Time is one of the most mysterious substances in the world. It is, in fact; so impossible to understand due to the fact that it is not actually a substance. Because of the dangers of delving into such an impossible figment, it seems strange that there would ever be a book written about time, and time alone, and the adventures that surround time. But written it was, and it is the one you hold in your hands. It revolves around a young storyteller, and the journey that she takes through time. It is not an easy story to tell, due to the complications and frequent dead ends I ran into as I was researching. So I ask that you stay with me, and hear out the words I wish to convey to the world. For words hold power, and it is only in words that I can tell this story of time.

This is a story of two worlds. The First will take place in This World. The Second will take place in Other World. Both have very much to do with that mysterious force called Time. But this is the beginning. This is the Time Lock. This is the space between the Worlds.

This story involves a storyteller, a princess, and a warrioress.

This story is about a knight, a shapeshifter, and a hero.

There are six of them. This is their story.

It begins some time ago. I cannot give you an exact date, because outside of This World, time does not exist. It is, as I have mentioned before, a fickle substance, which conveniently decided not to exist in other places.

It occurred in the space between This World and Other World, which as you may see is not the same thing. There is no official name for it, but those of us who knew of it at the time had begun to call it the Time Lock. Because locked it was; locked between two worlds with no possibility of escape. The danger of entering the Time Lock was that you had no idea at what time period you were going to enter the world you chose to go into; you could only bend time once you entered one of the two worlds.

The people sitting around the table called themselves the Distance for a simple reason – because the distances they could reach in time were unexplored and unimaginable. But they also kept the name to remind themselves of the great risk they were taking jumping into time.

There were six of them, and they were builders, every one of them, and it showed. The table at which they sat was littered with glowing metallic pieces, some colorful, some sharp, some, smooth, some flat, some curved, some zigzagged. Each mechanic was tinkering with the pieces, bolting, screwing and fixing them together until they formed shapes in the metal. They sat there for who knows how long – and I certainly don’t, because as I have mentioned, they were in a place where time didn’t matter and could not be used.

When the six mechanics finished, or at least seemed satisfied, with their own parts of the machine, they came together, building the pieces around one another, forming a giant something. The something had curved sides and rose up into a huge sphere made of metal curves, fitted at the top with a brass piece that joined the entire sphere together and was inlaid with glowing designs and pictures, looking so real that they almost seemed as if they would come out of the brass and float around in the world.

The sphere was held together with nothing more than a few pieces of metal – until the mechanics fitted four flat circles made of class into four gaps in the metal structure. Each piece was round, flat and smooth, and glowing softly from the inside, with marks written around the circumference of the circle.

And when the entire contraption had been put together, the six mechanics stepped back to see their handiwork.

And what had they created?

You, reader, have just witnessed the building of the world’s – both worlds - first clock.

The mirror crashed to the floor.

Gwendolyn took a deep breath, her hands shaking. Her gaze returned again to the window, where two dark-cloaked figures were stepping out of an even darker-swathed carriage. The evening had barely begun, and already Gwen’s pale fingers were trembling in anticipation. She’d sometimes dreamed of this day, when someone would finally come to retrieve her from the orphanage that was her only shelter and bring her home.

It was a difficult word to define, that: home. Gwen had lived in the orphanage for years, but it had never been a place she loved. And of course, she’d had many more places of living, but never one quite as gravitating as this. She hadn’t left it in ages, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to stay there.

The two people were crossing the street now, and they disappeared from Gwen’s view as they entered the long stone archway that led to the doorway of the great gray building. Leaning out her window, Gwen watched the black flaps of the man’s waistcoat disappear under the overhang. Any second now they would be knocking on the mahogany oak door, and someone would be letting them in. Then they would come for her.

Gwen forced herself to take deep breaths. Easy now, she thought to herself. They’re just going to sit you down, read you your records, tell you what remaining relatives you might have who could take you in.

But Gwen didn’t have any remaining relatives – none she knew of, anyway. Most likely they would give her an application for a job, then send her out on her own. Possibly Beth would come with her, but Gwen couldn’t count on that. Starting in a few minutes, she would be without a home.

But she couldn’t force herself to think that way. Things might still turn out for the better. Gwen closed the window, locking it into place. She stepped back and felt a crunch beneath her slipper as she realized she’d just stepped on a shard of broken glass, dropped by her shaking hand when she’d seen the carriage pull up outside her door. 

