Chapter 2 Tick-Tock Goes The Timeline

"I would rather eat my other shoe," Thalassa snaps, but she grabs the handle of her shop’s door anyway.

She isn't about to let a crowd of peeping villagers watch her get dragged into an imperial dragon carriage. Besides, the dark silk bundle in his hand is radiating a faint hum that only her hidden elven ears can catch.

Aurel follows her inside and his towering frame makes her tiny workshop feel like a broom closet. The two guards attempt to squeeze in behind him, but Thalassa whirls around and slams a wooden panel straight across the threshold.

"Out," she orders. "My shop fits two people, three gears, and a cat. Leave your swords on the porch."

The guards bristle, looking to their master for permission to draw some elven blood, but Aurel only gives a lazy flick of his wrist. "Wait outside."

He turns back to Thalassa, his golden eyes sweeping over the dusty shelves, the glass jars filled with clock springs, and the stacks of ancient texts. "You live like a rodent."

"I live like an independent artisan who doesn't take blood money," she retorts, marching around her workbench and pulling out her stool. "Set it down. Let's see this famous miracle you think I can fix."

Aurel hesitates. For a brief second, his grand tyrant facade wavers to reveal a proud man facing utter embarrassment. After all, over a hundred imperial grand mages have tried their hands at fixing that pocket watch, only to fail miserably.

"If you break it further," he warns, narrowing his eyes in a glare, "my offer of marriage becomes a life sentence in my least comfortable parlor."

"Charming threat. Give it here."

He lays the pocket watch on her workbench pad.

Thalassa carefully unravels the silk. The moment her bare fingers touch the iridescent casing, her Timekeeper blood roars to life. A jolt of electrical static shoots up her arm.

The watch is exquisite, forged from a shimmering metal that hasn't been seen in modern mines for centuries. Its glass face is spider-webbed with fine cracks, and the hands are frozen at twelve seconds past midnight. To an ordinary mage, it looks like an ancient piece of dead brass.

As Thalassa lowers her magnifying loupe over her eye, her unique vision activates.

Layer upon layer of ethereal, glowing golden gears appear beneath the physical surface. Millions of tiny magical threads are frozen in place, bound together by a spell so intricate it makes her breath hitch.

It wasn't broken by time, she realizes. It was locked.

"Well?" Aurel leans over the table, his broad chest brushing her shoulder and smelling outrageously like cedarwood and warm hearthfires. "Can your little tools mend what imperial mages could not?"

"Shut up. Your breath is fogging my loupe.”Thalassa mutters, completely spellbound by the mechanism.

Surprisingly, the great Dragon Lord falls silent.

Thalassa reaches into her tool wrap and pulls out her finest silver pick—a delicate instrument passed down from her grandmother. She doesn't need to force the gears. She just needs to whisper to them in the lost language of her people.

Aligning the tip of her pick with the central pivot, she closes her eyes, letting her magic flow through the metal.

‘Tick-tock, tick-tock, remember how to move,’ she whispers in her mind.

A second later, a CLACK echoes through the quiet shop.

The frozen golden gears beneath the surface burst into a spinning radiance.

Aurel gasps, stepping back, but it is already too late. The hands of the watch begin to spin backward at violent speed. The air in the room shatters like thin glass, and a vortex of silver and gold sparks swallows the workbench, the tools, and the two of them whole.

Thalassa tries to scream, but the sound is sucked right out of her lungs.

The last thing she feels before blacking out is a silk-clad arm wrapping around her waist, pulling her against a solid chest as they plunge into the unknown.

The rich scent of damp earth and pine needles wakes her.

Thalassa groans, her head throbbing as if a dwarf has used her skull for anvil practice. She sits up groggily, blinking against the bright morning sunlight streaming through green forest leaves.

She isn't in her shop. She is lying on a patch of wild clover at the edge of an old dirt road.

A low groan echoes beside her.

Aurel is sprawled in the grass, his fine velvet coat covered in mud and his silver hair thoroughly ruined. He pushes himself up on one elbow, his eyes wide with shock as he stares at his own trembling hands.

"My magic," he rasps, trying to summon a dragon flame, only for a ridiculous, tiny spark to pop on his fingertips like a dying candle. "My flame... it's suppressed! What did you do to me?!"

Before Thalassa can answer, the thrumming pocket watch rolls out of her apron pocket, coming to a rest between them. A tiny, glowing light bursts from the casing.

The light coalesces into a creature no larger than a teacup. It is a tiny sprite dressed in a miniature scholar's cloak made of yellowed calendar pages, carrying an hourglass twice its size.

The sprite dusts off its tiny cloak, looks at Thalassa, then looks at the muddy, disheveled Dragon Lord.

"Congratulations, last of the Timekeepers. You have successfully shattered the timeline," it pipes up in an annoyed butler's voice.

Thalassa stares at the creature as if it has suddenly sprouted horns. "That sounds bad."

"It is catastrophically bad."

"How catastrophically?"

The sprite checks its hourglass. "On a scale of one to ten? I would recommend not allowing it to reach eleven."

"What?"

"You are currently fifty years in the past," the sprite explains. "Neither of you has been born yet, your grandmother is alive and kicking, and if anyone discovers who you are, the universe will implode. Have a wonderful day!"