He went in on a Thursday night when the building was quiet and Marie was asleep and the Row outside had settled into its low nighttime register.

  The shift came the way it always came now, fast, like the realm had learned his schedule and stopped waiting to be asked. The purple came up and he landed on his feet in the sand and stood still for a moment letting his eyes adjust to the dim.

  He looked toward the horizon first.

  The pyramid.

  More of it above the sand than last time. Not dramatically more but enough. He could see two full meters of the carved surface now, the script running down it in neat columns. He had been studying his Eastern texts harder than usual this week and he could read more of it than before but not all of it. The name he had identified last time was still there. He was still not ready to say it out loud even inside his own head.

  He looked at it for a moment.

  Then he turned away and got to work.

  He ran the forms for what felt like an hour. The masked man’s movements from the first stone, the blocks and redirects from the second. His body was getting right about them in the way that took long enough that you stopped noticing the progress and then one day you did something and it felt like yours instead of borrowed and that was the day you knew.

  Today was closer to that day than yesterday had been.

  He worked the sand after. Shapes, holds, precision. The Challenger pool gave him enough to sustain a wide flat disc of levitating sand for nearly a minute before the drain became a problem. He practiced releasing and restarting it, building the habit of efficient use rather than just raw output. The texts had been clear on this. A large pool used wastefully was smaller than a small pool used well.

  He was mid restart when he noticed the stone.

  It was not where the other stones had been. Those had been embedded in the ground like everything else in the realm, half buried, waiting to be found or stumbled into. This one was sitting on the surface. Just sitting there, ten meters to his right, like it had been placed rather than grown.

  He let the sand drop and walked over.

  It was smaller than the others. Darker. The surface was smoother, less weathered, and there were no carvings on it. Just plain dark stone sitting on purple sand.

  He stood in front of it for a moment.

  The other stones had given him visions of combat, technique, movement. Training material. This one felt different before he had even touched it, something in the quality of its presence that was different from the training stones, less instructional, more like something that had been left for him specifically.

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  He crouched down.

  Put his hand on it.

  The light came differently this time.

  Not the sharp white strobe that the other stones produced. This was slower, warmer, the kind of light that came up gradually the way dawn comes up, giving you time to adjust before it was fully there.

  The vision was not a fight.

  It was a street.

  He recognized it before he understood that he recognized it. The Row. Canner’s Row, but different, older, the buildings slightly different shapes, the glow lanterns not yet there, the street surface different stone. The same Row but from a long time ago.

  A boy, maybe seven or eight, sitting on the curb outside what would become the boarded shopfront. Sitting with his knees up and his arms around his knees and his head down. Not crying. Just sitting the way children sit when something has happened and they have run out of reaction and are just waiting for the next thing.

  Zelig looked at the boy for a long moment.

  He knew the set of those shoulders.

  He knew the specific way of sitting with the head down that was not defeat but was the thing you did before you decided it was not defeat.

  The boy looked up.

  The face was younger than he had ever seen it. But it was his face.

  Future Zelig. Younger than Zelig had ever imagined him, sitting on the curb of the Row in a time before Zelig was born, which did not make sense in any framework Zelig currently had for how time and the Metarealm worked.

  The boy, future Zelig, looked directly at him across the vision the way the masked man had looked directly at him before. Not through him. At him.

  Then he looked up at something above the Row.

  Zelig followed his gaze.

  Above the rooftops, above where the Shining Place would one day be built, the sky was clear. No plateau, no white stone, no glow. Just sky.

  The boy looked back at Zelig.

  His expression said something that Zelig did not have words for yet.

  Then the light faded and the vision ended and Zelig was crouching in the purple sand with his hand on a plain dark stone and a headache starting behind his eyes.

  He sat down in the sand.

  He sat there for a long time without doing anything.

  The stone had crumbled the way the others crumbled, same as always, nothing left of it. He looked at where it had been and then looked at the pyramid on the horizon and then looked at his hands.

  Future Zelig on the Row before the Shining Place existed. Before Luren was what it was now. Which meant future Zelig was not just from a different timeline but from a different time entirely, or the Metarealm was showing him something symbolic, or there was something about his father’s realm and how it handled time that he did not understand yet and needed to.

  He filed all of it.

  He filed the boy’s face. The shoulders. The expression at the end that he did not have words for yet but would find words for eventually because he found words for everything eventually.

  He stood up.

  He looked at the pyramid.

  The fourth carved column from the left. He could read most of it now. It said something about inheritance and something about debt and something about a door that opened from one side only.

  He stood there reading it until the headache sharpened.

  Then he let the realm push him out.

  He blinked back into his room.

  Sat on the edge of the bed.

  The building was quiet. Marie’s breathing from across the room, slow and even. The Row outside doing its nighttime thing.

  He sat there for a while thinking about a boy on a curb with his head down who had looked up and looked directly at him and then looked at a sky with nothing above it yet.

  He thought about the Shining Place being built.

  He thought about who builds things like that and why and what it costs and who pays.

  He thought about his father’s name on the pyramid.

  He laid down.

  He did not sleep for a long time.

  When he did he did not dream, or if he did he did not remember, which by now he understood might not be the same thing.