As the the returning Hound cracks time for the fourth and final time in less then a minute, that question becomes increasingly abstract.

Shards of time begin to rain down around them spraying fragments of seconds that detonate with the sound of ringing chimes.



Around her, in a way she cannot quite verbalize, Bina feels the moments in time that she herself is occupying begin to come loose from the past and the future. Her timeline, much abused, bent sometimes and folded in on itself, but always there, shudders, then shakes loose.



The sensation of wrongness is appalling. It is not unlike being flung down a cliff side, slick with ice, toward a dark abyss.

And in the darkness, at the bottom of that abyss, something stirs.