When awareness returned, it did not crash in like surf against break-water; it seeped—cool and deliberate—through the thin membrane between dream and certainty. The first hook that yanked me fully awake was sound: a single tick, precise as a surgeon's scalpel, emanating from the arcane chronometer on my left. One tick, then the answering tock, both perfectly spaced. Good. Whatever had happened to me past this room's walls, the gears of my life here still ran on schedule.
I blinked, letting my vision settle on the familiar lacquer of my desk. Blackwood, polished so many times the grain had begun to shine like onyx beneath morning light. A faint crescent of half-dried ink lay near the blotter—evidence of an interrupted equation? No, a glyph draft. I remembered now: I had been refining a frequency rune for temporal anchoring before the quest had snatched me away. That blob of ink had once bothered me, but in this moment it felt like a breadcrumb left by a friend.
