The knight was chivalrous, yes, but also confused by the fact that Alice wore trousers. He bowed stiffly, as if unsure whether to address her as a lady or a sorceress. He kept glancing at her. She tried to explain that she was a historian without success because he was distracted. #vss365

The sheep on the tor were unimpressed by Alice’s anachronistic arrival, which, frankly, made them the most reasonable beings she’d met all day. The techs in the lab had been in a mood, whether it was bad coffee or the 4:00am drop, Alice could not tell. #vssmagic

The wind off the Tug Hill Plateau was chilly enough. However, it was the massive amounts of snow there that would make a legend of any person who stayed through winter. Whether this was meant in a good way depended on the person. #2WordPrompt

They walked past the house without looking. It had been the family homestead. The scotoma was mutual, and it kept the peace. Ten years ago it had been the subject of an inheritance dispute, but it had been sold and the moneys divided equitably. #bravewrite

Sarah wore her disappointment like a crown. She was the age and had the look of someone who’d waited too long for something that never came, though she never said what it was. It might have been love. It might have been that promotion. One could only speculate. #blueskyrelay

It’s winter in Upstate NY.

Agnes hadn’t been meant to travel through the aphotic zone of the timeline, but the coordinates had glitched. After causing an eclipse in Camelot, she was hastily retrieved. However, it took her weeks until she stopped drawing all the light out of the laboratory. #vss365

After returning from her temporal jumps, Agnes needed space - not the astronomical kind, but the kind that let you breathe without someone correcting your Middle English. In this regard, Albert was a godsend. #vssmagic

She combined the moral certainty of her mother with the wild, ungovernable heart of her father, and it made her dangerous in the best of ways. No fool I, I did not try to tame her. Rather I learned to ride the wind and hold on tight. #2WordPrompt

She loved the scion because he didn’t know how to lose. That was before the blockade and the famine last winter. The enemy had blockaded food supplies from the town. Her hunger for love was supplanted by hunger for food. #bravewrite

It wasn’t that we didn’t see it coming - the spark took its time, politely waiting until the committee had adjourned and the last cup of institutional coffee had gone cold. However, when it lit the fuse overnight, the whole campus was in an uproar. #blueskyrelay

Beneath the grand display of chandeliers, she draped herself in a faux sable coat, but she refused to wallow in pretended. She rose to exhort the crowd, urging them to enable change. In that moment, the illusion of luxury cracked, revealing a deeper truth beneath the surface sheen. #inkmine

They weren’t supposed to move anything, touch anything, or speak to anyone, which would’ve been easier if the 19th-century suffragette hadn’t mistaken Agnes for her long-lost cousin. The next thing Agnes knew she was marching to the statehouse demanding the right to vote for woman. #vssmagic

Seamus was a bashful man by nature, but it was a matter of principle that he stand before the Town Board and speak the truth, even if his voice trembled like a boy’s. Their proposed decision would level the old park and Seamus simply could not abide it. #2WordPrompt

He had found the child in the ruins of an old country inn. She hadn’t spoke in the days since he found her. Then it happened. She smiled, and it was a breakthrough, though he didn’t know what it meant or if it would last. #bravewrite

The historians at Oxford insisted on objectivity, but time tried again, slipping sentiment into the margins of their data, smudging the clean lines of causality. Time in this context was human history and there was no squeezing all the humanity out of it. #blueskyrelay

There was something suave in the way he leaned against the marble balustrade, as if the world had been built for his leisure. He was a pretender. His appearance was built on credit and soon the bill would come due. #vss365

Ok, this has to be shared and shared and shared and shared! Thank you @preciouspetal.bsky.social !

It was impossible to tell whether the paradox was unraveling the fabric of reality or just the university’s budget, but either way, the Dean of Oxford’s Time Travel Department looked like he needed a biscuit. #vssmagic

Agnes was staying at the widow Goode’s boarding house. In the middle of the Blitz, with bombs falling like punctuation marks on every sentence of their lives, Agnes found herself cherishing the absurdity of tea still being served every day by Mrs. Goode at precisely four o’clock. #2WordPrompt

Allie stood on the threshold of the ballroom, a pale wisp of a girl haloed in chandelier light, as if the night itself had paused to watch her decide whether to enter or vanish. I watched too. Had she decided to forgive me? If she vanished, I knew she was gone forever. #bravewrite

The music swelled, the lights blurred, and we laughed before the toast, gilded in a kind of hope that only the young can ferment. It’s the after party of youth that gets us, one by one, and no one remembers to turn the lights off, but they go off just the same. #blueskyrelay

A dust up with the Army in the 1980s had forced Eneas to exile himself from Ireland, or so they said, but in the end, the matters that undid him were quieter: a prayer unanswered, a letter returned to sender, a child unnamed. #vss365

After her drop to monitor the crowds at a Jefferson Airplane concert, the technician handed Agnes a crayon and a clipboard. “Draw what you saw,” he said. “Even if it’s just a blur.” She drew a blur. #vssmagic

