Time's Army
an excerpt

Makis was beginning to run out of ideas. He was actually rather pleased at this, since he always enjoying new experiences and doing things that he had never done before. Indeed, things that he had previously thought impossible were even more enjoyable.
Maybe it was even a good sign. Once you started achieving the impossible, there is generally little reason to stop. Many people get to a stage in their lives when the possible seems not quite as fulfilling as it had once been, and so they move on to try something impossible.
Philosophers have often argued that growing tired of the possible is itself an impossibility, and so since it could never happen, the impossible could never start to happen by this method, and thus the impossible remained the exclusive domain of fiction writers, who were becoming increasingly annoyed, as people who could just go out and live fantastic lives had no real desire to sit down and read about them.
Fortunately, Makis was neither a philosopher, nor a fiction writer, so neither of these things bothered him.
Using a physical barrier was not the solution. Neither was invisibility. Out of desparation, he had thought about possibly giving the Balfins a potion that would allow them to become invincible and eternal, meaning that their enemies could neither kill them nor outlive them, but he had decided that they would become too annoying when he was left in a world mostly populated by the one people group he had mistakenly given immortality a while ago. Some might have thought this unkind, to withhold such a gift. It wasn’t that Makis was evil, uncaring or even selfish. It was mostly just that with great power came great responsibility.
One of those responsibilities, Makis felt, was to ensure that the world was not overly cluttered with annoying people.
The next idea that he had thought of for how best to ensure their survival, was to create a disease that almost instantly killed anyone who came too close to the host. Once all the Balfins were given the disease, to which the Balfins were obviously immune, any attacking army would be forced to retreat once they realised what was going on.
He had then pondered what would happen if a young Balfin man fell in love with a young Jedurah girl, and then the Balfin man worked up his courage one day to approach her, only to find that she promptly collapsed upon his arrival.
Unrequited love, the fiction writers would have agreed, was best kept out of reality.
Plus, there was the possibility that the inability to marry outside of their own people might cause their population to dwindle to the point where they could die out altogether. Makis had wondered if Ralnon would be willing to pass that off as an unfortunate side-effect.
The possibilities he had covered were of the approaching army not reaching the Balfins, not seeing them and not being able to go near them. A spell convincing the world that the Balfins no longer existed would be too complicated, and probably require checking over the years to make sure that no one had become immune to it.
If then, people could go near enough to kill them, and he was unwilling to stop them from being able to die altogether, what was left?
Then, the idea had come to him.
All that was left was for them to know the way that they would be attacked.
Yes! Makis stood up from his chair, and moved about the room. The king had said that it must be as if they knew of their enemy’s plan before it happened. That was the key, and it was a wonder that Makis hadn’t realised it before. Then again, it was just an ordinary human who had given him the clue, so maybe it was understandable.
Time. The solution lay with time.
Now, where was it that he kept the...Makis wandered over to the shelf, and pulled a book down. Flicking through it, he came across the spell that he wanted. A few modifications, and it would give him a good start.
Speaking aloud the incantation, he began to experiment.