In the year of the shattered moon, I stumbled upon an old journal buried beneath the roots of the ancient weeping willow. Its pages, yellowed and brittle, spoke of a merchant from the 12th century who wandered into a realm where time was no more than a distant memory.
He wrote of castles vanishing at dawn, of shadows that whispered in forgotten languages, and of a girl with eyes like molten silver who promised him eternity. The ink on the last page was smudged, as if someone had wept over it, longing for things lost to the tides of time.
There was a night, steeped in fog, when I met the Keeper at the edge of the Clockwork Sea. His visage was cloaked in darkness, and his voice was the grinding of ancient gears. He offered to guide me through the temporal corridors, where each step could take me a century back or forward.
Reluctantly, I declined, for I knew that the past is a labyrinth of its own, and the future a tapestry yet unwoven. Instead, I listened as he spun tales of travelers who had dared chart their courses through the stars and time.