Day 291 - Midnight Story

Midnight Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Halfway between sunset and sunrise time froze in place. The arrow of time failed to point in any direction and cause and effect lost all meaning. Now was then and then was now, the future and the past folded and overlapped and all were one. Existence existed, but time ceased.

It was a magical and mystical moment. A universal pause. Most all of everything was frozen in place along with space, time and reality. Those that were asleep had no idea and remained asleep. Those that were awake were frozen as well, unaware of what was going on around them.

Then there were those, a very small and select few, which were neither awake nor asleep. They existed between seconds. Whether they knew it or not, they were not bound by things like time or space. They were the ones that got to see a different world entirely.

Reality opened up and spilled out the unthinkable and unimaginable. The dark and dangerous erupted forth and took their moment and made the most of it. The unholy went unchecked. The impossible became real. The real became fantasy.

Timothy was unaware of the great power he had been born with. No one ever taught him that he was special. No one he knew was aware that he was special. Timothy didn’t possess one static soul, but several, ever changing souls, some fully developed, with others that were parts put together. His partial souls had lived in different times and in different worlds. They came together in the cross section of the here and now to appear as one united entity. But really it was a shattered and displaced existence inside him. He just didn’t know it. But it gave him the ability to travel where others couldn’t, alongside companions of the unnatural.

Tonight was the first time that Timothy became aware that he could do anything unusual.

Timothy assumed he was dreaming. He actually got to see time slow down before it completely paused. Not many could ever say that. He didn’t process it as time slowing or pausing, because for him, time didn’t pause or slow at all. He was still fully functional. But he saw everything else slow down around him. That was why he thought he was in a dream. It seemed like the only rational explanation.

Timothy saw shadows that tore themselves free and ran off into the night. He watched ogre-men appear out of the ground and the walls of buildings and do battle with the winds that could hit as hard as if comprised of stone. He ran with a pack of talking wolves that weren’t exactly wolves, but that was the closest thing he could compare them to. They howled at the moon and the moon howled back.

Timothy wasn’t scared, even though in his heart he knew he should be. Even if he was dreaming, he knew it should have been a nightmare. But it wasn’t. He felt alive. He felt at home. It was invigorating and was the greatest experience of his life. He didn’t want it to end. He wished he would never wake up. He was unaware that with his special abilities he never had to. But that was another discovery for another time.

There was a festival that featured unmen and men alike. There was music and dancing and revelry in general. For a moment it seemed like things would never end.

And then as mysteriously as it began, it was over. One pattern of time slowed down and the other began to run again. The dark and mysterious faded away and disappeared back into the shadows of the night.

Timothy thought he was waking up, but then realized he wasn’t where he had been when he thought he was falling asleep. He was miles away from home now, in the location of the final festivities.

Timothy grew frightened at last. He had no explanation for what had occurred. He had no idea how he came to be where he was. He didn’t think any of it was possible, and yet he had no other explanation. In a way he was excited. It meant that his experiences that night had been true, his feelings real. He didn’t understand it, he wasn’t sure he fully comprehended it yet, but he was glad that it was possible to believe it happened without also feeling himself insane. It was a strange and mysterious night, and he got the feeling it would be the first of many yet to come.