Rewinding Time (Narry)

Chapter Forty-Two

He dangled the necklace a mere centimeter in front of my face, tauntingly as he lowered his lips closer towards my ear. "Your lack of fear interests me."

In the blink of an eye, the loud bustling streets of France seemed to be sucked up in a vacuum as silence engulfed us. I tried to lift my head up and glance around, only to realize that we had returned to the same strange dark realm from before, the one filled with different sorts of doors.

"If you promise to stay and become my apprentice, I shall let your accomplices go."

My stomach began knotting when the remembrance that Zayn and Liam were still trapped behind that looking glass hit me like a ton of bricks. I swallowed thickly. "What if I refuse?"

He pushed my hands further up my back, bending it at an erroneous angle, nearly eliciting a painful scream. "Then they shall perish with you."

I gritted my teeth, thrashing about one last time but to no avail before huffing out in frustration. "But you promise to let them go, right?" I asked. "Set them back onto the same track that they were headed?"

"Yes," he replied, "as long as it doesn't disturb the flow of time."

My face paled as I thought of Harry and I; Harry held an extremely high social status and if I were to return to him, certainly time would be disturbed. His inheritance was much too important for some insignificant commoner to intrude upon.

My tongue dragged across the bottom of my lip slowly as I tried to bite back my words, afraid to find out the truth in the matter. "What if it will disturb the flow of time?"

"Then such a request shall not be fulfilled and they shall be returned to their respective place in time," he said, slightly loosening his grip on my wrists.

Something inside of me snapped.

I never believed in the whole 'time travelling will affect the flow of time' crap. Things don't just happen. If the future was already mapped out, perfectly planned and supposed to be fixed, that would mean that nothing would be able to move it or change it; especially not a lowly human.

Certainly the whole time travelling thing should have already been mapped out in my life. After all, time is fixed and cannot be disturbed.

I never quite understood the whole theory which stated that a time traveler would drastically alter the future by preventing a tragic event from occurring, for example; in such theories, history would change and nothing would quite remain the same.

But to my understanding, history cannot be rewritten. If it were meant to be, there would be no stopping it. Even if I were to time travel back to my past and attempt to stop my parents from meeting and consummating, it would be impossible; I already exist—that itself would be a paradox.

The events would still roll out the same way regardless; the time-travelling-me would probably stumble or trip at the last second, missing the interference of their meeting by a hair. After all, history is fixed and cannot be changed.

I tried to quirk my head backwards to catch his gaze. "How do you know and who the hell are you to determine such a thing?" I snapped.

He laughed bitterly, digging his nails into my skin. "I'm the Timekeeper, of course," he replied, shifting and repositioning one of his knees onto the dip of my back, further immobilizing me. "I know because I was a result of a slip in time. Whenever somebody tampers with the flow of time, a new timekeeper is born."

"I thought that there could only be one."

"You know nothing, my boy," he replied, laughing like it was the most obvious thing and I had missed the memo. "Now, I shall release you, but if you try anything funny, I shall end you and your accomplices with the snap of my fingers, got it?"