 
### Avalon

## The Pilot Episode

### M G Kizzia

### Copyright 2011, 2019

### MGK Books, Second Edition

### Revised and Expanded (version 2.24)

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting and supporting the hard work of this author.

### Table of Contents

Part I: Various Nefarious

Thief, Kidnapper, Father.

Meanwhile, Back on Earth

The Tower of Bricks

Humanity

Part II: Missing Person

Mission Team

Avalon

The Heart of Time

The Middle of the Night

Before the Beginning

Part III: The Beginning of History

Myths and Legends

Ararat

The Plains of Shinar

Nimrod

Babel

Kairos

Bokarus

Avalon, Moving into the Future

### Avalon, The Pilot Episode, Introduction

Avalon is designed as a television show in written form, with each episode forming a chapter, and thirteen chapters making a whole season, or a book. Like any good television show, seeing one full episode (or reading one full chapter) should give enough information to grasp who the characters are, the relationships between them, as well as understanding that this is a time travel adventure, where this small group of people are attempting to get back to the twenty-first century.

Thrown back to the beginning of history, the travelers from Avalon must get home the hard way—through the time gates that surround the many lives of the Kairos, the Traveler in time, the Watcher over history. Plainly stated, the time zones are dangerous. The Kairos never lives a quiet life. And the travelers also understand that they are not the only ones lost in time. Other people, beings, and creatures are surviving around the edges of the time zones, and some have picked up their scent. Some are following them, and some are hunting them. The travelers face a long, hard road to get everyone back to the twenty-first century, alive.

The pilot episode immediately follows the prequel, _Invasion of Memories_ , which is available from your favorite e-book retailer, or from Amazon in hard copy, under the author **M. G. Kizzia**. The prequel will help flesh-out the characters, but _The Pilot Episode_ is a perfectly good place to start.

After reading _Avalon, The Pilot Episode_ , I encourage you to continue with the Avalon stories, which are neatly divided into seasons, where you can follow the travelers in their impossible journey through time. You might also want to look at what is posting on the website: **mgkizzia.com** , where I regularly post stories for free—that is, for zero money.

Only one warning. I have never been good at the distinction between science fiction and fantasy. It is like the amulet that leads the travelers from one time gate to the next. It is a marvelous combination of sophisticated technology and magic. Thus, you will find science fiction in these episodes, like space aliens and their technological wonders. You will also find elves, spirits, ancient gods, mythical creatures, and magic of all sorts. And often, you will find aliens and elves in the same story. Be prepared.

Thank you for reading. Happy reading, and enjoy.

\--MGKizzia

### Cast

**Robert Lockhart** , a former policeman, now assistant director of the Men in Black, the one organization on earth in the twenty-first century that deals with strange and impossible things. He is charged with leading this expedition through time, though he has no idea how he is going to get everyone home—in one piece.

**Boston (Mary Riley)** , a Massachusetts redneck, rodeo rider, and technological genius who finished her PhD at age 23. A "Man in Black," she loves all the adventure, and all the spiritual creatures they encounter, which suggests she may be a bit strange.

**Benjamin Lincoln** , a former C. I. A. office geek, now working for the Men in Black, determines to keep a record of their journey. He tends to worry, and is not the bravest soul, but sometimes that is an asset.

**Alexis Lincoln** , an elf, who became human to marry Benjamin, and also went to work for the Men in Black. She retained her healing magic when she became human, but magic has its limits. For example, it can't make her father happy with her choices.

**Roland** , Alexis' younger brother, a full blood elf and gifted hunter. He came to keep his father Mingus under control and out of his sister's face. He discovers there is something in humanity worth saving and protecting. He knows many of the creatures in the spirit world that they face, including the nasty ones inclined to rise-up out of the dark.

**Mingus,** father of Alexis and Roland, an elder elf. He ran the history department on Avalon for over 300 years. He knows the time zones and the lives of the Kairos but tends to keep his opinions to himself. And he believes his children are being ruined by so much human interaction.

**Doctor Procter** , a half-human, half-elf who worked with Mingus in the Avalon history department for years. The old man, with the long, white beard, also knows the many lives of the Kairos, but at first, he speaks in half-sentence, and soon, the others can hardly get a word out of him. He carries the amulet, a sophisticated combination electronic GPS and magical device that shows the way from one time gate to the next.

**Lieutenant Katie Harper** , a marine and a PhD out of the pentagon whose specialty is ancient and medieval cultures and technologies. She is torn between her duty to the marines, to her boss at Groom Lake, and her desire to be part of this larger universe she is discovering.

**Captain Decker** , a seal trained marine special operations officer who will do all he can to keep everyone alive, even if it means shooting his way back to the twenty-first century. He is a skeptic who does not believe half of what they experience—even if he does not know what else to believe.

**The Kairos**. But that is a different person in each time zone.

Part I: Various Nefarious

Present day, Between Avalon and Earth. Kairos 121: Glen, the Storyteller.

### Recording...

Mingus, a well-respected elder elf, nearly eight-hundred years old, a true academic and head of the Avalon history department for the last three-hundred years, a peace-loving scholar by reputation, dragged the elderly human woman to an obscure closet on the campus in the castle of the Kairos. She struggled, but her hands were bound behind her back and her lips were magically sealed so she could not cry out. Her eyes got big when Mingus opened the closet door and a cloud of dust greeted them.

_You wouldn't_ , she thought. Mingus, a master of mind magic, caught her thought because she directed it at him. _You can't do this. Lady Alice will find out. She will know_.

"Hush," Mingus said out loud, as he forced her to sit on the closet floor beside a broom and dustpan that hardly looked used. He raised his hand, and the woman widened her eyes.

_You wouldn't_ , she repeated her thought. _Father!_ Her mind cried out and her whole being objected when he touched her forehead. Her eyes rolled up and closed as she fell into a trance.

"Alexis. I am just trying to save you from yourself," Mingus whispered. He left the light on when he gently closed the door. He paused to make sure the light did not leak out the bottom or around the edges of the door frame. Satisfied with his work, he stepped out of the first-floor door and headed across the green toward the history building.

The great, wooden tower on his right reached for the clouds. He understood it was the first building in Avalon. The rest of the castle got built around that ancient structure. It housed the Heart of Time, the glowing crystal that beat with light like the beat of a living heart. The Heart of Time held a record of all human history. It got created when the old god, Cronos and the Kairos, Alice, held hands, the angel presiding. Alice made a three-pronged stand to hold the great crystal, built the tower to house it, and there it rested through the ages, beating from its own internal light, capturing a record of everything that happened on the earth.

Mingus shifted his eyes to the spring beside the tower. The spring and the stream that came from it supplied all the fresh water in the castle. People called it the spring of life. Fortunately, the naiad of the spring was not present. Rumor said she was still in recovery from the time, several years earlier, when the goddess Ashtoreth invaded Avalon and enslaved the people. The naiad was the last defender of the tower and the Heart of Time. The goddess overcame her in the cruelest way imaginable, and then Ashtoreth had access to all of human history.

Mingus paused. He stopped walking and looked again at the spring and the tower.

In the end, the children of the Kairos overcame the demon-goddess with the help of the Knights of the Lance, but in the meanwhile, Ashtoreth discovered some interesting things about the Heart of Time.

First, she found that gateways, something like invisible time gates, bracketed the many lives of the Kairos throughout history—like bookends. The gates gave real access to the lives before and after whatever life the Kairos presently lived. If one knew how to find the gates and work them, and could cross safely through each time zone, they made something like a time-travel highway through history, from the beginning of history, when the Kairos was first conceived to live lives number one and two, up to the present one hundred and twenty-first lifetime of the Kairos.

Mingus started to walk again. The second discovery showed a person could enter the Heart of Time and travel to anywhere in the timeline of history to begin the journey. Jumping into the past through the Heart of Time displaced a person from his or her normal time stream. Mingus supposed a person would continue to age according to their own internal time clock, but at that point they could travel through the gates into the future and not fear prematurely ageing, or into the past without suddenly getting younger than their birth.

No one knew this before Ashtoreth. Maybe the Kairos knew it, but no one previously guessed. Ashtoreth proved the fact by sending all sorts of terrible persons and monsters into the past, in her effort to disrupt history. "Unsavories," as Doctor Procter called them. Mingus smiled. That quick access to any point in history was the discovery he counted on, dangerous as it might be.

After Ashtoreth got overcome, the brains and powers around Avalon got together and built a prototype amulet that would lead a person from one time gate to the next. Mingus volunteered to test it, in the dead of night, without telling anyone. He took his daughter to the days of her youth, not that anyone knew he kidnapped Alexis. They jumped to the year 1776, but Alexis remained stupid and stubborn. She refused to come home to the Long March of Elfenheim. She insisted on staying married to that human—on remaining human. There appeared to be no way he could get through to her. Mingus got angry to think about it. He ended up dragging her back to the present through the time gates, which proved their worth. It took him half a year to do that. He felt prepared then to let her go. But when they got back to the present, she made him angry, again, and he thought what he had thought a thousand times before. _No daughter should die before her father_.

He stepped into the history building and walked up the stairs to the lab.

### ###

Lady Alice stood on the wall that surrounded the tower and the campus. She watched Mingus enter the history building before she turned to the lovely naiad that stood beside her. "You understand. This one time I want you to stay away from your spring and let Mingus enter the tower of the heart. He will run. I will send others to chase him, and when they have him, I will bring them all back through the heart."

"Aren't you afraid they will get lost in time or mess up something in history and set the whole course of human life off track?" the naiad asked.

"There is a risk, but it is the only way to test the heart. When Ashtoreth broke it, I feared time itself might unravel. Some said history would come to an end. Some thought the whole of creation might roll up like a scroll and be finished. Glen's children were able to collect the broken pieces of the heart, and I managed to make it whole again. It is continuing to record the events on earth, but it needs to be thoroughly tested before I can pronounce it fully healed."

"But what if you can't bring them back all at once from the past?"

"Mingus and his captive daughter, that is one elf and one human, tested the time gates between my Michelle Marie's lifetime and the present; even if Mingus did not realize that was what he was doing. If something goes wrong, it may take a long time, but we know the people will be able to get home using the time gates."

"It just seems a big risk."

"Relax. Have some faith. Everything will work out in the end, one way or another."

"Oh, I know," the naiad said. "I love the conspiracy of it, except it makes my waters churn."

Thief, Kidnapper, Father.

Mingus stopped at the top of the stairs. He heard voices in the lab. He peeked through the glass in the door and saw old, white-bearded Doctor Procter leaning over a table, trying to concentrate. Doctor Procter held a delicate piece of equipment in one hand, and held his wand in the other hand, ready to make whatever adjustment might be necessary. The young elf doing all the talking and interrupting kept leaning into the light, like he might be trying to read over Doctor Procter's shoulder.

"Roland." Mingus entered the room, the name of the young elf on his lips. "Leave the man to his work."

"Father," Roland turned and stood tall. A look of pride crossed his face. "I guessed I would find you here."

"Why?" Mingus sounded suspicious.

"Because I have not been able to find you anywhere since you came back from the past. But you have always lived in this place... Oh, I guess you are asking..." Roland straightened up. "Because I want to give answer to your unasked question when you went away."

"What question? Maybe there was a reason it was unasked."

"Father." Roland sounded serious. "You said some terrible things about Alexis before you made the time jump, but I want you to know, I support my sister. She freely chose to give up being an elf and became a human to marry a human, and I say, as long as she is happy, she will have my full support."

"And you have told her this?"

"Not yet." Roland looked down at the table and at his feet. He worried his hands before he raised his head again. "But I intend to." He spoke with conviction.

Mingus nodded and kept his sarcasm to a minimum. "You better hurry up, son. Your sister is sixty. Her human husband is sixty-five. They have children of their own. They have grandchildren. You know; humans don't live very long." It irked Mingus every time he thought of Alexis getting old and dying, but he tried not to show it on his face.

"Like a breath," Doctor Procter breathed.

"Roland. Son." Mingus stepped to the far side of the table to face the young elf. "I am glad you support your sister. Family is important. But now, um... You are over a hundred, aren't you?"

"Father." Roland let out a deep breath of exasperation. "I will be one-hundred-twenty-seven next winter solstice."

"Good, good." Mingus waved off his own ignorance. "I heard certain elf maidens have a bonfire and dance planned in the three-circle court of Giovani. An elf your age should be out enjoying himself."

"No good. You spoiled him by activating his brain cells," Doctor Procter said, with a small grin beneath his long white, unkempt beard.

"Father. Those elf maids are not exactly well educated," Roland admitted.

"It isn't their education you should be looking at, at your age. Go have some fun. You remember fun?"

"But father—"

"Get out," Mingus yelled. Roland flushed red and made a fist. He stomped his way to the door. Mingus and Doctor Procter watched until the door closed.

"No need to yell," Doctor Procter said.

"That is what children are for," Mingus responded. "They are for yelling at when they don't get the message."

"Um," Doctor Procter made a sound, shook his head slightly, and returned to his work.

"So," Mingus said, casually, taking a deep breath to calm himself. "Is that the new amulet? The prototype worked well enough, but it did not give much detail in terms of the surrounding area. We—I came to a cliff in the Rockies in 1875 and had to backtrack a long way to go around."

Doctor Procter nodded. "See any Indians?"

"Native-Americans. No. Is it ready?"

Doctor Procter paused in his work. "We have added some basic scanner technology to the amulet so it will get a reading on the area, cities, towns, forests, mountains, and so on. But the screen is so small, it will take very good eyes, preferably elf eyes to see it. It took some real coordination with the technology and IT departments, not to mention—"

"Doctor." Mingus cut the man off before he went into a half-hour unintelligible explanation. "Is the amulet ready?"

"This? No. It needs further adjustments, and then testing."

"Adjustments?"

"Additional work. I'm afraid it would not work at all in its present condition."

Mingus nodded. "The prototype still around?"

"On the wall there," Doctor Procter pointed over his shoulder without turning from the table. Mingus walked to find it in the mess by the filing cabinets. Doctor Procter paid no attention.

"The prototype worked well enough," Mingus said, in his friendly voice.

"Yes, yes," Doctor Procter responded as he leaned over his work and squinted at the amulet in his hand.

"It got me home in one piece, through the time gates."

"And we are all glad. Welcome home," Doctor Procter mumbled and he leaned further into his work. Mingus found the prototype under some papers and slipped it into his pocket. Doctor Procter paused and turned to Mingus. "We are glad you are home, but this time, don't expect to steal the new amulet and leave me a note about going to test it. The new one is shielded. If you so much as touch it, alarms will go off and all of Avalon will know."

Mingus looked down and nodded like a child, properly scolded. "I understand. It was just the first one. I am the only one in all of Avalon who knows the history; maybe the only one who had a reasonable chance of making such a journey, and getting home in one piece. I might have died at the outset, entering into the crystal. I felt I was the only one who ought to take that risk. An expedition of young elves without the proper knowledge would have been a disaster."

"That is debatable," Doctor Procter said. "But you stole the amulet and went before anyone could stop you. You won't be stealing this one."

"Fair enough," Mingus said. "I'll leave you to your work. You have had enough interruption for this evening." He headed toward the door, and paused only briefly when Doctor Procter had one more thing to say.

"Glad you made it back. The history department would not be the same without you."

Mingus stepped through the door and hurried down the stairs.

Now that it had become a fully dark night, he needed to get Alexis before she broke free of her enchantment. They needed to be gone before anyone found out. He looked once again to be sure the naiad was not in her spring. He looked again at the tower, now pitch dark, like a giant finger pointing to the stars. There were various opinions on just which finger the tower represented.

Mingus found his daughter in the closet where he left her. He paused to note her gray hair, wrinkles, and pale human skin. _At least she didn't get chunky like some human women got when they turned sixty_ , he thought. He made sure her hands were still bound and the magical gag remained in place. He made her stand and walk. He had to lighten the trance so she could stagger. He had to help her, but he dared not let her come to full consciousness, even bound and gagged. She retained her elf magic when she became human. She was hardly powerless, and might yet find some way to break free from his control. She was his daughter, after all.

The most dangerous part came when they went out into the open to cross the green, and particularly when they crossed the little bridge over the stream. Mingus' mind wandered. Doctor Procter was wrong. The history department on Avalon would get along just fine without him. Some fifty years ago, the dark elves learned to extract information directly from the Heart of Time and put it on computers. The history department on Avalon started slowly filling up with computer geeks. _Elves_ _should not be nerds_ , he thought. Mingus knew he was old fashioned, like someone out of the stone age. But he still believed in things that mattered. He still believed in family. He believed a daughter should not die before her father, and Alexis, now human, was ageing rapidly right before his eyes.

