The Sketchbook
Saoirse ran her fingers across the battered leather cover of her sketchbook, heart pounding in anticipation of what she might sketch next. Each time she pressed pencil to paper, she felt the stolen $TIME watch tingle around her wrist, feeding energy into each line she drew. The simple doodles she’d begun with—small events like a friend’s promotion or a neighbor’s lost key—had quickly spiraled into bigger, more unnerving predictions.
Tonight, she sat in a dimly lit attic room, candle flickering by her side. The watch glowed softly, as if coaxing her hand onward. Saoirse started outlining what felt like a cityscape under siege—twisted spires of black smoke, streaks of strange lightning overhead. She hadn’t even finished shading the tallest building when she felt a dreadful certainty that she was glimpsing a Coalition of Nine assault on the horizon.
Down below, her charcoal lines seemed to shimmer with life. People in the half-finished sketch fled the scene, silhouettes scribbled in frantic crosshatches. She tore out the page in panic, hoping to halt whatever timeline she might be conjuring—but the watch glowed fiercely. The lines on the torn paper continued to move, merging with the next blank page in the sketchbook, forming an even larger tableau of chaos.
Far away, Time Keepers across multiple eras caught wind of the looming calamity. Temporal alarms rang in secret outposts. Field agents whispered urgent messages: A watch is forging new futures out of an artist’s drawings. If the Coalition harnesses that power, entire realities could collapse.
While Saoirse wrestled with the swirling lines in her attic, disguised Time Keepers raced to track her location. Every second counted. If she completed the catastrophic drawing, the assault might become irreversible fact, etched too deeply into the timeline to unravel. Meanwhile, the Coalition lurked, certain this magical sketchbook could shape the future in their favor.
On a chill wind came the faint hum of a temporal jump—Time Keepers converging on the old house. Saoirse shivered, pen stilled above the final lines. Would she finish the ominous sketch, or tear out the page before the watch made it real? In that fragile instant, reality hung in the balance, each new stroke tethered to infinite possibilities.
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!
