Back in the cottage, Zin paced in tight, agitated circles around the table. Her nerves, already fried from waking up in the wrong century, were now unraveling entirely. The unfamiliar quiet outside—the absence of traffic, sirens, life—only amplified the buzzing in her head.
Her fingers, cold despite the warmth of the fire, kept brushing the pendant in her hoodie pocket—the heirloom that had flipped her life like a table in a reality show finale.
She drew it out again.
Same weight. Same soft glow under the worn etching. Same strange hum that wasn't sound, exactly, but a presence. Like the object itself had a pulse, a rhythm that echoed faintly against her skin.
"Okay," she muttered, lowering herself into the chair. "You got me here. Now what? Where's the off-switch? The time-un-travel button? The 'get out of the 19th century' free card?"
The pendant, of course, didn't respond. It just sat there, slightly warm in her palm, humming its smug little secret song like it knew something she didn't.
Zin turned it over again and again in her hand, as if sheer repetition would force it to unlock some hidden meaning. She pressed her thumb to the symbol carved into the metal—an hourglass in a circle, split by a jagged line. She hadn't noticed that crack before. It hadn't been there. Had it?
The door creaked behind her.
Mrs. Alder entered, holding a wooden tray with a bowl of broth, a hunk of bread, and a folded cloth napkin. She moved like a woman who had seen everything—storms, sickness, strange girls from strange places—and still had no time for drama.
"You should eat," she said, setting the tray on the table without ceremony.
Zin didn't look up. Her eyes stayed fixed on the object in her hands. "Do you know what this is?"
A pause. Not long, but long enough.
"No," Mrs. Alder said.
Zin glanced up, sharp. "You hesitated."
Mrs. Alder slowly sat across from her, folding her hands neatly. Her eyes, though kind, were steady and unreadable. "It looks familiar. That's all."
"Familiar how?" Zin pressed.
The widow's gaze flicked toward the door—quick, instinctive, almost fearful. Like even the walls had ears.
"Some things," Mrs. Alder said softly, "are better left undisturbed."
Zin held the pendant up like it was a cursed Rubik's cube and frowned at it like it owed her an explanation.
"So what, you just dragged me back here because I share some unfortunate DNA with a man who disappeared before I was born?" she muttered, tilting it toward the firelight. "Was that the requirement? Last name Aster, vaguely skeptical, good with sarcasm?"
The pendant didn't respond, naturally. It just sat in her hand, pulsing faintly like it had a smug little heartbeat of its own.
She turned sharply toward Mrs. Alder, still perched at the edge of the hearth with that unsettling calm.
"Why me?" Zin asked. "Why now? I'm from 2025. I have nothing to do with this place, with this... century. My mum doesn't even talk about him—my dad, I mean. He left before I was born. I barely even know what he looked like, let alone why he'd leave behind a time-traveling murder trinket in a cardboard box full of floppy disks and terrible jazz CDs."
Mrs. Alder studied her. "And yet, here you are."
Zin scoffed. "Helpful."
She pressed her fingers to her temples. "I was just driving. Storm rolls in, GPS dies, heirloom starts glowing, and boom—I'm doing a face-plant in a thorn bush in the 1800s. That's not fate. That's absurd."
"Sometimes," Mrs. Alder said gently, "absurdity is how old truths arrive."
Zin dropped her hands, her tone more brittle now. "So what, I'm supposed to believe this thing picked me? Because I have a pulse and my surname's inconvenient?"
"You bear his blood," Mrs. Alder said. "And you carry what he left behind. That may be all the past needed."
Zin looked down at the pendant again, suddenly aware of how light she felt—untethered from everything she knew. Her job. Her flat. Her mother. Group chats she'd probably been booted from by now.
Something popped into her mind.
Zin stared at Mrs. Alder like she'd grown antlers.
"Wait," she said slowly, voice suddenly tight. "You're saying my dad was here. In this village. In the 1800s."
Mrs. Alder didn't blink. "Yes."
Zin held up a single, trembling finger. "Okay, small problem with that: I was born in 2004. He went missing sometime around 2003. Unless he time-traveled before I was born, shagged my mum, and then zipped back into the 19th century like a Victorian Batman—how does that make any sense?"
Mrs. Alder's expression stayed maddeningly calm. "You said he disappeared."
"Yeah. As in gone. Vanished. Lost at sea, presumed dead, probably enjoying cocktails in witness protection. Not waltzing through history with a haunted pocket watch!"
Zin started pacing again, her hands slicing the air like punctuation marks. "Okay. Okay. Let's just logic this out. Either—one, I'm hallucinating. Two, I hit my head harder than I thought. Or three…" She stopped. "Time travel is real, my dad was doing it behind everyone's back, and now I'm in his mess."
She sat down hard on the edge of the bed. "Jesus Christ, Dad. Was a family vacation too much to ask?"
Mrs. Alder moved closer, voice gentler now. "We never understood how he arrived here. He said little. Only that he came from a world no one believed in."
Zin barked out a laugh—tired, half-crazy. "Yeah, sounds familiar. That's how I feel every time I try explaining TikTok to my gran."
She rubbed her eyes. "But seriously… how is this possible? If he was born in the 70s or 80s like a normal person, how did he end up in the 1800s? And why leave behind this?"
She shook the pendant like it might cough up answers. "What is this thing? A key? A curse? A time-travel fob?"
Mrs. Alder hesitated, then sat down across from her. "He called it a tether."
"A what?"
"A thread between worlds. He said time wasn't a line. It was... folded."
Zin stared. "So he left this behind. Knowing someone might follow."
"Or hoping someone would."
