“A beaver dam!” Myra squealed in delight.
Shera looked at her oddly. “Y-you okay?”
“Sorry. I just like beavers.”
“Really? I would have put you down as an antelope person.”
“Huh? Why antelopes?”
“O-oh. It was just a joke.” She looked embarrassed that it hadn’t landed. “Why beavers, though?”
“I mean look at them!” She flipped back to the cover so she could point to its atrocious beaver sketch. “They’re cute! And they’re basically nature’s runecrafters! You know, it’s believed the earliest runecrafters learned how to build an alphabet by observing the way a beaver’s dams could manipulate aura flow. The earliest known runic alphabet is from around three millennia ago, and it only had, like, four symbols, and they were huge. ‘Cause they didn’t have all that precision tooling at the time, so they were shaped out of logs, and a diagram would extend for hundreds of meters. Anyway, lots of evidence suggests these runes were modeled off of nearby beaver dam structures.”
“Oo-okay.”
Myra flipped back so they could keep reading.
----------------------------------------
April 12
Dear Research Journal:
Today for the first time, I met the rest of our crew. In addition to the professor, there are his 3 apprentices: Marcus Bora, Linda Zeawak, Jen Rebanko, and one other outsider besides me: Theodore Kettle, an architect who works with waterwheels and other forms of hydropower.
In our first meeting, Professor Kurtwell spared no effort in impressing upon us the danger of our mission. He lectured the group for over an hour on safety precautions, reminding us that any natural phenomenon on the scale of the sort we’re going to see is always accompanied by some anomalous effect. It seems he already trusts his own group well enough, as most of the lecture seemed pointed towards myself and Theodore.
While I was always prepared for a taxing and possibly perilous journey, what I had failed to realize was that beavers in particular are believed to be directly responsible for roughly 30% of all Spontaneous Irregular Phenomena. It makes some sense, in hindsight. Beavers shape their ecosystem unlike any other non-sapient animal, but because they are non-sapient, they are also highly susceptible to irregularity. Furthermore, it is well-documented that beaver dams dramatically shift and consolidate aura both in the water and in the atmosphere. I simply didn’t realize the percentage would be so high.
Fortunately, none of the reports by the natives indicate anything we should be particularly concerned about. We’ll be deep in the untamed wilderness, of course, but all our reports indicate that the biggest risk near the dam will be “getting lost.”
----------------------------------------
April 14
Dear Research Journal:
Today, we set off. We anticipate four weeks of hiking to reach our destination. I am getting along with the other members. I find Theodore to be a little standoffish. Linda, Jen, and Marcus are a delight. They seemed to have developed quite a rapport with each other, united, perhaps, by the pressures of being an apprentice to the most demanding, renowned explorer in the world. Jen in particular is a bit of a flirt. I imagine I will quite like having her around for the trip.
----------------------------------------
April 17
Dear Research Journal:
Despite the uneventful journey, there has been no dearth of conversation.
The professor has a lot of stances, and he doesn’t hesitate to make them known. He has a lot of opinions on recent educational trends. He believes there is too much focus on narrowly applicable skill sets, and that as a result, too few students are capable of innovating. He worries Halnya will lose its edge in magecraft if the trend continues.
A hot topic of discussion each evening is the collaborative abstraction project. Interconnected abstract objects with a common logical basis, accessible around the world, seem to be a boon for knowledge-sharing and it is accelerating magical innovation. It is accessible even all the way out here! It is truly something.
The professor believes it’s the future of magical infrastructure, but he seems worried about “low standards.” He repeatedly brings up an incident about six months ago, where a building collapsed because its architect relied on support magic based on “shoddy” abstract objects from the shared endeavor. He also complained at length about various experiments in his laboratory that had gone wrong because various abstract objects didn’t do what he expected.
Jen pointed out that since abstract objects are mathematical in nature, their physical and psychic interactions can be proved through airtight logic, and those proofs themselves can be made into abstract objects that can be shared. She thinks this is the best way to achieve reliability. Anything safety critical should rely on unforgeable proofs of functional fitness.
The professor disagreed on the practicality of Jen’s proposal. He said it was “elegant and high-minded, but too idealistic” (or something like that). He seemed to think the problem was more about access and qualifications. Unqualified or antagonistic mages shouldn’t be able to manipulate the shared abstract objects. He seemed intrigued by the idea of linking the abstract objects to a physical anchor that could be used to create obstacles in the link between Physical Space and Abstract Space.
