ELSEWHEN

Chapter 9: The Hourglass Decision   It happened suddenly. The pocket watch began to hum—its gears spinning on their own. The mechanism was waking. The tether was calling him back . The sky flickered. Lights blinked. Time rippled. Elias had only minutes . He ran to Ella’s apartment. She opened the door before he could knock, already crying, already knowing. “You’re leaving.” He held her. Desperate. Breathless. They didn’t argue with fate. They didn’t beg. “I will find you again,” she said. “If I knew you once, I’ll know you always.” Elias pressed the watch into her hand. “This will remember for both of us.” Then the light swallowed him. And he was gone.

  Chapter 8: A Day Without Time They ran. Not from danger, but from clocks. They turned off their phones, left behind their watches, and took a train to the countryside. No plan. No destination. They laughed, picnicked beneath the wide spring sky, and danced to the sound of birds and wind. Elias taught her a waltz. She taught him how to eat a mango without making a mess. He failed. They kissed under an oak tree. It was slow, sacred, and full of everything lost and rediscovered. “You feel like home,” she whispered. That night, as they lay beneath a blanket of stars, Elias stared into her eyes and said: “If this is all we have, it’s enough.” But inside, he heard the clock ticking.

Chapter 7: The Archivist’s Warning  They met the archivist at the museum—a thin man with spectacles and a strange hunger in his eyes. He specialized in “chronological anomalies” and invited them for tea. He knew. Before Elias said a word, the archivist placed a hand on the journal and said: “You’re not supposed to be here.” Elias stiffened. The man explained: objects displaced from their original time create temporal scars . The clockwork Elias had used wasn’t just a machine—it was a tether. And tethers break. “If you stay too long,” the archivist warned, “you’ll unravel things you can’t fix. And her? She may forget, or worse… never become who she was meant to be.” Ella didn’t speak the entire ride home. When they parted that night, she held his hand longer than usual. “If we’re not meant to be… why does it feel like the only thing that ever made sense?” Elias had no answer.

  Chapter 6: Pieces of the Past They visited the museum on a whim—though Elias felt drawn to it by something stronger than chance. The air inside smelled of old ink and iron dust. Modern people passed glass cases, unaware of the magic hiding in plain sight. Then he saw it. His pocket watch. It rested beneath a placard that read: Unknown Origin, Recovered from River Thames, 1872. Ella reached for it instinctively. The curator scolded her gently, but just as her fingers hovered, the watch clicked open. It had not moved in 150 years. Inside was a folded note in Elias’s handwriting: “To the time when love lives again.” Ella stared at the message. She didn’t understand how—but something in her did . She remembered his name without asking. She whispered, “Elias.”

  Chapter 5: The Photograph It was time. Elias brought the photograph—the one from the box in the attic. This photograph was taken in 2025, although he never remembered posing for it. He handed it to Ella beneath the golden light of the café. She stared. “That’s me,” she whispered. “But I don’t remember this photo. And… is that you ?” Elias only nodded. Her fingers traced the edge of the image, and then she looked up, eyes glazed like glass under strain. “I’ve had dreams of this. Of being watched, of this coat. Of you.” He could feel it—her memories fighting to the surface. But time is not kind when questioned too deeply. She pressed her palms to her temples. “Why do I feel like I’ve lost something I never had?” Elias gently placed his hand over hers. “Because time doesn't forget. Not when love is written into its gears.”

  Chapter 4: Of Names and Echoes They kept meeting. Ella would perform, and Elias would listen—devoted, silent, enraptured. Afterward, they’d talk. She was curious about him in the way you might be about a haunting: drawn, unsure why. “You speak like a man from another era,” she teased one night. He smiled softly. “Maybe I am.” As the days blurred into soft evenings and rain-dappled streets, their connection deepened. Ella began to share her art—paintings, dreams, songs—and Elias saw something that made his breath catch: The artwork depicts a beautiful garden. Their garden. Every detail was identical to the one outside his home in 1871: the iron gate, the wild violets, the way the light fell through the hedges. She had never been there. Yet somehow, she remembered . “It came to me in a dream,” she said. “A man was waiting beyond the gate. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was waiting for me.” Elias reached for her hand then—trembling not from fear, but from wonder...