Birth of a Time Lady

Vortex

She had no idea where they were taking her.

Her parents had told her to go along with them, and now she was sleepily stumbling through the dark in an attempt to keep up. They weren't unkind; if she stumbled, they stopped to help her. But she couldn't shake the feeling that they felt more like guards than anything else.

She'd turned eight yesterday. She'd been told that it was a very special day, although she didn't exactly know why. It felt like any other day to her. After weaving herself a little crown with the thick red grass that grew on her family's property, all she had done was roam the vast halls of the manor. If there was one thing she was good at, it was entertaining herself.

Even now she kept herself preoccupied by picking the dead bits of grass from her crown. At least she'd had the forethought to take it with her.

She ended up being so distracted by the crown that she bumped into the leg of one of her guards and fell back, smack on her bottom. They'd stopped walking now. Wherever they were headed, they must have arrived.

The guard she'd bumped helped her stand up again, and gently pushed her forward. She looked up to him for guidance, and he merely gestured in front of her. She turned to look where his hand had indicated, and froze in place.

She was looking at something she had never before seen, or even imagined existed. It was a seemingly endless spiral inside of a suspended, circular, glassless window. But it was rough, uneven, full of clouds and lightning and swirls of varying color. Every now and then, a pulse seemed to reverberate through it, and she wasn't sure if it was meant to carry sound, light, energy, or something else entirely.

Slowly, but steadily, she walked forwards. She was walking towards it now, but she felt as if she were only partially in control of her body. Her hand let go of the grass crown, and it fell to the dirt, abandoned. That same hand was rising now, towards the otherworldly abyss in front of her. Some little whisper, a voice in her head, was whispering to her to go on, push forward, dive in.

But the rest of her screamed and fought against it. This thing, whatever it was, terrified her as much as it intrigued her. She forced herself to stop walking, but found she couldn't tear her gaze away from it yet. It held her attention as if it were a person trying to tell her something.

The more she looked into it, the more she could see. But now it wasn't just colors and clouds. She could see concrete scenes, ideas, thoughts. All were laid out before her, and she could see the connections between them. She saw entire lives and civilizations, and how they progressed from birth to death, and how they interacted with other lives and other civilizations. She could see other planets, other galaxies even, and their exact places in the universe. Then suddenly there were other universes, all running parallel to one another, and she could see them all too. She had all of reality, all of time and space, streaming through her head.

She could see everything. She had been awakened.

NO!

In an instant, that part of her fighting against the swirling infinity in front of her won. The trance she was in had broken, and she turned away, shuddering, on the verge of tears. She tried to get away from it, but stumbled after two steps, and knelt on the ground, arms now wound tightly around herself. She felt so small, so terrified and alone. Her reality had just been expanded a billion times over, and it was all too much.

One of the guards approached her then, and offered her a hand. She, after considerable hesitation, took it and stood.

"What... what was that?" The question was offered up in a shaky, timid voice, and she thought she saw a flash of pity in the guard's eyes as she asked it. When he answered her, he seemed to be trying to placate her.

"The Time Vortex. You did very well. Just last week a boy turned and ran off into the hills, and we had to catch him."

"So... can I go home now?"

Her second question was answered much more hesitantly. "Not yet. We need to show you where you'll go to school. There's a place for you to sleep there."

School? The prospect gave her a glimmer of excitement. Maybe there she would finally have somebody to play with. "Will there be other kids?"

"Yes," the guard told her, escorting her once again. She barely noticed even as they walked off in an opposite direction to her family home. "The Academy is full of children just like you. You'll like it there. And you will have much to learn."