Standing there, on a recreation of Crossroads, I was supposed to find something. Apparently it was important enough for the Reapers I had just helped to go through all this trouble, but for whatever reason they didn’t want to just come out and specify what to look for. They had made sure to tell me that this was exactly what Crossroads had been like at the exact moment that I went back in time with Ehn, so it was probably relevant to that. Was this about saving Gaia? What would be somewhere in the Crossroads buildings that could help with that? Well, obviously the location of her prison. But would they just have that written down?
Wait, hang on, what had that Reaper who looked like Gaia said? Illuminate. She said I could find something here that would be illuminating. That had to mean the lighthouse, right? Maybe there was something in there that would help us do something about the Reaper who was locked in there back in my time.
Okay, so I needed to go look there. That was a good place to start, anyway. After glancing over my shoulder to look at the door into the girls dorm where I had spent so much of the previous year, before the rebellion was brought back into full swing, I swallowed hard and then turned back to pointedly walk away from the dorm and head for the lighthouse building off in the distance.
God, it was weird being back here. Even if I wasn’t really back at all. Just being in this recreation of the place made me feel incredibly awkward and anxious. I kept glancing around in every direction, half-expecting Ruthers or one of the other Loyalist Committee people to show up and demand to know what I thought I was doing.
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure which was worse, those thoughts or the memories of all the good times I’d had around this place. Sure, it had been… probably over a year since we all left (time travel made that hard to keep track of), and there had been a lot of secrecy and anxiety just from living in a place full of people who thought that so many ones I cared about should be killed. But still, there had been good times too. This place had opened my eyes to so much, had taught me so much. And there had been very good people there, trying to change things. It was where I had met both Shiori and Avalon, where I met Sarah and Sands, Columbus and Sean. It was where I met Koren and Wyatt. It was… it was where so much had happened.
And now I needed to push all that out of my mind and focus on what I was actually here for. Too bad I still wasn’t sure what that was. But on the off chance that I was right about the Reaper Bob Illuminating thing, I headed that way.
At first, I thought it was a dead end. The lighthouse looked the same at the top aside from the fact that the skull wasn’t there. I guess they didn’t replicate that part, which was fair enough. It probably seemed pretty morbid. But still, there was nothing up here that stood out as something I should see. Especially nothing that they would go through all this trouble to show me.
Hold on, wait. She’d said it was important for me to see this place at this exact time. Why? Why was seeing the grounds at this time important? Illuminating and time, illuminating and time… the sun! It wasn’t about the lighthouse, it was about the sun! Or the facsimile the Crossroads pocket dimension used that would–whatever, it was the sun! The illumination at this precise time, where it was in the sky? Obviously I wasn’t supposed to just look at it, but what else…
In that moment, the light from the sun reflected off the glass fixture that normally held the skull. The sun had reached the perfect spot to make it almost blinding, forcing me to squint away from it. In the process, I looked up. And that’s when I saw it. Lettering–no, runes. There were spellforms drawn up there. They were only readily-visible now, with the sun reflecting off the glass and bouncing upward. It was like they were intentionally hidden. But now that I knew they were there, I enchanted a couple rocks with light and used those to get a better look. Yeah, definitely a spell. It was… it was very subtly siphoning power away from what I was guessing would be the skull. But what for? And why would whoever was doing that need to be secretive about it? What– oh, it was sending the power somewhere nearby. That bit there on the end of the spellform dictated an exact direction and distance.
Quickly, I ran to the edge of the railing just outside the top of the lighthouse and squinted off to see where the power was going. It took a minute, but finally I figured it out. The main building. It was sending the power it was siphoning from the skull off to the main building. More specifically, unless I missed my guess, to the headmistress’s office.
No, the headmaster’s office now, I supposed. The headmaster, Liam Mason. Some part of me still thought of it as Gaia’s office. I couldn’t even really see the twins’ father as the leader of the school. He’d been a fine teacher, sure, despite his other negative qualities. But headmaster? Was there really no better or more qualified choices? Or was being headmaster his reward for staying loyal and turning against his loved ones for the second time in a row?
