“Sorry Tyler. That’s actually not possible.” Eris said.
“Aww. Why, though? I thought you said anything was possible with magic?”
Eris sighed. “Yeah. And it is. But that’s for things that are logically possible, and time travel just isn’t logical.”
They were watching the first installment in one of Tyler’s favorite movie franchises, and the wiry-haired doctor had just demonstrated time travel. The movie was paused as Tyler wanted to ask if she could go back in time. She wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was thinking of her father when she asked.
“But, why, though? It doesn’t seem logically impossible to me. Wouldn't it just make a new timeline?”
“The problem with time travel is two-fold. The simple answer is that you’d create a paradox simply by going back in time with a goal. Say you go back in time and save someone. What will happen? The person is alive now in your own past, so present you would have no reason to go back to save that person, but if there’s no reason to go back in time, then you weren’t able to save them. It’s like asking me to pull myself up by my shoe laces, it can’t be done because it’s logically impossible.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense. What’s the second reason?”
“The second reason is a bit more complicated. Time isn’t actually a series of events… well, I suppose from our points of view it is, but what’s actually happening is the slow decay of the universe.”
“The decay?”
“Mhmm. Remember what I said about our souls, how if I tried to repair them and replace what was lost then it’d be impossible to restore you to the way you were exactly, and you’d be a different person? Or when I told you that trying to magically learn something would more than likely cause you to learn a falsehood rather than the truth?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s because magic, or rather my home, binds itself to your will. If you don’t know what the answer is, then it will try to fill in the blanks with whatever is closest to the desired outcome. You can consider time to be the slow wearing away of the universe. If you actually tried and succeeded in 'going back in time', you would probably end up in a rapidly decaying pocket universe with no way out, since it'd be cut off from my home and all other universes.”
Tyler gulped. “Right. Let's never do that.”
Eris nodded in agreement.
Tyler looked down at the table. Her phone had just vibrated, and the screen showed a new message from Durian. She quickly reached for her phone and unlocked it; unconscious of the small smile that found its way onto her face.
Durian L Hey Tyler! How do you feel about my family’s shop for lunch? We could meet there around 1-ish? Sounds great! I’ll see you then. ☺️
She put her phone down and looked over at Eris, who was looking at her with a playful smile. “What?”
“Nothing.” Eris replied.
“Right, then I’m going to go get ready. You can finish the movie if you’d like.”
There wasn’t much to prepare. She took a quick shower, and though she had finally gotten used to her body, she still felt giddy with euphoria by the time she was finished. She checked the time as she dried her hair, it was noon fifteen. The bus ride to Durian’s family business would take roughly twenty-five minutes. Assuming the buses were on time, she’d want to leave soon.
Tyler opted to forgo makeup and just applied a little lip gloss and got dressed in the clothes she had spent last night picking out. It was one of the nicer outfits her mom got her at the thrift store earlier that week. It was a pair of navy-blue women’s slacks with an embroidered scoop neck shirt and matching jacket. Her mom was actually pretty proud of her thrift find for this one, as it was an entire set piece that was mislabeled as seventy-five percent off. She decided to go with flats instead of heels, not wanting to risk the small heels since she hadn’t had much practice. It’d mean she would be a good head shorter than Durian, but that shouldn’t matter, right? It was just going to be a friendly chat. Tyler realized she had butterflies in her stomach.
She had to move past the living room to get to the kitchen from the hallway stairs, and heard a camera snap as she rounded the corner. She gave Eris a raised eyebrow.
“Christine asked me for a picture.” Eris explained. “You look spectacular, by the way.”
Tyler blushed at the compliment and heard the camera app go off again.
“That one was for me.” She smiled.
Tyler tried to fight the blush, but found it too difficult, so she pouted and decided to deflect before her friend could embarrass her any further. “How do you even have a smartphone? I don’t remember mom buying you one.”
“I went down to the store with your mom last Thursday evening and paid for my own.”
“How’d you get the money for that?”
Eris looked at her lopsided, “By magically conjuring the bills needed until I had enough?”
Tyler facepalmed, “Eris.” She gave a sigh. “Those bills have a unique number on them to prevent exactly that sort of thing. I hope that no one notices that and traces it back to Christine, since it’s her phone plan you were added to.”
Eris looked a little dejected. “Oh. I didn’t realize. I just assumed it would be fine because that’s how I always used to do it.”
Tyler gave her friend a small smile. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” She ignored the feeling that she just had of a flag rising. This wasn’t a fantasy story or a video game. She checked her phone, it was half past noon. “Shoot, I gotta go, or I’ll miss the bus.”
