Lia Ardent stood at the edge of a bustling 17th-century market, her hands resting lightly on the straps of her satchel. She scanned the scene in front of her—the town square of Falmouth, 1652—alive with the sights and sounds of history unfolding as it always had. Peddlers hawked their wares, villagers bartered, and the clop of horses' hooves echoed through the cobbled streets.

Everything seemed ordinary.

She watched without interacting, careful not to draw attention to herself. In the corner of her eye, a small, glowing display projected from her wrist unit, flickering with readings from the past: temperature, wind speed, and even the likelihood of historical anomalies. There were rules about interfering with history, and Lia followed them to the letter. This was just another routine surveillance mission, ensuring the timeline flowed as it always had.

She glanced down at the readings. Stable.

The job wasn’t glamorous. On a good day, Lia thought of herself as a guardian of time, preserving the fragile balance that kept the universe intact. On a bad day, she was a glorified historian with more paperwork than adventure. Today, it felt like the latter.

She exhaled, trying to let go of her restlessness. Her eyes wandered across the stalls—wooden carts stacked high with vegetables, woven baskets, jars of herbs—and then to a cluster of wildflowers nestled against a stone wall, blooming in vibrant shades of red and violet.

Her pulse quickened.

The flowers shouldn't be there. Not yet.

Her wrist unit buzzed softly, almost in response to her thoughts. She tapped the glowing display, pulling up the local botany records. In this region, in this time, those flowers weren’t supposed to bloom for another two months. She stared at them, her mind racing, but the sight was so small, so insignificant. No one in the bustling market had even noticed them.

But Lia had been trained to notice everything.

She tapped her wrist unit again, this time capturing an image of the flowers for later analysis. It was probably nothing—a fluke of nature, maybe a change in the climate from some distant part of the world. It wasn’t unheard of. Yet a feeling gnawed at her, something deeper than the anomaly itself. Her years of experience told her that the timeline didn’t make mistakes.

"Stay alert," she whispered to herself, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

A few minutes passed, and she forced herself to continue observing the marketplace. If there were other signs of temporal disturbance, she couldn’t afford to miss them. But everything else seemed perfectly aligned. The merchants continued to sell their wares, children played by the fountain, and the village buzzed with life. Only the flowers stood out—tiny, innocent, yet unnervingly out of place.

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Her wrist unit chirped again, signaling her designated return window. Lia hesitated, her gaze lingering on the flowers for just a moment longer before she tapped the device, and the market scene shimmered and faded around her.

When the holographic projection vanished, Lia found herself back in her investigation chamber, surrounded by sleek, polished surfaces and softly humming machinery. The stark contrast between the vibrant past and the sterile present left her momentarily disoriented, but she was used to that by now. Time travel did that to a person.

“Report,” came a voice from the overhead comm system, startling her.

Lia straightened, regaining her composure. “Observation complete,” she said, her voice crisp. “Timeline appears intact, no significant disturbances—except…”

She paused, knowing what she was about to say sounded absurd.

“Except what?” the voice prompted.

“There was a bloom of Scilla bifolia—star hyacinths. They were flowering early. Two months too early.”

A brief silence followed. “That’s... minor,” the voice replied, after a beat. “Climate fluctuations, nothing more. We’ve seen this before, Agent Ardent.”

Lia closed her eyes, resisting the urge to argue. She could feel the impatience from the other end of the line, as if the disturbance was barely worth the mention. Maybe they were right. Maybe she was reading too much into it. But a part of her—a deep, instinctual part—knew something was wrong.

“Understood,” she said at last. “Logging it now.”

With a few quick taps on her wrist unit, she filed the report, attaching the image of the flowers for later review. It would likely be flagged as a trivial anomaly, one of countless data points that would eventually be archived and forgotten. And yet, as she made her way through the sleek corridors of the Temporal Operations building, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the flowers were more than just a random anomaly.

Back in her quarters, Lia sat at her desk, pulling up historical records of the region on her data terminal. As the system combed through centuries of archived files, she drummed her fingers on the polished surface, her mind wandering back to the market, to the feeling of wrongness that had lingered in the air.

A small alert chimed, pulling her back to the screen. The file she had requested—a timeline report from a case she’d handled years ago—popped up. She hadn’t thought about that case in a long time. It was closed, after all.

But there was something about the timeline disruptions she had seen then, tiny changes, seemingly unimportant details, that had unsettled her the same way the flowers did today. It had been filed as a low-priority disturbance, an isolated event. She hadn’t questioned it at the time.

Now, though, the connections were too hard to ignore.

Her eyes narrowed as she scrolled through the report, feeling the weight of something larger hovering just out of reach.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” she murmured. “Or maybe it’s the start of something.”

She pushed the terminal away, leaning back in her chair. The flowers bloomed in her mind’s eye, vibrant and misplaced. Her instincts screamed that she needed to look deeper.

And for someone like Lia, instinct was everything.