Read the first two chapters below (also included on the Kindle preview).
A Faerie Named Fae
Some emotions can't be bottled. Some days refuse to end.
Fae Underwood has a problem with Mondays. Specifically, this Monday—the one that keeps repeating no matter what she does. As a troubleshooter at HeartStarter Corporation, she's used to investigating their emotional products when customers experience "unexpected results." But now she's caught in her own loop of unexpected results, waking to the same alarm, same pink sunrise, same customer complaints.
With each reset, her carefully maintained glamour—the magic that hides her pointed ears and conceals her true nature—grows harder to maintain. Her faerie perception, always a challenge in the corporate world, starts revealing troubling patterns beneath HeartStarter's sleek surface. The company isn't just selling emotional experiences; they're doing something with time itself.
As Fae investigates HeartStarter's secretive Beauty Protocol and ventures into restricted sub-levels, she uncovers disturbing truths about what's really being extracted when customers use their products. Brunswick East isn't just experiencing a glitch in reality—it's been deliberately enveloped in a manufactured Monday.
With her two worlds colliding—corporate employee and magical being—Fae must navigate a recursive reality where the rules keep changing but the day never does. And as her glamour threatens to fail completely, she'll have to decide which is more dangerous: being discovered as a faerie, or discovering why HeartStarter wants to keep her trapped in Monday.
A Faerie Named Fae blends urban fantasy with time manipulation in a story where corporate power meets magical resistance. Perfect for readers who enjoy unique world-building with a dash of rebellion against reality itself.
Author’s Note: Cracks in the Glamour
This started with a blunt idea: a punk-rock faerie stuck in a Monday that won’t end, working for HeartStarter, a company that bottles and sells emotions. From there grew a story about Fae Underwood—a troubleshooter who spends her days handling customer complaints and her nights noticing the seams in reality. Park benches that hum with hidden equations, a clocktower where time runs strangely, and a glamour that won’t quite hold together.
What interested me wasn’t just the loop, but the clash between a corporate world that treats feelings as inventory and a faerie nature that refuses to be standardized. Fae’s chipped-nail stubbornness is my answer to that—mischief as resistance, and a refusal to let a product manual decide what a life or a day is worth.
I won’t give away where it leads. Only this: the book sides with the unguarded, the unpriced, the things you can’t trap in a bottle or reset with an alarm. If Monday won’t end, make it blink.
ONE
The Paradoxical Customer
The Paradoxical Customer
The alarm shrieked with a sound like crystallized disappointment. Fae opened one eye, revealing a sliver of iridescent pupil that shifted between violet and green as it adjusted to the morning light. The clock's digital numbers—6:15—glowed in corporate HeartStarter pink, a shade engineered to stimulate trust receptors in the human brain while simultaneously triggering purchase impulses. To Fae's faerie perception, it radiated artificial cheer with all the authenticity of plastic flowers.
Her wings had unfurled again during sleep—another glamour failure. The translucent membranes caught the morning light, casting fractal patterns on her ceiling like a horoscope drawn in physics.
"Seelie-fucking-Court," Fae muttered, her voice hoarse from last night's chain-smoking session after band practice. The Gaelic curse tasted of iron and oak on her tongue—a reminder of courts and customs her grandmother had described but she'd never truly known. She rolled from the mattress, her feet hitting the cold floorboards with a thud that sent the empty whiskey bottle under her bed skittering toward the radiator.
The mirror showed all 5’2” of her: angular features, hair the blue-black of midnight tram tickets, and skin that unsettled humans not used to the fae. Her wings twitched as she splashed water on her face.
In their patterns, a keen observer might have recognized symbols from older alphabets than any human university taught.
The sink gurgled in protest as she brushed her teeth, spitting toothpaste that briefly sparkled with bioluminescent faerie enzymes before fading to mundane white foam. From below, the fragrance of fresh flowers wafted through the floorboards.
Darrowdale's Florist—run by Darrowdale, an elf with exquisite taste and terrible business acumen—opened precisely at 6:30 AM every day, giving her just enough time to get ready.
Through her kitchen window, she watched a tram rattle past with a metallic whine, its wheels producing a rhythmic clacking against the tracks that sounded suspiciously like corporate quarterly projections being recited in Morse code. A human businessman sat beside a bulky troll in a tailored suit, both staring at their phones with identical expressions of bored contempt for a world that demanded their attention before coffee.
Her HeartStarter ID badge glinted accusingly from the kitchen counter as she prepared instant coffee, lacing it with a drop of Silver Morning dew she'd collected from the botanical gardens—not technically illegal for personal use without a Class C enchantment license, but certainly not company-approved. The caffeine-magic fusion hit her system with a jolt that realigned her mitochondria into perfect crystalline structures for exactly 3.7 seconds (she'd timed it). She sighed as the sensation faded, leaving behind something hollow, as if her cells themselves remembered more vibrant realities.
The HeartStarter office squatted in a renovated warehouse on the eastern edge of Brunswick, its entrance a garishly decorated pink door emblazoned with the company's logo—a stylized heart with a lightning bolt through it. Corporate literalism at its finest. Fae swiped her ID card, the wards recognizing her fae signature and adjusting the ambient temperature and humidity to accommodate her species-specific needs—an HR requirement after last summer's unfortunate wing-crumpling incident with Dorith from Accounting.
Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed just loud enough to worsen her hangover. To her faerie ears, the sound hinted at smugness, as if the building took pleasure in collective suffering.
The reception desk was manned by Grix, a half-goblin with meticulously manicured nails that clicked rhythmically on his keyboard like tiny bones counting profits.
"Morning, sunshine," he cackled, baring teeth filed to fashionable points. His grin revealed the economic stratification of his dental work—premium cosmetic filing for the front teeth that clients would see, bargain grinding for the molars. "Quarterly sales projections are in. Management's positively orgasmic."
“Spare me the corporate afterglow,” Fae muttered, dropping her messenger bag beside her desk. Her cubicle walls were plastered with band posters—The Clash, Nirvana, the Pixies, the Stone Roses, Pink Floyd, Bowie—and dotted with pressed flowers from Darrowdale: small acts of rebellion against the relentless HeartStarter branding that crept across every surface like pink kudzu. Overnight, a lone mushroom had sprung up in her pencil cup, its cap glowing with unnatural luminescence—a silent greeting from the kingdom that considers fairies distant cousins.
Her crystalline display lit with twenty-seven new emails, all flagged with urgency her nervous system dismissed as fake. Janice’s query about the supply room blinked like a crisis, as if ignoring it might topple the emotional infrastructure of the company.
A banner scrolled across the top of her screen: “SECURITY ALERT: Counterfeit product reports rising in Greater Melbourne. Document all irregular magical signatures.”
The message repeated endlessly, its period linking back to the first letter like a typographical ouroboros.
At the top sat a message from Marianne Thornfield: SUBJECT: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION ISSUE—URGENT.
The emphasis hummed at a frequency that made Fae’s molars ache.