----------------------------------------
April 22
Dear Research Journal:
Today, we passed a beaver dam. It is a small, normal beaver dam, much smaller than the one at our destination. Professor Raine, who doesn’t like to waste time in the slightest, had no interest in stopping to gawk at it. His apprentices overruled him. We are on our way to see beavers, after all, and so the professor could hardly fault us for being excited about beavers.
I was thinking more about the professor’s statistic about how beavers cause 30% of Irregular Anomalous Phenomena. While idling last night around the fire, it occurred to me: Could human mages not count themselves among that number? After all, in a certain light, humans are highly irregular. Further, it is said that the earliest humans learned to build runes by observing the beavers and that these developments kickstarted agrarian civilizations. Though not a purely scientific notion, I find it to be a romantic idea.
Professor Raine, however, seemed to find the idea to be repulsive. He believed my perspective implied that humans were indebted and subservient to the beaver. He proposed an alternative viewpoint. His view was based on the observation that humans and beavers are the only species to engineer their environments to such an extent (and I believe he was lumping other sapients in with humankind). In this light, he proposed, humans and beavers are the animal kingdom’s only worthy contenders for environmental domination, and as such, they are natural competitors, locked in an indefinite struggle.
In my mind, it is a rather cynical perspective.
----------------------------------------
May 2
Dear Research Journal:
We encountered an aggressive bear today. It seemed impervious to all magical attacks. This is the sort of danger we were prepared for, though. The professor faced the bear head-on, emerging victorious with only a few scratches. There may have been some swooning from the ladies. I confess I was fairly taken in myself.
----------------------------------------
May 15
Dear Research Journal:
Today, we finally reached the edge of the dam.
The beaver dam, as we were led to understand, is more like a ‘dam complex.’ On one hand, there is a ‘main dam,’ about 2000 meters west to east, but there are multiple ‘offshoots’ along the way that divide the surrounding area into sub-levels. Chief among our goals is to discern the structure and purpose of this ecology. Our first task is to map the dam in its entirety. We will begin tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
May 16
Dear Research Journal:
I had a productive day mapping out the furthest-east part of the dam. The group split into pairs; I was paired with Linda. In addition to our surveying work, we were able to observe the beavers in action. In one instance, I spotted a young beaver learning from an older beaver, probably its parent, how to chew through a branch. We observed their work for around an hour, until the pair returned to a lodge some distance away.
I cannot help but wonder: What drives them so? Despite moving with such purpose, the elder beaver seemed concerned with an area quite far from its lodge, which already seems to be safe and stable. It is not at all clear what this beaver had to gain from its work. Much like the shared abstraction project, I suspect the beavers are collaborating towards their common good. But how?
----------------------------------------
May 17
Dear Research Journal:
I had another fairly productive day of mapping, though something unexpected happened. While I was traversing a shallow pond, its water level rose quite suddenly, about half a meter. It gave me quite a shock, though I was unharmed. The cause was not apparent, but I wondered if part of the dam broke somewhere. I never figured it out, and in my investigation of the surrounding area, everything seemed to be in equilibrium, as if it had always been this way.
----------------------------------------
May 19
Dear Research Journal:
I regret to say that the productivity mentioned in my previous entry has not been maintained. The last couple of days have become a confusing mess, as our attempts to piece together the results of our surveys have led to naught but contradiction and inconsistency. We have spent all day trying to figure out what went wrong and making a game plan to stay organized in the future.
----------------------------------------
May 23
Dear Research Journal:
Despite our efforts, our attempts to map the dam have proved utterly fruitless. Marcus says that he has started leaving physical trail markers, but he insists that the beavers are “undoing his work” because he keeps stumbling upon areas that he has already marked only to find them unmarked. I found myself a little skeptical of his story. If he can tell without the markers, why did he need the markers in the first place? He must be getting confused.
Regardless, the group is starting to become convinced that there is something ‘off’ about the space that is causing us to become confused (though a part of me fears that this is just our poor attempt to cope with our dreadful surveying skills).
Somehow, Professor Raine remains unperturbed. He rejected the group’s prevailing opinion that we have made no progress over the entire week, insisting instead that we have done valuable work in understanding the problem we are facing.
