He stood trembling atop the bailey of the crumbling castle, faraway fireflies of destruction flickering in the shine of his eyes. He quickened his pace.
At dawn, the river would run thick with the ashes of the unlucky.
His hands were an angry white, blots of red blossoming on his knuckles like blood on wet tissue paper. His fingers felt wooden and a thousand years old, as with motions mechanical and precise he kept on folding, a sleeve here, a collar there, dropping the clothes with small, frequent phut, phut, phuts on the growing pile next to his left leg. His mind, stunned and deaf, thought of nothing, and felt nothing.
A caw split the sky in two.
A silent thunderbolt of terror arched up his spine, and he buckled with the weight of sudden emotion. His vision swam as he scrabbled around to steady himself, feeling the cold stone sear the palms of his hands. There was a retch, twice, three times, then utter silence.
He collapsed onto his back.
The physician, gone. The linguist, gone. The botanist, physicist, and biologist, gone. The naturalist, disintegrated. The heads of the expedition… lost somewhere in the cavernous infinity of time and space. So, well, dead.
This whole thing had the potential to go horribly, devastatingly wrong… yet…
Yet they were the ones who had let the fluorescence engulf them, the ones that bellowed and shouted with excitement before the soul-fragmenting pain of what felt like their innards being pulled from their bodies over and over, neck hairs rising, as one by one they flickered and vanished, or in the case of the naturalist, was torn asunder into a million points of light that scattered like dust in a whirlwind, the screams of their pain melting in with the chaotic din of a thousand wars before the machine itself committed suicide, picked apart in rough chunks by the raging fingers of the time stream it was traveling in.
He remembered the physicist explaining his one theory. How their physical bodies might be the only thing transported fully through time, something… something about time-specific biochemical reactions, delayed chronological… something in biological systems within specific energy conditions. The physicist had been right all along, but what he had failed to mention that it wasn’t just their clothes that would have been left behind, but hair, tooth fillings, and nails as well.
In the dimming light, the historian let out a quiet sob.
So where were the others? Scattered through other points in the universe’s history, naked and missing body parts?
He had been awoken by a sudden explosion, far off in the distance, and had crawled along the jagged spine of the deserted castle tower. It had taken a few hours for the shock to wear off somewhat, and in the meantime, with a growing worm of dread, the historian had waited, waited for his colleagues, ignoring the skin-crawl-inducing image of their clothes lying in broken heaps nearby, surrounded by rings of their hair…
Far beyond the abandoned castle and surrounding emptiness, the siege of the city continued.
Needing something to occupy his hysteria-addled mind, he had begun to gingerly shake the clothes clean and fold them neatly in a pile. After all, they could make use with some order once they got back and made their way through the castle. Yet in a few minutes his surge of delirium withered away. It dawned on him that they were now gone, probably forever, but still he had continued to fold in… in… what, respect? For the dead, for the indefinitely lost? Was it the rational thing to do? What is a rational thing to do, he had raged at nobody, when you are stuck in second-century Gael with nothing in the world but seven extra sets of clothing?
The historian shivered suddenly; he’d fallen asleep. His eyes were still closed but they fluttered under their lids. The small towers of clothes pressed against his side, shifting slightly as a snatch of wind caressed his skin. A distant whisper. Immediately his head snapped up. “Hello?”
Outlined by the broken lip of the castle wall, he could make out the choked remnants of what looked to be a moat and, beyond that, the characteristic pine-studded ripples of Irish rock scraped smooth by ancient masses of ice and snow. Past the hills and hugging the mouth of the river was Dublin.
It was violently spewing fire and the sounds of the dying into the twilight sky.
He steadied himself on a nearby boulder, sniffed, and squinted, rubbing away tears brought on by the chill. His hand brushed against his right pocket where the useless transmitter lay. He closed his eyes in somber acceptance.
Well, he thought, I suppose this is the culmination of my useless degree.
Time to go meet this in the flesh.
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