First Sentence

"THE WATCHER’S GIFT. BOHEMIA, 1267 I wasn’t there. Nobody alive was there. But the manuscripts survived, and the monastery records survived, and the margin notes in Brother Aldric’s own hand survived seven centuries of weather and war and slow forgetting. What follows is my reconstruction, part scholarship, part imagination, part a knowing that happens when you’ve held the pages a dead man copied and felt the weight of what he carried. I’ve done my best to honor the evidence. Where the evidence runs out, I’ve followed the patterns. They have never lied to me yet. Blake Masters, Mýrdalsjökull, Iceland"