Rewriting the First Stone

The rough, grey stone felt unnervingly solid in my hand. Not like the brittle, chalky remnants of ancient pottery I usually cataloged, but a dense, unyielding mass that seemed to hum with a latent energy. I’d picked it up out of sheer, professional habit, turning it over and over while the Goddess’s ethereal voice still echoed in my mind, a fading melody of desperation and hope. *Restore our timeline, Leo Vance. Power the portal. Return home.* Easy for her to say. My idea of restoring a timeline involved meticulously re-shelving a misplaced manuscript, not mending the very fabric of a world’s past.

My fingers traced a faint, almost imperceptible scar on the stone’s surface, a hairline fracture that looked as though it had been caused by a sharp blow. And then, it happened. Not a flash of light, not a thunderous roar, but a subtle shift, a tremor that ran not through the ground, but through my perception. The scar *undid* itself. The stone in my hand, a moment before fractured, was now whole, smooth, unmarked.

My breath hitched. *What in the name of dusty archives was that?* I blinked, looking from the stone to my hand, then back again. The scar was gone. Utterly, irrevocably gone. It was as if the fracture had never occurred.