The first breath Lysander took outside Alistair Finch's house was a desperate gasp, as if he were emerging from drowning, not in water, but in time itself. The relatively clean air of Elm Street, still tainted by the tannery, felt like an alpine meadow after the cloying, chemical miasma of the laboratory. Jacob, the skittish apprentice, had shuffled him to the end of the street and pointed him homeward without a word, his duty done.
The walk back was a blur. Finch's final question, "What do you know of the nature of Time?" echoed in his mind, a discordant bell tolling his doom. Had it been a philosophical inquiry, the natural first topic for a man obsessed with transformation and eternity? Or was it a probe, a sly, knowing test? The man's inscrutable, fever-bright eyes gave nothing away.
He found his parents waiting in a state of high anxiety. Clara rushed to him, clutching his shoulders, searching his face for any sign of harm."Lysander! Are you alright? What did he do? What did he say to you?"The smell of Finch's laboratory clung to his clothes, a ghostly residue that made her wrinkle her nose in distaste.
"We talked… of philosophy," Lysander said, his voice deliberately weary, playing the part of an intellectually drained child. It wasn't difficult. "Of the principles of matter. He is… very learned."
Edmund, his chest puffed with a strange mix of pride and concern, asked, "And did you understand him, son? Did you hold your own?"
"I believe so, Father." Lysander allowed a small, tired smile. "He asked me about the nature of Time."
A shadow passed over Edmund's face. "Time? A heavy subject for a child."
"He said the mind knows no age," Lysander repeated Finch's own words, watching how they landed. They had the desired effect, flattering Edmund's perception of his son's unique place in the world. The immediate danger of being forbidden to return receded. The hook was set.
But the triumph was ash in his mouth. The encounter with Finch was a looming, monumental problem, but it was a known quantity. A battle on a defined front. The other, more intimate war was about to begin its final, futile campaign.
Cecily.
His sister, now a vibrant girl of seven with their mother's kind eyes and a laugh that could light up the dimmest room. In his original timeline, a fever had taken her in the autumn of 1708. A sudden, brutal illness that had stolen her in a matter of days. He remembered the hushed tones, his mother's shattered face, the empty space at the table. It was the foundational tragedy of his first youth, the event that had sent him, desperate and grieving, into the orbit of Alistair Finch.
This time, he was ready. He had been preparing for years. He had subtly guided conversations about health and miasmas. He had, using his "prodigy" status, insisted on improvements to their diet, on the importance of clean water, on airing out their bedding. He had pointed out the damp spot in the corner of Cecily's room, arguing with a child's "inspired" logic that it was a source of foul air. Edmund, impressed by his son's seemingly divine insight, had repaired the leak himself.
Lysander was armed with the knowledge of a future that understood germs, that knew fever was a symptom, not a cause. He was going to cheat fate. He was going to prove that the timeline was not a solid block of marble, but clay he could reshape.
The first sign came on a Tuesday. A cough. Not a dramatic, wracking cough, but a dry, persistent tickle. To Clara, it was a minor childhood ailment. To Lysander, it was the sounding of a death knell.
He launched into action with a frantic, silent intensity that terrified his family. He became a tyrant of health."She must have broth! Only broth!""Open the window! She needs fresh air!""Mother, the honey and lemon tea! Now!"
He barely slept, spending nights by her bedside, watching the rise and fall of her chest, his own heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He used his visits to Finch as a cover to inquire about medicinal herbs, framing his questions as intellectual curiosity about the "healing properties of plants."
Finch, amused, had provided him with a tincture of willow bark, mentioning its use for pain. Lysander administered it with a trembling hand, praying to a God he wasn't sure he believed in that this primitive precursor to aspirin would be enough.
For two days, it seemed to work. The cough lessened. Color returned to Cecily's cheeks. She smiled at him, a weak, grateful thing. "You are my best brother, Lysander," she whispered.
A hope, fierce and blinding, bloomed in his chest. He had done it. He had changed it. The fixed point was not so fixed after all.
On the third day, the fever came.
It did not arrive as a gradual warmth, but as a conflagration. One moment she was sipping water, the next she was burning up, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes glassy and unseeing. The cough returned, deeper, settling in her chest with an ominous rattle.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized Lysander. This was different. This was not the fever he remembered. It was faster, more violent.
Clara and Edmund were beside themselves, their fear now overriding their trust in Lysander's strange wisdom. The physician was called, a pompous man who bled her with leeches and pronounced it a humoral imbalance. Lysander watched, helpless, as his sister's life force was literally drained away based on medieval superstition. He wanted to scream, to throw the man out, but he was a child. His opinions, his knowledge, were nothing in the face of established authority.
He ran to Elm Street, bursting into Finch's laboratory without ceremony. The alchemist was calibrating a delicate brass scale.
"My sister," Lysander gasped, tears of frustration and terror finally breaking through. "She is dying. The fever… it is in her lungs. You must have something! An elixir! A true medicine!"
Finch looked up, his expression one of mild, clinical interest. "The sister. A pulmonary fever. A common enough affliction. The body is but a complex chemistry. An imbalance."
"Can you fix the imbalance?" Lysander pleaded, his carefully constructed composure in ruins.
"To manipulate the vital humors directly is… precarious work," Finch said, turning back to his scales. "The tincture I gave you was for symptomatic relief. The outcome of such illnesses is written in the constitution of the individual. It is a fixed variable."
The words fixed variable struck Lysander with the force of a physical blow. He stared at the alchemist, at the man who played with time, dismissing a human life as a predetermined equation.
He ran back home, a sob catching in his throat. He arrived to a scene of utter despair. Clara was weeping silently by the fire. Edmund's face was a mask of stone. The physician was packing his bags, shaking his head.
Lysander rushed to Cecily's room. She was still, so still. Her breathing was a shallow, ragged whisper. He took her small, burning hand in his.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, the words a broken plea. "I tried. I tried to change it."
Her eyes fluttered open. They were clouded with fever, but for a moment, they seemed to see him, to truly see the ancient soul trapped in his child's body."Don't be sad, Lysander," she breathed, her voice a faint echo. "You are my best brother."
And then, the ragged breathing stopped. The small hand in his went limp.
The silence that followed was the loudest sound Lysander had ever heard. It was the sound of inevitability. The sound of a door slamming shut, forever. He had used all his knowledge, all his foresight, all his desperate, clever manipulations, and he had only succeeded in altering the method of her death, not the fact of it. The event was fixed. His actions were nothing more than eddies in a relentless current.
He stood there, holding his sister's dead hand, the weight of his powerlessness crushing him more completely than any infantile helplessness ever had. He had been arrogant. He had believed his knowledge made him a god. He was just a man. A boy. Trapped in a story whose saddest pages, it seemed, were already written in indelible ink. The loop was not just a personal torment; it was a cage of cosmic indifference. And he was alone inside it, with the scent of death and failure clinging to him as tenaciously as the smell of Finch's laboratory.