“Have fun!” Eris called to her as Tyler slung her purse over her shoulder and ran out of the front door.
◊◊◊
Durian nervously opened and closed the messenger app on his phone as he waited in the back room. He initially wanted to wait at a table for Tyler, but got too nervous at the customers who came in and looked at him, wondering why the person who normally pulled the cuts for them from the freezer was sitting in casual wear at a table looking nervous as all get out. So in the break room he sat, the door propped open slightly, so he could hear when someone comes in.
He wasn’t sure why he was so nervous. Okay, that was a little white lie. Durian did know why he was nervous. He thought Tyler and he were good friends until recently. She had seemed really shocked when he called her that, so what else could he have gotten wrong? Durian tried to go through his memories again, but that just caused him more anxiety as he tried to figure out what Tyler had been thinking at the time, so he went back to his phone and started playing a simple puzzle game.
The game was simple enough. It reminded him of the board game Clue he used to play with his parents when he was younger. It was a simple enough 3D puzzle game that required you to find clues around several beautiful areas to solve the mysteries of each level. There were only three levels currently, but he still hadn’t gotten past the second one, so he retraced all the steps he took from the previous attempt to see if he missed something.
The front doorbell chimed. Durian loved that little bell chime. As a kid, he would open the door repeatedly to hear it until his father told him off. He quickly turned off his phone and walked out of the break room.
Three women walked to the front counter, talking animatedly about something that happened earlier at work. Durian tuned them out and resolved to just sit at a table and deal with the looks. The break room wasn’t doing his nerves any favors anyway.
No sooner had he sat down than the door chimed as it opened again. Tyler was standing in the doorway, and she looked stunning, the dark blue clothes matched perfectly with her blonde hair, and he had trouble reconciling the person in front of him with the Tyler he knew from Monday. She scanned the room, and Durian felt a little leap in his chest when their eyes met. She gave a smile and started walking over to his table, while Durian quietly squashed the lingering doubts in the back of his mind that this wasn’t the Tyler he used to know. She looked the same, sort of. Looking closely at the person walking towards him and comparing her features to what they were before when they looked up at him with embarrassment in the Nurse’s office, he could see the similarities. But there were differences too. She looked different enough to not be a sister, and wondered again if her and Eris were related. They had the same hair and strikingly beautiful eyes.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
He had to pull himself out of his thoughts as he closed the distance to say hi. “Tyler. Thanks for coming.” Durian winced at himself. Good job buddy, He thought to himself, now this sounds like an interview.
She gave an easy smile. “Hey, Durian!”
Durian wondered again if this was really the same shy Tyler he had known for the past two years. She looked stunning, and pulled off the outfit incredibly.
“Hi.” He greeted again and after a moment of awkwardness spoke up again. He wasn't sure what to say, so he offered her the chair across from him.
Durian immediately felt the awkward silence that followed, as she put her purse down on the chair next to her. “So, what do you do for fun?” Durian asked, trying to keep the conversation moving.
“I like to write.” Tyler said with a smile on her face. “I’d love to be a writer someday, but I don’t know if I’ll be any good.”
“Can I see something you wrote?”
She looked shocked, and blushed a little. “Okay, but only if you promise not to make fun of it. It’s a little embarrassing.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a navy-blue notebook that looked like it was straining the purse to fit inside. She started flipping through the pages until she came across a short story. It looked as if it were only four or five pages long.
Durian played with the corner of the pages as he read the short story. He noticed that the more he read, the more Tyler seemed to squirm with anxiety, until she stood up and went to the counter to make an order.
“Would you like anything to eat?” She said.
“Huh?” Durian asked, taking a minute before he understood the question. “Oh! Yes, please. Dad’s working today, so he’ll put the food on my tab. Could you tell him that I’ll have my regular lunch, please?”
“You have to pay for your food?”
“Only on days I’m not working. Dad says it’s to keep the books balanced properly. He’s a real stickler for making sure everything is in order. The one time he got audited when he was setting up the shop for the first time, he took the IRS completely off guard by his binder full of receipts, notes, and inventory. They said it was the fastest audit they ever had to do.”
Tyler nodded along and said she’d be right back as she headed to the counter, and Durian turned his attention back to the short story, trying to tune out the introductions. He could hear his father laughing loudly and could only imagine the shy girl shrinking in front of his boisterous dad.
The story was about two wizards, or maybe one wizard and a friend, who were escaping a town guard and hid out in a cave while they were being hunted. They managed to get away with some illusion magic to make the guards think they were dead.
When he looked up, he had a sandwich in front of him and Tyler was looking at him, nervous as ever.
