The last of the drink is drained, followed by a slow look around.

  Blue candles softly light the walls of the ancient cave—never flickering despite ocean waves frequently pounding the ceiling and echoing deep inside. Waves crash onto stone, breaking into white-headed shapes. They strike the cave walls, slowly, forcing the rock back over millennia. Each and every wave—unique, exquisite. Alive.

  Water passes through the figure, untroubled. The presence isn’t truly there. Standing and stretching—slow, casual—the being tucks the chair beneath the tidy desk and glides toward the entrance of the cave.

  The seawater crashes around, but the form remains dry. It flows where it chooses, leaving the cave and emerging onto the familiar beach, wide and endless, the tide high and raging, unreachable by most at this point.

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  A thought. Time shifts. The tide speeds up—crashing, retreating, shaping new landscapes. It becomes low. Normal time resumes, and the entity allows itself the sensation of walking on wet, fresh sand as the waves ease into stillness.

  Around the cliff edges, away from the cave. Bright sunshine. Clear skies.

  The air is cold, but the traveller is unaware of this. Moving forward across the beach, it is known that it is March 1984—not by feel, but by fact.

  A child plays in the rock pools. The child is known—just as the mother and the grandmother are known. They sit on a blanket that keeps lifting at the corners in the wind.

  Watching unseen, for another player to enter the scene.

  Another child.