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Chardiye got weakly to his feet and looked around. His home,
his sopping garden, and his sister were all gone. In fact, even the rain was gone.
The sun shone brightly and the sky was purely blue, with some lazy clouds drifting
over the horizon.
Looking across a meadow Chardiye saw the silhouette
of a stooped Kacheek slowly approaching where Chardiye stood. Panicking, Chardiye
leapt into a clump of bushes and peered through a break in the branches to watch.
The stooped yellow Kacheek, which had a walking stick in one hand and a shovel
in the other, stopped began to dig in the earth just where Chardiye had been
standing. The Kacheek dug until Chardiye could see beads of sweat trickling
between his wrinkles and running into his long white beard. When the hole appeared
to be satisfactory, the Kacheek put his hand into the pocket of his long robe
and retrieved something Chardiye could not see. In fact, it looked like the
old Kacheek had pulled simply air out of his pocket.
The Kacheek held his empty hand up to his face
so he could let the nothingness in his hand sparkle in the sunlight. Then he
moved his fingers and a tiny snapping sound could be heard. He brought his hand
lower and, dropping his walking stick, stroked the air with his other hand and
muttered, "I'm getting too old for you, my boy," to his empty hand. Chardiye
couldn't see how anyone could be so mad to talk to air in his hand. The Kacheek
bent down and made the action of dropping the invisible item into the hole,
and then began to fill in the hold once more.
When he had picked up his shovel and walking
stick and trudged somberly away, Chardiye came out of the bush, plucked several
thorns out of his hindquarters with a series of yelps, and sat on the grass
to think about his situation. He had pressed the knob on the pocket-watch, which
still hung around his neck, ticking merrily; and then rushed back here. He had
watched an old man bury something that didn't exist. Now he was sure that his
owner would be angry with him when it turned out he had mysteriously disappeared
in his own garden.
With a growing thought in his mind, a crazy
thought, he stared down at the watch that hung around his neck. It was ticking
happily away. Chardiye hadn't added new batteries or anything; he had simply
reset it. Chardiye stared hard at the cover, amazed. Instead of the incoherent
markings on the inside of the cover, a message appeared scratched into the gold.
It read:
I am a pocket-watch quite sublime; I will
regain your missing time.
"'Regain missing time?'" Chardiye mumbled aloud.
Then it struck him. This pocket-watch had taken him back in time. He had watched
the pocket-watch itself be buried just there where he had found it. It had seemed
invisible to Chardiye because the tangible pocket-watch was around his neck,
and there couldn't be two of them.
I will regain your missing time.
Was Chardiye missing time? It seemed to the
Eyrie that it would be dreadfully annoying to keep a watch that took you back
in time every time you wanted to correct the time it told you. The message on
the inside of the cover had implied that the watch would only take someone back
if they needed to fix something. But Chardiye couldn't think of a single thing
that would require him to come so far back in time. Chardiye knew it had to
be far back because his house and the rest of his street was gone and only a
few stone cottages dotted the meadow. Chardiye could see that a large brick
building was being constructed in the distance and decided to have a look.
The construction team barely noticed Chardiye
there. One Wocky with a hammer and a hard-hat asked Chardiye quite politely
to "Get outta ther way 'r else," but no other said a word to him. A makeshift
banner hung between to stakes and proclaimed that this was the Guild Headquarters
being built. Chardiye knew that the giant brick building had been built over
one hundred years before Chardiye had left the garden and his sister, although
the time felt like no more than a half hour after. Time travel was indeed
a strange thing, he thought.
Chardiye wandered in awe around what had been
Neopia Central over one hundred years before his time. He was amazed, though
somehow frightened. He had no means of communication to tell anyone where he
was, he didn't know anyone, and he didn't have anywhere to go. The Time Clock,
as he called it, had taken him back to the time when it was buried. Why? Surely
items like the Time Clock would be made by the faeries. Chardiye decided to
ask them, since he had nothing better to do and it might give him some answers.
He spotted Faerieland floating up in the sky,
the crystalline castle glinting against the sun. He aimed his beak toward it,
spread his wings, and took off. The sky-flying city appeared miles up in the
air, suspended magically over the sea, but in Chardiye's experience it never
took more than five minutes to get there from anywhere. The Faeries appreciated
visitors and evidently wanted them to be able to access the beautiful city without
too much hassle.
Chardiye landed comfortably on a tuft of cloud
just outside the large golden gates to Faerieland. Every time the Eyrie had
visited here, he'd always thought the gates opening to the large glittering
city in the clouds were something like what he thought heaven might look like.
He stroked the Time Clock with one feathery finger before he set off to see
the Faerie Queen. If anyone would know anything about the mysterious instrument,
Chardiye figured she would.
He started his way up the street, stopping every
once in a while to gaze at the faeries that passed by and the shops they went
in and out of. Nothing much had changed in those one hundred years. It struck
Chardiye that since Faerieland was so high up in the sky and isolated from the
rest of Neopia, time must not affect it as much as other places.
Chardiye approached the shining violet castle
with his Time Clock hidden under his bandana. He didn't want anyone to see it;
it wasn't normal for a NeoPet to wear a large, shiny golden pocket watch from
a chain around his neck. A Faerie guard bowed Chardiye through the large purple
stained-glass double doors, and he entered the Great Hall.
The more purple, the more glass. Chardiye supposed
that everyone who entered here would be as nervous as he was of tripping and
smashing the perfect glass sculptures of every kind of Neopet and Faerie there
was. The life-sized models lined both sides of the carpet right up to the wall,
where a purple-clad figure sat imperiously on a purple glass throne. Chardiye
jumped slightly when he saw her, and immediately stood still for fear that he
would destroy one of the beautiful glass pets. He didn't know anyone was watching
him. He suddenly realized that this was the first time he had ever seen the
Faerie Queen.
She had long, flowing purple hair, big, liquid-looking
violet eyes, and pale skin. "Chardiye," she said mellifluously, "It is so nice
to see you. What brings you to my castle?"
"Erm," Chardiye said shiftily. He pulled the
Time Clock from his bandana and held it up for her to see, "I dug this up from
my garden, you see, and-erm-I just twiddled the knob and set the clock when
it took me back in time one hundred years. I belong in the future. I just thought
you might know something about it, since it's obviously magical."
The Faerie Queen's eyes grew larger when she
gazed at the Time Clock. The benign expression on her face changed to mixed
concern and surprise. "This…? Yes, I have heard of this. This pocket-watch was
made by the Faerie clocksmith, but I do not know of its powers. Only the Faerie
clocksmith could tell you, but sadly she has been imprisoned by Jhudora ever
since she allowed that watch to escape from Jhudora's possession. Jhudora was
using it for evil, of course; and the Faerie clocksmith, seeing it misused,
stole it from Jhudora and gave it to an unsuspecting old man."
"Then… then what?" Chardiye said breathlessly,
"How do I find the-the Faerie clocksmith?"
"She is in Jhudora's dungeon," replied the Faerie
Queen, "And if I were you, I would not let Jhudora know of the presence of either
you or that watch."
To be continued...
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