The Chronomancer and the Twins of Time

Suddenly, I understand.

This miracle pregnancy has shattered the ordinary bounds of time. My connection: with him, with the strange child inside me, lets me drift between ancestral memories and futures not yet written. The golden drops, the singing in lost tongues, the waves of faintness—these aren’t symptoms, but signals. My body is tuning itself to generations past and possible.

I sit up too fast. The room doesn’t tilt: I do, slipping sideways through something that isn’t quite space.

Asdar’s hand finds mine. His palm feels ancient, the skin mapped with scars I’ve never seen. Then I blink and they’re gone—his hand smooth again, just warm pressure against my knuckles.

The singing. My body tuning itself to frequencies I can’t name.

I close my eyes and the darkness behind my lids blooms with images: a coastline that predates maps, children speaking in phonemes that died millennia ago, Asdar’s face younger, older, the same. Not visions. Memories that aren’t mine, leaking through.

When I open my eyes, my skin is wet. The golden drops again: warm, weird, dripping down my belly where colostrum should be.

The child inside me—bridge, anchor, thief—is taking more than nutrients. Time, maybe. Linearity. Or rather my previous certainty that cause preceded effect.

“Well,” I say, my voice steadier than I feel. “That’s new.”

The understatement sits between us like a third presence.

Time’s boundaries have dissolved within me. Instead of terror, I feel a strange alloy of awe and crushing responsibility. When he lays his palm over mine, I sense ancient lifetimes pulsing through that simple touch.

For a moment, I let myself ride those currents of memory—seeing the world as it was, as it might yet be, and as it’s becoming through me. This supernatural child is a bridge—not just of blood, but of all memory and possibility flowing forward.

My heart stutters, the room tilts with the magnitude of it all.

Fuuck, I am so utterly fuuuucked, screams my brain.

I wake to an empty bed. Of course—Asdar, master of slipping through the fabric of reality (and apparently, my sheets). I lie still for a moment, stretching in the hush he’s left behind and feeling the faint ache of missing him: a wound I already know will never truly heal. My body is a confusing festival of aftershocks: tired, content, and somewhere beneath, still humming with the memory of gold.

Sighing, I shuffle to the kitchen: tea, the old ritual. The tin is predictably at the back of the cupboard, because some things in life never lose their capacity to annoy. I reach up for the tea tin, stretching on tiptoe, and my breasts brush against the cold cupboard door. For a split second, I brace myself, expecting to see a shimmer of gold—those strange, luminous drops that marked the night as anything but ordinary. But there’s nothing. The skin is warm, tender, but perfectly dry.. No golden drops, no miraculous mess down my nightgown. 

Just a pleasant ache and the normal indignities of morning after intense lovemaking. I blink, oddly relieved. Last night’s miracle seems to have taken a break, sparing me the embarrassment (and perplexity) of dripping gold through my pyjamas and onto the kitchen floor. Whatever power surged through me in the dark, it has ebbed for now, enough to let me play mortal at least until my next cup of tea.

Relief and curiosity mingle. Maybe it was a one-night-only show, a sign for me alone—miraculous, yes, but perhaps with a dash of mercy. After all, leaking liquid gold through my bra all day would be a logistical and sartorial nightmare, supernatural baby or no.

I smile to myself, equal parts grateful and bemused. 

At least today, I can face the world with dry clothes and only my usual quota of mysteries. I manage to steep something probably caffeinated just as the world’s volume leaps several notches.

A rapid knock—one-two-three—then the Boswell boys stamping in, radiating more cheer than sense. They knocked, I wondered. They’re loud, irreverent, and not quite able to keep the cockney out of their banter—or their pride.

“Oi, Dr D, you seen the telly?” Darrel grins, swinging himself onto a stool, eyes dancing.

Bartley, voice full Pikey, barely gives me a chance to answer. “Lord Fetchitall’s done for! All over the news—the posh lizard, caught with its trousers and morals down. You’re a bloody hero at the firm.”

They’re chuffed, full of stories about how their dad’s demanding I turn up for a “family celebration”—and bring my glittering circus: Eve and Lord Taren. “One in the eye for the blue bloods, eh?” Darryll winks, already halfway into my biscuit tin.

“A party?” I say, voice dry as a late-night G&T. “Tempting, but today I’ve got my own business to tend to. Empires to build, rueful memories to make, maybe a miracle or two. Anyway, can you picture Eve with the entire Boswell clan? We might burn Parliament down by accident.”

They groan, mock wounded. “Aw, come on, Dr D. Make it a knees-up for the ages!”

I shake my head, half-smiling. “Go on, tell your dad I’ll see what I can do. And leave my biscuits alone—I’ve survived miracles, but not famine.”

They laugh, spilling out again, the house full of their noise. I finish my tea and look around my little kingdom—messy, improbable, and mine. The day awaits, with all its glorious nonsense.

I step into the shower, letting the hot water sluice away the last remnants of sleep and the impossible marks of last night. Habit and wariness have me squeezing each nipple, half expecting alchemy—yet nothing but relief meets my fingers. The gold is gone, for now, and with it the pressing fear that I might stain my blouse with magical liquids before lunch.

I.Ph.