The Timeline Catalogue

Prologue

Many people say that time is like a river, that it flows, moves, corrodes the earth to make its endless path. It carries us down a winding road in which we can't escape. The tide pulls, and we must let it pull, no matter how hard we try to swim against it.

That’s why this story starts where it does, on a riverbed. In the middle of a fight, a fight that makes the difference between life and death.

The fist made contact with his cheek with a sickening crack.

He hit the floor, aware immediately of the way the skin had broken open, red and burning, not bleeding, not yet. Blood was a sign of life, and life was only being lost, not lived.

They were all around them, surrounded a trillion to one with the odds of them winning at a similar number. The petals floated on the breeze that now felt, and perhaps was, more like a hurricane, and the river was now a flood. How are you supposed to live when the river of life becomes a tidal wave that doesn’t carry, but drags under, and drowns. He ducked out of the way of the spray that crashed over their heads.

She loomed over him, preparing for the kill. Her eyes peered, and they beckoned, perhaps a trick to lure in the prey, or maybe a cry for help. She was the prisoner of their past lives, the titan of their futures, which were mapped with such flawless precision, no room for change, nor for freedom. There is no freedom in fate, and fate was what she was, for lack of a worse word.

The circle glasses, lenses in golden frames too big for their own good, clattered along the cobbles, and lay, almost perfectly within his reaching distance. He had no time to question the shattered glass that once assisted with sight, nor the drops of blood that found themselves on it’s surface. What was a few drops of blood when he was lying in a river.

Another spray over their heads that rocked the very foundation of the bridge. He watched the clear splatter into the red, the deep red that ran and stained. He reached out to his side and grabbed the glasses, thankful for their sharp snap and shatter as he stabbed it through her cheek. He ignored the red on his hands and his clothes as he pushed himself onto his feet. She drew back with a shriek, a cry that shattered any fragility around them both. He stumbled two steps back as she did, writhing, choking on the thick black liquid that ran, dripped, mixed and intertwined with the red. Her eyes faded, sharp and quick glitches, and as did she, like a TV with a signal that was bad or wrong. Her very being fell into a state of aberration as she screamed. He’d be surprised, and feel blessed, if he was able to hear at all in the next life.

In her moments of shock, he took his chance, and he ran, holding out a hand so that his staff was summoned from where it had been thrown across the bridge. The cobblestones were rough, painful under his boots, but he didn’t feel the pain, not with the adrenaline that was coursing through his veins that kept him running despite the burn and the wound across his chest. He became aware of another, a friend, on his left. She shot an arrow through an oncoming shadow, and slid under their feet to keep up.

Then another, running along the edge of the bridge, stumbling a bit from his sight being drawn back. He launched his spear through one of their chests, tripped, caught it, and threw a bomb backwards that exploded into colourful cracks and pops akin to fireworks. He saw her, gaining and growing in height and speed.

As if riding the waves, he rose from his left with another crash that rumbled the ground beneath their feet. Landing with precision and running alongside them, he gripped the handle of his kusarigama in his hand and tipped the brim of his hat, calling out “Prynhawn da'' over the sound of the anarchy. He could see the shine in those eyes beneath the bottle green goggle lenses.

Then, from the right, they sprung like a frog, up and over the wall’s edge. They ran alongside, their shoes launching them forward at a rate that their small legs wouldn’t be able to take them. A wall of shadow emerged in front of them, and they bent their legs, and sprung, with the grace of the amphibians they branded themself after. The swing of their scythe as they flipped over their head was enough to cut through the wall of darkness that had seconds before threatened to engulf them.

He heard her voices pierce the air, her shrill cries of agony and rage, and from behind them, the bridge began to crumble like powder. Under her force, even bridges that have stood for centuries would fall, if she so desired them to, and fall it did.

The pace quickened, because who in their right mind would wish for their demise to come from a falling old bridge in the heart of a river city in England. The stones that loosened under their feet threatened to give way with every step, but they were almost there, and the van was waiting with the others inside.

They crossed, with one lucky jump and only the fact that they were, in terms of the universe, and this story, important. Jumping into the back of the van, the pedal clicking up and the door slamming shut behind them. They sped off, down the street, around whatever remained as the buildings toppled in their wake. Their speed increased, away from her, and he dared himself to rise, over the pain and the stab wound in his stomach, to peer out the back window.

She stood over the city, watching them go. There was an amusement in her stance. She had won. She had once again won, and this world was hers to destroy. Like all other worlds, they had been forced to flee.

All of her eyes honed in on him, through the small window that he peered through.

"There's nowhere to run, Onesiphorus," her voices called, echoing and layering in a horrific chorus of doom, "one more timeline, and you will have failed. You're doomed to an eternity of failure."

She led out a laugh that rocked and roared through the air, as Timeline Y, or what remained of it, faded out behind them.