It turned out that a fifteen mile high tower was going to take more than a few minutes to look through, even when all the traps and security had been disabled. To be honest, we could probably search through the whole place for years and not find everything. Just standing there at the entrance thinking about how much was ahead of us felt positively daunting. This place was supposed to be completely full of stuff taken from powerful Necromancers across the ages, as well as plenty of other non-Necromancer things. The amount of powerful secret knowledge locked in even one of those rooms probably would’ve been enough to freak out almost anyone. And we had an entire tower full of it.
Laein, of course, was chomping at the bit to charge up the stairs and see everything. She had been bouncing up and down the entire time since I got back, muttering to herself about what sort of lost spells and tools might be waiting just for her to grab. She was like a kid sitting in her bed on Christmas morning watching the clock tick toward the time her parents had told her she had to wait before getting up and racing full-tilt to the presents.
That, of course, made me wonder about what sort of dangerous things she might be about to get access to. I really didn’t think she was as dangerous and evil as she tried to portray herself as. That whole demeanor was more of a coping mechanism. But I also wasn’t sure she’d be able to control any dangerous weapon she happened to grab in her eagerness to try things. Whatever happened, I was going to have to be careful about the whole situation and try to very carefully keep her from accidentally doing anything we would all regret. Hell, for that matter, I was going to have to be careful not to do anything I’d regret myself. It wasn’t like I was perfect at all this. Between the two of us we were both still amateurs.
While I was digesting that, Gaia held up a hand. “I’m not entirely certain I should be here right now,” she noted. From the sound of her voice, it was a very painful thing for her to bring up. “If you are from the future, and this place is not well known, perhaps it’s not something I should see just yet. At least, not in detail.”
Before I could respond to that, Bastet rocked backward on her heels before holding up a hand. Her voice snapped and annoyed, “Yes, yes, I get it. So glad I could be here to play messenger for you. Too bad you’ve all been too busy to so much as say hello any other time. But I suppose all your tender, emotional letters welcoming me to the family are still being delivered by horseback.”
“Reapers?” I guessed with a wince. I knew how I would feel if the closest thing I had to living family ignored me through almost all of my existence until I could play translator and messenger for them. It probably wasn’t exactly a good feeling.
Rolling her eyes, Bastet focused on me. “They said you are welcome to this tower, though they’re taking the most dangerous items away.” While Laein started cursing in the background, she continued. “There will still be very powerful items and magic here, just not the apocalyptic ones. But they will only allow you to stay if they can look into your mind and see that you can be trusted with it.”
Part of me wanted to snap that their counterparts had already given the tower to me so it wasn’t any of their business, but of course, there was no point. Not only was there a very fair argument that it wasn’t up to the prisoners to hand over the prison, but they didn’t have to listen to me anyway. I was still a bug to them. So, I pushed that thought down and simply replied, “And how exactly are they going to look into my mind?”
Bastet grimaced once more. “Apparently they need to use me as a conduit, which is just fantastic, let me tell you. Step over here, stand very still, and look into my eyes. They’re going to channel power through me into you and see down to your soul, or something like that.”
Obviously, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Not if I wanted all this to be worth it. Well, it was already worth it. I had helped turn those imprisoned Reapers into something much better. I had helped them become so much more than they had been while locked up in here. Even if this whole tower and everything in it was destroyed, I would still have that. And I had all the memories of my other selves, so many uncountable other selves whose… personalities I could access and talk to with a little effort. Yeah, that alone would have made everything worth it.
But still, I had come here to start the process of creating that Necromancy school, and I still believed that was the best way to stop the Fomorians in the long run. We needed this tower and the tools that were in it.
So, I stood in front of Bastet and looked into her eyes while she stared back at me. Her hands rested on my shoulders, and I felt a slight tingle go down through me. It felt like I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to. Her gaze stared right through me, only it wasn’t just her gaze. There was something far more ancient and powerful looking out of them through her. It was sort of like when I looked into the fake Impatient Douche’s eyes. Only this one was even stronger. Or maybe it just wasn’t holding back as much. I felt as though I was falling into an endless void. That’s what it was like. It wasn’t similar to looking into those other eyes, it was like when I had been falling through space after possessing the other Reapers, when so many versions of myself had been splitting off. Even though my feet were rooted to the ground, I felt like I was falling forever. Those ancient eyes were staring through me. They saw my every thought and stared into my past and my future. They saw everything I was and everything I could be. They weren’t gentle about it, but nor were they violent. They simply opened me up like a book and stared at everything I was. They saw me in ways I could never see myself, ways no one should ever see any person. They read my every thought and understood me better than I would ever understand myself. Even though I only picked up a small percentage of what they were getting off of me, I knew that much. They knew me.
