The Tale of the Timeless Traveller
In the murky outskirts of the tranquil town of Brighton, a secluded old mansion stood with an eeriness that curdled the blood of the most courageous souls. This mansion, masked with mysteries and draped in the shroud of time, was home to Everett, an elderly man known throughout the region as incredibly kind yet frightfully peculiar. The townsfolk whispered fables of his perceived insanity; however, Everett was more than a mere madman.
Everett was a Time Traveller.
One fateful night, a lightning bolt split the onyx skies, and streaks of searing light descended, gifting Everett his unique ability. Time, a dimension unbeknownst to man, became his personal playground, and he rapidly unraveled its arcane secrets. In his subterranean riddled with gadgets and contraptions, Everett, the brilliant eccentric man, meticulously honed his craft.
He began to travel through the ages, thirsting for knowledge and determined to decipher the enigma of time. He navigated epochs, witnessed turning points in history, and experienced climactic downfalls of empires. Though Everett was privileged with a spectacle few could fathom, a deep solemnity overwhelmed him. He pondered the susceptibility of civilizations to fall on his homely travels, while the continuity of mankind's ceaseless ambition sparked a flicker of hope.
Everett was not merely an observer; he left subtle marks in each age, carefully programmed to prevent creating disruptive ripples in the historical continuum. He posed as a humble healer during the Plague, a silent soldier in World Wars, a benefactor of scientific revolution, and several other unsung heroes through time. He lived lifetimes, embraced countless cultures, and learnt a myriad of languages.
One day, a rift in time appeared, threatening to consume the fabric of reality itself. A miscalculation, a glitch in the system Everett never expected. He quickly scrolled through eons aboard his time machine, tracking an anomaly. Among billions of his subtle marks, an unintended one flickered—a medieval maiden he had rescued from bandits had become a queen, drastically altering the timeline.
The ripple effect was catastrophic. Reality had warped, the timeline got distorted, and history as everyone knew it began to unravel, with its roots bearing consequences to the present Brighton. As the simple seaside town morphed into a bustling metropolis, then shrank to a primitive village, the people remained oblivious, their memories shape-shifting with the altering history.
Everett knew he had to intervene. He set his coordinates for the Middle Ages, vowing to correct the unintended outcome of his earlier intervention. However, the maiden learning of her destiny from a vision, refused the queen’s throne, marking another alteration outside Everett’s intended plan.
Eventually persuading her, Everett managed to reset the timeline while the maiden agreed to go back to her initial future. Returning to the present, everything was back where it was supposed to be, everything save for Everett. The journey had taken a toll, his mortal body was no longer a fit vessel for his timeless soul.
With a soft sigh, he parked his Time machine in his cavernous basement one last time, surrendering to the unyielding grip of mortality. His life was one for the books, ironic as none but he himself knew just how extensive that life had been. In his last moments, he realized he was merely a traveller. A Traveler through Time, observing, learning, subtly interfering yet never truly belonging.
His life ebbed away, leaving behind a corpse possessing the wisdom of countless eras, a basement filled with impossible inventions and a million untold stories. And thus ended the tale of The Timeless Traveller, the world unsuspectingly marching forth, oblivious of its history and the old man who'd once held it in his hands.