Teaser: Beyond The Invisible
On the night Harry Potter's parents gave their lives to save him, a Time Knight left his Order. That in itself was rare, but hardly unremarkable. However, he was the first, ever, to leave by any means other than death. The 50 became 51 for the first time in a hundred decades of recorded history and chaos would reign for the next eighteen years. And yet, and yet, even in chaos, order may be found.
Above all, this is a story of Nature and of order amidst the chaos. Nature can not be subjected to any man's will for too long. Nature has laws, and while any law may be bent or even broken, the laws remain. As do the ones who enforce them.
They are the timekeepers. The "children of Merlin," the fabled one who lived backwards through history and now resides far into our ancestry. The Time Knights. Teeks.
Timekeepers are immortal. They are sterile and in the present tense are squibs, deaf and unable to communicate verbally. At any one time there are only 50 in the entire world. They do not need to know your language to speak it better than you could ever hope to. Once they reach maturity, they can age themselves older or younger at will through apparation. Teeks can assume the appearance of either sex. Only when one of them dies does the birth gender have any meaning.
They're also called "the Adams" and "the Eves" because whenever one dies, a male will lose a rib. It simply disapparates from inside the chest cavity, and shortly thereafter a female will become pregnant. This pair is mated until the woman is required to give birth again, which may mean centuries, when she is then mated to whichever male has lost a rib. Once a new child is born to replace the fallen comrade, the male who lost a rib begins to regrow it, but the process takes years - when the rib is complete, the child is mature. The decades between birth and maturity are full of both joy and sorrow because, while a new life is created, an old friend has passed.
Since they have no trouble hearing or speaking and are powerful wizards in the past, they are sent on missions by the Ministries of the world. They are bound by a simple code: to keep the timeline clean of interference caused by any nefarious use of time travel. That is their sole mandate and their complete limitation. Interfering in the timeline in any other way by a teek is forbidden; beyond that it is antithetical to their very nature, like a house elf wearing matching Ralph Lauren designer socks.
Like house elves, they like what they do - it's a part of them, in their nature. Snakes slither, birds fly, teeks navigate history. They have no need for "time-turners" or other spells or enchantments to navigate time, nor are they restricted by the same limitations that lessen the usefulness of those other means of time travel. To go back a century is no more difficult than moving back six hours. All that is necessary is a small fire, a glass of water, and five tablespoons of finely chopped herbs - one each of parsley, sage and rosemary, and two of thyme.
Muggles know nothing of them, wizards do not speak of them and even the Dementors fear their power.
For the past 18 years, the wizarding world has revered the-boy-who-lived. For the past 18 years, the Time Knights have feared the-one-that-left.
The most frightening aspect of all this is that for the past 18 years, both have been under the protection of the
same man.
----