"Fuck me sideways with a pixie wand," Fae groaned, clicking to expand the message. The curse was standard faerie bar talk, but the pixie reference was deliberately offensive—like humans disparaging their own kind with slurs against distant cousins. Some cultural habits were hard to break, especially when nursing a hangover that had settled behind her eyes like a squatter claiming adverse possession.
FAE—NEED IMMEDIATE RESOLUTION. CUSTOMER 458-7TJ (GRAHAM WILKINS) EXPERIENCING SEVERE EMOTIONAL DISSONANCE AFTER LOVE POTION APPLICATION. PRODUCT PURCHASED BY THIRD PARTY. PROBABLE T&C VIOLATION. FIX BY EOD. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. —MT
Fae closed her eyes, counted backward from ten in Old Gaelic, then opened the file. Each number carried a taste—seacht with iron and soil, sé like tart berries.
Graham Wilkins, 34, human, Fitzroy North. No purchases on record, yet exhibiting Grade C effects.
She tapped her chin with a finger that momentarily trailed glittering faerie dust before she suppressed the reflex. The dust dissolved before reaching her desk, but not before spelling out a tiny, perfect obscenity visible only to magical eyes. Third-party purchase meant someone dosed this Graham without his knowledge or consent, which violated Term 3, Clause 7 of the standard HeartStarter contract: All targets of emotional modification must provide preliminary consent, verbal or written.
"Goddamn amateurs," she muttered, reaching for her field kit—a battered leather satchel containing remedy potions, emotion neutralizers, memory adjusters, and the ever-essential corporate paperwork that somehow weighed more than its physical components, as if bureaucracy itself had mass.
Thornfield appeared beside her desk with that managerial flicker—more budgeted omnipresence than magic. Her smile, PR-approved and biologically unsettling, bared teeth with too much symmetry.
"This needs to disappear, Underwood," Thornfield said, her human features arranged in what HeartStarter's PR department insisted was a smile but what evolutionary biology would categorize as a threat display. "The Wilkins issue could attract Regulatory attention. We don't need another Q3 incident."
Fae nodded, tension coiling in the muscles where her wings connected to her back. The strain of keeping them glamoured around Thornfield always made her shoulders ache as if she'd spent hours hunched over bass guitar tabs. "I'll need a transference approval form if it's a third-party purchase. And access to the original sale record."
Thornfield's smile thinned like truth under quarterly review. "Forms in your email. Sale record's been... misplaced."
"Misplaced," Fae repeated flatly. "So, I'm walking in blind with unstable emotional chemicals and no provenance data." The words tasted bitter, like artificially sweetened corporate compliance.
"That's why we value your improvisational capabilities, Underwood," Thornfield said, her voice dropping to a register that suggested both threat and promise in equal measure. "Resolve this cleanly and there might be a performance recognition bonus."
The carrot and stick approach, Fae thought—but at HeartStarter, both were moulded from the same pink polymer and stamped with a barcode. Incentives designed not to motivate, but to label the compliant. Emotional dysregulation leaked from Graham’s flat before she even knocked. Pink vapors curled under the door, saturated with HeartStarter’s midrange signature—synthetic oxytocin, floral notes, and the cloying afterscent R&D swore was undetectable.
To Fae's faerie senses, it was like walking through a perfume department where all the sample bottles had been replaced with artificial sweetener.
A sharp whistle cut through the air as a Magical Enforcement drone zipped past, scanning for unlicensed enchantments. Fae instinctively tucked her field kit closer to her body, wings pressing tight against her back beneath their glamour. The drones had been increasingly active since the Metropolitan Thaumaturgy Authority had cracked down on unauthorized magical emissions last spring, after three humans accidentally turned themselves into part-time flamingos through improper potion disposal.
The man who opened the door was handsome in that fragile, human way—beautiful because he would decay, not despite it. But his eyes were chaos: pupils dilating like lenses trying to focus on two realities at once, his aura crackling with pink static and compulsive longing. "HeartStarter Customer Solutions," Fae said, flashing her ID while surreptitiously performing a magical field assessment. Her faerie senses mapped the house in seconds, each emotion a flavor note in a corrupted vintage: sour longing on the couch, bitter fixation by the sink. Classic Grade C overdose—formulated for someone else’s brain chemistry.
"I understand you're experiencing some... emotional inconsistencies?"
Graham's face crumpled with relief, the expression sending ripples through his disrupted aura. "Thank god. I thought I was losing my mind. I'm obsessed with my neighbour—Alyssa—can't stop thinking about her. But yesterday I was fine, and I've only spoken to her twice about mail mix-ups, and suddenly I'm composing poetry at three AM—" He broke off, running his hands through already dishevelled hair that stood up in patterns that unintentionally mimicked love-potion molecular structures.
"May I come in?" Fae asked, already cataloguing the symptoms. Classic Grade C overflow—emotional intensity calibrated for someone with a different neurochemical baseline. The potion was working too efficiently on Graham, like overwatering a plant until its roots drowned.
Inside, the emotional contamination was stronger. Pink tendrils of active formula clung to the furniture, concentrated around a half-empty coffee mug on the kitchen counter. Her faerie vision flared. The mug shimmered with fingerprints—not Graham’s, whose aura scattered like static, but a finer print. Hesitant, anxious, romantic. Female. Desperate. The kind of trace you only leave when you really hope magic will cover for courage.
"Have you consumed anything unusual in the past 48 hours?" Fae asked, though she already knew the answer. The mug practically screamed with magical tampering, its residue forming tiny hearts that burst like soap bubbles when exposed to her sceptical faerie gaze. "Just the usual. Coffee, takeout, beer..." His eyes darted nervously to the mug, then away, as if the ceramic vessel had suddenly developed accusatory powers. "My neighbour Alyssa brought over coffee yesterday. Said she'd made too much."
Bingo. Fae suppressed a glitter-laced sigh. Amateur hour. Dosing a crush with uncalibrated Grade C was like handing them a love letter written in gasoline. Eventually, it burned.
Now Graham's emotional architecture was collapsing into artificial infatuation, with his authentic emotional systems fighting back against the imposed pattern like an immune response to an invasive parasite.
“One question first,” Fae said, laying out her kit on the coffee table. “Do you want to feel this way about Alyssa?”
Graham’s clarity flickered. “I… don’t know her. These feelings don’t make sense.”
Graham's expression shifted, authenticity momentarily breaking through the chemical love haze like sunlight penetrating storm clouds. "I... don't know her. Not really." He swallowed hard, the sound audible in the emotionally charged air. "These feelings aren't... they don't make sense."
"That's what I thought." Fae removed a small crystal vial of clear liquid that refracted light in impossible directions, splitting sunbeams into prismatic patterns that corresponded precisely to the emotion-spectrum frequencies being disrupted in Graham's system. "This will neutralize the external emotional influencers currently affecting your system. You'll return to your baseline emotional state regarding your neighbour." His eyes fixed on the vial with naked longing that had nothing to do with the potion and everything to do with the human desire for cognitive coherence. "Will it hurt? Losing these feelings?"
That question always landed like a stone in her chest. “Artificial feelings feel real,” Fae said. “Losing them hurts. But it’s like waking up from a beautiful dream. The pain is just truth arriving.”
