The ghostly creature pulled his hand away from the gap he had torn in the physical realm, the magical gateway snapping shut as the last centimetre of gnarled fingernail retracted back into his pocket dimension.

---

This realm was wholly unlike any sight that had graced mortal eyes. It was a colourless void – a pitch-black sky over an infinite, inky sea. With no stars and no shore, no wind and no waves, the only thing that differentiated the two were ripples cast upon the water’s surface as an enormous, bright teal bubble drifted along.

Upon the inner surface of this bubble were a hundred or more openings akin to the surface of a puddle. Only, these surfaces did not reflect the visage of the spectral being that gazed into them. Instead, they reflected any place on the mortal plane that the Ghost wished to see. They were like windows; crystal balls through which anything could be scryed.

Currently, each pool represented the same place: the bedroom of the Elven Sultan. However, details – ranging from the almost-indistinguishable to the unmissable - set each image apart. The time of day, the orientation of the furniture… in some, even the degree to which the palace itself had been constructed. These were pockets of time, moments.

The mortals called them ‘past, present and future’ – but to the Spirit, time was not a river. He was beholden to no flow, no strict continuity. Time was little more than an extension of space: more places that he could go.

As the Spirit’s work took effect, the images began to ripple, undulate, distort; change. Soon, all of the details that had set them apart had been expunged and every portal appeared the same. They represented only one moment: the one that had been frozen, made absolute. Now, those that remained within the confines of that room were outside of time. Unable to age, or to die.

The ghostly creature, whose shape was almost completely enshrouded by an immense violet cloak, shifted his attention – and as if it were an extension of himself, the bubble changed in colour to a vibrant golden hue and the screens ripple again. They began to represent somewhere different, although still within the walls of Nahreen’s palace; another place not too far from his original scrutiny. He peered into one in particular:

Therein, the door to the Sultan’s bedchamber had been approached by a much younger man, accompanied by one of the lizard-folk and two of the palace guardsmen. This, he surmised, was the mortal that would uphold the Sultan’s end of the bargain.

---

“Is this some kind of joke?” Sehrti folded his arms across his chest as one of the guard attempted to pull the door open. Moments ago, he had knocked, but there had been no sound – and not only from within. When his knuckles had rapped against the brass, it had been utterly quiet. The metal had been muffled.

“I assure you not.” He replied, pulling now at the ornate handle with all his might. He beckoned his partner over and he too set about attempting to get the doors open.

“Your Magnificence?!” the other guard yelled. For obvious reasons, this impasse was of great distress to them. Who knew what sort of peril the Sultan might be in behind those doors? Yet, for Sehrti, this was only mildly amusing. To be bamboozled by so simple a spell really proved how dull they were, he thought.

Then, the guards stopped moving.

Sehrti blinked in confusion. He approached one of them, prodded him, but there was no reaction at all. Both of them had been frozen in place, mid-action, still attempting to wrench the door open. Had they inadvertently brought a curse upon themselves? He turned to Kolaran to debate it – but the lizard was much the same. Unmoving.

Now, he began to panic a little. He whisked himself over to his lizard, inspected him as thoroughly as he could in a few seconds’ span, looking frantically from his head to his talons. Yet before the young Elf could fully question what had happened, he found his answer in a spectacular burst of light at the end of the corridor. From a portal little more the size of a man, a spectral figure floated out and emerged.

---

It was swathed in a cape of brilliant purple that somehow seemed both immaculate and ancient, but far more significant than this was the form clad in it. It took the shape of an elderly Elven man, although this was barely visible for the effervescence that surrounded him: strings of light split into their many component colours swirled about his body like wrappings, drawn out of the vortex behind him. They danced and encircled him for a time, forming beautiful patterns and shapes - but were eventually sucked away into a gaping darkness that sat in the creature’s abdomen. A black hole, dark and impenetrable, and all-consuming.

“Sehrti, fourth son of the Elven Lord…” the figure whispered. Despite the distance between the two of them, the words found their way to Sehrti’s ear immaculately, as if the Spirit were but inches from him.

“I am Zi’at: patron of your people, God of Time…

Your journey begins here.”