The Wizard of Time Trilogy (A Fantasy Time Travel Series)

by G. L. Breedon

  “Well,” Teresa said, after a long pause. “That’s better than two years.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said, trying to infuse the word with as much optimism as possible.

  As the weeks continued to pass, the days grew longer and hotter, signaling a seasonal shift from a rainy spring to a dry summer. The grass of the plains became brownish and brittle, the river shrinking to half its former size. This newly expanded riverbank would have proved a boon if they had still needed to find a fossil. However, they deemed their time better spent trying to generate the magical power necessary to utilize the fossil they already possessed rather than hunting for something new that might take them farther into the future of the alternate timeline.

  In the early hours before sunrise, nearly two months after Teresa’s birthday, Gabriel sat by a small fire taking the last watch before dawn. The dark clouds blotting out the stars had threatened all night to release a torrent of rain. Instead, as the sun rose behind a canopy of grey, lightning began to flash across the sky like brilliant, deformed spider webs. When the faint smell of smoke tickled his nose, Gabriel gently nudged Teresa to consciousness.

  “It’s still dark.” Teresa groggily rubbed her eyes.

  “I think we have a problem.” Gabriel pointed to the western horizon. A pale orange light reflected against dark clouds that looked less and less likely to release their rain.

  Teresa followed Gabriel’s finger and then turned back toward the east where a hidden sun had barely begun to brighten the sky. She looked at Gabriel, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Either the sun is rising in the wrong direction, or the world is on fire.”

  Chapter 13

  “The lightning started a brushfire. And it’s coming right at us.” Gabriel stared toward the mandarin-tinged sky and tried to gauge the distance and speed of the wind. “I don’t think we have more than an hour or two before that fire hits us.”

  “The river is low and the water isn’t very fast, but if we take the raft downstream we might be able to get out of the fire’s path.” Teresa found Gabriel’s hand with hers. The river ran downstream to the south. The fire approached from the west. They would need to cover miles and miles via the slow river in order to escape the approaching flames. “I think it’s the best chance we have.”

  “It’s the only chance we have.”

  They quickly gathered their few possessions and tied them to the raft. Gabriel checked to make sure both Teresa’s stone birthday present and the small spearhead still rested in his pocket before helping her haul the raft into the water. Climbing aboard, they used the flat ends of their spears to push against the muddy river bottom and drift downstream.

  They thrust their spears into the water again and again, alternating sides and timing their strokes to steer the raft and propel them as swiftly as possible downriver. They took occasional sips from the seedpod cistern but did not pause to eat. The closer the flames appeared the more creatures they saw fleeing from the grass and leaping into the water, seeking the supposed safety of the other shore. Even the crocodile-like beasts had abandoned the river for the overland flight from the flames.

  “Maybe the lizards have the right idea.” Teresa jammed her spear into the muck and pushed to steer the raft out of the path of a prehistoric reptile splashing through the water. “We could try to run east. The fire might not be able to jump the river.”

  “Look at the height of those flames.” Gabriel pointed at the blazing wall rushing toward them. “It’ll only take a few sparks to set the other side on fire. Then we’d have to try and outrun it on foot. I don’t think these lizards can run that fast or that long and I know I can’t.”

  After two hours of exhausting labor they saw the wave of flame approaching, the arid wind carrying its baking heat. The view downriver still offered no hope of sanctuary against the rapidly approaching conflagration. They pulled their tunics up over their noses against the increasingly black smoke, hoping the waterway might alter its course and turn east in time to save them. In defiance of their desires, the river continued to run due south.

  Eventually the smoke became too thick for breathing and the heat too oppressive to continue laboring. With the fire now gorging on the grass of the plains merely a hundred yards from the river, Gabriel pulled his spear from the water and clasped Teresa’s shoulder.

  “We’re never going to make it.” Gabriel tossed his spear to the narrow deck of the raft. “Our best chance is to get in the water and stay low.”

  “Even in the water, the smoke is going to kill us if the flames don’t.” Teresa coughed as though to emphasize her point. “Maybe we should try to run east.”

  “We can use the imprints of the spearhead and combine our magics to make a shield against the fire until it passes.” Gabriel stepped into the chest high water, holding the edge of the raft to keep it in place for Teresa. “Once the fire burns out, we can try to walk out of here.”

  Teresa nodded and jumped in the water beside him. While she held the raft in place, he took their two spears and shoved them into the muddy river bottom, angled against the flow of the water and just below its surface. If they survived, they would need their weapons for whatever they might encounter in the charred wasteland that remained. Teresa took their seedpod of drinking water and tied it to her arm as she released the raft, watching it drift away with the current.

  Gabriel took the stone spearhead from his pocket and Teresa clasped her hands around his. He tried to still his mind even as he coughed to clear his lungs from the burning black air. He focused on his subtle energy, concentrating it in his heart center as he reached out to the meager imprints of the spearhead. They could not both simultaneously hold the imprints, but he could share their power with her. He sensed her magical energy and opened up his own, letting them blend together into to one magical force, like water mixing with water.