“What do you think?” She asked. “I know it’s not that great, but it’s only a first draft.”
Durian smiled. “I love it. I could read an entire book series about these two.”
Tyler beamed and all the anxiety washed away from her face as she started animatedly talking about her ideas of where she’d like the story to go. Durian was sure she had enough ideas for two books by the time he had finished his fries, and it didn't look like she was going to run out soon. Listening to her talk, using her hands to gesture during some of the more action packed scenes, he couldn't help but smile.
I could listen to her talk all day, Durian thought as he started on his sandwich, content to listen to Tyler explain how the friends in her story got caught up in a coup d'état.
◊◊◊
Eris played with her new smartphone. She found herself completely astounded at how far technology had come since she was last awake. When she had first encountered humans, they were very kind to her and welcomed her to their small village with open arms. They wore handmade clothes and the houses had the barest of necessities.
Then there were the advances that came out of the early city states. With so many people, it became necessary to create things to help the day-to-day tasks finish faster. Eris wasn’t sure if humans were actually good in large groups. She compared the easy happiness of her very first friends with the growing anxieties of the people of ancient Babylon. The peoples were prosperous indeed, having invented numerous useful tools for agriculture and record keeping. People started to specialize as the needs that were once small grew to a size that was unmanageable without some of the more interesting inventions. Seamstresses, cordwainers, and butchers started to appear when people could no longer manage both the duties they undertook for the city, and the needs of the home.
Then there were the inventors themselves. People who only wanted to make new things and found repeating the same acts everyday akin to drinking poison. They built machines that ran on their own with steam, and jars of liquid with rods of metal sticking out that numbed your hands if you put one on each jar. Cars were fine, she could imagine how the same steam engines that were once just a curiosity or a play thing turned into the thousand pound metal box that moved. Refrigerators were fine, too, after she looked up how a compressor worked. By changing how much air was in a box, you could cool things down. Ingenious, she thought.
But the phone in her hand she couldn’t make heads or tails of. It had to be magic, despite Tyler telling her otherwise more than once. She couldn’t figure out how a battery could become the machine of light in front of her. A tool that could become other tools and changed its face to meet the needs of the holder.
She was pulled from her reveries when the doorbell rang. Since she was the only one in the house, she figured it’d be fine to answer the door. “Yes?” She asked the old man who had appeared at the front door. She hadn’t seen him before and going from the shock on his face, he didn’t know who she was either.
Collecting his surprise and stowing it, so it wouldn't show on his face, he introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Matthew Johnson; an old teacher of Tyler’s. Are you her friend? Is she around?” He seemed a little scared. That was weird, normally people who have aged several decades weren’t easy to frighten. She started to get worried that something terrible happened.
“Yes, I’m her friend, Eris. She’s out presently, but she should be back in an hour or so. Is something wrong?”
“No.” He quickly lied. Eris could easily see that something was wrong. “I mean. Not with Tyler, I don’t think. But I was hoping I could talk to her about the incident with Sid again.”
“Ah.” So, he was the one who had shown up earlier that week. She had been in bed at the time. She had a feeling that he wasn’t lying about who he was, so she invited him in and started a kettle for tea. Matthew asked for coffee instead, so she got down the jar of instant espresso and a stirring spoon. After a few minutes, they both were sitting at the table with mugs in their hands.
“So what was it about Sid you wanted to know?”
Matthew put his cup down and sighed. “Were you there for what happened?” he asked.
“Only for the end of it.” Technically, that was true, though she wasn’t aware of what was happening around her while she tried to fix Tyler’s body.
Matthew nodded to himself, satisfied with her answer. “Do you happen to know what happened to the trophy that was in the display case? It’s been missing since Monday.”
Eris eyes widened when she realized he was asking about the trophy she was bound to. What did the teacher know? Was it safe to share things with him? Eris normally would just say what's on her mind, but Tyler scolded her after she blurted out the existence of magic at the school cafeteria.
“I don’t know. I was focused on Tyler the whole time. Why would someone steal a trophy?” Matthew looked a little nervous at her question. So, She thought, something about my prison has him worried. She decided to just go for it.
“Does it have anything to do with the being that was trapped inside it?” She was taking a risk, but it was the only explanation she could think of as to why this person would be so concerned with it. She doubted even the school noticed its absence.
Matthew was gobsmacked. “H-how did you know about that?”
Eris smiled as she finished her sip of tea, a little proud of how quickly she got him on the back foot. Remembering how Tyler spoke highly of the teacher and the things he’d done for her, she decided to trust him. “I am that being.” She had never seen color drain from a person’s face so quickly before, so she hurriedly moved to calm him a bit. “I’m not sure what you were told about me, but I don’t intend to do anything bad. I’ve been living with Tyler since Monday and nothing catastrophic has happened.”
