A Keeper's Last Sacrifice
Randel Cole never expected to find so many children in the middle of a collapsing timeline. His $TIME watch had led him here—an old schoolhouse near the edge of a fractured reality. The building was half-swallowed by distortions, the once-sturdy walls bowing in on themselves like paper. From the outside, it looked abandoned, a flicker of ruin across half-formed fields. But within, trembling voices cried out: a teacher and her students, trapped by forces they couldn’t understand.
He stepped inside cautiously, feeling the watch hum at his wrist. Chasms of broken time hovered in the corridors, warping tile floors into unsteady slopes. Distant echoes of other eras crackled like static in the hall. The children were holed up in a second-floor classroom, the door barricaded with desks. Their teacher peered out through a small gap, relief warring with disbelief on her face. She wasn’t expecting a stranger—much less one carrying a device that glowed with each pulse of reality’s collapse.
Randel knelt, speaking softly to reassure them. He felt the watch’s readouts spike into the red. The timeline here was moments from disintegrating, ripping away entire chunks of existence. Most might have fled. But Randel had once been a teacher himself, in a life before he joined the Keepers. His lips thinned into a resolute line. These children would see another dawn.
The teacher helped herd the pupils into the hallway. Randel braced himself, adjusting the watch’s dial. With each twist, it strained to carve a corridor through the roiling chaos. He guided the group carefully, urging them forward, step by trembling step. Behind them, pieces of the school vanished in swirling motes of dust. Floors caved. Hallways collapsed into swirling blackness. But the path ahead shimmered just enough to be real—long enough for the children’s small feet to hurry through.
One child stumbled, crying for her friend, and Randel caught her at the last second. They pushed on. At last, the teacher ushered the final student out into stable reality—no small miracle. Randel exhaled in triumph, only to feel the watch’s power gutter like a dying flame. The device had given everything it could. One more childlike voice called, and without hesitation, he raced back in, passing once more across that fading threshold.
The swirling darkness closed in. The watch sparked feebly, broken beyond repair. Outside, the teacher and her students heard a final roar of collapsing air. Then, silence. Reality sealed, leaving them safe on the bright lawn under an unharmed sky, a last child hurled out of seeming nothingness.
Their rescuer was nowhere to be found, his final footprints etched into a timeline that vanished behind him—one selfless Keeper, devoting all he had so that the children might carry on.
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!
