1/1/2022

Inside a small studio in New Orleans, Louisiana.

A young man laid down on a bed.

Elijah White was a 21 years old Caucasian man. Standing at 1.7m and weighed 185 lb. One look and you could tell that he was borderline obese. 

He has past signs of acne growing on his otherwise slightly oily face. A straight and pointy nose full of blackheads, normal round ears, and slightly sunken brown eyes with black sacks underneath, marking his tiredness.

He had unkempt, longish raven-black hair and a beard growing around his face and neck, unshaven for a year.

A year ago, he was a fisherman and deckhand who worked on a family crab-fishing trawler. His father and grandfather were fishermen. That was in the past, however. 

Currently, he didn't have a family nor a girlfriend. Heck, he didn't have friends either, as he distanced himself from them after that incident happened...

A year back, Eli was just a normal high-school graduate who joined the family business. It was crab fishing. He was fit and healthy then and only weighed 140lb. He had no acne or blackheads, no long hair, no beard. He looked a bit charming even. He even managed to reach base one with a girl.

However, one fateful day after returning from a voyage a year ago, his mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Saving her was futile. He and his father could only watch in anguish as her life withered away for six months.

In that period, Eli began overeating. He knew it was unhealthy, but still, he couldn't stop. Eli gained forty-five pounds and developed acne in no time. He began distancing himself from his friends, cutting contact with them. His girlfriend, Trinity, unable to watch his self-destruction anymore, rightfully decided to dump him after three months.

As for his father? He smoked and drank. Began gambling. Soon he lost his family trawler, his car, his house—everything. In the end, he shot himself with his hunting rifle. Eli was unfortunate enough to witness the aftermath after he heard the bang.

Traumatized, and with nothing but ten thousand dollars worth of savings in his dwindling bank account, a suitcase filled with clothes, a water-resistant pistol and smartphone, and a small trinket he found at sea last year, the now 21-old Eli knew he had to get a job, or he'd die on the streets.

He tried returning to crabbing, but they didn't accept him anymore since he got too fat. He lost his strength, even though he had the experience. So he had to look for another job.

A week ago, he somehow managed to score a job at a crab-processing factory: to man the boilers, boiling live blue crabs for further processing. Ten dollars an hour, he worked there for ten hours a day, six days a week. Including his overtime pay, he averaged about $2,640 a month. Not bad for a 21-old without education, although incomparable to his crabber salary.

He stared at the small trinket he found at sea last year, an eerie hourglass filled with crimson liquid.

Eli still vividly remembered that day where he'd found it...

 

 

One year ago, on his family trawler, on a mid-September stormy night, he and his crew reeled in a haul of Dungeness crabs. If that was all, it was normal. 

However, something strange happened that night.

One of the crabs dropped from the net held an eerie hourglass with its pincers...that wasn't all. 

That crab even approached Eli and dropped the hourglass right next to him.

Curious, Eli picked it up.

The hourglass had the size of a quarter of a palm, its frame wooden black, ominous-looking with Root-like endings, extending from the columns holding it, with a small bail on top. It had two clear glass bulbs, linked in a thin neck in the middle, holding nothing but air.

Is this a treasure from some shipwreck? He looked sideward at Gregor. Hmm... maybe old Gregor would know. He knows about antiques.

He approached one of the old deckhands, a 50-year-old hardened sailor. "Old-man Gregor, look what I've found!" He raised it.

Gregor looked at his hand for a moment before he laughed.

"Eli, are you pulling my leg now? You're holding nothing!"

Stunned, Eli looked at the hourglass. "What? You sure?” He fiddled with it, examined it closely.

Gregor flattened his lips. "Eli, I think you should go have some good rest after we finish hauling this load. I'll speak with your father."

Eli stared at him and then back at the hourglass. Gregor couldn't see the hourglass in his hand…

He decided to put the hourglass in his pocket and continued working.

A few days flew by. Eli, still puzzled, couldn't figure out what the heck was this hourglass. Nobody else could see it but him.

Figuring that it was probably special, he strung a string through the bail, creating a makeshift necklace. He wore it with him everywhere, even when he worked or slept. No changes happened for two days until the day where it was his turn to cook.

