Ferenc Szemere's mind drifted away, leaving all the bustling noises of the city behind, reaching a place beyond the Veil where dreams and reality converged, sending ripples through time. His mind was never at peace, even though he thought he had long accepted the turmoil inside his troubled head. He was wrong. His personal hell never left his side.

Ferenc relived his own mistakes repeatedly. For a time-master 'finality' had no meaning. His very nature played cruel tricks on him, and he could do nothing but open his eyes and watch events of his life unfold in his mind. He knew the outcomes, he accepted the choices, he acknowledged their consequences. But despite all that, despite his own limitless vision, he still struggled as if something in that world depended on him. As if he could change something.

How old was he when his parents left? Twelve, perhaps eleven. He remembered watching them talk to each other, casting occasional worried glances at him, lowering their voices to whispers. They were in Budapest, in the botanical gardens, enjoying a long walk among twisted trees and blooming flowers. Somewhere far away a war was raging on, but Ferenc vaguely understood the nature of the conflict. He remembered the waters of a small pond reflecting his mother's serious face, framed by a halo of lotuses. He had been trying to reconstruct the details of that day for years, yet his mother's expression never came out right. Something was off: her eyes seemed glazed, the tilt of her head looked forced, the muscles of her forehead flexed unnaturally. Why did it feel real then?

She approached Ferenc with silent steps and smiled, her cold hand brushed his long wavy hair.

"We need to leave, Fero," she said, her voice trembling. "Vajk Kolosy expects us to follow him. We need to help our kin."

Ferenc knew what she would say, but he could not accept her words.

"I see you die. That is all I see..." His voice trailed off – too low for a teenager and too raspy for an adult.

"We can only glimpse extracts from our futures, Fero. We can never be sure how many possible detours and twists those glimpses reveal." She sighed, allowing her elegant lips to break into a sad smile. "I don't know how fate and time operate. And neither does your father."

"Then how can you rely on something as uncertain as time?"

His question remained unanswered. He was convinced that he saw further than his parents did. But he was wrong. His mother's logic was impeccable.

"If we are expelled from the Veil, we will die," she said, "Even your turul knows that, and does not venture outside the Pannon Basin. We need to defend our lives, Fero."

Ferenc shook his head.

"There must be other ways... There must be other possibilities!"

"Ilona," his father called out to her. "We need to leave." She looked back, the soft lines of her face suddenly hardening, a new cruel vigor sneaking into her gaze.

"Give me a second, Andor."

Ferenc's father sighed deeply.

"We both know what Kosar did to our people in Zagreb," he murmured. Ferenc sought his gaze in vain. His father refused to look him in the eye. "We are next. If we do not go, we are as good as dead."

"We will get through this." Ilona kissed Ferenc's hands, squeezed out a comforting smile and left. They hated long good-byes, and Ferenc forgave them. He did not cry, only watched them depart, helplessly balling his fists, slicing his palms with his nails.

His parents never returned. Later, he heard that light-benders blinded and killed them, but the information mattered little by the time it reached him. He could not change anything. Somewhere deep inside, he knew he could have stopped them. But he never had enough decisiveness, enough power or enough madness to do so.

Ferenc entered a tastefully decorated art-nouveau apartment owned by Vajk Kolosy. From the windows of Kolosy's living room he could see the Danube embankment covered with autumn leaves. He straightened his spine and forced himself to switch his attention to the host's face, but a miniature woman with dark-green eyes and short curly hair barred his line of sight. Kolosy introduced her as Lady Despina Asenova, his voice trembling with uncharacteristic reverence. "What is it about the little lady that makes Lord Kolosy so nervous?" he asked himself. When Ferenc dared to meet her eyes, he felt her presence – grand and overwhelming as an endless vortex. The tilt of her head alone made him shiver.

Before he could introduce himself, Kolosy's two children barged into the living room, startling him. Aladár firmly shook Ferenc's hand, expressed his condolences. The boy told him his father was brave. Ferenc pretended to listen, but his mind had already drifted away by the time Kolosy's son started talking. Aladár, however, did not give up on him, shaking his shoulders, much to Ferenc's shock. Ferenc smiled absentmindedly and blinked. He should have been angry, but he was not.

Aladár's twin-sister Hajnal - almost a copy, almost a dead ringer - had a wild spirit. She solemnly promised to kill Kosar herself, and broke a porcelain cup to prove her ferociousness. The thought of revenge did not cross Ferenc's mind, but it surely appeared in the minds of the Kolosy twins. At that point, Ferenc could not understand if he appreciated their sincerity or found it excessive. Something inside him broke with the departure of his parents. He could do nothing to mend it.

