Page 24 of The Messengers of Magic

The Hidden Journal of John Dee

W e journeyed home after our failed attempt to open the gateway between Heaven and Earth.

Still unsure why our calculations had failed, Giordano and I rode in shared silence, each consumed by the gravity of what we had attempted.

Though nothing immediate seemed amiss, a lingering question gnawed at the edges of my thoughts: had we truly walked away unscathed, or were there consequences yet to reveal themselves?

A week has passed since that night in Dunblane, and at first, life appeared to carry on as normal. But now, subtle discrepancies have begun to emerge, each one hinting at a fissure in reality as we know it.

The first of these was the clock in my study, a trusted companion for years; it chimed thirteen times at midnight.

This I could have dismissed as a malfunction or overwinding, perhaps.

But when I stepped outside to observe the stars, I noticed that Polaris, a most reliable fixed point, a star I often used for navigation, had shifted.

It no longer aligned with the constellation it had anchored for centuries, as though the heavens themselves had been rearranged.

This was what first set my nerves on alert.

Then other peculiarities began to creep in, small at first but increasingly unsettling.

A servant fetching water from the well came to me in distress, swearing he had seen his reflection in the rippling surface, but it was not his face as it is now.

He described it as lined with wrinkles and his hair grayed with age, a version of himself decades older than he could possibly be.

In Mortlake’s square, a woman stopped me to speak of a feast day she insisted was to be celebrated on the coming Sabbath.

Yet no such day exists upon any calendar I know of, and no record of it could be found.

The final and most troubling sign came this morning as I reached for my journal to record these events.

Within its pages, I found a passage written in my own hand, yet I have no memory of composing it. The ink was fresh, the words clear, and yet they spoke of occurrences that have not come to pass.

Am I losing time? Is it madness? Or something else entirely?

The handwriting is unmistakably mine, and yet the man who wrote those words feels like a stranger to me.

I do not know which frightens me more, that I wrote them and have forgotten, or that another version of myself seems to have broken through into this reality.

These disturbances, faint though they are, seem to press against the edges of what is real.

At first, they appeared as harmless oddities, but something darker lingers beneath them now.

Giordano and I both sense it, though neither of us dares voice the thought aloud: in our failed experiment, have we torn something irreparable in the tapestry of time?

Each passing moment heightens my unease.

I fear we may have shattered more than a quartz disc in that crypt.

The world around us feels fragile, as if held together by mere threads that could unravel at any moment.

It is as though the heavens themselves are holding their breath, waiting and watching for the moment when our mistake will demand its price.