If traveling to the future was like watching a movie, delving into the past was like wading through muck. And although I knew I could not change the past, being able to run my hands through water and air while feeling matter oozing through my hands, made me feel like I should have been able to change things.

After all, it looked so real, so tangible. I could smell the smells, hear the sounds, taste things that I licked in a moment of desperation. Yet, my sense of touch betrayed my own transient existence inside the past. The murky ooze made it obvious to me that I was only here as an observer. And just like when I moved to the future, I did not stop moving backwards in time in small increments. But unlike with the future, where stopping or moving something would have locked me into that point in the future, I knew stopping in the past would be far worse.

I would become like the ooze I could feel in my hands.

I shuddered. Everything around me, the many memories that had rushed by had been terrifyingly disorienting. By the time I had gotten some control over this domain, I was slurring through my earliest memories in this world, going back through my encounters with Noel and the elves of the Jora tribe. Yet, despite the warmth of some of those memories in my head, I had felt a chill in my heart. I had known that these were not memories come to life. They were phantasmal echoes, that same disgusting muck turning into strange shapes to provoke my memories and tempt me to stop.

These memories were like vampires or demons or ghouls of a sort, they were slimy parasites or all encompassing menaces, hell bent on consuming everything they could. Thankfully, reaching out and touching them, moving them, interfering with them, was not dangerous, since I couldn’t change the past. The only thing I couldn’t afford to do was stop.

Which meant I kept going past my own time in this world. My ability could not reach me in my old world, which meant it went wild both in time and space. I flipped between the villages of the elves on the Plains of Serenity, the Izlandi Kingdom, the Singing Horde, the Lux Republic, even smaller tribes and villages that didn’t belong to any major nation. I saw communities of people from different races living together or competing with one another.

Moments of happiness.

Moments of sorrow.

Moments that rekindled the warmth in my heart.

Moments that sent a chill down my spine.

I had to look away when a village was ravaged by monsters. Blood and gore and misery of the worst sort. Moments of heroism and sacrifice that were ultimately pointless. Everybody would die. But the worst part was that I was experiencing everything in reverse.

Tell me, how would you feel if you saw dead children turn into dying children turn into crying children turn into panicking children turn into happy, carefree, ordinary kids enjoying a stroll with their parents? If Alfred Hitchcock said that a ticking time bomb that the audience knows about is better and more suspenseful than one that merely explodes at the final moment, then what can one say about a time bomb that has already exploded, showing the audience the grisly results before reconstructing the happy scene that preceded it?

I followed the life of an old beastwoman in snippets. From her death bed to finding out that her adult son had died in battle to losing her home in a flood to playing with her grandchildren. I watched her children get married. I observed as she brought up her own children. She lost three as babies and four others made it to adulthood. Her husband died soon after she had had all of her kids and she could not get remarried. Instead, her kids helped her take care of the farm. But in reverse, I saw her hopelessly in love with her husband. I excused myself from the more intimate details of her life, but her happiness in those early years was palpable. I returned to her marriage, her life with her parents in their ancestral village, the first time she met her future husband when he came to visit from the other village. I saw her playing with the other kids, with her siblings, and losing her own mother and unborn sister one stormy winter evening. I focused more on her relationship with her mother as I followed her childhood, dampening the warm scenes in front of my eyes with the tears she shed when she lost her mother.

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I ended my strange reverse survey of this random woman’s life when she appeared as a baby clad in cloth in her mother’s arms, reaching out for her father’s finger. The family cuddled together, happy for their firstborn and the future that, from their perspective, held promise but which for me had already unfolded in some detail.

I kept going. I saw more lives, more experiences, more sadness and happiness mixing together like a sweet and sour curry. I could detail them all here, but that would not make for good entertainment. And that is what you are here for, isn’t it? Entertainment.

I went back. Far back. Back before the Kingdom and the Republic and the Horde. I went to strange places, all on this same continent, which perhaps confirmed this was the only continent in this world. I dropped in on tribes on the empty plains, a few island dwellers, and even a group of humans who had set up shop on a series of rafts on a lake. The diversity of this world was heartening, yes, and it was fascinating to watch these civilizations fall, grow, and establish themselves in that order, but it wasn’t anything revolutionary.

What was revolutionary was seeing evolution in reverse. More specifically, domestication. Monsters, plants, even difficult terrain. The peoples on the other side of the mountain had made a lot of progress over many generations, and I was breezing past them at lightning speed. Many things that I had brought to the humans came to the demons, fairies, spirits, and beastmen over many, many years, and after a lot of trial and error.

And of course, I saw the elves. I hadn’t been able to see the elves that had crossed over the mountains after Noel and I were pushed into the future, since my magic had been too unwieldy in the beginning, but now I could see the way the elves of the Plains of Serenity setting up their civilization around the Oracle and The Terrible.

Many lives were ruined by the Oracle. I saw a young man being sacrificed by the Oracle, then I saw him being tortured and admonished, declared insane and condemned in front of other elves, with his weeping partner unable to save him. I knew his name, he had been mentioned once before, Arma Kisi, the third exile.

I went further and found another sacrifice condemned by the Oracle. The elves called her the Witch of Desire and she had a strange first name: Flying. Perhaps that was why the Simurgh liked her enough to almost turn her into its Ikon, although in the end, the Immortal did not care enough to fight for her when she was killed the Oracle in cold blood, probably on the orders of her jealous and pitiful deity. She was the second exile.

It took a lot longer to reach the first exile, but I finally arrived at the point where an old man lay dying in the middle of a forest. He scratched runes into stones and all but walked into what would become his tomb, many years later. I recognized the tomb, the runes, and the location. This was the resting place of the Mad King Barson Jora. As he lay dying in the tomb, I could not help but ask if he had been mad at all. He had a grim, stately appearance, and a serious countenance that made it difficult to imagine him ever cracking a joke.

I saw Barson Jora and the difficult life he had lived. He fought monsters and other elves, especially those who were under the influence of the Evil Eye. Eventually, only the Oracle remained, except, this time the Immortal of Evil had decided to intervene somewhat directly. He sent down The Terrible, a five star monster far beyond the capabilities of a mere elfin king. King Barson Jora had no choice but to surrender. I saw the moment the happiness was knocked out of his eyes, the moment when he realized war was inevitable and his people would not be united under his rule.

I also saw the moment that he began reading many runes out loud, and I slowly learned the language that had been written outside the cave of The Terrible. Funnily enough, it took me all this time to finally read those words. Funnier still, I realized learning the language didn’t help at all. I already knew essentially all I needed to know about the elves and their history.

Or at least, that’s what I thought, until I saw Barson Jora light up a fire with magic, and look in my direction with a strange smile.