Matthew’s face shown a look of absolute surprise as it took him a moment to recollect his thoughts. He cleared his throat, “I didn’t know demons could look so human.”
“Demon? Demons don’t exist. At least I don't think they do.” She had never been called a demon before, and it hurt. It reminded her of the people who shouted “witch” and ran her out of their cities.
Matthew seemed to pick up on that hurt. “I meant no disrespect. That’s just how Mr. Potts described the being that was held there. What—. Um. What are you?” Matthew paled again. If the conversation wasn’t so serious, she’d have found it funny. “Wait. You’re not that Eris, are you? The one from the myths?”
So, he knew a little about magic. Eris seemed delighted that magic hadn’t completely fallen away since she’d been gone. She couldn’t help but giggle at his last question, though. “No. I’m much older than the stories of the primordial god of Chaos. In the first human tongue, my name simply means ‘the one who came first’.”
That caused a complete shock in Matthew. Eris was glad he kept himself in shape. If he was weak in any way, she would have been worried he’d have a heart attack by now.
“The first… the first human tongue?”
Eris nodded. “The language and people didn’t have a name for themselves as a group, but they had names for individuals. Eris was what I picked out from their language. It felt right. As for what I am, well, I’m not certain.”
“You’re not… sure? Never mind. I’m getting off track. I guess I don’t need to look for the trophy anymore since you’re freed from it anyway.”
“About that. How did you come to know about magic? I was under the impression that my gifts had been gone from the place for over a thousand years.”
It took Matthew a full minute before he could respond. Eris started to like this person and his facial expressions. She understood why Tyler was so fond of him. “Your gifts?”
Eris nodded again. She was tired of explaining magic at this point, so she went with the brief description. “Magic came from my home. I brought it here to try to help people with crops and disease. I’ve—. Well, I’ve had too many friends die from hunger and illness to not do anything about it.”
Matthew looked completely scared, and Eris wondered what he was thinking because by the look of it, it wasn’t doing his heart any favors. As she looked closer at him, she realized he smelled like her home, and recognized the scent as a defensive spell. “To be clear, I truly do not mean anyone any harm. But might I ask how you’re using magic? It shouldn’t work, since the ley lines have been gone for about a millennium now.”
“Ley lines? Like from the stories?”
“Well, that’s not what I called them. I hadn’t actually heard the term until I woke up. But that’s essentially what they are, yes.”
Matthew looked uncertain. “I’m using this. It was a gift from my teacher.” He reached into his shirt pocket and held out a small pocket watch. At first, it meant nothing to her, but on closer inspection, she saw that the cover to the watch looked familiar. She slowly reached out and took the watch from his hands. It caused Matthew to jump a little, but she paid him no mind. “Ammurapi.” Memories of Ugarit came back to her as her eyes started to mist.
“I’m sorry?”
“Ammurapi.” She repeated. “He was, well, he was the mayor of Ugarit. I had gifted this to him at the behest of his lover. He had feared an assassin would target Ammurapi and wished for him to be protected, so I made a medallion for him. I had wondered what happened to it. I couldn’t find it on his body.”
Now Matthew was a history teacher, so he knew a lot about early human history, so he could pinpoint what she was saying at around 1000 BC. That wasn’t the problem, the problem was hearing a girl who looked no more than eighteen talking about something that long ago as if it had happened yesterday. His mouth opened and closed, trying to find a way of asking a how she could know any of that. His curiosity as to what she was explaining conflicted strongly with his desire to ask a million questions about what life was like, which mixed with several emotions about how impossible this conversation was. It was strange. He knew of magic, even used it, but sitting here with an honest to goodness immortal was killing whatever paradigm of normalcy he had left. Even worse, he could barely remember why he had come in the first place. On top of all that, it had finally clicked for him that this was the demon he’s been up late every night for the past week trying to find, and she looked as if she was Tyler's cousin. Giving up, he dipped his forehead into his hands and just sat there staring at the steam rising off the coffee mug and counted his breathing.
Eris continued drinking her tea as she traced her finger over the medallion turned pocket watch cover. Eventually, she moved it across the table, back to Matthew, and sighed a sigh that only those who have lost more than they could count could sigh.
She was still drinking from her mug when what felt like a bucket of cold water splashed down her spine and into her very essence. A sharp pain radiated out from all sides of her, like a million knives made from pure ice.
The coffee cup she was holding fell to the ground and shattered, only one word escaping her lips before she passed out.
“Tyler!”