‘Time is not an entity to be waited for, or waited upon we must ready ourselves, we must greet it with open arms and when time passes us by we must look forward to its next coming. We must not sit and mope and whine that our time has come and gone; that it has slipped through our fingers like the grains of sand on a crisp white beach as the wind sweeps across it; for time is eternal it does not leave us, we leave it and time simply sit and waits for another to come along’
-Margo Layne
Prologue
Buildings that had once stood tall and proud had crumbled to the ground with-in a second, in the blink of an eye the ground had been levelled and all that now reached into the sky was the thick black smoke of destruction. There were no screams exploding into the air, no cries of anguish and desperation; there were no people left, no animal’s left to make the exasperated noises of anguish and despair. Margo was alone; she had arrived too late. Just a second too late meant the world had been destroyed; it had started with the cities falling, the rivers and seas drying, the land crumbled and became scorched and those who had not perished in the collapse of bricks and the mortar of metal and glass were burned up, disintegrated. She had started out with good intentions to change the agonies of history, to end the evil that stalked the earth and manipulated time for themselves but now that she stood the tallest thing left in the world she realised how wrong she had been, the things she had changed had been there for a reason, they had had a direct influence on history and on time; this was her fault and now she had to change it back but she had no idea where to start. The city she stood in no longer resembled the one she had left, London was once again burning; there were no street signs, no land marks, nothing remained to point her in the right direction of where she needed to be and she was alone, all alone. Everyone she cared about, the people she needed to keep going had gone, they had all been taken in the blast that had cleared the planet; she had no one.
She began to walk, it became one of the hardest tasks she had ever undertaken, it took all of her reasoning and strength to get herself to move from the spot that she now felt rooted to. The air was thick and clouded with dust from the fallen buildings; Margo had expected it to be thin and depleting, hard to breath but it was thick like molasses and even harder to take in. It tasted of soot and iron and there was something else that felt rough against her throat and tasted rusty. She struggled to suck air into her lungs, it took all of her power to fill them and even more to breath out the dense air and it was then as she struggled to breath that she realised what it was that was scratching at her throat, that tasted like old pennies and rusty nails. The people that had bustled along the streets of London, the throngs of lives that had existed there had not fallen to the ground dead; they had been disintegrated, turned into tiny particles of matter, particles that she was now inhaling. The sudden realisation caught her off guard, she felt the nausea rise in her stomach, the unmistakable saliva that filled her mouth, the convulse of her stomach, she doubled over as the last remnants of the dinner she had eaten the night before rushed up her throat on a sea of stomach acid and filled her mouth, she felt terrible as she vomited over the cracked earth until nothing remained in her stomach and then she fell to the floor. Margo sobbed for those who had died, for the world; she pulled her knees to her chest and rocked and though she had to fight the convulsions of vomiting she sucked in great gulps of tainted air, she felt pathetic curled up on the floor like a child with no clue what it was she was going to do. The tears that fell down over her cheeks left clear paths through the dirt that had freely settle upon her skin, the dirt of the dead and the fallen, she was covered in those who had perished and she was the only one who could do something about it, to change what she had started; this was her fault. Margo pushed herself up from the floor, she scolded herself for being so wretched and feeble, this was not what she had been taught; it was her fault and now it was her time to stand up and change what had been put into motion, what she had put into motion.
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