The Master of Eons

[wallwalker]

Title: The Master of Eons
Author: Wallwalker
Fandom: Changeling the Lost
Rating: T
Characters: Original characters
Word Count: 557
Content Notes: Implied consent issues (kidnapping)
Notes: kink_bingo fic, Ageplay square. Backstory for a Keeper, based on a custom kith (a sort of time elemental) that my SO came up with. I hope it deals with the kink well enough.

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The Master of Eons says that he is thousands of years old.

In truth, while what he says is probably true, he does not know. He is a being for whom time has no meaning. It passes, and he senses its passing, but it means nothing, because he can see every moment arrayed before him as if it were the present.

The humans of the mundane world held no interest to him at first. Why would they? They were so small, so insignificant. They lived quiet, mundane lives, and they can't truly understand what time is when they see so little of it. How could they endure, when they only see a moment at a time? It was incomprehensible, and at first he did his best to ignore them. He had power within his realm, could understand things they could barely imagine. What were they to him?

But he found that he could not ignore them, once he had discovered them. He was consumed by curiosity about how these humans lived, how they saw the world. And so he began to draw them into his realm, one at a time, luring them with tricks and traps into the gaps between their world and his.

Once they arrived he would study them intently as they screamed and struggled against their restraints. It was still intensely puzzling to him, how they seemed to experience their captivity moment to moment - if they could have been able to see that they were trapped forever, perhaps they could have come to terms with it. But their inability to see their own futures made them struggle against their present circumstances over and over again - a strange thing.

He had no real desire to harm them; his experiments, at first, had been meant to help. He began to infuse them with his power, the essence of time itself. He had hoped that if they could see what he saw they would accept their fate, realizing that they could not change it.

It failed, as he had known it would. Most of them went mad. A few gained some small measure of the gift of time, but they still could only see portions of it, their feeble brains unable to comprehend his power.

He had known, of course. His own future, while constantly in flux, was visible to him. But that tiny measure of flux intrigued him, and he found that as he played with these tiny humans, their mayfly lives, the blind spots in his vision would grow. And he found it appealing, somehow, the idea that he might not be able to see every aspect of time in an instant.

He does not know if he will ever find a human who can understand his powers, but he continues to capture them and study them. Most have died, or lost their minds completely; a few, a very few, have slipped away, taking advantage of the few blank spots in his vision. He does not chase them; he continues to search for the perfect subject. Humans are so short-lived, after all; it is part of his fascination. And there are so may of them, ready for the taking.

Sometimes he wonders what will happen if the blankness overwhelms his sense of time completely. That is an outcome he cannot see in his future. But he is ageless, as old as time himself, and such an outcome seems incomprehensible.