“You are here!” said the Mad King of the elves, Barson Jora. He had a massive smile plastered on his face, stretching from ear to ear and dipping down to his chin like drool. “Oh, how long I have waited! My love! My muse! The object of my fantasies! How I have missed you. Come, come, take a seat on this patch of dirt. It isn’t as glamorous as the palaces of my people, but what can be a greater seat than the planet itself?” He swept his hand over a patch of dirt, sending a puff of dust flying to the side. The dirt became more erratic and disturbed than before. Nobody would want to sit there.

I blinked and looked around. Then I looked back at the Mad King, my heart dropping in my chest. His words had made sense.

His words had made sense!

I was supposed to be traveling back in time. All of the words I had been hearing so far had been in reverse. Looking around at the trees confirmed that the leaves were blowing with the wind. Sounds and noises from far away in the forest all sounded like they normally did, which was strange considering the circumstances. Even the sun in the sky, peeking through the canopy, seemed to be moving in its usual direction. I stepped forward a little and brushed my hand against a tree.

It was solid.

“Are you feeling shy?” said Barson Jora. “Please, don’t be shy. I am yours. I will always be yours. Come sit here with me! Oh, what a lovely, lovely day. You know, I almost thought you had forsaken me. No, not that I would ever truly think that! Please, you must believe me, I always believed! I always believed! I would never think badly of you. Never, ever!” He shook his head wildly from side to side like a dog shaking off water.

I stopped moving towards him. I also realized that my body was no longer in my control. No, it was in my control, but it was moving on its own. I knew that if I wanted to, I could step away from this point in time and I would be able to continue my journey. I could keep running further and further into the past while thinking of a way to unite my temporal domains. I would be able to use that knowledge to make new spells that would help me take on the Immortals and maybe even return to my world.

But something stopped me from running away. It was a feeling, a strange feeling. As if the importance of this moment in time had been impressed upon me from some sort of universal force. Call it a divine will, karma, or the will of the universe itself. No, it was the knowledge in my head. The knowledge that came with the temporal domains and which was slowly mixing together inside my head as I explored my abilities.

Of course I could stop going backwards through time at any moment. I had control of the Future, after all, didn’t I? All I needed to do was switch from the Past straight to the Future. I could not dwell in the past, but I could make it run the right way around, couldn’t I? And that was exactly what I was doing right now. Except, it wasn’t me who was doing it. It was another force, another will, that had been here once before and which considered this moment in time an incredibly important one.

“My beloved Desire! Please do not leave me again!” said the Mad King as he fell to his knees and groveled in front of me. The large, well built elfin king was crying fat tears, sobbing incoherently, and even began to cough from the dust he had kicked into his own face.

I wanted to step forward and pick him up, but my instincts told me that doing so would interrupt the memory. It was with that thought that I realized this was a memory and that the domain of the Past could be used this way. I also realized this was one way of collecting more knowledge. Specifically, knowledge about the people of the past. Whether that knowledge could be turned into magic spells or if it was simply the kind of knowledge that would help me better understand this world, I didn’t know.

“Barson,” came a voice from my mouth. My mouth hadn’t moved nor did I feel like I had said the words myself. The voice was simply coming from where my mouth was. It was also a voice that I recognized. With a singsong quality and a tone as smooth as velvet, it was the voice of the Simurgh in its united form.

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“Yes!” said Barson in a hurry.

“You have failed me,” said the voice of the Simurgh.

“No, I mean, yes, of course, you are wise and kind and merciful, yes, so merciful! I have failed, please punish me!” said Barson. His voice changed midway through his groveling statements as if he had seen something strange in my face. Was he able to read the Simurgh’s facial expressions? Or perhaps he could feel its anger and frustration. Somehow, I could feel those emotions too.

“To think, the great king of the elves couldn’t defeat a usurper from his own ranks,” said the Simurgh with a sigh. “I suppose I must accept some of the blame. I should have known that the king of a fallen race would never be able to stand on his own feet. I was preoccupied for the smallest of times by that silver menace, and you lost everything to the red star. What a pathetic mongrel you are, Barson.”

Barson Jora lowered his head, his slender lips trembling as he began to cry once again. “I had it all under control, my Desire. I rebuilt my army after our disastrous defeat to the monster horde. My warriors were well armed and powerful. You should have seen their magic as it rained down upon the monsters on the plains. We were so successful, I renamed the site of our victory to the Plains of Serenity! And it was all thanks to you and your magic, my Desire! I passed down your knowledge and wisdom, exactly as you told me to. Every spell you taught me, my warriors learned a bastardization of it. Nobody was as powerful as me, yes, but the monsters, they couldn’t face us at all! You must believe me, my Desire, we were unstoppable! We were unstoppable!”

“And yet you were stopped,” said the Simurgh in its regal voice.

Barson’s face paled, his words left him, and he shrank deeper into himself. His slender frame trembled as if a terrible thought had run through his head, and he raised his eyes to meet my gaze and forced out a sentence, weakly, “Are you here to punish me?”

The Simurgh did not reply for the longest time. It let the silence stagnate. No leaves rustled, no wind whistled, and no birds chirped but perhaps that was a given. Barson held his breath but he held my gaze with a surprising tenacity. As if he was willing to die, but not without facing his end with some semblance of bravery and honor.

I took a step forward. I reached out a hand and pressed it against Barson Jora’s forehead. The Mad King did not flinch. He kept looking past the hand, trying to meet my eyes, even as I felt them close.

It was the strangest feeling, thinking that my eyes were closed but still being able to see everything. Just because the Simurgh had closed its eyes did not mean that I, who had come to this time and place as an observer, would have to do the same. I looked on as strange words spilled out of my mouth and a gentle harmony filled the air. The stale silence was filled with a macabre song, one that reminded me of funerals and death.

The somber song slowly turned the grass, the leaves, the very scenery of the place into a dull grayscale painting. No, it was closer to a pencil sketch made quickly on a piece of scratch paper. Smudges appeared along Barson Jora’s face and big fat globs of black ink fell out of his eyes. The Mad King opened his mouth and some harmonious words escaped him but his song was cut short by a record scratch and replaced quickly with music.

Haunting, dizzying, chaotic music.

Music filled with thumping feet and beating chests and clinking pottery. String instruments discordantly dancing with drums and rattling bones and some manner of reed pipes. The music was livelier than the Simurgh’s music, so they clashed harshly with each other.

Imagine a funeral hymn played over a guitar solo. The two did not mix and if I was not protected by the power of time, I knew that I would be doing exactly what the Mad King was doing.

The Mad King laughed. His laughter was cacophonous and haunting. It felt like somebody forced to laugh even though he was drowning in sorrow. A truly painful, pitiful laugh. In his eyes, I could see his regret, his sadness. His eyes sad sorry and he tried to voice those words too. But Madness would not let him apologize to the Simurgh. And even if he had been able to squeeze out an apology, the Simurgh was unlikely to accept it. After all, what Immortal would listen to the words of a traitor?

A small stone slab appeared above Barson’s head.

The scene froze. Then it began playing in reverse.

I kept walking into the past.