Gwen looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the crash, but she was alone in the small room she shared with three other girls. She reached over and closed the door that was next to the dresser, leaned against the dresser, and closed her eyes.

Stillness echoed in the room for a moment. Then a row of shimmering shards of glass, scattered on the floor from when the mirror had fallen, rose up from the floor as if suspended by invisible hands. Then piece-by-piece, the glass shards resealed themselves, until an unscathed mirror sat on the dresser, as if it had never fallen at all.

Gwen picked up a hairpin from the floor and slowly began to slide it along the dresser surface. As soon as it touched the mirror, the tip of the hairpin vanished. Gwen waited for a moment, and then saw the hairpin’s tip reappear on top of the mirror.

She didn’t know how she’d done it, or why it had worked- but it had. All she knew was that somehow, she had made time stop. She had created a tiny frozen moment in time, and now that moment would forever (for at least a long time, anyway) be a minute behind the rest of the room.

A knock came at the door, and from the other side of the door came the timid words, “Miss Rivers?”

Hastily Gwen set down the hairpin. “Come in, Louisa.”

The petite, pretty blonde maid that served Gwen and the other three girls in her room entered, her small hands folded in front of her white-on-black apron and uniform.

“Miss Ryland sent for you. But she said you can have a few minutes to change into something more suitable,” the girl said in a clipped British accent.

Gwendolyn herself was American, or at least her parents were. Had been, she corrected herself. Her parents had been American. Gwen still retained her American accent, which the other girls in the school liked to giggle at.

Louisa pulled a cobalt blue dress with white lace trim out of the closet and helped Gwen to dress. As Louisa did up the straps at the back of the frock, Gwen considered herself in the mirror. She had dark blonde, almost brown hair, which stopped at about her shoulders and came down in waves, curling into ringlets at the ends. As Louisa began to tie the ringlets back into a restricted cluster with a ribbon, Gwen considered her eyes, pale blue in the mirror, although some days they seemed to be more green, and other days a bit more gray. Her brother’s eyes had been the same, Gwen thought with a pang, and then pushed the thought out of her mind, resolved not to think about it again.

Her face was heart shaped, her bangs coming down annoyingly to brush across her eyes that were deep-set into pale skin. A long nose, and pale lips bleeding and chapped from all the times she’d bitten at them. Her eyelashes were dark and defined. And there was where Gwen’s likeness of her mother ended.

“There you are, Miss,” Louisa said. “Go on downstairs. See what they wish of you.”

Gwendolyn did.

Such was the beginning of the princess’ story. For a princess she was, although Gwendolyn did not know it. What led to the beginning of her story, however, all began with a discovery made by one of the most powerful people you will meet in this story.

Derek was in Egypt, his asian eyes and complexion hidden by a brown scarf he had wrapped around his head and blocking his face. Just days before he had been in Ireland, and before that, Beijing. When Derek was working, he often found himself moving quickly from one place to another, crossing large expanses of land and ocean to get to his next destination. He could make it faster if he tried moving in the way his friends of Starlock did, but Derek preferred manual travel. It gave him the time and the energy to think.

Derek was standing on a busy street in the middle of a marketplace, people pushing past him, constantly in a rush. Their shoulders brushed and bumped against his, each shoulder covered in a different fabric, some patterned, some plain, some worn, some fine, some ragged, some clean.

The throng of chaos was too much for him. And before you could blink an eye, the 17-odd-looking year old boy had transformed into a black raven.

This was what Derek meant when he said “manual travel.” Derek was a Shifter, born from birth with an electric current running through his bloodstream. He had been ten years old when he discovered that he had such a mysterious power. It had taken two more years to learn how to use it, but since then Derek could not imagine life without it, the power was so useful.

Although those form both his world and this one viewed Derek’s power as extraordinary, Derek had come to realize that the supernatural powers people had were often not nearly as important as the natural ones. The kindness, the compassion, the gentleness, the empathy, the knowledge, the cunning, the cleverness, the wit, the bravery, the courage, the strength, and the love that he had seen in other people were talents that he valued much more than his own supernatural one. Everyone had a power within them, Derek decided, one that came from within. It was just a matter of hinding it, realizing its worth, and then safeguarding it. Because it truly was a treasure.

