Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

The Case of Gentleman Jack 3

Last night, the Time Traveller visited the Seer, someting all time travellers have to do!

The peculiar, not old, just a woman living where the cliffs meet the sea, in a crooked cottage full of peat smoke, old maps, and the atmosphere that makes people accidentally tell the truth. The Traveller arrived carrying her glass bowl under one arm and far too many thoughts under the other.

“I fear,” she admitted, “that I may have acquired a Muse.”

The Seer sighed the sigh of someone who had witnessed this particular cosmic subplot many times before.

“A dangerous thing.”

The glass bowl shimmered between them. Inside sparks and pieces of recent days: wild northern seas, unfinished conversations, emotional weather systems, and a woman growing strangely composed whenever feelings approached too closely.

The Traveller frowned.

“I cannot tell,” she confessed, “if I am becoming inspired or simply wandering into some old Celtic warning story where the heroine disappears into the hills chasing fairy lights.”

The Seer leaned forward.

“The danger is not the Muse,” she said quietly. “The danger is forgetting you are also the inventor.”

Some people, the Seer explained, fall so deeply into longing they vanish into it entirely. Others take the same feeling and build observatories, paintings, poems, and whole new versions of themselves.

Perhaps the Time Traveller had simply forgotten what life force tasted like.

Not happiness exactly. Something older.

Enchantment with a moment or the electricity of anticipation, even the way a single conversation can linger in the mind for hours afterwards.
It is the sudden return of poetry, in the heart.

Somewhere between survival and responsibility, the Traveller had become efficient at moving through time without always inhabiting it.

Then the Muse appeared like a match struck in a dark observatory.

Not necessarily to be possessed.

Perhaps only to remind the heart it was still capable of glowing.

©Elke T.B. Stevens, May 2026