Zin slumped back, exhausted. "Brilliant. I've been recruited into a family legacy I didn't even know existed. My dad's some secret historical hit-and-run artist, and now I'm wearing his weird necklace and eating soup with a woman who thinks time folds like laundry."
Mrs. Alder's mouth twitched. "You're handling it better than he did."
Zin gave a hollow laugh. "I don't suppose he left a diary? A set of instructions? A post-it note?"
"Nothing we ever found."
"Of course not," Zin muttered. "Because why make it easy."
She stared down at the pendant again, the glow now faint as moonlight under skin. And for the first time, she didn't just feel confused. She felt afraid. Not of the village. Not of the year.
But of the fact that maybe... just maybe... she was the only one left who could figure out what the hell her dad had started.
The pendant sat motionless in her palm, but Zin could swear it was watching her. Not with eyes, but with that same smug, unreadable energy that seemed to hum from its core. It was the kind of object that looked ancient enough to curse a bloodline and smug enough to know it already had.
She clenched her fist around it and looked up again. "So what exactly did he start? Because all I'm getting is cryptic metaphors and the creeping suspicion that I'm on season three of a mystery I never signed up for."
Mrs. Alder sighed—not irritated, but tired in a way that made Zin pause. "If I knew, I would tell you. Truly. But your father... Elias didn't confide in many. And those he did, well—most of them aren't here anymore."
Zin's brows knit. "Not here as in moved?"
"As in buried."
"Oh." She let that hang in the air. "Fun."
Mrs. Alder stood, moving to the mantle to tend to the fire, her silhouette softened by the flickering light. "He used to disappear for days. Sometimes weeks. When he came back, he'd have sketches—symbols we didn't recognize, strange words he claimed weren't his. He was always… listening. To the woods. To the wind. To the things the rest of us couldn't hear."
Zin stared, unnerved. "You realize how that sounds, right? Like my dad was less 'inventor of time travel' and more 'should've had a padded room.'"
"I thought the same," Mrs. Alder admitted. "Until the night the sky cracked open. Just like it did when you came."
Zin's lips parted, but no words came out.
"I was there," Mrs. Alder continued, her voice gentler now. "I saw the lightning hit the chapel ruins. I saw him vanish."
"Vanished, like… poof? Gone?"
"Gone," Mrs. Alder said. "Like smoke in wind."
Zin slumped in her chair, staring into the fire. "So I really did follow in his footsteps."
The old woman sat again, setting a careful hand on Zin's wrist. "You may be the only one who can finish what he began. Or undo it."
Zin shook her head. "But I don't even know what he began."
A long silence passed. The fire crackled and popped, casting shadows on the walls that danced like they knew secrets. Zin leaned forward, arms folded on the table, forehead resting against them.
"I'm not ready for this," she whispered into the quiet. "I'm not some adventurer. I had a dentist appointment next Tuesday."
Mrs. Alder said nothing. She didn't have to.
And somewhere, beneath the table, the pendant gave a soft, almost imperceptible pulse.
Zin didn't move.
But she felt it.
She wasn't just lost.
She was summoned.
"I need air".
Zin stepped out into the night like it might bite her.
The cool air wrapped around her shoulders, sharp and unfamiliar, carrying the scent of damp grass, woodsmoke, and something older—something like iron and earth and memory. The kind of smell that reminded her of libraries no one went into anymore. It pricked at the corners of her mind, stirring thoughts she couldn't name.
She tightened the borrowed cloak around her shoulders and crossed the short stretch of yard, boots crunching softly on gravel. The cottage behind her glowed like a memory in reverse—familiar and foreign all at once, with its flickering hearthlight and lace-curtained windows. It should have felt safe.
It didn't.
Not because Mrs. Alder was unkind. Not because the villagers had glared at her like she'd invented fire and taxed it.
But because something had shifted. Deep down. Something Zin hadn't agreed to.
She stopped at the edge of the path where it met the tall grass. Beyond was a stretch of field dotted with wildflowers and dew-heavy weeds. The stars above were brighter than she'd ever seen them. No airplanes. No light pollution. Just sky—raw and glittering, like the universe had cracked open and spilled secrets.
She looked up and laughed bitterly under her breath.
"Of course it's beautiful," she muttered. "Time decides to eat me alive and drop me in the middle of a bloody Pinterest board."
Her hand found the pendant again, smooth and infuriating in her pocket. She yanked it free and held it up to the starlight.
"What do you want from me?" she asked it, voice sharp, trembling. "Seriously. You've made your point. Magic is real. Time is a liar. I'm in the nineteenth century and nobody knows what TikTok is. Congratulations."
The pendant pulsed faintly in response. Not glowing exactly—just that weird, skin-deep hum. Like it was listening. Waiting.
"I am not the person for this," she whispered, almost pleading now. "You've got the wrong girl. I can barely pay my electric bill on time. I've killed every succulent I've ever owned. I talk to my group chat more than I talk to actual people."
Her throat tightened.
"I never even met him," she said, quieter now. "My dad. Elias. He was gone before I could ask him anything. My mum barely says his name. She just looks tired when I do."
She closed her eyes.
"And now I'm here. Chasing ghosts. Wearing his broken heirloom like it means something. Like I mean something."
The pendant didn't answer. Neither did the sky.
She opened her eyes and looked out past the trees.
Something flickered far across the field, beyond the woods—just for a second. A warm light, impossibly distant. Like a candle behind glass, or a lantern carried by someone who didn't know they were being watched.
A shiver ran down her arms.
She didn't know what it was.
She didn't know who was out there.
But she had the distinct, gut-chilling sense that someone was watching the sky too.
And that whatever had pulled her into this time—into this mess—it wasn't finished.