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Time and Space Travel Agency Official Record
Declaration of Guilt, Given under Oath
Before His Honorable Commissioner Reese
TSTA HEADQUARTERS, Everywhen
I grew up in a world of my parents’ making. My mother and father, Sable and James Hall, both had incredible travel talents. Both were World Builders. Most would consider mine a fortunate parentage. Sometimes I did as well.
The world of my birthplace was known as the White Tower. Despite my parents’ talent for design, they lacked ingenuity for assigning their creations interesting names. Their world lay trapped in a single building. A white tower stretched toward a sky as black as the darkest space in the worlds. The exterior of the tower expanded, forming a sheet which grew longer as necessary to accommodate the tower’s interior hallway. The hallway, the Grand Entrance, was filled with doors leading to places of potentially no limit. Some of the doors led inside the main house, to rooms that I explored as a child, rooms filled with seasons and temperatures that I never found outside the tower.
The tower’s exterior reflected two seasons: warm and cold. Four moons separated day from night. After I left the White Tower, I learned that other worlds had suns, stars that were golden and warm. And full of light. The galaxy I visited most often contained a small planet or world called Earth. My affinity for Earth likely stemmed from the fact that my father had been born and lived most of his life as an Earthling and citizen of Folkestone, England. He’d abandoned his world to marry my mother. She was a being of Aboreal, a world without surnames, plans or deadlines. What Aboreal lacked in planning, it made up for with an abundance of violence and rules, used by its leaders as a means to control its citizens. My mother was happy to leave her life in Aboreal and to start a new life with my father. Together, they created the White Tower. I was born in that world shortly thereafter—a world intended to be their escape.
My parents got along well and lived happily enough, but their positions in other societies called them away from their escape, leaving me at the White Tower, well fed and well cared for, but alone. I was glad that my parents spent most of their time together. But that time was short-lived, for my father’s life expectancy was governed by the timeline of his birth-world, whereas mine and that of my mother were not. His life ended thousands of years earlier, from my perspective, which meant he aged rapidly. He died before I could say good-bye. If I hadn’t accelerated the process, if I hadn’t interfered with time, he may have lived longer.
I hereby admit fault.
I’ve stated the above freely and honestly, pursuant to the rules of the above-named agency.
Signed Valcas Hall .
Valcas Hall
Recorded /s/ .
Hon. Comm. Reese, TSTA
[This copy shall be retained by the convicted.]
I flipped the document over to add a handwritten update. A second admission of guilt, for my records only.
During my father’s lifetime, I made several pilgrimages to Earth, but only once to visit my Uncle Edgar’s estate in Folkestone. I remember sitting by the harbor in one of my uncle’s vessels, watching as the sun slowly danced toward the sea. The glow of the sun faded, spreading the last bits of light across the water.
I’d never seen anything more beautiful. Until a later trip to Earth when I met a baby girl, the daughter of my friend, healer and mentor, Basileios Plaka. In a blink of time, she’d grown into an intelligent and insufferably stubborn young woman.
Calla glowed more brightly than all the worlds’ golden suns combined. She was a universe of stars that could never be mine.
All because of me.