II. On the Consortium & her Suspicions

Sabine co-founded the Illuminated Consortium of Epocts alongside Dr. Etward Ritalsin in the months following the Night of the Missing Moment. The Consortium’s stated purpose was the study of Gatewalkers and the investigation of the phenomena surrounding the mass activation of the aiudara network. Its actual purpose, as we now know, was rather different, though Sabine appears to have been genuine in her intentions even as Ritalsin was not.

The question that haunts those of us who survived the Consortium’s collapse is: did she know? She is a temporal oracle. She sees possible futures. How could she not have seen what Ritalsin was becoming?

I believe the answer is both more complicated and more tragic than simple oversight. Sabine’s temporal sight shows her possibilities, not certainties. She sees branching paths, overlapping timelines, futures that may or may not arrive. She suspected Ritalsin long before the rest of us caught on, but her suspicions came wrapped in the same temporal confusion that characterizes everything she says.

“Don’t let Dr. Ritalsin know just yet,” she cautioned the investigators. “He’s too close to Dr. Rictus, you see, and, well, you know how time twists allegiances in the most unexpected ways.”

She knew. But she could not say what she knew in terms anyone would act upon, because the knowledge arrived fractured across multiple timelines, and she could not always distinguish between things that had happened, were happening, or would happen next Friday.

She tried, in her way. She directed the investigators to look into Dr. Viktor von Rictus and his missing students, specifically warning them to keep the investigation secret from Ritalsin. She told them about students vanishing with black veins like spider webs working through their cold flesh, about a body on the dissection table that began moving, about an incident in the chemistry lab that had not yet occurred but would.

“So you see, my dear investigators,” she said, “time is not a straight line here.”

The investigators, to their credit, listened. To their frustration, they could rarely determine what Sabine was warning them about until after the warning became relevant.