The Clay Lion

Amalie
Jahn

T
HE
C
LAY
L
ION

A
NOVEL

Copyright © 2013 by Amalie
Jahn

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Typeset in Garamond

Cover art by Amalie
Jahn

To
Molly and Brody-

 
A sister and brother whose love for one another was my inspiration.
 

May
you always remember to cherish your time
together.

P
ROLOGUE

I
heard it through the wall from the other room.  It was faint at first, but
then came on a little stronger.  There was a moment when I was sure that I
was imagining it. 
Hoping.
 
Praying.
  But then I heard it again. 
The low cough that always came.
 
Always.

I
resisted the urge to go to him, but my feet were moving before I could stop
myself.  I paused at the door to the hallway, waiting. 
Listening.
  The world was imploding around me for the
third time, and more than ever before, the full ramification of what the cough
signified weighed heavily upon me.  I knew it was over.  It was the
end of the dream. 
For all of us.

I
padded down the hall quietly and stood at his open door.  He was there, as
he often was, lounging on the bed reading nonfiction. 
Probably
historical in nature.
 
Perhaps for his world
history class.
  He was a voracious reader.  That fact had
never changed.  I studied his face, with his cheeks that were clearly not
chiseled, but slim.  He was chewing at his bottom lip, not out of nervous
habit but out of comfort.  He did not know I was watching him, which made
the moment
all the
more special, until the cat meowing
at my feet alerted him to my presence.

“
Whatcha
’
doin
’?” he asked, without
looking up from his book.

“Nothing,”
I replied, inching into the room, “What are you reading?

 
“About the fall of the Roman Empire.”
  He looked up and
saw me.  Really saw me looking at him, and like always, he could see right
through to the core of my soul.

“What?”
he admonished.  “What is it?”

Oh
Brother! I wanted to scream.  I am about to lose you again!  Only
this time even the hope of you is lost and I can’t begin to explain it to you!

I
averted my eyes quickly and climbed on the bed with him.

We sat
there, side-by-side, heads resting on the headboard, looking ahead, not at each
other.  He was so close I could feel his warmth.  Time passed. 
Several minutes in fact.
  He finally accepted that I
was not going to willingly share what was bothering me, and so, knowing me as
he did, he tried another tactic.

“Do
you remember when we were little?  When I would get up early, before Mom
and Dad would let us wake them?  I would come to your room instead. 
You would let me climb under the covers with you so I would be warm and you
would read your books to me.  What were those ones we read over and over a
million times? 
The Adventure of Doodle Bear
?
 
Doodle Bunny
? 
Doodle
…”

“
Doodle
Beetle
,” I answered quietly.

“Yeah!
 
The Adventures of Doodle Beetle
!  I loved those books!  I
wonder if we still have them around
somewhere?
” 
He looked at me again, gauging whether or not I was ready to talk.

I
smiled at him.  Not because of our circumstances, but because of the shared
memory.  There had been quite a few during the course of my second
trip.  Not as many as the time before, but enough that I was able to keep
my purpose under wraps. 

The
first time I had returned to him I had almost given myself away on more than
one occasion.  I was horrible at remembering that some things would be
different. 
That there was no way that it could all be
the same.
  One small decision could change everything.  I knew
that all too well.  Over the months, I had made the mistake of mentioning
shared experiences from our past a number of times.  There were several
instances when I was forced to act aloof when he no longer shared my
memory.  I had to pretend that I had dreamt it or that perhaps the event
had happened with someone else.  But I had gotten better.  I rarely
talked about the past, unless he brought it up first.  For this reason,
the moment was sacred.

He
coughed. 
Once.
 
Twice.
 
Three times.
 

“Must
be catching a cold!” he said, laughing.  “Probably shouldn’t sit too
close!  And we better not tell Mom… she’ll quarantine us!”  He winked
at me.

“Must
be,” I replied, scooting over out of pretense, not out of fear of some unknown
virus.  I knew he had nothing I could catch.

“You
think Mom has any cough drops in her bathroom?” he wondered aloud as he swung
his long legs off the bed.  He pulled himself up, crossed the room in two
strides and was out the door.  The moment was gone. 
Forever.

I
returned to my room and sat at the desk, not knowing what to do.  I stared
out the window into the forest just beyond the edge of our yard.  The
trees were beginning to bud.  Tiny patterns of pink and gold played in the
barren branches. 
New life.
 

Trees
are amazing, as is so much of nature.  They know when it is time. 
Time to grow.
 
Time to sprout new
buds.
 
