“The st-stars are w-wrong, the st-stars are w-wrong, the st-stars are w-wrong—”

Shera was curled into a ball on the corner of her bed, rocking back and forth, muttering the refrain again and again. She had been doing this for several minutes while Myra desperately flipped around for another neutron star that could be the one Shera was thinking of.

Why did I have to open my big mouth…?

This discrepancy was not, of course, any kind of hint to the time reset. It wasn’t like they had worked backward from the current state of ZK-1034 and calculated when it must have gone nova. Myra was looking at information written in a book published four years ago.

Myra double-checked that she wasn’t just getting confused over the speed of light. Indeed, she wasn’t. The ZK-1034 supernova had occurred over a century ago, and it had taken nearly that long for its light to reach their planet. According to the book’s figures, the supernova was visible 23 years ago, whereas Shera had claimed her supernova was visible 11 years ago.

“How’d you determine it was ZK-1034?” Myra asked.

“I checked a star chart. Long time ago, just after my first telescope broke.”

“The star chart wouldn’t have listed your star as a neutron star at that point.”

“Yeah, it didn’t. I got the right star.”

“You never checked a book after that?”

“Why would I? I always remembered where it was.”

Myra closed the book. “The tea should be ready. Are you happy with mint? I know you chose it because it was my preference.”

“Mint’s okay.” It wasn’t a very enthusiastic ‘okay.’

“What’s your preference?”

“Black.”

Myra prepared some black tea in silence. When everything was ready, she sat next to Shera on her bed. “You know, it could just be a misprint.”

“It must be. Nothing else makes sense.” It didn’t move her out of her funk, and she remained as shaken as ever.

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“Um… you should probably just finish your story.”

Myra felt bad leaving it at this, but she didn’t know what to do other than get on with their conversation and hope it provided a distraction. She proceeded through the recounting: the encounter with Benkoten, the earthquakes, the disappearance of the Common Library, and the massacre at the event hall. To Myra’s surprise, Shera didn’t respond much to her own appearance in the story.

“Sooo, I guess you see now why I acted the way I did,” Myra concluded, hoping to provoke more of a reaction.

“You’re talking about this morning, when you ran to me because you saw I was alive?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, yeah, about th-that. Um… Earlier, y-you said…” She twitched, then froze up.

Myra tilted her head, waiting for her to say what was on her mind. What did I say?

“Never mind.”

Okay…

“So, after the earthquakes—” Shera then launched herself into questions and clarifications about Myra’s story. They continued for several hours until Shera announced she would need to meditate on everything.

Myra had about hit her limit at that point, so she was quite ready to turn in herself. Back in her dorm room, the last thought before she hit the pillow was: What the fuck was this day? Did I really befriend Shera Marcrombie?

◆

The next morning, Myra decided she needed to talk about Benkoten.

Nathan wasn’t at any of his usual hang-out spots, and he didn’t join for lunch. Since it was around a month ago from Myra’s perspective, she couldn’t remember what Nathan had been up to on this particular day the last time around. It didn’t really matter. Ben had failed to appear the previous night and Nathan was now entirely out of sorts, so obviously his behavior would be different. According to Tazhin, he hadn’t left the dorm building all day.

Myra found him in his room. He had bags under his eyes and was barely dressed, and he all but recoiled when he recognized Myra at his door.

“What do you want.”

He’s still irritated about lunch yesterday.

“Have you eaten today?” It was an excuse to drag him out, though Myra was genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, I ate.”

“Well, you should eat again. I’m going to the food stands.”

“By the pond?”

“Yeah. Also I wanted to ask a couple of things about Ben.”

“All right. Let me get ready.”

Nathan didn’t bother putting on his full uniform, just the minimal amount to go outside decent: a loose shirt, trousers, and his rock-skipping gloves. Myra accompanied him to the food stands, where Nathan bought an unusually large sandwich. He’s probably hungrier than he let on. Myra bought a spicy lettuce wrap.

“Are there… any leads?”

“We found one student who said they saw him early this morning. Just after 6 AM, he was grabbing a breakfast bar from the dorm pantry, ‘looking unkempt,’ whatever that means. Then he went out to the roof and teleported. That’s pretty much all we know.” He chucked a rock into the pond and got four hops. “That’s pretty weird on its own. He usually cooks breakfast for himself.”

