Something is tolling that is not a bell, low under the chimes of the Parliament. Something is rumbling below the sky that is sensed and is not sensed at once. London is taut and tense, a cat about to spring. The Empress is watching with breaking diamond eyes.

“It’s coming,” says the One From Afar, her tone as unclear as her face. “Light streams from a world that isn’t yours. A history that wasn’t, that will not be. Its lessons seep from nowhere into this.”

The Empress does not answer. She rarely does. It is enough to know that she is not amused. “She’s not amused!” they whispered in Albion’s sky, first with laughter, and then with terror as well.

They would be more scared still, to see fear in the Empress’s eyes.

A clock stutters; a flame expands. The room is slightly smaller than before.

“So vast,” says the One, “that’s what your Albion was. Theirs, too, back then, right now. All of it still fell away. Like sand in a glass, don’t you think?”

There is an hourglass in the Throne of Hours, and the Empress is not looking at it now. The sand should lie still at the top of it, time frozen round it like fondant. A symbol of Britain’s dominance, over both time and space.

She is not looking at it now. She knows how the sand will now slip away.

“The sun never sets, that was your Empire’s creed. But every sun is setting in the skies. They’ll lose it all, in that century that’s not to come. What will you lose, before all of this is done?”

The Empress of Hours draws to her full height. It is only for a second, and that moment will never stop.

“Those who know me will attest it,” she says. “I have lost more than an Empire. A lover and a child, and my death. It is not only stars that weep for what is gone.”

“Then you accept it,” says the One.

“I cannot stop it,” says the Empress flatly. “I control the universe, stitch and spin raw time. But every Monarch feels when the limits of her power come.”

“It falls,” says the One. “Albion falls.”

“No,” says the Empress. “It diminishes. Like a flame, like a life, like a husband. There is always more to be seen, before the end.”

She says it and the Wanderer is already gone. They don’t think anything is different, there outside.

The Empress watches as Albion shrinks, contracts, dilates. Geography stutters and the maps adjust. A teashop moves to somewhere it wasn’t before. Time and space overwrite themselves, and the minds of time and space adjust right along.

This was always the size of her Empire. It is much less, and it is exactly the same. Things are always exactly as they are. It is only our perceptions that will change.

Unseen by anyone in her universe, the Empress sheds a single secret tear.