Every inch lost is lost forever - there is no reclamation from the deeps. What were streams in my youth are now deep rivers; my grandchildren will watch them become impassable channels. The continents grow ever more and smaller.
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In four days’ time, the Astralla Institute would be subjected to one of the most effective and dramatic attacks of its history. A furious dragon rampaged through the academy, destroying half the student housing village and toppling one of the library towers before the headmaster and advanced teachers finally banded together to bring it down.
Attempts to warn them ahead of time were disregarded. The headmaster always remained his usual uncooperative self. Despite Jair dedicating hundreds of reversions to befriend, ally with, or simply bribe the man, Larenok refused to involve himself until the dragon proved itself impossible to ignore.
Before it could be stopped, the dragon would kill dozens of students. Including Ran Serin, specifically.
At first, Jair had tried hiding Ran away, but that quickly proved useless. The dragon could find him no matter how they hid him. When nothing within the academy worked, he tried evacuating him out into the desert. Leaving the academy entirely did minimize collateral damage, but didn’t save Ran.
Next he tried to lure the dragon into groups of teachers or the headmaster himself, but even at their most concentrated they were unprepared and unable to block the dragon's relentless attacks. Yes, the dragon died, but not before it killed Ran, and generally over half the staff in the process. Jair tried every possible story and trick he could think of to get them to show up ready for battle, but nothing worked.
Those first crucial moments between the dragon showing itself and Ran's death were an impossible barrier. He needed a prepared team. When he tried attacking them himself it got their attention, but then Jair himself wouldn't survive long enough to see the results.
He'd tried transiting Ran several cities away, which sometimes slowed the attack or sometimes hastened it, but didn’t save him. They once spent nearly two weeks on the run before the dragon caught up to them, but catch them it did.
Veor was one of the more sparsely populated continents and with no lunar window before the deadline bigger cities were out of reach. Being a refuge far from any contested coasts made it impossible to find any adventurers or mercenaries of the necessary level. Anyone strong enough to take on a dragon solo would be on the front lines, not hiding in the desert. Any attempt to bring in a larger team of weaker fighters to slow the dragon down was blocked by Larenok.
Jair tried moving them to the most secure locations they had access to, but while that generally got the dragon dead faster, it wasn't fast enough to save Ran. Even seeking out the Hyperion Legion, the king's royal mage-killers, wasn't enough.
If he ever wanted to assassinate a noble on the fourth day of the loop, Jair needed only to have Ran call for a visit. That was an almost certain guarantee of a successful and untraceable murder - if not for the fact that it always without fail ended up with Ran dead as well. And large portions of the city population.
In desperation, he'd even tried fording or bridging the barrier rivers isolating Veor from its neighboring countries, and experienced firsthand the reason running water could never be trusted. Even now, with all that had happened, water - and what dwelt within - remained one of Jair's strongest fears. Needless to say, Ran didn't survive that either.
Eventually, when every possible avenue had been exhausted, he stopped trying to stop it by force and instead switched to diplomacy. Why, exactly, this dragon pursued Ran so relentlessly, Jair had spent years to ascertain in previous loops. Communicating with the furious beast had been hard, arranging matters so that it survived long enough for him to even try interrogating it harder still.
In the end, it boiled down to ‘I hate his mother and eating him will hurt her’. No reasoning with it, no alternative options. Either the dragon died, or Ran did. No room for compromise.
So, how to slay a dragon?
First, Jair needed to refresh his memory on this specific dragon’s abilities. He knew it had poison breath and its primary vulnerability was cold, but there may be minor details he hadn’t retained. It had been a very long time since he last came back to these academy days.
Hence, himself and Ran, sitting in the south library with a stack of dracology texts piled on the table between them. Even if Ran didn't seem particularly engaged in the pursuit.
“Why are we reading about poison dragons instead of doing something more important?”
“Nothing is more important right now. Ah, here it is. Draconis Eilis Mercurios, advantages: too many, weaknesses… too few. Explosive poison breath, physical damage resistance, magical immunity. Minor cold vulnerability. Known for ignoring pain and minor injuries. Absorbs spells and reflects them as a wave of stunning sound. Yep, it's a nasty one."
When young mages thought they could help and peppered the dragon with their feeble spells, they didn’t realize they were only empowering the beast. Even ice magic could only be used at a remove; you could freeze water with magic and hurt it that way, but magically created ice would be absorbed as easily as any other spell.
“And why do you keep doing that?”
“Hm?” Jair glanced down. He’d absently traced the manapath for Absorb on his palm as he stared down at the page, lost in thought.
