dreams. His hand, wandering in dreams, never stranded from the watch, until the early hours of promising morning, when he had to stray his humble footsteps towards the school.
He was late. The time wasn`t exactly the same, as it used to be. How to look at everything the same, when all is changed and changing in every glimpse? How to sit in history class and wait until the end of it, when there is no time? What is there, anyway, beside's the change?
Josh observed a patient raindrops tapping on a class window, like the assembly line workers, reacting according the change. It seemed to stop raining, as the harmonic windy vortexes played lightly, when the teacher explained the Greek mythology to the class:
"Then the titan, Kronos, defeated his father Uranus, who ruled the sky…"
"Wait! Go back!"
The classmates peered at Joshua, who involuntary burst that word-fall on the slide show.
"Yes? Joshua?" the elderly grandmother-like teacher asked. She was very fond of her students, because of the lost luck to be a mother herself. She reimbursed it with her kindness.
"That watch… it`s… special." Joshua referred to an old painting of an Old-Greek mythology – the mythology that was baptized as a topic of today`s class. Josh shoved the Watch secretly into his pocket. It was the same Watch! With engravings and all!
"You have a very good eye,” the kind teacher said. “These are all symbols. Yes. Every detail carries a referral to the myths.”
"So that watch represented the rule over time and the scythe…"
His teacher didn`t have an answer. "Kronos was the god of the heaven, not time," she finally said.
The other students still looked at Josh unbelievably.
"Maybe," she tried to comfort Joshua, "when Kronos fell, the other gods came and divided the duties of the sky-god between them? His son Zeus, got the duty to rule the lightning, and someone had to rule the time, the rain, clouds, forests, lakes and so on."
"Good job, Joe," one of the chubby arrogant classmates poked Joshua on the shoulder. "You just added another question in the KGB`s test." That was the nickname of the history teacher.
Very subtle but a prompt ring sounded from the corridor. Students stood up with satisfaction and some of them wringed.
"Thank the sky-god for the solar eclipse," said the boy from another desk, being unnaturally tall for his age, on Josh`s right. His name was Nick Lander. Everyone called him The Ladder. "The sitting in physics class would`ve un-Einsteined us all. See you outside." Nick scooped all the content of his desk into his back-pack with one move and left, leaving Josh memorizing the picture on that slide-show.
As Joshua was leaving the class, the questions ran through his head – was that Watch eternal? A time-traveling Word of Creation? And how much did it have to do with the course of the history as we know it? Is there a history at all, if one can change it every second?
The light in the corridor felt brighter than the sun outside. The solar eclipse was about to hit its climax.
“Hey Toe-Joe,” the chubby arrogant classmate waited him around the corner, next to the lockers. His name was Percy. One of these rich kids who hadn`t had much love in their childhood and it was compensated with flashy things his parents thought helped the situation. He had his two tails with him – Jim and that French kid everyone called Fort. The last one laughed too loudly to the “Toe-Joe” joke.
Percy had called Joshua Toe-Joe since the second grade, when they hid his shoes and Joshua had to come to class on his bare feet. He tried to ignore them now, as always, but they moved on his way, blocking it.
“What up, nerd? Are you trying to flunk us in history class?” Percy wasn`t really mad, he just wanted to pick a fight, faking the anger.
Josh said nothing and tried to pass. He tried to do it nicely, because everyone knew that Percy and his goons were intimate with their fists like chimpanzees.
As he stepped on the side, trying to avoid the conflict, Percy pushed him the way that Joshua fell during the ode of the goons laughing, desecrating the hall with their bad personality.
Sitting down there on the floor, he remembered his Watch. He wanted to make himself disappear. Maybe it was shame that spawned that wish – the shame that he was afraid of them. He has always thought himself as a great hero, like in the video games, but when it came to real life, it made him mad that even those three classmates scare him.
He put his hand to a fist and got up. His anger over his own weakness consumed his thoughts and even the will to use the Watch. He found himself being too afraid to show them the thing. He still was a captive of the fear that they would just laugh at him even more. Maybe it was the last night attack by the hobo, which his body remembered and tried to avoid.
He just walked away, towards the exit, while those three shouted through laughs from behind:
“We`ll see you outside. IN THE DARK!”
Joshua just ignored them. There was nothing actually to do about it. “Let them be idiots,” Joshua thought. “They`ll never know that there is more in the world,” he comforted himself, thinking about the Watch. And tried to forget all the teenage suffering in the world.
He exited the front door, which was surrounded by the mirrors on both the walls.
He saw the schoolyard full of students, pointing at the sky or whispering and laughing. He saw senior class` boys pull the hair of some girls, using the poetic darkness of the day. Josh descended using the stairs, seeing a big shiny circle in the sky.
When he was stepping on the lowest stair, something unexpected happened.
Joshua felt someone grabbing his arm, pulling him towards the wall next to the stairway. He felt his back hit against the cool concrete wall.
He found himself, standing in the dark corner, with a stranger's hand on his mouth. A woman`s hand!
He had no intention of screaming – it was not in his nature. He saw a young woman`s long brown hair, with the curls reaching to her uniquely beautiful medallion on her panting breasts. The golden medallion seemed to emanate a shine, and was shaped like the Sun, missing the piece reminding the Moon, in the middle.
She was dressed into a long white dress or a robe and smelled like lilies.
She slowly removed her hand from his mouth and removed her hood.
"He`s watching," she said. "We have to go."
"Who? Where?" Joshua whispered.
"I`ll explain later, you have my word. But for now – you must come with me."
Josh didn`t know whether to agree or make her think he doesn`t have it, but she seemed to read his mind.
"Follow your senses, your heart," the young woman said, looking at him deeply with her eyes as blue as the sea on a vacation. Josh didn`t feel himself threaten by her. Instead he felt something familiar. Something indefinite and gormlessly mysterious.
"Where are we going?" his heart decided to trust her.
"To the Coven. You`ll be safe there."
With a flake of farewell, he saw his classmates, beyond his inevitable trice, making fun and being busy by the especial natural wonder. They looked so normal. Josh nodded. He suddenly didn`t feel so normal anymore.
The mysterious woman in white nodded too and they ran upstairs into the bright corridor of that school, that seemed like a midnight mall. It was empty and shining like a dry bottle.
"The backdoor," she said without a halt in her swift walk.
Joshua saw now, how beautiful she was in all her details. He looked back, convincing himself there`s no-one there, asking:
"What does he want?"
"The Word-bearer."
"And what do you want?"
She stopped, looking into his eyes with her pureness and explained:
"To protect it."
The corridor went dark. Did someone