Mingus got them to the tower door. He took one last look around the green before he slipped them inside.

"Uh," Alexis made a sound and wiggled in the light, like a sleeper trying to wake. Mingus held her until she settled down again into her enchanted sleep. He looked around.

The ground floor was the only floor in that great hollow finger. The walls stretched up high enough so Mingus imagined the cathedral roof might have been designed not only to keep out the rain, but to keep the stars from falling in. No fire gave light to that room. No torches lined the wall. No electric lights were allowed near the place. Only the Heart of Time throbbed with its own internal light, and somehow, the wood out of which the tower got built retained enough of the light to light up the entire inside, even to the ceiling.

There were theories about the wood. Recently, an ancient theory had come back to the surface—that it was some alien wood Lady Alice snatched off some impossibly distant planet. Another theory suggested that the tower had actually been planted, like a tree, and the wood was alive, and still growing. Mingus shook his head. Some people will believe anything.

He helped Alexis come inside the circle painted on the floor. They faced the stand in which the crystal rested, silently pulsing with light. Mingus reached into his right-hand pocket to make sure he still had the amulet. He reached into his left-hand pocket where he had a handful of gold dust.

"Mister Barrie called this fairy dust," Mingus whispered to himself—some distant memory. He sprinkled it on Alexis and himself, three times, and mumbled a long series of unintelligible syllables. Alexis sneezed. Mingus reached down to scoop Alexis up in his arms when he caught sight of movement out of the corner of his eye. Lady Alice was in the room. Mingus panicked and jumped right into the crystal. Alexis snapped out of her trance as they jumped into the light. She yelled, a muffled "No," before the sound cut off.

Alice and the naiad stepped up to the crystal.

"I think he saw you," the naiad said.

"He needed to see me," Alice responded. "Hopefully, he won't put up a struggle when the rescue party arrives. Now, let us see where they went."

Meanwhile, Back on Earth...

Three old men and one young woman stood in an open field somewhere in suburban New Jersey. The green grass looked uncut and undisturbed, except where the corporate plane set down. The trees that surrounded the perimeter of the field, mostly oak and maple, had just enough fir trees to break the monotony. The trees looked well-spaced for easy passage, if anyone cared to walk through the woods to the field. The sound of distant road traffic suggested civilization, not far away. The sound of children playing among the trees suggested the three old men and one young woman should leave before they were discovered; but first they had to watch.

A white light, bright enough to easily be seen under the noonday sun—a rectangle, door-like shape of brilliance stood before them. They watched it rise about ten feet in the air. A voice, like one might imagine the voice of an angel, came from the light.

"Remember, Lockhart, do not depend on those healing chits. They are organic and will stay in your system for some time, but you do not have the seeds to grow more. They will eventually die out, and while your spine and legs will remain healed, you will once again be vulnerable to the pains of age. I am sorry. I am not permitted to do more. Maybe the Kairos can do more for you, but that is not my place to say. Farewell friends."

The light rose slowly in the sky even as it rapidly shrank in size. It looked like it disappeared, but Glen, one of the three old men, shook his head.

"It did not really go invisible," he said. "It just got too small to see and zoomed off to somewhere else in this universe or in some other universe."

"We won't see them again?" Lockhart, the tallest old man asked.

Glen shrugged. "Who can say?"

Lincoln, the third old man, turned on Glen. "But you are the Kairos, the Traveler in time. Don't you know?"

Glen, the Kairos, shook his head as he replied. "No reason I should know. The future isn't written yet. Well, it is written, but I don't have the record of every individual life in history. Well, there is a record of every life in the Heart of Time, but I don't have snap-your-finger access to the heart. Besides, it only records what happened in the past, or rather, it is recording the present, but it has no record of the future. True, I remember a couple of future lifetimes, you know, but I can't say exactly what will be. I mean, my future lives can't be expected to remember all the intimate details in the life of every human being this far in the past. Are you following me? Am I making any sense?"

"None at all," Lockhart said, and added a big grin, like this was not the first time the Kairos spoke in riddles, and he found it funny.

Glen shook his head and continued. "Anyway, I mostly deal with events, and usually just the big things. I have one hundred and twenty past lives stretching all the way back to about 4500 BC, though I don't remember most of them. I have twenty or more in the future, though I only remember a few of those." He stopped and shook his hands as if to say, don't interrupt. "Remembering future lives is the only way to explain it, because it comes to me just like any memory. But, what I mean is, I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow. Tomorrow is just as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone else."

Glen turned toward the corporate plane that started to rev its engines. Lockhart looked at his own two feet as he walked, but raised his voice to comment to the young woman.

"Come along, Boston. Don't forget the wheelchair, which I no longer need." He smiled as he walked.

"Lockhart," Boston complained while she lugged the folded chair as well as she could through the tall grass. "It didn't seem so heavy when you were in it."

Lockhart nodded. "It is a wonder I didn't put on a hundred pounds given all the years I spent confined to that chair." He hopped, and tried to click his heels, but he nearly lost his balance in the attempt. He remained sixty-eight, even if he could walk. He did not suddenly become twenty-five, like Boston's age.

"But Glen," the third old man was thinking things through and stepped up to the Kairos. "How are we going to find Alexis? Don't you know where my wife is?"

"Lincoln," Glen spoke kindly to the man and touched his arm to assure him of his sincerity. "We will go back to headquarters and I promise we will use every means available to find her."

"But..." Lincoln started to say something, but he held his tongue and went wide-eyed instead when the old man in front of him vanished and a well-built young man in ancient looking armor appeared in Glen's place.

"Diogenes," Boston shouted the young man's name, and smiled. She normally smiled when the Kairos traded places, as he called it, with a different lifetime from somewhere in history. Lincoln normally quieted and his eyes often showed his surprise. Lockhart stayed busy enjoying the sensation of walking on his own two feet. He noticed, but he was preoccupied.

"L-let me," Diogenes stuttered, as he smiled for Boston. He reached out for the folded wheelchair and picked it up off the ground. He lifted it over his head, awkward as that was, but in that way, he got it up the ramp and into the plane. Lockhart and Lincoln followed, old-man slow. Boston came last because she caught some movement in the woods. A half-dozen children, the oldest being a girl of maybe ten years, stood at the edge of the trees, staring.

"Keep back," Boston shouted. "Keep the little ones back," she added for the ten-year-old, and underlined the command with her most serious look. Then she ran up into the plane and pressed the button to retract the ramp. The pilot hardly waited for the door to close. He took the stealth designed VTOL straight up into the air. Seconds later, Glen, Lockhart, Lincoln, and Boston were headed toward a non-descript building in the Virginia countryside, outside of Washington.

Diogenes had traded back with Glen. This was Glen's life, after all, and Glen sat his old body down on the couch facing a work table full of computers and an inordinate amount of paperwork. Lockhart sat in the co-pilot's seat until they reached cruising altitude, though he gave the impression that he wanted to stand on his newly repaired legs for a while. Lincoln sat in the corner and fretted about his missing wife. Boston sat at the table, facing her portion of the paperwork, but swiveled her chair around to face the Kairos.

"Glen," she tried for his attention, but clearly did not want to disturb him if he was thinking about something important. He looked at her. "Can I go to Avalon some day?" she asked, sweetly. One of the two young men working at the table handed her another stack of papers to be reviewed and filed. She griped. Glen snickered, but answered.

"Someday, maybe," he said.

"Grumble," Boston verbalized as she turned and at least pretended to type.

Lockhart came back from the cockpit. He faked a little soft shoe before he sat where he could face Glen, and Lincoln who moped in the corner.

"So, Lockhart," Glen asked a question. "As the assistant director of the Men in Black, got any ideas how Bobbi can convince Colonel Weber and his intrusive marines to go back to Groom Lake and leave us alone?" When the alien Vordan came to earth, they first targeted the so-called Men in Black in strategic locations around the globe. Colonel Weber and his marines, supposedly under the authority of the president, invaded the headquarters building when the Vordan flattened area 51. Weber came, presumably, to help provide security and defend the only organization that knew anything at all about aliens. Glen objected. The president had no such authority, but Colonel Weber said he figured the organization was so secret, who would know?

"I don't suppose one of your godly lives, like Junior or Nameless would be willing to blink them back to Nevada."

Glen thought a minute. "No. Colonel Weber is an ass, but not a threat to history. The gods have strict limits on where, when, and how they are able to interfere in normal, everyday life. But Danna and Amphitrite agree that they don't like the man, if that helps."

Lockhart shook his head. Getting the marines out of Men in Black business would be a headache. He would help Bobbi, the director, as much as he could. He would probably have to come up with some ideas for her to at least try.

Boston spun around. "Maybe you could tell them some Vordan got left behind and are available for dissection if they all fly out to their own place and leave us alone."

"We try not to lie," Glen scolded her, but smiled. "Besides, Colonel Weber already thinks anything alien is there to be dissected. Living, intelligent, alien person; it is all the same to him, and I don't want to promote that kind of thinking." He waved his finger in a circle. Boston made a sour face and turned back to the table and her work.

"PhD in electrical engineering and I'm nothing but a clerk...a cluck," she said.

Lincoln scooted closer to the conversation and kindly asked about something other than his missing wife. "What I want to know is what are you going to do about Emile and Mirowen."

Glen thought again.

Emile Roberts, utterly human, was a physicist that should have been an auto mechanic. His current specialty appeared to be taking apart two-thousand-year old abandoned alien spacecraft to see how they worked. Mirowen, a former elf maid, got right in there with him. She knew the little spirits of the earth were not supposed to make those kinds of attachments to mortal humans. But she got attached to the man, and whenever one of Glen's little ones got attached in that way, it felt like superglue. They were very hard to remove.

Boston spun to face them again. "But they are so cute together."

Glen looked at Lincoln. Lincoln's wife, Alexis, had been an elf; but she gladly gave up being an elf and became human to become Missus Benjamin Lincoln. The fact that Alexis became human was the main reason Glen had a hard time locating her. If she remained an elf, one of the age-old responsibilities of the Kairos, to watch over the Little Spirits of the earth, he would know where she was almost without thinking about it.

The problem with Emile and Mirowen was Mirowen did not seem so anxious to become human. Of course, Emile becoming an elf was laughable, so that was out of the question. Right now, the couple appeared to be in a stalemate position on the issue, but Glen knew that was not what Lincoln felt concerned about.

"Don't worry," Glen told Lincoln. "We will find your wife."

The Tower of Bricks

Mingus and Alexis landed somewhere in the woods. Alexis spent the first ten minutes yelling, and occasionally hitting her father in the arm. Mingus took it, but as she began to run out of steam, he said they had to move on from there.

"Why?" Alexis asked. "Why should I go anywhere with you?"

"Because I am moving on, and I don't believe you want to be left alone here in the wilderness, in the dark."

Alexis looked around for the first time. The woods appeared like a jungle, even if the trees and bushes were the sort that might be found anywhere in the temperate zone. All the same, there was no telling what might inhabit such woods—wherever they were. She had one more thing to say. "Cheater." They began to walk. Alexis added another word. "Kidnapper." After a time, she added, "Selfish."

Mingus checked the amulet once, set his direction, and otherwise kept the instrument hidden in his pocket. "An unspoiled wilderness, probably untouched by human hands," Mingus said, after a while. "I thought you were into all that environmental stuff, save the planet and all that."

"Save space for the trees and animals," she said. "That doesn't mean I want to go tromping through it. That sort of defeats the purpose."

Mingus shrugged. He picked up the pace where he could. He felt spooked, and wanted to get out of the woods as soon as possible. Something unnatural permeated the air.

After a while, Alexis said, "Wait a minute." Mingus stopped, assuming she needed a break. She was an old woman, after all. He knew he could not expect her to walk all night, but he wanted to get out of the woods.

In fact, all Alexis wanted to do was snap a thin branch off an oak tree. She used a little magic to clean off the bark and sand it smooth. "I need to use this wand to break it in," she said. Mingus said nothing. He looked around and feared she might get to use it sooner than expected. He walked.

Alexis was a real trooper. She walked a long way for someone her age. She thanked the gym membership, which she did not use often enough, and the Y, where she regularly swam. She kept in reasonable shape, but at last she said she had to stop.

"I can't do an all-nighter like some college kid. I need to rest. I need some sleep."

They came to a small clearing and Mingus did not argue. Only then did he think about how unprepared they were for such a journey. They had no tents or blankets, though it felt hot enough, the ground was dry, and it did not feel like rain. They did not have so much as a knife, which meant it would be hard to hunt or fish. If they arrived anywhere near his intended destination, he knew they could not count on human help.

Alexis did not worry about any of that. She just needed to sleep. She curled up in the grass and let her father watch over her.

Mingus remembered Alexis as a little elf with a big heart. A good spirit, with a good will, she was always kind to the animals and to all the people she met—even human people, which might have told him something. He did not need to think about that.

He remembered how everyone praised her gentle heart. She practically raised her baby brother when their mother took a turn on the earth before she retired to Mirroway. Of course, Roland would take her side. He would support Alexis in whatever she wanted to do. She was loved. Mingus, on the other hand, might have been...perhaps...not a very good father. He spent all his time in the history department and had little time for his daughter, Alexis. He named her after Alexander the Great, and his son Roland, he named after the best friend of Charles Martel. He spent so little time with his children, he admitted to himself. Even when he did, he made everyone feel like they were a burden and disturbing him. He did not need to think that way.

Mingus found some stones and built a small circle in the clearing. He gathered some dead wood and piled it inside the circle. He held his hand over the pile, and the fire jumped from his fingers to the wood. It gave him a small campfire to cut through the dark of night. He could do that much.

After mind magic, Mingus' element was fire. Alexis, a healer, a reflection of her internal goodness, could manipulate the air, like her mother. Roland, a hunter, had a little of both wind and fire. Mingus wondered where Roland might have gone off to in the night. He hoped the boy would find a nice elf maid and settle down. He prayed that he not make the same mistake his sister made.

Mingus cried to think of losing Alexis to death. Once she went over to the other side, even the Kairos would not be able to save her. Mingus was not a man to pray, but his heart cried out to the Kairos, the god of the elves, light and dark, and all the dwarfs in between. The Kairos became their god at the beginning of time—at the beginning of history. All the ancient gods on the earth gathered, agreed, and anointed him and her for the task.

Over one hundred and twenty-one lifetimes, the Kairos did take turns being male or female, more or less. The Kairos did have double the normal DNA, and the capacity to be him and her at the same time, but... Mingus understood being one person in two bodies at the same time would be very hard to pull off.

In any case, the ancient gods wanted a god for the little ones, and not just the little spirits of the earth, but the sprites of the fire, air and water as well. The gods wanted someone to watch over the little ones and, more to the point, be held responsible when they screwed up. But they were not about to put that much power into the hands of one of their own. So instead, the elves got a person who moved on every fifty or sixty years and started all over again from scratch as a newborn baby.

Mingus laughed at the memory of an expression old Fangs the goblin used to say. "Just our luck. We get a god who dies." Of course, the little ones rarely followed the rules the Kairos gave them, even if they knew the rules, like not lying, not stealing, being good, and doing good for others, and stuff. Then they got a break every sixty or so years when the Kairos started over again as a baby. It seemed a good arrangement, overall.

Mingus prayed. He knew little ones prayed to the Kairos all the time, but like humans, their normal prayers asked for things people had no business asking for. Most would be scared witless if the Kairos actually showed up. Mingus shrugged and figured he fit that category. He had no right to ask for a solution to his problem, and he knew, deep down, Alexis was a problem of his own making.

Mingus chided himself for spending so many years in study. He missed so much of his own children's childhood. He sighed, but realized it was too much to ask the Kairos to turn Alexis back into an elf. The Kairos, in the form of Lady Alice, was the one who made her human in the first place. It was too much to expect the Kairos Glen to change his mind.

Mingus stirred the fire for the next several hours and worried about what he could do. Alice stood there, in the tower on Avalon. She saw him escaping with Alexis held captive. Surely, she would send a rescue party. Old Doctor Procter might get that new amulet working, and then they would be after him. Mingus figured his only chance was to get beyond the range of the Heart of Time. He had to somehow take Alexis back to a time before history began. He had no idea how he might do that.

Something shuffled among the leaves. Mingus looked to the sky. It would be daylight in another hour. Something wailed nearby. Mingus woke Alexis gently.

"We have to go," he said. "We have intruded and made the spirit of this wilderness angry. I have been feeling the anger building, ever since you snapped off that twig from the oak tree. We have to get out of the woods while we still can."

"Father?" Alexis asked. She did not quite grasp what he said. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes to better focus.

"Come on. Now. Hurry." Mingus took Alexis by the elbow and dragged her among the trees.