6 A.M. Myra had woken up at 8 A.M., two hours later. “That’s pretty early. Is that normal for him?”

“Oh, yeah, he probably sets his alarm around then. He always makes breakfast and then goes for a jog. And then he needs time to clean up before class…”

“So he got up at his usual time, and then rushed off somewhere.”

“Yeah, I guess. Unless he got up even earlier.” He chucked another rock. Five hops.

Ordinarily, Myra would spin up a few vortices at the opposite end of the pond: a five-point goal, a ten-point goal, and so on. But right now probably wasn’t a good time for tense competition.

“Is that all you wanted to ask?”

“No… I wanted to ask—well, first I wanted to apologize for being evasive yesterday.”

He grunted something she couldn’t make out.

“I, uh, I wasn’t quite sure how to bring this up…” Myra still wasn’t sure how to bring it up, exactly. Myra really didn’t have a clue how Nathan would react to this kind of revelation, or if he’d even believe her, but she needed to throw out at least a morsel of truth if she wanted to get information out of him. “Sorry, can I ask you to keep this between us?”

Nathan squinted at her, but he didn’t immediately answer.

“Sorry, I’m probably making this out like a bigger deal than it is. I don’t think this is a clue to what happened to him or anything.” Nathan nodded for her to go on. “He like, asked me out? Kind of out of nowhere. He was a bit weird about it, too.”

Nathan blinked in bewilderment. “He asked—huh? Wait, when was this?”

“Oh, it—” Shit. How do I answer this? Myra had absolutely no idea where Benkoten had been the day before the first day of class. For all she knew, he could have been with Nathan all day. She didn’t even know when Ben had arrived in the city post-break. As a result, there weren’t very many times Myra could give that she could be sure Nathan wouldn’t directly contradict. “It was in the middle of the night, the morning he disappeared. Maybe 2-3 A.M.? I was having trouble sleeping, so I went for a walk and ran into him.”

“... Really.” He sounded skeptical, maybe because Myra was a shit liar who couldn’t keep a straight face. But it would be hard to call her out on this given the existing accounts that he’d been acting oddly. “You didn’t think him being up in the middle of the night could be important?”

Whoops!

“Fuck, sorry. You’re right. I-I should have said something. Um…” It was time to plow ahead and ask the question she really wanted to ask. “Has he been, like, crushing on me for a while or anything?”

“No… he likes this other girl his year,” Nathan said. “Katerina Lensi. She’s on the student council with him, so he’s been all stressed out over if it’s appropriate to ask her on a date.” Nathan shrugged. “She likes him back, though, she was always pretty obvious about it. She was the first person I asked after he went missing. Did he seem like he was in his right mind when he talked to you? Uh, no offense—but I can’t remember him ever showing any interest in you.”

Of course, Nathan was unaware of the large chunk of time where Ben’s feelings could have evolved. But how had that happened? What would make a girl like her appealing to someone living a month over and over?

“Did he ask you to go with him or anything? Like on a trip with him?” Of course that was a natural question for Nathan to ask given Myra’s obfuscations (lies), though it was completely the wrong direction.

“Ah, no, nothing like that. Perhaps he was just addled over… something.” She tried to dismiss the whole thing. “Hey, by the way, if he comes—I mean, when he comes back—” Way to go, Myra. Great job. “—can you not mention this to him? Just, if he’s been dealing with some kinda crap, I don’t want to cause him more embarrassment over this or anything.” Does that sound reasonable? No, it totally sounds like I’m hiding something, fuck. “I’ll talk to him about it if I need to, it’s just, I don’t want him to know I blabbed about this confession when he wasn’t in his right mind—”

Nathan just nodded, though. “Yeah, I can leave it to you if—oh, shit!” While skipping rocks, Nathan lost track of what he was holding and accidentally chucked his sandwich, which splintered into its constituent ingredients. Myra reached out telekinetically and stopped the food before it hit the water, and slowly pulled the parts back to where they were sitting.

“Thanks.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t able to get the pickles.”

“Eh, don’t worry about it. Thanks for telling me about this, anyway.”

◆

The conversation with Nathan ended amicably, though Myra felt terrible about the deceit, and she could scarcely believe she’d gotten through it without getting caught in something. Myra made it a point to mention to the others that they should keep an eye on his well-being. Meanwhile, she had investigations to continue.