She uncapped the vial. Three drops in a glass of water. Simple chemistry, really. Magical molecules binding to synthetic emotional compounds, breaking them down into harmless magical particulate that would exit his system within 24 hours, leaving behind only the faint embarrassment of having written mediocre poetry about a near-stranger.
Graham drank without hesitation, grimacing at the taste—like bitter tears, most humans reported, though the actual flavor was closer to the moment before rain—when the air remembers drought and hints at relief. The glass clinked—a small sound that echoed like a bell ending enchantment. Within moments, the pink tendrils of emotional manipulation began dissolving, revealing the unaltered emotional architecture beneath—simpler, less intense, but authentically his.
"I need to speak with Alyssa," Fae said, repacking her kit. The neutralizer bottle clinked against the other vials, a chorus of glass voices chattering about emotional calibration and corporate liability. "There are regulations regarding love potion administration. She needs to understand the legal and ethical implications." Graham nodded, his expression clearing as the neutralizer worked through his system like dawn burning off fog. "Apartment 4B. Directly across the hall." He paused, then added with newfound clarity, "She seemed desperate. Sad, maybe."
Fae nodded, gathering her things. Another satisfied customer returned to the emotional status quo— isolated, disconnected, but authentically so. The corporate mission accomplished: disruption contained, potential regulatory violation addressed, customer recalibrated to acceptable baseline functioning. All tied up with paperwork and ready for quarterly metrics.
Alyssa Chen opened the door on the third knock. Hope. Confusion. Fear. Her emotions cycled so fast they left a wake behind her eyes—like an honest performance with no rehearsal, raw and tangled, too real for this plastic world. She was lovely in a fragile human way, with anxious fingers that twisted the hem of her sweater into accordion pleats that captured her nervousness in fabric form.
"You're here about Graham," she said, voice small. Not a question but a confession wrapped in syllables too thin to bear their own weight.
"May I come in?" Fae asked, keeping her tone professionally neutral despite the pressure building behind her temples. The residual love potion emanating from Alyssa's apartment clashed with the neutralizer lingering on Fae's skin, creating an uncomfortable harmonic that only magical beings could perceive—like two songs played simultaneously in clashing keys.
Alyssa's apartment mirrored Graham's, but hers overflowed with life. Dozens of plants leaned toward her like attentive pets. The humidity held emotion like mist holds light. Fae's wings twitched, instincts stirred by the wildness hidden beneath this mess of longing. Each plant leaned toward Alyssa, responding to her care in ways she likely didn't notice.
"You administered a Grade C Love Elixir to your neighbour without consent or proper calibration," Fae said, not bothering with preliminaries. Corporate efficiency demanded direct address, even when delivering bad news. "That violates Terms 3, 7, and 12 of HeartStarter's service agreement."
Tears welled instantly—light caught in them like dew in a web. "I just wanted him to notice me," she whispered. "The salesperson said it would amplify what was already there. Not create something new."
Fae frowned, the expression sending a ripple of disruptive energy through the room that made the nearest fern briefly curl its fronds inward. "What salesperson? Where did you purchase the product?" "HeartStarter booth. Lunar Market. Last weekend," Alyssa said. "Tall woman, red hair. Said it was safe. Said it was designed for… first approaches. Like it would just nudge things along."
That wasn't right. HeartStarter had rejected the Lunar Market permit—Fae had filed the forms herself. And Grade C wasn't sold casually. It required biometric calibration. Blood. Brainwaves. Contracts in triplicate. The company was ruthless, but never sloppy.
"Do you still have the receipt? The packaging? Anything from the purchase?" Fae asked, professional concern now overriding her discomfort. Her wings pressed against her shoulder blades with tension, straining against their glamour.
Alyssa nodded, disappearing into her bedroom. She returned with a small pink bag bearing the HeartStarter logo, containing an empty vial and a card that, at first glance, appeared to be standard HeartStarter documentation. The bag released a scent memory—not just floral notes, but something sharper. A magical signature echoing with ambition and calculation.
Fae turned the vial under faerie light. It glinted like truth pretending to be marketing. The magic signature was perfect—too perfect. Modified to bypass resistance. Stripped of ethical failsafes. Whoever made this knew the formula. Maybe even improved it.
"This isn't our product," Fae said slowly, a cold certainty settling in her stomach like iron fillings finding a magnetic pole. "It's counterfeit. A very good one, but definitely not HeartStarter."
Alyssa's face drained of colour, leaving behind a pallor that made her look like an underwatered version of her thriving plants. "Is Graham okay? Did I poison him?" "He'll be fine. I've administered a neutralizer." Fae pocketed the evidence, the glass vial warm against her skin as if retaining heat from its creation. "But I need detailed information about this vendor. Everything you can remember."
As Alyssa described the transaction, Fae's sense of wrongness intensified. The vendor's description, the too-good-to-be-true promises, the lack of safety protocols—all aligned with the security alert she'd seen that morning. This was sophisticated counterfeiting, down to the magical signature, suggesting inside knowledge that shouldn't exist outside HeartStarter's heavily warded R&D department.
"I'm so sorry," Alyssa said when she'd finished, fresh tears tracking down her face like rain on windowpanes. "I just... it's so hard to connect with anyone real anymore. Everyone's always distracted or halfway out the door to something better."
The raw honesty caught Fae off-guard, resonating with a cavity corporate life had hollowed where something wilder used to grow. She thought of her own empty apartment, the meaningless sexual encounters, mostly men, mostly human, that left her feeling emptier, the band practices where she felt momentarily alive before crashing back to corporate reality.
"Look," Fae said, softening despite her professional training, wings rustling invisibly beneath her jacket.
"The neutralizer doesn't erase memories. Graham knows you tried to... influence his feelings. That's your opening for an authentic conversation. Messy, uncomfortable, real."
Alyssa looked up, hope and fear warring in her expression like opposing weather fronts. "You think I should tell him the truth?"
"Truth's messier," Fae said. "But at least it leaves something behind when it falls apart."
The plants seemed to lean in, like they agreed. Back at her apartment that evening, Fae sat cross-
legged on her bedroom floor, the counterfeit product spread before her. The pink bag, the empty vial, the instruction card with its perfect forgery of HeartStarter's typography—physical evidence of someone operating just outside the boundaries of corporate magical commerce, exploiting the same human vulnerabilities but without even the pretence of regulation.
She wrote the report in masterful corporate obfuscation: technically accurate, revealing nothing. Customer 458- 7TJ: RESOLUTION COMPLETE, EMOTIONAL
BASELINE RESTORED—but had conveniently omitted any mention of counterfeit product or unauthorized market presence. Something felt wrong about the whole situation, a wrongness that extended beyond corporate protocols into territory that made her faerie instincts bristle like a cat sensing an earthquake before the first tremor.
