time elemental

Between one instant and the next, someone appeared beside me—or perhaps not. Even while I was looking at him, it was hard to say if he was really there. He seemed to exist between moments and places, there and gone again. I couldn’t say why, for all that he was my Elemental; my sense of him was strange. Perhaps he sometimes stalled and existed a moment behind me or maybe he waited patiently for me to catch up. Maybe he was only here when I observed him or when I looked away. I honestly didn’t know.

What I could say was that his appearance was the most normal of the advanced Elementals I’d summon, if not precisely stable. He looked somewhere between about fifteen and thirty depending on when you looked, with black hair and even darker eyes, the orbs lacking any whites—or any other color, really. He wore a suit of black armor that was alternately smooth and sharp, with angles that varied as you tried to measure them.

It was rare that I chose to use my more advanced Elementals in battle, simply because they weren’t the most efficient uses of my power. At high levels, they might be a better option, but here and now, the draw on my power was too severe. But…this wasn’t the time to worry about that. If I had to burn through my entire store of Dust to win this fight, I’d call it a fair trade.

And since it was time I needed, there was nobody better to ask.

A moment after he appeared, pitch-black orbs shifted to look at me and through me at the same time.

“Yes,” He agreed a moment before I thought to say anything. Though I actually wasn’t sure he was speaking to me, as such; I never actually saw him speak to me, I just remembered him saying the words.