"Father, the fire." Alexis saw the fire and objected.

"Give the wilderness spirit something to do while we run for it," he said, and picked up the pace. Alexis had a hard time keeping up.

They reached the edge of the woods when the sun topped the horizon. They tumbled out from the bushes and paused to stare. The plain before them had been stripped clean of vegetation. It had become a great mud flat, like it might have looked after a devastating flood. A great, three-story sized mound of dirt, like a small hill, stood to their left. On the top of the mound, an enormous brick-built tower stood and reached up toward the clouds.

"The bricks won't hold that much weight. It will come down," Mingus said.

"Father! Do you know what that is?" Alexis looked, awe-struck.

Mingus turned from the tower to look back at the trees. He saw the unmistakable face among the green. It looked like a face full of rage, tempered only by a touch of cruelty. Death glinted in the eyes; but it also looked like it had no intention of setting one foot beyond the edge of the forest. Clearly, it despised the human race that stripped the flatland bare. Mingus had no doubt the spirit would attack the humans if it could. He imagined some agreement had been reached. The edge of the forest looked like the DMZ. Mingus sighed his relief to be out of it.

Humanity

People, maybe a million souls, stretched out on the flat land beyond the tower. They dressed in ragged animal skins, or went naked, looked gaunt and starved, but for some reason, they kept working—gathering clay, whatever grass or bark they could to strengthen the bricks, baked the bricks, and added them to the tower. Why they would continue to work while they starved to death, Mingus could not imagine. They were human, he concluded. They were crazy.

"We need glamours, an illusion so the people think we are one of them."

"Father," Alexis objected. "These people need help."

"That may be, but we dare not stop among them." He paused to look at his daughter. He dressed her in fairy weave for their first journey, a magical cloth that could be shaped, colored, and given texture as desired. Alexis shaped her fairy weave to give it the look of raged, animal-skin clothing. She added the glamour to appear too skinny, like a person half-starved, and she added a slightly bloated belly, but he made her adjust the look.

"You need to darken your hair so you don't look so old. I suspect when the elderly collapse, they probably get eaten."

"Father," Alexis objected again, but she made the change.

"Now follow me," Mingus said. "I believe we have jumped to the first days, before the human race got scattered and the language broke into a million forms. These people likely speak the universal tongue, which you should understand. But if they speak to you, do not answer them. Keep your head down, and do not meet them in the eyes. We are going to try to skirt the edge of this mass of people, and walk. Only walk. If we must run, I will tell you to run; but if we show these people our backs, I suspect they will be after us like a pack of dogs."

"Father." Alexis said it a third time, but she voiced no more objections.

The people grunted and moaned, but few talked. It seemed like talking would take too much energy, and that was energy they needed to use for brick making and building. No one moved, or stepped aside for the couple. Mingus and Alexis had to walk around people, fire pits, and bricks laid out to bake in the sun. It felt like they were weaving a thread through a tapestry.

The first portion of the journey went well. The people ignored them, but the mass of people stretched for several miles, up to the edge of a hill that looked a long way away.

"There is some powerful enchantment at work here," Mingus said. Being an elf, he was able to direct his words to Alexis' ears only.

Alexis felt unsure if she could still do that. She knew the little ones in the future could hear, understand, and respond to any human language, but Alexis knew she could no longer do that since she became human. _Too bad_ , she thought. _It would have helped when she and Benjamin traveled to France_. Alexis contented herself with listening.

"It appears to be centered in the middle of this mass of people, and feels like some form of compulsion. No doubt that is why these starving people are continuing to work day and night. And here, I thought they were just expressing typical human insanity."

_Father!_ Alexis did not say the word out loud, but she thought it as hard as she could.

Two-thirds of the way along the edge of the camps, and Alexis could not hold her eyes to the ground. The distraction came in the form of a dozen naked, filthy children attempting to run and play. It looked like a game of tag, and for the most part, the adults around them ignored them. Sometimes the children got yelled at. Sometimes they got pushed to the ground or got hit. One brute picked up a little girl and threw her into the fire. He laughed as the girl scrambled to get out. She did not get badly injured, but Alexis could not help herself.

"Father. The children." She watched a baby try to suckle a dry and shriveled breast. The mother had nothing to give. "The children," Alexis repeated.

A man stood in their path and signaled for others to join him. "What about the children?" the man asked.

"They are making a nuisance of themselves," Mingus quickly lied. "We can't get any work done."

"I've watched you," the man said. "You haven't been working. You are not staying in your place. I think you are trying to escape."

The crowd that gathered began to make noises about taking them to Nimrod. More than one suggested eating them.

"We are going to collect plants for the bricks," Mingus tried. "In the hills. It is the new place." He pointed up the hill at the end of the camp. "We were sent to see what is there that may be useful."

The man paused, rubbed his chin, and the crowd noise toned down. The man looked once up the hill before he decided. "No. That is the place from which destruction comes. No one goes into the hills." The crowd noise started up again. Alexis pulled her wand. Mingus made a fist around which he formed a small fireball. Then everything stopped and became utterly silent. Everyone looked frozen in place, unable to move.

A woman appeared in that same instant. She looked young and seemed to be well fed, which made her stand out in the crowd. The man who blocked their way and the crowd did not appear to notice. In fact, after a moment, the people all went back to what they were doing as if nothing at all happened.

"Let me look at you," the woman said, and grabbed Mingus by the chin. He squinted as she squeezed, but did not resist. "Elder elf. You two are leaking the future all over the place." She let go and looked at Alexis. She smiled. "Former elf," she said, correctly.

"Yes, ma'am," Alexis offered, and felt it was only right to curtsey.

"Your Kairos. I see you belong to them. They are right now wending their way back to the tower. They are not in a position to draw attention to themselves by meeting up with you. Really. You must stop leaking the future. I have already been exposed to far more knowledge about the future than is safe. The Kairos is beginning to leak, badly. I had to put a hedge around them so the others could not find out about tomorrow."

"I am sorry," Alexis said, feeling the need to apologize out of her confusion. She did not understand why this woman referred to the Kairos as they and them.

"We don't know how to stop leaking," Mingus admitted. He imagined this woman had to be a goddess and she unconsciously read their minds.

"I can see your limitations. I am a titan. The gods have not begun yet, though young Zeus has been born and he is coming to kill his father." She raised her hands, one to each of them. "There. I have placed a hedge also around you, and I will ask others to strengthen it. I have also scrambled your words, so when you speak of future things, no one may hear unless they are standing with you and hear by normal hearing. The gods to be do not need to know what will be."

"But what if I inadvertently say something in the wrong ears?" Alexis felt concerned.

"Then you will give the Kairos in the future many headaches."

Mingus understood what confused Alexis. The Kairos in this day had to be the twins, Zadok and Amri, if the history was correct. He looked at his daughter with his expressionless look, but the woman read the elder elf's true insides.

"You love your daughter well. That is the only reason I did not give you to the bokarus of the woods. And yes, the Kairos is Amri and Zadok. And yes, I can still read your thoughts. It is my hedge, but it is too late for me. I have already been tainted by the future, even beyond the day of the dissolution of the gods, though most of the gods have not yet been born." The woman raised her hand and the three of them vanished from that place and reappeared on the distant hilltop, the one before the mountain that still had grass and trees upon it. A fire had already been made, and a beast of some sort, well cooked, roasted slowly over the flames.

"But who are you?" Alexis asked.

"Leto," the woman said, and she had two things to add. "I will also put a hedge around your friends when they arrive, so you may have to explain it to them. Now I go to mourn. I know Zeus will bring an end to the days of Cronos. That is as it must be. Time being the mere counting of days will come to an end. Time will now be vested in the Kairos. Everything will get complicated and confusing. It will be counted by events and the rise and fall of great civilizations. Now, we begin event time, and I know the tower will fall." She vanished.

Alexis turned to her father. "What friends?"

Mingus shrugged. "All I know is the way to get home is to go back to the beginning of time. Once we break through the last barrier, we should automatically go back to our own time." He lied.

"Should?"

"Will."

"So why did you kidnap me if you were just going to bring me right back?" she asked in her sharpest voice.

Mingus shrugged. "I realized when we got here that it was not fair to you. What I want doesn't matter." He looked sad, but elves could fake that look very well.

Alexis did not buy it. "Change of heart?" She scoffed.

Mingus shook his head and offered another lie. "Actually, in the forest, I realized I was putting you in far more danger bringing you here than leaving you back home. I never could fool you, or your mother. Here. Have some lunch. Then you can lie down for a while and get some rest."

Alexis did not trust her own father, but that did not prevent her from eating and lying down. She trusted enough to know her father would watch over her while she slept.

Alexis woke up around four in the afternoon, as near as she could tell. It appeared to be summer, so the sun was still well up in the sky. Mingus had the campsite cleaned up, so all they had to do was walk.

"You wouldn't have liked the climb earlier, in the heat of the day." Mingus tried to sound like he cared.

Again, Alexis did not exactly buy it, but she went along because she had no choice. And it felt all uphill. After a short way, it seemed like they left the hill and started to climb a mountain. The sun eventually set off to their left hand, but Mingus did not want to stop. He made a fire into a small floating globe of light to trail them in the dark. Alexis used her wand to make a fairy light, to light their steps and shed some light on the way ahead.

Alexis had to stop about every hour to catch her breath, but Mingus seemed kind to her, even brushing off logs and boulders to let her sit and rest her legs. Near midnight, they finally came to a dark entrance to a cave.

"No," Alexis objected. "I'm not going in there."

"I'm sorry, but this is the way. Trust me. We are almost there. Besides, I don't want to risk sleeping again out in the open. Trust me. Another hour and we will be home."

Alexis screwed up her face and tried to shove her fairy light into the cave. It immediately went out. She took out her wand and tried again. The second light fared no better than the first.

"Wait, let me show you." Mingus said. He stepped through the opening and made a fire light that lit up the way for a short distance.

"A tunnel?" Alexis asked.

"That is how I know we are in the right place, now come on."

Alexis stepped forward and felt her whole-body tingle as she stepped through the opening. She watched her wand rapidly shrink. The oak stick became covered with bark before it sprouted a leaf, became a twig, and vanished altogether. "What?"

"Proof we are on the right road," Mingus said. "You don't need the wand to make a light."

"It helps. I'm tired, already. The wand helps me maintain focus so I don't have to do it all in my head. That is very draining."

"But only one more gate and we will reach the last point," Mingus assured her. "When we pass the last point, we will be home."

"Is that what that was, a gate?"

"Like an invisible door," Mingus said. He knew she did not remember much from their journey home from the eighteenth century. He made sure she did not remember.

"It felt like spider webs."

"So only one more web, and after that we will come to our destination."

"I don't like spiders," Alexis said, and shivered, but she walked.

Part II: Missing Person

Present day outside Washington DC. Kairos 121: Glen, the Storyteller.

### Recording...

Glen looked at his silent companions while the plane landed. Lincoln looked distressed over his missing wife. Lockhart probably thought about his miraculous healing. Boston tried not to think about the paperwork. All seemed right with the world, as the pilot shut down the engine, until Lincoln reached out to grab Glen by the arm, as if Glen had no idea what the man wanted to say.

Lockhart stood up and stepped out of the plane on his own two feet. He took a deep breath of fresh air and let it out slowly through his smile. He couldn't help it. He spent the last fifteen years in a wheelchair and had come to dread retirement. Now, healed and free, he stood on his own two feet and tasted the good air.

Glen scooted past, but paused long enough to repeat the earlier comment. "Don't start depending on those healing chits. That is a good way to get yourself killed." Lockhart nodded, but then they saw Lincoln rushing to the door so Glen hurried off.

Boston followed Lincoln. She lugged the folded-up wheelchair. "I guess this goes in storage." The young woman groaned as she lifted it over the lip to the ramp. Boston and the old man walked side by side toward the main building where they saw people running toward them. Boston thought to say one more thing before they got swallowed by the crowd.

"I will miss pushing you around in this thing."

"Me too," Lockhart responded in all seriousness. Then he had to stop walking to hug Bobbi, the director of the Men in Black. Bobbi cried big tears; while Lockhart had to be touched, praised and congratulated for getting his legs back by any number of others as well.

Glen got as far as the door to the main building before Lincoln caught him, grabbed his arm and spouted again. "My wife has to be out there somewhere."

Once again, Glen tried to reassure the man. "Don't worry. Up until now there were a few other things pressing, like fending off an alien invasion and finding you, for instance. But Alexis is now my top priority. Oh no." He said that last because he saw Mirowen and Emile Roberts racing toward him. "Lincoln is one. This is two. Trouble does come in threes," he mumbled. "I can't wait."

"Hey you!" The shout came from further down the hall as Mirowen and Doctor Roberts hustled up to the front door to hide behind Glen. A marine followed and only stopped when Glen held up his hand like a traffic cop.

"Go tell Colonel Weber to meet me in the lunchroom in thirty minutes." The marine looked ready to object, so Glen repeated himself. "Go."

That just made the marine mad. It looked like he was going to say "Who the hell are you?" but when Glen vanished and an absolutely stunning young woman in an outfit both tight and short stood in his place, it came out, "What the fuck?"

"Princess," Mirowen, the elf, lowered her eyes in a sign of respect for her goddess.

"Crude." The Princess stared down the marine before she gave both Lincoln and Doctor Roberts a sharp look. She grabbed Mirowen by the arm. "We will be in the ladies' room so too bad for you Lincoln." It remained the one place Lincoln could not follow, and she could get some peace, even if Glen could not.

Once inside the women's room, the Princess turned immediately to the mirror. She understood the reflex, an automatic reaction to see how she looked. The main part of her mind focused on the elf, and she spoke. "So Mirowen, what have you and Emile decided?"

Mirowen curtsied, and gracefully, despite the fact that she stood dressed in greasy overalls. "Lady. Emile is reluctant to become elf kind, and we have researched it. It has not seemed to us that you have done that very often."

"Not often," the Princess responded in an absent-minded way as she examined her eyes in the mirror. "But one of my godly lifetimes like Danna or Amphitrite might arrange it."

Mirowen curtsied a second time and looked at the floor. She spoke softly. "I understand."

"But Mirowen, what about joining Alexis in the human world?" The Princess turned from the mirror to look at the elf, the lovely elf. The Princess had no doubt she would make an equally lovely human woman.

"I am prepared for that." Mirowen dropped her eyes again but she did not sound convinced. "Oh, but Colonel Weber is threatening to drag Emile back for trial for stealing property from area 51. But it was my unicorn. I was just getting her back."

Boston came to join them at that point, and also went straight for the mirror while the Princess turned again to face Mirowen. "You know if you stay as you are, he will grow old more rapidly than you can imagine while you will hardly change at all. You will lose him, and he will lose you in the end."

"One of us will likely go first in any case." Mirowen sounded forlorn, and she would not look the Princess in the eyes.

"I could do that," Boston interrupted. "With Lockhart, I mean. He is such a snuggle bear, and a good kisser too, I bet. If only he wasn't such a father figure."

"Grandfather figure," the Princess corrected her, and Boston did not deny that truth.

"Oh, but did you hear Lincoln's concern for his missing wife?" Boston asked. She spoke to Mirowen and the Princess without putting together in her mind that the Princess and Glen were essentially the same person. They were separated by over two thousand years of time, and while they had different upbringings and life experiences, male and female being a big, obvious difference, and while they developed their own personalities and skills and so on, deep inside, they remained the same being. When Glen reached into the past, or future, and brought a different life to fill his shoes for a while, as he sometimes described it, he could still see and hear everything, almost like Glen and the Princess could talk to each other through time. Boston was not exactly sure how that worked. "I only met her, but I understand Alexis was an elf once. He must really love her." Boston finished her own train of thought.

The Princess nodded for Boston, but she spoke with an eye on Mirowen. "And she really loves him and would do anything for him."

"Two peas in a pod." Bobbi, the director came in, a marine on her heels. The director caught the tail end of the conversation. "And that is why we need to find Alexis if we can. Is it crowded in here or what?"

"Women's conference," Boston suggested. The marine grimaced. She set down her briefcase and took a turn in the mirror.

"Yes, well, Mirowen, we will talk more, later." The Princess took back the conversation. "Meanwhile, I had a hard time at first getting a lead on Alexis. She became too human, I think."

"She still has the magic," Bobbi noted.

"Yes, but so do any number of humans these days, and more so as the Other Earth waxes toward full conjunction."

"What about the Lady of Avalon?" Boston suggested.

"Alice?" The Princess closed her eyes. "Yes, that is how I found her. Alexis is there in Avalon, or was, and I suppose I knew that all along. She was just not the priority because she did not appear to be in any danger. Her father Mingus took her out of fear that she was getting too old and would soon die and leave him grieving." The Princess sighed. "I guess we have to go fetch her."

