The year is 1555.

The year is 1555. In a cramped, candle-lit study in Salon-de-Provence, Michel de Nostradamus—a man whose face is mapped with the deep lines of a physician and a scholar—dipped his quill into a pot of thick, iron-gall ink.

Outside, the winds of the French Renaissance howled, but inside, the air was heavy with the smell of dried herbs, parchment, and the metallic tang of destiny. Nostradamus did not write as a man observing the world; he wrote as a man drowning in it, pulled under by the crushing weight of centuries yet to come.