The sensation of falling didn't end with a crash. It ended with the smell of old copper and the sharp, medicinal sting of mustard oil.
Elias opened his eyes to a world that was muted and grey. The vibrant, violent purples of the April sky were gone, replaced by a low, suffocating overcast that threatened snow but only delivered a biting, damp chill. He was lying on the cold cobblestones of a narrow alleyway—not the one behind The Pendulum, but one he recognized with a sickening jolt of familiarity. It was the alley where, in every cycle, the "Void" first felt the itch of the ink.
"Lyra?" he rasped, his voice sounding thin, stripped of the resonance of the Void-God.
There was no answer. Only the distant, rhythmic clanging of a blacksmith's hammer and the far-off chime of a clock tower. He looked at his wrist. It was pale. Empty. The silver scar that had bound him to her was gone, leaving only a faint, phantom warmth where her skin had pressed against his.
He scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm. The "April Paradox" had done more than reset the calendar; it had separated the Pen from the Ink. He was back in the beginning, but the beginning was wrong. The air felt heavy, like a lungful of dust, and the people he saw passing the mouth of the alley moved with a sluggish, mechanical indifference.
He checked the wall of a nearby bakery. A flyer, damp and peeling, bore the date:
1 FEBRUARY.