Vega’s enthronement revealed that I had been away not for a decade, as I had suspected; not for a century, as I had feared; but for eleven thousand years. The enormity of it roared. At their apex, the Anth had a prehistory only six thousand years distant. This interval, eleven thousand years, doubled their whole story, from the earliest settlements of the Old Anth to the doom of the dragon moon. Vega blared in the north. Eleven thousand years gone, and the heavens all askew.