Bobbi touched the Princess on the arm and the Princess started to move over, but Bobbi had a request first and only glanced briefly at the marine before she spoke. "Can I go to Avalon? All these years I have worked this operation and in these last few years I have kept it all running, and I have never been to Avalon. Not even once."

The Princess smiled and hugged her friend. "Soon. Not this time, but after you retire, and no, you cannot retire today. I need you to keep Colonel Dipstick away from Mirowen and Emile while I am gone." The Princess turned toward the marine. "So, do you work for Darth Weber?" Colonel Weber's name was properly pronounced "Vay-ber." The marine picked up her briefcase and smiled, but just a little.

"I don't do typing pool gossip," she said, and left.

"Humph." Bobbi harrumphed, but not in a sour way. She stepped up to the mirror, touched her gray hair, looked at Boston who was maybe twenty-five, the beautiful elf, the incredible Princess, and harrumphed again. "What am I looking at? I am way past the age for mirrors."

All the women paused to give Bobbi love hugs before they exited the women's room together. They had a real conference to attend, and they had to get Lincoln's wife back.

Mission Team

The woman marine arrived in the lunchroom first. She saluted Colonel Weber and the captain who stood up to greet her. The colonel went straight to the introductions. "Lieutenant Harper. Captain Decker."

The captain stuck out his hand. "Welcome to the monkey house."

She shook the hand and responded with her name. "Katie."

"Sit," the colonel said, and it sounded like an order so both complied, while one of the three men across the table spoke.

"Decker and Harper. Sounds like a couple of cops from a cheap television show."

Colonel Weber pointed at the speaker and continued with the introductions. "Robert Lockhart is the assistant director of the so-called Men in Black organization. Ben Lincoln is the one with the missing wife. Of course, you know Doctor Emile _I am stealing your property_ Roberts."

"Sir." The lieutenant acknowledged each man and kept it business-like. "Mind if I ask a few questions?" The colonel waved as if to say be my guest, but good luck getting any straight answers.

"I read the briefing but I don't exactly understand it. I have heard of people who claimed to be reincarnated, but this sounds a bit more extensive than that."

"And I hardly expected to find it in a briefing paper," Captain Decker agreed.

"Not reincarnated," Lockhart rubbed his unshaven chin as he spoke. "He sometimes refers to himself as an experiment in time and genetics going back to the beginning of history. And if the paper was accurate, you will find it says he also remembers the future."

Lincoln touched Lockhart on the arm to quiet him and spoke to the marines. "May I ask your security clearance?"

The colonel answered. "Both Captain Decker and Lieutenant Harper have been cleared all the way to the top."

Lincoln rubbed his own chin. "That might not be high enough."

"That's right." Lockhart grinned. "There are some things it would be best if even we did not know about. Isn't that right, Emile?"

Doctor Roberts looked up. He tried to keep a low profile in front of the colonel who kept threatening to arrest him, but he could not resist a response. "Like Santa, spry little elf that he is," he joked.

"Yes." Lieutenant Harper thought they were all kidding and tried to get back on topic. "What does it mean when it refers to elves and dwarfs? I assume that is code for something."

Doctor Roberts went back to hiding and Lincoln said nothing, but Lockhart grinned more broadly and shook his head slowly. The lieutenant reacted.

"You must be joking. I stopped playing fairy princess when I was five and found out there are no such things."

Before a more reasonable response could be made, the entrance of the women, who were laughing and having a wonderful time, interrupted them. Colonel Weber and Captain Decker stood. Lieutenant Harper also stood, though after what she just heard, she felt like it might have been safer to stay seated. The colonel at least got to introduce the director, Roberta Brooks.

"Bobbi," Bobbi said, as she shook their hands and took her seat.

Boston butted in front and took each hand in turn. "Mary Riley, but everyone calls me Boston." She said it twice and went to sit next to Lockhart.

Mirowen nodded shyly at the marines but avoided shaking their hands. "Mirowen." She went to sit beside Doctor Roberts.

"Mirowen?" The captain asked, like he might be searching for a last name.

"Soon to be Roberts, I think." Lincoln sounded morose. Mirowen's presence underlined for him like nothing else that Alexis was missing.

"For now, just Mirowen." Lockhart kept grinning and raised his hand to point his thumb at the couple. "She is an elf."

Mirowen blushed, but she brushed back her hair to reveal her pointed ears. She turned quickly to Doctor Roberts and he gave her a peck on the lips to reassure her.

At the sight of those ears, Lieutenant Harper sat. When she sat, the captain sat with her, and barely in time to deal with what happened next.

"Hi, I'm the Princess, but people call me..." The Princess paused and pretended to think about it before she concluded, "Princess." She smiled her dazzling smile. "Right now I have to go home. My husband owes me a foot massage, or something." She reached to take both the captain's and the lieutenant's hands.

"And where is home?" the Captain asked, while he unsuccessfully tried to keep his eyes from wandering up and down her curves.

"204 BC," the Princess answered with a straight face. "Now don't let go," she added, and vanished from that time and place so Glen could return to his own time and face his own dilemma. The captain let go, but only for a second.

"Now." Glen smiled at the military people. "Lovely to have you here. Lovely to meet you both. You can't come."

"Now, wait a minute," Colonel Weber wanted to protest, but Glen cut him off.

"Despite your soldiers, you have no authority and no real power here." Glen walked around the table to the far wall, the only big, blank wall in the room. "Be gone," he mumbled. "Before somebody drops a house on you."

Once at the wall, Glen turned and looked around the room. He had instructions. "Bobbi, I guess you need to play hostess to Mister Smith when he gets back here on the Kargill ship, at least until I get back. Emile and Mirowen, make a decision already." He took a deep breath and then paused to consider what he was about to do before he spoke. "Letting ordinary mortals other than me and my immediate family into Avalon is not a common occurrence. But Lincoln, you can come and fetch your wife. Lockhart, you need to come to be the boss, and keep a tight rein on Lincoln. Boston, you need to come to keep Lockhart from freaking out, and you need to behave yourself." Glen shook his finger at Boston while Lincoln, Lockhart and an excited Boston got up to stand beside him. "That's it. Colonel Weber, Mirowen and Doctor Roberts better be here and untouched when I get back." And with that said, he turned again to the wall and spoke softly.

Emile took Mirowen's hand and she looked at him, smiled broadly, and repeated an ancient rhyme. "How many miles to Avalon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again." Part of the wall turned momentarily dark. A seven-foot-tall and seven-foot-wide space took on a shadowy look before it suddenly became as bright as a window facing into a sunny day. An archaic archway formed around the space and it became an opening to another place, altogether. The grass there looked green with life, and the castle in the background, high on a hill, looked positively medieval. The aroma of life filled the stuffy conference room, and people sighed, softly.

In the foreground, a little creature stood and bowed most regally in Glen's direction. Several eyes shot toward Mirowen. Mirowen kept up a glamour that made her look nearly human with only the pointed ears to give her away. This creature in the archway was clearly not human, and Glen did not help when he named the thing.

"Kalderoshineamotadecobean. Lovely to see you."

"My Lord is always gracious."

"Speaks sort of human," Decker whispered to Harper, who did not hear him because, for some reason, she started crying. "Bit of a shock though. I can't imagine an ogre."

Glen invited his fellow travelers to cross the threshold, and he watched them closely as they went, before he turned once more to the room and spoke. "Oh, and Mirowen, don't worry. I hope to be back long before the baby is born."

Mirowen flushed as red as Boston's red hair before Glen stepped through the wall and the entrance to Avalon snapped shut with a bright flash of light.

Avalon

Lockhart spoke as the door closed. "I feel like I died. I thought when I died I would get to be young again." Lincoln struggled to not throw up. Boston looked around and grinned with all her might.

"If we died, we went to Heaven." Boston pointed at the castle, rubbed her shoe in the green grass and reveled in the fresh air and glorious colors everywhere she looked. Somehow, the colors all seemed richer and brighter to her than they ever did back on drab old earth. A field of ripe brown grain grew, not far away on her right, and a small sparkling blue river on her left flowed into the deep green sea not twenty yards to her rear. It all felt too wonderful, and the castle, the most wonderful of all. It looked like a veritable tapestry of colors with more spires, towers and keeps than she could count, all with flags fluttering in the cool breeze, and some of those towers shot right up into the clouds. "I feel like I'm in Oz, you know, from black and white to color."

"If it's any consolation, I feel like I died too," Glen said. "But the feeling will pass, shortly. And no, Boston, this isn't Oz and it isn't God's heaven. This is in the second heavens."

"I don't understand," Lockhart admitted.

"Very simple." Glen motioned for Mister Bean to proceed. The little one strutted up the path and the others fell in behind. "The second heavens is my name for the place between Heaven and Earth. It is where Aesgard, Olympus, the Golden City of the gods and all the other places of the gods used to be, including the places where the spirits of the dead were kept until the coming of the Christ, like Hades, you know."

"This is the place between earth and heaven?" Lincoln started to feel better. "It must be small. Thin like a line?"

Glen shook his head. "Infinite and eternal as far as I know, and multi-layered, like a fine French pastry. The isles of Avalon are called innumerable, but actually, they add up to very little compared to the vastness of it all. Alice keeps the atmosphere and everything functioning well enough for this little part so we have a sanctuary for my little ones, and others across the various islands of the archipelago."

"What do you mean she keeps the atmosphere?" Lincoln took a deep breath and wondered.

"I mean the natural state of the second heavens is chaos. It folds in and back on itself and even time is uncertain and in flux. In order to have anything here that approximates earth and the natural laws of physics, it has to be carved out of the chaos and sustained. Otherwise we would all be floating through an airless, ever changing and swirling mass of stuff the color of rainbow sherbet and with the consistency of something like cotton candy."

"Hurry up. Come on," Boston interrupted. She got excited. "The Castle gate is opening."

The others saw the gate opening but were presently huffing and puffing to get up the hill. They paused to stare at the girl and Glen spoke. "I'm fifty-seven, Lincoln is sixty-five, and Lockhart is sixty-eight, ready to retire. We will get there."

Boston frowned and ran ahead.

"I think it would be best if I let Lady Alice take it from here." Glen finished his thought and vanished from that spot. Lady Alice met Boston as she ran inside the door to the castle courtyard.

"Thank you Mister Kalderoshineamotadecobean. You did your job perfectly and brought them here safe and sound." Alice's first thought was for her little one. The little Bean grinned more broadly than a human face could possibly grin and marched off across the castle courtyard with a real swagger. "Hello Boston dear. It is good to see you again." Alice stepped up and gave Boston a kiss on each cheek, and Boston had a thought. She spun around and saw Lockhart and Lincoln but no Glen.

"Glen?" For all her reading and experience with the subject of the Kairos, she still felt uncertain about exactly how all these different lives of the Kairos actually worked, especially when an old man vanished and became a much younger woman, or traded places with her though time, or however he explained it.

"Yes, Glen is here." Alice touched her heart and responded with a very human smile. "But not at the moment. For now, he thought I would be best to explain."

"Trouble?" Lockhart picked up on something in Alice's voice. Once upon a time, he had been a police officer, and he still showed the instincts now and then.

"Eh?" Lincoln originally worked with the CIA. He had other virtues, though presently his thoughts were for his missing wife.

"If you will follow." Alice waved them forward and they crossed the courtyard. They tried hard not to stare.

The yard overflowed with bustling little ones, all about on some errand or other. Dwarfs, elves of light and dark, and others hard to categorize could be seen working and walking across the cobblestones. Fairies and pixies of many different types and sizes fluttered through the air. Two hobgoblins struggled with a barrel of something and tried to load it onto a wagon. One big creature stood off in one corner, like an ogre or troll in the shadows. The men did not want to look too close. Boston, of course, delighted in all of it, and even clapped several times at the sights that came to her eyes.

At the back of the courtyard, they stepped through a gate and into a garden-like area. It looked big and well groomed, but it seemed more nearly the size of a small forest than a garden. The trees appeared to be placed randomly, like in an old growth forest, but the paths were clean of debris.

"One could get lost in this castle and wander for days without finding a door," Lincoln remarked, quietly to himself.

"It has been known to happen." Alice heard, and threw the response over her shoulder.

They traveled through several buildings, several courtyards, and several gardens—all different—and came at last to the spring from which the small river flowed. Boston guessed when she saw the naiad sunning herself. She would have been more taken by the sight, however, if the naiad had not been lounging in a plastic lawn chair.

"Is nothing sacred?" Boston asked with a click of her tongue.

"Very little these days," Alice sighed, and opened a door to a building which might have been called a cathedral back on Earth. The building, a tower, contained only one room, all wood. It looked like a construction as old as time itself. The wood looked full of delicate carvings, the walls and floor full of intricate mosaics and the ceiling full of magnificent paintings all picturing the one hundred and twenty-one lifetimes of the Kairos, so far. In the center of the room, there sat only one piece of furniture. A three-pronged table held in its grasp a crystal that throbbed with a discernibly bright light. The visitors found it otherwise impossible to tell where the rest of the light in the room came from, since there were no windows and no other visible doors but the one. It seemed to Boston as if the building had been built around the light to trap the light inside for all eternity. Boston held her breath in that sacred space.

The Heart of Time

"Gentlemen, and Boston." Alice spoke in hushed tones. She did not have to speak very loud to be heard through the utter silence of that tremendous room. "This is the Heart of Time." She pointed at the crystal that throbbed with light like a beating heart, but she did not touch it. "This has recorded all of human history since before the days the human race became scattered across the face of the earth. In here, you will find Shakespeare's London, Caesar's Rome, Alexander's Babylon and everything all the way back to the Tower of Shinar.

Boston stepped up for a closer look, but Alice had not finished explaining. "There are time zones represented here. They are centered around my person, but allow access between one of my lifetimes and the next. They have always been off limits until a few years ago when Avalon got overrun by a demon, a goddess. She discovered the time zones. She got stopped and prevented from carrying out her wicked designs. She can't have done more than a few experiments, but still..."

"My wife?" Lincoln could not contain himself, but closed his mouth immediately after he spoke. He looked around to be sure he had not disturbed anything or anyone, though they were alone in that room.

Alice nodded grimly. "Alexis was taken by her father Mingus. We could follow their progress through the heart. She got carried back to the end of the eighteenth century, to the days of her birth with the hope that the memory of her happy childhood might convince her to give up her life as a human and become an elf again. Mingus fears to see her age. He fears he will lose her too soon and he cannot bear that thought."

"Uh?" Lincoln did not want to interrupt again.

"Do not worry. She steadfastly refused, and tried to escape on several occasions. But once it became known that the Storyteller—that Glen was awake from his memory loss and long slumber, Mingus panicked. Through the heart, he has taken Alexis into the deep past. But do not be afraid. There is only so far he can go."

"Why don't you just zap them back here?" Lockhart sounded respectful, but not afraid to speak.

"I could fetch Mingus easily enough through the heart, but Alexis is human. I have no such power over her and I would not dare leave her alone in history." Alice paused to collect her thoughts before she spoke again. "As I said, each time zone centers around a life I once lived. But I stand at the center of each time zone and the center moves with me. If they came to the center I could do something, but as long as Mingus skirts around the edge, I can do nothing."

"What do you mean the Heart of Time has recorded history?" Boston asked. She thought hard and tried to picture it. "Do you mean it is like a computer program, but one you can walk into so it seems real?"

Alice smiled. "It is utterly real. The Heart of Time gives access to reality, not just a recording. The thing is, the reason the time zones are strictly off limits to my little ones—to everyone, is because I have not been able to determine for certain how a change in the events in the zones of time affect actual history on Earth. I believe they are the same—that history itself is in play."

"But you can't reach them as long as they stay out of the center of the time zone." Lockhart went back to the original proposition.

"I cannot." Alice shook her head. "But you can reach them. I can both send you from here and retrieve you as well when you come to where I am in the center of whatever zone you are in. And don't worry, Lincoln. There is only so far Doctor Mingus can go," she repeated.

"That sounds risky," Boston said. "What if we change things by accident? What if we change real history?"

"It is a risk, but it is not that simple. Most changes and minor changes do not seem to matter. Yet even with interlopers there seems to be some correlation with actual events. That is why the time zones have remained off limits for all these millennia. But to ask about the correlation between the events in the zones and actual history as it occurred is really a chicken or egg question."

"Like do the interlopers have a bearing on history that we don't quite see or are even their actions somehow directed by the program?" Boston said, thoughtfully, and Alice nodded.

"Your pardon." Lockhart spoke up again. "But why are you afraid to leave her alone in history?" His old police instincts acted up again.

