A price of power

To live in this world there is one thing one like yourself must know.

It's more like a law of nature than a thing that could be cast away.

Perhaps it would be better to show you.

We go back to the very start of the mess we're in. A mess that I started. A mess that my powers started. A mess.

This story does not begin with a corrupted government or a big bad to defeat.

No, this story begins in a field.

This story began with a deal, a deal only a fool would make. A deal that I made.

 "Do you wish it?"Asked the tiny creature dressed in silks and buttons as hats.

The woman, more of a girl than anything, a child thrust into a world of pain and suffering, nodded.

The little creature, fae her grandmother called them, eyed her carefully.

"So be it," the fae said and it exploded in a ball of light almost blinding her.

The girl looked around for a moment as if searching for any sign of difference, yet she found nothing.

She was afraid of being cheated when she turned around and was in an odd-looking place. Everything felt different, almost as if she was in a different time.

Yet nobody noticed her standing ina middle of busy palace halls, where ladies dressed in clothes she saw in museums ran all over the place.

The older woman stared at her, yet the child had not noticed. She never did. I never did.

Time and Space

That was the name of the power I was given, the thing I was given the control over. The thing I sacrificed so much for.

As I said that was the start of a mess we were in, we are in.

The whole history of the world, no matter the past, the present, or the future, all of it, at the fingertips of a child.

Maybe it was odd to call a 19-year-old a child but compared to now...she was a child.

But the fact stood that she was foolhardy at best and an absolute moron at worst when it came to the power that resided in her.

Many things can go wrong when you give such power to a child. But she was safe for the start, seemingly there was no price she paid to the fae and she happily strutted back into her time, back to her parents.

Only to realize they couldn't see her.

No matter how much she screamed and cried and pleaded they didn't budge. They passed through her as if she was a ghost.

She wasn't dead, that much she knew. She had a heartbeat and she felt pain and she almost drowned so she was alive, alive but unseen.

She didn't know the price of her power. Her power of time and place that cost her existence, people's memories of her.

She had all the power in the world to change the events of history, she had the power to see the unseen parts of the future and the past and the present. Yet she herself remained forgotten.

She could save her sister, she could save a million people but she herself couldn't be saved.

"A fool, "I hissed as I watched my younger self cry at my parents' feet and them not even sparing a glance.

Power comes at the cost. It always did and it always will.

"You want to have a power to save your sister, correct?"Asked the fae in her memories.

The little girl (she refused to call that moron her younger self, even if it was the truth)nodded, not even knowing what she was signing up for.

"More than anything," the girl said.

It starts out always innocently, wanting something good.

She saved her sister, her parents had regained their lost child but unknowingly lost another.

She wouldn't know what kind of consequence that made. 

It started like that, saving people from disasters, warning others, helping that child not starve to death, etc.

Little by little, she was changing the world. Quite literally so.

Whenever she affected anyone, whether it is a whisper or a push she changed the course of history.

They found her, she already saved a hundred people but they found her. And they wanted to set the world straight.

"You can't continue doing this,"

"As if you can stop me,"

And with that began her chase over the whole time continuum from the prehistoric era to the spacial empire in the future.

The only constant in all of those was one of the head chasers, timekeepers, as they called themselves. Odd bunch if you asked her. They were dressed futuristically yet they meddled in matters of magic. The only presence that remained throughout this endeavor was him.

Maybe it was the one time in the Victorian era when he pretended to be a bartender and they flirted senselessly or that one time when he saved her from a velociraptor that was about to eat her alive or perhaps when she saved him from a pirate on her ship that was about to shoot him-

Well, to cut it short they had moments. And for the longest time, she convinced herself that they were just that, moments, nothing less nothing more.

Oh, how wrong she was.

Suddenly she saw a new perk in her curse and blessing of power.

She wreaked havoc over the time stream and he followed her all over it. Correcting it and trying to prevent it. 

Somewhere along the line, she realized that she loved him.

Foolish, childish, idiotic, cliche- call it however you want.

Maybe it was foolish, cross that it was most definitely foolish.

But as time passed things changed. They doomed each other as many times as they saved each other. They fought and laughed and ran from each other in every era known to the human mind.

Soon they knew each other better than they knew themselves.

She wreaked havoc over the time stream and he followed her, trying to correct it, to prevent it.

And soon the end of the first year neared and they found themselves in Greece.

It seemed funny that time had no meaning for her now, funny for someone whose power is literally time and space. But going from looking at T-rexes eyes to running from robocops in a matter of days did tend to mess with a person's sense of time passage.

But in the end, in Greece, they had a fight. He demanded that she stopped, the last one of her escapades caused over fifty thousand deaths.

She screamed and cried and he tried to talk to her but soon he was a crying mess too.

Before either of them knew it they were kissing each other senselessly. And the rest was, as they say, history.

Once upon a time in Greece, I guess...

It was a mess. His task was to capture her and she most definitely did not want to be captured.

She pleaded for him to run away with her, to a pocket dimension, to pat and the future, through hell and heaven.

But he...

He...

God, she couldn't even think of it.

Looking at her right arm, all of her right, wrinkly side.

Power has a price.

It always had and it always will.

She just wanted to save her sister. How did it go so wrong?

Mad with rage, mad with power, and simply mad. She marched towards their troops that came after her.

After that fight, they could try to find their remains over the time streams but they'd never find them.

After that day there were no more timekeepers after her.

She used immense power and she paid for it. All cells in her right side are now at the edge of their existence.

As for her lover...he tried to kill her in her sleep.

His legs were in the Victorian era, his intestines were dinosaur food and his head stood rotting on a pike in front of Vlad Draculas castle. She didn't care for the rest of the body parts, they might be fertilizing Pangea or being studied in the future.

And her?

She was slowly decaying in the Veil, watching the people live their lives while hee own remains being unseen. Rotting away, slowly and tirelessly.

After all, power has a price.