Fractured Time – Chapter VI
The Fall
Queer Fiction 🔞
The jump was chaos.
Mason had never experienced a transition like this. The prototype didn't hum—it screamed. The cabin rattled violently, the displays flickering between dead black and blinding white. Adrian slumped against him, his feverish body trembling, his breath shallow and ragged. Elena fought with the controls, her fingers flying across the console, her face lit by the stroboscopic glare of failing systems.
"We're not stabilizing!" she shouted over the din. "The energy cell's detonation damaged the core! The jump is—"
The world inverted.
Mason felt his stomach drop through the floor as the prototype twisted through something that wasn't space. Colors bled into sounds. Sounds became textures. For a terrible, endless moment, he was everywhere and nowhere at once—a ghost scattered across the timeline.
Then, with a bone-jarring crash, they stopped.
Silence.
The kind of silence that rings in the ears. Mason blinked, his vision swimming. The cabin was dark, lit only by a faint, grey light filtering through the cracked viewport. The air smelled of ozone, scorched metal, and something else—damp earth. Rotting leaves.
"Everyone alive?" he croaked.
Elena groaned from the pilot's seat. "Define alive."
Adrian stirred in his arms, a weak, pained sound escaping his lips. His skin was burning hot. Mason pressed a hand to his forehead and felt the fever radiating off him like a furnace.
"Adrian? Can you hear me?"
His husband's eyes fluttered open. The brilliant blue was dull, clouded with pain. "Where…?"
"I don't know yet. But we're down. We're safe. For now."
Mason looked through the viewport. The world outside was green—dense, oppressive green. Massive trees with gnarled trunks and thick canopies blocked out most of the sky. The air that seeped through the cracks was cool and damp, carrying the scent of wet earth, moss, and something wild.
The Dark Ages. Or somewhere close.
Elena checked the diagnostics, her face growing grim. "The core is damaged. The jump destabilizer is fried. We're not going anywhere until I can repair it."
"How long?"
"Days. Maybe a week. If I can find the right materials."
Mason looked at Adrian. His husband's breathing was laboured, his skin pale and slick with sweat. The wound on his side, where the Time Warden's touch had burned through his flight suit, was red and swollen. Infected.
"We need medicine," Mason said quietly. "The antibiotics are gone. Used the last dose in the Eocene."
Elena nodded slowly. "I know what you're thinking. Penicillium. The mold. But Mason—this is the 14th century. You don't know what's out there. The people. The dangers."
"I know my husband is dying."
The words hung in the air, sharp and final.
Elena looked at Adrian, then back at Mason. She sighed. "I'll start on the core. You… be careful."
The Forest
Mason stepped out of the prototype into a world that felt centuries old.
The forest was ancient, the trees so tall their crowns disappeared into the grey canopy above. The ground was soft with centuries of fallen leaves, dotted with mushrooms of every shape and colour. Some he recognized. Some he didn't.
He had studied. He knew what Penicillium looked like—the blue-green mould that grew on decaying organic matter. But knowing and finding were two different things.
He moved carefully, scanning the forest floor, the rotting logs, the damp crevices of tree bark. Every sound made him freeze—the crack of a twig, the rustle of leaves, the distant call of a bird he couldn't identify.
He was a stranger here. A man from the future, dressed in the tattered remains of a flight suit, wandering through a world that would burn him as a witch if they found him.
The first sign of trouble was the smell.
Smoke. Woodsmoke, but not from a campfire. It was thicker, darker, carrying the scent of burning fat and something else—something organic.
Mason crouched behind a massive oak, peering through the underbrush. A clearing opened ahead, and in it, a small village. Thatched roofs. Mud streets. A few figures moving between the huts.
And at the centre of the village, a pyre.
It was still smouldering. The remnants of whatever—whoever—had been burned there were unrecognizable. Blackened bones. Melted metal that might have been a cooking pot or a crucifix.
Mason's blood ran cold.
He backed away slowly, carefully. He couldn't be seen. If they caught him, if they saw his strange clothes, his strange tools…
He turned and ran deeper into the forest.
The Hunt
They found him an hour later.
Not the villagers—something worse. A hunting party. Men on horseback, dressed in rough leather and chainmail, carrying crossbows and swords. They weren't hunting game. They were hunting him.
Mason heard them before he saw them—the thunder of hooves, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men in a language he barely understood. Middle English. A dialect so far from modern speech that he could only catch fragments.
"…the stranger… the devil's servant…"
"…found his machine… black magic…"
"…burn him like the other…"
Mason ran.
