The Lake of Time

"Fools tell foolish tales - and to foolish tales, there is no end. They're spun from the same yarn that makes the shaky foundations of that lake in Scotland - supposedly home to a 'monster' that is more an elephant's trunk put digitally - and rather callously - over the surface of an otherwise rather unremarkable body of water; 'Ness-tled' away from the grandeur of much more majestic highlands - and far from memorials of war heroes and castles of folklore. Legends are men and women who fought to achieve greatness, not myths that are blown away by the faintest gust of wind on an otherwise unremarkable night."

Those were the concluding remarks given by the gentleman with the wooden leg, before he hobbled off stage. He paid such little attention to the applause behind him - as if the cheering (and the jeering) came from another time. It may have been from an era before the magic of technology had kissed us on the forehead, and given us excuses to explain the unexplained - by saying it was a bunch of 1s and 0s.

The fact of the matter - however - was that Edinburgh University had been founded long before those times. And the morning of December 7th, the man had been lecturing in a sleek, bleak, gloomy and altogether-unimaginative lecture hall in that very institution; a little room hidden away from all which taught more 'employable' disciplines.

He had been brought there by a horse-pulled carriage - but by the time he got back to the main road that wrapped itself all around the university, there were cars of all sorts there; they ranged from those being powered by fossil fuels, to those which were beginning to find a way to have their power come from just, or almost-just, electricity.

Time had such little meaning in his life that he often thought it was a figment of the imagination of people who had room for nothing else. All they did was stare at shanty walls and broken mechanisms of telling the 'time' - numbers which people would not correct until another two thousand years after that chilly morning.

His insides were boiling - ready to dissolve into scales of such magnificently variable patterns that he would almost immediately be placed inside a large, air-tight tube of some sort.

Of course, the container would have to be the size of all of Inverness for it to contain him properly. That was the up-side of being the way he was - the ultimate winner of any competition where men were comparing sizes.

There was another jitter in the Field - one which could not have been accounted for by the terrible driving skills of the woman who had somehow been 'tasked' by a random computer interface to deliver him to the train station. The jitter meant that all temporal alignment had been dislodged - and that he was going back in time again.

Space, of course, would not change.

By the 'time' he got back to Inverness, there would be a man in a hat and a prim suit to welcome him. People knew how to dress in the early twentieth century.

Time found itself reaching the left-end of the Spectrum thrice every day - and the same number of times did it reach the right-end. The man often joked that he was telling stories to keep the identity of his kind a secret and a doubt, such that those stories would echo for 'an entire century'. In truth, it was only he who could echo for a hundred years; three times every damned day.

"And what do we get by not being discovered?" That was always what the woman with the wooden leg would ask. "What if you didn't have to go to the Surface - and walk around, altering the planet's Field? What if we just stayed here, and waited for some poor soul to venture into the waters of Loch Ness? Are we not able to deal with intruders?"

The man would smile at the barrage of questions the woman always had, before answering them patiently. For all the questions she had or would have about the Surface, the man had the same answer:

"We do it to protect them, not us. The day they find us is the day we have to start making other 'arrangements'. And the day we do that, things will end rather badly for them."

And to himself, he would often mutter - under his breath - the same words he would say before he went to sleep:

"Just like the time an old fellow saw my daughter, and we had to start this whole ruse. There is no way out of this temporal loop for us - and it all began with one cursed morning. That can't happen again - one human may have paid the price, but any more would be going too far."

And then, the man with the wooden leg would go to sleep. Being under the water meant that no temporal anomalies would arise - until the next 'time' he was supposed to go out and talk about how he and his family did not exist.

It would not be until the year 3471 that a young lady by the name of Syra would find out the origin of the word 'Ness'; it did not come from the regional Gaelic dialect - nor from English. It came from a language spoken by those who were later referred to as of the 'Rahab'.

The word meant 'Time'. It was the lake of Time. And for another fourteen hundred years, that was all it would be. And when the discovery would be made - and with it the discovery of the family living there; well, that's going to be a story for another millennium.