Ran yelped in distress, the shark’s mouth heedlessly slurping down both them and the surrounding sand.
For a moment all was chaos. Jair reaching out in the darkness amid the swirling sand to find his bearings, then dragged himself toward the right spot.
Ran’s panicked voice was snatched away as the sandshark vacated sand and air both, leaving a momentary vacuum. There was a brief flash of light as the massive beast inhaled in its graceful leap above the sand, then the mouth closed and Jair felt the impact as they dove back under.
Now.
He put a hand to the dry leathery roof of the creature’s mouth in the instant before it gulped them down, ignored the sense of violating wrongness innate to opening his mana to another living creature, and allowed his power to flow out into the creature's dull brain.
The rough leathery flesh of its mouth quivered, then settled, quiescent beneath his hands.
Jair exhaled a breath, tension disappearing that he hadn’t quite realized was there. He'd rarely attempted this so early in the loop, with his manabody still so fluffy and uncontrolled. Its edges had begun to firm up, but its interior was more ragged than ever as the dragon blood constantly tore it open.
It would have been unfortunate to discover his manabody's integrity was too low to even pilot a sandshark. Thankfully, all had gone to plan.
Jair mentally envisioned the city, the cliff, the direction they'd been facing, then slid one hand gently along the interior wall of the mouth to the right. The shark shivered again, as though shaking itself out of a daze, then ponderously turned toward Astralla City.
"What is my life coming to?" Ran asked, sounding on the edge of hysteria, voice echoing hollowly around the enclosed space. "How is this my life?"
"Just think of it this way. We escaped and we’re alive, so there's still hope!"
"In the course of a single week, I'm being chased by dragons, eaten by sandsharks, and soon to be kidnapped off to the ghost moon, with someone who's apparently wanted by the dovak Hyperion Legion!"
"Those guys are pretty annoying, yeah." Once Jair judged they were facing the correct direction, he shifted his hands to the roof of the shark’s mouth, and it began to accelerate forward steadily. "I can't think why they'd be hunting me already though. I haven't even met the conspirators yet."
“Who are you?”
“Jair Welburn, Ascendant Mageblade, time traveler, and your most devoted servant.” If he’d been anywhere but in the dark tight confines of a sandshark’s mouth, he’d have swept a dramatic bow. As it was, he had to settle for an affected accent to convey the grandiosity.
“And conspirator… assassin… smuggler?” Ran’s voice wavered, as though all his credulity had been drained entirely.
Jair saw no reason to deny it. “If the situation so requires,” he replied casually.
“I don’t understand. I’ve tried to accept all this, I really have, but look where we are!”
“Ah. Have I been moving too fast? I’m terribly excited about all this, you see. It’s hard to remember ordinary norms and conventions.”
“It’s one thing to know that your friend is a time traveler who can do just about anything, and another to be inside a shark’s mouth to prove it.”
"Take a deep breath."
"We're inside a sandshark!"
Jair steered the shark to the surface, then left it to lie still. Its mouth opened minutely, sucking in fresher air and allowing a sliver of light into their dark cavernous hold.
"Ran. Look at me." Jair took Ran’s hands, which he noted were trembling. "This is fine. We're going to be fine. Are you claustrophobic?"
"I didn't think so, but I'm beginning to reconsider that assumption." He was still breathing too fast, voice too shrill.
"We're over halfway. Can you hold out that long? It would be a lot more dangerous to try crossing the rest of the way on foot.” Even without sandshark attacks to worry about - there were unlikely to be more than two or three in a given region, and Jair could always tame each of those and leave them to lie stunned - it would be far too easy for someone to spot them, and there was a much better chance the Hyperion Legion would have gotten word out to the city before they reached it.
"I..." Ran swallowed, then took a sharp breath and nodded. "I'll try."
"Sit down here, close your eyes, pretend it's a carriage ride."
"I'll know it isn't." But he sounded less strained, the calm and light beginning to relax his fears.
"You're not normally claustrophobic. We've crossed the desert by sandshark more than once before, and you never had a panic attack. This is something new."
"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" The concern levels in Ran's voice ramped back up.
