Inspiration: Cheating a bit by using one of my own pictures, taken during a week of bowbuilding and archery in France.
The people in the picture are dear friends and are in no way like the people in my story.
The people in the picture are dear friends and are in no way like the people in my story.
Crap, she thought, from all the devices she could steal she
must have taken the only malfunctioning one. Her intention was to flash back just
a few hours, not a few centuries. She had never seen a world so green in her
own time, the device must have sent her way back. Sure she had noticed it was
an old model when she picked it up, but there was no time to be picky really.
It was either act and flash back or be gone forever. She preferred the first
choice.
The world around her was overwhelmingly green. Did she die
after all? People who came back from the dead told stories about green hills
and colorful flowers. But the grey clouds above her contradicted that
suspicion. She must have travelled back before the 22th century, when rain was
not controlled yet and was known to pour down for days, hence the green land
and the moist soil beneath her feet.
Concentrating in the middle of her head she tried to brain
scan her surroundings, but as she feared she lost connection, definitely way
back in time. She closed her eyes in order to access her internal library, but
the lack of sunlight must have shut down that system too. So she had to rely on
memory! Not many people of her time were able memorizers, but now she was
grateful it had been a part of her training as a time traveling assassin. During
those intense training years she had to memorize a whole range of ancient
weapons too, all designed to inflict bodily damage, so barbaric.
With a shock she recognized the bows, one in the hand of a
man walking in front of her. She must have landed in a warzone, if only she
could know when? Bows indicated somewhere before the 16th century
even, but something in the picture didn’t add up. There was a wooden chair, with
more bows on it. That was strange, in every picture shown during training, bows
were stored in racks. Nobody in his right mind would lay a precious weapon such
as a bow on a chair.
The man in front of her started to turn, it was only a
matter of seconds now before he would see her. If she was in a warzone, he
would most certainly take her for an enemy. He would shoot her, wouldn’t he? She
fumbled with the device in order to get back, trying to estimate the century
she was in to be able to travel back safely. Travelling beyond your own
lifespan meant a certain dead, thus were the rules of time travelling.
She had to think fast. So she calculated, archery, replaced
by fire arms around 1500 AC, take a safety period of 200 years that would make
it around 1300 AC. Adding the years travelling back adds up to… She set her estimated
goal and pushed the button, before anyone noticed her.
Green, the land was still very green, was the device really
broken? No the rainclouds had vanished, the men and bows were gone. It was
sunny, very sunny but not hot. She looked at the big flowers in unbelievable
colors. She had never been good with calculations.
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