"There's no point doing it more than once or twice a day."
"It's faster this way."
“Aren't you worried about causing damage before imprint training begins?"
"It won't hurt anything. Don’t worry, I know what I'm doing." Jair switched hands, tracing Reflect onto the other. "Yes, there's diminishing returns for repetition, but once you get past a certain point it starts increasing again as long as your precision is flawless. Doing it at the suggested rate allows the spells to relax between tracings, while building up even slightly imprecise copies in quick succession entirely changes the resulting imprint."
"See? That! That's what I'm talking about. Something's different."
"I'm a mageblade now and I’ve got a dragon to slay. No more time for fooling around. As soon as we finish with the dragon we can sit down and decide on our spell complements, but Absorb and Reflect will always be useful." Trading his favored foundational spells for Compression in that last loop had pained him, an act of desperation he had no desire to repeat.
"This obsession with dragons all of a sudden. Whatever happened to 'as soon as the ceremony is over I'm sleeping for three weeks straight'?"
"Did I say that?"
"Yes."
Jair laughed faintly. He had been like that once, hadn’t he? "Well. Maelstrom changed everything. I can't even think about resting while there's still so much to do."
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"If that sword scrambled your wits--"
"It hasn't." Jair spun the book to face Ran. “You’ve been on fancy hunts. Where do you hit something like this to bring it down fast? I want to say left wing-shoulder and center back?”
“Oh, no, you’re not getting out of this that easily. You can’t just change the subject and think I’ll–”
“I’m fine, no need for a healer. We can check in a week if it doesn’t improve.”
“You do know you’re supposed to assess risks before–”
“Focus, Ran. Dragon. How to kill? Where to stab? I need to know. This is very important.”
Ran huffed out a frustrated sigh, but reached out a hand. “Give.”
Jair nudged the book, already firmly on Ran’s side of the table.
Ran glowered down at it as though it were responsible for everything wrong with the world. “Yes, this type has its mist sac in the left shoulder area, its main weak point. Traditionally, hunting an Eilis-M would be done with flaming frost arrows.”
“Ice to pierce, fire to explode. Right. I knew that.” It was hard to hit just right to actually ignite the explosive poison gas the dragon secreted, and its innate ability to absorb magic made normal spell-guided bolts useless.
“Even if you hit it just right, that isn’t going to kill it, but the blast will disorient it and almost certainly ground it unless it’s very lucky. With the wing right there, it won’t be flying for a while, which gives you time to get behind and–” Ran mimed a stabbing motion, then pointed to the spot on the dragon’s back about a quarter of the way back. “Heart’s there, which is the preferred target for hunting.”
“Don’t want to mar the head, right. Trophy.”
“Well, that. And the neck is one of the most heavily armored and most flexible of all dragon types, so even if you could get close enough to stab it in the eye, it’d probably take you with it.”
Jair shuddered. He’d experienced that a few times himself. He may be able to reverse the effect of time and trauma on the world as a whole, but his own mind retained a great many things he’d prefer to forget.
“Are you sure you’re feeling well?”
"I don't want to waste hours going to a healer just for them to say 'you shouldn't overwork yourself even if you are a scholarship student, you can go without studying for one night to get enough rest'. I know what I’m doing.”
“You keep saying that.” Ran sounded utterly unconvinced.
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
He wasn't going to stop, was he? Jair sighed. “If I agree to go with you, you’ll let it go.”
“Yes.” Ran practically exhaled the word, heavy with relief.
“And you’ll stop questioning my inane suggestions for the rest of the week.”
“Never.”
“Worth a try.”
“But you’ll–”
“Yes, yes. It won't help anything, I already know what I'm doing and how to--" Jair cut himself off with a sigh. "You know, never mind, there may be some residuals lingering that I'm not aware of. We can check just this once. But if they don’t find anything, that’s it.”
“Deal.” Ran thumped the book closed, standing in the same motion. “Let’s go.”
Jair didn’t protest further. After all, he had never managed to carry something with him back in time before. Until now, his every attempt had either destroyed whatever was in his soulspace or dropped him out of the timefall at the moment the item came into his possession. Usually both.
Neither of which was a valid precedent for this new reality.
Exiting the library, they walked past a row of seven upright rectangular grey stone slabs, each twice as tall as a person. The Institute’s crest - crimson laurel branches on either side of a seven-point star - marked those on both ends, while between arcane glyphs were inscribed the Institute's guiding principles.
Strength.
Precision.
Mastery.