Finally the connection broke. Only it didn’t completely break. As I found myself looking into Bastet’s normal eyes once more, I could feel her annoyance, and her fear. She was angry about being used like this, about only being helpful to the Reapers, to her family, for something like this. But she was also afraid that they would never reach out again. She was afraid this was the only time she would have any real connection to them.
Oh. Oh damn, this was the reason for my emotional connection to Bastet before. Ever since I had seen her the first time back in the present, I’d had some weird ability to detect her emotions and understand her in a way that had felt impossible. Apparently our connection stretched back-and-forth through time somehow. I didn’t understand it, but that had to be it. This moment right here was what had forged that emotional connection.
Wait, did that mean that she knew who I was and what I would do from the very moment she’d seen me and she felt the same connection? I was going to have to ask her once I got back to the future.
Bastet, for her part, took a deep breath and then stared at me once more. Her voice was flat. “They’ve agreed to let you keep the tower. They think your goal is noble, but some of them have doubts about whether you can pull it off or not. They’re interested in watching what you end up doing.”
Laein, who had been intently watching that whole exchange, quickly piped up. “Right, fantastic, does that mean we can actually get off our butts and go see what’s in there? Or do we have to sit around and play more stupid staring games? Because if this goes on much longer, I’m just going to lay down and take a nap.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Of course, absolutely none of us believed she would actually be able to do any such thing, not when she was excited. Even Eurso gave her a doubtful look in that moment. It was kind of funny to see. But her point was made. And she wasn’t the only one who wanted to get on with this. I really was interested in seeing what was in this place.
Then I remembered what Gaia had said and turned to look at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to be here for this?”
Her response was a rueful smile. “No, I absolutely want to be here for this. But it seems like a bad idea if we want to keep the timeline intact. And I very much do.” For a moment, it looked like she was about to say something else about that. But in the end she simply shook her head. “Whatever reason you have for wanting to use this tower, I hope it works out for you. And that I will be able to see the fruits of it someday.”
My shoulders rose in a shrug. “Who knows, you might get that sooner than you think. Stranger things have happened. But either way, thank you, Gaia. I mean, thanks for all your help.” I meant that for everything she had done for me, not just here in the past, but in the future as well. And something told me she understood that, even if it wasn’t something we could verbally acknowledge or really talk about.
I still wanted to find a way that we could help her in the future without breaking the timeline. So, I asked her to give us a way to contact her at some point. Specifically, once I had done enough research and training to do something like that. She immediately gave me a golden egg and said that if I cracked it and spoke into the shell, she would hear those words and be able to do the same thing with her own egg to send a message back so she could tell us where to find her. She also reiterated that she was going to be staying in this land and that she might even find a way to visit now and then, assuming we didn’t make the tower disappear immediately. But for the moment, she was going to thoroughly explore the land that would one day be known as Desoto.
Of course, I had to keep my face carefully neutral at that, not wanting to give away anything. Seeing the excitement on her face about how beautiful she thought the land was and knowing the pain she would suffer when she was eventually forced to make the choice to destroy that very land was pretty rough though. As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to hate the Fomorians, seriously.
Suffice to say, there was a lot I wanted to talk with her about. But I couldn’t. I had to keep it together. At least I had the upcoming exploration of this very tower to help distract me. I tucked the egg away in a safe spot and gave the woman a firm embrace, doing my level best not to let all my emotions show. She returned it, and did the same with Percy and even Cerberus and Eurso. She and Bastet exchanged brief glances of curiosity (from both of them) before the future Headmistress of Crossroads made her exit. And God was it ever painful to watch her walk out of the tower. There was a part of me that desperately wanted to run after her, grab the woman by the arm, and tell her everything so she could prepare for it. Not just what happened to her at the end of my first school year, but everything. I wanted to tell her about the Seosten, who murdered Pericles and how to stop that, who was possessed, who was doing the possessing, how to stop my mother from being abducted, and… and…
But where would it stop? Should I tell her about how to stop the Rebellion from being outed in the first place? Or how to make sure my mother wasn’t forced to surrender herself when Wyatt and Abigail were abducted as babies? Put quite simply, that would save the most amount of lives. Even if it would prevent my own existence. Which kind of seemed like a paradox, but from what I understood that would basically create another timeline that I would continue existing in as myself while the younger me simply wouldn’t exist. No version of me would exist in the new timeline until the point at which I had appeared in the past.
