Chapter28 The Turmoil in the Time - Space Fissure
The gnome's shriek was the least of Jack's problems.
One moment he was basking in the glow of scientific breakthrough – *he'd cracked time travel, people!
* – the next, the burrow floor dissolved beneath him, and he was plunged into a swirling vortex of blinding light and earsplitting noise.
It was like being inside a malfunctioning washing machine, only instead of soggy socks, he was tumbling through shredded realities.
The pull was ferocious, threatening to rip him apart atom by atom.
His time-hopping ability, once his pride and joy, now sputtered and sparked like a faulty toaster, completely out of his control.
*"So much for 'peak time-space revelation',"* he thought wryly, the humor a thin veneer over the sheer, pants-wetting terror gripping him.
Regret slammed into him harder than a runaway trolley.
He'd been so focused on the mechanics of it all, the *how* of time travel, that he'd completely neglected the *what if it all goes horribly wrong*.
And if he was shredded across the multiverse, what would happen to Sophia?
To Isabella?
The thought sent a fresh wave of nausea churning through his stomach, mixing unpleasantly with the general disorientation of being flung through time and space.
Sophia, ever the action-oriented mage, didn't hesitate.
Ignoring Bartholomew's muttered warnings about the unpredictable nature of the burrow's magic, she surged forward, her hands glowing with an ethereal blue light.
Arcane energy crackled around her, pushing back against the edges of the temporal maelstrom.
The air shimmered and sparked as her magic clashed with the raw power of the time-space rift, erupting in a shower of dazzling sparks, like a celestial firework display gone rogue.
It was a dangerous gamble, but Sophia, her heart pounding in her chest, was determined to pull Jack back from the brink.
For a precious few moments, Sophia's magic held.
The vortex stabilized, the swirling chaos momentarily subdued, offering a fragile window of opportunity.
Jack, battered and disoriented, caught a glimpse of Sophia's determined face, a beacon of hope in the surrounding madness.
He rallied his scattered thoughts, clinging to the remnants of his scientific training.
*Analyze, Jack, analyze!
* he told himself, pushing through the disorientation and fear.
He focused on the structure of the vortex, searching for patterns, for anomalies.
He noticed points of concentrated energy within the chaos, pulsing rhythmically, like the beating heart of some monstrous cosmic entity.
*Nodes,* he realized.
*Control nodes.
* He just needed to…
The transition was brutal.
One moment he was fighting for survival in the vortex, the next he was suspended in a strange, otherworldly realm.
The chaotic energy of the rift pressed in on him, not physically, but mentally.
His thoughts felt sluggish, his senses overloaded with a cacophony of whispers and static.
It was as if the very fabric of reality was unraveling around him.
The space around him shifted and morphed, a constantly changing landscape of impossible geometries and vibrant, hallucinogenic colors.
He tried to orient himself, to find some semblance of direction, but the environment was a labyrinth of ever-shifting pathways and dead ends.
Panic clawed at him again, threatening to overwhelm his already fractured mind.
Then, amidst the chaos, a fragment of memory surfaced.
Elara Moonshade, the enigmatic time-traveling guide he'd encountered earlier, had mentioned the unpredictable nature of time-space fissures.
She'd warned him of… something.
He couldn't quite grasp the memory, his thoughts still shrouded in the strange energy of the rift, but he clung to it like a lifeline.
There had been a key, a clue to navigating these treacherous realms.
He struggled to focus, sifting through the mental fog, searching for the elusive piece of information that could save him.
And slowly, painstakingly, he began to piece together Elara's cryptic advice.
He needed to find…
"Fascinating," a voice whispered, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The gnome, predictably, was not pleased.
He stood barely a foot tall, but brandished a pickaxe twice his size with alarming ferocity.
Before Jack could even offer a conciliatory wave, the gnome charged, bellowing something about trespassing and stolen fungal delicacies.
Bartholomew, for his part, simply shrugged again and ambled deeper into the burrow.
"Don't mind Nibbles," he called back.
"He's got a temper."
Jack, however, *did* mind Nibbles.
He ducked the pickaxe swing – narrowly avoiding losing a vital part of his anatomy – and stumbled back towards the burrow entrance.
He fumbled for the slate, hoping to activate it and jump to another time.
The slate, however, vibrated violently in his hand, glowing with an erratic, pulsating light.
The familiar sensation of temporal displacement was replaced by a sickening lurch in his stomach.
"What in the blazes...?" he muttered, the burrow walls seeming to melt around him.
The ground vanished beneath his feet.
He plummeted into a swirling vortex of colors, a chaotic kaleidoscope of half-formed landscapes and distorted faces.
He glimpsed Isabella's worried face, Sophia's wide, frightened eyes, and even Lady Eleanor, holding a feather duster aloft as if preparing to battle the cosmic anomaly.
They were all fleeting images, swallowed by the turbulent maelstrom.
The air crackled with an energy that both terrified and exhilarated him.
This wasn't his usual smooth transition between times; this was something else entirely.
He was caught in the raw, untamed power of the time-space fissure itself.
A voice, calm and measured, echoed through the chaos.
"Focus, Jack. Anchor yourself to a point in time. Visualize it."
It was Elara Moonshade.
How she could communicate with him in this chaotic void was beyond him, but her advice offered a sliver of hope.
He closed his eyes, desperately trying to conjure a stable image.
He thought of Isabella's gentle smile, of Sophia's infectious laughter, of Professor Magnus's stern lectures on temporal mechanics.
But the images fragmented, dissolving like smoke in the swirling currents.
Panic tightened its icy grip around his chest.
He was adrift, lost in the boundless expanse of time and space.
Then, a different image materialized – John Smith, the honest farmer from the village market, offering him a freshly baked loaf of bread.
The simple act of kindness, the earthy aroma of the bread, the feeling of normalcy…it held.
With a surge of willpower, he focused on that image, clinging to it like a lifeline.
The swirling chaos began to subside, the colors slowly coalescing into a recognizable form.
He could feel the slate cooling in his hand, the violent vibrations gradually diminishing.
He opened his eyes.
He was no longer in the vortex.
But the world around him was…different.
The air was thick with the scent of pine and damp earth.
The sky was a preternatural shade of violet, and towering trees clawed at the heavens with gnarled, skeletal branches.
He wasn't in any time he recognized.
He was still lost, but at least he was no longer falling apart.
He took a deep breath, the unfamiliar air filling his lungs.
"Right," he muttered, dusting himself off.
"Now, where the hell am I?"