“Lukai must have been the runecrafter here before me!” Myra grabbed her friend and shook her shoulders more violently than was probably necessary. “Iz, this explains everything! They killed him for some reason and got rid of all the evidence! That’s why they’re so cagey about who I’m replacing! And that’s why he disappeared after agreeing to meet me! They killed him! Then they needed a new runecrafter!”
“Myra…” Iz said slowly, recovering from Myra’s intense oscillations, slowly wobbling to a halt. “You’re the one who spent a month with this group before, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about…”
“Yeah?”
“But there’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense?” How Myra hated those words. “Why try to hide his very existence? They could just tell you the previous runecrafter left. As a lie, it’s much easier to sell than the idea that they literally didn’t have anyone maintaining their runes for however long. Though I guess you bought it anyway—”
“Hey!”
“—and that’s not all. Why did they toss the whole bed over the edge? Was it evidence? That might make sense if the murder took place on the bed, but look at that sheet. It’s pristine.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Myra said. “I didn’t say this explained everything.”
“You actually—” Iz stopped, then mouthed something to herself. It looked like she was working through the conversation in her head. “—did say that.”
“Okay, well, it was hyperbole. Anyway. Let’s just look at it.” Myra tele’ed the sheet up so she could examine it more closely. “Can we analyze this?”
Iz took it and draped it in front of her to get a holistic look. “Well, I don’t claim to be a forensics expert, but I don’t really see anything odd about this sheet.” It was ripped, but that appeared to be from the branch it had caught on, and it was appropriately dirty as a result of the same. There wasn’t any blood on it.
“So what do you think?”
Iz clicked her tongue. “I dunno.”
◆
Myra wanted to get to work at the vault right away, though the timeline was a little constrained because the murk bogs wouldn’t be hired for the big mission in Ralkenon until midway through the loop. Even so, she was able to steer a conversation towards it and prompt Geel into bringing up the project early, and as a result, they were able to arrange to get started with the teleportation training they’d need.
Myra was able to rest well the first night, being used to the place by now. Iz looked quite a bit less rested when she woke up, but she claimed to have gotten six hours of sleep. The bookish girl in the murk bogs training uniforms made a slightly odd sight.
“What are you giggling at?” she asked, tying her hair up into a bun.
“Nothing.”
For her part, Iz eyed Myra with a degree of skepticism, somewhat incredulous at her own choice of dress.
“I know it’s pretty warm out…” Iz said, “but are you really not gonna wear a shirt around these people? These murderers?”
“Oh, see, the thing is—”
“I wanna make this promise to you,” she told Shera. “Every happy memory we make over these loops, I’m going to recreate them with you, once this time loop is over. That way you’ll be able to remember them, too.”
“And does it mean you’ll…” Her face turned bright red.
“I’ll what?”
“Never mind.” She turned away, face still bright red.
“C’monnn, what is it you want me to do? If you don’t tell me, I won’t know to repeat it!”
The other girl looked like she was going to die, like the entire platform would fall into the abyss if she said what was on her mind.
Finally, in a voice so faint, which must have been her way of speaking up while tricking part of her brain into thinking that she wasn’t, she told Myra which memory she cherished.
“I kinda have a blood pact,” Myra explained.
“A blood pact,” Iz said flatly.
“Yeah, don’t—don’t worry about it.”
◆
Myra, obviously, didn’t need to learn the teleportation skills again, but Shera and Iz did. So they were out there early in the morning with… Nesr Wald. The lesson started out much like it had the last time.
“The vault has a redirection trap. Do you know what that is?”
Iz spoke up. “It’s a rod that warps auraspace so teleportations are redirected to it.”
“That was a rhetorical question. Don’t bother answering.” Somehow, this schtick is even more annoying the second time. “And you’re also wrong. It does ensnare teleportations, but it doesn’t warp anything. All it does is trick the caster into teleporting to the wrong spot. Do you know why wasps are attracted to flames?”
Iz looked flabbergasted by the seemingly unrelated question. Nesr Wald went on.
“The reason is that wasps usually use the sun to navigate,” he went on. “Therefore, bright lights confuse them. A redirection rod is very similar. Mages can intuitively feel their way through auraspace using the natural auraflow of the universe. I’m talking about the solar channel, the lunar channels. You likely do not even realize you rely on this, but you do. It’s the same way you use the accelerometer in your inner ear to know if you’re standing upright or not. You doubtless don’t even think about it, but you do.”
