It was Aylen. Aylen was here. She was the witch who had been sent by Arthur. As in King Arthur. As in the man she was supposed to somehow help bring back to life as the Merlin Key. She was here, and somehow several years older. Had she come back to this time after years had already passed in the present-future? No, no it wasn't that. She had literally just said that she was hoping we could answer questions she’d had for a long time. That didn't absolutely necessarily mean she'd been here for years, but still. I felt like that made the most sense. Or at least as much sense as anything made right then.
And speaking of things making as much sense as they could, something told me this was connected to the rift situation and wasn't something completely different. But how, why? Had Aylen been brought back to help me as well? Wouldn't that mean she had appeared with another version of me if she had been here for years? And why would she be here for years? That didn't make any sense. Hell, if she had been brought back to help another version of me, why would she be looking at my Jacob self like she had no idea who I really was? She was definitely looking at me strangely, but there was no familiarity there. She had no idea it was me. But if she had been helping another version of me, I definitely would have used my Jacob disguise at some point, right? Why wouldn't she know me?
Even as all those questions were rushing through my mind, Shiori had already launched herself that way to embrace the girl in question. She blurted a quick, “Aylen! How did you know it was us?! What are you doing here?! What happened to you?! How long have you been here?! Did you get brought back to help Flick too? Where is your Flick? How long have you been here? Didn't you deal with your rift? What happened?”
Asenath took a step that way to gently take her sister's arm and tug her back. She looked at me, her gaze searching and curious before she turned back to the new arrival. “Maybe let her answer.”
For Aylen’s part, she continued to stare at me while looking just as confused as I felt. “As far as knowing who you two were, I can see through simple disguise spells. What I don't know is how you got here, or how you found this Jacob guy. Which, for the record,” she added to me, “B Minus on the speech. My mother made better dramatic threats to the toaster that one time the springs got stuck and trapped her bread inside. Was he the one who brought us to the past? And what do you mean ‘my Flick?’ I don't have a Flick. I haven't seen her since I woke up outside Arthur and Morgan’s village years ago. I've been hiding who I am and trying not to completely lose my mind since then. What's this about a rift? What's this about Flick? And, one more time, why are you with Jacob?”
Okay, something really weird was going on. Something even more weird than everything else that was already happening. But first things first, I held up a hand. “Right, I have no idea how you've heard of my fake name, but maybe this will help.”
With that, I shifted myself back into my normal self. A glance at the walls of this time dilation spell revealed that everyone outside was still frozen.
Seeing me like that, Aylen made a sound of strangled surprise before blurting my name. “Wait, you're Jacob?! Hold on, have you been Jacob the entire time, or did you take over his identity? Has he always been you? I mean, have you always been him? Oh Gods, please tell me the Flick we know wasn’t really Jacob in disguise the entire time because to be perfectly honest that wouldn’t be the weirdest thing when it comes to you and your life.”
My head was shaking quickly. “There is no Jacob. I just made him up as a disguise so I wouldn't let all those people we know see me in the past. I was pretty sure that could change the future. But how do you know him? I mean me.”
Shiori spoke up first. “He's famous. I mean, you're famous. Sort of famous anyway. Maybe more like infamous. It's kind of weird that you never heard of Jacob the Necromancer before. But we read stories about him while you were gone. We've been trying to figure out how to find him, and it turns out you're him.”
Asenath gave a very soft chuckle at that while shaking her head. “Well, I've been in more than my share of baffling situations before, but I think this one might take the championship trophy. Explaining what we know to Aylen might be the best way to start.”
Aylen, for her part, nodded. “Yes, please. I can't hold this time dilation forever, but I am pretty sure I can keep it going long enough for us to get on the same page. Or, at the very least, into the same book.”
They had a point. No matter how confusing this was, talking it through would help. It had to, even if it didn't answer every question. So, I launched into the quick version of what was going on. I told the other girl the basic gist of what had happened to me since I went into the past, why I was Jacob, how I had met her mother before going into that Reaper tower, and what had happened to me in there. And I told her about the whole Ehn situation, as well as what was happening now.
Once I had gotten through all that, Aylen stared at me for a moment. It took her a couple tries to find her voice. “Wow. I am really going to have to talk to my family if we get back to the present. But now I'm even more confused. Well, maybe not more. I’m a different sort of confused. If I was brought back to the past like these two and the others to help you with one of these rifts, why did you never show up? I mean, why did another version of you never show up? Would two rifts be only a few years apart like this? Why would I have just been left to wait around for all this time until you guys came?”
Swallowing hard, I admitted, “I have no idea, I'm sorry. I was barely keeping up with what was going on before all this happened. Maybe the Ankou messed up or something when they were pulling you back and uhh… missed or something? I have no idea. But you've really been here for years?”
She grimaced a bit before giving a short nod. “At first I was afraid to so much as breathe too deep. But I started putting a lot of effort into timeline reading about things that were supposed to happen, and in a lot of cases they were things that only I could do. So I umm, I think I was always here. I mean, I don't think me being sent to the past actually changed history. It always happened that way. The timeline always included me being sent back here.”
