Way Back

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.


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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