She examined the fake HeartStarter vial under faerie light—a small globe of luminescence she conjured between her palms, its colour shifting according to her emotional state. Tonight it glowed a sceptical amber, illuminating the subtle magical signature embedded in the glass. The pattern was familiar yet wrong, like hearing a beloved song played in a minor key. Whoever had created this forgery had intimate knowledge of HeartStarter's proprietary formulations—knowledge that shouldn't exist outside the company's heavily warded R&D department.
Her phone buzzed with a text from Thornfield: CUSTOMER SATISFIED?
Fae typed back a simple affirmative, then set the phone aside. She'd deal with the implications tomorrow. For now, she needed to think.
She opened her window, breathing in the night air of Brunswick East—a complex bouquet of food truck spices, tram electricity, human lives in close proximity, and the subtle undercurrent of magic that flowed beneath the city's mundane surface. Each inhale carried stories her faerie senses could interpret: someone cooking with enchanted oregano three buildings over, a minor woodland spirit lost in the concrete landscape, a trio of university students attempting a love spell with more enthusiasm than skill.
A distant siren wailed, its pitch rising and falling like a cry for help. From her fourth-floor vantage, she could see into other apartments: a witch carefully measuring ingredients into a cauldron that doubled as a slow cooker; a troll family watching reality TV with impassive expressions; humans performing their evening rituals of connection and isolation, each sealed in their private bubble of light.
The counterfeit vial caught the moonlight, refracting it into patterns that shouldn't have been possible with ordinary glass. Fae narrowed her eyes, faerie perception sharpening as she examined the refraction pattern more carefully. Her pupils expanded, irises disappearing as she shifted into full faerie sight.
There—embedded in the light itself—was a signature. Not a company mark or serial number, but something more fundamental. A magical frequency that resonated with a sense of wrongness she couldn't quite articulate, like a word that hovers, just out of reach.
She reached for her bass guitar, propped against the wall beside her bed. Her fingers plucked a progression that thrummed with the same dissonant energy. The deep tones resonated through her apartment, making the windows subtly vibrate as if acknowledging the truth in the sound. As she played, the vial began to glow with increasing intensity, the counterfeit potion glowing, reactivating like a trap responding to its trigger chord.
Fae stopped playing abruptly, her heart racing. This wasn't just a counterfeit product. It was responsive to specific magical frequencies—a sophisticated feature that went well beyond mere forgery. This was advanced magical engineering with a purpose beyond simple profit. The counterfeiters weren't just exploiting HeartStarter's market; they were implementing technologies the company itself might not yet possess. She carefully rewrapped the vial and tucked it into her bass case, mind racing with implications that branched like frost patterns on winter glass. Tomorrow she would begin investigating quietly, outside official channels.
Something larger was happening, and she had a sinking feeling that HeartStarter might be involved in ways that extended beyond standard corporate malfeasance into territory dark enough to make even Thornfield's smile genuine with concern.
As she prepared for bed, a strange dizziness washed over her—a disorienting sensation of déjà vu so powerful that she had to grip the bathroom sink for support. For a moment, time seemed to stutter, reality folding in on itself like origami being unmade. The bathroom light flickered, though the power remained stable. In the mirror, her reflection seemed momentarily out of sync with her movements, catching up a millisecond too late as if reality itself had buffering issues.
Then it passed, leaving her staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Blue-black hair. Faerie features. That same cynical stare—yet for an instant, she could have sworn she'd lived this exact moment before. The feeling wasn't the vague familiarity of standard déjà vu but a precise certainty, as if she were an actor who had performed this scene countless times yet was still expected to react with authentic surprise.
"Get it together, Underwood," she muttered to her reflection. "No more mixing Silver Morning with whiskey."
But as she turned off the light and crawled into bed, the sensation lingered—a prescient certainty that something fundamental had shifted. That in addressing the paradoxical customer, she had inadvertently stepped onto a circular path where endings were merely disguised beginnings.
Her last thought before sleep claimed her was of Alyssa and Graham—two humans reaching desperately for connection through artificial means because the real thing seemed impossible. She understood that impulse more intimately than she cared to admit, recognized the hollow space that products promised to fill but ultimately only defined more clearly through their failure.
The alarm would shriek again at 6:15 AM, with a sound like crystallized disappointment.
Two
Time Distilled
Time Distilled
Fifty-seven Mondays had passed—or, more precisely, the same Monday had looped fifty-seven times—and Fae was starting to grasp the geometry of madness. She sat on the fire escape outside her apartment above the elf-owned florist shop, watching the sun crawl up through cigarette haze and cynicism. The same sun, the same clouds, the same shade of morning that she'd witnessed fifty-six times before. Her bass guitar leaned against the railing, strings still vibrating from when she'd been playing "The Future Is Always Yesterday" by Temporal Anarchists—apropos soundtrack for a day that refused to move.
"Iteration fifty-seven," she said, exhaling a perfect smoke ring that hung in the air longer than physics should have allowed. The ring shimmered with faint faerie iridescence before dissolving, each mote remembering all fifty-six rings that came before. "And still no bloody sign of Morgan."
She flicked her cigarette into the alley below, watching it fall with the detached interest of someone who had seen the same object follow the same arc dozens of times. The ember traced a perfect parabola, landing precisely where it had landed in every previous iteration—a small universe of predictability in a world gone recursively mad.
A small part of her mind—the part that remembered what normal time felt like—still registered shock at how quickly she'd adapted to living the same day repeatedly. The larger part, the faerie part, found it almost natural. Time had always been more suggestion than law to her kind. Her grandmother had once told her that fairies perceived time like humans perceived colour—as a spectrum rather than a fixed progression, with shades and hues that could be appreciated simultaneously.
Her phone buzzed with a text that she could recite from memory: Maritha from work, informing everyone that Gerald from Accounting had brought faerie cakes again. Half the staff were actual fae and found the name culturally insensitive. The words appeared on her screen as they had fifty-six times before, each pixel displaying with such perfect recursion that Fae could almost see the underlying mathematical pattern that governed the loop.
"Ag athdhéanamh arís agus arís eile," she muttered, the Gaelic phrase for "repeating again and again" tasting of iron and oak on her tongue. Fifty-seven times she'd received this message. Fifty-seven times she hadn't replied. Why start now?
She slipped the phone back into her pocket, next to the impossible vial—her talisman of sanity, proof that she wasn't hallucinating this whole ordeal. The pink container from the future still felt unnaturally warm against her thigh, its temperature fluctuating with subtle pulses that matched the rhythm of the time loop itself. Each pulse sent tiny ripples of temporal energy across her faerie senses, like pebbles dropped into the still pond of reality.
The early morning air shimmered with that liminal quality unique to Brunswick East—where the mundane and magical existed in uneasy symbiosis. A tram rumbled past on the street below, its human passengers scrolling through phones while a trio of minor woodland sprites clustered on the roof, their tiny forms surfing the electrical currents with expressions of manic glee. To Fae's enhanced perception, the tram left temporal echoes behind—ghost images that showed where it had been moments before, overlapping with where it was now in a visual palimpsest of moments that shouldn't coexist.
