#lysherry

According to a first, vague estimation, Lyon Vastia was currently breaking three and a half laws, was on his best way to terribly upset his teacher-turned-mother-figure  and  risked being locked up for the rest of his life. But, hey --- whatever. Because as he was staring at his --- idol, someone who had died long before he had been born, the concept of punishment seemed to be highly irrelevant. Of course, when he had stepped through the gate, centuries in the future, he had considered the possibility that he might end up meeting  her  as he went into the past, but he had not thought that it was very likely.

Time travel was fickle business, something that usually went more wrong than right, and he had been quite sure that with his luck, he would end up in the week  after  her death, but --- there she was, still alive and just as lively as he had imagined her to be from the letters of contemporary artists he had read, something that now started to feel quite awkward.

“Excuse me, miss,” he started, biting down on his lip as he tried to figure out  what  he wanted to say and  how  he wanted to say it. “What --- what’s the date?”

Her eyebrows arched as she reached for the pocket watch that had been safely tucked away before. “It’s the 15th of July, 1756,” she finally said, angling her head as she reached out, grabbing his arm as he staggered backwards.

“Shouldn’t you be --- I don’t know, somewhere else?” he chocked out, trying not to say out loud what he was thinking, what he was dreading: shouldn’t you be at the theatre where you will die, as the sole casualty, in a fire, for example?

His head was spinning and he felt how everything inside of him was twisting. The first rule of time travel was not to change the events that were meant to happen, but apparently, this rule had been broken the moment she had stumbled over him, because --- it had caused her  not  to be where she would die. Because --- that she had stopped to help him had delayed her. In the distance, he could see hungry flames reaching into the calm afternoon skies.

He had messed with the flow of time, had changed history --- and he had not even planned to do this, but he supposed that this was what his teacher had meant when she had said that until there was a way to move through time with accuracy, time travellers would  always  lack control.

“I don’t know,” she replied with a shrug, blue eyes her contemporaries had always raved about gleaming as she tucked back a strand of her hair. “I’m an artist, I don’t  like  schedules very much.”

Sherry Blendy had been, no,  was  obviously  an artist.  The most famous sculptor of her century, famed for her œuvre that, in spite of her originally untimely death, had been impressive due to its size and diversity. When Lyon had been twelve and first stumbled over her name in a book, he had not been able to truly understand  why  she had been this admired, but by the time he had been twenty-three and not only a time traveller but also a sculptor himself, he had understood why people had adored her work so much.

A part of Lyon wanted to tear out his hair; he had surely done the world a favour by keeping her from dying but this did not change that messing with time was a dangerous thing, something he had been taught to  never  even consider because these things always got messy and never ended well for anyone. And everything was connected, meaning that if she stayed alive, other things would never happen --- and this, of course, meant that a lot of work was coming his way because he would have to  personally  ensure that history stayed on a basic track. But even though the easiest way to keep history from going  wrong  would be to simply kill her, he knew that he was not going to do that.

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” he muttered as his eyes flickered to the gate he had come through, fear grasping his heart when it was  GONE.

“That,” Sherry said, deep blue eyes that had followed his gaze wide and faintly terrified, “was your road home, wasn’t it?”

Lyon was frozen inside as he pressed his hand against the wall, wondering if maybe, he could feel a last spark of magic inside the stones, but finding nothing. “Yes,” he confirmed with a solemn nod though he wondered how on earth she had known this. “I guess this means I stay.”