Olarane was a mage-queen of the Tolarian line in its final generation, and the one member of the dynasty who said out loud that the Apparatus of Severance would fail. She was no outsider to the work and no skeptic of the creed. She had been raised in the clean working like every other child of the line, and she could hold a tradition unmixed as well as any of them. Her objection was narrower and, as it turned out, exactly correct. She argued that the design had no margin. A severance that took hold completely might do what the dynasty intended, but a severance that took hold only partway would leave the world torn open with no way to close it, and the Apparatus had no provision for stopping once it began. She put the case to the court at Elderran and lost it. Caedran, her kinsman and the last mage-king, ruled that the work would proceed.
Tell me how we turn it off, and I will throw the switch myself. No one could. That was the whole of my argument, and it was enough, and it changed nothing. — words attributed to Olarane on the eve of the activation
What she did then is the part the dynasty's own would rather not remember, because it acquits her. She did not flee, as Vesimar fled. She did not stand at the spire in triumph, as Caedran did. She stayed, after losing the argument, to try to halt the activation by hand, working against the machine her own family had spent three centuries building. She was still doing it when the Apparatus turned on its makers.
Olarane is frozen at Elderran's center, in the dilated heart where time crawls toward a standstill, caught in the middle of a warning that has not yet finished leaving her. Whoever reaches the center finds the architect Caedran at the controls and finds Olarane a little apart from him, the two of them locked into the same ruined second from opposite sides of it, the one who chose the catastrophe and the one who tried to stop it. She is conscious, as he is. What she has been living, across all the centuries the seam has stretched that second into, is not the disaster she caused but the disaster she predicted and could not prevent.
She is the dynasty's moral counterweight and a cleaner hook than any of the others, because freeing her costs the rescuer nothing in conscience. She wanted the Apparatus stopped before it ran. She still does, presumably, if anything in her has survived the wait. Anyone who reaches her gains the one mage-king who understood the flaw in the design before it was sprung, which is to say the one most likely to know where the machine's logic breaks. The catch is the same catch the center sets on everyone. To free the person who knows how to stop the Apparatus, you have to first survive reaching the Apparatus, and no one yet has done it in time to ask her anything.