Her landlord, Darrowdale, was opening the florist shop below, his movements precise and identical to every previous iteration. The flowers responded to his elvish presence by turning toward him like eager puppies, their petals opening in perfect synchronization. Fae could hear the faint melody of their collective blooming—a sound imperceptible to human ears but clear to her faerie senses, a morning symphony that had become as maddeningly familiar as everything else in this recursive hell.
It was all so ordinary, so predictable now. Every loop, every iteration, followed patterns so precise they felt mathematical. The world around her had the uncanny perfection of a snow globe—beautiful, contained, and utterly artificial in its precision.
Fae checked her watch—a vintage mechanical timepiece she'd enchanted to run on faerie time rather than human chronology. The face showed multiple hands moving at different speeds, some clockwise, some counter, creating a complex dance of brass across the numbered face. According to the outermost dial, she had forty-three minutes before she needed to leave for HeartStarter if she wanted to maintain the timeline she'd been carefully mapping across iterations.
The innermost dial, which measured emotional time rather than physical seconds, showed her patience running dangerously low. The delicate hand quivered near the red zone labeled in faerie script that roughly translated to "imminent volcanic eruption of sentiment."
"Fifty-seven bloody Mondays," she muttered, rising from her perch on the fire escape and climbing back through her window into her apartment. Her wings momentarily caught on the frame, sending a shower of irritated faerie dust onto the windowsill where it crystallized into tiny, perfect obscenities visible only to magical eyes.
The small studio was a perfect reflection of Fae's contradictory nature—corporate procedure manuals stacked alongside ancient faerie grimoires, empty bottles of premium whiskey repurposed as homes for carnivorous plants that chittered quietly as she passed. They sensed the time loop too, in their primitive plant way; their teeth had begun growing in perfect Möbius strips rather than the usual spiral patterns.
A corkboard on the wall was covered with index cards, string, and photographs—a physical manifestation of her attempt to map the loop—its variations and its constants. She'd added a card every cycle, creating an ever-more complex web of connections that was beginning to resemble a mandala of madness. The cards for iterations one through twenty-three were color- coded according to her initial approaches: blue for corporate channels, green for magical research, red for desperate measures. After that, they shifted to purple— the color of methodical investigation based on accumulated knowledge.
Fae dressed for work with practiced efficiency, donning the corporate-approved attire that passed HR's dress code while still expressing her barely contained contempt for HeartStarter's manufactured positivity. Black suit tailored just a fraction too sharp, silver accessories that weren't quite jewellery but definitely not standard office fare, combat boots polished to a mirror shine that reflected multiple timelines if you knew how to look.
She applied her glamour with similar precision, the magic settling over her wings and slightly pointed ears like a filter that pushed her appearance from "obviously non-human" to "probably just alternative." The glamour felt thinner with each iteration, as if her true faerie nature was increasingly resistant to concealment within the recursive envelope. Tiny motes of faerie light now escaped at her periphery no matter how carefully she constructed the illusion, like reality's ink leaking behind her.
The journey to work was the same choreographed dance of public transit and pedestrian crossings that she'd performed fifty-six times before. Fae could have navigated it blindfolded, counting steps and timing traffic lights with military precision. The predictability should have been comforting; instead, it felt like a straitjacket tightening with each iteration.
The tram arrived on schedule, its doors opening with a hydraulic sigh—the universe, tired of repeating itself. Inside, passengers arranged themselves in the configuration she'd memorized—businesswoman with coffee, student with textbook, elderly man with newspaper, young couple holding hands with mathematically identical expressions of infatuation.
Through the window, Brunswick East unfolded with perfect recursion. A dog walker, three corgis, same tangled leash. The bakery owner flipped his sign from CLOSED to OPEN at precisely 7:08 AM.
The postal carrier stumbled on the same uneven paving stone she always did. A cat watched from the same windowsill with the same inscrutable expression— though Fae sometimes wondered if the cat, like her, retained memories across iterations. There was something too knowing in its slit-pupilled stare.
She used the time to mentally review what she'd learned across the loops: HeartStarter had a secret lab on sub- level three, they were developing time-based emotional products, and somehow, in a future that hadn't happened yet, she would create the very formula that trapped her and Morgan in this recursive hell.
Morgan. The stranger who had appeared in that first iteration, known what was happening, and then vanished from subsequent loops as if extracted from the equation. Morgan with the impossible knowledge and the pink vial—a future version of a product that didn't yet exist but somehow anchored this entire temporal nightmare.
As the tram rumbled toward her stop, Fae noticed something unusual—a temporal ripple in the air near the entrance to Pendulum Coffee, a café she'd passed countless times but never entered. For the briefest moment, she saw a figure that looked suspiciously like Morgan sitting at a window table, then the image vanished like water droplets on a hot skillet. Her wings twitched beneath their glamour, responding to the temporal disturbance with faerie instinct older than human civilization.
The anomaly sent a jolt of energy through her system. A deviation. Something different in a pattern that had maintained perfect recursion for fifty-six iterations. She made a mental note to investigate the café in iteration fifty-eight—assuming, of course, that there would be a fifty-eighth iteration. Part of her hoped there wouldn't be; part of her feared there might be hundreds more.
The pink neon sign of HeartStarter Pty Ltd came into view, flickering with manufactured cheerfulness against the morning sky. The color had always struck Fae as obscene—not the warm, organic pink of a rose or the soft hue of a sunset, but a chemical approximation designed by marketing algorithms to trigger trust responses in the human brain. To her faerie perception, it pulsed with artificial emotions, a visual representation of everything wrong with commodifying feelings.
She paused on the corner, calculating. In the first few iterations, she'd followed her original timeline— crushing her cigarette by the service entrance, exchanging corporate pleasantries with Janice, discovering the paradoxical case file, meeting Morgan. But Morgan had stopped appearing around iteration twenty, and by thirty, Fae had begun experimenting with variations, making different choices to see what would change and what remained constant.
Today would be iteration fifty-seven, variation seventeen: bypass the front office entirely and head straight for sub-level three. The most significant deviation she'd attempted yet, and potentially the most dangerous. But fifty-seven loops had worn her patience thin as gossamer wings, and caution seemed pointless in a world where consequences reset at midnight.
She reached into her pocket and touched the pink vial, drawing courage from its impossible existence. The liquid inside responded to her touch, swirling with increased activity as if recognizing its creator. The paradox made her head hurt if she thought about it too directly—she would eventually create this very vial, which would then be brought back to her, creating the circumstances that would lead her to create it. Causal loops within temporal loops, wheels within wheels. "Muca sionnach," she swore softly, combining Gaelic and English in the unique patois she'd developed growing up between worlds. The curse tasted of burnt honey and copper pennies, a flavor that lingered on her tongue as she approached HeartStarter from the east side, avoiding the security cameras she'd mapped in previous loops.
A service door used by the cleaning staff would be propped open for seven minutes while the troll janitor took his smoke break. Fae timed her approach precisely, slipping through the door at 7:17 AM and into the service corridor beyond. The building's magical security system registered her employee badge and allowed her passage, unaware that she wasn't following her usual route.