Jair ran a hand across the glyphs somewhat fondly. Of everything he’d learned here, he remembered these three words most strongly. They’d been a lifeline of hope even in the darkest times.
The transit platform was most of the way across the academy grounds, taking about twenty minutes to cross the distance. Jair remained quiet as they walked, mind playing out possible scenarios to force the dragon into close combat range.
If past loops were any example, the dragon rarely landed at any point during the attack. Its preference was to swallow Ran whole, and went out of its way to eat him if possible, but wasn’t above roasting him or smoking them out with its poison breath if they hid somewhere inaccessible.
Ran didn’t break the silence. He probably felt that any attempt to push right now would result in Jair going back on his deal. Jair wouldn’t, of course, but he’d been a much less straightforward person in his younger years.
Ran stepped up to the control stone and pressed his personal homing disc into the reader, then the academy’s authorization disc.
The clear crystal at the center of the platform began to glow dimly, flickering in brief pulses of red light.
"So many people coming and going for the ceremony must have drained it. Ugh."
Jair knelt and put a hand to the crystal, allowing the construct to connect with his inner mana and draw it out. Constructs cost exponentially more to activate than an internal spell, but they could attain levels of complexity and precision beyond the average human's ability to remember.
Ran joined him a moment later, adding his own mana despite his groaning. Gradually the red glow faded to white, then to blue, then the flickering stopped and the light glowed steadily.
Even after the platform was fully charged, they had to wait another minute for the connection to be clear, probably due to an arrival queue on the other end.
Then the crystal blinked to green, growing brighter and brighter, mana spreading through the carved channels of the floor. When the glow faded away, they stood on an identical platform in an arrival hall. The green light winked out, leaving the platform inert.
The transit terminal held twenty identical arrival platforms and an equal number for departures lining both sides of a long sandstone building.
Places like this always reminded Jair of a stable, with stalls lining both sides of the central walkway, only here each section had an opening to the outside as well as to the center. Despite the many openings and additional slit windows high up, the atmosphere was always unbearably hot and sticky.
It did help encourage people to leave quickly, at least, limiting traffic congestion except in severely inclement weather.
Jair took a moment to acclimate as he stepped outside.
Astralla City was one of the larger settlements in Veor, second only to Vaes City itself and the twin merchant cities of Parein and Silvas. And it was just as unappealing a place as Jair remembered. Crowded, noisy, full of stale mana afterdrift, and without any particular redeeming features.
The upper districts would be more reputable, but he didn't have the slightest interest in visiting them.
In a few months he would practically be living in the mire of intrigue and petty backstabbing that went on among the lower nobility. It couldn’t be helped. They were the best way of obtaining sufficient sums of money and quantity of materials quickly.
No need to get involved in that mess any sooner than necessary.
The streets to either side of the transit terminal were paved with pale brown pebbles held together in a vaguely translucent glue, giving it the look of something leftover and congealed.
Jair didn’t care for the city.
From where they stood, the academy's pale towers were just visible against the surrounding desert sand, high up on a distant clifftop, glowing in the sunlight like the fangs of an ancient beast.
Jair couldn’t wait to be away from this place. Not just Astralla, Veor as a whole. He missed Aethron’s forests, the sounds of life everywhere, the ripple of gentle water. Coming back after spending years there made Veor feel so much more lifeless.
Ran led the way to a healer’s practice, a spacious place with a small spring as its centerpiece. Jair stood patiently while the healer scanned him with every tool in her inventory, cast several spells, and had him perform a number of basic poses.
"There does seem to be some strain on your body," she finally reported, consulting her notes. "I would suggest you empty your soulspace and focus on strengthening its boundaries for at least two weeks before trying to store anything in it again."
Yeah… no way that would happen. He couldn’t afford to lose two days, let alone two weeks. But Jair nodded, and promised to be careful, and assured them he’d not overstrain himself in the future.
"See?" he told Ran as they walked back through the bustle of the streets toward the transit platform. "I told you nothing was wrong."
“Something is wrong, whatever you did to–” Ran cut himself off and lowered his voice, “ascend your sword caused actual damage–”
“Not damage, strain. It’s no worse than mana overdraw, and less painful by a lot. I’m entirely fine.” Jair stopped walking outside a merchant's shopfront, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “But while we’re here, there are some things I’ll need. You have access to money still?”
Ran Serin, sole heir of House Serin and favored genius, stared at Jair incredulously. “You’re… asking me… that?”
“I know it’s sudden, but–”
"Maybe we need a second opinion on your mental status."
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