----------------------------------------
May 24
Dear Research Journal:
Many of the others also have anecdotal reports of the water levels moving suddenly. This seems to be a part of the reason for all our inconsistent data (though not the whole story). Professor Raine argued that the moving water must be a consistent, predictable feature of the dam’s structure. The group is generally in agreement with this, though there was heated debate over the mechanism.
Broadly, there are two camps of thought: One camp posits there is a continuous but slow water movement, but that when water levels hit certain critical points, there’s some kind of ‘tip-over’ effect, resulting in the sudden motion of a large quantity of water. A siphon is a simple example of such a phenomenon, though probably not the only one.
A diagram of an ordinary beaver dam and beaver lodge. The beaver dam creates a pond of elevated water, and the lodge is in this pond area. A beaver is inside the lodge. [https://i.imgur.com/4YQQa0q.png]
Classical beaver living situation.
A similar picture to the above, but instead of the lodge, there is a beaver-built tunnel that acts as a siphon from one pond to a lower pond. [https://i.imgur.com/NFx8jT9.png]
Camp 1’s Proposal.
The other camp (which has my allegiance) proposes that the dams have moveable gates with an explicit, operable control mechanism hidden in one of the lodges.
A diagram similar to the first one, with a dam and a lodge. However, the dam has a gate that can be opened, and there a series of levers leading into the lodge. The picture is caption "Advanced pulley/lever contraption", but the depicted contraption is simplistic and has no pulleys. The lever system goes underwater and leads into the lodge, where it looks like a beaver is operating it. [https://i.imgur.com/8tUnBWU.png]
Camp 2’s Proposal.
Unfortunately, at this time, there has been no strong evidence in favor of either theory. Professor Raine has remained neutral. We intend to search for evidence of either mechanism early tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
May 26
Dear Research Journal:
Theodore claims to have made a breakthrough. After pouring over our data for a while, he seems to have concluded that the water is moving around in a cycle, roughly twice daily, like the tides. He said the water was moving clockwise around a particular point, and he went to inspect that point. There, there was a large circular pond, and in the center, growing out of the water was a tall red vine. He seemed to struggle with words to describe it. He said it extended into the clouds, though this makes little sense to us since we would surely be able to see it from here if that were the case. He also said the pond was covered in such a dense fog that he could barely see eight meters ahead (except that he could see the vine anyway).
It seems a clear case of an irregular phenomenon. The group will seek it out tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
The next page was blank.
“Really? Really? This is when he decided he got bored of journaling?”
“I c-can’t believe it,” Shera looked at the book in awe.
“What?”
“Kurtwell Raine’s unfiltered opinions from before he became emperor? A h-hint on how he seized and locked d-down the Common Library? As short as this book is, it c-could be worth a fortune to the right person.”
“I wanna know about the beavers, though!” Myra protested. She didn’t care much about the fucking emperor. “Do they think they ever found evidence of this dam gate pulley mechanism?”
Shera’s skeptical look at Emmett’s schematic was answer enough. “Maybe.”
“We should go there. I wanna see it.”
“Is it that important? It sounds like th-they found the vine and brought it back and made a security system out of it.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s important. I just wanna see the largest beaver dam in the world.”
“We d-don’t even know if it’s still there.”
“Well, let’s go find out!”
◆
They made for the library. Gemstone Institute, where Kurtwell Raine had earned his renown as an explorer, of course had an entire archive dedicated to his academic writings. The librarians didn’t seem to know anything about a ‘beaver dam expedition,’ though, and there wasn’t any paper or book about it. The only evidence the expedition had existed was a gap in publishing that corresponded to roughly the time period of the journal (a span of 8 months that predated the founding of the empire by about six years). They checked an atlas, but the entire northern third of Miirun was sprawling uncharted wetlands, so it was impossible to narrow down the location.
Shera increasingly started to think that it was important, that they’d discovered something on the expedition they wanted to hide. If the anomalous red vine had substantial implications for security technology, maybe because it could subvert domains and measure spell origins, it was conceivable that the emperor would keep it to himself. And in retrospect, it was definitely weird that Myra had never heard of ‘the largest beaver dam in the world’ despite the beaver being one of her favorite animals.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
(Though, he hadn’t been the emperor at the time…)
Nonetheless, they’d hit a dead end, and it was highly unlikely they would learn more about Emmett’s death this way. Myra tried to call all the sages again, especially the ones that had been on the expedition, but it seemed they had already left for Casire.
