The first rays of dawn filtered through the windows. I hadn’t slept. The previous night’s horrors replayed in my mind over and over again. They clung to me like a second skin. Sherry's cold corpse. Uncountable bodies, many so disfigured that I couldn't even deduce their identities.

The survivors's list remained uncertain, and with it, the identity of potential spies as well.

I retrieved a fresh notebook from the shelf and set it on my desk. Vengeance demanded strategy; anger alone would not serve me here. With trembling hands, I opened the cover and began sketching lines and circles—structuring the labyrinth of questions tangled in my mind.

At the center, I drew the academy’s defenses—layers of adaptive wards meant to withstand the most dangerous of threats. Their impenetrability had been my pride, and now, their failure felt like a knife twisting in my gut. How could they fail so spectacularly unless someone had fed their secrets to our enemies?

My thoughts darkened as I jotted names—those few in my inner circle who knew of the sigils, who might have been able to override them. The same people I had once trusted implicitly.

As I listed names, my stomach churned. Could some of them even be alive? Who among them had betrayed me?

I conjured the communicator again, muttering Arthur’s name. The device brightened, and his fatigued face emerged.

“Aldric,” he greeted wearily. “Did you find something already?”

“I found some leads,” I began. “Two months ago, Sherry and I integrated a new layer of defensive sigils around the academy. The encryption was unbreakable—or so we thought. Beyond her and me, only a select few were privy to the details.”

Arthur’s face hardened. “Are you implying someone in your inner circle gave them the key to bypass the wards?”

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I nodded. “What else explains it? Someone with detailed knowledge fed them what they needed. And if one of my own betrayed me…”

Arthur' voice dropped. “Think carefully, Aldric. Could it have been desperation? Blackmail? Anyone in your ranks showing signs of… struggle?”

I hated the plausibility in his suggestion, my stomach churning as I replayed the faces of colleagues, friends and allies. “Struggle doesn’t justify the annihilation of everything we’ve built, if the spy needed help he could have asked Sherry or me” I snapped. “But I’ll dig deeper. There has to be a trace. Something we’ve overlooked.”

Arthur nodded grimly. “Be careful where you dig. Your spies may have the backing of the Obsidian Order, or they might have been left alive to lead you into a trap.”

His image dissolved into the ether, leaving me alone with the lingering weight of his warning.

I rested for a moment, closing my eyes while massaging my aching temples.

After a few minutes, I reopened my notebook, scratching out broader possibilities and abandoning the certainty of trust. Friends, colleagues—I couldn’t afford to dismiss anyone. Not until I understood why Sherry hadn’t used the artifact.

But even my grief couldn’t hold back a darker compulsion. There was a way. My eyes landed on my final page of notes— my temporal magic. A spell I had created in my laboratory, a spell that had worked. For a minute.

Stretching that to hours or even days posed risks I couldn’t ignore. Chronal distortion, rupture of events. Death.

Yet, the carnage was vivid in my memory— If I could undo that horror, no cost was too high.

No, not yet. First, I needed to know the truth behind the Obsidian Order’s grip on us, and why they had chosen us as their target. Answers first. And if they refused to surface in this timeline, I would tear another into being to force them out.

I closed the notebook and leaned back in my chair, exhaling shakily. For now, one thing alone kept me from losing my mind was their faces. Sherry, my colleagues, my students. The many who had been cut down indiscriminately. I needed to uncover the truth and go back to the past to save them.

“For you,” I murmured to the silent room. “For all of you, I’ll make this right.”

I had an idea on how the find the culprits. The magical tower had an unparalleled magical surveillance, its arcane crystals recording events across the region. Despite the academy’s protective wards rendering its interior undetectable, the comings and goings at its borders would still have left traces here—footprints in time that could not be erased.