Page 85 of The Messengers of Magic

Chapter Fifty-Eight

P en sat and waited, straining to hear what Adelaide and Carolyn were saying above, but with the trapdoor shut, he could only make out muffled words.

He looked down at the journal lying in front of him, like an ember, burning a hole into his soul.

Every part of him wanted nothing more than to pick it up and continue reading, but he had promised Adelaide he wouldn’t.

He considered going into the shop, but with the way things had been reacting to him lately, he didn’t dare. If the trapdoor decided to make itself known in their timeline mid-conversation, he might do more than just startle Carolyn. So, he waited.

When the front door finally closed behind them, he headed back to the apartment to make himself and Frankie some supper.

It felt strange, coming into the apartment now.

For years, it had been both his home and his prison, but now it belonged to Adelaide, and she had begun to leave her mark on it.

He didn’t mind, though; he actually liked the little things she’d brought with her.

The painting above the sofa, the cozy blankets, and the framed photos.

Even the clutter of her mismatched mugs.

All of it softened the place. Well, all except for that god-awful elephant lamp she’d placed on the side table in the living room. He could have done without that.

He opened the fridge, reaching for the ground beef, when a strange flicker, sharp and quick, caught his eye through the window. Was it lightning? A storm approaching?

He turned and crossed to the window, peering out over the quiet town. It couldn’t have been lightning; the sky was clear, the moon bright overhead. His gaze swept the street. The apothecary glowed under the orange wash of the streetlamps. As his focus shifted farther down… he froze.

The bakery was gone.

So were the shops beside it.

In their place stood a long stone wall, moss-covered and ancient, running alongside a narrow road that weaved past a cluster of tall oak trees that stretched out into the countryside.

Beyond that, the moon lit up a mountain range he didn’t recognize.

It looked nothing like what had been there before, as if it were an entirely different place altogether.

Pen’s gut twisted. He blinked hard, hoping it was some trick of the light. But the dark stretch where the buildings had been didn’t change. Nothing moved. Nothing existed there anymore.

The air thickened, as if the pressure had dropped and the shop was bracing for something.

Not a storm outside, but one curling just beneath the surface of reality.

It was the same wrongness he’d felt the night the window vanished, when the shelves disappeared.

But this time, it wasn’t just a flicker.

It had settled in, rooted deep, like something had taken hold and wasn’t letting go.

The fear that had been humming beneath the surface began to swell. This wasn’t just about being trapped anymore. Something far worse was taking hold; his timeline was being rewritten into something new, something wrong.

“What the hell is going on?” he muttered, staring at the street, half of it still Helensburgh, the other half twisted into something he didn’t recognize.

Fear flooded through him. This wasn’t just some missing bookcases anymore.

It was something far beyond that now; something was beginning to fracture his reality, pulling parts of this place away and adding things that didn’t belong.

He was glad it seemed to be confined to his timeline, since Adelaide hadn’t mentioned anything strange happening in hers.

That was a small comfort. But he still needed to figure it out, and fast.

“Frankie,” he called, already moving toward the door. “Come on, boy.” He didn’t wait for the fox to follow. He sprinted down into the bookshop and over to the trapdoor, yanked it open, and descended into the secret room beneath the shop.

What had shifted tonight to push everything over the edge?

It always came back to the watch. That damn watch.

Tonight, Adelaide touched it, and now, it seemed the thread holding everything together had started to completely unravel.

Why? It didn’t make any sense. There was no astrological event, no reason her touching it should’ve triggered anything. Yet it had.

Pen reached the desk and turned to the journal still lying on its top; his fingers tracing the edges of the worn pages. He’d promised Adelaide he wouldn’t continue without her, but after what he’d just seen, how could he not? The answers were right here, and the world was crumbling around him.

He sat down in the old captain’s chair, and it groaned its welcome. “Sorry, Adelaide,” he whispered into the stillness as he lit a cigarette, the smoke curling from it as he clenched it between his fingers.

Flipping to the last page they’d read, his eyes raced, scanning the next several pages. Symbols, diagrams, and a warning. A single line stared up at him, the ink darker, messier, written in haste. He read it once, then again, aloud:

“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 clock in my study, a trusted companion for years, chimed out 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 one of my most reliable fixed points, 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.”

John Dee had seen it too. All those years ago, he’d experienced the same unsettling phenomena. When he and Giordano created the Astral Synchronum, they had unknowingly caused a rip in time itself.

Pen read on. Dee and Giordano had tried to mend the tear, weaving together a makeshift patch, a desperate attempt to hold their timeline steady.

But the solution had come with a warning: once sealed, the device was never to be used again.

Another activation, and the stitch wouldn’t hold.

The tear would rip open again. The delicate fix they’d managed would unravel completely, and this time, the damage might be irreversible.

Pen’s fingers tightened on the edge of the journal.

Rowland had used the watch, desperate to save Carolyn, and in doing so, he’d peeled back the fragile patch John Dee and Giordano had stitched over the rip in time.

Then Pen, in his ignorance, had activated it again, loosening it even further.

And now, with every passing moment, it was unraveling, the last fragile threads barely holding it together.

Even Adelaide merely touching it seemed to have caused more strings to break.

He felt it then, the quiet give of something beginning to slip.

The world he knew was thinning. Not all at once, but inch by inch.

And the replacement was a reality he didn’t recognize.

This was no longer about escaping a time loop.

If he didn’t find a way to stop the tear, to fix the patch, there might not be a reality to escape to.