However, learning the book search spell had unlocked a lot of potential, and it invigorated them to press on.
◆
A few days later, Shera made a breakthrough in another direction.
“I might have found something,” Shera reported, holding the contact book to her chest.
“Someone noteworthy?”
Shera held out the book and pointed to one of the entries: Carmack Sermanol, with an address in a place called Ealichburgh. In her other hand, she held out a map of Casire with a train line annotated.
“Ealichburgh’s a tiny village in Casire. It’s only a few hours north of Ralkenon by train. If, around 2:30 A.M., Carmack decided to ride to Ralkenon as quickly as possible, he could have caught a train at 2:45 and arrived at 5:02. I read your notes, and you said the cyclist probably arrived by train at 5:02—”
“Oh, huh.” Myra didn’t have any hard evidence that the mystery caller and the mystery crater victim were one and the same, but she’d long thought it was an appealing way to connect the two deaths together. “Who’s this Carmack guy?”
“Well, I went back to the university library—”
“It’s open at night?”
“Yeah, it was really nice. The night shift librarian made cocoa. A-anyway, I went through all their news archives with the help of your new research spell and looked for any mention of Mr. Sermanol.”
Shera summarized what she’d found. Carmack Sermanol had been an elite infiltration officer and crackmage in the imperial military until about twenty years ago, when he was discharged due to a knee injury. He worked an office job in the military for a year, then took a post at Gemstone Institute as a lecturer and research assistant on formal mathematical logic. Six years ago, he retired. That was presumably when he moved to Ealichburgh, though Shera’s sources didn’t specify it.
“Logician? That’s an… odd career turn,” Myra remarked.
“Yeah, but it could explain why he was connected to the Sage of Magical Infrastructure.”
“Sure.” Formal logic is the foundation of mathematics, and that makes it inseparably tied to the intrinsic structure of Abstract Space. Emmett Massiel was the head of development for the Common Library, and the formal proof theory that underlies the Common Library is one of the most sophisticated ever developed. Massiel must have been an expert in mathematical logic, and he would have had a lot of contacts in the community.
It made sense, but it also meant that Carmack Sermanol didn’t really stand out so much in the late sage’s contact book. His military experience could just be irrelevant to his relationship with Massiel, and the fact that the train times worked out could just be a coincidence. After all, there were a lot of names in the contact book—there were a lot of opportunities for coincidences.
Even so, it seemed reasonable to follow up on the lead. They first went back to the university to try to find a picture of the guy. Unfortunately, Sermanol hadn’t been a full professor, and it didn’t seem that lecturers had enough status to get official portraits. They decided to go check Massiel’s manor again and search for Sermanol’s name, but they had to wait for nightfall (as Shera still didn’t think she would be able to isolate the information aura during the daytime).
They puzzled over what to do until then. It seemed impossible to call Sermanol. Ealichburgh only had two phone numbers listed for the whole village, one for the train station and one for the town hall. They did call the town hall, but it wasn’t much help.
Then Myra had a brainwave: Near the gemstone tower, there was a military tribute center. It was the sort of thing Iz would disown her for setting foot in, but it seemed like a good bet it had information on Sermanol.
They were right. In one of the larger halls, there was a wall honoring over a hundred officers and exemplary rank mages. Carmack Sermenol had a short bio, which explained that he had served the empire gathering intelligence in Quistil and Dakteria before they had been subsumed into the empire. There was also a short quote by him:
“They say I executed impossible heists. But that’s impossible.”
“He’s r-right,” Shera said.
There was also, most importantly, a portrait. Carmack Sermenol was a flat-nosed man with a thick head of hair and sideburns to match. He had a sharp jaw, a slight overbite, and a far-off look in his eyes, though the last could have been the artist’s interpretation.
“What do you think? Could it be him?”
Myra hadn’t seen anything other than a police sketch. She didn’t even remember it that well, and it’d be hard to get her hands on it again this loop. And the man in the portrait was twenty years younger. But…
“Yeah. He could be the guy.”
◆
It was apparent they really needed to actually go out to Ealichburgh. They did wait until they had a chance to check Emmett’s manor for any more information on Mr. Sermenol, but they didn’t find anything. Deciding they were as prepared as they’d ever be, they set off the next morning.
