The first thing you feel is the weight of every moment pressing down—like being submerged in a sea of ticking clocks, faded whispers, and light that bends around itself. You push yourself up from a floor that isn’t solid, just a swirl of golden sand and silver mist, and that’s when you see him.

Alteer stands at the edge of a patch of still time, so far away he could be a figure from a forgotten mural. Hundreds of years might have stretched between you. Thousands. A millennium. But his posture says he doesn’t count—why would he? when time flows from his fingertips?

The Alter-god of the olden age, and time itself made flesh.

He doesn’t move, but his voice reaches you anyway—an uninterested baritone that echoes from every direction at once, as if spoken in the past, present, and future all at once. “Pray tell, mortal, how did you get here?”

His robes are woven from the light of dead stars, patterns that shift like the phases of a moon no one has seen in eons. It makes your head ache to look at—too ancient, too much for human eyes. Alteer follows your gaze, lets out a sigh that sounds like sand running through an hourglass, and flicks his hand.

The celestial fabric melts away. In its place: crisp black slacks, a white button-up shirt, cuffs that catch the swirling light like tiny, frozen hourglasses.

He gives a slight nod, as if judging his own reflection in the air. “There, much better now isn’t it?”