Problems with time. Chapter 8.

Chapter Eight.

 

Out of Time.

 

A group of weary travellers sat near the hearth, clay mugs in hand, talking quietly. As Calizone passed them, she caught a few fragments of their conversation.

“…King Haldan won’t like it, not after last winter’s taxes…”

Calizone stopped dead in her tracks.

Haldan had been dead for twenty‑three years.

She turned her head slightly, her gaze sharp. “Who did you say was king?”

The man blinked at her, mildly puzzled. “King Haldan, of course.”

Calizone’s voice was cool, level, and icy. “Syldan is king.”

The man frowned, shaking his head. “Syldan? Syldan is a mere boy. He cannot be king yet.”

His companion nodded. “Aye, Haldan sits the high throne. Has done for years.”

Calizone studied them closely. Their faces were calm, their eyes steady. They were not confused; they were absolutely certain.

Memory was slipping.

Not just seconds.

Not just minutes.

Decades.

Across the common room, a man lifted a spoon toward his mouth, paused, set it down, and then lifted it again, his expression smooth and unbothered. Nearby, a woman holding a mug of small beer stared blankly into the hearth until a sudden flicker of the flames seemed to reset her thoughts, prompting her to take a sip she had already taken three times before.

The innkeeper hovered beside Calizone, rubbing his hands together in his apron. His eyes were wide, glazed with the same fog that had settled over Burnton.

“The mutton stew is hot, my lady,” he said cheerfully. “Freshly made this very hour.”

Calizone looked at the iron pot hanging over the cold hearth. No steam rose from it. The hearth below was nothing more than a pile of cold grey ash, yet the innkeeper’s hand moved toward the ladle with absolute confidence in a fire that had died hours ago.

She noticed the open guest ledger on a nearby table. The ink shimmered faintly under the lantern light. She crossed to it and opened the heavy volume.

The entries were completely wrong.

A royal messenger who had died ten years ago was listed as arriving yesterday afternoon.

A merchant she had met last month was recorded in a shaky hand dated fifteen years earlier.

A blank page flickered, briefly revealing names that vanished the moment she blinked.

The ledger was remembering the wrong century.

Calizone closed the book gently and looked up at the landlord.

“I have my own provisions,” she said, her voice firm enough to slice through the surreal stillness. “A cup of clear water will suffice. From the well outside, if you please.”

The innkeeper blinked, as though trying to grasp a sentence spoken in a foreign tongue, then bowed deeply. “Of course, my lady. At once.”

He turned to fetch the pitcher, but halfway to the taproom door, he stopped, turned back, and bowed again with the exact same smile.

“My lady Calizone! A room, of course! The best we have. No charge!”

Calizone felt a cold, sharp knot tighten in her stomach.

It is accelerating, she thought.

In Burnton, the lapse was moments.

Here, the loop is trapping human minds within minutes, or dragging them back decades.

She did not correct him. She simply climbed the narrow wooden staircase to her chamber, her boots heavy on the creaking steps.

The room was clean, its single window overlooking the narrow stream behind the inn. But when she looked down, she saw the stream flowing backward for several yards, turning in a lazy, unnatural circle before snapping back into its downhill course with a faint, wet slap.

She closed the shutters, shutting out the sight of the confused river and the pale, dying light.

She set her saddlebags on the table and pulled out a small wedge of hard cheese and a piece of flatbread. She ate methodically, standing near the door and listening to the heavy, broken silence of the inn below. Her black stallion was tucked safely in the stable, tethered with a physical knot that owed nothing to magic, though she had double‑checked the girth before coming upstairs.

If the spell’s dying breath was devouring the immediate past simply to sustain its trapped present, then the anchor was not merely ancient; it was ravenous. It was pulling memory, time, and sequence into itself, trying to gather enough weight to finally collapse.

And the closer she drew to the source, the less her own mind would be able to rely on normal sequence. She would have to keep herself anchored, breath by breath, using the raw, stubborn weight of her own memory.

Calizone unbuckled her cloak and laid it over the chest at the foot of the bed. She did not sleep immediately. She sat in the dark, her back against the wooden headboard, watching the small candle on the nightstand. The flame burned straight up, unwavering, held steady by the quiet ward she had drawn around her bedframe. Beyond the threshold of her room, the world was unspooling, but inside the narrow circle of her spell, the seconds ticked as they ought to tick.

Even so, the pillow beneath her head felt warm, then cold, then warm again, as though remembering different sleepers from different years.

She sat up, rubbing her temples. “Burnton was bad,” she murmured. “This is far worse.”

Time was slipping.

Memory was dissolving.

History was folding in on itself.

She could not allow this to continue much further.

Calizone slept lightly, though “sleep” was generous. She drifted in and out of a shallow rest, her mind tethered to the steady flame of the candle and the faint hum of her protective ward.

Twice she woke to a silence so complete it felt like a missing heartbeat in the world.

Once she woke to the sound of footsteps repeating the exact same three‑step pattern over and over, as though the walker had forgotten how to reach the end of the hall.

She did not investigate. She did not break the ward. She simply waited until the pattern resolved and the world remembered how to move forward.

When dawn came, it did so in a strange, uncertain fashion. The light outside her shuttered window brightened, dimmed, brightened again, and finally settled into a pale morning glow.

Calizone rose, buckled her cloak, and checked her saddlebags. Everything was where she had left it, though the cheese had aged slightly overnight, and the flatbread felt a little fresher than it had been the evening before.

She opened the shutters. The stream behind the inn was flowing normally now, though a faint ripple occasionally ran backward along the surface before snapping forward again. A bird hopped along the bank, pecked at something invisible, then pecked again at the exact same spot with eerie precision.