The trip was a long one, slightly longer than the one they took to get here, despite Ealichburgh being closer as the crow flies. That was to be expected. Ealichburgh was a small town with only one major train line running through it, so they had to make a couple of transfers. They left early so they could arrive late in the afternoon.
Ealichburgh was an idyllic countryside village. It was also, Myra gathered, a fairly wealthy one, the kind of place rich old people would move. Shera seemed impressed by the houses (and Myra didn’t mention that they were similar to the house she’d grown up in).
They briefly stopped to check out the phone at the train station, mostly just to confirm it existed and that it was open to the public. They considered taking prints, but it would be a lot of work and they didn’t have anything to compare to. Myra filed it away as a possibility.
They had to ask for directions to even find the road, a straight dirt path with a row of houses that sat in front of a densely wooded area. Shera continued to look impressed at the elaborate architecture. “Hey, uh,” she finally asked. “Is this the kinda place you can afford on a lecturer’s salary?”
“Not a chance.”
“What about his military role?”
Myra scratched her head. “I’m not sure. He was pretty high-ranking.”
The house they were looking for was a large brick house, three stories high. Its windows were shut and its blinds were drawn. They knocked for around five minutes but didn’t get any answer. Shera had the idea to check the shed for bike equipment. This was fruitful: The shed was unlocked, and it housed an air pump, a spare tire, and a handful of other tools. Notably, there was no bike.
Of course, they’d already known the resident was away from his house. Shera, though, also noticed there were no tire tracks. If he’d left within the last day or so, there ought to have been clearly visible tracks.
They went to a couple of the neighbors to ask about Carmack, claiming to be relatives who were worried about him. The neighbors on both sides said they hadn’t seen him in a few weeks. Unfortunately, the neighbors seemed to twig pretty quickly that they weren’t who they said they were, and they quickly retreated once they got past the pleasantries. It was hard to get more out of them.
“The neighbors don’t have any defenses,” Shera observed. “No teleportation disruption field, no sensing disruption field, nothing like that. Carmack’s house does.” Shera was right; it was impossible to sense anything inside the house.
“I think we should break in. I need to start taking more risks with these things. Probably best to start with something like this—”
“Hold on, d-do you hear something?”
“Eh?”
Myra closed her eyes and listened. “Not really.”
“I’ve b-been wondering if it was my imagination this whole time, but I hear something very faint.”
“We should check it out, then…”
They walked around a bit to find the source of Shera’s sound. It was louder in the back, loud enough that Myra could hear it now. They levitated up to the top story and hung by the window. Here, it was louder still.
“Yeah, it’s some kind of ringing, isn’t it?”
It was definitely some kind of ringing, but there still wasn’t anything they could do without getting inside the house. They looked all over for a way to enter, and they finally decided to go through the front door.
“It’s not a magical lock,” Myra said, inspecting it.
“Do you know how to open a mundane lock?”
“Eh… yeah, it’s really pretty easy with telekinesis, but—”
“What?”
“This lock is fucking weird. All the pins are the same height.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that… uh, the key to this lock would have all its grooves at the same height. It might not need grooves at all, it could just be flat, maybe?”
“You’re s-sure it’s a normal lock?”
“Yeah, don’t worry, let me just—”
She clicked the pins into place and turned the knob. She pushed open the door, and she realized immediately that something was wrong with the tension. “Oh, fu—”
The entire house went up in a fireball. The roof went up and the windows went out, and all was engulfed in hot purple flames. Bricks and shingles and shards of glass scattered across the grass.
“Shera! Shera!”
Myra had teleported in the nick of time, the instant she’d felt the pressure wrong with the door and realized how stupid she’d been. The air was hot and her ears were ringing, but she had teleported as far as she could, and she was fine, physically, at least.
But Shera—
Fuck! Shera! I just said—I just said it was safe! I just told her not to worry and then—
There was an ugly coughing noise.
“Shera!”
She was on the ground, surrounded by debris, hacking and coughing. She had teleported, by the looks of it, but she hadn’t teleported as far. Something was odd—her leg wasn’t right.
“Shera! Shera, Shera—”
“I’m a-a-alive.” She kept coughing.
“Oh, god.”
“Just l-leave me… next loop…”
“For fuck’s sake, I’m not leaving you here.” She took a look at Shera’s leg, which was clearly broken and which had hot pieces of debris lodged inside it. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot who should have learned more first aid when I found myself in a time loop, and I didn’t.”