Alice looked at the man, but she could say nothing less than the truth. "Because most of my lives are surrounded by danger. And if you die in the past, you will remain dead forever. And then there is this." Alice swallowed. "Several years ago, though Ashtoreth was defeated as I said, she sent ghouls and bogeys, terrible giants, dragons, and things too terrible to name into the time zones. There are still some unsavories there that have evaded my reach. Presently, the time zones are not a safe place to be."

"But you can send us to Alexis and bring us right back, right?" Lincoln needed confirmation.

"I will," Alice affirmed. "And I have gotten this help for you since there is no telling how Mingus will respond when he is caught." Alice snapped her fingers and two more people appeared in that tremendous room. She pointed to the first who looked human enough. "Doctor Procter is half human and has been Doctor Mingus' partner in the history department for three hundred years. If anyone can speak sense to the elder elf, I have every hope that Doctor Procter can." Doctor Procter looked older than either of the men present, and he had the great white beard to prove it, but he tipped his hat and his smile looked genuine enough.

"Gentlemen, and young Boston, it will be a pleasure and honor traveling with you. I must say—"

"A-hem," Alice interrupted and pointed at the other person. This other man stood as tall as Lockhart, but skinny, and utterly elf in the way Boston always imagined an elf should look. He did not look at all like Mirowen—a virtual human with pointed ears. This one still belonged on the reservation, but he was cute, Boston thought, and young.

"This is Roland, Mingus' son and Alexis' brother. He has volunteered to represent the family in this matter. He is a bit young, but I trust you will keep him in line."

"Lady, I am fully grown. I turned one hundred and twenty-six last Yuletide."

Alice made no comment on the elf's age but simply added, "He has no trouble with his sister's choice to live a human life, and disagrees strongly with what his father has done."

"The important thing is she be happy, don't you think?" The young elf looked at Lincoln.

"Oh, I think it," Lincoln said. "I just did not know anyone in her family thought it."

"And I think it, too," Alice said, with a great and warm smile. "And I think there is time for a good feast and a good night's rest before your journey. Come." She led them away from the Heart of Time and to a proper medieval banquet complete with acrobats, minstrels, storytellers, and all sorts of real magical entertainments. Everyone enjoyed themselves, until the middle of the night.

The Middle of the Night

"My lady." The elf maid tried to wake Boston, but Boston felt determined to sleep in. She never had so comfortable a sleep in her whole life. "My lady." It did no good.

"Stand aside." The fairy fluttered down to the end of the bed and pulled out her wand.

"Oh, no." The elf shut her eyes. The fairy waved her wand and a spark struck Boston on her toe. Boston sat up like she got charged with lightning.

"What? What? I'm awake, mom!" Boston's eyes came into focus. "Fairy," she said. The fairy had her hands on her hips and tapped her foot in mid-air.

"Up, lazy bones."

"My lady." Boston heard, turned to look at the elf beside her, and got right up, though she was naked.

"What is it? Why is it still dark out?"

"You must dress. You are needed."

Boston looked around. "But my clothes? I laid them out here for the morning. Where did they go?"

"Lady Alice said fairy weave only." The elf maid lifted a skimpy bit of cloth from the bed.

With the word fairy, Boston dared another look at the one in the room. "I am sorry miss fairy," she said. "I was having such a wonderful dream."

The fairy softened her look. "Quite all right. Good dreams are worth holding on to. And it is Mistletoe."

"I'm Mary Riley, but everyone calls me Boston." She looked at the elf who was still holding the little bit of cloth.

"Lady, you must put this on."

"But that isn't even enough for a bikini," Boston protested.

"It is fairy weave." The fairy fluttered in close. "Her name is Rosemary, and this little cloth is magical. It can be grown or shaped with a thought. It can be separated into several pieces and even hardened to make shoes or boots. You can make everything from an arctic outfit to a bikini and even color your bikini with lavender flowers, if you like. Here."

Mistletoe helped Boston dress in sensible jeans, running shoes and a shirt while Rosemary took up the explanation. "You can make a nightgown for the night and freshen the clothes in the morning with a thought and without ever having to put them in the wash."

"Remarkable," Boston responded at last. "But how do I know it won't change every-which-way every time I have a stray thought?"

"Because you are human, it won't change with your thoughts like normal. You will have to tell it to change."

"Good to know," Boston said, and while they fixed her shoes she had another thought. "How is it you know about running shoes and such?"

"I've been to Earth," Mistletoe said, flatly, like Boston should have guessed.

"And Miss Mistletoe is friends with the Kairos' daughter."

"I was once. I am sure she does not remember."

"Of course, in your big size." Boston had a revelation. "You can pass for a human. I remember Missus Pumpkin getting big. So, you have been to Earth and pretended to be human."

"Not too well," Rosemary whispered and nodded at the fairy, as if Mistletoe could not hear. "She is too pretty to be human." The fairy shrugged and Boston turned to the elf, but Rosemary anticipated the question. "Oh no, Lady. You are the first mortal human I have ever seen."

"And I think you are rather pretty yourself," Boston complimented the elf and saw her turn her eyes away, just a little.

"Enough now. Come. We must be going. They are waiting on you." Mistletoe led the way. Rosemary stayed behind to straighten the bed.

"Why so early?" Boston asked, but Mistletoe did not know.

Boston found the others in the banquet hall where she made herself a plate of hot eggs and biscuits from the breakfast bar someone had set up. She imagined it had to be the fat little dwarf lady from the night before that seemed determined to make her gain twenty pounds in one night. She enjoyed the breakfast, and only got startled briefly when Lockhart set a backpack beside her.

"What is this?" she asked.

"Medical kit. Hope we don't need it." Lockhart gave a short answer as he checked his shotgun. Boston saw he was also armed with a police pistol. Lincoln had a pistol and a wicked looking knife attached to his belt. Roland sat at a nearby table, sharpening his sword with a whetstone. Boston looked quickly in her pack and found a Berretta, like the one she used on the range, and her own wicked looking knife. Beside the medical kit, there was something else. She pulled it out.

She saw it was a handheld computer, which she immediately recognized as a database, and maybe a few other things. "What is this?" she asked out loud. No one answered at first, and then Boston had a real shock. She saw Captain Decker and Lieutenant Harper. They looked more than well-armed, with weapons that looked pretty sophisticated for regular issue. Decker also had some equipment, which from her distance looked like scanning equipment. Harper had a similar handheld, and she walked toward Boston.

Boston held up the handheld so Lieutenant Harper saw the back of the unit. "That is a Reichgo battery," she said. "We haven't learned how to duplicate it yet, but it will put out a continual electrical charge up to ten years or more depending on usage."

Boston paused and thought about what she was going to say. "I don't get it," she said at last, to whoever might be listening. "I thought we were just going to retrieve them and come right back."

"Here." Lieutenant Harper put something like a watch on the table. "This is an old-style walkie-talkie with a ten to twenty-mile range that should work without satellites." She walked back to her equipment.

Boston picked up the watch, examined it closely, and put it on in time to see Lady Alice come in, followed by Doctor Procter. The Doctor carried an amulet, which he shook, listened to, and shook again. The amulet appeared to be made of wood and strung with leather so it looked like nothing special, but Boston knew appearances could be deceiving. She wondered what it was for.

"Are we ready?" Alice clapped her hands when she spoke to be sure she had everyone's attention. Boston raised her hand like a schoolgirl and Alice answered her unspoken question. "Mingus has taken his daughter to the beginning of history and insanely leapt into the chaotic void beyond where even I cannot reach him. I do not know if they can be saved, but we need to be prepared for any eventuality. The guns will never run out of bullets. The fairy weave you are all wearing can be shaped and colored as needed to blend in with the locals. Oh, and..." Alice reached out like she was picking an apple from a tree. A golden orb appeared in her hand, which she quickly put into the pouch that hung at her side. Then she vanished and Glen came back to stand in her place. He looked once around the room.

"You have no idea how much I miss this place when I am not here," he said.

"I can imagine," Boston spoke softly as she put on her backpack and noticed Katie Harper looking at her with wonder in her eyes.

"Perhaps you can." Glen smiled for Boston before he clapped his hands like Alice and they all found themselves floating in a multi-colored stickiness and unable to breathe.

Before the Beginning

_Too far_ , Glen thought. _Alice, how did you make things work at the beginning? How did you survive?_ he asked himself, and felt surprised that Alice was not there in his subconscious to answer. He had to think, and quick. He expended his air at last with the words "Air bubble." A bubble of air instantly formed around him. He quickly said, "Big air bubble to encompass everyone, and normal light." The air bubble grew until everyone was inside of it. They were still floating, weightless, but a quick scan around him told Glen that everyone would survive despite the hacking, gagging, and gasping for breath.

_Think_ , Glen told himself. Way back at the beginning of time he remembered Alice appeared in a place on a rock. The old god, Cronos appeared, along with Angel—that is what he called him anyway, if Angel could be called a him. With that thought, he said, rock and stared down beneath his feet, though everyone's feet were certainly not pointed in that direction. Still, the rock began to grow and it continued until the air bubble became a dome. Then he said, "Solid and heavy with gravity like a mountaintop on Earth." Everyone fell.

Glen felt lucky. He was the one who fell the farthest, then Roland, but the elf proved to be nimble enough to avoid being hurt, and Boston, though she was young enough to also go without injury. Some of the military equipment in the backpacks bumped rather hard, but Glen did not worry about that. He felt he twisted his ankle. He tried the word, "Heal," but it had a minimal effect. Meanwhile, Lockhart held up the bleeding hand he used to catch himself. Everyone watched in amazement as the bleeding stopped. In only a few seconds, the wound healed itself.

"Because we are at the beginning of things?" Boston wondered out loud.

"The grace of our god." Roland had another suggestion, and looked at Glen.

"Some magical cure?" Lieutenant Harper asked.

Glen shook his head. "He is still filled with those Gaian healing chits that healed his back and legs. They may help you, Lockhart, but you best not depend on them. I'll say it again, leaning on them is a good way to get killed."

"Understood." Lockhart responded shortly, since he already stood and reached out from the edge of the rock to touch the stuff of Primordial Chaos.

"Big dome of air. Plenty of air." Glen said and waved his hands. The swirling mass complied and soon they had no fear of running out of air.

"Doctor Procter?" Roland knelt beside the old man. Doctor Procter wore the amulet, but held it in his hands and shook it, like he could not see what he needed to see.

"Lincoln?" Meanwhile, Boston knelt beside Lincoln because the man looked ready to cry.

"I'll get our bearings in a minute," Doctor Procter responded, as Roland looked over at Boston and Lincoln.

"No way she survived this, even with her magic. I don't see how." Lincoln let his tears flow.

"Confession." Glen spoke loud enough to get everyone's attention. "I was afraid something like this might happen. We went back further than I planned. It all happened so fast. I could not control it. Alice is out of touch. It may take a long time to get home, as I feared."

"What?" Lockhart pulled away from the edge, and even Lincoln looked up.

Boston thought it through and lifted her voice in protest. "But I can't live 6500 years to get back to where I belong,"

Glen waved off her complaint. "The time gates should still be there where I am at the center. Doctor Procter's amulet should work as well. How I get home may be a bit more problematic." He mumbled most of that.

"Man!" Boston started again but stopped when she got interrupted by a great light at her back and a voice in her mind that said, simply, "Do not be afraid."

Boston turned to see Lockhart, Glen and both soldiers on their knees, and she felt the need to join them, especially after Glen named their visitor. "Angel."

"Come. Kairos. Stand. You are required to resolve this."

Glen got slowly to his feet while Angel did something to lessen his own light so the others felt less afraid and could look up. Even so, none dared to look into Angel's face.

"How can I resolve this?" Glen asked.

The answer came without hesitation. "You must offer yourself in place of the woman."

Glen stepped over to touch the sticky ooze. "Will I die?"

"I cannot say."

"Will Mingus return with the woman?"

"I cannot say."

"Will I still be able to help my friends get home?"

"I cannot say."

"What?" Lincoln found the courage to speak. Perhaps it was the prospect of getting his wife back after all that inspired him. "You do not know, or you are not allowed to say?"

"I cannot say." Apparently, that was the only answer they were going to get.

Glen looked at the suffocating mass that surrounded them before he turned from the chaos at the edge of the rock to face them all. He took the glowing golden ball out of his pouch and Boston saw that it was indeed an apple. With a sharp knife that Glen also carried in his pouch, he cut three slices. He handed the first to Lincoln. "Take and eat," he said. Lincoln ate the slice and at least half or more of his age fell away from him. He still seemed older than Boston, but not much older. He ended up around thirty at the most.

"Take and eat." He handed a slice to Lockhart and with the same effect. "The golden apple of youth," he explained. "You will age normally from this point, but I could not let a couple of old men face the time zones. You would not live long enough to get home." He turned toward Boston. "Sometimes you may have to run," he confessed with a grin. "And to you I give this slice for Alexis. I know you won't eat it because you won't want to become a baby. Tell her to take and eat as soon as she arrives. And now the one-minute review."

"It would be best to stay out of whatever trouble you can and not kill if you can help it. Remember, no matter how impossible it may seem, these are real people in real time and they are capable of fear and pain and they will respond to hate as well as love and kindness. I understand there may be times when you will have to defend yourselves. Do not hesitate. Remember, if you die you will stay dead." Glen looked at Angel, but there was nothing there for him to hold on to. He needed to do this himself.

"Two things.

One: The only difference between you and the people is they are confined to their place in time whereas you can move from zone to zone through the gates and can jump forward anywhere from a few years to fifty or more years at a time. Not counting the things you have with you, whatever other stuff you take from time zone to time zone, will age a corresponding number of years based on the number of years in your time jump.

Two: Don't forget that Ashtoreth wanted to control and change time. Some of her creatures are still out there." He paused before he added, "Most dangers you can escape by simply going through the next time gate. I suppose if they can follow you from time zone to time zone, you will know they are a real danger." He turned on the marines.

"Decker and Harper. You need to consider Lockhart your General, and in his absence, Lincoln is your Colonel. If I recall, he got designated a light Colonel at one point with the CIA. Anyway, they know more about what is involved than you do, so don't get cocky or I'll see you stranded in some place unpleasant. Is that clear?"

"Sir, yes sir." Lieutenant Harper responded. Decker said nothing, but he nodded his agreement.

"Boston, you have the medical kit?" Boston nodded. "Let us hope you don't have to use it. Meanwhile, I have filled your packs with elf bread-crackers since you don't have to carry extra clothes. The fairy weave you wear can be shaped to your needs, and just so you know, Boston has vitamins in the med kit since you won't always get a square meal. Oh yeah." He clapped his hands twice. "So now you will understand and be understood whatever the language. It will all just sound like English to you. Now I have to go." _Trouble does come in threes_ , he thought, and with the word, "Three," he ran and leapt into the ooze before he changed his mind and chickened out.

Alexis immediately came back, Mingus clinging to her sleeve. And after Boston gave Alexis the apple slice, she became more nearly Boston's age and flew into Lincoln's arms. They kissed for a long time.

Boston licked her fingers and became something closer to twenty-three. Mingus fumed to see his daughter in the arms of that human, but with his son holding him back there was little he could do—not to mention the fact that the presence of the angel scared him beyond reason. Lockhart, alone kept his head.

"But where do we go from here?" he asked.

"I can't get a good reading this deep before history," Doctor Procter admitted with a whack of his amulet. "Your thoughts Mingus?"

Mingus said nothing, but the angel said one more thing. It pointed opposite the direction Glen had jumped and a bit of the primordial goo cleared off to reveal a tunnel that led a long way to a distant light. Angel spoke.

"This is your way home."

Part III: The Beginning of History

Around 4500 BC on the Plains of Shinar. Kairos 1-6: The Twins 1, 2 and 3.

### Recording...

"I must say, it is kind of interesting being thirty again." Lockhart spoke after they entered the tunnel. Lincoln looked back to see if the angel might be following them. It did not, but the angel light illuminated the tunnel, and good thing, because it looked like a long way to the dim light at the other end.

"Twenty-nine." Lincoln spoke up. "You may be thirty, but I decided I am only twenty-nine. And my wife is now Boston's age, just twenty-five."

"That's right." Alexis took Lincoln's arm. "Benjamin and I get to start all over again." They kissed and began to make loving noises. The others did their best to ignore them until Mingus could not stand it.

"Shut-up." He turned and yelled at them, but his son, Roland was right there.

"Father, Alexis chose her mate and her human life, now you leave my sister alone."

Mingus paused and looked at his son. "A scolding from my own infant." He stopped walking so everyone stopped. "Well, at least she got her youth back so she is not going to die any time soon."

