Scales slithered against unyielding rock as she pulled her aging body through the confines of her prison. Her labored breaths echoed like the exhalations of a slumbering volcano. Scratches both new and old from her massive claws marred the smooth, obsidian floor. She squeezed through passages like a snake, wings tucked close to her sides.
How she longed to open them beneath the skies again, to float above mortal concerns and land alike.
Were I to free myself, I fear age has already marked its passing, she thought sadly.
Even slipping through the corridors of her ancient warren was tiring. Bones ached under the weight of muscle and sinew long atrophied from lack of use. Milky eyes stared blindly out at the world, barely able to distinguish claw or tail.
“Yet it is age that draws me forward,” she spoke in a whisper. “An age that may not be.”
Duty.
The concept was not new to her. Thousands of years had passed in pursuit of that ideal. Plans were concocted, allies planted, enemies taken note of. Bumps still occurred. Time was fluid, ever changing. Whatever obstacles she placed were but pebbles around which it flowed.
Only one other could offer a fork. Only one whose very existence offered discord in the harmony of time.
Havoc.
Time was running out, figuratively and literally.
She was dying, but so was the past and her present. The future she had worked so hard to guide in a positive direction was becoming undone. It had happened before. Ever was it her duty to correct this error, this disharmony.
With eyes closed against the pain, she pulled her body into the room her goal resided in. Though she could not see it, the object’s image was burned into her mind, branded there by countless hours examining its frame and purpose.
An hourglass stood there, on its side. Sand flowed in both directions. Precariously it balanced, on the edge of tilting one way or the other. She did not know what would happen when it tilted, yet she worked to balance it regardless.
“A thousand times it has been done, a thousand it has failed,” she whispered to herself.
A sense of discordance rippled through her, a divergence she had to force together. If she were to let it go, her life would cease to have been, being and to be. It was a possibility, just as she was.
She fought it, barely. Her resistance would not last forever.
Even the Warden of the Stream eroded in the face of eternity.