First, Myra tried to follow up on the potential lead in the form of Katerina Lensi. As a member of the student council, Katerina wasn’t that hard to track down. Myra’s pretense for seeking her out was that she was concerned for Ben as Nathan’s friend and that Katerina (being on the student council) might know something. Myra didn’t say anything about a crush.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t very fruitful. Katerina only told her that she’d already talked to Nathan, and she didn’t let much show in the way of personal feelings, so it was hard to tell how upset she was. She said she hadn’t seen any indications of Benkoten acting oddly, but that was to be expected since she had only interacted with him before the semester had started.

In the end, what could she conclude?

Shera had agreed with Myra’s initial assessment, that it sounded like Benkoten had been iterating on getting into her pants. The serendipitous stuff, bumping into her in the lecture hall, liking mint tea, knowing the best way to tutor her, knowing which apprenticeship she would click with… as far as she knew, all that stuff had been optimized for winning her over. He had probably iterated on the duel, too.

But what the hell was he doing with all those drugs? Based on his state of mind, Myra was inclined to believe he hadn’t been intentionally lying, at least not after his mask had come off. At that time, he’d stated that the drugs weren’t, actually, for the sake of forcing himself on her. He had been trying to romance her “the right way,” for as much as his idea of what that meant was messed up. But if that was the case, what were the drugs for? She had already been near-paralyzed, but he had been about to inject her with some pink chemical. What could it possibly accomplish when a volcano was about to destroy their city?

And why had Benkoten acted differently this time? Instead of attempting to meet Myra in the topology class, Benkoten had left campus abruptly, and it wasn’t clear if that decision had anything to do with Myra. It might have been an indication that he knew Myra remembered the previous timeline, and as a result, he wanted to avoid having anything to do with her. If that was the case, he had obviously made this decision before Myra had awoken and thus before he had any chance to observe her acting differently. That could be a pretty big clue as to how Benkoten knows what he knows.

But Myra couldn’t jump to conclusions here. It was still possible that Ben simply had an entirely different objective this iteration, one that was time-sensitive and which forced him to rush off.

So what were his objectives, overall? Surely he would be focused on investigating and preventing the catastrophe. It’s what Myra would do.

… Wouldn’t she?

… Or would she start to develop “side projects”?

Was that what Myra was? A side project? Maybe Ben was off right now, pursuing his real goals, while the previous loop had been a “break” for him? A fun little dating side quest?

“God! This pisses me off!” Myra slammed a fish against the wall. Shera jumped. “How many loops has he been fucking with me?” Fuck, it felt good to speak freely.

“Do you think he would have succeeded eventually? At charming you, I mean?”

“That’s what pisses me off! He was so close! Seriously, all he needed to do at this point was figure out the right way to comfort me after watching Iz get brutalized. Then I would have melted into the palm of his hand! It would have been over!”

Myra paced back and forth while Shera watched her, her face pale. She had been following Myra’s footsteps intently, fidgeting in response to each motion like she was afraid Myra would step too hard or pace in the wrong direction.

“And how many girls has he done this to? I’ve been thinking about it, Shera, and there’s nothing special about me, you know? He probably got bored of Katerina Lensi and decided to branch out. Probably made his way through the whole senior class, then started working his way down! He might have gone after Cynthia, or Iz… Shera, he might have gone after you!”

“I d-don’t think anyone would…” She bit her thumbnail, then looked horrified at it for a second before going to grab her nail clippers and undo whatever damage she perceived.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have… speculated like that.”

“It’s okay.”

Myra didn’t think it was okay, but it was hard to make headway with Shera when she clammed up like that. So she moved on to other things.

◆

Instructor Yam seemed to be making good on his word to teach the class to manipulate lava as the curriculum went in a completely different direction than it had the first time around. How far in advance does plan his lessons? Apparently, he planned this direction entirely from my request.

As nice as that was, Myra was worried the class wouldn’t advance far enough before the eve of the full moon. Instructor Yam was—quite reasonably—spending a lot of time on prerequisites first, probably stuff he would have taught them eventually anyway. Today, they were learning to manipulate boiling water.

“You need the telekinetic equivalent of oven mitts,” Instructor Yam explained. “Otherwise you’ll burn out your own aura terminals. Now, what do you all think is the best element to use to cushion yourself?”