Flying above the crowd, the Derek-falcon searched the streets for his objective – a time lapse. Which could also be called a gap, he supposed. A break. A hole. A drop. An emptiness. The way to find such a thing was to search for a disturbance in the energy radiating from every person, place and thing below him. Derek concentrated hard, it had taken him years of practice to master this, but when he looked again he could see rippling waves of clear, empty energy, almost like sound waves, radiating from each person. It took him a while to find what he was looking for amidst all the rush of energy waves. But soon enough he found it. And there in the midst of it all – a silence. No rippling waves surrounded a small, 3 by 4 foot wide area about ten meters away, something that, without his falcon vision, Derek didn’t think he ever would have seen. He flew towards the space, wind beating under his wings.

The space in the energy waves floated right above an alleyway behind a row of small, cramped houses. Derek turned back into his human form and landed in the alleyway, looking around for his objective. From his pocket he pulled a small round object about the size of a kiwi fruit, and threw it on the ground. The object seemed to be rolling across the cobble stone streets, as it should be. It was a clock in the shape of a sphere, with a glass outer casing that formed the sphere, and inside, a flat circular clock face rolled and rotated with the rolling of the ball. The ball stopped right underneath the empty space in the air, where no energy was floating. And suddenly, a thin purple stream of light burst from around the clock face in the sphere, forming a perfect circle in the air. And the empty space where waves of undulating energy should’ve been, there opened up an empty black void in the air, as if Derek were looking into space itself.

Derek had been lucky – he’d arrived quickly, before the time gap had gotten too wide. Nothing that Derek could see had been pulled into the space. But, just to be sure, Derek picked up the sphere on the ground, which still had its purple light surrounding the dark space perfectly. As he lifted the sphere, the circle of glowing purple light moved to follow his actions, so that when Derek held the sphere at waist level with the clock face pointing across from him, the dark space was also right across from him, so that he could look into it. He had controlled it.

As Derek looked closely, he could see at  the very back of the black space (if the space even had an end) was a swirling vortex – like a tornado, except smaller, and swirling with black, purple and dark blue light, with miniscule flakes of golden and silver light like glitter just barely visible in the swirling vortex. That was the place where all broken pieces of time went, ready to be floated into Otherworld. If any pieces of time from this world had gone into the gap, then Derek should have been able to see them still in the swirling vortex, and to retrieve them with a shining loop of silver like a lasso he kept always looped at his belt. But nothing was there, so Derek prepared to close the gap again.

As he did, or at least as he began to close the empty space, Derek stopped. Something cold suddenly froze his limbs and shuddered down his spine. A dark horrifying fear began forming in the pit of his stomach, making him feel like it was going through a washing machine, turning over and over. And for the first time since he had almost ruined everything for his people, Derek felt something he’d hoped never to feel again.

Horror – but not just any fear. A terror that gripped his limbs and seemed to send them into spasmodic attacks without them moving. A fear that made him want to scream, but every single one of his limbs and muscles had frozen and he could not move. This was no ordinary fear. This was a fear that sent his mind racing and left him wanting to cry – this was magical fear. And Derek had only ever been close to a single presence that made him feel this much magical fear this strongly. And it was one he had never wanted to be close to again.

Then, suddenly, it receded – not by much, but enough to unfreeze his limbs and for him to fumble hurriedly with the glass ball in his hand – he searched with trembling fingers around the glass surface. Then he found it, a tiny indent in the otherwise perfect glass sphere, and pressed his thumb into it, muttering words under his breath. The tiny indent glowed gold, and then the rest of the sphere did, and then it spread to the purple light, turning it golden as well. The golden light then began to slowly close in on the dark space, forcing it into a smaller and smaller structure. As most time lapses did, this one was resisting, and Derek gripped the sphere tightly, channeling all of his energy and power into the little device and willing the darkness to be gone.

The dark space grew smaller and smaller, until finally it folded into one tiny miniscule circle, and then was gone, leaving just a thin beam of golden light pointing into thin air. Derek removed his finger from the indent, taking a deep breath. Closing the time lapse had been as easy as a normal job, and he would have thought nothing of it. Except.

Except for that horrible dark presence, the one that Derek knew meant danger for eveyonr in this world and his own. It wouldn’t be easy bringing this back up in the Starlock, Derek realized. But he had no choice. Something was coming, and Derek knew he would have to be ready for it.

This was too dangerous to keep to himself.