“I kn-know—first aid,” she said weakly.
“She cast something on her leg for a bit, wincing sharply as she did so. “I-I-I need t-to wrap th-this up.”
“Uh, uh—I don’t have any bandages—”
Shera grabbed onto Myra’s sleeve. There was a weird look in her eyes. “I need your—your—”
“My clothes, right.” A quick slicing-spell chopped off a big chunk at the bottom of her dress, revealing most of her ankles. She helped Shera tie it around her leg. “Sorry.”
“Wh-what?”
“Next time, I’ll pick something more revealing.” Myra wasn’t sure why she said that. Shera turned bright red and looked away, making it more difficult to finish the bandage. When she was finally done, she hefted the girl to her feet, and they made themselves scarce before the police could arrive.
◆
They were in a bit of a pickle.
They had already gone around and raised the neighbors’ suspicions, and there was no doubt the police would speak to the same people. So the police would definitely be on the lookout for a pair of suspicious girls. To make matters worse, both of them were dirty, Myra’s clothes were torn, Shera’s clothes were singed, and her monochrome hair was very distinctive. To make matters worse again, they were in a middle-of-nowhere village where visitors stood out.
Ultimately, they agreed they needed to find a hood or some other covering for Shera, and even then, they would need to travel pretty far away before they could safely board a train. Shera could barely walk, so the only way she could get anywhere was by chain-teleporting, roughly 40 meters at a time, a generally inadvisable process that could quickly lead to headaches and nausea. Thus, Shera had to pace herself to avoid getting sick, and on average she was able to move just slightly slower than Myra’s hiking pace.
It took them a day and a half (living off of the light snacks they’d thought to bring, and pulling water out of the atmosphere) to reach a town they’d judged far enough away. Myra bought a cloak for Shera, and they took a long train back to Jewel City. Throughout the entire trip, Shera was quiet.
By the time the whole ordeal was done, it was the second-to-last day.
They hobbled off the train, again to the salty sea air. There was a commotion by a newsstand.
Break-in at Imperial Trebuchet Not Foiled
At 2:30 A.M., last night, a third intrusion was detected at the Raine Eastern Trebuchet (REaT) launch site in Kanre, Halnya, twenty-one days after the previous attempt. The intruder once again targeted a building containing confidential documents and blueprints. To the shock of the facility operators, the intruder moved the entire building onto the trebuchet and launched it hundreds of kilometers west. It is believed the intruder also escaped inside the building. The imperial military recovered the building at 6:00 A.M. They did not comment on the state of the building or the status of its interior.
There has been much speculation over whether this incident would affect the anticipated peace conference with Unkmire, currently set to occur tomorrow night. The latest release from the emperor’s office indicates that the conference will proceed as planned.
Finally, the Halnya Times wishes to offer a correction and an apology for erroneous information in the previous reports on the break-in. It has come to our attention that there is no individual at Halnya Upper Institute of Magecraft named “Jay Thrustma.” We originally met the individual claiming to be “Jay Thrustma” on the institute’s campus while searching for a domain expert to offer commentary. The name and credentials of this individual were entirely self-identified, and no independent verification was attempted. However, the editors at Halnya Times still believe that the previously reported information was largely correct. The individual’s motivations remain unknown.
“Look! W-we were right!” Shera cried.
“What?”
“Look!”
While Myra had read the front page article, Shera had stood opposite her, reading the back page. Myra flipped the booklet around to see whatever Shera was looking at.
Domestic explosion connected to mysterious crater death
A peaceful afternoon in Ealichburgh, Casire was interrupted by an alchemical gas explosion that destroyed the house of the distinguished former crackmage and imperial military officer, Carmack Sermanol. There were no known direct witnesses, and the cause of the explosion is not well understood. There is no known reason why the chemicals involved should have been present at the house, and police were unable to identify clues in the rubble. There is no evidence of any casualty.
Subsequent investigation revealed that Carmack Sermanol had been missing for several weeks. Police later determined that Carmack Sermanol was a previously unidentified victim of a mysterious crater-related incident in Ralkenon, Casire. The cause of the crater incident is unknown.
Villagers reported that two young women of dubious character were asking around about
Shera squealed. “Ah-ah-ah! Look at th-this!”