The security wards tingled against her skin as she passed through them, their magic calibrated to detect unauthorized beings but not unauthorized behavior from authorized beings—a conceptual blindspot typical of corporate thinking. One benefit of HeartStarter's corporate efficiency: the security protocols were as predictable as everything else in this looping Monday. The service corridor led to a utilitarian stairwell. The concrete stairs spiraled downward in a perfect logarithmic curve that made Fae's faerie senses dizzy— there was something unnaturally precise about the mathematical perfection of the architecture, as if the building itself were constructed to accommodate recursive time rather than linear progression.
She descended past the main floor, past basement level one with its employee cafeteria and fitness center, past basement level two with its inventory storage and magical ingredient processing rooms, to the door that shouldn't exist but did—the entrance to sub-level three. This far underground, the air tasted thicker—charged with magical potential and faint metallic undertones that reminded Fae of blood. The temperature dropped with each step downward, until her breath formed tiny crystalline structures that hung momentarily in the air before dissolving back into potential. The walls themselves seemed to absorb sound, creating a pocket of silence that felt more manufactured than natural.
The keypad awaited a code, and this was where the variations became crucial. In previous iterations, she'd tried different combinations based on Morgan's original sequence, documenting which worked and which triggered alarms. Today she entered 7-5-8-9-3, a variation she'd calculated based on the pattern of successful codes across loops.
The numbers glowed faintly as she pressed them, each digit resonating with a specific emotional frequency that her faerie senses interpreted as colors—seven was a deep indigo of contemplation, five a bright yellow of joy, eight the burnt orange of ambition, nine the crimson of passion, three the green of new growth.
Together they created a chromatic harmony that the system recognized as valid authorization.
The keypad beeped affirmatively, the door clicking open to reveal the sterile white corridor humming with contained magical energy. Fae stepped through, her faerie senses immediately overwhelmed by the concentrated emotional residue permeating the air.
Love, desire, obsession—HeartStarter's raw feedstock, pumped and refined like crude.
The sensory assault made her wings vibrate painfully against their glamour. Raw emotions in such density, created a cacophony of feeling that faerie physiology wasn't designed to filter—like walking into a room where a thousand people were all speaking different languages at maximum volume. She gritted her teeth, focusing on the mission rather than the discomfort.
The corridor stretched before her, identical to how Morgan had shown her in that first iteration, with the third door on the right labeled "Temporal Response Testing." The label was printed in standard corporate font, as if experimenting with time itself were just another product development phase requiring appropriate signage and regulatory compliance.
Fae approached the door cautiously, checking her watch. In previous iterations, the lab had been empty at this hour, the scientists not arriving until after the regular morning meeting at 8:30. She pressed her employee badge against the scanner, holding her breath. This was the moment of variation—sometimes her access worked, sometimes it didn't, with no discernible pattern beyond the cruel mathematics of the loop itself. The scanner blinked green, magical wards recognizing her employee identity while remaining ignorant of her intentions. The door slid open with a soft pneumatic hiss that reminded Fae of a satisfied sigh, as if the building itself were pleased by her infiltration.
The laboratory looked different in this iteration. The glass tanks still lined the walls, containing swirling emotional essences in various colors that pulsed with the heartbeats of their unknown donors. But the central workstations had been rearranged into a perfect octagonal pattern that Fae recognized from ancient faerie texts on temporal manipulation. New equipment had appeared—or perhaps it had always been there and she was only now noticing it, another quirk of the recursive envelope that seemed to reveal its secrets gradually across iterations.
Most significantly, the sealed chamber at the far end where she'd first seen the prototype with Morgan was now open, its interior visible. Inside, suspended in a containment field that distorted light around its edges like a heat mirage, floated a mechanism that resembled an antique pocket watch merged with a crystal decanter. The device pulsed with soft pink energy that matched the frequency of the vial in Fae's pocket with such perfect synchronization that she felt the resonance in her bones, a harmonic vibration that made her teeth ache and her wings flutter against their glamour. "Temporal Distillation Prototype," she read from a nearby terminal, accessing the project files with her employee credentials. The screen illuminated her face with cold blue light that contrasted sharply with the warm pink glow of the prototype, creating an unsettling chromatic dissonance. "Current phase: Time-flux emotional separation."
The technical language that followed was dense with magical theory and quantum terminology that scrolled past too quickly for full comprehension. But Fae had spent enough loops studying HeartStarter's product development protocols to grasp the basics through the corporate obfuscation. They were attempting to distill emotional responses across time—to separate and bottle not just the emotion itself, but its temporal components. Past nostalgia, present intensity, future anticipation—all isolated and packaged for maximum commercial impact.
"Bottling time itself," she whispered, her voice creating small ripples in the temporal field. The very concept violated fundamental magical principles that even corporations should respect—time wasn't meant to be contained or commodified. The hubris was breathtaking even by HeartStarter standards.
The terminal revealed more as Fae dug deeper, her fingers dancing across the keyboard with faerie grace that made even typing look like a form of ancient ritual. Project lead: Dr. Marianne Thornfield. Primary application target: Extended emotional satisfaction via temporal dilation. Current obstacle: Containment degradation during temporal separation. Projected market release: March 2026—when Morgan's vial had been manufactured.
The pieces clicked together in her mind, connections forming across iterations and information sources. This prototype was the precursor to the product that would eventually be marketed as "Eternal Moment Advanced"—the formula in the pink vial from the future that Morgan had given her in iteration one. The formula that had somehow triggered or enabled this entire recursive nightmare.
"So you're the grandmother paradox in a bottle," Fae addressed the floating mechanism, her faerie perception allowing her to see the temporal energy flowing through its components like blood through veins. "You eventually become Eternal Moment Advanced, which creates the loop that leads me here to discover you before you're fully developed."
The elegant mathematical symmetry of the situation would have been beautiful if it weren't so terrifying—a perfect causal circle with no beginning or end, just eternal recursion like a snake devouring its own tail.
The prototype seemed to pulse in response to her words, the pink glow momentarily intensifying as if acknowledging its role in the temporal violation.
A notification flashed on the terminal screen: "Automated test sequence initiating in three minutes." The words appeared in HeartStarter's corporate font, rendering the potential destruction of linear time as just another product testing milestone requiring proper documentation and quality assurance protocols.
Fae's fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing the test parameters. Today's experiment would push the temporal dilation further than previous tests, attempting to achieve a 300% extension of perceived emotional duration. The system was drawing power from HeartStarter's main reactor, channeling it through the prototype to create a controlled temporal field around the emotional essence samples.
The glass tanks along the walls began to hum in harmonized anticipation, their contents swirling with increased activity as the system prepared for the test. Each tank contained distilled emotional experiences harvested from unwitting subjects—love, desire, infatuation, adoration—all the commodified feelings that HeartStarter packaged and sold with satisfaction guaranteed.
Fae hesitated, weighing her options. In previous iterations, she'd observed, documented, occasionally sabotaged specific experiments. But she'd never attempted to destroy the prototype entirely—partly out of scientific curiosity, partly from fear of the unknown consequences. Breaking the loop might free her, or it might shatter reality beyond repair. The mathematics of time were unforgiving, and fairies understood better than most that magic followed precise, if obscure, rules. The terminal beeped as the test sequence entered its final countdown. One minute remaining. The sound resonated through the laboratory, bouncing off glass surfaces and returning with subtle distortions, as if time itself were already beginning to warp around the prototype.
