Time Is Always With You – Episode #13: Interlude: The Secundus In Imperio

More about Time Is Always With You – Episode #13: Interlude: The Secundus In Imperio

Elsewhere. Elsewhen.

There is a place the universe does not name. It exists between the folds of causality, suspended above the machinery of everything, where even time pauses, not from exhaustion, but from deference.

Upon a crystalline platform adrift against the slow churn of colliding galaxies stands a figure robed in deep violet and stellar dark, adorned with golden clockwork gears that are not decorative but functional, spinning with the quiet precision of a universe that never rests.

He is called Secundus in Imperio. Second in command to the Supreme Time Lord. First among all others.

In one hand he holds the hourglass, golden, intricate, luminous with blue sand that does not fall so much as “choose” its descent. Each grain is a timeline. Each grain is a life. Billions of them, coursing through his grip with a warmth that lesser beings would confuse for mercy.

It is not mercy. It is superintendence.

His metallic face, lined in gold, lit from within by eyes that have witnessed the birth of the first star and the death of the last, surveys the multiverses not as a scholar reads a text, but as a conductor commands an orchestra, with absolute authority over every instrument, every rest, every deviation from the score.

He perceives past, present, and future simultaneously, layered like transparencies. Where a mortal mind would fracture, his holds without strain. Around him, holographic filaments branch and recombine, threads of causality already adjusted, or quietly corrected before they knew they needed correcting.

A flicker crosses those luminous eyes. Not surprise. Recognition. The quiet acknowledgment of a moment long prepared for, arriving at last at its coordinates.

The convergence is near.

In Astral City, the Pilgrim wanders still, directional glyph in hand, unaware of how precisely his wandering has been permitted. The broker was placed. The Oracle was allowed to speak. The lullaby was always the price.

Nothing that has happened to the Pilgrim has been incidental.

In the Eternal City, centuries deep in his vigil, the Knight Time Lord waits. He perceives past, present, and future simultaneously, and so he knows the Pilgrim is coming, not as anticipation, but as recollection of something not yet happened.

When they meet, the lock will engage. What follows will be irreversible. A chain of events the universe has never witnessed before.

Secundus raises the hourglass, tilts it by a degree no mortal instrument could measure, and watches a few grains of blue-lit sand redirect their fall. A phrase surfaces from his deep archive, the voice of the Supreme Time Lord, spoken in a register that vibrated below sound:

"The Supreme Time Lord listens not for prayers, but for patterns emerging across lifetimes."

The pattern is almost complete.

The symphony plays on.
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