the teller twins of tales in time

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons in the –

“I’m done.” I am so done. “That’ll do.” It probably won’t do.

“Is it unwritten?” My brother asks me. I nod, not at all confidently, and he drops his head into his hands. “For the love of time, Lila, you have to learn when to stop.”

“I don’t know that I do.”

There’s a look in Ambrose’s eye that suggests he isn’t finished reprimanding me - but I am certainly finished being reprimanded, so I skirt right past him and out of our library before the Ambrose ambush can commence.

The hallway between our rooms is pretty dull. Dark. Drab. For what we are, you’d expect lavish paintings hanging off the wall and elegant grandfather clocks in every empty corner. But the empty corners are just empty. The walls bare. The floor uncarpeted, which makes it so much more apparent that Ambrose is stomping after me, now.

“Lila, stop,” he urges, “stop it now. You know this is wrong.” Sadly, he doesn’t mean my storming off. “You have to stop telling stories, L. You know what it does.”

Halting dead in my tracks, I whip around to face him so fast that he flinches. When he does that, he looks more like his younger self, his more vulnerable self, the self who understood me better, the self who’d not try to abolish my tales but embellish them. I miss that brother, sometimes.

“I know what it does Amb, what it’s always done. So do you, remember? But it didn’t stop you before, did it?”

We don’t have paintings because we’re not allowed to be inspired. We don’t have home decor because we’re not allowed to find a muse. We don’t have anything of worth to think about, really, because we’re not allowed to think. When we do that is when the bad things happen.

Ambrose glances at a crack in the plaster because he cannot meet my eye.

Ambrose and I, we’re - for want of a better title - the time twins. Sometimes the teller twins. Sometimes “those dastardly kids that needs killin’!”

It depends who you ask.

But the story remains the same: about us, at least. Like most children, most adults, most humans, we grew up telling stories. Drafting adventures on the back of napkins, scribbling plots into the sand, chalking out ideas and brainstorming characters with one another to create worlds at our fingertips. It was all fiction, all make-believe, all unreal alternate realities.

Nobody told us it was going to end up real.

My first catastrophe was when I decided to reinvent the dinosaurs’ ending - by not giving them one.

No meteor, no extinction, just free-range rex’s doing what dinosaurs do. My writing was interrupted that evening by an ear-piercing scream outside my window. Mrs Lind, our neighbour, was on our driveway. And in our garden. And dripping off the roof. A large, definitely reptillian footprint in the space where her house once was. My dad grounded me for a month (it meant I didn’t have to help clean up next door, though).

Ambrose was worse. Much worse.

He wiped out an entire country by telling tales of the moon plummeting down into the Earth. But no, no, not poor little Ambrose. He didn’t get a punishment of any kind - I did. For “encouraging him.” For “not stopping him.” I am the “three minute elder of the two of us,” after all.

I even had to rewrite his mistake - which is a lot easier than it sounds, thankfully.

When I first learned of what me and my brother were, I thought we were a breed of historian. A fictional archiver of time. Librarians of Life, I used to call us. But that panicked me a great deal, because I know very little about factual history - much less the minuscule details that led to life as it is now. How the heavens was I supposed to write the world right, if I didn’t accurately know what actually happened to the dinosaurs? Or how gravity works? Or when my own father’s birthday is?

When your mind is full of stories, facts don’t even get five minutes.

Fortunately, dad showed us how to do it.

We simply tell the opposite of the story we told.

I said that there were dragons in the valley and lo and behold, our treehouse was burned to a crisp by one. I’ve only just finished unwriting it a hundred times: just to be safe.

Imagine if we were ever to tell a story in which Mother Nature decided, “no. No. Not today. Not ever. I will not let my precious soil be tainted by any such a human person. There will be no room for them here. I will not be a mother to them. This time, nature thrives.”

What we do then? If I rewrote humanity? If I undid them entirely? If I said the words,

“Once upon a time, there was not but a single human to ever tell a tale. They woul—”

…

(Father can’t punish me if he too does not exist).