Asenath made a noise under her breath. “Hm. That would make sense. Especially if this is related to your… uhh, position as the Merlin Key.” Senny was one of very few people who knew about that. It wasn’t exactly something we wanted to have any chance of getting out.
“Believe me, I thought about that a lot,” Aylen agreed. “Especially after I met my--” She stopped then, biting her lip as though considering how much to say and where to start. “Maybe I should go back to the beginning.”
My head bobbed quickly. This whole thing was a lot to take in. And the idea that she had always been meant to come back to the past to contribute to Arthur’s kingdom and all that raised even more questions. Swallowing, I asked, “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. What exactly happened to you? I mean, how did you find yourself here and meet Arthur and Gaia?”
She started to tell us, but had only gotten through the part where she woke up on her own (aside from Sovereign) and explored a little bit on way to find herself meeting the children version of Arthur and Gaia before a visible wince ran through her as the glowing, mostly transparent walls around us flickered slightly. “I can't hold this any longer. I have to let it down, which means we need to be disguised again. if there really is a rift in this place, let's find it and deal with that. Then we can discuss the rest of this.”
Shiori nodded. “If we can get Flick through that rift, maybe that will end all this and we can all get back to when we belong. Including you.”
Aylen looked like she wanted to say something to that, but instead she just grimaced from the effort of maintaining the bubble and waved quickly for us to hurry. So, I shifted back into Jacob before checking the others. Their disguise spells were still up. We were as ready as we could be while still being very confused.
With an audible crack, the time dilation spell went down, and everything went back to normal. I could see some of the soldiers, including their leader, look around uncertainly. It was like they could tell something had happened, but not exactly what.
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Rather than give them time to focus on that too much, I looked at Aylen. Or whatever she was calling herself right now. “You were sent by the king to help? I hope you know something about stopping Necromancers.”
She, in turn, offered me a small smile as a private bit of amusement passed between us. “You could say I have a little experience with them. And between all of us, I believe we can handle whatever is in there.” With that, Aylen looked at the leader of this group. “Bedivere, you can trust these three, I promise. If they tell you to do something in that cave, treat it as though I said it myself.”
Wait, hold on, did she just call this guy Bedivere? As in Sir Bedivere, the knight of the Round Table who would eventually form the Atherby clan? As in the guy who was literally my ancestor? That was who this guy was?! I had been running around this place with my own ancestor while all this was going on?
Resisting the urge to summon a roll of supernatural bubble wrap to encase this guy in, I forced myself to focus while Bedivere and his men gave a chorus of agreements, promising to listen to us in that cave.
And just like that, it was time to go in. Or rather, it was time to deal with the protection lining the outside of the cave. Because the guy inside, whoever it was, clearly wasn't about to just let us waltz in there without putting up a fight. I had felt them attempting to summon more of those monsters around us to defend the cave, while also shoring up their defenses within. The former I was able to stop. Every time I felt that Necromantic energy gathering, I kept pushing it down and dispersing it. But I wasn't able to prevent the latter. It took everything I had just to stop them from making more of those monsters. We were going to have to deal with the rest of it the old-fashioned way. And hope that whatever power that rift was giving this Necromancer didn’t end up escalating to the point of completely overwhelming us once we were in there. I wasn’t sure exactly how I knew that the person wasn’t using all the power the rift had available, or why they weren’t, but it came to me as a certainty. He wasn’t trying that hard. It was like he was testing me.
With that in mind, I warned everyone to be careful. And, of course, restrained myself from asking Bedivere to hang back. There wasn't really a good way to tell him that I was afraid that he would die somehow in there and end up erasing our entire family line. Well, I could have been completely upfront about that, but it would have caused more problems all on its own. I was just going to have to be very careful and keep an eye on him. If it came down to it, I would absolutely grab the guy, and as many of his men as I could, and teleport them out of here. One way or another, I would keep them safe.
As further proof that she had been here for years, learning and growing, Aylen took just a minute to produce everything she needed to break through the protective spells lining the cave entrance. It was a mix of prepared magic on coins, stones, and even a few tools like knives, and new magic she etched into the ground. Through it all, the person in the cave continued to prepare their defenses on the other side. I could feel the traps and creatures being summoned, but it was still all I could do to stop them from summoning anything else on this side. I warned the soldiers around us, as well as Shiori and Asenath, about what we were about to face as soon as the shield went down. This Necromancer already knew they couldn’t stop us from making it inside, but they were damn sure going to make us fight for every single inch before we could make it to them and the rift.
They were trying to do something, I realized partway through all that. They were delaying us instead of fleeing because they were trying to do something with that rift. Exactly what that something was, I couldn’t tell, but it definitely wasn’t good. We had to get in there and put a stop to it. Ordinarily I would’ve planned to send my ghosts through to get a look so I could teleport there, but in this particular case, that was a bad idea. The further any of the ghosts got away from me, and the closer they got to this other Necromancer, the greater the odds of that Necromancer taking control away from me. I had to get physically closer before I could risk sending them forward.