Yeah, suffice to say, I had some unresolved anger when it came to how Sarah and Sands’ dad acted. He had betrayed my mom the first time around, forcing the rebellion out into the open. And now when he had another chance, he still stuck to his same old ways. At least he was consistent in his beliefs, I supposed. But I still wanted to punch him in the face, even if it wouldn’t get me anywhere or accomplish anything useful.
Okay, now I really needed to find out what the hell was going on here. Quickly, I jogged down the lighthouse steps and headed for the main building. My stomach was twisting itself into knots, and that feeling of anxiety didn’t get any better as I made my way inside. My eyes continued to scan through the hallway, taking in the paintings, the doors leading into classes I would never attend again, the cushy chair in the corner where I had taken my first book on magic to study in between watching everyone else running around, just because I didn’t want to miss anything by being in my room. I saw ghosts out of the corner of my eye. Not real ghosts, the sort that came in images of myself and my friends moving through those halls and into those classes.
Pushing all that out of my mind, I continued up the stairs and found my way to the entrance into Gaia’s office. Wait, no, Mason’s, damn it. Only once I was actually in front of the door did I realize the problem. Every other time I’d been there, Gaia had just sort of gestured and made the door dissolve like a waterfall. Did the actual door even work? Would these Reapers have recreated that whole thing perfectly even to the point of not leaving me a way to get inside if I couldn’t figure out how to open it?
Well, only one thing to do really. Taking a breath, I reached out to try the doorknob. As I’d half-expected, it didn’t move. Not in the ‘it’s locked’ sort of way, but in a ‘the knob isn’t even really meant to turn’ way. It was all just decorative. And peering closer, I couldn’t even see a crack around any part of the door. It was flush with the wall, like it was the wall. Which made me actually pay attention to what my item sense was saying, only to find that it said… nothing. It didn’t tell me anything about this door, like the thing wasn’t even there. Which–well, yeah maybe it wasn’t a real door. But my item sense was acting like there was nothing there aside from a solid wall with nothing beyond it.
Clearly the school’s leader was supposed to be afforded some pretty good privacy. A fact I confirmed for myself by reaching out to try to get a look at the area beyond the door by using my power to mark objects and then see through them. Nothing happened. Which could have been because this whole place was just a construct, but as powerful as the Reapers were, I was pretty sure they had made this place accurate enough for that to have worked here if it would have in the real Crossroads. Which meant this door was protected against that particular power.
By the same token, I tried possessing the wood of the door to get through that way. Again, nothing happened. Either it wasn’t actually wood, or again, it was just protected. Which made sense, naturally. But still, I needed to find another way to get through it. Just on the off chance that it was this simple, I tried knocking a few times. It felt ridiculous, and I probably would’ve jumped out of my skin if there was a response. But no, nothing happened. I waited another moment before trying again. Still nothing.
Okay, I had to think about this logically. They couldn’t be certain of what powers any particular headmaster would have, and forcing them to use a magic spell every time they wanted to go in and out of their office would be ridiculous. Not that doing so would be all that hard for them, but it just felt silly to think that they’d have to have a magical rune drawn on something so they could activate it just to get through this door. If I wanted to have this protective, very mysterious, very cool waterfall-type magic door, but I also wanted the person who was authorized to be able to easily and repeatedly use it while not knowing exactly what powers they might have, what would I do?
Technology, I realized belatedly. I’d use technology. When I’d seen Gaia activate the door herself, she’d gestured at it with her hand. I knew her main Natural Heretic power had to do with manipulating technology, so maybe she had simply activated a mechanism that others used a remote control, or even some other power for. I could see someone like Liam walking around with a keyfob and just pressing the button on it to activate the door. Yeah, that made sense. And another thing that made sense was that they would have another way into the room if they didn’t have their key (or whatever) with them and couldn’t use any other power or magic to do so. There had to be some sort of redundancy, right? That was just basic logic.
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Looking up and down the hall, I frowned thoughtfully before starting to feel around the wall for some sort of hidden button. My fingers traced over the paneling, across the frame for a nearby painting, and along the door itself. Nothing. And my item sense wasn’t being any help on that front either. Because that would be too easy.
It took me a couple minutes, but I eventually found what I was looking for. A few feet down the hall was a painting of that Kaiser Willhelm guy. From what I had heard, in addition to being the leader of Germany, he was also a headmaster here. Right in the middle of his suit jacket, an image of a brass button turned out to be a real button. When I pressed it, there was an immediate effect. The nearby door waterfalled away just like I’d seen before.