Someone suggested ice. Myra couldn’t fault him. The obvious answer was right sometimes. It was worth a try.

Iz volunteered the correct answer. “Vacuum?”

“Exactly. I’m sure you all know that heat can’t be conducted through a vacuum. This remains true in aura space. Now, there are two ways to go about this. First, you can create a vacuum pocket in the physical world and ‘push’ the liquid around with the vacuum. In other words, you control where the liquid is by determining where it isn’t. The second way is to do the same in aura space, pushing around the liquid with vacuum aura, without actually creating a vacuum in the physical world. The second is a lot more efficient, though the first one has the advantage that the vacuum can protect your physical body as well.”

Yes. That one, Myra thought. Protecting my physical body sounds swell. She still remembered how it felt to cook alive.

“Since it’s safer and easier, we’re going to start with the first method.”

The instructor gave some more detailed instructions and then had them get to practicing. Myra got the hang of this particular exercise pretty quickly—maybe it was easier than usual, or maybe she just had a lot of motivation for it. Iz was a natural as usual, so it left the two of them with little to do towards the end of class.

“Iz, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Yeah?”

“You were in Miirun when it lost access to the Common Library, right?”

Iz tensed up a bit. “Yeah, why?”

“What exactly was that like?”

She crossed her arms and looked down. “It was the worst year of my life. My parents worked at our city’s underground cart service, which broke down immediately. So we didn’t have any income… just about everything broke down, we couldn’t get a reliable source of water for weeks. Every week, the story from the capital changed. One week, we were close to working out a deal with the empire. The next week, the government was determined to replace everything without the Common Library, retrain all its mages and replace all its infrastructure. But they kept flip-flopping so that work never got done… Why are you asking about it now?”

“Actually, um, I just meant, like, what did it feel like in Abstract Space? Like, if you tried to access the Common Library yourself, was it just gone, or what?”

One of the most terrifying things about that night, maybe even more terrifying than the volcano, had been the disappearance of the Common Library. It was like Iz said—far too much crucial infrastructure relied on the Common Library, and magecraft wouldn’t be a tenth what it was without it. Its disappearance would be a catastrophe.

The Raine Empire had the ability to selectively restrict the Common Library, which it did primarily on a geographic basis, thus enabling it to exert power over its subordinate states. It could also restrict access on a person-by-person basis, supposedly, though Myra understood they didn’t do this very much, only to the absolute worst criminals. Her father hadn’t been cut off, for instance. Exactly why they did it this way was unclear to Myra.

At any rate, she very much hoped this was what had happened on the day of the peace talks, that the empire had cut off Casire for some reason, or at least the city of Ralkenon. The alternative…

“No, it wasn’t gone,” Iz said. “We could still feel it, even read some of it. But it was impossible to activate the functionality. There were some efforts to just copy some of it, make a new version we could use. I tried to help, that was actually how I got started learning logokinesis… Those efforts didn’t get very far, though. So many important constructions are expressed in enormously general terms, then specialized… so you need an ocean of theory to do even simple things.”

Shit.

That wasn’t what I experienced at all. The Common Library hadn’t just been rendered inaccessible, it had been completely gone. Abstract Space had gone dark.

How could that have happened?

◆

“Maybe Iz’s account doesn’t mean anything,” Shera suggested. “Maybe the empire just… changed the way it works?”

“Do you really think that’s it?”

Shera didn’t say anything, just bit her lip, which answered the question enough for Myra.

“I mean, it already doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why would the empire disable the Common Library in Ralkenon? When the prince and princess are here? It makes way more sense if this was an attack on the empire. I mean, we already know there was an attack on the empire, anyway.”

“Actually, about that,” Shera cut in. “The prince and princess were both murdered around the time the Common Library went out, right?”

“Well, I don’t know what time they died.”

“But it could have been around the right time?”

“What, you think it’s some kind of dead man’s switch? The death of imperial royalty triggering the Common Library to disappear? I guess I could see them being vindictive enough to create a dead man’s switch. Though I think it’d be attached to the emperor, not his son, yeah? Like… I don’t think the emperor would want to live in a world without the Common Library, even if his family were all dead.”

“Maybe the emperor was assassinated, too?”

“Then this whole speculation is completely baseless. And anyway, suppose they implemented a dead man’s switch like this. Wouldn’t they tell everybody about it? You know, to deter people from assassinating them?”

