Beneath the Ice
Captain Astrid Vega crouched atop the frozen ridge, biting wind stinging her cheeks. The Arctic tundra stretched endlessly, an alien wasteland of ice and unbroken silence. She had come here—not as an explorer of geography, but of history. Clutched tight in her hand was a $TIME watch, humming softly despite the subzero air.
Her research was fueled by a hunch: stories of a hidden civilization said to have thrived beneath the polar ice, millennia ago. She intended to jump back and observe their rise and fall firsthand—a chance to record lost knowledge before it disappeared.
When the watch activated, it wreathed her in a halo of pale light. A moment later, the polar wind died; the horizon flickered, reshaping itself. Ice-blue spires of a forgotten city glimmered on the now-thawing tundra. Astrid’s heart pounded. She’d done it. She was standing in an era so ancient it defied the textbooks.
But as she ventured farther, she realized something was wrong. Structures half-buried in the glacier seemed… alive, pulsing faintly with unnatural energy. Murals etched into the walls depicted monstrous beings worshipped by these long-vanished people—creatures that stirred in the dark recesses of the world.
Each step Astrid took echoed with an eerie resonance, as if the city itself woke beneath her feet. Her watch flickered, as though whatever slept here interfered with time’s currents. Worst of all, her presence seemed to rouse the ancient guardians—a shifting mass of half-corporeal shadows. She glimpsed hollow eyes in the gloom and felt their collective gaze upon her.
Fear clawed at her. She scrambled back, but the walls reconfigured, corridors warping and collapsing in temporal loops. Something old and furious stirred—the guardians, outraged by her trespass. As the city quivered around her, she realized this knowledge had been sealed away for a reason.
With trembling fingers, Astrid tapped her watch. Time felt sluggish, resisting her attempt to leap forward. A ghostly wail reverberated through the glacial corridors, as if the entire structure roared its disapproval. Fighting waves of dread, she jammed the watch’s rotor. A final surge of power tore her free of that reality.
She crashed into the present—back to the stark Arctic ridge. The watch in her grasp glowed hot, then went dark. Smoke curled from it, its delicate mechanisms fused beyond immediate repair. Heart hammering, she stared at the lonely ice field where, only moments ago, an impossible city had towered.
The Arctic wind howled like a warning, gusting at her ankles. Captain Astrid Vega staggered upright. Whatever secrets had lain hidden beneath the ice were best left undisturbed. She knew now that learning such truths could shatter mind and timeline alike. Wrapping the broken watch in a leather pouch, she prepared her return journey, shivering less from cold and more from the memory of what she had seen—and nearly unleashed upon the modern world.
Micro stories are a content feature offered by $TIME's dev Woj. Handwritten and accompanied by art, they serve to deepen the story world we're creating here. Enjoy!