Calizone closed the shutters, hoisted her gear, and descended the stairs.

The innkeeper was waiting at the bottom, bowing deeply. “My lady Calizone! A room, of course! The best we have. No charge!”

Calizone’s jaw tightened. “I am leaving.”

The innkeeper blinked, utterly confused. “Leaving? But you have only just arrived.”

“I arrived yesterday.”

He frowned, struggling to grasp the concept. “Yesterday? Yesterday was… was…” His voice trailed off, his eyes glazing over with fog.

Calizone stepped past him toward the door. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

He bowed again, exactly as he had the night before. “A room, of course! The best we have. No charge.”

She did not correct him.

Outside, her horse stood patiently in the yard, though his ears flicked uneasily at the shifting morning light. Calizone checked his girth, tightened the leather strap, and mounted. The air around her felt thin and stretched, as though the world were struggling to remember how to hold its physical form together.

She nudged the stallion forward.

The Great Road lay ahead, unchanged, a dead strip of grey earth, steady and silent. But the world around it was fraying rapidly now. The inn behind her flickered once, twice, then settled. A cart on the far side of the stream rolled backward a few feet, then forward again, then froze entirely.

Calizone set her jaw. “North‑east,” she murmured. “Toward Nordon.”

She touched the shorten‑the‑journey spell lightly, letting it settle around her like a cloak. It resisted at first, the world did not want to be stitched, but she forced it into place, anchoring herself with the stubborn weight of her own mind.

The horse stepped onto the road, and Calizone rode on.

At first, the countryside slid past rapidly as she used her magic to speed the journey. This region was sparsely populated, and the road remained mostly empty. The fields on either side looked like a painting left out in a torrential rain.

Wheat was golden and ripe in one patch under a phantom sun, while ten paces further on, the soil was black and barren, waiting for a spring planting that had already passed. A farmstead stood near a hedgerow, its stone chimney puffing a thin curl of smoke that rose three feet, stopped, snapped back down into the flue, and rose again in a hopeless, going‑nowhere loop.

Her horse snorted, tossing his head, but Calizone held the reins tight, keeping her mind anchored to a single, unyielding truth:

The road goes east.

I am riding east.

One mile, then the next.

By noon, the flat country gave way to the rough, grey knees of the Eastern Mountains. Here, the Great Road began to climb, twisting into narrow, jagged passes where gorse bushes grew thick and thorny.

And here, the silence changed.

It was no longer merely the absence of sound; it was a physical weight. The air was dry and smelled of ancient dust and burnt tin. The shorten‑the‑journey spell finally frayed completely, dissolving from her shoulders with a faint, prickling hiss. Calizone did not attempt to rebuild it. The ground here was far too unstable to stitch; forcing distance to compress now would risk tearing reality open.

She let her horse drop to a slow, steady walk, using what power she could spare simply to shield herself from the degrading nature of time.

By mid‑afternoon, even her protective wards began to thin. The world pressed against her like a heavy tide, dragging at her thoughts and tugging at her memories. She corrected moments as she went, nudging time back into place with small, precise gestures, but each correction cost her physical strength.

A rockfall ahead froze mid‑slide, resumed its fall, then froze again.

A crow perched on a fencepost cawed twice, identically, then vanished as though it had forgotten how to exist.

Her horse’s hooves struck the stony path, once, twice, once, the rhythm stuttering like a broken drum.

Calizone’s breath grew shallow. Sweat prickled at her temples. The day stretched agonisingly long, each mile feeling like three. The single thought that kept her moving forward was that the severity of the distortions meant she was drawing close to the source.

These high mountains were sparsely settled, no inns, no taverns, no coaching houses. Only occasional stone cottages tucked into folds of land where a mountain spring still ran true.

As the light began to thin, flickering uncertainly between late afternoon and early dusk, Calizone spotted one such dwelling: a small stone cottage with a slate roof and a tidy patch of beans growing beside the door. Smoke rose from its chimney in a steady, unbroken line, completely unaffected by the temporal distortions.

A woman stood outside, gathering wild herbs into a woven basket. She looked up as Calizone approached, her lined face softening into an expression of cautious welcome.

“You are out late, my lady,” the woman called. “The mountains are not safe after dark. You will stay the night.”

It was an offer, but spoken with the certainty of a decree.

Calizone dismounted, her legs trembling slightly as her boots hit the dirt. “I thank you.”

The woman, a widow, judging by her plain grey shawl, ushered her inside.

The cottage was warm, the hearth fire steady, and the air blessedly normal. Only once did the copper kettle hanging over the fire flicker between full and empty before settling back into place. Calizone corrected it with a flick of her wrist, and the widow noticed nothing.

She offered a simple supper of vegetable broth and crusty bread. Calizone ate slowly, profoundly grateful for the stillness. Her horse was stabled in an adjoining lean‑to, tethered with a physical knot that would hold even if time itself forgot how to flow.

When the widow spoke, she talked only of small, ordinary things: wild goats on the hillside, a neighbour’s newborn baby, rumours of poor harvests further east. Nothing dramatic. Nothing alarming. Just the quiet, steady talk of a woman living her life step by step.

Calizone listened, her eyelids growing heavy.

She slept on a straw mattress beside the hearth, her cloak wrapped tightly around her and her hand resting lightly on her saddlebags. The night passed in deep, unbroken quiet. Inside these walls, the world behaved itself, and the distortions outside could not breach the threshold.

But as Calizone closed her eyes, she could feel them waiting just beyond the door.