Legend XXXIII – The Time Traveler

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She appears when time trembles. When clocks fall silent and the light can't decide whether it's morning or evening. Then she suddenly stands there – amidst golden leaves, enveloped in the stillness between two seconds. Her skin seems woven with metal, as if someone had placed gears beneath her heart. In her hand she holds a clock, round as the sun, and within it are reflected the faces of all those she has ever lost. No one knows where she came from. Some say she fell from the future, others that she is the dream of a dying machine. But the ancient chronicles of Solvinarneu state that she was once a human – Lyra Tenebris, watchmaker of the forbidden workshop of Mirahal. She loved time as others love music: with longing, with pain, with the sense that all that is transient is more beautiful because it is fleeting. One night, witnesses report, Lyra stood before an open clock, its gears motionless. She wanted to heal it, like stitching a wound. But the deeper she reached, the more she saw: the ticking was a weeping heart. The clock spoke to her—not in words, but in seconds, in pulses that sounded like breaths. And Lyra answered. In that moment, she vanished from the world, as if time itself had inhaled her. Since then, she has wandered among the hours, a being of flesh and mechanics, with oil and light flowing through her veins. Her dress is a network of tubes, hinges, and brass wires. Gears turn softly at her hips, as if remembering dances of bygone eras. Wherever she goes, the wind slows. The rain hangs in the air for a heartbeat, and even the shadows seem to listen to her. The time traveler collects not treasures, but moments. She seeks what has been forgotten: a gesture, an unfinished thought, a silent smile unnoticed. When she finds such fragments, she picks them up and places them in the chambers of her clock. They say they shine like tiny stars. But the years—if they still matter to her—have changed her. With each leap in time, her gaze deepens, her movements become heavier. The mirror in the clock sometimes shows her scenes that have not yet happened: cities burning; children laughing; oceans turning to glass. She knows that all of this resides within her. That she not only travels through time, but carries it. A chronicle of the Aether Library records that she once appeared there, silent, in the steam of the Mechans. The robot librarians looked at her, and for a moment even their clocks paused. Then she breathed: “Your time rusts because you worship it. Let it breathe.” Then she disappeared again, and in the silence remained only her ticking, echoing through the corridors for a long time.