  “You concentrate on shielding us from the fire and I’ll try to create an air bubble for us to breathe.” Gabriel looked into Teresa’s eyes, seeing his own fear reflected back to him.

  “Right.” Teresa swallowed and her face hardened as she squinted.

  As the wall of fire reached the river’s edge, Teresa created a small sphere of magical protection against the inferno that lapped out over the water to engulf them. Gabriel established a similar bubble using Wind Magic to seal away what little smoke-filled air remained among the oxygen-devouring flames whirling around them. He watched the fire, blown by the strength of the wind, leap across the water to the kindling-like grass on the opposite shore. Within moments, both sides of the river blazed and roiled with smoke.

  Gabriel sensed his magical energy waning as he struggled to maintain the bubble of breathable air. He could feel Teresa also fighting to hold in place her magical shield against the flames. While they had practiced cultivating their subtle energy, they had little training in prolonging its use while performing magic, and the holocaust threatening to consume them showed no sign of dissipating or even lessening in intensity.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” Teresa shouted over the roar of the firestorm. As she spoke, Gabriel sensed her shield against the flame shrinking.

  “I’m not sure if I can last, either.” His magical bubble of air began to become porous, noxious black smoke seeping through the barrier. “We have to hold our breaths under water.”

  “No.” Teresa’s voice sounded forceful and fearful at the same time. “You need to go. Now!”

  “I’m not leaving you to die in flames.” Gabriel’s concentration wavered as the anger of the old argument gripped his mind. He struggled to hold his magical energy, and the air bubble, in place.

  “You have to.” Tears ran down Teresa’s soot stained face. “I can’t keep the flames away. You have to save yourself.”

  “No.” Gabriel watched Teresa’s sphere of Fire Magic protection begin to collapse. He took his hands from where they still clutched the imbued spearhead and placed them on her shoulders. “Breathe!”
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  Gabriel gulped a lungful of air and pulled Teresa down, his magical air bubble evaporating beneath the increased pressure of the water. Teresa glared at him as they clung to each other, the fire making the underside of the water a nightmare of orange and yellow and red and black. The water began to heat up, and he hoped they could hold their breath until the fire ate through its grassy fuel.

  Teresa tried to break away from Gabriel, pointing at him with her free hand. He understood the gesture. He wrapped his fingers around hers and signaled with the stone spearhead, pointing to himself, then to her, then the spearhead, before pulling the fossil they had worked so hard to discover from his pocket. She shook her head. Gabriel pointed again, emphatically. Their only hope would be to combine their magical energies with the insubstantial imprints of the spearhead and try to make a time jump. Gabriel knew the futility of the idea. If they could not maintain the magic needed to shield themselves from the fire and smoke, it would be hopeless to try a time jump. But, if they had only one chance, they had to attempt it.

  Teresa shook her head again. She reached out and cupped Gabriel’s jawline in the palm of her hand. An icy wave raced through his body and mind. He grasped the significance of her gesture just as she opened her mouth and exhaled.

  Air bubbles streamed upward from Teresa’s mouth toward the fire cloaked surface of the river. As she willfully sucked in water the limbs of her body revolted, spasming wildly while she struggled against the instinctive urge to swim for the air overhead.

  Gabriel nearly let the pent up air in his lungs explode forth, repressing the scream of rage building within him as Teresa began to convulse, her lungs filling with water. Gabriel held her close, tying to press his lips to hers and force the air from his chest into her own. She struggled against him, trying to pushing him away. As much as she fought against his attempts to stop her sacrifice, she never looked away from him.

  Not knowing what else to do but unable to do the thing Teresa’s actions attempted to force him into, Gabriel pushed the fear and anger and pain from his mind and embraced his inner subtle energy and the paltry imprints of the spearhead. He focused his space-time sense on the fossil he still grasped in his hand while holding Teresa close with his other arm. Her body ceased its battle against her will as her eyes closed and her limbs went limp.

  The rancid air, hastily gulped down before his submersion, bit at his lungs, fighting for release. He remembered this sensation. He had experienced it before. In the bus at the bottom of that other river. He knew how long he could hold out before his lungs, longing to expel the air within them, overrode his need to retain it. He concentrated on merging the subtle energy of his own being with the nearly imperceptible space-time traces of the fossil, willing them to unite, as he had done so many times previously.

  With his lungs aching to exhale, and his mind battered by thoughts of Teresa’s death, the blackness that accompanied the warping of space-time began to shroud him. He closed his eyes against the sight of Teresa’s still form and redoubled his efforts to make that sphere of warped space and time extend to include her. No matter how hard he pushed, regardless of the magnitude of his desire, he could not generate enough subtle magical energy to make the warping bubble of space-time embrace Teresa.

  Gabriel had to choose. He could jump to safety in an instant, but he could not manage the magical power to take Teresa with him. He would need to leave her there in some unreachable alternate past — or he would die with her. His death would mean many things to many people, but he could not imagine that his passing could affect anyone as deeply as Teresa’s sacrifice would touch him. She had given her life to save his own in the hopes that he might save the Great Barrier and the Primary Continuum from the Apollyons.