“Sure…” Iz said, still looking oddly.
“So can you guess how a redirection rod works? It messes with all the aura flow in a space so that you get disoriented and move your endpoint into the redirector without thinking about it. Fortunately, if you know how it works, there are many ways to course-correct by properly understanding the correspondence between physical space and auraspace. Now—”
“Wait, hold up,” Iz said, finally giving a voice to whatever had been going on behind her face of crystalized bafflement. “Redirection rods warp auraspace. It’s confusing to your senses because it’s completely bent out of shape. It’s not some kind of illusion.”
“Incorrect,” Nesr Wald said impatiently. “Now, I’m going to teach you how to stay anchored in physical space.”
“Hold on, no, I wasn’t incorrect,” Iz butted back in. “A redirection rod bends auraspace like a black hole bends physical spacetime.”
“No. It does nothing of the sort. It is entirely designed to fool your senses. This is proved by the fact that reorienting yourself via physical space is sufficient to overcome the illusion.”
Myra tried to cut in half-heartedly. “Iz, uh—”
“This is actually something I know a lot about,” Iz kept going. “And this explanation is absolute bollocks. Where’d you even get it?”
The teleportation instructor took three heavy steps towards Iz, towering over her with eyes darker than tar. “Listen, young lady. I don’t share Geel’s sense of humor, and I certainly don’t share his enthusiasm for hiring three novices to do a one-person job. Now, I would like to do my job and teach you what you need to know. But if you make that impossible by contradicting me—”
“How can you teach if you’re just spewing bullshit?”
Nesr Wald grabbed a clump of her hair and yanked her down, and Iz screamed.
“Iz! Iz!” Myra cried hastily. “He taught the—I mean, I was taught the same way! It works, just hear him out!”
“Okay okay okay okay ow,” Iz cried. “Sorry sorry sorry I’ll listen—” Her frantic desperate voice pulled up an ugly feeling in Myra’s chest. But it also caused Nesr Wald to let go, satisfied he had asserted himself. “I’ll… I’ll listen to the expert,” she whimpered.
“Good.” He stepped away, returning to where he was standing before, muttering to himself in his own language. “[Unknown word], I have to deal with these [unknown word]…” He took out his pistol, put it to his own skull, and shot point blank with a loud bang.
Myra had seen him pull the same obnoxious stunt before, so she understood the incorporeal bullets would just fly safely through his head. Her two friends, however, screamed in shock; Shera flinched, and Iz—still reeling from the instructor’s aggression—put a hand to her mouth. In time, both seemed to work out what had happened.
Whoops… I should have warned them that he likes to do that.
Somehow, they got on with the lesson.
◆
Iz got the technique down in less than five minutes, which Nesr Wald wasn’t happy about at all. He congratulated her through his teeth and then stormed off—somewhat slouched, stomping, and even kind of huffing.
“Er…” Myra said. “Well, then.”
“C-can y-yinz help me?” Shera asked. “I still haven’t gotten the hang of it.”
“Yeah, I can help,” Iz said. “My main advice is to not think about any of that nonsense he said.”
“Um—” Myra raised a finger. “We really were able to get the hang of it last time we were here, going off only his explanation.”
“Well, I guess, as long as the technique works, then it’s fine. And sure, that shit about using the channels to orient yourself in auraspace is true to an extent, but it’s obviously not the primary effect going on here! The reason your senses get warped so much is because auraspace is warped! This is obvious, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s obvious,” Myra said. “Well, that guy’s always a complete asshole, so it’s probably best not to, uh, rock the boat. Or rock the platform, I guess.”
“Fine, fine.”
“Anyway, I’ll help you, Shera—” She noticed that Shera was staring off into the distance, looking pensive. “Shera? You thinking about something?”
“Oh, n-no!” She snapped back. “Well, just, where do you think that bullet is now? I mean… does it just keep going ’cause it can’t interact with air resistance while it’s incorporeal?”
“I have no idea. I guess gravity is still acting on it… maybe it eventually just falls through the ground. No idea what happens after that. I guess the aura would burn out, eventually.”
“Incorporeality is pretty efficient,” Iz said. “It’d probably last a day if nothing else acts on it.” She frowned. “Honestly, the whole concept is ridiculously dangerous. I hope they have some safety mechanism we aren’t aware of.”
