The Blue Fairy Dust Saga
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
Not Enough Time The Ticking Lab Five Days Later Time To Try Again The Longest Night
The Ticking Lab
Workshop Annex - March 1824
At least, that’s how it felt to Chris Kringle.
He stood alone in the quiet heart of the Workshop Annex, a special wing of the Toyworks that had been converted—at his insistence—into a place for “impossible thinking.” The walls were cluttered with clocks of every sort: wall clocks with painted sleigh scenes, gilded cuckoos that chirped on the hour, sundials mounted under lanterns, hourglasses full of dyed sugar, and a spiraling pendulum that ran on rootbeer vapor. Most had been donated by elves over the years; some were experiments in their own right. All were ticking—or tocking, or chiming—in chaotic disharmony.
Chris folded his arms and slowly turned in place, frowning. “One night,” he muttered. “Just one night isn’t enough.”
The memory was still fresh. On Christmas Eve just three months earlier, he had made his first full attempt to deliver gifts across Earth. It had been glorious, breathtaking… and utterly frustrating. Despite all the Portal Sacks and teleportation jumps, the careful sleigh calibrations, and dozens of helpers on standby in Europe, it hadn’t been enough. The world was simply too vast. The night, too short.
Now, something had to change.
At a long table near the center of the lab sat Bernard, spectacles perched on the end of his nose, leafing through a thick volume labeled Chronotemporal Dissonance: Theory and Fudge Recipes. Parchment maps, dust samples, and half-eaten licorice sticks littered the surface. “You’re muttering again,” Bernard said, not glancing up.
“Muttering is thinking with sound,” Chris replied. “And I’m thinking very hard.”
He reached for a jar set apart from the rest. It was squat, silver-lidded, and faintly luminescent. Inside swirled a fine, pale-blue substance: Blue Fairy Dust—newly isolated from fairy migration trails only weeks earlier. Unlike Red or Yellow Dust, which sparkled or buzzed, Blue Dust moved with slow grace, like fog over still water. It didn’t glow—it shimmered, subtly, like time remembering itself.
Bernard finally looked up. “We’ve only ever recorded Blue Dust during deep-sleep fairy transits,” he warned. “Usually when they’re mid-dream and half-phased out of Dondavar entirely.”
Chris nodded. “That’s why it’s perfect.”
He removed the lid with care. A soft pulse rippled outward from the jar, and with it, the air itself seemed to pause. Sound dropped away. Pendulums froze mid-arc. Hourglasses halted mid-drip. Even the steam from Bernard’s tea stood still in the air.
Chris blinked. “Well,” he said quietly, “that’s new.”
Bernard whispered, “That’s not new. That’s ominous.”
Chris dipped the tip of a silver sleigh-bell into the jar. A faint glow enveloped the bell, and then—tick!—every timepiece in the lab jumped forward exactly one second, in perfect unison. Then… silence again.
“I think we’ve found the right path,” Chris said slowly. “But it’s going to be delicate.”
Over the next three days, Chris and Bernard ran controlled tests. They tried adding a pinch of Yellow Dust: it caused time to flicker erratically, like a blinking lantern. A dash of Red sped things up wildly—so wildly that one of the clocks completed an hour’s worth of ticks in twelve seconds, exploded, and shot its minute hand into the rafters.
To maintain consistency, they brought in Merrit Cobbleknock, the nimble-fingered elf from Christmas Eve, to record each trial. Merrit arrived with an armful of enchanted clipboards, a pencil tucked behind each ear, and a sugar bun stuffed in his vest pocket. “I am ready,” he declared, “to observe either genius or disaster.”
They experimented with anchors—physical objects that could stabilize time magic. Sleigh bells worked well. So did stopwatches, brass pendants, and even a peppermint stick (though Merrit ate half of it before the end of the trial, skewing the results).
“What matters,” Bernard concluded, “is that Blue Dust responds to intent. It won’t just stretch time because we want it to—it stretches when we mean it to, when it matters.”
On the fourth day, they tested the sleigh.
It had been pulled into the Annex and placed on wooden blocks, the reindeer unharnessed. Chris installed a small, time-bound anchor beneath the seat: a bell coated with a thin film of Blue Dust and wrapped in copper wire. He climbed into the sleigh, gloves gripping the sides.
Bernard stood just outside the open bay door with a stopwatch. “On your mark…”
Chris took a breath and whispered to the dust, not a word of command, but a thought: Let me stretch the moment. Let me find the minutes that slip between the seconds.
The air around the sleigh shimmered. The interior blurred at the edges. Chris felt weightless—not floating, but suspended in syrup. He moved his hand in slow motion, then poured himself a cup of cocoa. The steam curled upward in a lazy spiral. He jotted notes. Adjusted the buckle on his boot. Tapped the bell.
Inside the sleigh, five minutes passed.
Outside, Bernard’s stopwatch ticked twice.
“Success!” Bernard shouted.
Chris grinned—until the clocks started ringing.
First the grandfather clock in the corner. Then the twin tower gongs. Then all of them. The room erupted in a symphony of off-beat, overlapping chimes. Clock faces spun wildly. Hourglasses shook and burst, sending puffs of powdered candy-glass into the air. The peppermint stick exploded in Merrit’s pocket, coating him in sugar shards.
Chris leapt from the sleigh just as the time anchor cracked in half with a metallic ping! The shimmer collapsed, and the lab fell back into normal time.
Everyone froze.
Merrit brushed glittering dust from his shoulders. “Well,” he said. “That was… spirited.”
“Next time,” Bernard muttered, “let’s not set off the entire timeline in one room.”
Chris looked around at the chaos. Frosted windows rattled gently. The minute hand dislodged days ago by the Red Dust trial finally fell from the rafters and landed with a soft tink beside his boot.
He picked it up, then set the cracked jar of Blue Dust gently on the table.
“No,” he said, smiling slowly. “Next time… more control.”
Bernard raised an eyebrow. “You really think this is the answer?”
Chris nodded. “We don’t need more hours. We need to fold the ones we have—make each one bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.”
“The sleigh… as a time vessel?” Merrit whispered.
Chris’s grin widened. “We steer it through air. Now we’ll learn to steer it through time.”
He turned back to the table and began to draw in his notebook—spirals and sleigh runners, bell mounts and anchor points. The notes of a new experiment, and the heartbeat of an idea that could make the night last forever.