Island of Shadows

Book excerpt: In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix was a legendary bird of unspeakable beauty, unique of its kind, which lived in the desert and then consumed itself by fire, rising again from its ashes as a paragon of youth and splendor. On this day of infamy, May 20, 2059, a desert-dwelling city called Phoenix was similarly devoured in the flames of Armageddon, her incineration as certain as her legendary rebirth apocryphal. For the virtually imperceptible length of a mere nanosecond, a dwarf star shone hot and bright, kissing the Earth with blistering lips of stellar conflagration. A dozen dreams, a hundred, a thousand, a million more perhaps, evaporated in that sizzling, scintillating moment forever seared into eternity. In simultaneous synchronicity, one enigmatic fantasy, however, was wonderfully fulfilled. The fusion event twisted gravity for miles around, warping the space/time continuum, deforming reality itself. Fourth-dimensional barriers were rent asunder and a temporal phenomenon coalesced, never-before-existing and yet always-ever-there. Not magically but rather, methodically, the time sphere anomaly was born, neither here nor now, neither there nor then. And yet and still, it was. As predicted. As predicated. All that remained was for Terry Montgomery Tarrant to find it. That thing. Out there. Somewhere. In the desert. Before somebody else did. Not that anyone else would be looking for it. Only he knew what he was searching for. Only he knew it existed. He created it. It belonged to him. A temporal playground of unfathomable scale and consequence. And once he found it, mastery over Time itself would be his.