“You might wanna save that hope for something that has a snowball’s chance in the volcano of being true.”
◆
Despite the… road bumps, they did learn the skills they would need to get into the tree vault. Myra also managed to get a bit more instruction on long-distance teleportation (Nesr Wald had initially refused to teach her, so she just practiced on her own in front of him until he got exasperated with her awful aura constructs and gave her some more direction). She also tried to inquire about some of the other weird security measures she’d encountered, like the lock on Carmac’s house, or the yarn-based lock she’d seen both in Emmett Massiel’s house and in the Mirkas-Ballam laboratory. However, nobody seemed to have a clue about either.
Eventually, they learned all the skills they needed to enter the vault. Myra was sorely tempted to ‘solve’ the Klein bottle security layer immediately in order to impress Geel, but that also ran the risk that it would prevent her from making a deal with him later. The girls together decided it would be best to wait a few days before the murk bogs would score their big job in Ralkenon, then make the deal that they could join if they solved the vault security, then solve all the vault security.
“The plan sounds okay,” Iz said. “But… how are we going to solve the vault security, exactly? What’s the thing you’re stuck on again?”
“There’s some kind of giant combination lock.”
“How are we going to get past it then? I assume you don’t have the combination?”
“Uh… I dunno. Unlike the two layers I already got, I don’t have a clue where to start. I was kinda hoping you’d have an idea?”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Me? I don’t know a thing about combination locks, let alone high-security government ones.”
“I was hoping you could do some… lateral thinking? Maybe look at the problem sideways or something…”
“What I meant was, why me specifically?”
“Oh. Just ’cause you’re pretty clever?”
She sighed. “Myra… I hope your entire plan isn’t reliant on me working a miracle.”
She zoned out, deep in thought about something, and the conversation petered out. Eventually, she wandered off, leaving Myra and Shera to their own devices.
“Y-y’know I can help out, too,” Shera said.
Myra blinked. “Huh? Of course I know that, Shera.”
◆
Myra didn’t see Iz much the rest of the day, and when she did, she seemed to be rather in her own head, and they didn’t get a good chance to properly talk until the next day. When Myra found her, she was by the edge of the platform, standing with, of all things, a golf club and a large bucket of balls. When Myra approached, she was lining one up on a tee.
“You’re… golfing?”
With an elegant stance, Iz swung and hit the ball with a satisfying thwack. The ball disappeared into the trees, yielding only the faint sound of foliage ruffling from far away.
“Just calming my nerves. What’s up?”
“Oh, uh—How do you get the balls back?” Myra asked, temporarily distracted.
“I don’t. I’m trying to get into the time loop spirit.” Thwack. “They’ve got a lot of balls, so I figure I won’t run out before the month ends.”
“Oh.”
Myra sat down and watched her friend for a round or two. It wasn’t entirely clear if she had a target or if she was just hitting them for the hell of it.
“Okay, but how is it meant to be played, way out here? They can’t possibly have had a golf course.”
“No idea.”
Myra sat and watched for a while, listening to the satisfying thwack, thwack, thwack.
“Anyway…” Myra scratched behind her ears. “I’m sorry if this whole ordeal has been… uh, if it’s been uncomfortable out here.”
“Tell me about it,” she said dryly. “Not having the Common Library around makes my skin crawl.”
“Oh.” Myra blinked. “I hadn’t even thought about that. I was thinking more like… being around these creeps.”
“Well. That goes without saying.”
“Right.”
Thwack.
“Nonetheless, I made the choice to help you out,” she said, though her tone was still a little cold.
“In previous loops, you were really worried about being manipulated.”
“Oh, that’s smart of me.” Another swing. “Hopefully I wasn’t too much of a pain in the ass, though, heh?”
“Well… I dunno. This is only the second time you’ve believed me.”
“Really? I figured you could just… predict the news, or the weather, or something, and I’d come around pretty quick. That beaver dam with the clock helps a lot, too.”
If only. “Actually, I was really surprised when you suggested it this time… In the past, when I tried it, you uh, wanted a different kind of proof.”
Iz winced, and she absolutely whiffed her next shot.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You know what I’m talking about?”
“I… have a pretty good guess.”
“Is there something that would convince you?”
“Well…” She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hand. “What if you cut off your arm or something? Or maybe that’s too much. Maybe an eye?”
“I’m sorry?”
