Time

It was early morning when the young scientist ventured into the humming area that constituted as his lab. Successes and failures alike lined the walls, mingling with works in progress. They were all shadows in the pre-dawn darkness. The sun had yet to rise, but tinted the sky faint pink, a dark rainbow of color that was slowly brightening as the seconds ticked by.

Shoes were soft on the golden tile, socks a rutty mess about his ankles. His pants were food-stained, ink-stained, and grease-stained. He didn't bother to change them, or probably to even take them off before falling into bed 4 hours before. His shirt was wrinkled, sporting similar stains to his pants. The only thing that never seemed to change about him was his glasses and hair. His hair was always a vertical mess, but that also gave him more character.

Blue eyes scanned the darkness before finding the remote to turn the lights on, flicking the switch. Halogen lights warming up, bulbs arching over the atrium windows support beams, casting their glow to the golden floor below. Strange shadows played from the lessening darkness, gliding across the floor to the safety of cover from the light. The lab was, per usual, quiet and brightly lit.

Grabbing his lab coat, the light blue material just as stained as his clothing (which meant that he really needed to get it washed, or at least take some time away from working) slipped onto and hung from thin shoulders. Trudging to his design desk, he stopped short. There was already someone in here. The man was reclining in the chair, one of the composition notebooks, floating in the air, open before him. The page turned without any gesture from him.

The man was dressed in brown, the material looked like velvet, with a faint sheen and fuzzy texture. He was well built, muscular, with hard lines etched in his face, and dark hair tinged with silver at the temples. He was old, but hardly looked it. A white cloak was tied around his neck, the fabric loose and crumbled to the floor, but seemed to still move as if blown in a non-existent wind. Behind him was a staff that towered over them both, the silver blades glittering in the increasing light as it hovered off the floor. The purple stones flowed into green and back again; shifting back and forth.

The man turned indigo eyes towards Lewis, smiling an award-winning smile. "Thanks. I couldn't find the light switch, so I was reading in the dark." His voice was light, baritone, sounding wise beyond years, beyond age.

It took several long moments for Lewis to open his mouth, and voice the question that had stormed his brain. "Who are you, and how did you get in here?" No one should have been able to get into his lab, not without a key, or him to unlock the door, or breaking in. None of the windows above looked shattered, and the door had still been locked.

The man looked back to the book, motioned with his hand, and the book closed, dropping back to the desk with a soft thump. The man stood, nearly 6-foot, and the staff still towered over him. "Through a window; I'm able to pass through glass, as it is partially liquid anyway." He replied, taking a breath to speak again. "My name is Alexander Darkfire; I am the Vassal and Messenger of Sol, the Elemental of Time. I am the deity of Garan; Time Mage and Creator, Traveler and Teacher of the Magus Arts. You, young Cornelius, have trod upon ground that you should leave alone for now."

Cornelius or Lewis, the name didn't matter, blinked several times, before shaking his head. "What? What 'ground'? That doesn't explain why you are here, either." He retorted, not believing that this crack-pot man was what he said he was. Magic didn't exist.

"I am here to show you why you should leave this alone, until I tell you that you can begin again." He tapped the notebook. "When we are done, you need to lock this up, and give me the key. I shall return it when you can truly begin working on Time Travel again."

"And why should I follow your rules?" The young man asked, arms crossed. The more this man spoke, with that arrogant tone, Deity or not, the more Cornelius disliked him.

Darkfire stepped from the desk, walking about the lab, the hood of the cloak pushed back, revealing a red-lining within. The cloak itself moved fluidly around him, swirling, catching, and hanging of its own accord, doing what it wanted. "Because if you don't… all this, everything here, that you have and know of, would be gone." He waved a hand about the room, indicating not just this place, but everything beyond it, the people, the city.

"There are alternate worlds out there, all possible, Quantum Physics, if you will; triggered by events that you chose. From this point, there is no true, destined, future, just key events to shape it. The future you saw when you were twelve was a possibility, the most probable one. If you continue exactly as you have been, working on this—" He tapped the notebook on the desk. "—you lose that future, because you have been told when you start tinkering with Time Travel. Prepatory research can be very bad in certain situations." He paused, looking up at the windows, before dragging his gaze back to Cornelius. "According to what you know, what you were told by your future son, you begin Time Travel Research when you are about 37. You still have twenty years, Cornelius, before you should even begin working on this."

Cornelius wasn't buying the act, but couldn't help but hear that Darkfire's words made sense. He wanted Franny as his wife, Wilbur as his son, that entire family to be his. He didn't want to destroy that chance, that time stream. The anger before faded after a short moment to think, to analyze the information.

