The Time Turner Society { Undergoing Edits! }

Chapter 8:

Eryl never wakes me up to change shifts.

When I finally do wake up myself, (judging by the light it's around midnight) he's gone. Well, not completely, but he is a few yards off, looking pretty engaged in whatever he's doing. I rise up onto my knees and peer out over the lip of stone. The wind hits me dead on and the adrenaline rush from running refuses to keep me warm any longer.

The battleground is entirely void of life. Both groups have cleared out to recuperate. Who knows when they'll be back. At least they had been deployed to a well-supplied area, unlike the other Wards. But I'm not ignorant to the fact that there are battles going on in other places, too. Probably all over the Dominion. And innocent people I know and innocent people I don't are dying for equally terrible causes.

I dust myself off and tighten the straps on my backpack. I feel like I should make noise, announce myself in some way, but I don't want to. I move quietly in behind Eryl and peer over his shoulder. In front of him is an uprooted and overturned shrub, the small base of which had been sawed off. Wood shavings cover the ground, and Eryl holds a smooth, oval pebble in his hands. A wooden pebble, and on it he had carved my name.

"It's so I don't forget," he says. I jump, startled by the deep voice that shatters the already unsettling silence around us. I lower myself down to crouch beside him

"What do you mean?"

"I was born in 2020," he says quietly. My eyes widen. "I've been sent through time more than any other turner has - before or since then. Being sent through time like I was... it messes with your head. Bad," he rises to his feet, barely wavering on his bad leg, and I get a glimpse of how tall he really is. He reminds me a lot of Blayke, in the way he acts and even his looks. He has caramel hair and green eyes and very different features, but he looks to be the same build and roughly the same height, and he has a ruggedness to him, but also a softness. He looks like he was built for survival on rough terrain, with rough hands and a natural sense of... well, everything.

He's never wrong and he's always honest. And he doesn't think he's extraordinary but he's perfectly comfortable being himself.

I turn away from Eryl because I don't want him to see the tears. I shouldn't be crying. I know Blayke is out there, after all. I'm on my way to find him. But he's been gone for so long. Really it's only been three years, but with all my turning it feels like much longer.

"Has it ever happened to you?" Eryl asks, saving me from drowning in my own reverie.

"What?" I ask, wiping the tears from my face and pretending to be itching at it.

"It's kind of like... every version of something blurs together in a loop. Like when I look at you-" he pauses to turn my face toward him. "You're just you. But then you're a little girl missing her two front teeth. And then you're a little older and you look terrified. And then you're you again, and it just keeps shifting."

"How long has it been since you've been to the Society?"

"Forty-eight years," he answers instantly, as if he keeps count of every second he spends in this war.

"Well we have a name for it, when all of time blurs together like that. It's called a Haze," I tell him. "And we have medicine for it now."

"I know about the medicine," Eryl scoffs. "But it doesn't work. Not on me, anyways. Just imagine that - a Haze - every second of every day. And imagine never knowing which reality you're actually staring at because what you see first isn't always true. And imagine knowing someone will die soon because you never see them past the age they are now. That's what it's like for me. Every single day. And it makes it very difficult to remember some things - mostly people. So when I want to be sure to remember someone, I carve them a stone." he holds up the one with my name on it, then slides it into his pocket and nods toward the remnants of Ward One.