[LEGACY VERSION] The Emperor of Time (Book 1 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Prologue - Barenin

Barenin Lyr couldn't see the time wall through the viewport of his tiny pod, but he sensed its shape in his mind. The twisted fold of space-time festered like an open wound, stretching for thousands of lightyears to either side and up and down on the galactic plane. It made this space impassable for any human--but Barenin hadn't been human for millennia.

He wound his thoughts through the pod's ship-mind and edged it forward. As he neared the wall, he closed his eyes. He let the cold touch of his hands on the controls fade. His breaths in the near-airless compartment slowed. His heart, which beat once every three minutes, slowed to five. Then eight. Barenin expanded his thoughts, melding with the raw, primal rhythm of the wall.

Then he moved within the wall. A time wall was an endless moment. He relived all of his life when he stepped through a wall, every memory across thirteen thousand years. It always shook him, and he always recovered--but this time was different.

Barenin felt himself tilting. He'd held the shape of his pod in his thoughts as he'd entered, but now it slipped from him, and he was carried in a flood of memories so dense he couldn't identify one before another ripped it away. Barenin flailed for something concrete to pin himself to. He'd known this trip through a time wall would be different than all the others, but he hadn't thought it would kill him. It couldn't. He hadn't yet closed the paradox.

Barenin stumbled out, his palms scraping solid ground. Heat seared the air, and he looked up to a street in flames. Buildings belched as sections of roofs and walls collapsed. People screamed as they ran--open-mouthed silhouettes in the strobe of lights, the roaring thunder. Their thoughts screamed in his mind until he shut them out.

Barenin drew a breath and choked on smoke and fumes. Where was he? His pod was gone. He should still be in space, lightyears from any inhabited world.

The ground shook. When was he? It was night, and someone was bombarding this city from orbit. This could be any number of wars.

But there should be no wars. He'd carefully studied the time he'd stepped back to, and there shouldn't have been any battles like this on the day he'd calculated to arrive. The time across time walls was different, but it still followed the laws of physics. It was still linear. He should have arrived when and where he'd calculated.

Barenin stretched for a sense of the time wall. He felt his tether to his own time--he must have set that unconsciously. But the sense of the wall itself was gone. How far had he been flung through it?

An energy blast slammed into the buildings a few blocks away and Barenin shoved himself up off the pavement.

A man clutching a bundle to his chest tripped as he ran past.

Barenin reached without thinking to steady him. Then he recoiled and let go. He knew that mind. He looked into dark eyes in a grime-streaked face. His father.

"Luc," he said. It had been so, so long since he'd seen his father. Luc was much younger than Barenin remembered. Too young. The bundle in Luc's arms popped a tiny fist free from its wrappings and gave a throaty, infant wail.

Barenin slammed down all his mental walls in reflex. He'd meant to come back to the time of his younger self, to close the paradox, but he hadn't meant to come this far. He shouldn't have come this far, it shouldn't be possible.

The baby was him.

An orange streak lit the sky and he looked up. He could make out familiar patterns of lights through the haze, the towers of Hale City, the capital city of his birth planet.

Barenin turned to better take in the destruction around him. This had to be the Battle of the Last Stand. The Caelian Empire was in its death throes, and the revolutionaries bombarded from orbit.