Millenium Myths

A Time To End

            Peter completed teleporting and settled on his feet. Darn that Keijay. He thought. Wasting my precious time with his philosophical ideals. I've already wasted a week of my vacation. "Who cares if I use the word 'time' interchangeably with 'change'?" He said out loud.

He checked the time. It appeared in his vision at the same moment the information was sent to his brain. It was 8:00 in the morning, November 8th, the year 2589 R.C., the age of Heaven's Rule. Currently, local time was in perfect sync.

Everyone else had already been on vacation for a week. He'd had to stay an extra week to polish up on details. He sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Seven days from now the time machine would revert to this moment. Seven days from now Peter would help...he might...he might put an end to the time machine forever. This vacation might be the last he would use the machine's powers, and perhaps the last he would see his family.

Peter looked around himself. He was on a dirt road at the top of a gently sloped hill. The sun was low in the east, casting long, deep shadows across the land. In those shadows the dew looked like sky blue snow on the grass, melting to glowing sun drops where the light touched. Fog clung to the winding stream flowing from the hill to his left and down into the shallow valley. The fog glowed where a ray of sun touched. In the shadow, the fog still slumbered in twilight.

This is why he always picked this spot to teleport to before walking the two miles to his parent's home. He could see the land all around and their house on the other side of the valley.

He began to walk the shallow decent into the valley. His tennis shoes made a soft crunching sound as he walked.

Peter breathed in deeply, and his chest swelled against his T-shirt. That was the smell of night rain upon dirt and fallen leaves. He could still feel the cool humidity against his skin. A chill breeze began to pick up with the coming of the morning, rustling drying green leaves. The forest's bright yellows, oranges and reds were doused blue in the shadows but burned brightly in the sun.

Peter smiled. His walking was easy going downhill. At one point, the path curved to one side to avoid a bulge in the stream. Peter kept walking through the grass and along the bank of the stream. His jeans became wet with the dew and a few chill drops from the trees above landed in his short hair. He shivered.

A week's vacation was barely enough time to cool his nerves. After working through the ranks from a Special Field Agent to a Senior Narrative Engineer for millennia, a week felt like a day. He shook his head. Don't think about work. You're on vacation. Just don't think about it.

The chirping of birds caught his attention and he stopped, watching them flit about the trees. He continued forward and stepped on a stick, making a loud crack.

The red and white coat of a fox caught his eye further down the hill. It bounded casually between the trees and through the wisps of fog. It stopped around the edge of a bush and eyed him for a moment. Then it sprang away, fading into the fog. Peter's last sight of it was when it jumped through a ray of sunlight, its coat flashing for a moment before it was gone.

Peter looked after it, wondering if it would show itself again, but it didn't. He looked around for other stirring wildlife, but he couldn't see any.

Peter brought up the interface for the time machine into his vision. He couldn't feel the full body scan to confirm his identity, but he knew it happened. Like anyone else at his level of work, he had access to localized time reversion. In this instance, he was pre-cleared to revert everything within the fence around his parent's property back to the moment when he first completed teleporting.