The
Timekeeper’s Story
The Timekeeper slowly stroked
the boy’s blue black hair from his face and felt the slick sweat on his brow.
The boy’s face was smudged with white ash, probably from the fires that still
burned on.
The Timekeeper withdrew from
the body on the table, noting sadly the holes in the boy’s sackcloth shoes and
the rags that still covered his small frame. He walked to the window allowing
the searing heat of the flames that were consuming the refugees’ newly made
huts to scorch his skin. The guard on the tower turned his head to see the old
master standing on the balcony, his short white hair blowing in a breeze that
did little more than feed the inferno.
The Timekeeper sighed as he
looked down on the battle. The trolls they’d grown in their labs so long ago
were massed like a huge tidal wave breaking against the fortress’s massive
stone walls but it would only be matter of time before they came in. All up and
down the wall the human defenders ran barely keeping a hold of their large
blasters while the trolls’ tank shells fell between them flinging some onto the
cobbles or over the side into the waiting arms of their enemies.
The Timekeeper glanced down at
his hands and thought sadly of a time when they’d held the first of the troll
children. It had been such a wonderful time then, when humanity had stood at
the peak of its powers, creating new life out of the myths of their fathers and
now hearing those creatures howling their fury at the walls of the last human
city in the world he realized all his work had been for nothing.
Unfortunately he could not
stop. The defenders on the wall needed reinforcements and they needed what he
could do for them. The Timekeeper turned his back on the war that had been
raging on for over seventy years and when the guard on the tower turned his
head to watch the old man return inside he could only wonder at how frail he
appeared.
The Timekeeper returned to the
boy’s side and laid his hands over his body allowing the white energy that
still kept his aged heart beating to emerge. Its glow spread over the boy’s
arms and legs seeking out his wounds and sealing them closed. Lastly the white
energy restarted his heart and refilled the air in his lungs causing his eyes
to spring open. The Timekeeper stood back as the boy rolled off the table and
cast his eyes over the room. He soon found his blaster and ignoring the
Timekeeper walked over to the corner and picked it up as carefully as another
man would pick up a child.
There was an eagerness in the
boy’s features as he looked over his weapon that pained the Timekeeper greatly
but he reflected that it was far too late for regrets. The boy turned around
stiffly and stood to attention his blaster on his right shoulder.
‘What are your orders sir?’ the
boy asked him.
The Timekeeper glanced at him
looking for any sign of recognition in the boy’s eyes but there was nothing in
them, nothing at all. The Timekeeper felt all of his one hundred years in that
moment but he placed a hand on the table behind him to steady himself and said,
‘Engage the enemy. Push them back from our walls.’
‘Yes sir!’ the boy responded.
He turned on his heel and left
the Timekeeper staring after him. The Timekeeper went to the window and watched
until he saw the boy run out in the courtyard and over to the stairs that led
to the wall. In his lifetime the Timekeeper had raised over three hundred boys
from the dead, one bloody battle after another until they couldn’t even
remember their own names or the faces of their families and observing now as
his own great grandson fired on the trolls that kept trying to rush onto the
wall he couldn’t shake the feeling that the trolls might be right, maybe
humanity didn’t deserve to exist anymore.
