I had to stop. I steadied myself against the brick wall and gasped for breath. I had escaped Cyri, but that wasn't enough. Margaret wasn't going to give up. She wasn't going to rest, and she wasn't going to let me rest. She needed to stop me. Rather, she needed to need to stop me. She needed what she was doing to be a kindness. A harsh kindness. One that most didn't have the stomach for, but remained kind nonetheless. I didn't stand in her way because I could reverse her spell with mine. I stood in her way because I too, wanted to be kind.

But if what she was doing was good, truly good, and necessary, then ending it needed to be cruelty. It needed to be wrong, and it needed to be stopped. I needed to be stopped. I didn't need to reflect on this to understand it. I knew the moment Cyri stepped through that door. I knew before that. When I saw her eyes as her mother died, I understood. The desire to maintain the pedestal of our heroes. Of our parents. The ways we twist and contort our own souls to reflect the image they present us. I understood it all.

She wasn't choosing between me and whatever her plan was. It wasn't about stopping me from ending it. It was about her father. It was what I represented to his memory. Keeping the dirt off our personal portraits of our loved ones... I understood that. And I understood hurting someone else to do it. It was so easy to justify, a little at a time. The pain we inflicted was so easy to dismiss in service of loyalty. To revel in, even. And in Margaret's case, it must have felt like the only option. Because that night in her mother's bedroom... that memory required either her father's perfection or her mother's agony. It hurts to allow monsters to be monsters in your heart, when they have a face you love.

I had escaped, from Cyri. It was easy to do the first time. I led her to a quiet lot, stopped the world around us, and fled. I remained unsure if she had a way to track me or if she just knew a stranger would need to stay at the inn. It had taken her some time to find me, so I hoped it was the latter. It was a foolish hope. Because it was fulfilled. I hadn't considered what that might mean. Not until I got away. I didn't go near the girls or Harrison, trusting Marcus to deliver the note to them and fearing the consequences of my proximity. I asked around about the local library instead. If I couldn't confront Margaret or the quieted this time, I could track down any knowledge I could on soul magic.

But before I made it, I heard a scream. A scream from a woman I had never heard before, at a time and place that had always been safe, on every other loop. "Don't hurt him!" A woman screamed and I nearly bolted like a rabbit in an open field. Then the glass broke. The window of a nearby home shattered and a man flew through it, his clothes torn and his back bloody. His glasses shattered against the hard cobblestone as his skull bounced against it, leaving a bloody stain in its wake. Glass from his spectacles cut into his eye, leaving it as an unusable, swollen mess. I nearly vomited as I stepped back, failing to avoid the pooling blood around my boots.

"Oh fuck, Oh Aethon, please, n-" the woman's voice cried and I looked in her direction. The ashen skin of another man blocked my view of the crying woman, but it was clear what had happened. I started chanting as quickly as I could, desperate to avoid a mistake in the spell but equally desperate to finish it as fast as possible. I was too slow. By the time the blue aura left the heavy grimoire on my hip and flew to the corpse inside the ruined home, the Quieted body had already forced his victim into the remains of the shattered glass, tearing her throat open. My aura surrounded him anyway, and his body replayed the violent motions of grabbing and murdering his victims.

He did not, however, return to his peaceful death. It had been more than an hour since he had turned into... this. It didn't do nothing, however. As soon as the aura faded, he locked his eyes on me. Once he did, it was barely a breath before he charged me with a speed no living man could withstand. He threw himself through the window with more grace than I would have expected, and was on me before I could form the first syllable of 'Still World'. His hands closed around my throat to prevent me from doing exactly that.

I tried to grip his hands and pull them off, but he lifted me from the ground and began to strangle me in the air. My feet flailed a foot above the ground and my vision faded. I was ready to accept the end of this loop, when I fell to the ground in a heap. His hands were still wrapped tightly around my throat but their grip was gone. My head hit the stone and the fingers loosened, allowing me to breathe again and returning color to the edges of my vision. I gasped for breath and my hand frantically reached around me to find the earth.

It was a long, terrifying moment before I realized what had happened. All around me, the remains of the quieted man decorated the road. It was like a statue had shattered and the stone bits had yet to be swept from the road, except... I could see the muscle and sinew in each piece. It reminded me of the body in the Mayor's home, although the... mess wasn't so obvious. Perhaps because of the longer time between his death and this, the blood was thicker and more congealed. As I looked up, an older man looked over large round spectacles with terrified eyes. His hands struggled to carry a massive potted plant with a large crack near the bottom.