"I don't know," Doctor Procter spoke up absentmindedly and shook his amulet once more. "If I can't get this thing working there is no telling where we may end up. I suppose we could all die on the road."

"Cheery thought," Lockhart quipped.

"But, say. Mingus and Alexis just ran through time in this direction. Right? Surely you can help guide us back." Lincoln smiled to encourage them.

"Don't look at me," Alexis said. "I spent most of the time with my mouth and eyes shut."

"Some. I might help some with the history, but really, we only arrived and skirted the edge of last time zone. We moved as fast as we could. For the most part, we traveled through the Heart of Time. We did not come all this way through the time zones. You can't normally go back in the time zones unless you want to get younger..." Mingus let his voice peter out before he stepped over to the doctor to examine the amulet.

"Sounds like a plan to me," Lincoln said. "We skirt the edges of the time zones as fast as we can, and hide."

"No." Everyone but Mingus objected. Doctor Procter explained first.

"I spent the last three hundred years studying the lives of the Kairos. Now that we have the opportunity to walk through those lifetimes, one by one, and in order, I might add, I am not going to miss that opportunity. Isn't that right, Mingus?"

Mingus shook his head and sighed, and in that moment, everyone got a good look at the difference between Mingus, a full blood elf, and the Doctor who was half-human. The contrast did not appear startling, but seemed obvious. No plain human could have eyes as big, features as sharp or fingers as thin and long.

"If you say," Mingus muttered as he took the amulet and shook it once for himself.

"What says the Navy?" Lockhart turned to look at the two who were armed and bringing up the rear.

"I'm to follow orders," Captain Decker frowned.

Lieutenant Harper smiled. "I would not mind exploring a little while we have the chance."

"Besides," Roland spoke up, while Lockhart faced front again and encouraged everyone to resume walking. "I have a feeling the Kairos would not mind if we rooted out some of the unsavory characters that wandered into the time zones without permission."

"Oh, that would be very dangerous." Alexis said it before Lincoln could, and she grinned for her husband.

"All the same..." Roland did not finish his sentence. He fell back to walk beside Lockhart to underline his sentiments to the man.

"Hey." Boston came up. She had been straggling near the back.

"Boston, dear." Lockhart backed away from the elf and slipped his arm around the young woman. "What do you think? Do we run as fast as we can or explore a bit and maybe confront some unsavories along the way?"

"Explore and help the Kairos clean out the time zones. I thought that was obvious."

"Well for the record," Mingus said, as he turned and walked backwards. "Though it may kill me to say it, I agree with that Lincoln fellow."

"I haven't offered an opinion," Lincoln said.

"No, but I can read the mind of a frightened rabbit well enough."

"Father!" Alexis jumped and had some scolding in her voice. "I vote we explore and help." She looked at Lockhart, and so did everyone else except Doctor Procter who still played with his amulet.

Lockhart nodded. "Okay," he said. "But the number one priority is to get everyone home alive and in one piece, so when it is time to move on, we all move, no arguments."

"You got that right," Captain Decker mumbled.

Everyone seemed fine with that except Mingus who screwed up his face and asked, "And who decides when it is time to move on?"

"I do." Lockhart spoke without flinching. The two stared at each other until Doctor Procter interrupted.

"Anyway," he said, as if in the middle of a sentence. "I would not worry about hunting unsavories. I don't imagine it will take long before they start hunting us."

"Cheery thought." Lockhart repeated himself as Boston slipped out from beneath his arm.

"Lovely arm," she said and squeezed the muscle as she let go. Lockhart just gave her a hard stare in return until she amended her words. "Dad." She thought about it and changed it. "Grandpa." Then she said, "Gramps," and had to cover the grin that came to her lips. She felt rather glad Alexis interrupted.

"Look! A baby. Two babies." Alexis pointed toward the ceiling of the tunnel and everyone looked. The ceiling and walls of the tunnel were opaque, not rock. The angel light did not penetrate far into whatever they were walking through, but it lit things up enough to see the forms. Sure enough, there were two babies. They saw one kick, and the other kick back.

"What is this stuff?" Boston asked the question.

"Amniotic fluid." Doctor Procter answered her like it was the most obvious answer in the world. Fortunately, Mingus took up the explanation.

"The Kairos was designed to inhabit two bodies at once. One male and one female. It did not work out too well at first. In fact, the first two times old Cronos tried to bring the Kairos to birth, he failed."

"The god failed?" Roland sounded shocked to hear that. Mingus merely nodded.

"You might as well say the Kairos failed to be properly born," Doctor Procter corrected his colleague from the history department. "We debate this, regularly, but it is not well publicized."

"But wait." Boston spoke from behind so everyone stopped and turned. "What are these dark patches? It looks like there are spots that no light can penetrate."

"What?" Doctor Procter and Mingus both slid up to the wall to examined the evidence. This was something new.

"Two babies." Lockhart still looked up. "One male and one female. But both the same person." It was a hard concept to grasp.

Alexis took that moment to whisper something in Lincoln's ear to which Lincoln blurted the words, "Again? We already have two children, and a grandchild."

"But the dark patches?" Boston did not get an answer. "They appear to be moving around."

"Demons, definitely." Doctor Procter concluded. "That explains some of the early difficulties in the birthing."

"Demons, perhaps," Mingus did not sound convinced. Lieutenant Harper reached out and Mingus reacted. "Don't touch!" He shouted, and the Lieutenant caught her hand. "Better to be safe."

"Demons." Doctor Procter sounded certain, but to confirm the statement, he got closer than he should have been. The dark patches quickly raced to his position to form a single mass of darkness and something reached out into the tunnel and touched the Doctor's hand, or so Boston thought. She was the only one at an angle and the nearness to see in the dim light. But she could not be sure because at that same time there came a great flash of angel light. Even those with their backs turned had to pause and blink, and then the light went out altogether.

"The tunnel closed up behind us," Roland said, and with his elf eyes, he seemed to be the only one who could see clearly—him and his father, and perhaps Doctor Procter. For the humans, it just looked dark behind them while the light from the other end of the tunnel looked far away and very dim.

"Keep moving." Lockhart said, and in only a few steps, he felt a tingling sensation. They all felt it, like a small electrical charge.

"The time gate." Alexis explained. "We have moved on to the Kairos' next life."

"The other failed life," Mingus called it.

"The other practice life," Doctor Procter countered, and as they walked, the light at the end of the tunnel grew stronger.

Boston had her eyes wide open in search of demons. Roland had thought to take up a position near the rear with her as they walked two by two. They both saw the motion when it came, and Boston grabbed Roland's arm in an automatic response for fear of the demons. Something moved inside the walls. It moved first on their left, and then on their right, and it took a moment for Boston to figure it out.

"Hey. This time the two babies are separated and to the sides. Why is that?"

"Different mothers." Doctor Procter spoke first again, but like before, it came out cryptic and did not explain much. Mingus had to explain, again.

"The first attempt failed in the birthing process, so in Cronos' second attempt, he tried to separate the two babies. They were born, but being separated turned out to be too much for the infants. They didn't live long."

"At least they are not kicking each other," Boston said, and she looked up at Roland. He looked down at her and she added, "Oh," softly, and let go of the elf's arm, not that he was complaining.

"Why would being separated be too much for the babies?" Lincoln took up the questions.

"I imagine one consciousness split between two brains is hard enough." Lockhart thought to answer. "Add to that two different mothers and two different fathers, different smells, two different sights through two sets of eyes. It is a wonder the Kairos did not go mad."

"Split personality, certainly," Alexis added her thought.

"Worst in history, daughter," Mingus said.

"At least that is what the Kairos says," Doctor Procter added as they came at last to the end of the tunnel.

"Wait." Lockhart made everyone pause while he stepped to the front to look out on the world.

Myths and Legends

Lockhart peered out, like from a cave on to a ridge, but he could not see much or very far outside of a blue hazy line in the great distance. He thought that might be the sea. He put his hand gently forward until he touched the gate.

"I see the shimmer of the gate in this light," Boston said, and everyone nodded. She had come up to the front and looked around at her fellow-travelers. They could all see it, but not well.

"This would be easy to overlook, especially if we were in a hurry," Lieutenant Harper said.

"Weapons ready?" Decker suggested, and Lockhart nodded. Mingus rolled his eyes, but Roland got out his bow, Boston fetched her Beretta, Lincoln checked his pistol, and Lockhart cradled the shotgun in his arms like a baby. The marines, of course, were always ready. Doctor Procter pulled a rickety stick from some secret place up his sleeve. It was his wand, and with that, Alexis felt prompted to look around for something she might use to focus her magic as well.

When they were set, Mingus rolled his eyes again, but Lieutenant Harper saw and threw the elf's words back at him. "Better to be safe," she said, and they all stepped into the next time zone.

The ridge top proved not very wide, and though it did not end in a cliff or sharp drop off, the slope looked steep enough to make them keep to the ridge top in the hope of finding an easier way down. Lockhart headed them east, toward the rising sun, and Boston remarked how lucky they were to arrive at sunrise instead of the dark of night.

"Of course it is dawn." Doctor Procter squinted in the early light. "The time zones all share the same twenty-four-hour cycle. They may be different days or different times of year, or on different phases of the moon, but they all have twenty-four hours."

Mingus added a thought, getting used to making up for what the Doctor left unsaid. "He means when it is noon here, it will be noon in every time zone. The only way we will enter a zone at night is if we leave a zone at night."

"Nine in the morning or so, not dawn," Lincoln interrupted. "It is hard to tell with the sun rising behind the mountains."

"Chain of mountains," Alexis spoke to her husband. "And we seem to be fairly-high up, though it is warm. I would guess near the tropics." Lincoln nodded and for the first time he got out his proverbial notepad and pen. The pistol got put away since there did not appear to be anyone or anything around apart from a few birds.

After a short distance, they found a place where the ridge crumbled and rolled to the bottom ages ago. It seemed a gentle slope, but instead of being full of rocks and loose pebbles, it had become covered in grass.

"Our way down," Lockhart said.

"Mmm." Boston looked around and half-listened, as usual. She had her hand up to shade her eyes, and looked up now that they could see several peaks at once above them. "I like the way the rising sun sets off the peaks like so many islands in the sea."

"Islands in the sea, indeed." Captain Decker pointed across the slope to where the ridge top picked up again. A large wooden structure looked abandoned there—a man-made structure. It remained partly hidden behind some boulders, but for want of a better word, it looked like a boat, and a big boat at that.

"It can't be." Doctor Procter said it first. No one else said anything until they arrived at the site, and then they all said, "It can't be," except Mingus, who suggested it stunk.

"Father!" Alexis protested and Roland stood right beside her. "You stuff all those animals in a boat for forty days and forty nights and see how much stink there is."

"The stink is hardly the point," Roland added.

"Look at this." Doctor Procter got everyone's attention. The boat had graffiti on one panel near the quadruple-wide door and ramp. Over all was a picture of the sun and the moon squeezed together so it was a half-moon and a half-sun. A mermaid had been crudely drawn on one side.

"Half-woman and half-fish," Alexis said while Lincoln desperately tried to make a rendering of the drawings in his notebook. He cursed not having a camera. "And a centaur, half-man and half-horse on the other side," Alexis finished her thought. She ignored her husband's curse and pointed with her finger.

"And the middle picture?" The captain, lieutenant and Lockhart did not see it, but to their defense, the pictures were very primitive.

"The Kairos," both Doctor Procter and Boston spoke together, and Boston let the doctor describe it.

"The two persons of the Kairos are attached on her right and his left, so there are only three legs and two hands on a double-wide body. You can see the two heads clear enough."

"And she has little boobs," Boston added, and watched Roland redden just a bit.

"So, you like my work?" Everyone jumped and looked up. A man stood inside the Ark, at the top of the ramp. "You are future travelers. I thought that sort of thing was not possible—a self-contradicting proposition."

"We are accidental travelers." Lockhart spoke up quickly and just as quickly got Captain Decker to lower his weapon. Lockhart stood back from the others and still cradled the shotgun. Mingus stood beside him on the other side and frowned for some reason. "We plan to move on as soon as we can," Lockhart finished.

The man nodded and asked for no further explanation. "I am just glad there is a future. I have worked hard so what I once saw might not come true. My wife says I am making freaks. I said they are her children too." He paused to smile, but since no one but Decker joined in the smile, he finished his thought. "The truth is these offer hope, and there are others working elsewhere."

"Why centaurs and mermaids?" Lieutenant Harper asked.

"Because the world is empty and needs to be filled. If the ones who would-be gods have nothing to occupy their time and attention, they will be occupied with each other, and that would be very dangerous."

"Do I know you?" Doctor Procter asked, and squinted at the man, but the man shook his head.

"But I know you. I can't help it. Boston. You will live much longer than a human should live. Alexis, your days will be shorter than they might have been. Doctor." The man paused and scrutinized the doctor. "There is something different about you—something wrong."

"He is half-elf and half-human," Boston suggested.

"Half and half. No. But what an interesting concept. I wonder why I did not think of that. It would certainly cut down on their wild rampaging through the earth."

"But wait," Lieutenant Harper spoke quickly. She felt afraid that the man might run off, or maybe just disappear. "I still don't understand the centaurs and mermaids. What about human beings."

The man looked up at the lieutenant and smiled. "A sharp mind. They are the future—your future. But right now, they are all bunched up on the plains of Shinar. Oh, there are some small groups scattered here and there around the world, but mostly Shinar." He pointed. "I see your way lies in that direction." People looked, though there was nothing to see but mountainside. He waited until they all looked at him again before he spoke. "I must think on these things you have said, only I fear my children will find me before I can act on my thoughts." He vanished. One moment he stood there, contemplating eternity, and the next moment he disappeared. Mingus answered everyone's question when he spat the man's name.

"Cronos."

Ararat

It took all day to climb and scramble down the mountain, and cross the hills that quickly petered out as they approached the plains. In the first valley, Alexis found a section overgrown with vines. She picked grapes, and everyone had some and enjoyed them, even though they had seeds. The humans were no longer accustomed to eating grapes with seeds.

"The Kairos said the food here would nourish only we might not find everything we need." Lincoln made a note in his book.

Boston spoke up. "I have the daily vitamins. We need to start taking them in the morning." She looked. She had three bottles in her medical pack. One was marked human, one marked elf, and one marked especially for Doctor Procter. She wondered what made them all different. "Hey, wait a minute." Boston took the medical kit out of the top of her pack. It came in its own carry pack, like a purse that could be worn over a shoulder. She handed it to Alexis. "You have to be better at this than I am."

Alexis took it, and by what she called a simple bit of magic, she made the strap longer so she could slip her head and one arm through and carry it on her hip. "I was thinking of asking for this, but I thought maybe you wanted it."

"No, ma'am," Boston said. She felt used to thinking of Alexis as a much older woman and decided it might take some time to make friends. "I cry too much and I don't like to see people bleed."

"I thought so. Emotional, like a little one."

"Really?"

"Flighty as a fairy, they say."

Boston frowned. She did not imagine that was a compliment, but she did not say anything for the sake of a possible future friendship.

"I hope you keep a good eye on your father," Lockhart told Roland as they walked. He looked at the elf and tried hard not to show anything on his face before he turned his eyes again to the trail. "To be honest, I was not made for elves and fairies and such, though I have known a few in my time. Still, and I mean no offense, but I find being so close to elves..." he paused, and thought, _a bit creepy?_ "Let's just say it is going to take me some time to get used to it."

Roland did not get offended. In fact, he answered in innocent honesty. "I know exactly what you mean. I have spent time on earth, but working and observing. I am not used to being around mortals, er, humans like this. I think what makes it hard for me is the fact that we are more similar than most people think."

"Similar?" Lockhart could see very little in the way of similarities. Creepy was not a bad word.

"We both fall in love, and elves and humans can even have babies together."

Lockhart could not keep his lip from curling up ever so slightly at the idea of making love to an elf. He looked back at Alexis and Boston, and gave Roland the point. Not every human had his problem.

"Do not worry, Lockhart. I will keep father ever in sight." Lockhart merely nodded.

"Aha!" Doctor Procter shouted from the front of the line. Lincoln walked beside the doctor and Mingus came right behind. In fact, Mingus nearly bumped into the two when the doctor came to a sudden halt. "It's working." The doctor held up the amulet.

"Let me see." Lincoln wanted a look, and Boston ran right between Lockhart and Roland.

"That girl has too much energy," Lockhart said, softly.

"Yes, she does," Roland agreed, but it was impossible to tell what he thought about that matter.

"You see?" The Doctor explained. "It is linked to the castle all the way in the future. It picks up the vibrations of the time gates and points the way we need to go, like a compass. That will take us to the next gate. It gives an approximate distance to travel, here, about twenty miles; and it should give off a dim green light when we get near the gate. I don't know if that part works yet."