Something told me there was more to this process in the real version. I doubt that just anybody could come through and press that to get inside. There was probably a verification process that wasn’t here for obvious reasons. But in any case, the door was open. So I quickly walked through and took in the sight of Gaia’s office again. Yeah, every single time I tried to think of it as Mason’s, it didn’t sound right in my head.
Unfortunately, looking around the office didn’t really yield much at first either. I felt the obvious pangs of nostalgia from memories of being taught by Gaia herself, but I couldn’t tell where that spell energy was being used, or even where it was stored. And I couldn’t find any big obvious notes detailing exactly where the former headmistress was being held either. They weren’t nice enough to simply put a big map on the wall with a red circle on it next to Gaia’s name.
After a few minutes of searching the place, however, I did find something. First, there was a door in a back corner of the room that I swore hadn’t been there before. When I went to open it, there was a series of clicks and an affirmative beep before I was able to turn the knob. I wasn’t sure if that was the Reapers giving me access to this, or my auto-unlocking power. Either way, I was able to step into a smaller room. It wasn’t quite a closet or anything. Instead, it looked like one of the special reinforced spell testing rooms elsewhere on the grounds. Had Mason put this in to use that energy he was siphoning off the Reaper skull without damaging the office?
I wasn’t sure, but there were definite signs that he had been using it. Scorch marks on the walls and floor, dents here and there, and the remains of various spell forms drawn everywhere. It was like he kept drawing runes, testing them, and erasing some but not all. Probably because he was still in the middle of working out how to combine a few different spells, or adjust one in particular. Giving more credit to that was the existence of several piles of various magical instruction books scattered through the room. Whatever he was doing in here, it had to be pretty complicated.
Well, of course it was, if he had been drawing energy from Bob to do so.
There was a thick tarp over the far wall from the entrance. Reaching up, I took hold of it from one side and peeked underneath, only to see a lot more magical stuff drawn there. Fresh, pristine spellforms. With a grunt, I ripped it down and took in what I was looking at.
Well, it was definitely a complicated spell of some sort. From the look of it, the thing wasn’t even half done. There were pieces of multiple spells that weren’t connected to one another on various spots of the wall, and it looked like he was having trouble working out how to interweave them. But what were they supposed to do? I had a bad feeling about this, a hard lump in the pit of my stomach. He was Sarah and Sands’ dad, he wouldn’t be trying to do anything too dark, would he? Even if he had betrayed my mother to expose the rebellion…
Swallowing back the feelings that thought brought up, I tried to focus on deciphering what the spells I was looking at were supposed to do. After a moment, I started leafing through the books to compare with the images on the wall.
Even then, this would have been basically impossible. There are dozens of books and I had no idea which ones he had been focusing on. Or which ones he had already discarded. Flipping through every single page looking for specific images matching what I was looking at on the wall would have taken days to actually narrow down.
But I had a secret weapon. Looking around at all those books, I set them aside and sat down in the middle of the room. Crossing my legs under me, I rested my hands on my knees and took a deep breath before letting it out. Meditation. I was basically meditating, focusing on one of my other lives out of the trillions upon trillions that had been locked away from my own sanity. I couldn’t access everything those other versions of me had experienced, not even a tiny percentage. It just would’ve been too much. But I did have some knowledge that was only superficially locked away, just enough to stop me from casually remembering it. The Reapers had left me with a direct connection to several hundred different duplicates that I could reach for when I needed to. But it had to be like this. I had to take the time to meditate and connect with my other selves. All of this was for my own safety. It would’ve been far too easy to break my sanity by being able to easily recall so many lives all at once.
The version of myself I was reaching out toward had served as a friend and companion for a very old librarian in a magical library. His name was Marnnik, and he had been killed over a million years ago. He was a four-legged, tall figure with a long giraffe-like neck and equally long arms. Those allowed him to look through the massive library shelves more easily.
Marnnik also really liked puns, though it took a bit of special translation between languages to understand the actual pun itself. Either way, I knew that other-me, who had become his guide and friend through understanding and accepting his own death, had felt even more endeared to him thanks to that. It reminded her-me of Shiori.