Yeah, time travel was complicated, news at eleven. The point was, how could I possibly decide how much to change once I started doing so? By so many metrics, the ‘right’ thing to do was to save as many people as possible, no matter what it did to my own personal timeline. Sure, it wouldn’t actually change anything in the universe I had come from. I’d just be creating another version where things went differently. The universe where I lived, where I had been born and all my family and friends were would still be exactly the same. The only thing I’d be doing would be cutting myself off from ever getting back there. And yet, what was the ethical choice in– fuck. Nope, not gonna think about that anymore. It was too complicated, too gross, and too… just, no.
But, eventually it was done. She was gone. Only then did I realize that I had been holding Percy’s hand tightly. Or maybe she was holding mine. Either way, it helped stop me from running after Gaia. And now I could turn my attention back to the matter at hand, while ignoring the quiet voice in the back of my head insisting I was making a mistake. Or possibly several dozen mistakes. And, knowing my current situation, several dozen voices.
“So, are you sticking around for this whole exploring bit?” I asked Bastet curiously. “You know, now that the Reapers have taken away anything too dangerous, apparently. Hey wait a minute, have you guys even said much to each other?” I waved back and forth between her and Percy. “I mean, you’re basically… like, sisters or whatever, right? Sort of. Wait, should I not actually be bringing that up? That kind of feels like pushing something neither of you are interested in, and I don’t even know why I’m saying all this out loud oh god I can’t stop talking.”
“You can’t stop wasting time either!” That was Laein, sounding very put out in that moment. “Allow them to decide their specific relationship issues or lack thereof on their own time, we have exploring and cosmically powerful treasure cataloging to do!” After a moment, she gave Bastet (or rather, the Reapers who spoke through her) a dirty look while amending with gritted teeth, “Semi-cosmically powerful treasure.”
“Well,” Bastet began pointedly while looking at me, “if I was going to have a long enough conversation to learn anything about my… sister, that would risk changing the future just as much as you saying whatever it was you so desperately wanted to tell the woman who just left. Any interaction could risk contamination. I already know things I probably shouldn’t just by looking at her.” She took in a deep breath before letting it out. “But, in whatever time you’re from, if you do find me again… look me up.” Her eyes were on Percy. “I would like to know more about you, once it doesn’t risk the stability of the universe.”
Percy agreed to do just that, sounding both surprised and eager for the possibility. Then Bastet turned back to me. “I might not be able to talk to any of you about the things I want to, but I will walk with you to the top floor. Apparently there’s something important you’ll want to see there before you start spreading out into the other rooms too much.”
Well at least that time when I pushed open the door at the top of those stairs and stepped through, I didn’t end up back in some recreation of my old hometown. Instead, we were in a massive hallway. This one stretched on for about four football fields in length and a full field in width, with a floor, walls, and ceiling that appeared to be some sort of softly glowing whitish-pink quartz. This entire facility was clearly meant for beings that were bigger than human, judging not only from the size of the ship and the corridor, but also what appeared to be consoles spread here and there. They weren’t anything like the computers I was accustomed to, of course. Instead, there appeared to be more crystals involved, as well as some goo the crystals were moved through. But they did appear to be control consoles of some sort. Very, very large control consoles. My best guess was that you’d need to be at least fifteen feet tall to use them comfortably.
“Um, Reapers have forms other than what we see, don’t they?”
“Several,” Bastet replied. “I suppose the ones they tended to use on these ships were larger than humans. But the real forms, the ones the original Reapers were… born in, I suppose, you can’t see any of those. If you did, you probably wouldn’t survive the experience. At least, you wouldn’t be the same person you are now. Your… brain would be damaged.”
“True Reaper forms drive you insane, got it,” I noted with a wince. “I’ve got more questions about that, but let’s just keep going. After all, we’ve still got fifteen miles worth of tower to hike our way up through.”
“Yes,” Laein snapped while intently charging ahead, “and at the rate you’re going, those two won’t have to meet up at another point to discuss their shared blood.
“We’ll have already caught up with the present by the time we reach the top of this tower!”