Extract from prologue

...sated, it turns its head ponderously this way and that, eventually facing upward: a dizzying wealth of stars. Once they were familiar but now they are made strange by the years. It reminds itself that there are no stars where it lies now, in a place where memory comprises almost the totality of existence and all else is cold stone and silence. With a deft exercise of will it scatters these thoughts and returns to the past.

Stars. No end of stars, blinking into existence and disappearing again as quickly, the life cycle of entire worlds played out before there is time to recognise it. Time is liquid, abstract, to be lived or recollected as slowly or quickly as it chooses. It slows then to the tempo where concepts like nights and days have meaning in time to see a meteor shower rake the horizon.
       As the glittering fire falls through the atmosphere a new image transposes itself: dust motes caught in a beam of light, in a small room with bare floorboards, and now it is shooting down toy soldiers with a cork gun...