Time to lose their leaves and go dormant
for the winter.
  It all has to do with the amount of daylight that
the leaves receive on any given day.  During the summer, the sun shines on
the leaves for 15 hours a day, giving the chlorophyll in the leaves plenty of
sunlight to produce the glucose the tree needs to survive.  But by autumn,
the sunlight the leaves receive is down by several hours a day, causing a
chemical reaction which forces each leaf to close the trap door at the base of
its stem that connects it to the branch.  Once the trap door is shut,
glucose cannot exit the leaf and water cannot enter.  The green
chlorophyll dies off and the true beauty of the leaf is momentarily revealed
before the leaf breaks from the branch, falls to the ground, and dies.

As it
was for the leaf, so it would be for my brother.  His time was coming yet
again.  I had been almost positive that whatever needed to change to reset
the outcome had surely taken place, but if the cough was any indication, that
was not the case.  In time, my brother would die.  I had failed to
stop the inevitable.  The only question now was whether I would have the
courage to stay and watch it happen again.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The
first time Branson died, the “original” time, as I would come to refer to it, I
almost died with him.  Not literally, but figuratively.  My soul
broke into a thousand tiny pieces that I did not think I would ever be able to
put back together well enough to sustain a normal existence.  Months went
by.  I moved in and out of my foggy reality. 
One
that did not include my beloved brother.

Slowly,
over the course of many months, I pulled myself out of the pit that I was
in.  I grew obsessed with the idea that I was not living the life that was
set for my soul.  Clearly, something was wrong with my timeline.  I
felt that perhaps Branson’s death was caused by something that I could
fix.  I set about to rectify it. 

After
months of gentle persuading and outright begging, I convinced my parents to let
me use my trip.  They were not easily convinced, knowing that once you
used your trip voucher, you could never travel again. 
Unless
of course another voucher was freely given to you, which rarely happened.
 
And so I began the laborious process of petitioning the federal government to
use my trip with the hope of saving my brother’s life.

The
paperwork I was forced to fill out seemed endless.  And for good reason, I
supposed.  When the ability to time travel was discovered, it was at first
quite expensive and reserved only for scientists and those who could afford its
hefty price tag.  There
were
a handful who served
as pioneers, courageously sending their consciousness back into their own
bodies within their own lives to record how small changes would affect the
outcomes of their personal timelines.  Unfortunately, as with all
technology, as the science behind the travel became easier to replicate and
cheaper to create, more and more people were able to gain access to the
equipment that would allow them to travel back into their own lives.  But
with growing numbers of voyagers came larger and larger problems. 

One of
the best-documented problems involved what came to be known as the “snowball
effect.”  In essence, when early travelers returned to their lives at
previous points in history, researchers assumed that since the past had already
happened that they would be able to simply relive the same paths
step-by-step.  They quickly found that it was impossible to do. 
Initially, timelines seemed unaffected by very small changes in day-to-day
activities.  However, after travelers began returning to the past
repeatedly and for longer and longer periods of time, it appeared that those
infinitesimally small changes began to accumulate into what would become more
noticeable changes. 

For
example, one of the first women to travel, Dr. Ronda
Smallson
,
chose to relive her honeymoon dozens of times.  Each time, she tried to
replicate the exact same chain of events that was documented via microscopic
digital surveillance.  Over the course of the first several trips, she
made only slight variations of her speech and activities and it appeared that
the changes caused no significant shift in her timeline.  The trip ended
in the same way and researchers agreed that successful time travel looked
promising.  Dr.
Smallson
ended up reliving her
honeymoon 64 times in all, but by the final trip, so much had inadvertently
changed along the way that she and her husband returned home on separate
flights, by choice.  When she arrived back to present day after the 64
^th
trip, she found that she was without her wedding band and that she had been
divorced for twelve years.

Despite
the setbacks, scientists continued traveling back in time and eventually the
general population began taking voyages as well, although the scientific
community advised against it.  It was at that point that the real dangers
became apparent.  As more and more people were traveling back to relive
wonderful moments in their lives, one can imagine that eventually there would
come a time when some of those infinitesimally small changes would affect, not
only the traveler’s life, but also the lives of innocent bystanders. 
Inadvertently, travelers were changing the futures of the people around them
without even knowing they were doing it.  They would return to the present
only to find that people who were once a part of their lives were no longer
there.  Different career paths were chosen.  Loves were lost. 
Children disappeared.  It was a dark period in the history of time travel.

Perhaps
the most horrendous of the traveling effects involved retribution.  Once
there were enough travelers that people were changing timelines outside their
own, it was inevitable that those affected would eventually realize that their
lives were changed because of another person’s voyage. Some began to go back in
time in an attempt to prevent the former traveler from affecting their
timeline.  Many times these voyages ended in brutality. 
Sometimes murder.