Professor Sabine Wreidt

Being an Account of the Woman Who Sees Tomorrow and Yesterday in the Same Breath, Her Founding of the Consortium That Betrayed Her, Her Bargains with Creatures That Should Not Be Bargained With, Her Founding of the Organization That May Yet Save Us All, and the Persistent Question of Whether She Is Brilliant, Mad, or Simply Experiencing a Thursday That Has Not Yet Arrived, Compiled from Academic Records, Personal Observation, the Testimony of Confused Colleagues, and the Author’s Own Attempts to Take Notes During Conversations That Refused to Occur in Linear Order

I. On the Nature of the Woman

I must begin this account with an admission: I am not certain which version of Professor Sabine von Wreidt I am writing about. This is not a failure of research. It is, as near as I can determine, the fundamental condition of the woman herself.

Sabine is a temporal oracle. Her perception of time exists slightly out of phase with conventional experience, which means she perceives past, present, and multiple possible futures simultaneously. She experiences Tuesday while speaking about Thursday and remembering Saturday. She references events that have not yet occurred in the same breath as events that happened centuries ago. She describes chairs that remember being trees.

She once cancelled all her evening lectures because, she explained, “the atmospheric conditions aren’t conducive to safe magical research,” which would be a puzzling statement from anyone else but from Sabine may have been perfectly accurate about conditions that existed three days in the future.

She wears leather gloves stitched with fine silver and gold thread in rune patterns, leaving only her fingertips exposed. Kiren’s initial assessment, recorded in her log, notes that these appear to provide “self-awareness and self-control,” presumably serving as an anchor for a mind that might otherwise drift entirely out of temporal alignment.

When she touches someone with those exposed fingertips, she can read something about them. The nature of what she reads is unclear. It may be their present. It may be their future. Based on the accuracy of her subsequent advice, I suspect it is both. At the investigators’ first meeting she touched each of them in turn: she told Mutu to bring oil, told Charles it was not his fault he burned it down, and waggled her eyebrows at Thulnir in a way that suggested foreknowledge no one wished to examine too closely.

She was seen, on at least one occasion, talking to pigeons in Market Square for two hours. Whether she had gone completely mad or those birds knew something the rest of us did not is a question I have learned not to ask, because the answer is almost certainly “yes” to both.

I note all of this not to diminish her but to establish the essential paradox of Sabine Wreidt: she is simultaneously the most unreliable narrator I have ever encountered and the most accurate prophet. Her words tumble over each other, past and present and future intertwined, and her meaning must often be excavated from the temporal debris like an artifact from a dig site. But when her meaning is found, it cuts.