Elias Turner sat in the dim hum of the Timekeeper Unit Control Room, staring at the flickering screen before him. The digital glow illuminated his tired eyes as he scrolled through the latest anomaly reports. 

The Timekeepers, a covert branch of the Temporal Defense Agency, were charged with one mission: to keep time clean. 

While revolutionary, time travel had a dark side that most people would never understand. When breaches occurred—when an action in the present disrupted something from the past—ripples spread, bending reality in impossible, terrifying ways. The Timekeepers were supposed to prevent this, but recently, Elias and his team had begun seeing something new, something darker.

The dead were returning.

It had started small. A young woman in 1930s Berlin had reportedly screamed at her reflection in a café window before collapsing in fear, claiming she’d seen her husband, who’d died in a war a decade earlier, waiting across the street. 

Similar incidents cropped up all over the world across different eras. 

From the medieval to the near future, witnesses reported seeing people long buried—people who seemed alive at first glance, only to fade or disappear altogether.

At first, the reports were dismissed as glitches or misunderstandings. The Timekeepers had previously dealt with “ghost anomalies”—momentary apparitions that popped up due to temporal fluxes. 

But these were different. These revenants, as the team had come to call them, weren’t ghosts. They lingered, and their behavior grew more erratic with each new appearance. Angry. Violent.

The data before Elias blipped and alerted him to another breach. He stared at the screen, his stomach tightening as the alert’s location populated: London, 1864.  

Elias clicked the link, and a holographic image of a man filled the screen. His clothes were threadbare, his eyes hollow, his cheeks sunken, and his skin stretched tightly over his bones. His file read Benjamin Ashford, deceased: May 2, 1859. 

Ashford had been a notorious murderer, executed in a public square and buried in an unmarked grave. His file listed him as a low risk for temporal disruption. Yet, here he was, reported nearly five years after his death.

Elias summoned his partner, Mara, a seasoned Timekeeper with a sharp instinct for breaches. She glanced over the file, her face paling as she reached the incident details. 

“Five years dead,” she whispered. “And it says here he attacked a guard. An unprovoked attack—he wasn’t supposed to exist at all, and here he is, behaving like he never left.”

Elias nodded. “Not just here, Mara. Everywhere. The anomalies are spreading faster than we can handle. And it’s not just harmless appearances—they’re starting to interact. To act on their own. ”

Mara’s gaze darkened. “We need to pull Ashford back and contain the breach.”

They suited up, outfitted in temporal stabilizers and pulse injectors, their only defense against the distortions. Then, with the flick of a switch, they stepped through the temporal door, slipping back to London in 1864.

The damp, foggy streets lay silent as they emerged, their devices flickering in the mist. The coordinates took them to a narrow alleyway. 

The man from the file was hunched in a shadowed corner.

“Benjamin Ashford,” Mara called, her voice steady as she stepped forward, injector ready. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s time to go back.”

Ashford’s head lifted, his eyes hollow but alive with something far darker than life. His lips twisted into a smirk that sent chills through both Timekeepers. 

“Go back? There is no ‘back’ for me,” he spat, his voice jagged, as though from a throat long closed.

Mara raised her injector, but Ashford moved impossibly fast, lunging toward her with unnatural speed, his fingers claw-like as they grasped her arm. Elias fired his stabilizer, the pulse hitting Ashford square in the chest. Ashford staggered, but he seemed to strengthen instead of dissolving, his flesh swelling with each breath.

“You don’t understand, do you?” Ashford hissed. “We’re trapped—caught in the web of your time games. We’re no longer dead, but neither are we alive.”

The air around him shimmered, warping, as the alleyway walls flickered between past and present, reality bending in strange, terrifying contortions.

“What… what is happening?” Mara choked out, struggling to breathe under Ashford’s grip.

Elias fired again, with more power this time, and Ashford stumbled back, releasing Mara. “He’s feeding off the breach!” Elias realized, horrified. “Every moment he’s here, he grows stronger.”

The ground around them buckled as more figures emerged from the mist. Pale, ghostly faces flickered in the darkness, some skeletal, others bearing expressions of torment. 

Each was a life cut short by unnatural means: victims of war, plague, execution—all revenants trapped in time, their bodies bound to moments they could never escape.

Ashford laughed, a guttural, painful sound. “You think you’re masters of time, but you’ve only managed to tear open reality itself. Now we are all unmade, caught between worlds. You sent us here, and now, we want justice.”

As the revenants closed in, Mara and Elias activated their emergency exit devices, desperate to return to the present. But the devices faltered, the temporal energy sucked dry by the ravenous presence of the dead.

The revenants whispered, voices melding into a low, mournful wail that rose and fell, punctuated by broken sobs. 

Elias could feel the weight of their grief, their fury pressing in on him. It was more than vengeance. It was agony—the pain of lives forcibly severed, stretched across eternity.

“You could release us,” Ashford said, his tone softening to a sickening plea. “But if you won’t… then we’ll drag you into the endless night.”

With a final surge, Elias forced his device to emit one last stabilizing pulse. The shockwave ripped through the revenants, scattering them back into fractured moments. Elias and Mara fell backward, grasping each other’s hands as they tumbled through a collapsing breach, barely escaping.

They landed back in the control room, breathless and trembling. Around them, screens flashed, data points flaring red as more anomalies populated. Mara looked at Elias, her face ashen.

“We’re not saving time, Elias. We’re tearing it apart. Every time we erase, we create something worse.”

He nodded, the implications of their work dawning on him like a shadow that would never leave. The revenants weren’t just mistakes—they were fragments of people, stitched together, their fury growing with every intervention. 

And the breaches wouldn’t stop. The dead, once forgotten, were rising, pulled by their desire for the only justice they could grasp.

As the screens blinked with new alerts, Elias knew they’d soon return. The dead were coming back, angrier and stronger with each breach, reminding them that even time had its limits.

The Timekeepers could silence them for a while, but soon, the cries of the unmade would demand an answer.

The End