The Unknown Alchemist

Chapter 3-Time is Relative

          

Roedin was propped up in bed with a collection of pillows and blankets supporting his back but preventing his shattered wing from being crushed. Avery sat in a chair beside the bed helping him eat some stew. He was mortified at being fed like a youngling but he was too weak to hold the spoon steady.

"Were you in a fight?" Avery asked quietly after offering him a spoonful.

It was the first time she had asked about what happened to him.

Roedin swallowed the stew. "Yes."

She waited for more, he didn't explain.

She pursed her lips and then looked down at the bowl.

"Did you attack a preserve?" she asked with a bite of venom in her tone.

Roedin was horrified that she would even suggest such a thing. Humans on preserves were defenseless and under the protection of the sapiens.

"No, I certainly did not!" he spat. "A flock of Odonata faunids were harassing some farms on the edge of our territory. We went to enforce Common Law but they were hyper-aggressive. Dragonflies are predatory by nature."

Avery didn't apologise for her accusation but nodded and gave him more broth. He swallowed it down along with the bitter taste of being fed by a stranger.

"How long was I unconscious?"

She hesitated. "Hard to say really. Several Darks but they seemed quite long to me. Maybe because I was feeling impatient for time to pass. The Light was very short, almost like it was just long enough for me to run out and collect a few things then come back."

Roedin was so confused. Dark and Light?

"So, about four days?"

"Not exactly," Avery grimaced. "Dark and Light are not equal. Sometimes it's close, but it's random. It can stay one for a long while, or the other. I only know it's long if I get so tired I fall asleep when it's still Light out. Or if I wake and the sun never rises, I just continue on my day in the Dark. Sometimes the sun will set, and then like it has changed its mind, it rises again right away. The lack of a pattern makes it impossible to use Light and Dark as a measure of time passing. It could have been four days or four weeks."

This made absolutely no sense and Roedin began to reconsider the Crazy-Fox-Lady hypothesis.

"It's the same with the seasons. Winter can last for one Dark, the snow gone when the Light returns. And summer sometimes feels like it never ends. It can change so quickly, you need to be prepared for anything at all times. But usually if it feels like winter is coming back, I come back right away. I'm never far, so it's easier than carrying a heavy coat everywhere."

Roedin found Avery's over-explanations of things strangely comforting. It was as if no one could make up such an elaborate lie it must therefore be the truth. Her long-winded answers were in stark contrast to his usually terse and curt conversational tactics.

"How can this be?" asked Roedin.

"Magic, I guess," she shrugged. "I have spent a lot of time trying to work out how it might be possible—solar wobble, ocean-effect on climatic variances—but in the end when there's no logical explanation the only way it's possible is through magic. I think it's so that you can't measure time. There's nothing here that allows for that. The moon is full one Dark, then gone the next."

Avery brushed off this strange time-loop as magic, but the thought made Roedin uneasy. It would have to be a powerful brand of magic, something wielded by an alpha prime to affect the seasons and days as such. Magic was a rare and coveted gift of the sapiens.