The light did not resolve into a landscape.
It resolved into a space that was not a space in the conventional sense — no ground, no sky, no atmosphere, no gravity operating in a direction that his spatial sense could establish as down. What he stood on was present but had no material property that the spatial sense could read as material.
Below his feet, or in the direction his feet happened to be pointing, a river.
Not water. Nothing with water's properties — no temperature, no surface tension, no optical refraction. But a river in the sense that it moved, and it had a direction, and the movement carried something. The spatial sense, attempting to categorise what it was reading, produced nothing. The Time law's 0.05% produced recognition without understanding: this was time. Not a metaphor for time. The literal flow of temporal progression that the absolute law described.
He had just stepped into the absolute.
His body locked.
Not an external force — the specific consequence of a system operating at a level his current comprehension could not interface with. He could hold his position. He could not advance. The current was not hostile; it was simply too much for what he currently was to move through volitionally.
He looked around with his eyes, which was the only movement available.
Twenty metres away, on what might have been a bank — a position at the river's edge that was somehow outside its direct flow — a man sat.
Simple robes, the fabric carrying the specific quality of material that existed at the intersection of dawn and dusk, both shades present simultaneously the way two frequencies could occupy the same medium. A fishing rod, extending a line of silver light into the river's flow.
The man's face, when it turned toward him, was the face of someone who had been watching the specific river they were fishing in for long enough that the patience was not patience anymore — it had become the face of someone for whom waiting and presence were the same thing.
Markus understood, with the specific certainty that sometimes arrived before comprehension could account for it, who this was.
His father was not dead. He was here, or a version of him was here, in the place that existed at the boundary of the Time law and the void — the conceptual space that a primordial time deity could maintain a presence within when their physical form was not available.
He was inside a black hole. Markus was inside a blizzard in the Borealis Dominion. The distance between those two things, in ordinary space, was unmeasurable. The River of Time apparently had different geography.
The man smiled. It was not a simple smile. It was the smile of someone who has been waiting for a specific thing to happen and has watched it happen and has not stopped finding it significant despite having predicted it.
He did not speak. He turned back to the river and with a practiced motion drew the line up.
Breaking the surface: a fish.
Not biological — the creature existed in the same category as the river, built from the law rather than from matter. Its scales reflected something that was not light: possibilities, Markus thought, or the space between what had happened and what could have, the specific domain of a law that governed when rather than where.
The man considered the fish for a moment with the attention of someone examining something they have been searching for.
Then he looked at Markus again, and with a single fluid motion — not a throw, something more deliberate — he released the fish toward him across the river's surface.
The fish crossed the current without resistance. Its nature was temporal rather than spatial; the river's flow was its medium, not an obstacle.
It touched his chest.
The conceptual space expelled him.
Not violently — the way you expelled air from a space that couldn't hold more than it was designed to hold. He was not ready for the River of Time. He had 0.05% comprehension of its law, and the river required considerably more than that before it could be traversed volitionally. The ejection was protective rather than hostile.
He was standing in the clearing, in the blizzard, in the Borealis Dominion, with the fish in his hands.
Behind him, the white portal had folded closed.
The fish was real — present in the physical plane, occupying a position in his palm, producing the specific felt quality of temporal law expressed in physical form.
A voice arrived in the architecture of his consciousness rather than through the air: Not yet. Come back when you understand more of what time is. You will know when.
He looked at the fish.
He looked at where the portal had been.
Then he put the fish carefully in the dimensional inventory — the temporal stasis of the storage space would preserve its state without his needing to manage it actively — and walked back to Frost-Anchor.
His chambers were quiet.
He settled onto the meditation mat and retrieved the fish.
The room's ambient quality shifted the moment it re-entered the physical plane — not dramatically, the specific subtle wrongness of an environment in the presence of something whose temporal properties did not match the surrounding material. The mechanical clock on the nightstand began ticking incorrectly: three seconds forward, two back, the gears attempting to synchronise with an influence that was not synchronised to ordinary temporal flow.
He looked at the fish with the Time law's 0.05% comprehension and found that 0.05% was significantly more useful in close proximity to a concentrated temporal law object than it had been in the abstract study of the tome.
The scales were not scales in the biological sense. Each one was a closed system — a stable temporal container, the specific structure of something that preserved its contents against the flow that surrounded it. The outer-layer scales encoded the mechanism of temporal deceleration: the architecture of what he had seen in the clearing, the specific coordinate-relationship modification that allowed local temporal progression to pool without ceasing entirely.
The subdermal layers held a different encoding: the stabilisation structure that allowed an entity to exist within the River of Time's direct current rather than being carried by it or dissolved into it. What the fisherman had used to sit at the river's edge. The tether between a practitioner and their temporal anchoring.
The tail's encoding was what had expelled him: not an attack, a threshold measurement. The portal's protective mechanism had read his temporal law comprehension against the minimum required to navigate the River without dissolution, found it insufficient, and returned him to the physical plane before the current could reach him.
He spent the night with the fish.
Properly: he spent the night with the principles the fish was encoding, using the 0.05% comprehension as the lens through which the encoding became legible, building the understanding incrementally as the fish's physical form gradually converted — not dissolved in the sense of losing its coherence, converted in the sense of completing its purpose, the temporal law substance that composed it transferring into the practitioner for whom it had been given.
This was what his father had caught in the River of Time and given to him.
A study aid, built from the law itself, designed to accelerate the comprehension of a son who was moving toward a threshold that required the law to be understood rather than simply acknowledged.
By the time the fish was gone — the last silver strand absorbed, the clock on the nightstand snapping back to accurate time, the air in the room returning to its ordinary density — the comprehension had moved. Not dramatically. Measurably. The specific additional clarity that more than a year of working with the tome's first two pages had been building toward.
He held the new reading for a moment.
He thought about the man by the river, who was his father, who was inside a black hole, who had been waiting long enough that waiting and presence were the same thing.
He thought about what 10% would look like and what it would require to arrive there and how long that was going to take from 0.5%.
He thought: I'm coming.
He settled the prayer cushion into its position, closed his eyes, and let the morning find him in the work he was doing, which was the work that everything else was in service of, and which was going to take as long as it took.
The absolute flow continued, equably, without relation to anything external.
He worked within it.