"Kosar's death will not change the past," he told Hajnal, forcing her to roll her eyes.

"How can you say such stupidities? We are time-masters, we can change everything!" Hajnal retaliated.

"It does not work that way."

"It does!"

Ferenc remembered Hajnal growing on him. The more time they spent together, the more difficult it became for him to imagine his life without the Kolosy girl. She had admirable artistic skills and a gift for mathematics, she even fed his turul, when everyone else avoided Fahej.

He supported both her and Aladár when they decided to become professional architects. The siblings wanted him to join them, but he refused. It was the tiny Bulgarian time-master that he wished to follow. She was the only person who had the answers to his questions, the only one who could remedy his inadequacy.

She had captured his mind that first day when he saw her – a miniature woman with sharp features, dark curls and a voice that seems incongruous for someone of such small stature. Ferenc admired her and her scholarly accomplishments. When Professor Asenova said he had the right tact and talent to make a brilliant lawyer, Ferenc did as she told him. And it seemed right.

Hajnal was infatuated with him. Ferenc knew. He saw them together in one of his blurred visions, and he deducted she might have had the same revelation. Their love affair quickly became everyone's favorite topic in Hungary and beyond - all thanks to Aladár's lack of tact. But Ferenc did not care. He was a young and promising student with a spirited woman by his side. And somewhere far away, light projectors kept transmitting pointless gossip about the growing influence of the Psychics on the Council. Was another war even possible? Ferenc recognized the feeling of uneasiness from his childhood, and it terrified him. By his side, Hajnal refused to acknowledge the gathering clouds. Years later, Ferenc would ask himself if it was the mirage of happiness that prevented her from seeing clearly. Was it, perhaps, the limitation of her character? He never found out.

When Despina Asenova left Budapest, believing that the Fasma would stop the war, Ferenc could not stay behind. He had to do something. He had to act this time. He chose to join the Fasma, leaving Hajnal and his old life behind.

Hajnal never forgave him for abandoning her, and never tried to understand his motivations. She broke their connection. Aladár secretly tried to exchange messages with Ferenc, but eventually even he gave up. What Ferenc remembered was how loneliness stretched out its slimy tentacles towards him, pulling him into the depths of his own consciousness. He was terrified of going crazy. By the time he arrived in Bucharest, he only owned an old book by Antal Szerb that had once belonged to his mother, and a bag of food for his turul. He had no other possessions.

Upon his arrival, he spent most of his time at the Fasma libraries. After passing his initiation, Ferenc finally realized what it was that made the purple-wearers different from everyone else. He was never supposed to mention the nature of the entrance test, of course, but the knowledge itself was enough for him to fear his own colleagues.

Despite the rigorous selection and the twisted nature of their scholarly services, everything around Ferenc seemed pretentious and artificial. Even his studies offered little consolation.

Until the day he met Leudora Galbur.

When a bright energy flow caught his eye he was unable to look away, fascinated by its strange radiance. All that splendor was generated by a young Offcast, whose dark figure he saw from the window. He had watched energy-twisters practice their enhancements before, but this performance did not resemble a simple test. It was deadly and dangerous. He couldn't find a reason for someone to purposefully endanger herself without much to gain. The woman in the garden channeled pure electricity through her body, and it made her glow, tremble and bleed. Ferenc ran out of the building, ignoring Bucharest's distorted typography beneath the Veil, reaching out to grab the woman's hand. She had a long slender body of a dancer and braided dark-red hair, but he could not get close enough to see her face.

"She must be insane," he whispered to himself, devising a way to stop her in his mind. When she fell to the ground, he leaned over her, squeezing her wrist to check the pulse. Her charcoal eyes stared at him in vague amazement, their feverish golden gleam searing his soul.

"You could have died." He did not realize he spoke Hungarian to her. Leaning on Ferenc's shoulder, she tried to stand on her wobbly feet, but failed.

"I did not die," she said with a twitch of a slanted eyebrow. Ferenc remembered her soft accent, strange intonation and the vile vision that shattered his mind: he would be the one to expel her from the Fasma, he would be the one to betray her. He would have to do all that to save her from her enemies.

Another frightening realization came later: this woman had a power unlike any other. She terrified Ferenc. There was something intense in her dark eyes that captured his heart and clouded his thoughts and visions. It was the day when he first wondered if Leudora Galbur would be the death of him.