“What?”
“The intruder at the trebuchet! Th-they pulled it off!” Shera turned the paper around again, shoving the article about the trebuchet in Myra’s face.
“Oh, yeah, I—I already read that.”
Myra turned back to finish the article about Carmack Sermanol, but there wasn’t much else beyond the attacks on the pair’s dubious character.
“W-what do we do now?”
“I apparently need to get ready for Ben to come after me with a trebuchet,” Myra said dryly, though in truth, she had her doubts that Ben was the intruder, or that he could really build a trebuchet off of a stolen blueprint that he would have two days to memorize.
But she also hadn’t expected Ben to come at her with a mage sect from the Ptolkeran mountains. So who knew what he was really capable of?
“And me?”
Myra looked back at Shera. Genuinely, it was a miracle she was even standing. Was she supporting herself with magic?
“You need to rest. You’ve earned it, anyway.”
“I need to eat.”
“Okay. I will drain my bank account so we can eat at the nicest, most expensive restaurant in Jewel City. And then—whatever the hell you feel like after that.”
◆
Shera wanted to spend the last night stargazing.
That was fine with Myra. They went to the astronomy tower at Gemstone Institute, which they were technically not allowed into, but which didn’t have very good security anyway.
Myra really only had one objective for the end of the loop: to observe Jewel City and see if anything interesting happened. She had been killed by Unkmire mercenaries in her second loop, and she still didn’t know anything about them, if they were hired by the Unkmire monarchy, or by the ‘culprit’, or if it was another weirdo group Ben had allied with one time, or what.
Anyway, the astronomy tower was a nice, tall location from which they could observe the city and watch for any last-minute invasions.
As of half past midnight, the city was peaceful. Shera was seated, head down with her eye glued to a telescope, humming softly to herself, observing her favorite neutron star. Myra sat right behind her, straddling her with her legs. It was nice, for once, not having to worry about the event hall or the volcano or Ben. She worried about her friends, of course, and she worried about Iz, who was probably in the infirmary right now. And she couldn’t stop from looking at her watch.
Still, Shera seemed happy, and that made Myra happy.
“So what do you think?” Shera asked.
“About… which thing?”
“Carmack.”
Of course, Shera would also want to spend the last hour of the loop discussing the case.
“Welll…” Myra started. “Assuming the police did their job right and that paper reported accurately, I mean, it must be what we were thinking, right? Carmack Sermenol, for some reason, tried calling Emmett Massiel until the investigator picked up the phone and informed Carmack that Emmett was dead. Then… Carmack immediately caught a train to Casire, brought his bicycle, and then biked off in the direction of the hotel, maybe to see the princess… though I’m not really sure how he’d have known where she was, so maybe it’s something else… And on the way he… uh… gets in a crater accident?”
“You think it’s an accident?” Shera asked, still occupied with the sky.
“I dunno. Do you think it was a murder?”
“We know the culprit’s interested in trebuchets and high-velocity projectiles.”
“Okay, but all that stuff didn’t happen in the previous loops.”
“I d-didn’t say it did. I just said they’re interested in trebuchets and high-velocity projectiles.”
“Okay… I take your point. But might I remind you, the trebuchet break-in was less than two hours after Carmack’s death.”
“Not strictly impossible.”
“Fine.” No fucking way. “But why would they use such a baroque, complicated method?”
“We don’t know the method.”
“Well, we know that it’s complicated.”
“You could say the same thing about the event hall massacre.”
“I guess so…” That’s not an explanation for anything, though.
Around that time, the Common Library finally went out. Myra briefly got up to go to the tower balcony so she could look over the city. There were alarms in the distance, probably because of the Library disappearing, but at least there didn’t seem to be any invasion. After a while, she returned to her seat, wrapping her arms around Shera’s stomach and resting her head on her back.
“No surprises?” Shera asked.
“No.” What a relief, honestly. She watched her watch tick down. “It’s nice to be able to just—”
Shera screeched. She slammed her head back, knocking into Myra’s nose. “What th-th-th-the—fuck—” She twisted around to look at Myra, her arms flailing around and her eyes about to pop out of her sockets.
“Shera what’s—ow—” She massaged her bruised face.
Shera grabbed Myra’s shoulder with a shaking hand.
“Th-th-the stars—the stars just moved—”
End of Book 1