It always felt like something or someone other than the security guards was watching over us at HSMSE. Out of sheer boredom one English Class, I stared up at the aging, purple pipes which layered the ceiling like veins and arteries layered skin. At first, it was just a few seconds, but then it strangely began to feel like minutes, hours even. Just as I felt like I was being dragged in by some invisible force, I felt the faintest tinge of anger and someone staring at me—it was not the English Teacher who had stopped teaching in order to reprimand me. No, it was something else—some other being. I had noticed it now, but it had noticed me first.
That night, I struggled to sleep, thinking about the watcher in the pipes, and how it could be watching over me even then, despite being a borough away from school. After finally managing to fall asleep, it all came to me in a dream—if you could even call it that. Everything that had or would happen within the school grounds etched itself into me. For better or worse, I was chosen. Chosen to be bestowed with the forbidden knowledge. There was a secret society operating beneath us all this time. Like Smith’s invisible hand, they manipulated everything that made this reality our reality. But was it even reality anymore? The phrase “history repeats itself” was never more true than for the events happening now. The Covenant of the Lavender Dragon existed in plain sight, and I now had the privilege of knowing their entire history.
To begin with, let me start by telling you about the pipes and the dragon within them. The dragon is serpentine in nature, stretching within the lengths of the pipes, looping back and forth infinitely, entangled with the pipe. The most shocking part is that it exhibits quantum properties on a macroscopic level, being in multiple states and places at once despite being so unimaginably large. Its scales are lavender in color, and the cultists used to wear a strand of lavender flower to appease the creature. As for the cultists who didn’t, it’s hard to describe what happened to them and even harder to comprehend. It is important to note that the Covenant’s preliminary observations stated that the dragon “smelled good” and looked “like a nice fellow”.
No one really knows the true origins of the dragon—how it really came to be. What came first: the pipes or the dragon? Their early records state that the dragon exists between all three states of time simultaneously, as well as a secret fourth state that no one knows much about. To my dismay, this was the sole detail left out in my dream (perhaps the fourth is the secret to the dragon’s powers—to life itself). They say that the dragon could be a physical culmination of the Theory of Everything, which I cannot confirm nor deny. Is the dragon paradoxically responsible for its own creation? It could be, but how would that make any sort of sense? It is an absurd creation, there is no making sense of it—no real meaning. The society knew this, and yet they still tried to control it. Make order from disorder. Their journey began and ended all on the same day.
It was a cold day. The clouds obscured all that was blue, highlighting the purple of the pipes within Baskerville. They were just 3 men at the time. Three ordinary construction workers. They had just finished the final touches on the piping system within Baskerville. As the lavender scent of the purple pipes emerged from seemingly nowhere, they heard the gentle—then quickly violent—sound of rain starting to fall. As the sky rumbled and the lights went out, all three of them stared wide-eyed at the pipe liquifying before them to reveal the head, whiskers, and wise purple eyes of a dragon. One of the men fell on his back at the sight, but what they didn’t notice is that there were now four of them. Upon noticing the extra construction worker, the dragon disappeared instantly and the liquifying pipe returned to normal, as if it was a simple illusion. “How was this possible?” they thought. The visitor looked just like one of them, except his face remained hidden under a veil. It seemed like fiction, but it was all real, more real than anything they had ever seen. The Watcher. The Lavender Dragon. The name appeared in their brains without ever having thought about it, as if they had known about it from the moment they were born.
Now they had to figure out who the fourth worker was. Where had he come from? Without them seeing, he had come out from the pipe behind them. That man was the youngest of the three men, now older than all three. He had taken the pipes back in time—to where it all began, in an attempt to stop it from happening. It wasn’t possible. They were caught in a loop. The traveler from the future realized this, now remembering seeing himself when he was still young. At that moment, he had thought nothing of the veiled stranger before him, but now, as the veiled stranger himself looking at his younger self, it was all too absurd. Was he destined to repeat the actions of his future self? Did the existence of time travel make his own existence meaningless?
He had traveled to that point to stop the Covenant from ever discovering the localized time fluctuations of the pipes at HSMSE, but he had unknowingly caused them to discover them in the first place. Realizing the futility of his actions and his supposed lack of free will, he left the three original members to themselves, never appearing before them again. Those three would go on to form a secret Covenant in honor of the Lavender Dragon.
They knew how horrific the powers of time travel could be in the wrong hands, and they vowed to only use it for good. They recruited countless physicists and mythologists to decipher the true capabilities and nature of the pipes and the dragon. They desperately wanted to control time. To undo all of their past mistakes. To create a perfect world. But as long as time travel existed, there would be no perfect world. They couldn’t change anything. Everytime they attempted to undo a mistake, they realized it led to another. Everytime they tried to create a perfect world, they realized they were the reason why it was imperfect in the first place. They had already gone through this countless times, doomed to repeat the same sentences over and over again.
Yes—it was painful at times to accept it. At other times it was dreadfully crushing. But so was life. And with this being their new life, they acquired a newfound appreciation for living in it. Even if every single day of their lives had already happened before, they were still living, and that was all that mattered. Although it plagued them to keep time travel a secret, they found a certain bittersweet joy in being able to simply chat with friends and adore the predetermined world around them. Even a loop had purpose after all. For some of us, it might feel like every single day is repeating—that we play no part in our own lives, and that we have no choice. But the truth is that we all have a choice. We have the choice to simply enjoy life for what it is. We have the choice to fully breathe in the lavender scent of the present, without being dragged away by the past and future.