The sailors ate canned food, also some of the crabs they caught. Eli cooked live crabs that night when he noticed a change in the hourglass. 

A small drop of crimson liquid reminiscent of blood.

Creeped out, he took it off his neck and placed it in his drawer. The next day, it somehow ended up back on his neck.

Mouth twitching, he asked himself, "Am I going crazy? Or is this thing haunted?" He stared at it for a moment. He sighed. "Screw it. It didn't do any harm until now, so maybe if I ignore it, everything would be alright."

Two weeks passed by, there were no changes. But each time Eli cooked crabs, a drop of blood trickled in his hourglass.

After returning from the fishing trip, inside the ship's saloon, Eli stared at it. There were six drops of blood now inside it.

"Just what the fuck are you?"

Just then, his door opened, and a man barged inside without knocking. The man was a 40-years-old, 1.8m tall, wide-shouldered, muscular, and tanned. He resembled Eli, especially his face. He was Nathan White, Eli's father.

Nathan stared at his son, pain in his eyes, and he said the words that marked the beginning of Eli's nightmare.

"Eli...your mother...she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer last week when we were still at sea. She has only six months to live."

 

 

One year and three months had passed, right before Eli joined the factory, the hourglass held a few dozen drops in it. However, after working at the boilers, the volume spiked, filling up almost half of the hourglass with red viscous liquid.

Now he understood it.

Whenever he cooked a live crab, the hourglass got filled. Since he boiled over ten thousand crabs on that day, the hourglass got almost half filled up.

Two more workdays, including his day off, he reached this point. The hourglass was now full of crimson liquid, not even an air bubble within.

He sighed and muttered, "Screw it, I should probably get some sleep. I lost sleeping hours because of this thing already." Tossing the hourglass onto the table, he snuggled in his blanket and slept.

Unbeknownst to him, sleeping for a few minutes, the hourglass shone, floated, shot to Eli's chest, absorbed.

 

Eli, who had a dreamless sleep, as usual, found himself on a red plane. Skies colored crimson, soil so red as if it soaked in the fresh blood of millions, air smelling metallic and sweet like blood. In front of him stood a majestic, hill-sized version of the hourglass, empty.

No wind. No warmth or cold. Nothing else could be spotted for miles and miles away.

"Hey! Is anybody here?! Hello?! HEEEEYYYY!"

Nothing happened. 

Just as he was worrying, the hourglass seemed to glow and talked in a deep, ear-grating, mechanical voice, in an alien language. For some reason, he could understand it.

[GREETINGS, HOST. I HAVE WAITED FOR A VERY LONG TIME TO MEET YOU AT LAST.]

Startled, he looked around. "Wh-who are you? Where are you?"

[I AM SATURN, THE HOURGLASS BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES.]

Eli looked at the glowing, giant hourglass, then calmed down. "What are you, and how can I understand what you're saying? And how can I even hear you? You're an hourglass!"

[I AM YOUR BOUND ITEM. I HAVE CHOSEN YOU FOR SOME SPECIAL QUALITIES IN YOU, THAT NO OTHER POSSESSES. YOU ARE NOT HEARING ME THROUGH YOUR EARS BUT THROUGH YOUR MIND, FOR WE SHARE A TELEPATHIC LINK.]

Eli flinched. "Mr. Saturn, can't you speak a little more gently? My head is about to explode!"

Saturn remained quiet for a moment.

"Is this better, host?"

A gentlemanly voice rich in baritone sounded in his head. It was even in English now.

Eli sighed. "Much better, Mr. Saturn. And please call me Eli."

"Alright, Eli. Just calling me Saturn is fine. Thanks to you killing all those crabs, I have managed to gather enough energy to awake and bind myself to you. However, we do not have much time until I fall asleep again, I am afraid, and we have much to do and discuss. I shall now install something called the system into you. You will not feel a thing, I promise."

A speck of light shot from the hourglass and into Eli's head. He then saw through his eyes—no, through his mind, lines that looked something out of a Bios screen of a computer.