“That shouldn’t be a big deal, right? If this time loop is real? You’d just get it back when time loops back.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m not kidding you. I’m taking your ridiculous premise seriously. If you’re in a time loop, and consequences really don’t matter because they’ll be erased in a month, then you shouldn’t have a problem doing it. That’s logical, isn’t it?”
“Fuck,” Iz said. She struck again, but she was shaking and barely got the ball off the edge of the platform. “You must think I’m a piece of shit.”
“Well, eh. All’s well that ends well.”
With a heaviness to her step, she grabbed another ball. “Do you mind if I try to defend myself?”
“Go ahead.”
“You really are asking a lot. So… any demonstration that would show me you really, truly believed your actions were consequence-free… It would go a long way to making me feel better about the whole thing. I guess you could say, I needed to be convinced emotionally, not just logically.”
Myra couldn’t help it. She laughed, bitterly and ironically.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Seriously, what?”
“Seriously, nothing.”
“Okay.”
“I understand your point of view,” Myra said, collecting herself. “But you realize asking me to cut off a body part in exchange for one month’s worth of help is… I mean, maybe if I only had to do it once, but I’d need to do it every time—”
“Yeah, I know, Myra. I just—I don’t know, maybe this other timeline version of me didn’t believe you at all, and I was just being shitty.”
She looked at her golf club for a bit, then let it fall to the ground, seemingly giving up on the game. Then she sat down herself, taking a seat next to Myra.
“Hey, how much did you look up about Dr. Geel Hattuck?”
Myra was thrown off a bit by the topic change. “I told you, he was a psychologist who disappeared. Why?”
“I remember hearing something unpleasant about him. I need to check something, though. Do you think you could cover me if I left for a day or two to get some more books?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll try to get all the way up to Ealichburgh too, like you asked. Take a look at that door you keep talking about. See if I can make myself useful.”
“That’s a pretty good idea,” Myra said, though Iz frowned in response. “Er, going to Ealichburgh is a good idea, I mean. Sorry, er—do you feel like you’re not being useful or something?”
“Well, your new friend this morning let me know what she thought of my derailing Nesr Wald’s lessons. She said I was endangering the mission or something.”
“Ehh,” Myra said, stalling because she agreed with Shera but needed to find something supportive to say. She shifted closer to her friend and put her arm around her. “I liked the way you made him storm off like a baby.”
“A redirection rod is just—it’s just a thing that bends auraspace! It’s not anything more exotic than that!”
“I know.”
“Anyway…” She shifted a bit. “I think Shera thinks I forced myself into the mission or something.”
“Absolutely not!” Myra insisted. “I need you here. I need your fresh perspective.”
“Perspective, huh?”
She thought for a minute.
“Well, I have a perspective, all right.”
“Yeah?”
“My perspective is that these people are full of shit.”
Myra giggled. “Well… no shocker there.”
“No, really. Here, I’ve got something for you.” She pulled out from Myra’s arm, shifting to sit so she could face her, leaning forward intently.
“Okay, so. You said that Obyl told you there used to be a village here that burned down in a tragic accident that might have been sabotage, but that the murk bogs had nothing to do with it.” Iz spoke with an intense look bubbling up in her eyes.
“That’s right.”
“Did he mention one of the few survivors of the fire is a member of the murk bogs?”
“What? N-no, he didn’t!”
“Well, I spoke to Obyl and confirmed everything he said. And he told me there were a few survivors who ‘lived around here.’ So I went into the other village, down by the station, and asked around. Or, well—I got all the way there and then remembered I could barely talk to anyone. But this one guy, the steward at the station, told me that they’d all ‘relocated’ but wouldn’t say where they went. Except for one.”
◆◆◆◆◆
The survivor’s account
It is just as Obyl said. In fact, he would have gotten the story from me to begin with.
It was nearly six years ago when it happened. We had a bonfire at the center of the village. It was the first day of winter, and it was appropriately chilly that day, so we gathered around to warm up, and we celebrated late into the evening with story and song.
I turned in around 9 or 10 PM. I don’t know if I checked the time myself, but the official report listed the fire as taking place at 10:15 PM, so it must have been a bit before that.
I took a stroll through the village, as I prefer to do before bed. Nothing seemed off, though I wasn’t particularly on the lookout. I never approached the enchantment core at this point. The enchantment core—which protects the village from fire, among other things—was located in a locked building here on this platform, which served as a community center. Our dwellings, however, were out in the woods, like in most Unkmirean villages.
