Caedran was the last of the Tolarian mage-kings and the one who finished what six generations before him had only been able to plan. He inherited a near-complete Apparatus of Severance, the dynasty's three-century machine for tearing the world's tangled magics into clean separate forms, and he inherited the conviction that came with it. He believed the work was right and all but finished, and that the design would hold despite the warning of his own kinswoman Olarane. And on the day it was ready he gave the order, walked to the central spire, and threw the final switch with his own hand.
The Apparatus half-succeeded, which was the one outcome no one in the dynasty had planned for, and worse than the failure they had at least imagined. What the activation did to Elderran is the city's own account. What it did to Caedran is that it caught him at the controls and never let him go.
He is still reaching for the lever beside the one he pulled. The records say he understood his error within the first second. At the center, that second has not finished, and he has had a great many years to live inside it.
He is frozen at the Apparatus's heart, in the deepest time-dilation the seam produces, where decades pass outside in the space of one of his thoughts. He is conscious. He has been conscious the whole time. Where a traveler who reached the center would live the collapse of Elderran compressed into moments, Caedran lives the opposite torture, the disaster stretched so wide that a single instant of it fills lifetimes, and he experiences every fraction of it as the man who chose it. He is the machine's operator still, caught mid-adjustment, the only hand on a device that cannot safely be shut off and that no one outside has ever reached in time to try.
He is two things at once. As the villain, he is the architect by hubris, the man who spent an empire and three centuries on a certainty that broke the region and is still breaking it. As the victim, he is sentenced by his own work to a punishment exact enough that even those who curse the mage-kings find it hard to wish on him. He is also the central figure behind the rumor that the mage-kings may yet be alive at the center, frozen in the instant of their greatest triumph and their worst failure. Anyone who reaches him will find the one person who knows precisely how the Apparatus was meant to work, how it actually failed, and whether it can be stopped. Whether he can still be spoken to, whether centuries alone inside a single ruined second have left anything that will answer, is the thing they will have to find out, and the thing he cannot tell them until they arrive.