Crashing Time Trunks

by Amber Savage

  After an extended silence, he said, “I come from a time that is different from yours. I traveled here to look for Clarissa, the woman I was supposed to marry.”

  “Future?” a confused Bronia asked. She may have been one of the most powerful warriors across all the Isles, but she did not understand the concept of traveling from today into yesterday.

  “It’s when you leave today and go back to tomorrow,” Hagan said, almost not wanting to see the way she responded.

  Bronia was upset. She had started to believe Hagan, but now she felt he was making a fool out of her. Her rage fueled her reflexes and she pulled out her cloaked dagger and leaped at him. Before he knew it, it was at his throat.

  Magnahul gently restrained his daughter. “I have something to show you in the other tent,” he told her. “Bring the stranger.” He went into the adjoining tent and waited for Bronia to follow. Her face fell silent the moment her eyes met the image of the object in front of her. Hagan was just as surprised as she was, but for different reasons.

  “They have found my pod.”

  Part of him worried, but a part of him was relieved. Perhaps they would believe him now.

  “What is this, m’lord?”

  “By the look on our guest’s face, I believe this belongs to him.” Turning to Hagan he said, “Is this your carriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “This seems to be our divine intervention – a gift from the heavens,” Magnahul said.

  The Magnahul soldiers who tried to open it were not able to. The shell was made of hardened titanium. Its onboard electronics were powered by the electricity that was held by rechargeable batteries. It had probably been charged by now after days of sitting up on the ridge. Hagan could see the scuff marks where someone had tried to open it.

  He was almost afraid of activating it.

  It would look like magic. But there was no other choice. If indeed the batteries were juiced, he would be able to use his palm to open it. Just laying his hand on any part of the shell would activate the pod. He placed his palm on the shell and it unlocked and opened.

  “He is a witch,” Bronia whispered under her breath.

  “I am not a witch,” Hagan shot back, not believing in such nonsense and only in science. Being called a witch was degrading and demeaning. “I am a man of science and I built this machine to travel through time.”

  Magnahul believed him, but Bronia was not in the mood for games and witchcraft.

  “Where is science?” Bronia asked, “I have never heard of it.”

  “Science is not a place.”

  “You said you are a man of science.”

  “Science is the study of how things work. I study how time works.”

  As Bronia and Hagan argued, Magnahul inspected the pod. “What is this?” He asked, pointing to a picture of Hagan and Clarissa that was pinned to the side of the control panel.

  “That is the woman I was supposed to marry. She is the one who disappeared.”

  Magnahul was soon starting to believe the intrepid stranger.

  “If I sit in this carriage, you can send me back to the time I was born?”

  “Yes, but I can’t now.”

  “Why, is it broken?”

  “No, it needs fuel.”

  “What is fuel?” Bronia asked.

  “Like beef fat for fire.”

  “What do you use for fuel?”

  “Zarcionian Sapphire. It comes from the moon.”

  Magnahul turned silent. He literally took it to mean to come from the moon, as though the moon had lobbed it over. He didn’t think that man had traveled to the moon and mined it. That made him think for a minute.

  “If you had fuel in your carriage, how could it be used to help us against the French?”

  Hagan froze at that question. The implications of Magnahul’s request and the assumption was unacceptable. He had already caused so much trouble to the timeline and he was forbidden to enter into any feud to help and party. The outcome would be beyond the clean-up crew’s ability to rectify.

  As he was thinking about it, Bronia was curious about the picture that Magnahul had asked Hagan about and she came around to look at it. The image bore an uncanny resemblance to the images that she had been seeing in her dreams.

  None of all this made any sense to her, but Hagan was either a witch or what he said was true, and somehow they were connected. She could not decide which.

  There was a silence that hung in the tent. Each ruminated in their own thought.

  Hagan suddenly realized that he could diffuse the tension by agreeing to do it, because he didn’t have the fuel to do it anyway. No harm could come from it. “I will be willing to help you if I had the fuel. But, since there is no fuel, I will help you with the strength of my arms and the sweat of my brow.”

  Magnahul laughed. “You do not have much strength in your arms, laddie.” It was the first time he had laughed and been informal. Hagan didn’t know what to make of it. Seeing her father happy elevated Bronia’s sunken spirits.

  The giant man stuck out his arm to Hagan and shook it. A Magnahul handshake was not to be taken lightly. It was a pledge that might as well have been cast in iron and enforced by mighty armies.

  The leader of the Magnahul clan and his successors after him would take it to their grave. With the agreement made, Lord Adelstan Magnahul drew his longsword. Commanding Rylen Hagan to kneel, he laid the sword on Hagan’s puny shoulders.

  “By the power of my ancestors and the force of my brethren, kinship is bestowed on Rylen Hagan.”

  Magnahul had made him a member of the clan. He was no longer a prisoner but a friend. The charade that Magnahul had orchestrated the night before was to read the man’s eyes under threat of accusation. Magnahul had already seen the pod. It had been brought down from the ridge while the riders were dispatched to Inverness.

  Bronia, still in shock from seeing the image in the photograph, trained her senses on Hagan. Her father seemed to trust him, but for her father’s sake, she would have to watch him. With the new turn of events, Magnahul returned to his stoic self.