I reached my house, which was… six bridgeways from the bonfire. I was about to turn in, when I heard a scream. I returned to the bonfire, to see that a nearby tree had caught fire, though it wasn’t at all clear how this had happened.
Initially, I did not think there was a need to panic, as I believed the enchantment would kick in. Accidents like this had happened before, you see, albeit on smaller scales. In retrospect, I should have realized there was something wrong with the enchantment immediately—I wrongly assumed the fire wasn’t yet significant enough for the enchantment to activate.
I fetched some water, but it was no use—the fire spread much faster than it should have. It had an uncanny ability to hop from place to place. By the time I realized something was amiss, multiple bridges were already in flames, and I finally insisted on an evacuation. We were to head here, to the platform.
However, the fire had already gotten out of control… only a few of us were mages, and even fewer of us could teleport. I knew of alternate routes through the wild, where one had to hop from branch to branch. However, it was difficult for the young, and as the flames raged, it only became more and more dangerous.
In the end, there were… 13 survivors out of over a thousand. Most never stood a chance, not with the trees turning to ash below their very feet.
Investigators determined that someone had broken into the building containing the enchantment core and smashed the runework to pieces. Since I owned the only key to the building, they interrogated me.
I’ll tell you what I told them.
I entered the building a total of twice in the week preceding the fire. I entered once on the morning of the day of the fire; I also entered four days prior to that. Each time, I locked it up when I left. At no time did I sense anything amiss.
I was the only person with access to the building. I own the only key… and I had that key on my person from the time I locked up to the time of the fire. I told the investigators I did not know how anyone could have gotten in. According to their investigation, there wasn’t any indication that the lock had been forced, or any other indication that the security had been subverted.
There was, however, evidence that someone had been inside. There were footprints… There were prints in the mud outside the building, and then there were very faint mud tracks inside the building. It seemed that someone had simply walked in through the door, then back out. However, they didn’t seem to identify anybody from the village. They were too small for me—and thus I was acquitted—and furthermore, the boot prints didn’t match the local style.
The next year, the murk bogs moved to the platform. I was lost, so I joined them and found a role for myself. I became involved in projects designed around breaking and entering, in hopes of making sense of what had happened, but even now, I know of very few ways to get in without a trace. I consulted Nesr Wald, who is an expert on teleportation and infiltration. He insisted that the teleportation field would be easy to subvert, but that it was very difficult to reconcile the possibility with the footprint analysis. The culprit would have needed to be very intentional about laying a fake trail. Nesr Wald found this odd, in light of the fact that the prints weren’t designed to point to anyone.
Nonetheless, it is the best answer I can offer.
There’s one last thing. I said that I entered the building four days prior, so I should tell you about that day. That day, there was a visitor to the village, an unusual but not unwelcome occurrence. I showed him the enchantment core because he was curious. The investigators were very interested in this person, and they naturally suspected he was the culprit. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to provide them with a helpful description. He was well-dressed and somewhat portly, but he wore a facemask that covered his mouth and a hood that covered the top of his head.
◆◆◆◆◆
“Hang on.” The girls had listened patiently through most of the explanation, but Iz had to cut him off here.
Four people sat around a bench in Roc’s workshop: the three girls, and of course, Roc himself. It had not taken a lot of persuading to get him to talk, though he had relayed the entire tale in an exhausted tone, with very little emotion. Much of it seemed practiced, like he’d told it half a hundred times: the bonfire and the evacuation, the mysterious stranger and the footprints. Meanwhile, other parts had seemed like a struggle to recall: the number of survivors, the information about the enchantment core. They had all listened patiently, not wanting to interrupt Roc in the retelling of his most traumatic experiences, at least until Iz was finally ready to make an objection.
“You let a stranger,” she said, “a guy so suspicious that he was obviously hiding his identity, into this high-security area?”
“He established a rapport first. I found him very agreeable, and we had shared enthusiasm.”
“Shared enthusiasm for what?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember,” Iz repeated in a tone of outright incredulity.
“Correct.”
Iz let out a really ugly sigh, but she also glanced at Myra with a look as if to say, what did I tell you?
“Okay, what about the second time?” Iz continued her questioning. “You said you also entered the building on the day of the fire. What was that for?”
“I needed to instruct a younger villager in the maintenance of the core.”
“So you were there with someone?”
