The Time Travelers Secret

Chapter 1

           

my name? it's marlize. or at least that's what I think it is. but this isn't a story about me; this is the story about a girl who had no idea of how her actions affected my life every. single. day.        everyday I wake up with a different memory than before. I'm forgetting who I am more and more every day and I'm afraid of who I'll become if it gets to that point.

       let's backtrack a little bit here. how do I know all this? to tell you the truth, I didn't until a few hours ago. let's start from the beginning. when I was born, I only had my mother and brother. my father left shortly before I came. my brother, ephram, was sick. like, really sick. from what I remember my mother telling me, he had what was called hydrocephalus and he died at the age of 11 from later developing cancer because of it. I don't remember much about him, since I was just a baby back then, but my mother talks about him nonstop as if he were still here. I understand her heartache, losing a child does sound tough. I have two of my own now and I don't know what I'd do without them. anyways, before I tell you this next part, you're going to have to try and open your mind and believe in the impossible – in this case, that would be time travelers. after my mother lost ephram, she lost herself. she did research, quite a lot of it, and talked to I don't know how many so-called psychics. one of them told her about these "time travelers" that exist in our era, who are both ageless and faceless. desperate for her son, my mother set out to find them, leaving me behind with my grandparents. I never held that against her. it never meant that she loved him more than she loved me, it just meant she wanted her wounded heart healed. she was gone for only a few days. it would've taken her a lot longer, but the psychic wanted to be nice and help her out – or so I thought. turns out the psychic was affiliated with the two time travelers, and she was in it for the "reward" she was so convinced she would get after fulfilling my mothers wish. In that case, the reward would be me. the time travelers promised my mother her son back. well, not exactly, more like they'd take her back in time to before he developed his cancer and died from it. they told my mum she could prevent it and keep her son – at a price, of course. my life. not that they were going to kill me to save ephram, more like they were going to keep me, and my mother kept her son. A trade-off, you could say. of course, my mother declined. what kind of parent would she be to give a child away to bring another one back? so yes, she declined despite all her efforts and heartache. the time travelers, for some reason very desperate for my mother to change her mind, continued to push her, trying to come up with different explanations as to why this would be the right choice for everyone. "do you really think you can raise a daughter in this mental state you're in?" "how careless could you be to keep a daughter but know you're the reason your son died?" my mother politely declined once more and shut the door behind her. she was distraught for a while after that. maybe for a few years, stuck in mental state of "what might've been." 

so now, knowing all that I just told you, you're probably thinking to yourself, "so how does this all connect to what you said in the beginning?" well it turns out there's a different me out there. one who's mother did give her up to save her son, and that girls name is atta. and she exists in a placed known as "earth-2."