"But that is wonderful," Lincoln shouted. "However does it work?"

Doctor Procter looked up at the man, while Mingus said the expected, "Magic."

"You lie like and elf."

Mingus and Roland spun around to see who insulted them, but Alexis said it, and grinned. Mingus stared at her for a second before he conceded the point. "I never could lie to your mother, either." Roland wisely said nothing.

"Let's have it." Alexis reached out and the Doctor handed over the amulet as Lieutenant Harper came up to have a look. Alexis twirled it twice in her hands before she handed it to Lockhart. Lockhart immediately handed it to Boston, and Boston spoke up.

"The latch." She opened it and stared at the sophisticated electronics inside for a few seconds before she made her pronouncement. "It is a homing device. On earth, I would call it a geo-positioning device, but here, I suspect it works in some strange way because of the space and time distortions we are traveling through." She closed the amulet and looked up. "So how close was I?"

"Judging from the looks, I would say you nailed it," Lieutenant Harper said. "And that was very good."

"She is a natural born geek," Lockhart added, before Roland burst out with his thought.

"Why, that was brilliant." Boston turned a little red, as was her way, and pointed up the hill. She handed the amulet back to Doctor Procter and walked out front until her feelings of embarrassment subsided.

From there, it did not take long to get to the top of the last hill before the plains. When they arrived, about an hour before sunset, they were astounded at what they saw. There had to be a hundred thousand campfires and a million people packed into a treeless, grassless valley that butted up to a hill at least two or three miles away. On top of that distant hill, there sat an Empire State Building high tower. Captain Decker got out his binoculars.

"It can't be." This time, Lincoln said it first.

"Shinar," Doctor Procter announced.

"We went under a glamour here," Mingus said.

"I remember," Alexis spoke up, and this time she took a moment to explain what a glamour was. "That means we made an illusion so we would look like the normal people and not stand out in the crowd." Alexis shook her head. "But it is not easy to do, and it works best when applied to oneself."

"That is something Roland and Mingus may have to consider in the future." Lockhart looked at the sky. "For now, it is nearly dark and I think we should camp on this side of the hill, out of sight."

"It is hot enough," Captain Decker agreed. "I suggest we skip the fire to not draw attention to ourselves."

Lieutenant Harper had her own binoculars out and she responded only to Doctor Procter's statement. "Shinar. The Tower of Babel," she said. Then she paused. She caught the glint of sunlight off something shiny on that distant hill. When she squinted, it looked to her like a man on horseback. It looked like a knight in armor. She blinked and it vanished. She shook her head. She felt sure horses were not domesticated yet, and surely these were not a metal working people to produce such armor. She decided it must have been an illusion, or her imagination, and put it out of her mind.

The Plains of Shinar

In the morning, the armed and ready group walked slowly toward the mass of people. They paused only briefly when they were seen. They started to walk again when it appeared they were seen and ignored.

"I was going to mention this gathering of humans," Mingus said quietly to Lockhart. "I guess it slipped my mind."

Oddly enough, Lockhart did not get angry. He fully expected the elder elf to lie or withhold information, if for no other reason than because he was an elf. But he had been taught by the Kairos in years past that once a little one gave friendship, it was solid and steadfast. He could only hope.

As they drew near to the crowd, they began to see the gaunt faces of the people. Ragged, well-worn animal skins barely clung to some of the people. Others were simply naked, and on many of them, the ribs showed to indicate their hunger. The eyes of many were empty, like they had lost all sense of what it meant to be human—what it meant to have hope. Still, they labored. Lockhart noticed the men dragged trees from further and further afield, and he noticed the great pit that had to be a quarter mile wide from which they dug clay with tools of stone and bone.

"Oh, the children." Alexis spoke with concern. A pack of them gathered to see these strange new people. "Boston, give me some of the bread-crackers you have in your pack." She reached one hand back but her focus stayed on a grubby little girl in the front of the pack. Boston would have given the crackers to her if Lockhart did not speak up.

"Don't do that," he commanded. "You will start a food riot."

"Best to keep things hidden for now," Mingus agreed.

"Absolutely," Captain Decker seconded that agreement.

Alexis looked disappointed. She turned to Lincoln, her hand still out in search of bread. "Dear?"

Lincoln shook his head and gave a very practical answer. "We may need that food down the road. It isn't for these people." He held his breath as they walked straight into that mass of humanity. "I still say we should have gone around," he mumbled, but one way was the clay pit, and the other offered no place to hide. Truth be told, they were all curious about what they might find.

They walked around most people who hardly gave them a glance. Some people stepped aside for them to pass and mumbled unintelligible words in their direction. Sometimes they had to walk a good bit to the side because there were fire pits everywhere, where men and women baked the clay into bricks, adding only a bit of grass, leaves, or crumbled bark dragged in on the trees, in order to hold the clay together.

"Straw would work better," Lieutenant Harper spoke quietly, but they looked around and saw only mud beneath their feet. It looked that way for miles. The earth had been stripped clean of every living thing and trampled under two million feet

They walked slowly, all bunched up, eyes everywhere, until they came near a mound in the center of it all. It had a tent on top, and sat about half-way to the hill with the growing tower. Lincoln looked ready to ask about the mound, the one spot that remained untouched in all that mass of humanity, but several men stepped in front of them and finally and deliberately blocked their way. They stopped. One man with skin the color of red clay, and with big eyes, big hands and a big nose took a long whiff of air. He smiled, showed all three of his teeth, and said, "Mangot." The man beside him said, "Golendiko." The third man, one almost as big as Lockhart, shouted, "Clidirunna."

Mingus tried to clean out his ears. Elves were gifted with the ability to hear and respond no matter what language was spoken, but he was getting none of it.

"I think they are trying to say food," Roland said, and he put his hand to his sword hilt but made no hostile move. The shouting soon became enough to attract a crowd, but the crowd still looked reluctant to touch the strangers

"Make for the mound," Lockhart suggested.

"Keep moving." Captain Decker urged them forward. At first the crowd parted, but before they could reach the actual mound, the crowd closed in again. Lockhart could see over the heads of nearly everyone, and he saw the commotion had not drawn in more than fifty or so people.

"Make for the mound," Lockhart repeated, softly, for fear the people would understand. They moved, but the crowd moved with them to block the way.

"Food!" Everyone spun around. Boston at the back as usual, threw a half-dozen bread-crackers over her shoulder, away from the mound. People shrieked and raced to fight over the morsels. Everyone got jostled. Lincoln got knocked to the ground, and Lockhart yelled.

"Everyone circle around Boston,"

"Lieutenant, opposite sides," Captain Decker shouted. They circled up even as more people arrived to block their way. Eyes looked at Boston and wondered if there might be more food where that came from.

"Serious damage going on here." Lincoln pointed at the fight over Boston's generosity.

"You mean you? You big baby." Alexis got on the opposite side of the circle from her husband. She stood next to her brother and faced the mound.

"Let us move together, as one body," Mingus suggested. They did, and the crowd backed up, slowly. They got within ten yards of the mound before the crowd froze and would not budge.

Roland reached for his sword. "No, no." Doctor Procter stayed the elf's hand. "One act of violence on our part and we will be dog feed."

"So, we are in the red zone," Lockhart said. "Any ideas how we score?"

"A quick shot over their heads?" Captain Decker suggested.

"Sudden moves and frightening sounds would not be a good idea," Lieutenant Harper said. "Besides, they would not understand it."

Alexis grabbed her brother's hand. He looked at her with a curious expression as she spoke. "Split the herd." He nodded. They swung their hands, once, twice, three times, and a brilliant flash of light poured from their fists. It shot straight to the mound and shoved everyone in that line back ten feet on either side to make a clear path. They ran. No one had to say it, and they reached the mound before the crowd could stop them.

Nimrod

"To the high ground and prepare to defend yourselves," Lockhart shouted, and the marines moved before they noticed what the others saw right away. The people did not follow them. None of the people so much as stepped on the mound. They looked like they did not dare touch it, and after only a moment, they began to wander back to whatever they had been doing, as if the travelers were never there.

"Very primitive construction." Doctor Procter had already moved on to examine the crude tent. It appeared to be no more than a number of overlapping animal skins held up by some precious lumber. It seemed larger than Lincoln thought when he saw it from a distance, and might easily hold a dozen or more people. He sketched furiously, but at the same time, he imagined a good gust of wind could blow it apart.

"Wow." Boston stared at Alexis and Roland.

Alexis smiled. "On my bad days, Benjamin calls me a witch." She looked at her father. "But he says it with love," she added.

Boston got herself spun around to face a pair of angry eyes. Lockhart did not look happy. "You nearly got us all killed. I said leave the food alone."

Boston dropped her eyes. "I know. I'm sorry."

"You're lucky they didn't mob you and tear you to pieces looking for the food."

"Don't be too hard on her," Roland came to her defense. "She was thinking and just trying to help." Boston heard, but she was busy. She looked up into Lockhart's eyes. She saw that he loved her and the scolding was out of love, and that made her happy.

"I won't do it again," she said.

"Yes, you will." Lockhart softened a little as the relief he felt washed over him. He hugged her. "You just need to remember I'm the director here in Bobbi's absence. Maybe I can't tell these elves what to do, but I'm still your boss." He looked up. "And that goes for you, too."

"Yes boss." Lincoln spoke absentmindedly since he was busy. Alexis grimaced and gave a sloppy little salute.

"Oh!" Doctor Procter got ready to open the front flap of the tent when he got surprised instead. A woman came out and held the flap open. She opened her hand to invite them in.

"It appears we are wanted," Mingus said.

"Careful," Lincoln whispered, as they walked into the dark tent one by one.

"Come in, come in." They heard the man's words before their eyes adjusted to the dim light. It turned out to be not much of a tent. It had no furniture, just some grass in the corner to sleep on and a big stump to sit on. The man looked very old, but when he stood up from the stump, he also proved to be a very big man. "We do not often have strangers here." He examined them as closely as they examined him.

"Where are we, exactly?" Lincoln asked.

"In my world. And my people, as you have seen, are hungry." He took a step and paused in front of Mingus. "I do not traffic much with elves." He stepped over to examine Doctor Procter. "And there is something different about you. Something wrong."

"He is a half-elf," Boston offered.

The man shivered a little, reacting the way Lockhart reacted when he first thought about it. "But you others." He paused to point at Alexis. "Six, I think. You six are my people. You should be helping with the tower. You should be building the monument to my eternity." A compulsion filled his words. For a moment, Lockhart felt very much like that was what he wanted to do; but then Alexis touched him. He watched Roland touch the two marines while Alexis touched Boston and took her husband's arm. The feeling of compulsion faded.

"So that is how it is." The old man stared at them for another moment before he noticed the doctor's amulet. Of all the sophisticated things they had, the big old man went for something he might call familiar. "And what is this?"

"It is just a bit of sentimental wood." Doctor Procter practiced that lie.

"No, wait. Don't tell me. It is, how should I call it, a locator." The big old man smiled at himself. He obviously had special powers of discernment as well as compulsion. "I should have this, but then you know how to use it." Doctor Procter could do little more than nod. "I need you to locate something for me." He turned his back on them to walk again to the stump and bed where he lifted a spear as tall as the tent top. "Please." He said that last word without facing any of them, and it sounded like it came out, forced through gritted teeth.

"Well, I don't know. It isn't..." The doctor started to speak, but stopped when Mingus bumped him. Mingus, a full-blood elf, knew the sound of a bargain when he heard one.

"What would you have us find?" he asked.

The big man stood with his spear. "There is a creature," he said, before he thought to explain. "My people are hungry because the powers in my world have rebelled against me. They have made this unnatural abomination and kept the food to feed it and help it grow. This travesty must stop. You must help me find it so I can end it."

"And what is in it for us?" Mingus responded.

The big old man turned and eyed the elf with big, sad eyes. "My people are hungry," he repeated.

"A true manipulator," Mingus spoke, with a bit of admiration in his voice. He would have said something else, but Lockhart interrupted.

"We will do it." Several eyes shot to him in wonder. "Doctor, we can follow the direction on your amulet and I am sure this fine man will help us with the crowd."

"But—"

"Yes, of course." Alexis stepped up and took the doctor's hand. "We will follow the direction pointed out on the amulet and this man will help us through the masses of people." She turned to the big man. "We will help you because the people need food. People should not starve. That isn't right."

The big man smiled weakly but called with some strength. "Moragga!" The woman poked her head into the tent. "Gather the men. We are going on a hunt."

Babel

The travelers and twelve men with great spears, like their leader, gathered on the mound. The men all looked big and strong, and as Boston noticed, they all looked mean and cruel besides. The travelers got to walk in between the two lines, which may not have been military lines, but certainly spoke of men who knew how to retain prisoners. Doctor Procter got to walk up front next to the big old man.

"It's all right," Lockhart suggested. "The amulet is programmed correctly. You just take us in the direction we need to go."

Doctor Procter still did not get it, but he made no objection. They started off the mound, and the people parted before them like the Red Sea parted for Moses. Lincoln looked around and he did not like what he saw.

"The people." He spoke quietly to Alexis, but Lockhart and Boston in front of him and Mingus and Roland with their good elf ears heard. "They look like people past the tipping point. The looks they are giving the old man as soon as his back is turned are frightening. I sense trouble. I don't think we will get all the way to the tower."

"Humans," Mingus scoffed.

"They look to be cooperating," Roland pointed out.

"Are you sure?" Lockhart asked Lincoln, even as he took the shotgun from his back and cradled it with one eye to be sure the marines were ready.

"Oh, yes," Alexis whispered. "I trust Benjamin's nose for trouble. His senses are excellent."

Lockhart nudged Boston to encourage her to get ready to run, but she had her eyes on a man who paralleled them in the crowd. He seemed like one man who did not appear to have evil intentions toward them. It stood out, an unusual sight in a crowd of people who looked like they would just as soon eat the strangers as look at them.

Then it happened, just below the tower hill, and just before they broke free of the crowd. A big, burly man full of soot from the fires, one who looked something like a blacksmith stepped forward, supported by three other equally gruff looking men, and they blocked the way.

"What is this?" The old man looked up from the amulet and stared hard at the blacksmith who responded with what sounded to Lockhart like, "Gubba-dubba-mubba."

"Gibberish," the old man spat. "Remove him." He turned to the man with the spear beside him, but that man also said something odd.

"Bullaka Meeko?"

"I think he said, who died and made you god?" Roland whispered

Still, the intent of the big old man was clear, so the spearman lowered his spear and stepped forward. The blacksmith stepped inside the stone point of the spear and landed a right hook on the spearman's jaw. That one act set everyone free. Suddenly fists were being thrown everywhere and the scene dissolved into mayhem.

"Gibberish. Why can't you speak sense?" They heard the old man shout even as Boston shouted louder.

"This way. Hurry."

The travelers followed Boston, and she followed the man who had signaled to her. She had no idea what that man wanted, but he led them away from the ever-widening circle of violence.

The last they heard from the big old man was, "You must do what I say. I am god!" Then a fist went into the old man's mouth while the travelers, with no real injuries, managed to break free. The man they followed led them quickly up the tower hill until they were above the mayhem.

"I am Peleg," the man said, once they could slow to speak. "My family is safe. Come." He led them around the base of the hill to where the forest grew up to the back of the rise.

"Peleg?" Lockhart looked at Doctor Procter and then back at Mingus.

"One of the good guys," Mingus assured him.

"So why are you helping us?" Lockhart finished his question for the man.

"Because you don't belong to Nimrod. You are strangers and deserve no part in the madness that is breaking out everywhere."

"But what is going on?" Alexis was the one who asked.

They came to the trees and Peleg whistled before he turned to answer. "Nimrod has told us there is no God. He has taken the place of God and played on the fears of the people. He says this monstrous tower of his will be our lasting memorial in case the flood comes again and we are all swept away."

"But you don't believe that."

"No. Some few of us have not forgotten." As he spoke, young men, women and children came out from among the trees to stand beside him. "We remember the source of all, and the rainbow pledge. Many people have already escaped, but sadly they have taken to the worship of the powers in this earth."

"But that was madness back there," Boston took up the cause. "I can still hear the screaming and fighting and dying. Why?"

"Because the people finally realized if Nimrod can be a god, so can they. They are all being their own god."

Lieutenant Harper got it. "And when everyone is their own god, everything becomes relative. Then even the words you speak mean whatever you want them to mean, whether anyone else understands them or not, it doesn't matter."

"So, the gibberish." Alexis stepped up and took her husband's arm.

"What a nimrod. What a maroon. Yuck, yuck." Lockhart smiled. To Boston's curious look he simply added, "Just something from my youth."