  Gabriel recognized what he had to do no matter how much he would hate himself for doing it. He could not waste Teresa’s death, her gift of life to him. He had to honor her death and her choice and the woman she had been and the memories of their brief time together, as well as their dreams of a future she would never enjoy.

  Chapter 14

  As he stared at Teresa’s lifeless body floating a few feet beneath the water, crimson flames undulating along the surface above like a liquid sky of blood, a sudden clarity of profound depth fell upon Gabriel’s mind. He perceived, all at once, the import and impact of Teresa’s decision, and his own, rippling outward, a wave of immanent causality, colliding with every action of everyone else involved in his life. He saw the potential paths he might pursue, from wounded and vengeful tyrant forcing his will upon Grace and Malignancy Mage alike, to a mournful and disconsolate recluse hiding from duty and responsibility. In the midst of this clarity, he perceived the direction he would choose, the one that would have made Teresa proud of him, the one that might fashion him into a man from her martyrdom.

  As this new wellspring of awareness continued to expand within Gabriel’s mind, he reached out with the imprints and energy of his body and the spearhead, preparing to make the jump through time to the place he had identified along the course of the fossil’s timeline. As his fingers loosened their grip on Teresa’s arm and rose to touch the curve of her chin, he noticed something he had witnessed recently. With his consciousness more refined than ever before, Gabriel sensed the subtle cosmic energy pervading all existence. It seemed strange that he had not previously observed it so blatantly. Like only realizing that one breathed air once the temperature dropped low enough to make exhalation visible in small, vaporous clouds.

  Gabriel tentatively reached out with his mind to touch this cosmic origin source. As his own subtle energy touched and blended with the unimaginably vast and profoundly powerful energy at the heart of all being in all times and places and possibilities, he felt humbled and emboldened. With this power, any imagined aspiration became conceivable. With this power, his mind and will could dictate reality in a way that made normal magic seem childish and superficial.

  As wave of relief threated to upend the equanimity of his mind, Gabriel accepted a miniscule fraction of that cosmic energy. He bent down and placed the fossil in the mud of the riverbed. His plan had been to put it back exactly where he had found it. Only now did it occur to him that by moving the fossil downriver, he might have changed its timeline so much that it never again appeared above ground.

  He would worry about that later. With the power coursing through him, he knew he could dig himself and Teresa out of any depth of earth they found themselves buried in.

  He quickly scanned the fossil’s path through history with his space-time sense, searching for a moment that would give them an opportunity to seek out more relics and begin their journey home. Instantly the blackness of time travel surrounded him and Teresa’s lifeless body, carrying them to a point along the timeline of the fossil when a camel hoof would shatter it into crumbling dust.

  The whiteness of time travel faded to reveal the jungle and grassy plains had long ago given way to a dune-swept desert. Gabriel lowered Teresa to the sand beneath their feet and embraced her not with Heart-Tree Magic but with the power of his will, amplified by the subtle cosmic energy of all things. As the water from their faces and hair and cloths soaked the sand, Gabriel used this newfound power to expel the fluid from her lungs and return her to life. It did not require magic, merely thought and desire coupled with the power he now wielded.

  Teresa coughed and spat rancid river water from her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered as she looked up at Gabriel’s face.

  “What?”

  “You’re alive.” Gabriel reached out to brush the water-soaked hair from her face.

  “What?” Teresa propped herself up on one elbow.

  “I managed a time jump with both of us.” Gabriel stroked her cheek, elated that Teresa lived.

  “What?”

  Instead of an answer, Gabriel kissed her, holding her tight as tears filled his eyes. He thought of how close he had been to losing her. In this swell of emotion, he lost his hold on the subtle cosmic energy that had saved them and
the special perspective that allowed him to perceive it. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Teresa lived. They had escaped from the jungles and plains of the Paleozoic Era to an age where humans lived. They would find a way home — together. Gabriel broke away from the kiss, grinning and wiping tears from his eyes.

  “Who are they?” Teresa too brushed tears from her cheeks as she looked behind Gabriel.

  He turned to see a small caravan of men and camels not twenty feet away. The men stood wide-eyed, curved swords drawn to defend themselves from the two people who had appeared from nowhere beneath the blistering midday sun. The men whispered among themselves in a language that sounded to Gabriel like some form of ancient Aramaic or Arabic. Without his magical amulet to translate, he had no way of knowing what the men said.

  “Oops.” Gabriel remembered sensing the presence of people when he had made the jump away from the firestorm, but he had been too concerned with reviving Teresa to care who saw them arrive from nothingness.

  He stood up and faced the men. The camels warily shifted their feet at his sudden movement. The man closest to Gabriel raised his sword and emphatically shouted something unintelligible.

  Gabriel sought that immaculately still frame of mind that had allowed him to sense the cosmic energy pulsing beneath all phenomenon, but found it elusive. It felt like trying to find a misplaced book in a darkened room. He thought he knew where it should be, but could not manage to clasp hold of it. Exasperated and knowing he had little time, he instead focused on his own subtle energy and the minor imprints of the spearhead, channeling what little he could muster into a focused burst of Wind Magic.