“Maybe they just told certain people? Maybe since the Unkmire talks were happening, they warned to Unkmire government if anything happened to them—wait no—”

“No, if it’s meant as a threat against Unkmire—”

“They’d disable it in Unkmire, not in Casire. Right.” Shera huffed, frustrated that this direction seemed to be going nowhere. “It’s just that the empire is the most obvious entity to have this kind of capability.” She snapped a finger. “Maybe they were forced into using it?”

Hm. That theory had some merit, Myra thought. “Well, it did rather look like the princess had been tortured.”

“Maybe she gave up a diagram that led to the Common Library controls.”

Even if they had speculated their way to something halfway plausible, that didn’t make their conclusions any less, well, speculative. The idea that the disappearance of the Common Library was connected to the event hall massacre was already an assumption, as was the idea that either of those things was connected to the time reset.

The event hall needed to be investigated. Myra was on the fence about leaving some kind of anonymous tip to campus security (or even the Ralkenon police force) about a planned massacre, but they were already going above and beyond for security, right? Exactly how the culprit had gotten in and out of that event hall was a mystery unto itself, though it wasn’t one worth speculating on without knowing more about the spatial severance process or the hall’s other security functions.

Shera had been interested in something that Myra had almost forgotten was a mystery: the large number of buildings that had collapsed during the earthquake.

Campus buildings were all reinforced with stabilization enchantments, which had surely all failed when the Common Library had disappeared. But then what? It wasn’t like the buildings ought to be structurally unsound without the enchantments. Forget about ‘the Common Library disappearing.’ The buildings had to be more robust to much more common scenarios like failures in aura distribution. Hell, most of the campus buildings were pretty old, save the new astronomy tower, so they probably predated the enchantments. That meant they would definitely have been designed to be robust to earthquakes. Right?

Well, there wasn’t any need to speculate. This was something that could be researched. Sure, it was a little odd to go around asking about building safety specifications, but Myra figured they could come up with an excuse if they had to. Shera volunteered to say that “her father was worried about building safety” or something.

They didn’t need to do anything like that. The administrative office had a copy of the campus safety certifications, and apparently, they were just prepared to show them to anyone who wanted them, no questions asked. Maybe viewing these documents was just a thing people did sometimes. Anyway, the most recent evaluation had been five years ago, which among other things determined that all buildings on campus, even absent the stabilization enchantments, should be able to withstand up to an 8.0 magnitude earthquake. Myra was confident the tremors she felt were nothing close to an 8.0.

“It’s got to be sabotage, right?”

To Myra, this conclusion was obvious. Shera, naturally, was taking her word on most of this, but she didn’t disagree. That someone was willing to do such a thing, or that they had the capability, was a terrifying thought. But it was also one of the few leads they had. Whereas the disappearance of the Common Library had been all but impossible to speculate on, this remained a situation where they could seek out concrete evidence.

“So what do you think, they just bombed the buildings?” Shera asked.

“I suppose they must’ve. I didn’t see any fire, though. The buildings just kinda… collapsed. Like, the roofs caved in.”

“That could probably happen if they set it up right.” Shera didn’t sound sure, though. Myra doubted she was an expert in controlled demolitions. “But it doesn’t have to be set up in advance. Mages might just come and cast in person. After all, that’s probably easier once all of campus security goes down.”

As the month marched on, the pair began investigating the buildings for signs of anything off. This was easier than it sounded—most of the maintenance areas weren’t very well guarded (which admittedly might be part of the reason they were in this mess). To an outsider, the main obstacle would just be getting into the buildings, but Myra and Shera were students, so this wasn’t an issue for them. Also, it really did seem like Shera either slept very little or not at all, and she spent a substantial number of hours prowling around at night, sensing for explosives.

Unfortunately, they didn’t find anything. This didn’t deter Myra, though, who felt that evidence was more likely to show up towards the end of the month.

◆

Time marched on with few surprises. Benkoten Talzatta remained missing, and the imperial events on campus proceeded much as Myra expected. Melaney Barlow planned her party. The prince gave a speech. As the eve of the full moon approached, Myra and Shera began devising their plans for the most eventful night of the month.

And finally, on the last possible day, Instructor Yam brought to class a tub of burning red molten lava.