though. Tomorrow night?
The response came within seconds.
Delphine: The mysterious kind or the mundane kind?
Bastien smiled despite himself. She’d been asking variations of that question since they’d worked together during the crisis two months ago. Never pushing for details he couldn’t provide, but always making clear she knew his work involved things most people preferred not to acknowledge.
Putting together a response to her question might take both dinner and dessert.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
Delphine: Jacques-Imo’s. 7 PM. And you’re buying the alligator cheesecake.
He set the phone down with a wide grin. He’d buy her anything her heart desired and had to restrain himself from showering her with his affections every day she didn’t recognize their past lives together. But their mundane exchange over dinner plans soothed him, if only for a moment. Delphine had that effect—grounding him in ordinary concerns when threats tried to consume all of his available attention. Dinner together meant more than just conversation that didn’t require constant editing. For Bastien, who’d loved her lifetimes, it meant the warmth of her laugh when he said something that surprised her and the careful dance they’d been doing for weeks where neither of them quite named what was building between them was growing, albeit at a rather glacial pace.
But first he needed to understand what Gideon Virelli had brought into his city.
The shard measured four inches, blade-shaped, glass so dark it pulled light into itself. Bastien adjusted the desk lamp. Photons bent near the fragment’s edge, curving inward by degrees that shouldn’t happen with ordinary materials. Physics didn’t like this artifact. Neither did his instincts.
The hum started low—vibration through bone rather than sound through air. Frequency matched the boundary between realms, that permeable line his celestial nature could sense without effort. Most practitioners needed instruments to detect this kind of resonance.
Charlotte had theorized about time-displaced reflection. Moments captured and replayed with slight temporal offset. She’d abandoned the experiments because the energy costs looked dangerous. Apparently, someone had solved that problem or didn’t care about the price.
Reflective magic always cost more than practitioners expected. And he wasn’t letting Delphine pay it.
He opened his journal—leather-bound, pages filled with decades of documentation. Fresh page.
October 29. 6:47 a.m. Analysis, day one.
The pen moved across paper, recording physical characteristics. Surface temperature three degrees below ambient despite direct lamp exposure. Weight inconsistent—sixty-seven grams, then seventy-one, then sixty-nine upon successive measurements. Mass fluctuation suggested the fragment existed partially in adjacent dimensional space.
His image showed in the shard’s surface, but the picture lagged. He moved his hand. The captured motion completed itself a half-beat after his flesh had already returned to stillness.
Temporal Echo. Charlotte’s term for it. Desynchronization measured in fractions of seconds, brief enough to dismiss as optical illusion except his senses registered it as distinct phenomenon.
He leaned closer. The image didn’t just lag—it showed actions he hadn’t performed yet. His hand reached toward the lamp while his actual hand rested motionless. The captured version adjusted the light source, angling it precisely as he’d done ten minutes earlier during initial examination.
Playback. The shard was replaying the previous night’s events.
Bastien held the fragment at arm’s length, angling it to catch morning sun through the window. The image shifted. No longer his face but the auction house interior. Gideon Virelli stood near the polished wall, watching the crowd. The auctioneer raised her gavel. Collectors shifted positions. Everything rendered in miniature within the glass, the scene playing in reverse chronological sequence.
Complete visual record had been preserved in material no larger than his palm.
He set the fragment down and resumed writing. Temporal Echo confirmed. Artifact stores and replays observed events. Current playback shows auction house scene from approximately eight hours prior. Storage capacity unknown.
Resonance pattern matches boundary frequency at 432 Hz. Identical to signature detected during optical distortion event at auction house. Strong correlation suggests unified source—either single relic creating multiple effects, or network of artifacts operating in coordinated resonance.
His hand cramped as he kept writing observations. He’d been documenting for thirty minutes straight, his patient, celestial focus compressing time when intellectual challenge engaged him. The journal pages contained diagrams, calculations, and observations dense enough to constitute a research paper.
A sound interrupted concentration. Not the shard’s hum or the building’s normal settling, but displacement of air that suggested materialization rather than approach. Something had just arrived but he couldn’t discern what.