Category: The Ember Protocol

1567 – The Storm

Elias Merton, an apothecary’s apprentice, had always been too curious for his own good. That was why, despite the warnings, he ventured into the ruins of Blackthorn Monastery—a place whispered to be cursed.

The storm came without warning, the sky splitting with veins of lightning. One strike shattered the monastery’s last standing archway, and in a blinding flash, Elias felt the world twist beneath him.

When he awoke, the air smelled of burning metal and something sweet, like rain on hot stone. The ground beneath him was unnaturally smooth. Towering structures of glass and steel pierced the heavens. Horseless carriages roared past, lights flashing and engines humming. People in strange, tight-fitting garments strode by, eyes fixed on glowing tablets in their palms.

A woman in a bright yellow coat noticed him first. “Whoa, dude,” she said, pulling small beads from her ears. “You okay?”

Elias staggered back, his Latin tongue useless here. She frowned, then held out a silver rectangle. “You lose your phone?”

He took it cautiously—and the glass surface flickered to life, moving like a living painting. With a cry, he dropped it.

The woman laughed. “First time in the city, huh?”

The Historian.

For days, Elias wandered, half-starved and disoriented, until an old man named Dr. Lorne found him muttering in Middle English outside a library.

Lorne, a historian specializing in medieval Europe, assumed Elias was just an eccentric reenactor—until he witnessed the boy’s genuine terror at a flushing toilet.

“You’re either the best method actor I’ve ever met,” Lorne muttered, “or something impossible has happened.”

Elias learned fast. He mastered fragments of modern English, though his thick accent drew stares. He marvelled at hospitals where plagues were cured with a pill, at markets bursting with oranges in winter, at books housed inside glowing tablets.

Yet not everything was wonder.

The Dark Side of Miracles.

One evening, Lorne showed Elias a documentary about the 16th century—his century.

The screen displayed famine, war, witch burnings. Elias recoiled. “This is not the world I knew!”

“Isn’t it?” Lorne asked softly.

Elias fell silent. He had heard of these horrors. He had simply chosen not to see them. (That hasn’t changed)

The Artefact.

Lorne grew obsessed with how Elias had arrived. Together, they returned to the ruins of Blackthorn Monastery—now a crumbling tourist site.

Buried beneath a plaque, they uncovered a strange, fist-sized stone, etched with symbols that matched Elias’s tunic clasp.

“This isn’t just a time anomaly,” Lorne breathed. “This was designed.”

The Choice.

One night, Elias stood on a balcony, staring at the neon sky.

Lorne believed the stone could send him back—but it might also be a key to something greater.

The modern world was dazzling, yet it was loud, relentless, and full of screens and strangers who never truly looked at one another.

Elias thought of home—the stench of the streets, yes, but also the warmth of a hearth, the weight of leather-bound books, and nights where the stars belonged to you.

The Return.

In the end, Elias chose the past. Not because it was better—but because it was his.

As lightning cracked over Blackthorn once more, the stone in his hand flared.

Lorne’s last words echoed in his mind: “History isn’t just what happened. It’s what we make of it.”

Elias awoke in the mud, the monastery ruins whole again. In his pocket, the stone still hummed faintly.

He smiled. Perhaps miracles were not so rare after all.

Epilogue – 2024.

Dr. Lorne published a paper based on a “lost” medieval apothecary’s journal describing impossible cures—including one for the plague.

The academic world dismissed it as a forgery.

But hidden in the margins, in Latin, was a single line:

“The future is glass and fire. Remember me there.”

Moral.

Home is where the heart feels comfortable.