Fae made her decision, fingers racing across the keyboard as she modified the test parameters. Instead of a 300% temporal dilation, she entered 3,000%—an order of magnitude beyond the system's safety limitations. The numbers glowed an ominous red as she entered them, the terminal issuing warning messages that she dismissed with administrative overrides stolen from Thornfield's login credentials in iteration thirty- nine.
She initiated the emergency containment protocol, locking down the lab and preventing remote termination of the experiment. The system protested with cascading warning messages, but Fae overrode them with her customer service credentials, which paradoxically had higher emergency priority than research staff access—a quirk of corporate hierarchies that valued customer satisfaction above laboratory safety.
Thirty seconds. Fae backed away from the terminal, moving toward the lab door. Her wings strained painfully against their glamour, faerie instinct urging flight from the imminent temporal violation. The prototype's pulsing had accelerated to match her racing heartbeat, the pink energy growing more intense with each second, casting long shadows that seemed to move independently of their sources, dancing across the laboratory floor like entities with their own consciousness.
The air in the lab felt suddenly thick, as if time had become viscous, resistant to movement. Fae's limbs moved with increasing difficulty, as though she were walking underwater. The sensation reminded her of faerie revels that extended a single night into what felt like years—but this was artificial, manufactured temporal manipulation rather than the natural magic of her people.
Fifteen seconds. Fae reached the door, badge ready to escape. But as she raised it to the scanner, the power fluctuated—lights dimming momentarily before surging bright enough to cast multiple overlapping shadows behind her, each slightly out of phase with the others.
The door's electronic lock engaged its emergency protocols, sealing her inside as red warning lights began to pulse along the ceiling.
The prototype's pulsing had become a steady glow now, the mechanism spinning within its containment field at impossible speeds that left visual echoes hovering in the air. The emotional essences in the surrounding tanks began to resonate in response, their colors shifting through spectrums visible and otherwise, creating an aurora of feeling that bathed the laboratory in chromatic chaos.
Five seconds. Fae backed against the wall, faerie instincts screaming for escape from the imminent temporal violation. Every molecule in her body vibrated with the ancient faerie warning for temporal disturbance—a primal survival response inherited from ancestors who had witnessed time fractures and lived to pass down their genetic memory.
The vial in her pocket had grown hot enough to burn through fabric, forcing her to pull it out. It glowed with the same pink energy as the prototype, creating a visual harmony that suggested they were the same object separated only by time and refinement process. The liquid inside moved with unnatural purpose, forming patterns identical to those within the prototype, confirming what she had already guessed. "Grandmother paradox," Fae corrected herself, faerie dust falling from her lips as she spoke truth to power. "Not grandfather. You're my creation that creates me." The countdown reached zero, and reality fractured.
The prototype shattered its containment field with a sound like glass breaking in reverse—shards flying inward rather than outward, fragments collapsing toward a central point before exploding outward again in defiance of physics. Time spilled across the laboratory—not in the controlled, dilated stream the experiment intended, but in chaotic waves that collapsed and expanded simultaneously.
Fae felt herself stretching across heartbeats, her consciousness smeared across multiple instances of the same second like butter spread too thin across toast. She experienced the same instant from fifty-seven slightly different perspectives, all simultaneously, all equally real. The sensation was beyond disorienting—it was reality-shattering, a perspective no being was meant to experience.
She saw the prototype both intact and destroyed, the laboratory both empty and full of panicked scientists who hadn't arrived yet but were somehow already responding to the disaster. Time particles scattered across the room like confetti, each carrying a fragment of possible reality that glittered briefly before being absorbed into the shredded time-field emanating from the broken prototype.
Most disorienting was seeing herself—dozens of Faes from different iterations of the loop, all briefly overlapping in the same shattered instant. Some wore different clothes, some had fully manifested wings, some looked more desperate or determined than others. She locked eyes with iteration thirty-four Fae, who had chosen to call in sick that day. They shared an instant of perfect understanding before the temporal waves receded, pulling each variant back to their own slice of the loop.
Colors shifted beyond normal perception as time particles scattered light across multiple temporal frequencies. Sounds layered upon themselves, creating impossible harmonies as the same notes played simultaneously from different temporal positions. The very air tasted of broken time—metallic and sharp, with undercurrents of each emotion contained in the surrounding tanks, all experienced simultaneously in a sensory assault that would have driven a human mad.
As quickly as it had fractured, reality snapped back into a singular stream with the elasticity of a rubber band returning to form. The prototype imploded with a soft pop that belied its metaphysical significance, collapsing into a singularity the size of a marble before blinking out of existence like a star being snuffed. Emergency suppression systems activated, spraying the lab with alchemical retardants that neutralized wild magic. The mist carried the scent of thunderstorms and lemons, a bizarre combination engineered to stabilize temporal fluctuations.
Fae stood drenched and shaking, the vial from the future still clutched in her hand—unchanged despite the chaos, a perfect constant in a sea of variables. The impossibility of its continued existence made her question her own, a philosophical vertigo that threatened to overwhelm her already taxed system. Her glamour had failed completely, wings now fully visible and dripping with alchemical retardant that made them glisten like oil on water.
The emergency door release activated as the system detected the threat had passed. Fae stumbled out into the corridor, ears ringing with temporal displacement. Her faerie physiology was already adapting, processing the temporal shock better than a human could, but she still felt nauseated and disoriented. The hallway stretched and compressed as she moved through it, distances becoming subjective rather than absolute as her perception struggled to reconcile with standard reality.
She needed to move quickly—the system would have alerted security, and the scientists would be redirected here immediately. Even in her current state, she could hear the distant alarm bells, feel the vibration of approaching footsteps through the floor, smell the adrenaline and confusion of HeartStarter employees responding to an emergency they didn't understand but knew was significant.
She made her way to the stairwell, ascending with unsteady steps that sometimes landed on stairs that seemed to shift position between footfalls. Her watch had stopped, all hands frozen pointing in different directions—faerie time itself disrupted by what she'd witnessed. Without it, she had no precise way to know where in the loop's timeline she now stood. Had minutes passed? Hours? Was she still in the same iteration or had the prototype's destruction pushed her forward or backward? The only certainty was the subtle weight of the vial in her hand, her talisman of sanity in a world where time had become elastic.
The stairwell walls breathed around her, expanding and contracting with her own respiration as if the building itself had become an extension of her disrupted physiology. Each step left a brief after-image, a visual echo that faded heartbeats after she moved on. The concrete thrummed with contained magical energy seeking release, the entire structure struggling to contain the temporal discharge from the prototype's destruction.
Reaching the main floor, Fae encountered a scene of confusion. Employees stood in clusters, looking bewildered as the building's emergency systems ran diagnostics. Their conversations created a cacophony of overlapping voices, but to Fae's disrupted perception, the words seemed to arrive out of sequence—answers preceding questions, responses to statements not yet made, a verbal Möbius strip of corporate confusion.