"Breathe." Jair demonstrated, slowly, deeply. "I promise I'll protect you."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
Ran gestured helplessly, uncertainly, in all directions. "You're... going so far. Insanely far. I mean, we're good friends, but this seems excessive even for that."
"I told you, you don't have to worry. I'm not going to expect anything more from you than what we've always had. Join me in some adventures, then go live your life. There will be times we're together, times we're apart, I'm sure. Not going to demand anything more."
"But... you're..."
"Completely insane? Yes. Obsessive? Quite probably. Determined and unshakeable? Absolutely. You, Ran Serin, are going to live, long, happily, and that's not negotiable. Whether we travel the world together, or we part ways after today and never speak to one another again, this I promise."
"I... can't stay here." Ran scrambled for the narrow opening of visible light, and Jair obligingly tapped sharply on the right spot to open the jaws. Ran crawled out, then knelt on the sand breathing hard.
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Jair watched Ran from inside the shadow of the shark’s mouth, one hand lightly resting on the roof of its mouth to hold it steady, considering. Perhaps he had moved a bit too fast.
He'd been working toward this for so very long, it seemed natural to him, but from Ran's perspective... yeah, he'd been perhaps a bit overbearing. With their previous dynamic having always remained Ran as protector and Jair as beneficiary, even if they acted as equals in their prior escapades, he could see how the sudden shift could be disconcerting.
Didn't explain the claustrophobia, but perhaps that was a delayed reaction to the whole dragon fight thing. Threat of being eaten... actually being eaten… seemed plausible.
New territory, new challenges, new opportunities to ruin everything.
Eh. Perils of time travel.
Jair waited without speaking, the countdown in the back of his mind instinctively tracking its susceptibility, letting Ran take his time. He wouldn't push, wouldn't try to control him. That was the last thing he wanted. He'd far rather Ran went off to live far from Jair in happiness than stayed out of some sense of obligation. Even if the only interaction they had was a single week of madness to save his life, Jair wouldn't consider it wasted.
Still, the long-held dreams of the pair of them facing the world together without care for anything else had begun to crack. He'd known that Ran had other obligations, as heir to a noble house. It had never seemed that important before.
Ran had shifted to lie on his back now, one hand across his face, sleeve protecting it from the glare of the sun.
"You good out there?" Jair asked softly. "Anything you need? I didn't bring much but I have some water if you're thirsty."
"It's fine. I have my own." Ran's voice sounded flat, not the edge of panic any longer, nor his usual cheer or good-natured grumbling.
Silence. Minutes passed, the only movement the rise and fall of Ran’s chest, the occasional flutter of his robes in the sharp breath of the shark’s infrequent exhalations.
"Do you want to go back?" Jair asked. "If you don't want to be involved, we can forget the trip. I can go book shopping on my own. You don't need to come to the ghost moon today. There'll be other opportunities."
“No.” Ran sat up, arm still raised to shield his eyes, but a look of focused determination in the set of his jaw. "Let's go to the city. I do still have connections, and you'll need my money either way. The books are essential if you're going to survive this. Right?"
"Yes. The sooner I have an idea what pieces we have to work with, the faster I can solve this. Shimmer dragons and poison dragons don't share enough similarities, I need more points of data."
"Let's start there. One thing at a time. We can decide about the… other thing after.”
“No, no need. I can have that research performed at any time. Waiting another week or two won’t hurt anything. Besides, we still have unknown enemies doing unknown things. Why traipse off to the ghost moon when there’s still information to be found here?”
Ran didn’t try to argue, convincing Jair that delaying was the right choice.
“You want to come back inside, or should I escort you while you walk? It’d take longer, but I should be able to scare away any competitors.”
“I can do it. Like you said, pretend it’s a carriage. Already got this far.” Ran crawled back inside, seating himself against one wall of the shark’s massive mouth.
Jair shifted his own position to compensate, then tapped the shark back into motion. It stuttered unsteadily into motion, being surfaced for too long leaving it without momentum, then darkness descended as the mouth closed and it gradually nosed its way downward.
“Talk to me,” Ran said, voice deceptively casual.
“About?”
