SCRATCHED

Chapter 18

2020, Foyl Woods.

The drops fell violently, screaming as they did so-cracking the earth open for whatever monsters living underneath to crawl out. They came rumbling down like they couldn't wait to sink beneath the soil. The rain wasn't falling. It was running.

Maybe there were monsters in the sky too.

Henric saw that night replaying as clear as he saw the splashes, loud and fierce, yearning for nothing but survival. The teenager sitting on the bed beside him always wondered how his eyes never held a spark of fear, like the sky held that of lightning, despite seeing it all, living it all. And eventually he would come to know the answer-once you start losing parts of yourself, you're no longer afraid of losing yourself as a whole.

Sleep was long gone. Aiden helped him unfold the silence, and like archery, he was getting good at that too. But besides unfolding, Henric remembered, he was also good at breaking it.

"It's dangerous to go back and save a life, and the creatures have ended many. If you're going back in time to end them, won't that be saving all the lives they took?"

Henric blinked. It felt unusual. He had been staring into the dark eyes of the night for so long. "Time is a living thing, a moving thing. It has its own path, its own course and normalcy. When someone dies it's part of that course, and saving them is a time abomination which will trigger so many changes, and when they eventually become too many, time becomes unfixable-time waves start hitting, timelines start crashing and it's the end of the world as you know it.

Our mission is to restore time to its original path, its normalcy. And to do that we will have to eliminate the first abomination-the coming of the Moans. That's why I couldn't save my parents that night, because it wasn't the proper way. Saving them without eliminating the first abomination-"

"Would create another abomination, another hole being punctured in time, without the first one being patched," Aiden completed.

Henric nodded, impressed. "Exactly."

Aiden's thoughts hovered like the silence, and everything began to look like an abomination-the rain, the room, the eclectic antiques in an obedient observance on the shelves, the lightning carving their shapes out of the darkness. What if all this isn't real?

"I've watched a lot of time-travel movies," he said.

"You did?"

"Each one was different-the rules I mean. And the methods of travel. Some use spaceships, Doctor Who uses the Tardis, some walk through portals beaming with light, et cetera."

"Doctor who?"

Aiden let out a laugh. "Ah, you're from the future, I remember."

Henric didn't connect with the humor in the air. He turned his gaze back to the rain and said, "We are all everywhere."

Aiden knitted his eyebrows. "We are all everywhere," he repeated it like a mantra.
"There's a version of each person in every timeline. Like when you travel to the future, you see the future you. Travel to the past, you see the past you."

Henric didn't react. That was something obvious. But the weight of it fell on him when he realized what Aiden was trying to ask him. He had never given it a thought.

"None of us have seen future or past versions of ourselves," he began answering the question kicking a ball in Aiden's mind. "We don't know the effects of that clash either, but it's not something any of us would do-not even Freddie. In time's normal path there's no way the Aidens in different timelines can meet one another, and you know the rule: If it can't happen, it shouldn't happen. That's why time travel is an abomination in of itself. But time can heal if the changes aren't massive."