Much like the stories of old, so did mine begin, long ago and far away. As did the ones Father would read at bedtime, this tale started somewhere small and unassuming: a tiny coffee shop nestled into the corner of a busy street one rainy day, tucked beneath a soft blanket of clouds the colour of slate. Yet that was where such a resemblance ended: in this fairy-tale, there was no knight in shining armor, no wondrous dream lands, no star-crossed lovers, no little boys and girls who could stop the world with a sword or a true heart.

Not now,
not any more.

Up till a point, should I wish to tell it so, my own story might resemble such a bedtime tale, for it began the loss of my father to creatures of evil, of horrors that belonged to the nightmares of other beings, other worlds, not of our histories or legends. My knight and kind wizard swept me away from reality, preventing me from having to process that tragic loss, a wound that would quietly fester and bleed in the darkest of nights, hidden, but not forgotten. Eventually, I left them too. The choice to leave all those worlds and people behind was my own. Instead, I stepped out of their embrace and into the arms of an adopted family, and onto the pavement of a world many decades removed from the one I in which I was raised.

A home,
a happy ending.

Simplicity, however, cannot exist in a universe governed by chaos. Father would have been pleased by such symmetry, if he were not stricken by grief at the knowledge of what would become of me.

Tragedy took away this new family soon enough, not with the trappings of epic loss or drama, but with the pains and jolts one suffers as a result of surviving adolescence, of establishing independence, of moving on. A kind card at the holidays, the casual visit and tea once a year remained to prop up t he façade of a typical family, but as I had once clung to the stories of my youth, or my father's side, or Jamie's arm over the years, I moved on once more, let go.

As one does,
as one must.

That was why, sitting in the coffee shop on Heaton Terrace that Sunday morning in Shropshire, when I saw the red-headed waitress smile at me, I felt the world around me fracture, much like the sharp snap when the spine of a book cracks in your hands. The two halves of my world became disjointed, severed, yet loosely connected. The novel can still be read, but it feels irreparably wrong.

In that jolted moment, I felt the overwhelming urge to run to my lost father, to bury my face in his warm jacket, to wrap my small remembered arms around him. To return to simple stories and their happy endings.

For what I saw within in this strange woman's blue eyes was both something new and something old: a return to a world divorced so long from my mundane present, but one somehow new. And terrible. Over time, the pages of my story had yellowed and curled, and in my absence, the rules had changed. The world I now glimpsed was fierce with colour, with challenge, with complexity. Should I return, it was not one that I was certain I could survive.

I was to later learn that this woman's name was Compassion, but no such kindness from her was ever paid to me.

Since that day, I have been betrayed, tortured, and abused; a pawn in a war that has torn asunder the veil of time, a war that has repeatedly obliterated every world that has ever felt the warm breath of a sun. I was once a human born into the nineteenth century, but have since been transformed by treachery and deceit into a mockery of life, an enslaved creature bound by fire and fate: I have been crafted into a ship of time.

My name is Victoria Waterfield, and this is my story.