1. Battle for Baroke

A rhino and an elephant charged at each other. And no, this was not the start of a bad joke.

Thousands of arrows filled the sky, obscuring the sun. Their speed made them appear as beasts with ten heads. The elephant and rhino stormed on, but dozens of foxes turned and fled towards the bushes.

An enormous ape hung from a tree, shouting commands.

“Shields up!”

Hundreds of wolves stood in a row, right in front of the bushes. They lifted their shields and allowed the foxes to take cover. Between the wolves raced lions, tigers, deer with frightening antlers, and even a jackal.

The arrows clattered on the shields, like hail in a thunderstorm. They hammered and thunked against the wood, but thankfully couldn’t break through. Wolves sank to their knees from the impact.

The heath stretched for kilometers in front of them. Nothing grew but trampled weeds, flattened by rhino feet. Black specks made a skyline—their opponents. They’d been standing there for hours, never moving closer.

The rhino and elephant had almost reached each other. The rhino lowered his head, pointing his horn forward. The elephant did the same, baring his tusks.

The ape general swung to the foremost tree for a better view. A deer slipped between the tree trunks and stopped next to him. “At least a hundred archers. The rhino is a distraction, I can feel it. They must have more ground troops.”

“Then where are they? We’ve searched this whole area—there’s no one.”

The rhino crashed into the elephant with a bellow. The gray beast fell backwards but twisted his tusks like pincers, catching the rhino. They tumbled to the weeds together.

The lions wanted to rush over, but the ape held them back. A horn jabbed at the elephant again. His grip on the rhino, however, was firm now, so he threw his attacker many paces away.

The rhino lay motionless, a fatal wound in his side.

The line of wolves breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the arrows from their shields. The foxes ran across the heath—until something stopped them.

A red light blinded and froze everyone, as if the world was on pause. Amidst the red glow, a small object materialized, quickly growing into a large wooden circle. With sounds like a planks breaking and twigs snapping, over and over, the circle thickened.

The object spun around. The red light slowly faded until it was completely gone. Two hands sprouted from the middle, like blades of grass from the soil.

An enormous wooden clock crashed down in the middle of the heath. The time it showed made no sense at all. The pause was over and foxes ran across the object as if it had always been there.

The front flipped open. On the inside was a handle, held by a black paw. A few seconds later, a panda poked her head out.

She was completely black, except for shining white eyes with red pupils. She was small, no bigger than a baby, though her soft ears were nearly as large as her head.

A little bird whizzed past her out of the clock. She startled badly, tumbling out and onto the ground.

“Cuckoo!” the wooden bird yelped.

“How many times do I have to tell you, sister?” the panda said. “A cuckoo clock is a terrible idea! No one finds it helpful to get frightened out of their wits every hour on the—”

A large lion’s paw pushed her aside, back into the clock. She bumped into her fellow traveler—an all white panda, except for glistening black eyes.

They both poked their heads back out, but the procession of lions and wolves had already thundered past. All they saw was churned up mud and uprooted ferns.

“Sister dear, are you certain we’ve arrived in the right time? Wait, I’ll check for myself.” The white panda ducked back into their clock to look at the date.

“Yes, I’m certain. Are you certain we’re in the right place?” Arrows flew over the black panda’s head. She quickly shut the door.

They lay on a soft bench—the clock’s only seating—and studied the large collection of clocks covering the entire wall. The white panda put her fluffy paw on a specific one, a turqouise clock with three hands.

“Oh, whoops, just kidding. We’re in Baroke, near the Apire. That’s not right. We need to get to Floria!”

“Hurry then. I think we’ve landed right in the middle of a battle.”

“Shouldn’t we help them first?”

“Our clock taking us to the wrong places is trouble enough. We are NOT joining the fight too—”

“Fight? No way. We’ll go back in time and prevent the war from starting at all.”

“No. It’s a fixed point. Whatever we do, this war will happen, we only change how it happens. You …”

The black panda hesitated. “You don’t understand that, sister, because you aren’t the Goddess of Time. That’s okay, you’re nice, you have good qualities too, but trust me—”

Someone knocked on the clock. The white panda immediately opened it and found herself staring into the eyes of an orange deer.

“It’s dangerous here. We’re losing. Either you leave, or you help us.”

A large stone ball flew through the air, whisking past his ears.

“See! We have to help!” The white panda grabbed the deer’s leg and let herself be pulled from the clock.

An explosion sounded. The bushes behind the deer caught fire and dozens of bullets whizzed through the air.

The black panda leapt from the bench. “Explosions? No, no, I don’t want them to have gunpowder yet! I’ll be right back.”

Before the white panda even made it onto the deer’s back, the clock shut itself and disappeared in the same red glow.

“Hey! Ismaraldah! Come back!”

She didn’t hear it anymore—she was already in another time.