She talk on and on and asked many questions. She was slightly annoying, but that could only be a temporary thing. Truth, if his hypothesis was correct, could change reality. His parents were dead. He saw them die. But he had rewritten history and wrote something for the future to alleviate his stress.

But it seemed that it was not just an outlet for his emotions. It appeared hat he could change reality and time. He was going to try writing and changing something small as an experiment… after this girl, Gale, stopped jabbering.

“Excuse me, but I am feeling tired and must rest,” Truth lied. “Can we continue another time?”

“Let me ask you one last question. Then you may leave. Is that fine by you?” Gale asked.

“Ok.”

“So,” Gale said, “Why did you abandon your friends? You had some other mission that too you also abandoned.”

“I felt…” Truth looked for the correct words. “I-I felt myself calling to not be a pawn. I wanted to be my own master. I did not want to adhere to the Sovereign or the Master. What choice would I then have in life?”

“But what if there is no free will at all?” Gale asked. “What if fate or perhaps a god, if there is one, plans everything according to its will? I have wrestled with questions like that myself for several years now.”

Truth doubted she had wrestled with those questions she said she did. She could be lying to win him over. But he really wanted a friend and hated that he saw the worst in everyone. “I did not think of that side, perhaps,” Truth said. “If so, would not the ‘god’ prevent us from questioning our will and power?”

Gale only made a thinking noise.

Truth sat there for another minute and got up to leave. Gale didn’t stop him. She let him go to his own room.

His parents were there, but Tiger wasn’t. Truth had seen him go explore the palace… three? Chimes ago. Or perhaps five. In any case, Tiger had been gone for a long time. It was unlike him to do so. This being, worry sparked in his heart and lit a flame of anxiety.

“Hello Mom and Dad,” Truth said, hiding his worry.

“Do you want to play cards, Truth?” asked his father. “It has been years since we last spoke, excluding today, at least.”

Truth’s brain reeled to find a lie that would satisfy his parents and make them leave the room. “I am tired and all of this,” he gestured at his parents, “is quite a lot to take in. I need some time alone to process this all.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“We understand,” said his father who gave his wife a quick peck on the cheek left the room with her, closing the door.

Finally, some alone time.

Truth picked up the page he had written on the night before and a different quill. He proceeded to write: Let it be that the door to this room will fly open and Tiger will step in in only five little-chimes.

Truth sat back and took a breath. All this potential power was amazing and frightening. He had read in a quote from a book that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This also raised many other big questions. Ones Truth did not like to think about. He wanted control, but if he did, he would go bonkers. If a god or someone of the like did, they would go bonkers as well. If there was fate, which could be if what Truth wrote on the paper came into being, why was life not ever more unbalanced?

Truth went to the sink-like thing to get some water when his door swung upon and hurried footsteps followed. He someone hug and cling to his neck. Looking down, he saw that it was Tiger who was clinging to him.

“What is it, buddy?” Truth asked.

“I broke this grandfather clock in this ancient hall. I felt something strange then. Time seemed to stop, and something began before time resumed.”

“What do you mean?” Truth said. “Or should you just show me.”

Tiger took him to a ancient stone corridor. As they walked, Truth started to speak. “Tiger, what do you think of fate?”

“Well,” Tiger said, “I feel that everything is planned ahead but we still mold our own futures, in a sense. We do not know the future, so we create it and it becomes so. But we do not change the present which is the past future.”

“That does not make much sense,” Truth said. “I ask because the night before my parents arrived, I wrote down what I wanted to happen and wrote what I wished happened. I wished they were not killed.

“But then shortly before you burst into my room, I wrote on the same sheet of paper that you would do so at the time you did.”

“You can’t be serious,” Tiger said. “But it is possible you have some sort of power over time. Oh, and here is te clock I talked about.”

The grandfather clock was up against the wall, silent. It did not count the passing time nor did it go backwards. It was stuck at quarter of eleventh chime. The same time the clock in his room stopped at.

“Oh!” Tiger exclaimed. “If you really could alter time, perhaps a another way to test is healing your missing claw.”

This had occurred to Truth but he did not want to do it. It was part of him, or lack thereof. It molded him into who he was today. He was scared of what he would otherwise be. He was also scared that he might become a monster.

“I don’t think so,” Truth replied. “It is like changing me. Although I do not like the way I am, I am scared of being different.”

“Hmm,” said Tiger.

They looked at the grandfather clock for a long time before Tiger took out the note his father had given him and started to speak of a different past. One that should not have happened but someone–the god– allowed. But it was all unknown. And that was scary.