The overhead lights flickered in patterns that suggested the primary magical circuits were resetting, binary code translated into illumination that spelled out error messages too quickly for human eyes to interpret. No alarm had sounded—HeartStarter would never risk public awareness of their experimental division's activities—but the internal disruption was obvious to anyone sensitive to magical currents.
"There you are!" Maritha's voice carried across the atrium, the sound waves visibly disturbing the air like ripples in a pond. "Where have you been? Your calendar shows a meeting with a Mx. Morgan that never showed up, and then the power fluctuation happened, and now IT says we've lost all records from before 8:47 this morning. It's like a chunk of time just vanished from the system!"
Maritha's form seemed to flicker as she approached, her outline blurring and resolidifying with each step as if her very existence were uncertain. Her words reached Fae's ears with strange delays and accelerations, temporal hiccups that made conversation nearly impossible to follow.
"What time is it now?" Fae asked, her voice sounding distant to her own ears, echoing slightly as if returning from a journey through a different timeline before reaching Maritha.
"Almost eleven," Maritha replied, looking concerned. Her expression shifted too quickly, emotions overlapping like double-exposed film. "Are you alright? You look like you've seen a ghost. Or created one. Did you try that new coffee machine in the break room? I told facilities it was possessed, but no one ever listens to reception staff."
Eleven o'clock. Fae had lost over three hours in what had felt like minutes. Either the temporal distortion had affected her perception, or—more disturbing—she'd blanked out after the prototype's destruction, operating on autopilot while her consciousness processed the temporal shock. The missing time gaped before her like a wound in reality, a void she had no way to fill.
"I'm fine," Fae lied automatically, the words tasting of ashes and temporal displacement. "Just need some air." Her wings twitched visibly behind her, drawing a startled look from Maritha who clearly hadn't noticed them until this instant. The glamour failure would raise questions later, but right now everyone was too preoccupied with the power fluctuations to focus on one employee's suddenly apparent faerie nature.
She moved toward the main entrance, ignoring Maritha's continued chatter that seemed to stretch and compress like an accordion playing with time signatures rather than musical notes. The lobby floor tiles rippled beneath her feet, solid matter still adjusting to the temporal shock waves emanating from sub-level three. The very fabric of the building had been affected at a fundamental level, architectural reality struggling to maintain coherence after exposure to broken time.
Outside, Brunswick East continued its Monday as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Humans and magical beings alike went about their business, unaware that time itself had briefly shattered beneath their feet. The sunshine carried the same quality it always did at this hour, birds maintained their usual patterns, traffic flowed with mundane predictability.
But to Fae's enhanced perception, subtle wrongness permeated everything. Colors seemed slightly off- register, as if reality were a poorly printed photograph. Sounds reached her ears with tiny delays, creating dissonant echoes that only she could hear. The air itself tasted different—sharper, with metallic undertones that suggested temporal particles still lingered in the atmosphere like pollution.
She found a bench in a small park across from HeartStarter and sat heavily, the wood creaking in protest at the sudden weight. The world tilted briefly around her, then settled back into an almost-normal pose. A businessman walked past, his movements leaving brief streamers of color in her disrupted vision. A child chased a ball that seemed to occupy multiple positions simultaneously. A pixie flower seller arranged her wares in a cart, each blossom containing a perfect universe of potential.
Fae examined the vial from the future, its familiar weight grounding her amid the temporal instability. It s/till glowed faintly pink, but the intensity had dimmed, as if the destruction of the prototype had somehow affected its future manifestation. Most concerning was the label—previously reading "Eternal Moment™ — Advanced Formula" with a manufacture date of August 15, 2026—which had changed to "Temporal Recursion Antidote" with no date at all.
"The timeline's shifting," she whispered, understanding blooming like a poisonous flower. The prototype's destruction had altered something fundamental, creating ripples across the loop. But she was still here, still trapped in Monday. Whatever she'd done hadn't broken the cycle, only changed its parameters.
Her phone buzzed—not with Maritha's usual text about faerie cakes, but with a new message from an unknown number:
Iter 58 starts midnight Meet Pendulum Coffee 6am variance window widening -M
The text glowed with subtle temporal energy, the pixels arranged in patterns that suggested origin from outside the recursive envelope. Fae stared at the message, her heart racing with a mixture of hope and apprehension that sent small sparks cascading from her wingtips.
Morgan was back in the loop, or had never left—just been operating in variations she hadn't encountered before. And now they wanted to meet at a location outside HeartStarter, breaking the pattern they'd established in those first iterations.
The variance window was widening—the mathematical precision of the loop becoming less rigid, creating space for change. Each iteration seemed to allow greater deviation from the original pattern, like a rubber band gradually losing elasticity with repeated stretching. The implications were both frightening and exhilarating. If the envelope continued to degrade, perhaps escape was possible before iteration one hundred.
She pocketed the phone and the vial, a plan forming as she observed Brunswick East through newly calibrated faerie perception. She had hours until midnight, until the day reset into its fifty-eighth iteration. Hours to prepare, to gather what she'd need for this new variation. The prototype was destroyed, but the loop remained. Whatever was trapping them went deeper than a single experiment—it was fundamental to HeartStarter's operations, to the very nature of the emotional manipulation they practiced.
A tram passed, its signature leaving ripples in the fabric of reality that only Fae could see. Passengers gazed out windows with expressions of bored familiarity, unaware that their Monday was a fabrication, a temporal cage built from corporate ambition and magical technology never meant for commercial application.
As Fae stood to leave, a final realization clicked into place with the precision of a lock's tumblers falling into alignment: if the loop reset at midnight, then each iteration wasn't a full 24 hours as she'd assumed. The Monday she kept reliving wasn't a complete day—it was a carefully measured fragment, precisely cut to contain specific events while excluding others. Time wasn't just looping; it was being distilled, refined, and bottled. Just like HeartStarter's products.
She turned back toward the pink neon sign of her employer, seeing it with new understanding that sent a shiver through her wings. The mathematical elegance of their operation went beyond product development or profit margins. They were manipulating the fundamental fabric of reality, commodifying not just emotions but time itself. And somehow, she was both victim and creator of the system that trapped her.
"Time distilled," she murmured, the phrase taking on new meaning. Faerie dust fell from her lips as she spoke, forming fractal patterns on the pavement that mapped the recursive envelope's structure with cold precision. Tomorrow—or rather, in the fifty-eighth iteration of today—she would meet Morgan at Pendulum Coffee and compare notes. Together, perhaps they could widen the variance window enough to shatter the glass ceiling of this recursive hell.
For now, though, she had research to do and preparations to make. Whatever version of Monday awaited her at midnight, Fae intended to face it armed with more than just faerie cynicism and corporate- approved solutions. She set off toward Brunswick East's magical district, where the shops that catered to her kind operated on a different understanding of time altogether—one that might just provide the tools she needed to fight back against a corporation that had bottled eternity and sold it at retail price.