what happens when you go looking for your dad's family and end up in the sixth century
Let me introduce myself. My name is Jamie Poole. I time travel. Time doesn't run in a straight line — it gets slippy. That's my word for it and I'm keeping it. What I'm about to tell you is complicated. I'm going to walk you through it the way I walk through everything: one window at a time. One photo. One moment. The whole picture comes together at the end, and by then you'll understand why I needed to start at the beginning — which isn't actually the beginning, because with time travel it never is.
Here's what you need to know first.
Dad Is an Archaeologist
He digs up other people's dead for a living. He has spent his entire career reconstructing the lives of people who are gone, reading their bones and their artifacts and their buried possessions, telling their stories to the world. He is very good at it.
He will not tell me one single thing about his own parents. Every time I ask — and I have asked more times than I can count — he looks away. Sometimes he says what does it matter. Sometimes he says they're dead. Sometimes he says both, in that order, and considers the subject closed. I do not consider the subject closed. I have never considered the subject closed.
Mom's people fill the cemetery across the street from where I grew up. I know them all: names, dates, stories, the particular expressions they wore in photographs from decades past. Grandpa John, who is very much not as dead as he should be, walks with me wherever I go. The dead on Mom's side are excellent company.
Dad's side: silence. A wall. The look.
That is where this story starts. Not in the sixth century. Not on a rainy island north of Scotland. Not in a Druid clearing with a man in the wrong clothes holding a rose. It starts with a daughter who couldn't leave a locked door alone.
The Sarcophagus
We found her — me and Dad — in Scotland. In a sarcophagus. A fifteen-hundred-year-old Druidess who didn't look a day over twenty, who had been sleeping inside a stone box since approximately 565 CE, and who woke up in my aunt's house.
I know. Funny, isn't it.
Dad is a scientist, a rationalist, a man who believes in evidence and peer review and not in anything as inconvenient as time travel or resurrection. He stood in that room while Eliyana opened her eyes and I watched his entire worldview quietly come apart on the floor. He didn't speak to me for a week.
I said: told you.
Then there was Mary — Dad's colleague, his boss, his... well. Mom would have a word for it. Mary, whose entire professional existence is cracking old languages and forgotten scripts, looked at Doyle Dalton's diary and came up completely empty.
First time for everything.
That diary was for my eyes only. I didn't know that yet.
The Rose
The second time I landed on Larupus — an island north of Scotland that features prominently in my life whether I invited it to or not — I didn't know I'd been there before. The first trip had knocked it clean out of me. The fall, the hit, the memory gone. I didn't know Eliyana. Didn't know Za'id. Didn't know they were kin. Didn't know what I'd already seen and already lost. Then a man stepped out of the trees in the wrong clothes — a uniform that had no business existing in the sixth century — holding a rose. Grandpa John's rose. His specific rose, from his garden, a variety he loved. Grandpa John, who travels with me. Who had been to Larupus before me. Who gave that rose to a stranger as a signal: I trust this man.
When I saw it I woke up. Everything came back at once. And I had a great deal to say to a great many people who were not there to hear it. Dad, in particular.
The Loop
Everything started with Doyle Dalton. I want to be absolutely clear about that.
Quiet Bruce — Mary's nephew, as it happens; the world is not as large as it appears — was on that miserable island the rainy November morning we woke Eliyana. Bruce keeps secrets better than anyone I have ever met, including my father. Bruce and Za'id had to build a paradox loop: notes from Bruce to his own past self, carried by Za'id to Egypt, kept safe for fifteen hundred years in the ground, waiting for the precise moment to surface and close the circle.
Za'id is Eliyana's Advocate. He is a Celtic-Egyptian painter, musician, and Druid — two bloodlines in one body, two languages in one hand, and the reason Dalton's impossible cipher exists at all. Dalton arrived in a Druid village in the wrong century holding a rose and scraps of paper, and asked a twelve-year-old boy to write Arabic phonics in Gaelic letters. The boy did it. That act set fifteen hundred years of careful waiting in motion.
Dalton didn't know what he started. Neither did Za'id. Neither did I, until time told me.
What I Found at the Bottom of It All
I went looking for Dad's family. I found Eliyana and Za'id. And here is what took my breath away — what I had to sit with for a long time before I could say it out loud: They are not only my ancestors. They are Dad's too.
The dead he will not talk about are the ones I have met. I know their faces. I know their names. I have sat under the same tree. I know that Eliyana held a sword above her head at the age of seven while her father raged and two old Druids bowed their heads, unsurprised. I know that Za'id watched her from the dark of a window and didn't yet understand what he was promising.
Dad digs up other people's history for a living. His own history found me instead.
One More Thing
There is a man named Tristan.
He is a time traveler. He thinks he has it all figured out. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a psychopath — and not an unfair assessment. I call him my friend. Heavily. Heavily. Sarcastically. We are not friends.
He doesn't know what I know. He doesn't know what Dalton started, what the loop holds, what fifteen hundred years of careful keeping has been waiting to deliver. He thinks he's the only one playing this game.
He's wrong.
I intend to finish what Dalton began before Tristan does.
But first, Dad. We are going to have a very long conversation.
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