Microstory 1240: Erlendr Preston

< > Table of Contents

When the thousands of people who were in charge of The Temporal Gallery abandoned their responsibilities to protect the timeline, and exited the dimension, only three people remained. Athanaric Fury had the ability to create entire people, and even gift them with time powers, so it was he who designed the replacements for the people who left, but he did not start completely from scratch. He modeled the first three—and ultimately only three—new workers after the other two remainders, as if creating their children for them. Erlendr Preston was the leader of their people, whose job it was to keep watch over the Gallery, and assign duties, so there was no way he was ever going to leave his home. They called him The Curator; an honor that he took quite seriously. He and his wife were the driving forces in the movement. They were the first to see that time travel was causing problems, and it wasn’t ever going to stop unless they found a way to rise above it. They had to separate themselves from time, in some way, or the people they were up against would have too much of an advantage over them. They were heartbroken when their whole plan fell apart, and no one took it harder than Savannah. She hid herself away so deep in the gallery dimension that not even Erlendr could find her. He searched for years, but never came up with any evidence that she was even still there. He might have thought she escaped after all the others, but there was no evidence of that either. There wasn’t much for him to do anymore. Fury had built for him a skeleton crew to take control over the timeline, and though they would eventually come with their own headaches, managing the few of them wasn’t exactly a fulltime job. And so Erlendr spent most of his time watching the people on Earth go about their lives. He watched them like a normal person would watch television. He watched television too. He also read all the books, and saw all the plays. His life was busy, but boring, and depressing for him. He was secretly relieved when everything came tumbling down, and his whole purpose in life died. But he stayed. Even though the Gallery was useless without Athanaric’s temporal energy, he just could not bring himself to leave. Some say he’s still up there, all alone, watching the world with no hope of protecting the timeline from paradoxes. Others say he’s been reunited with his missing wife. Most seem to think he’s dead, either up there with a perfectly preserved body, or turned to dust with the rest of us.