Giving the teen time to think, Darkfire continued his stroll around, then speaking again. "Time is linear to a person, to a living being. A clock measures Time; Time has been labeled into increments, but in all reality… Time is but a moment, a speck, a dot. It is, then is not. The energy that Time produces, when Measured, when called Linear, is immense… allowing travel to different moments alone that measurement, along that line. Creatures can only exist when they define something as passing along with them, that Time is moving. But it already moved. It was here, but now it is not. Every moment, every second that goes by has already happened, will happen again, and never happened. All at once."

The man strode around Cornelius, white cloak flaring out, brown velvet hugging his strong features. "Let's say… that Time is a Line, you can stretch it out, and that all Human Beings share that line, that same thread. Now… One human in the future has the capability to travel that line—" He spun, lifting his hands, and then spreading them apart, a single line forming between his palms. Near his left hand, a ball of light glowed. "The light is the Human in the Future Who Can Travel. Now, say this Human goes back—" The light picked itself up from the line, and moved to the right hand "—and takes a person from the Past—" the light settled back to the line, taking on another color, signifying two riders, but then that shade of light was gone from the thread. The light picked itself back up, and moved back to the left hand. "—and brings them to the future. Now, that Person of the Past no longer exists, he never was after his moment of departure, and is not until he arrived in the future." The light settled back, and the missing color returned to the thread. "But, you know that you went back, to just after you left, thus creating an alternate line—" the line between his hands suddenly shot off in multiple directions, causing the mage to blink as if this wasn't expected. "Or many of them, as this wants to think. But this is just a rhetorical model, just an example as if it was true, but it is not." He dropped his hands and the lines and light faded.

Cornelius stared, having fallen against a counter for support. It was common belief that all people were on one line, that all traveled the same thread, as Darkfire put it. He didn't exist, then that future he saw, wasn't created by him. That 'Cornelius' in the future wasn't him, couldn't possibly be him. Wilbur had killed him in the past and--

"Lewis." Indigo eyes met his sky-blue ones. There was a hint of anger in the appearance now, the eyes borring into him. "That was not real, it was an example of what you idiots believe right now. I'm telling you the Truth of Time! You will become the foremost expert on Time, and damnit, you will be by the time I'm done with you." The eyes suddenly softened. "Now, here is what really is."

Darkfire lifted his large hands once more, and a ball of light appeared between them. "This is Time, larger so you can see what it really is. Come here and look, kiddo."

Pushing himself up, taking cautious steps closer to the stranger, he peered at the ball, blinking when he saw it was made of a tangle of lines; thread rolled together, millions of them.

"This, is Time. This is the moment, the instant of existence for Time." He dug his fingers into it, and pulled gently, pulling the ball apart, laying the lines flat, neatly, so they could be seen. "This is what you measure." The lines continued past his hands, seemingly fading out. "I have isolated the Current, here, a decade in each direction. The white vertical line is Current, to my left is Future, to my right is Past. Now, here is your line…" A blue-red line glowed, and they zoomed in, seeing that it was rather messy half-way towards Past. "This is when you traveled to the Future; see, it jumps, loops up, out of sight, and then back again, the moments you traveled to-and-from. Your time is Linear, this is your thread, how you measure, mentally, the passage of Time. You left, and then came back, continued on. You still existed to create that blue-sky future of yours."

Cornelius reached out, touching his line. "This is… real? This is fact?!" was all he managed to get out, his voice catching with amazement at what he was seeing. Now he was starting to believe that this man was everything he said he was, and possibly more.

Darkfire sighed, dropping his hands, the lines vanishing. "Yes. I guess I need to keep in mind you are a scientist, and not a mage. Mages believe that they can create something to be real: if they can form it, it is real. They are similar to scientists, but their medium is energy, pure and straight-forward, energy. Fact and Real, well, we don't exactly worry about those too much." He glanced the lab over once, and then met the eyes of the young inventor. His tangent of the Magus had lost the poor kid. He smirked, shaking his head.

"Cornelius, Trust me when I say that I know what I am talking about. You need to stop this research right now, or you will destroy your world. I have seen it happen before when others, much like yourself, trod into this realm, and do not stop when I warn them over and over, time and time again. I have shown hundreds exactly what I have shown you, and still lost hundreds of worlds because of it."