After meditating for a bit, I opened my eyes. Only I wasn’t opening them.
“Well,” my voice announced, “this is weird, huh? I sure feel like the real one, but here you are. You’re the physical me.”
“Pretty sure you’re real in every way that matters,” I replied, speaking for myself that time. It must have looked like I was talking to myself from the outside, when I was actually talking to a different– well, was she a different person? I supposed she was kind of like a… clone? A mental clone. She was a version of me that had split off and spent years helping an old magical librarian. And now she was inside my head. Sort of like having Tabbris, but… different. This was another version of myself.
“You spent a lot of time in that library, huh? What… can I call you?” I asked. We could probably talk inside my-our head, but right now there was no reason to.
“Years and years and years,” she replied with my own mouth and voice. “And you mean besides Flick?” With that bit of teasing, she–we coughed before literally physically shrugging. “Well, I do like books. They’re basically my whole life. So how about Story?”
“Story it is,” I agreed. And boy was it still odd to carry on a conversation with myself not only in the sense of talking to a duplicate, but literally because we were both sharing the same body. I’d summoned her up into my consciousness and now we were talking.
Once we both took a moment to really consider that, I showed Story the books and the images on the wall. She had spent so long around that expensive library, I thought she might have some idea how to narrow down which books to look at.
To my immense relief, it worked. Story had a fair idea about which books Mason had been focusing on for this. She singled out three of them for me to look through. The two of us– or was it one of us in two places? No, two of us. She’d had a whole other extensive life for years I could barely get glimpses of. She’d spent what was to her a very long time living with Marnnik. Story was, for all intents and purposes, another version of me, a different person in many ways.
I dwelled on that a little bit while she was looking through the books and pointing out which ones we should focus on. Obviously she knew what I was thinking, but politely ignored it.
Actually, I was just as freaked out as you were and completely missed what you were thinking about. I was too busy obsessing over whether I was real or not.
Okay, fine, we were both distracted. But either way, one by one, she used my hands–our hands to pull out those specific books and started to leave through them, comparing the images of the pages to what was on the walls. It still wasn’t exactly a quick process. But having three or four books to look through was a lot better than having dozens. It shaved a lot of time off the process. As did having an extra mind inside my brain–or whatever the proper term for that would be. There were two of us scanning the pages. We were using the same eyes, yes, but it still helped spot the right things.
Even then, it took over an hour for both of us to figure out what those spells were for. And we triple-checked just to be as certain as we could. Maybe that would be considered sextuple-checking. Regardless, we were certain. And once we were, the two-one of us stood there and stared at it in disbelief. Not to mention anger.
There was a whole lot of anger. Even more than should have been possible for both of us together.
“That–” she started with our mouth before resorting to an inarticulate noise.
“Yeah.” My own anger hadn’t gotten any better, audible in our voice.
“He’s a fucking–” Again, she cut herself off, making strangled sounds.
“Yup.” I wasn’t any less angry than she was, giving monosyllabic responses as I let the full realization really soak in.
Honestly it was a good thing that was just a recreation of Crossroads and we were still stuck in the past at that point, or we might’ve tried to attack him right then.
Yeah, a good thing. Not that–
Hush we haven’t gotten there yet. Still in the past.
Right, some part of me had been afraid that Mason had been trying to do another blood plague or memory eraser, this time all by himself. Not that I thought he could pull something like that off without a lot of backup. Still, he could’ve been trying something like that.
But no, this is something very different. He’d been putting together a very specific transportation spell. A forcible transportation spell that could bypass a lot of defenses. That was why he specifically needed energy from Bob. The magic he was getting into was very dangerous, and could so easily backfire drastically. That was why he was having so much trouble weaving these different spells together. More specifically, he was trying to connect the magic that would grab and move his targets with a different set of spells that were intended to rip open a hole in the universe. Yeah, it was exactly as dangerous as it sounded. A thought that made me feel even more angry about the fact that my family and I were some of his targets. Us along with others including Prosser, Gaia, Dare, Avalon, and several other important members of the Rebellion.
Liam Mason was trying to create a spell that would grab all of us and shove us into another reality, another universe far away from here, where we could never find our way back.
That…. fucking…. bastard.