“Something that isn’t a hungry shark’s mouth.”
“Did you have any other questions about my soulspell? We have plenty of privacy here.”
“Yeah.” Ran hesitated a moment, struggling to overcome his sense of taboo. “How does it interact with people with prophetic powers?”
"They see what will happen, or what might happen, in the same way as they ordinarily would. I ran some experiments with Oliss back in the day. Tried doing insane stuff to test her ability. But she's wrong as often as she's right even without interference."
Another pause, while Ran tried to think of a question. "What about the Crystal Eye? Can you use that to influence your decisions?"
Jair snorted softly. "You think someone like me has access to the most closely guarded prophetic construct in the world?"
"Of course." No hesitation.
"Fine. You know me too well. Yes, I've played around with the Eye. It once saved me years of research by showing me the outcome of my search immediately, but more often than not it's inaccurate or skewed by circumstance. I’ve seen it show me pasts or futures that don’t match anything I’ve lived."
"So it’s not reliable."
“No more than any other prophecy.”
“Is there anyone else who can actually move through time?”
Jair hesitated before answering, steering them around another obstacle, then urged the shark up to the surface to re-check their direction and replenish the air. “I can’t be sure,” he finally answered. “I’ve thought sometimes that things were going too badly against me, that adversaries seemed too well prepared for my every move, but there’s no way to prove such a suspicion.”
“So there might be evil time travelers out there. That’s not a fun thing to contemplate.”
“Or there might be very, very well prepared people out there who have no need of time magic to solve their problems.”
“What about mind readers? What do they see?”
Jair laughed dryly. “More than they want to. They usually back off very quickly.”
“Truth-seers?”
“Very easy to evade. I’ve done so much of everything, I can answer practically any question with complete honesty and never give away anything of meaning.”
“Is there any power you can’t counter?”
“Soul-damage, mental damage to some extent, though I’ve got Starshield for that.” He felt another dense something and guided their shark away from it. “Oh, that reminds me! We still need to plan out your imprints."
“I don't know what my soulspell will be. Shouldn’t we wait, if we’re using non-standard spells, to synergize with that?"
“Right. I got so used to you not having one I neglected to factor it into my calculations."
Most soulspells began to attune between one and three weeks after obtaining the class. Some came as quickly as a few hours - Lian's ordinarily appeared on the third day but could be induced sooner. Others took months. Jair's own Temporal Reversion had taken close to four months to fully manifest itself, though because of its nature it overwrote itself each time and grew faster with each reversion.
Ran's had never manifested. Even though he had a full two months longer than Jair as a mageblade, he always died before his soulspell showed itself.
Knowing what he did about time, Jair couldn't help but wonder if the reason it hadn't shown itself might be because Ran was destined to die. His soul had instinctively known that any power it might come up with would be useless.
Pure speculation, of course. Jair's meager attempts at researching such phenomena had been inconclusive, and his own soulspell clearly demonstrated that insanely powerful effects were fully possible.
"I've never been able to attune my soulspell? In every version of reality?"
“In fairness, this is the longest you’ve ever survived for as long as I’ve been doing this. You should work to attune your soulspell whenever you get the chance.”
“I already do.”
“Make more chances.”
"But you agree, we should wait until my soulspell manifests, and only make the decision on imprints then?"
“If you don’t know what you want yet, fine. We can wait. This time. Once you make a decision, I’ll let you know when I revert.”
Ran fell silent, expectantly.
“Are you expecting me to suddenly tell you your future?”
“Well, you said you’d come back and tell me, so… if you don’t, does that mean that we’ll be fine and nothing will go wrong?”
“That’s not how it works. We have to live through the time before it can be reverted. And, we’re here.”
They’d arrived at the heavy sprawling density that was the foundation of Astralla City. Jair directed their shark upward, then gave it a quick jab to instigate its expulsion reflex once he felt open resistanceless air above.
They landed in an undignified heap, dizzied from the tumble and blinded by the dazzling midmorning sunlight after spending so long in full darkness, but otherwise unharmed.
“Hah.” Ran laughed without sincerity as he got unsteadily to his feet. “We are never doing that again.”
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