The young man nodded, and walked to the desk. He picked up the notebook, paging through it. He still didn't understand fully, couldn't truly bring himself to trust what he had just been told, just seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own fingers. Now, since he at least had some idea of his future, he wanted to know the end, and perhaps… perhaps this man could help him, answer this last, burning question. "Darkfire… Is the time of someone's death predetermined?"

Darkfire stepped close; looking over the young mans shoulder at the notebook. "Depends on what you believe in. Reincarnation, or One-Chance-At-Life. What you believe in changes the outcome of your life-line, your Time-line. If you believe that this is all you get, this one chance, this one life, then when you finally expire, that is it, you are gone, your spirit, your soul, your mind, are gone." He reached over, and took the note book. "You can't cheat death with a Time Machine, Cornelius. You can, though, cheat it with technology… if you can keep the brain alive after the body stops, then you can save the soul and the spirit." He looked at the open page, and sighed once more.

"I… I don't want to cheat it.. I want to know how much time I have, how long I have to affect the world. If I could prevent it, I would, unless I…" He trailed off, letting the book go.

"Unless you lived a full life? Cornelius, you do, trust me, you do." Darkfire replied, placing a hand on the inventor's shoulder, giving a reassuring squeeze. "You'll have a loving wife, Franny. A wonderful son, Wilbur, though he will be very much a trouble-maker. You have the family you always wanted, they are just what you need to support you, the support you have always searched for.

"Beyond the age of 42, though, is when things become hazy, because you, right now, do not know what happens beyond that. You can measure the past by the centuries, millennia, but the Future… the Future you can't see beyond a year, maybe two. You are a new person every time you wake up, the world is always new, and the people always change." He glanced to the notebook in his hand, and then stepped in front of Cornelius, meeting blue eyes with his indigo ones. He opened the note book up, showing the young man the pages where pencil had scrawled questions, thoughts, but no answers, no proof.

"Here… let me have this book for 20 years, and I'll write down everything for you, everything you need to know about Time, about how you can control it. How you harness it; that is up to you, Inventor-boy. I will write down the facts, the equations, and all the things that will make sense, and then bring it back to you on the night you wake up in a cold sweat, Time running circles through your mind." He closed the notebook, and tucked it under his cloak, meeting the young mans blue eyes.

"But, that's cheating." Cornelius muttered, taking a step away from the man. "If you give me all the answers, then how am I to learn, to research anything?"

"You let me be the one to provide all the information, to do all the work for you. Believe me, you will learn quite a lot by the time I return it… And as for cheating, you have a point, but I've never been one to follow any rules, even my own." Darkfire replied, shrugging his shoulders with a quirky smile. "As for right now, just don't worry about Time Travel, and get to work on that Flying Car idea. You have the drive to make the world a better place, so start to it." The Time Mage grabbed the staff, the gems set into it glowing brightly, and then he was gone.

20 years later……………

The room was dark, not even moonlight filtering in through the massive over-head windows. Two figures were curled up together on the giant bed, the sheets rumpled, their skin bare. From the darkness green light flared, shifting into purple, and then back again. Next to it, a white cloak materialized; the figure underneath imposing as he strode silently to the sleeping figures.

A pale hand stretched out, slightly older, gnarled, and pressed two fingers to the forehead of the blond-haired male. Dreamland was interrupted, Time flashing.

Cornelius sat straight up, cold sweat running down his back and face instantly. He saw the glow of green and purple, the outline of a white cloak, and then plop into his lap was a thick notebook, crammed full with extra pages, drawings. The woman next to him stirred, opening her eyes, and looked to her husband.

Slowly, very carefully, Cornelius touched the cover, and slide a finger to open it, letting the pages lay open. The lettering glowed with soft light, allowing him to read it in the darkness. This was the secrets of Time, what he had pushed aside, but now it was open before him, the information of ages, just like he had been promised.

"I said 20 years, kiddo, now get to work." Echoed that wise and cocky voice from years ago, turning through his mind. Blue eyes shot up, looking again for the figure, but they were gone. Snapping the book shut once more, he sprang from the bed, pulling his robe on, and flying out the bedroom door, racing for the lab.

Time was on his side.

Notes: Alexander Darkfire is based off Chronos in the book 'Bearing the Hourglass' and some of Lachesis in 'With a Tangled Skein' (and my own little world that he says he is from), and the Time described here is from a million other books and movies I have seen/read on time travel. This is my belief on the matter. Oh, and multiple nods to Demyrie and her 'Blue Sky Future' and for all the times that story made me shudder with confusion and something akin to repulsion (nausea?). Takes good writing to disturb and creep me out that much. Please Reveiw... though you don't absolutly have too.