“No. I had not found an ideal candidate for the maintenance. I went through the instruction process, but nobody was there to listen.”
“… What? You’re saying you just… talked to yourself?”
“Right.”
“… Okay.” It took Iz a while to recover from this. “One last question, then. Why did the village only have one key? I would have expected the village to be less worried about saboteurs and more worried about the lack of redundancy. Er—in spite of what happened, I mean. What if there was an emergency and you needed to get into the enchantment building?”
“I can’t say. It seemed like a sensible arrangement at the time.”
◆
When the girls were alone, Iz was quick to make her thoughts loud.
“His whole testimony was rotten as cheese left out on a hot summer in Briktone,” Iz said. “Locked room my fucking ass.”
“I d-dunno,” Shera said, twiddling her thumbs hesitantly. “He s-seemed so s-sincere to me…”
“Really? First of all, he had the key. Not much of a ‘locked room mystery’ when someone’s got the key. Secondly, his story has holes you could run a train through. He says he went in earlier in the day, but he never gave a good reason for it. And why would the village only keep a single key? He didn’t have a good explanation for that either. Not to mention nothing else that adds up. And the weird stranger! I think he sounds completely made up. Roc was probably the one that burned the place down. He probably worked for the murk bogs already.”
“Eh…” Myra shared Shera’s instinct, though she didn’t know how to justify it. “I think you’re jumping to conclusions. If he was trying to hide something, why would he even give us so much information in the first place? You heard him—he’s lost and he’s trying to find the reason behind the most horrible thing that ever happened to him.”
“Come on,” Iz snapped. “No offense, but you two have been letting these assholes tell stories at you for one loop too long, and the stories are getting more and more ridiculous. Why won’t he even tell us what it was called? Honestly, did this village even exist?”
“Er, well, they have a bunch of old village shit in the basement,” Myra pointed out.
“Y-yeah, and I-I’ve heard of it b-before,” Shera chimed in.
“Okay, fine, it probably existed.” She paused. “Wait, Shera, do you know where we can look it up?”
“Er, no. I can’t remember where I saw it.” She looked embarrassed.
“Oh, I know this!” Myra cut in. “You told me it was in a magazine or something.”
“Oh!” Shera hit her palm on her forehead. “Oh! Y-yeah, that was it!”
“… You also said you couldn’t find it when you went back to look for it.”
“O-oh.” She looked pretty confused about that. “Maybe I should try again. I don’t think I would’ve th-thrown any of those out.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Iz with the frustrated skeptical look of someone who didn’t believe Shera at all. She gritted her teeth, and Myra could feel her trying to conclude the village really didn’t exist after all but getting stuck on the fact that, as Myra had pointed out, there was a bunch of old village shit in the basement.
Or that was Myra’s guess, anyway. She wasn’t a mind-reader.
◆
Iz did a walk around the entire perimeter with a light, looking for any other clues that might have fallen off the edge. She swept through the basement area, then all the buildings on the upper area. She scrutinized the building called ‘The Well’ up and down, she inspected the ground where the enchantment core had (allegedly) been before it was dismantled, and she even snuck into Roc’s workshop while he was away.
She identified a segment of the woods that looked like it had burned down several years ago, and she found what were probably remnants of the village, but there was a lot less than Myra had expected. There were three houses (or the burnt husks of them), one miscellaneous platform, and some broken bridges.
… Then again, if the scale of the fire had been what was claimed, then maybe they were lucky that even this much remained.
“Why are you so interested in this?” Myra asked, catching her while she was on her way from one place to another.
“Why shouldn’t I be? An entire village was obliterated by an act of sabotage.”
“I mean, it probably doesn’t have anything to do with the murk bogs’ mission in Ralkenon.”
“So what? As a tragedy, it’s greater than whatever happens in that event hall. Shouldn’t the saboteur be brought to justice? Thousands of people died.”
“Well… Okay, that’s true.” Maybe Myra had had some degree of tunnel vision with regard to investigating things that seemed relevant to the loop and the events at the end of it. Though to be fair to her, she didn’t know how long the status quo would last, of her being able to loop freely, and tangents felt like indulgences.
Anyway, Iz did seem to know what she was doing, or at least she seemed to be engrossed in it, and Myra had no problem letting her go about it.
Perhaps, though, if she’d paid more attention, she might have advised against talking to Nesr Wald to confirm Roc’s story. Or at least, she would have insisted on tagging along.