  “Now, we turn our minds to the French.” His countenance matched the somber tone his voice struck. “I do not know how one travels time, but I believe in my heart that it is a blessing that has been afforded to us.”

  He turned, looking squarely at Hagan. “You will have to tell us how it can be used to save bloodshed and subjugation.”

  “But I do not have fuel to operate it.”

  “We will deal with that later. Indulge me for now. How can your time carriage be used to hinder the French?”

  Sneak Peek

  Excerpt from Truth Revealed

  Book 3 of Heartbeats & War Drums

  Chapter 1

  Highland Islands

  Pietre had spent twelve years in search of his friend. It felt that he was finally able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Gray had computed a 98.5% probability of success with the plan that they now had in hand.

  Each day that passed, brought more evidence that the crashing of the timelines was increasing in severity and impact. Their exponential increase placed them on a truncated timescale. This worried Pietre who constantly felt that he was out of time – an irony since he was the father of time travel.

  The Scottish Highlands in Pietre’s time trunk was no longer highlands, but mighty fjords that plunged into the raucous ocean. When the seas rose after the change of climate, it had altered the lowlands and the valleys. What resulted were only the peaks. Mighty continents transformed into puny islands.

  The world had not become as hot as the scientists had predicted. Instead, earth found a way to protect itself. Thunderstorms were nature’s pressure valve. Every time the surface became too hot, it spawned giant hurricanes that cooled the area and returned a balance.

  Pietre landed in the eastern-most island surrounded by the sea that submerged old Edinburgh. The weather here was a lot nicer than Pittsburgh. It was nothing like the foothills of t
he Himalayan range he visited a few years back with his wife, but still, it was pleasant. He came alone on this trip. Nadia would be a distraction if she came along.

  His first visit was to the museum that held the artifacts of Scottish history. He needed to learn what history said happened here – it was changing and it was not what he had learned in school. After three hours of looking at the vast differences in politics and science that had occurred, he started to come across the names of Bronia Magnahul and Adelstan Magnahul.

  There were photographs of them – something that should not have been possible since photography is a 19th-century phenomenon. Magnahul was at the turn of the fifteenth century. He had been noticing these kinds of anomalies in the timeline. Not just changes, but impossible inclusions in history. It would be like seeing a picture of an SUV standing next to the Mayflower. Or worse, seeing a video of George Washington’s inauguration. The anomaly would be the picture itself since the camera did not exist. The same was happening now.

  When he first started seeing pictures, he thought that the museum had recreated them. It was an interesting touch. But as he kept going, he found that the photographs decreased in quality the further back in time he went. As he read the museum’s reference at the bottom, he realized that they had included a note to say that these were authentic and original photographs captured in the early 1400s. The other thing about the pictures was that they were not imprinted on paper – they were imprinted on slates. Thin slates of granite.

  Pietre studied these slates with care. Magnifying glasses were available at the counter and he got himself one. He started studying the images of Queen Bronia Magnahul I during her coronation. In Pietre’s time trunk there was no Magnahul. The king in the 14th and 15th centuries around that time should have been Robert III according to Pietre’s history.

  Everything before the coronation in this new trunk of history was about Highland clans and how they came together under one flag by the efforts of Adelstan Magnahul – the Queen’s father. The coronation seemed to be the point at which photography had become available. Prior to that, they were still recording history on parchment.

  The images on the slate, taken a thousand years prior, had brought the fact that only time and technology were different – the people were the same. Pietre, for all his endeavors and achievements, was having an epiphany. He had always seen people as a function of time. He suddenly realized that what he had missed all along was that time was a function of people.

  That epiphany began to resonate in his mind. The mathematical equations that would model that would have to be rewritten from scratch. His thoughts seem to leave his body and enter into a world of symbols and factors. When he came out of his pensive state, he found that he had been staring at the same coronation picture for two hours. But this time something else caught his attention. In the crowd, the Queen sat in the center while her father, now her subject, sat beside her but lower. Around them, stood the men of the Magnahul Redires of the Endecagon. Each concentric layer that moved outward seemed to be arranged in order of descending importance in the administration of the new Scottish history. But there, at the edge, was a face he recognized…. Pietre had found his old friend Rylen Hagan.

  The Saga Continues…

  Civilizations are colliding… Where is Clarissa… Follow the quest of love and honor in Book 3 of Heartbeats & War Drums, Truth Revealed.

  About The Author

  Amber Savage is a multilingual author and hopeless romantic whose vision is to inspire her readers through compelling and candid storytelling. An avid traveler who has resided in various locations all over the world, she is continually reminded of the thread that binds us all: love. (Yes it sounds cliché, but it’s so true.)

  When she isn’t crafting stories that showcase the wide spectrum of human emotion and experience, you can find this creative soul going on outdoor adventures, practicing yoga, or spending quality time with her loved ones (her husband, two canines, two felines, a parrot, chickens, and three horses). Infinitely dedicated to making this world a better place than when she first entered it, Amber also advocates for the prevention of cruelty to humans, animals, and mother nature.