The crowd was huge. They moved as one, united by hunger and the promise of bread. The sun hung low, casting long shadows by the bakery doors. The scent of yeast and ash drifted from the ovens. They had waited before. They would wait again. Hunger had taught them how. #2WordPrompt

Ellie sat on the porch, the rifle across her knees, watching the sun fall behind the badlands hills. It was her father’s rifle. His heritage. She had never fired it, but she kept it clean and handy. #bravewrite

The candle blinked twice, which, according to the lab’s temporal interference manual (Appendix B subsection 2.13), meant either a minor fluctuation in the continuum or that someone was using the microwave oven and it had shorted out the system once again #blueskyrelay

He spoke of his health the way one might speak of an unwisely spent inheritance, as though it had slipped through his fingers one cigarette after another and never returned. #vss365

The exodus from the lab began after Dr. Douglas announced a “minor containment breach.” Agnes was one of the first ones out. She had seen the professor foul up before. Judging by the smoke and the screaming, the breach was neither minor nor particularly contained. Vesuvius came to mind. #vssmagic

The time to make the jump was waning. With the system down, the time techs gave a wild estimate of the jump coordinates, which, given their track record, meant Agnes would either land in 1940s London or the middle of General Lee’s stall with Traveller. #2WordPrompt

You could say the heartland raised my sister and I, not just in the way it fed us with barley and beef, but in how it taught us to stand up straight in a blizzard and not blink when the sky turned mean. We were born into a world stormy in all sorts of ways. We were prepared. #bravewrite

Agnes found the Union soldier mortally wounded on the battlefield. Just yesterday he had provided her water from his canteen. She tried to bend the rules of time travel just enough to save him, but history, as always, was a stubborn beast. All she could do was hold his hand. #vssmagic

It was not the learning of books that saved him, but the learning of silence, of how to hold his tongue when the world turned crazy. Jack held his wits when all about him were losing theirs. He was nowhere near downtown when the riot broke out. #vss365

By the time the crimson maples turned, their leaves a quilt of flame, it was clear the autumnal land had its own design for letting go of summer. I could not complain. Letting the summer go out with a blaze of glory sounded good to me. #2WordPrompt

If I pull this off what a wonderful Thanksgiving it will be!

One glance, and he knew he’d make her his wife, but she would have none of it. He spent the rest of his life trying to forget her. #bravewrite

My father, adamant in his silence, built a wall of years between us, brick by brick. He had envisioned me sharing my life with some gay colleen. However, my heart had other ideas. #blueskyrelay

Looking into the pond, Agnes caught her reflection. She had to laugh at the dirty serf girl who looked back at her. She had thought doing PhD studies in time travel would be glamorous. Mostly though, like history, time travel was a dirty business. #vss365

Sheriff Barry found the meteor crater behind the church just after dawn. The earth was torn open, blackened at the edges. He stepped closer. Then he heard a rhythmic sound. Something inside was breathing. He didn’t draw his gun. He didn’t run. He just inexplicably whispered, “Not again.” #vssmagic

The war had been lost and the plantation lay in ruins. But tomorrow was another day. A champion knows that. He father knew that and so did Scarlett. #2WordPrompt

🚨Imagine ICE conducting a raid on your PRIVATE PROPERTY.🚨 Illegal, unconstitutional, and an elevation of ICE’s encroachment. This needs to have national attention. 1/2

Sage advice is letting a man come to understand things on his own. Jake wanted to climb the scree slope above Hunter Village. He said he needed a challenge. I tried to elaborate on the finer points of mountain climbing, but there’s a decency in letting someone earn their own bruises. #inkmine

The old warhorse listened to the pretty revolutionary. She spoke of equality. He listened, but the war had taught him something else. It was a survival of the fittest world. He would not shatter her illusions. He had an illusion of his own. #bravewrite

Agnes timed her entrance to the Court of St. Anne for dramatic effect. However either the tech had misread her coordinates or the time machine hiccupped. In any case, it dropped her in the middle of a medieval pig market in her finest gown. #vss365

The old man told Agnes that there was gold in them thar hills. He qualified it by saying the real lode wasn’t gold but stories, buried in the bones of the land, waiting for someone with the patience to listen. Agnes thought him very wise. Patience and listening were her core skills. #vssmagic

He drank the coffee slowly, letting the heat settle in his chest while the wind scraped dust across the porch. The lack of sleep made the ride harder than it should have been, his hands ached from gripping the reins too tight, and the horse had felt it too, skittish on the loose shale. #2WordPrompt

The priest said we were all human in God’s eyes, but she had seen what men could do. Not for the first time Saoirse thought the words of a cloistered man had not rung true. She had lived through the troubles and had seen much inhumanity. #bravewrite

Agnes tried to explain the time travel paradox, but the bishop kept gaslighting her with scripture and his wife did the same with marmalade. Agnes requested more toast. It was going to be a long argument. She had heard the bishop’s sermons. At least the marmalade was tasty. #blueskyrelay

The letter was old and no longer relevant, she was old now, but she read it every morning. She kept it folded in the inside her dresser, the creases worn soft from years of unfolding. The house she wrote from had long since been sold. What mattered was the weight of her voice in her hands. #vss365