The Time Witch (Concept)

The Concept

This is a concept chapter to give an idea of the plot. I have four ideas which I'm leaving up to readers to let me know which one they want me to write next. I'll be choosing the one with the most interest.  Smallest concept one of the lot, but I put across the point of the story well enough. It's a time-hopping romance where the main character, Yvette, passes through time and constantly meets a single man whom she falls in love with and makes immortal, so their times and stages of the relationship never quite match up. It'll be an interesting one to write. A modern fantasy and historical adventure thing.  - Tophat

I was sifting through the shop floor, ensuring the section for Elizabethan history was in order and rearranging the books after customers hadn't put them back again. A gripe I had, but it was part of my job to keep things under control, as well as handling customers who came into the shop seeking our services, rather than to purchase any historical tat.

I looked up when I heard the bell tingle and smiled at the elderly woman hobbling in, her weathered face sagging at her jowls and making her eyes vanish beneath her thick eyebrows. Mrs Haversham, a woman of eighty who had recently lost her husband and her home to a fire. But, the moment she saw me, hope sparked. Hope myself and my five aunts had managed to accomplish what she thought was impossible.

I rushed to the open the door leading into the office, leaving her to her own devices when she politely refused my help and smiled in appreciation. The moment she was settled in a chair I was beginning to question was all that comfortable by how old it was, her attention was on me as I trawled the files in the cabinet, seeking hers with quick flicks over my fingers.

'Have you managed to get it, Eda?' Mrs Haversham asked with bated breath, clearly not daring to trust I had but desperate to all the same.

I turned with the file in hard, flicking it open, before sliding across a single photo. She gasped, tears springing to her eyes as she reached for it with trembling hands. It was a single black-and-white photo of her marriage back in 1956 to her husband of sixty-two years.

I stood there, clutching my file to my chest and watching proudly with my heart in my mouth as she began to cry with relief.

'How?' She asked. 'How did you get this?'

I couldn't answer her. Unless she was aware of magic, I couldn't breathe a word that my aunts and I could slip through time, gathering up lost things, people and memories. I couldn't tell her I slipped to the day of her wedding and snapped my own photos of the day, melting into the background so no one noticed and speaking as little as possible. Mrs Haversham had been under the impression she'd hired a private investigator, not a time-witch.

'Trade secrets.'

'Everything burned. I had no pictures left.' She babbled and clutched the photo, crying harder when I handed her five more. 'Thank you.'

She didn't stop saying it as I handed her the digital copies so she'd never lose them again and handed her the receipt for our services (I'd cut off a small amount, feeling awful she'd just wanted a photo of her recently deceased husband. I'd argue with my aunts later about it. It hadn't been a hard job). Soon, she was leaving, thanking me once again as she trundled off home, that photo of her wedding day reclaimed. With a happy sigh, I slipped back into the shop and gazed at the shelves of books, replicas of paintings and statues, the face of the job we did quietly.

I had never lived a very normal life. I was raised by five aunts, although I'm not sure if they're related to me, they were at least older than they appeared, two of them I had no idea the year they were born in. My mother apparently gave me to them when I was young and vanished. I didn't mind. My aunts were good to me, distinct in their strange behaviours, if strict, which is fair given the fact they could dance through time, slip into history and walk through it, and intended for me to do the same.

A lot of rules came with this type of magic. Rules and regulations that, if even one was broken, would throw things out of whack, so they were important to obey as we hunted items, information, people, either of personal, political, historical and magical value. We'd be hired by the rich in suits to confirm a historical conversation or agreement happened or not, or discovering what had happened to a particular figure that was necessary to understand a political shift or magical disturbance. Or, we'd be approached by a little old woman simply desiring a photograph of her husband after a fire burned him and every photo she had of their wedding, or finding out what happened to an old friend or where why their father vanished to. My aunts declared themselves witches of time, a coven that could weave through history, but I saw us more as the private investigators we pretended to be. Either way, I was proud of what I did. I found lost things, lost people, and lost memories, and resolved regrets and hurt. We didn't filch from the past, we didn't treat it like some tomb to raid, only a thing to observe and gather information from, unlike some covens I knew of. Thankfully, this strain of magic was rare, which made me all the more prideful of my job.

And with my pride came rigidness. I'd refuse jobs made to harm those in the past, that would meddle too much present times. While it wouldn't affect my future, my aunts had pressed our timeline would splinter, creating two passages; the one I was in and the other one another me was in living the consequences of my actions. I didn't like that idea one bit, still didn't, so I ensured the jobs I took on meant I'd simply track a certain item's whereabouts to the day of the job and either secure it or pass the information to my employer. If I couldn't easily slip away a spare photograph, I'd buy a camera and take one myself, or I'd pose as a painter and paint them, creating my own portraits that shouldn't exist in the first place. I'd never take loose items or speak of things of the modern time, meaning I was a little bit of a history nut, but the magic in me meant I'd behave and appear precisely as the inhabitants expected, masking how obviously displaced I was.

The biggest rules though were very distinct. Don't get involved in deaths and births, don't talk to occupants outside your time, don't form relations of any kind, and never freeze the life of any living thing but yourself. Immortality was not something any witch should be handing out.

I was a stickler for rules. Proud of my code of ethics and how nothing could tempt me to break them.

I just hadn't realised I had broken them yet. That a man was hunting for me and had been for five hundred years, trying to catch up to my time and never let me slip through his fingers again having suffered it once too man. A man who loved me fiercely. A man I'd made immortal.

And a man I'd break time just to save.