"Oh." She curved her lips but made no actual sound.

"Our way lies along the edge of the trees. My family is reluctant to venture into the forest."

"Our way?" Lincoln asked, and Doctor Procter pointed into the deep woods.

"Thank you." Lockhart thought to say it.

"Go with God." Peleg responded, and he and his family began to move off the plains.

"Humans." Mingus shook his head. "It is all gibberish if you ask me." He started into the woods, and everyone became obliged to follow. They did not get far, though, before Doctor Procter shouted.

"No." He spun around, ran toward the hill. He began to climb. He ran elf fast, or half-elf fast, but because of his age, it did not take long for the others to catch up.

"What is it?" Captain Decker asked.

"He will not leave until he sees the Kairos," Mingus answered for the half-elf. "And on second thought, I suppose I agree with him." They did not have to look far. A child, rather, two children sat in the shadow of the tower, joined not along one whole side as in the drawing on the Ark, but only at the wrists. He had no left hand and she had no right. They sat in the dirt, turned away from the madness going on across the plains below. They could not have been older than five or six, and they were crying.

Kairos

"Children? Child?" Doctor Procter tried to get the children's attention.

"Kairos?" Mingus tried, and the children at least stopped crying.

"Glen?" Boston spoke, and the children looked up. Both sets of eyes got big and both mouths spoke in perfect unison.

"Boston!" Then both mouths closed and there appeared to be some internal struggle before the boy spoke first and then the girl.

"I am Zadok, a word for rock."

"I am Amri, a word for love."

"Glen is here but not," Zadok continued. "I don't know if I can reach him, exactly."

"Or Alice," Amri said. "And I know where she is.

"I am confused..."

"...and I don't know why."

"I cannot send you home, either."

"I don't even know if the gods can."

"Hold it." Lockhart interrupted. "Could just one of you speak? I'm getting dizzy."

The children looked at each other before they nodded. "I will talk," Amri said.

"I will listen," Zadok finished the thought.

"Wait a minute," Lincoln stepped forward. "You are like the Princess and he is like the Storyteller, or..."

"No, dear," Alexis explained. "They are one and the same person, only that one person is in two bodies."

"Actually," Amri looked briefly at Zadok. "I am one being, like one consciousness in two persons."

"But that doesn't make sense," Lincoln said. "How can you be one being in two persons?"

Amri and Zadok looked briefly at each other once more.

"Amri likes to talk," Zadok said.

"Zadok likes to listen so it works out well."

Boston inched up close and squatted. "What are you, six?" Both heads nodded before Amri spoke again and it sounded like a hurried speech.

"You have guns that will never run out of bullets and vitamins that will never run out no matter how many people start taking them. But that is all I can do for your health and safety. That, and remind you that when the demon Ashteroth invaded Avalon and gained access to the Heart of Time, she wanted to change time. She thought she could do that through the Heart of Time. It doesn't work that way, but in the attempt, she let all sorts of horrid creatures into time." Amri paused. Someone had come up to the top of the hill. The old man, Nimrod, interrupted everyone with a roar. He looked bruised and bloodied in any number of places. His face looked pummeled, and included the beginning of a terrific black eye.

"You!" Nimrod pointed at Lockhart. "You caused all this." Boston moved slightly and that attracted Nimrod's attention. The man shouted on sight of the children and raised his spear. He threw it at Zadok, but Boston jumped. The spear grazed her side and caused a great gash and a great deal of blood, but its trajectory changed, so Zadok was spared.

Roland's arrow arrived first in Nimrod's chest. A look of utter surprise crossed the old man's face before Lockhart's slug from his shotgun and corresponding fire from Captain Decker knocked the man completely off his feet to roll back down the hill, dead.

"Boston!" Zadok reacted first.

"Alexis!" Amri seconded the sound of concern, but called for help. Alexis, already on the way, started to open the medical kit.

"Daughter?" No one understood what might be going through Mingus' mind, but Alexis waved him off, locked her thumbs, and placed her hands an inch away from the gash in Boston's side. A golden-white glow of magic formed around Alexis' hands, but when they touched Boston, Boston grimaced for a moment before she relaxed. Lincoln, Lockhart and the others all watched while the bleeding stopped and the wound slowly closed-up. The healing was not as fast or as complete a healing as Lockhart's hand, but clearly Boston would be fine. All the same, Alexis wrapped Boston in some gauze and tape, and helped her stand. She then helped her repair her fairy weave clothes.

"I'll be fine," Boston said, as she felt two arms encircle her and two heads press up against her, with tears welled up in Amri's eyes. "Oh," Boston returned the hug. She wanted to squat again and hug the Kairos properly, but she was not sure if she could squat. "You are cute when you are young." She said, instead.

"Of course." Zadok looked up with a smile and Boston saw the same smile spread across Armi's face. "I'm always cute." The twins backed up and looked once around at everyone. Then Amri spoke again.

"You must go. Nimrod might have died alone, the tower fallen, and him ever so slightly afraid that something of him might survive death after all. You may have done him a mercy, but now you must go. Godfather Cronos must come to see me, and the tower must be shattered."

Lieutenant Harper, who craned her neck to see the top, nodded. "Bad bricks. Straw would have helped."

"Ahem!" Captain Decker coughed to get her quiet.

"You better hurry," Amri said. "I feel Cronos may come tomorrow, and shortly after he arrives, the tower will fall and I will cease. Then I don't know. This time zone might start again at the beginning—at the moment of my conception. It would be better if you were not here when it reset."

"So, we have until tomorrow to get to the next time gate," Doctor Procter summarized and got out his amulet. He turned to face the woods, then he turned back to say farewell.

"Will you be all right?" Lockhart asked.

"Of course," Amri responded. "I live here. But you must hurry."

"And Lockhart," Zadok interrupted himself, or rather, herself. "I am sorry to burden you with having to get everyone back home the hard way, but I believe in you." Amri nodded her head in agreement, quite independently of what Zadok was doing.

Lockhart said nothing. He just turned and followed the others back down the hill, toward the woods.

Bokarus

Roland happily helped Boston into the woods. Lockhart, Captain Decker and Lieutenant Harper kept their eyes open in case any people escaped the trouble on the plains by wandering in among the trees. Lincoln kept thinking of things to jot down in his notebook and his wife made sure he did not walk into any trees. Mingus appeared to be thinking hard about something else and stayed quiet. Doctor Procter walked out front with his eyes glued to the amulet. He did walk into a couple of trees.

After a stop for a snack and a chance for Boston to rest, they entered a section of the forest that somehow felt darker and more oppressive than before.

"A bit like walking into a goblin's lair," Mingus suggested. That did not help.

Lockhart figured they were far enough into the trees by then so it was safe to shoulder the shotgun. He offered to take a turn helping Boston. Roland seemed reluctant to let go of her and Boston hesitated as well. But after only a moment's hesitation, Boston gladly let Lockhart help her, though she felt pretty sure she could have handled it on her own by then. As they walked, she thought about how she liked having Lockhart's big arms wrapped around her. But then, she did not mind Roland's arms, either. She felt confused. Lockhart was supposed to be a father figure—a grandfather figure. Lockhart did not help matters when he reminded her of his previous life.

"I was married once, you know, and I have a granddaughter that is not much younger than you."

The forest continued to darken until there came a legitimate reason for the darkness. The sun got ready to set. Lockhart called a halt, and though he felt certain the elves and probably Doctor Procter could have continued without trouble in the dark, he thought it best to let everyone get some rest. Alexis showed signs of being tired, drained from the healing magic she performed on Boston, and Boston was not fully healed despite her playful attitude.

"So, what's for supper?" Lincoln asked first.

"Bread-crackers and bread-crackers," Alexis answered.

"Father, make a fire and give me an hour," Roland said.

Mingus nodded. "My son has some talents, too."

"A hunter?" Boston asked, as Roland disappeared into the dusk of the forest. Mingus nodded.

"Are you offended?" Alexis wondered.

"Not at all. I grew up with hunters. I love a good hunt. I can skin and cut up a deer and everything."

"Redneck daughter," Lockhart smiled. "Matches her red hair."

"Good of you to notice." Boston smiled right back at him.

When the tents were up and the cut-up deer roasted away, people wandered off for firewood and personal reasons, and perhaps to spend some time alone with their thoughts. Forty-five hundred BC was a long time ago. Sixty-five hundred years was a long time to travel.

Boston sat beside Doctor Procter and stared at the fire, her mind contemplating the impossible journey they faced. When she turned to the man, she imagined Doctor Procter had been unreasonably quiet so far. Her handheld database proved to be full of information about the various lives of the Kairos, but she imagined Doctor Procter knew a wealth of more intimate information, if she could just learn how to tap into it.

"So how far do we have to go?" she asked, casually. "Do you know the next life of the Kairos we will meet?"

The doctor took out his amulet and answered her first question with a look. "We should easily be there by noon." He shook the amulet and then repeated himself. "Yes, by noon."

"May I see?" she asked, but when he held the amulet out for her, the first thing she saw was a blackening of his pointer finger. It looked black all the way to the palm. "What is that? It looks blood black. How did it happen?"

Doctor Procter pulled his hand back, quickly. "It is just a bruise. It will be fine. It must have happened when we were escaping the fight back on the plains of Shinar. I think someone jammed it."

"Shouldn't you let Alexis look at it? Maybe she can heal it." Boston felt amazed at how Alexis had healed her.

"No, it is fine. Look." He wiggled it. "It is not swollen or anything. I am sure it will clear up in a day or two. Besides, healing magic takes a great deal out of a person. We can't expect her to heal every cut or scrape or bruised finger."

"But it looks so dark. Is that blood?"

"No. It is fine, really. Now if you will excuse me, I have some personal business to attend to." He got up, smiled, and waddled off. His old legs looked stiff.

Boston could hardly follow him, but she made a point later of mentioning it to Lockhart, privately. He also said to do nothing and not tell the others just yet. He said she should keep an eye on it, but when Doctor Procter came back to the fire, she noticed he made some fairy weave gloves that fit right up beneath his long sleeves.

"I thought I better protect it for a couple of days, just to give it a chance to heal," he said.

That made sense. It was probably nothing, so Boston decided not to worry about it.

By four in the morning, a good hour before dawn, Boston heard the crack of a great tree. Someone yelled. "Everyone out of the tents, now. Hurry!" Boston jumped because the crack sounded very close. Lieutenant Harper, who shared her tent, helped her, and they ran as well as Boston could. The tree came down on their tent, and while Boston and the lieutenant were brushed back by some branches, they only got scrapes and cuts like Doctor Procter talked about.

"Boston?" Lockhart was the first one there.

"You shouted?" the lieutenant asked.

"I woke up early, uncomfortable. I felt someone needed to be on watch and found Captain Decker had the same feelings."

"Boston." Alexis came running up. "What is it with you?" She began to tend their cuts.

"This is not accidental." Mingus' voice came from the far end of the tree. "The tree is old, but not dead, though what could have ripped it up, roots and all, is beyond me."

"Is everyone all right?" Doctor Procter came up last of all. "What happened here?" No one answered him.

"Roland, Captain Decker, can you watch the perimeter while we break camp?" Lockhart asked, and the elf nodded and stepped out among the trees. The captain simply checked his weapon as Lockhart spoke. "Lincoln, can you get Boston's tent out from under the trunk?"

"I'll do it," Mingus said. "It is fairy weave, but it will take some finesse in its present position."

Lockhart nodded. "Lincoln, you get scullery. See what there is for breakfast and be sure the fire is out. Are you able to travel?" That last question got directed to the women. The lieutenant, Boston and Alexis all nodded.

"What about me?" Doctor Procter asked.

"Just get us to the gate before the tower falls and this whole time zone resets, whatever that means." Doctor Procter nodded like the women and went to help take down the other tents.

Two hours after sunrise, Alexis screamed. "A face." She pointed. "There was a face, there, among the leaves." Everyone looked, Lockhart and Roland extra close, but they saw no one.

"A face?" Mingus wondered what his daughter saw.

Alexis took a deep breath. "It startled me. A man's face, I think."

"Well whoever he was, he is gone now." Captain Decker came in from behind the bushes.

"No, wait. I don't mean a face like on a person. I mean the leaves shaped themselves into a face, and—and I sensed the presence of something alive."

"I don't see it." Lincoln squinted.

"No, it is gone now."

"A face in the leaves." Mingus rubbed his chin. "A green man, do you think?"

Doctor Procter looked up. "It seems a good explanation, this far back."

Mingus spoke to the others. "A bokarus, a spirit of what you humans call the pristine wilderness. They resent intrusion, particularly human intrusion, and fights against any environmental changes. That would explain the old tree torn up by the roots. The tree probably did not have long to live and it became a worthy sacrifice to kill us, or two of us anyway."

"I read they are especially dangerous around water," Doctor Procter said in his way, without explaining why.

"They like to drown people and feed off their souls—the life force." Mingus did the explaining. "It is neat and clean, does no damage to the environment, and the dead body feeds those things that live in the river. But a bokarus can be dangerous on any ground."

"I understand." Boston touched the cut on her cheek. "But will it follow us through the time gate?"

"Not likely." Lockhart said, and looked at Mingus who nodded to confirm that idea. "Probably native to this land."

"Probably the reason these woods were considered off limits to the people back on the plains," Lieutenant Harper suggested.

"No doubt," Lockhart got everyone moving again, though they did not have very far to go to get to the gate. When they arrived, Doctor Procter held up the amulet, which glowed, slightly green, but he could not seem to locate the source.

"It is here, I tell you," Doctor Procter insisted, but no one could see the shimmering air. "But it must be here." He stepped forward and disappeared.

"I guess he was right." Lockhart said, and after only a second, Doctor Procter reappeared.

"Good to know the gates are two-way."

"Good to know," Lockhart agreed and he encouraged the doctor to go back through once more and everyone else to follow. They started to move when they heard a rumbling sound like thunder in the distance.

"The tower," Lincoln said, as he took one last look around, and they all stepped through the gate into the next time zone.

### END

Avalon, Moving into the Future

Avalon is a television series in written story form.

I only have one general rule: that anyone who reads a story/episode, for example, from the middle of season three, they should be able to pick up on what is going on and basically how it all works. If you want to start with the episodes that appear on my website, **mgkizzia.com** , and then want to go back and read the earlier adventures, that should be fine. Of course, reading them in order will enhance the experience, but I hate accidentally picking up book two of some trilogy and being totally lost. Especially for a TV show, a person ought to be able to come in the middle and still get a good story.

### ***

Look for **Avalon** _, Season One_ **, Avalon,** _Season Two_ **,** and **Avalon** _Season Three_ at your favorite e-book retailers. Thirteen Episodes from the beginning of history in each book detail the adventures of the Travelers from Avalon. Thrown back to the beginning of history, the travelers struggle to work their way through the days of myth and legend. They face gods and demons, gothic horrors, fantastic creatures and ancient aliens in this romp through time. They also quickly realize that they are not the only ones who have fallen through the cracks in time, and some of the others are now hunting them.

**Seasons 4, 5, and 6,** bring the travelers face to face with the worst monsters of all: the human monsters. As they move through the days before the dissolution of the gods, they get caught up in the rise of empires, and the birth of the great civilizations. It isn't what they think—a grand adventure of discovery. It is never what they think. It is dangerous around every corner, and troubles rise directly in their path.

**Seasons7, 8, and 9** will bring the travelers into the common era where the human capacity for violence and destruction increases exponentially. The spiritual terrors and aliens fade into the background, without ever going away, as the world turns to the history of humanity, and eventually world war threatens the travelers with every step of their journey back to the twenty-first century.

### ***

Free stories are presently being blogged in bite-sized pieces on my website: **mgkizzia.com**. You are welcome to take a look.

Also, look for **Avalon, the Prequel:** _Invasion of Memories_ , where the Kairos comes out of a time of deep memory loss and realizes he is the only one who has any hope of stopping an alien invasion. To keep from being overwhelmed with the sudden influx of so many memories from so many lifetimes stretching from the deep past to the distant future, the Kairos tells stories from various times in his own life when he remembered who he was; the Traveler in time, the Watcher over history.

_Invasion of Memories_ is both a collection of short stories and a novel of the Men in Black who struggle to prevent an invasion by the alien Vordan, a species given to shoot first, and that is pretty much it, just shoot first.

All of these books are reasonably priced at your favorite e-retailer, and are available through Amazon in a hard copy, so you can hold it in your hand. You can find them under the author name, **M. G. Kizzia**. And here, I am supposed to say, Pick up your copy today! or some such promotional doo-dah...

I hope you enjoy reading the _Avalon_ stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them.

Happy Reading.

\-- MGKizzia
