Chadwick Rye

Magistrix Caelwyn Starweaver pressed her palm against the obsidian surface of the Temporal Scrying Pool, feeling the cool stone pulse beneath her fingers like a heartbeat carved from eternity itself. The workshop around her—lined with crystalline chronometers and shelves bearing artifacts from ages both past and future—faded into insignificance as she spoke the incantation that would pierce the veil between moments.

“*Tempus revelio, memoriam dulcissimam*,” she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of forty years spent mastering the most dangerous of all magical arts.

The pool’s surface rippled, then stilled into perfect reflection before dissolving entirely into swirling mists of silver and gold. Time itself became visible—threads of causality weaving through existence like luminous silk, each strand representing lives lived, choices made, consequences rippling forward and backward through the endless tapestry of what was, what is, and what might yet be.

She had learned to navigate these temporal currents with the skill of a master mariner reading ocean tides, but tonight her destination was not some distant historical epoch or glimpse of possible futures. Tonight, she sought a single moment from her own past—one that had taken on new meaning as the decades accumulated like layers of sediment around her heart.

The mists parted, revealing a sun-drenched garden where a child of perhaps eight summers knelt among flowering vines, her small hands cupped around something precious. The girl’s hair—the same silver-white as Caelwyn’s own, though decades younger—caught the afternoon light like spun moonbeams, and her expression held that particular intensity of childhood fascination when the universe suddenly reveals one of its smaller miracles.

*Herself*, forty-three years ago, in the garden of her grandmother’s cottage on the outskirts of what would later become the Whispering Quarter of Lumenvale.

Through the temporal viewing, Caelwyn could perceive the moment with sensory richness that memory alone could never provide. The warmth of late summer air carrying the perfume of jasmine and honey-roses. The drowsy hum of bees moving between blossoms heavy with nectar. The particular quality of light that spoke of afternoon transitioning toward evening, when shadows began to lengthen and ordinary gardens transformed into realms of gentle magic.

But most vivid of all was the wonder radiating from her younger self as the child opened her cupped palms to reveal a butterfly unlike any catalogued in the natural histories of the realm. Its wings appeared to be crafted from living starlight—translucent membranes that shifted between deep violet and silver-white, pulsing with an inner luminescence that seemed to echo the rhythm of some cosmic heartbeat.

Caelwyn watched—remembering now what decades had obscured—as the extraordinary creature perched delicately on her childhood fingers, its presence both impossible and utterly real. She could see the exact moment when her younger self understood that she was witnessing something beyond the ordinary boundaries of the world, something that existed in the spaces between mundane reality and pure magic.

The butterfly had remained for precisely seventeen heartbeats—she counted them now through her temporal perception, able to measure time with magical precision unavailable to her eight-year-old consciousness. Seventeen moments of perfect communion between child and wonder, between the yearning to understand and the presence of mystery itself.

Then, with a flutter that seemed to disturb the very fabric of the afternoon air, the creature had dissolved back into whatever realm of possibility had briefly allowed it to manifest. The child Caelwyn had sat for long minutes afterward, staring at her empty palms, already beginning to doubt whether the encounter had truly occurred or was merely the fevered imagination of a girl who spent too much time reading her grandmother’s books of impossible things.

But through the clarity of temporal viewing, the adult Caelwyn could perceive what her younger self had been unable to recognize: the moment when her magical sensitivity had first awakened, when the dormant potential inherited through seven generations of star-touched bloodline had stirred to life in response to contact with pure, unfettered possibility.

The butterfly had not been a creature at all, but living magic itself—drawn by the nascent power beginning to bloom within her child’s heart, manifesting in response to her unconscious need to believe that the world held wonders beyond the reach of ordinary seeing.

That afternoon had planted the seed that would eventually grow into her mastery of temporal arts, her ability to perceive the connections between moments separated by decades or centuries, her understanding that time itself was not a river flowing in one direction but an ocean in which past, present, and future existed simultaneously, each moment containing echoes of all others.

Tears gathered in Caelwyn’s eyes as she watched her younger self finally rise from the garden, the child’s expression transformed by contact with mystery. This was why she had become a temporal mage—not for the academic prestige or the political power that came with such rare abilities, but for moments like this. Moments when the impossible revealed itself as inevitable, when wonder bridged the gap between what was known and what could be dreamed.

She had spent forty years learning to access these currents of time, to peer backward through the centuries and glimpse forward into possible tomorrows. She had witnessed the rise and fall of empires, had observed pivotal moments when individual choices rippled outward to reshape the course of nations, had seen love bloom and wither across generations like flowers opening and closing with the seasons.

But of all the moments she could access through her hard-won magical sight, this remained her favorite: the afternoon when a lonely child had briefly held infinity in her palms, when the universe had chosen to reveal itself through wings of living starlight, when the woman she would become had first begun to understand that magic was not something to be wielded but something to be witnessed with appropriate reverence.

The temporal viewing began to fade as her concentration wavered, the scrying pool’s surface gradually returning to its reflective obsidian state. But the memory lingered with crystalline clarity—not just the recollection of events long past, but the renewed understanding of why she had chosen this path, why she continued to probe the mysteries of time despite the isolation and danger such studies imposed.

In a world grown increasingly focused on practical magics—combat spells and defensive wards, economic enchantments and political illusions—she remained devoted to the exploration of wonder itself, to the patient documentation of moments when the ordinary world revealed its extraordinary nature to those prepared to see.

The butterfly had returned to her sometimes over the years, always at moments when her faith in the essential magic of existence had begun to waver. Never exactly the same—sometimes appearing as a moth of midnight blue, sometimes as a hummingbird with feathers that sparkled like captured aurora, once memorably as a soap bubble that contained an entire miniature cosmos—but always carrying the same message her eight-year-old heart had received in that sunlit garden.

*The universe is more wondrous than you dare believe. Keep watching. Keep believing. Keep your palms open to possibility.*

As Caelwyn extinguished the temporal viewing enchantments and prepared to close her workshop for the evening, she whispered a word of gratitude to whatever forces had granted her the ability to revisit that pivotal afternoon whenever her spirit needed reminding of why the pursuit of magical understanding mattered more than any practical application.

Some moments, she had learned, were too precious to experience only once. They deserved to be returned to, examined from new angles, appreciated with the depth that only accumulated wisdom could provide. This was her favorite use of temporal magic—not to change the past or predict the future, but to honor the perfect moments that made existence itself feel like the greatest enchantment of all.

The workshop fell silent around her, but in her heart, the wings of impossible butterflies continued their eternal dance between memory and hope, between the child who had first glimpsed magic and the woman who had dedicated her life to ensuring such glimpses never lost their power to transform the world.