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He trembled as he looked down at me, and his eyes watered. The thick lenses he looked through magnified them several times and made this almost impossible to miss. "Are you alright, miss?" A young boy asked and I turned to find him holding a large, cracked, walking stick. He held his free hand out to me, and I accepted it to regain my footing. As I did I realized the two weren't alone. A half dozen people surrounded me, all carrying different makeshift weapons and ruined household objects. The state of my assailant's body made perfect sense at that point. A few things did.

This was why, in every other loop, Margaret had been more careful. She'd held the quieted back until night, burning down entire communities at once. Barring the doors, and crushing anyone who seemed to escape too quickly. Or perhaps it was just me, the person who could fight her attack off. She wanted the Quiet to remain a rumor. To stop people from fleeing early or fighting back. Because sometimes, in a corner or tragedy, people will keep each other safe. If they did that, and if the Quiet became more than a rumor, well. It would be like the third day of the first loop. People would run and be killed by the Quiet anyway, and Margaret may not have been able to spare any of them. Or, what she considered sparing them, anyway.

I looked around at all the people who had saved me. People I hadn't met in a single loop, all running to aid me as soon as they saw what was happening. The poor old man, struggling to carry his cracked plant and the weight of what he'd done with it. I sighed. "Thank you, so much," I said, bowing slightly to all of them.

"What was that, miss?" The boy who helped me asked. I paused.

"It was... it was a man wearing someone else's pain," I answered. As they all looked at me with confusion, then at the remains of the shattered corpse with revulsion, I began to chant. Their eyes fixed back on me as the blue sparks skittered across my skin and swirled around my grimoire. I Cast mindlessly, helping the two victims of Margaret's search for me. That's what this was, there was no doubt about that. This had never happened before. Not here and not now. Not on the first day.

Margaret had given up on strategy. She had let go of the idea of keeping everyone in the city. She'd have to rely on the mayor closing the gates. If too many people died by the Quiet, she would handle it then. But she wanted to get rid of me. That was why these people were dead. I chanted, knowing this, and my aura left me like too much blood, leaving me tired and dizzy as it enveloped the first man to die in the road. People stared. Magic sparked. My body throbbed. I had relied on too many spells already. But I had to cast again, for the woman whose throat was still bisected by the broken glass of her window.

As usual, neither understood what had happened tot hem, or how the other was alive. Dozens of questions from spectators wrestled for my attention, but my vision blurred. I needed rest. Rest I knew I wouldn't get. The rest of the day was much the same. The Quieted didn't wait wherever Margaret held them; they stalked the streets and killed indiscriminately. If any saw me, they changed their focus immediately. Every single one of them carried pain on their faces like trees carried leaves. 'Undone' helped a few but not most. Enough that I had to try, whenever I saw them. So I trudged through the city. Hiding. Healing. Aching.

If it weren't for the teal sparks that erupted from the dead when I brought them back, I would have collapsed long before the end of the day. Part of me wanted to end the loop early. I pictured the water I used to watch. The water that could wash away my memories if I buried my head inside and left it there. But I just... couldn't do it. I had died and died, and died. It had been painful. It had been terrifying. But in a way, the fear of the result had begun to grow dull. But the fear of doing it myself remained. Like if I took that step once, I could do it again. And once I'd grown dull to that... the end of the loop would be more dangerous than anything else.

I never made it back to the girls. Long before the sun went down, I smelled fire on the wind. It could have been anything. It could have been an unrelated altercation. It could have been a family cooking their dinner. I was so far from them when I first smelled it, it would have been easy to dismiss. But I knew. I could feel it. She had attacked early. My stomach churned and I had to fight to stay inside myself. I had to hope that Marcus had made it. That the girls had made it to Hadley's if they had read it. I couldn't know, and I couldn't do anything about it.

I was so, so tired. Every spell drew water from stone and threatened to take my mind with it. But I cast, and cast, and cast, and tried not to picture Junia huddled in a burning home while I was too far to protect her. I don't remember when I made it to the library. I couldn't read signs anymore by the time I did. The fatigue and the guilt held their hands over my mouth and blurred my vision. All I know is I found myself in a quiet corridor, surrounded by books. There was no screaming. No crying. No violence.

So I fell to my knees, then to my face. I heard my head thump against the carpeted floor, but felt nothing as I finally stopped fighting, and my vision faded to black.

End of Day 1