The Prince never meant to unleash the Sands of Time, only to wield them enough to erase one mistake of his own making.
Every attempt to turn back brought him closer to a truth he refused to accept: no one steals from time without the Dahaka, guardian of a fate no one rewrites unpunished, eventually coming to collect the debt.
It was in the Yokudan ruins buried beneath the dunes of Hew's Bane that the dagger spat him back out, among the spectral guardians who have haunted those galleries for centuries, bound by an oath no death has ever managed to dissolve.
Those old Sword-Singers didn't linger on what they saw, a foreign blade and sand running backward inside a glass dagger, they recognized instead, in the Prince's eyes, the same weariness as their own: that of a man condemned to relive a single moment he can neither fix nor forget.