Even as that thought came to mind, Aylen straightened up. I wasn't sure which was more disconcerting, seeing her in this disguised form and knowing she had lived that way for years, or remembering how her undisguised form looked visibly older than I remembered. It was a brief, fleeting thought that passed through my mind as she looked to the rest of us. “That shield will come down in a moment. Prepare yourselves.”
At those words, every soldier there took a step forward and brought up their weapons. It was clear they were nervous, even afraid. But it was equally clear that they were comforted by Aylen’s presence and believed she would help protect them from whatever was in that cave. She really had made a name for herself here.
Yeah, we were definitely going to need to talk through everything. Or at least more than we already had. If we could get into this place and deal with that Necromancer, that would still leave several days before I absolutely had to go through the rift. We were ahead of schedule on that front. Plenty of time to actually talk to Aylen and try to figure out exactly why she had been brought back and left by herself. Something about that was itching at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t figure out why. Just the thought of her being here, the thought of why she might have been left here, raised the hair on the back of my neck for some reason.
Then there was no more time to think about it. The shield blocking the entrance collapsed, and we were immediately assaulted by a blast of Necromantic energy, like a fireball made of death power. But I had been ready for that, bracing myself. As the energy rushed toward us, I extended my staff and focused on pulling that energy toward me and away from everyone else. It burst out of that cave like a greenish-black tornado, only to shrink down and get sucked right into me. Or rather, through me, as I shifted the power straight back out and used it to manifest my own army of ghosts. Even as the soldiers started to react to that, I called out, “The dead stand at our side, prepared to aid their living brethren in reclaiming your land! Kill the beast within this cave, and they shall ferry what remains to the land beyond!”
In keeping with that, I sent the ghosts in first to take the brunt of the attack on the other side. Bedivere and his soldiers were right behind, and we brought up the rear. Or we started to. Shiori and Asenath quickly slipped forward to help, while I stayed back and directed my ghosts through the assault. I could feel the other Necromancer trying to take them over while detonating more magic traps along the way. But I was still stronger. At least, I was as long as it was relatively close to me. The further out from me things got, the harder it was to keep that Necromancer from taking over. And the closer we got to the rift, the smaller that distance seemed to become.
Beyond that cave entrance was a maze of tunnels, just wide enough for a few people to advance together at once. The tunnels descended down through the Earth, getting deeper and deeper, while dozens of side tunnels kept splitting off to head in various directions. It would’ve been so easy to get lost down here for days. But I could sense where the rift and Necromancer were, and kept calling out directions, in between disabling as many of the traps as I could.
The tunnels were full of zombie creatures, a mess of undead monsters of all shapes and sizes, each of whom had been put together out of multiple once-living things. They broke through the walls, charged through the tunnels from the front and behind us, clambered up from the ground or even down through the ceiling. They were everywhere. It was chaos in those tunnels, but Bedivere and Aylen kept control of the soldiers, preventing them from scattering or falling behind. Bit by bit, we kept moving closer to that rift. I could feel the Necromancer putting more effort into keeping us out, throwing everything they could at us, to no avail. Even if it was getting more difficult to stop their little traps. I was glad I had the others with me, and this small army of soldiers. There was no way I could’ve made it all the way through this cave if I had to focus on disarming that magic, fighting the zombies they summoned, and finding the right way through.
Finally, after what had to be twenty minutes of sheer chaos, we managed to fight all the way to the main cavern, over two miles down from the surface. The feeling of that rift’s power was becoming more and more overwhelming. It was all I could focus on, even before we managed to fight through the last of the zombies in our way and emerge into that cavern. A cavern which, by itself, was several hundred feet across in every direction, with a ceiling that stretched almost fifty feet high. It looked like the cave had once been much smaller, but a lot of work had been put into enlarging it.
The rift was there, on the far side. It looked like a massive glowing circle, about thirty feet across. I couldn’t see anything through it just yet. It was just like a bright greenish-blue light sitting there, pulsing with power. But I knew what it was. That was the thing I was supposed to throw myself into.
Aylen called a halt, echoed by Bedivere, before the soldiers could advance any further. They bunched up together, guarding one another’s backs as we stared at that rift. I could feel the power emanating off of it, being drawn toward one corner of the cave that was too dark to make out any details about. And I could also feel various traps that had been set up across the entire cavern.
“What--what is that?” one of the soldiers stammered, staring along with all his companions at the rift in question. “That thing, that… is it…” He started to take a step that way, as did several of the others.
“Stop!” Aylen commanded, her voice echoing through the cave. “No one move any closer!”
“Aww,” another voice, a strangely familiar one, spoke up. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. “Are you sure you don’t want to let them check it out? After all, I went through so much trouble to make certain you all made it here.”
With that, the source of that voice appeared, standing just in front of the rift. And yet, seeing her there, I still couldn’t comprehend what it meant. I couldn’t comprehend anything right then.
Because the Necromancer by the rift, the one I had been dealing with this whole time… was the ghost of the dead Charmeine, possessed by the Whisper Invidia.