“I wonder if that was the same knife the assassin at the hospital used,” Aaron said. “They were pretty much identical.”

Tia shook her head. “I don’t think so; remember the spell of sacrifice. The guy in your apartment invoked magic to ‘leave no trace.’ It wasn’t limited to your memory.”

“So it also changed physical reality?” Aaron asked, amazed at the scope of it.

Now that Aaron thought about it, the magic had done a great deal more than just try to cover his memory of the attack. It had restored his apartment right up to the moment before the attack. His beer had even been sitting on the credenza under the window.

“That’s my thinking, yes,” Tia said. “Very powerful stuff; very powerful. If it hadn’t changed the environment, you’d have come to without your memory and wondered why your couch was flipped over and there was a dead body on the floor.”

The mental image of that forced a laugh out of Aaron’s throat. He’d freaked out enough the way things had actually gone, he couldn’t imagine what kind of meltdown would have ensued if he’d gone to get a beer in the kitchen and come back to a murder scene in the living room.

“Obviously, we can rule out temporal magic,” Tia continued. “There’s no way this guy had a spell that affected an individual’s mind so effectively and a localized time rollback. Even powered by a spell of sacrifice, anyone would have trouble doing both at the same time.”

“Temporal magic,” Aaron repeated, astounded.

“I think it’s more likely the assassin was hiding in the corner waiting to attack so he could create a kind of snapshot of your apartment,” Tia mused. “That spell didn’t seem spontaneous, so he had it ready in advance just in case things didn’t go as planned. My guess is that the spell repaired or replaced anything that was normally supposed to be there and got rid of anything that wasn’t, including the assassin and his weapon.”

Aaron nodded slowly. “That makes sense, but I’m actually hung up on the idea that temporal magic exists in the first place.”

“It does, but the really powerful magic is almost impossible to pull off, especially these days,” Tia said. “Time is a lot less malleable than it used to be. Or that’s our best understanding, anyway.”

That tickled something in Aaron’s memory. Hadn’t Griffin said something about how there was more time than Aaron thought?

No, he said there was more history than I thought, Aaron recalled. Why am I thinking there was more time?

“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Aaron admitted. “Isn’t time just, y’know, time?”

Tia laughed softly. “It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try.”

Time, Tia explained, could be pictured as a river, flowing only in one direction and always at the same rate. You could swim with or against the current and you could even hold things out of the water, yet the river still flowed and carried all things with it.

A great deal of evidence — what had survived of it and was relatively credible, at least — suggested that this metaphorical river had been somewhat different in the past. Not only had the rate of its flow varied on occasion, but this river of time would sometimes pull things along in its current at different rates.

“That’s why so many ancient stories have people living to absurd ages or undergoing tasks that take years longer than they should,” Tia said. “It’s not like humans only learned how to see the sun or count seasons recently, so why would they keep making the same mistake?”

“What?” Aaron asked stupidly.

“Yeah, and it was also a lot easier to jump out of the river and land somewhere upstream, where you could divert the course,” Tia continued. “Metaphorically, of course.”

“What?” Aaron repeated.

Tia plowed on, heedless of the bombshells she was dropping on Aaron’s fragile understanding of the universe.

“Of course, it’s still possible to travel back in time, but it’s much, much, much more difficult. Oh, and it’s also been illegal for, like, more than a thousand years. I mean, it was sort of illegal before that since almost every faction had rules about it, but it was more of a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ situation, you know?”

After searching for some way to concisely arrange his inquiries into a coherent format — preferably in a manner that made him seem sophisticated and erudite to the beautiful woman sitting with him — the best Aaron could come up with was, once again, “What?!?”

“Anyways, since mind-altering magic is only really possible if you use alchemy — or are a vampire — I figure that rules out temporal and mind magic,” Tia finished.

“Oh, uh… right,” Aaron said. “So, uh, that’s why it’s probably not the same dagger.”

“Exactly! We’re pretty sure the one you took from the hospital didn’t have recall or tracking enchantments because they would’ve set off wards when they were put on the plane in California, which suggests the one used in your apartment didn’t either,” Tia explained. “That’s potentially more concerning, actually.”

With all the revelations of the last hour — recovering his memory and learning he was a murderer, finding out vampires existed, and that time travel used to be easier — Aaron’s brain was struggling to keep up with Tia, who was already almost certainly much smarter than him.

Yet his mind was making the kind of snap connections it sometimes did despite his preoccupation. More often than not, the things his brain put together left people staring at him like he’d grown a third arm, unable to follow his jumps in reasoning. Sometimes, however, it was one of the things that earned him the most sincere praise, whether for creativity, insight, or even outright brilliance.

Aaron had learned to stifle and ignore those connections as he grew older to minimize all the times people looked at him like he was a stupid-ass dumb fucking idiot, but they still came on occasion. Like this one.

And, like all those other times, he had a hard time stopping himself from giving voice to whatever puzzle had been transformed in his mind.

“Because if the dagger can kill — or even just hurt — a drakus, it probably required a lot of resources to make,” he said. “Resources whoever sent these assassins were willing to burn and could replace for a second attempt not even twenty four hours later.”

“Yep,” Tia replied, putting away the ritual implements and spellbook she’d used to recover Aaron’s memories. “Which is why I want to examine it and get a better idea of exactly how many resources the people after you were willing to blow on this.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I’ll go get it and we can find out,” Aaron said, getting up from the table. “Back in a sec.”

When Aaron came back to the table two minutes later, he had the dagger, wrapped in a t-shirt, and a Baby Bear, wrapped around the back of his head.

“Lemme see it,” Bear demanded. “I wanna touch it!”

“Hello, Baby Bear,” Tia said, pausing in finalizing her preparations at the table to give the teddy bear a nod.

“Aaron won’t let me play with the murder knife!” Baby Bear pouted.

“We need to test it,” Tia smoothly replied.

She had laid out a number of new occult accoutrements on the table: a black candle; a red ribbon made of some glossy fabric, like satin or silk; a thin metal rod; a stoppered ampule of green liquid; and, a flat, glossy stone with rounded edges.

“Hang the dagger, point down, over the stone, please.”

Aaron did so while Baby Bear positioned himself higher on Aaron’s head for a better view. The dagger hadn’t quite touched the stone when Aaron began to feel some kind of resistance. When he took his hand away at Tia’s urging, the weapon hung, suspended upright, less than an inch above the gray rock.

Like the blade from the remembered assassination attempt in his apartment, the one from the hospital had a strange, green discoloration and a faint gray aura that seemed to writhe and pulse just past its edges.

“I’m going to use ceremonial magic, again, so we get the best, most accurate results,” Tia said.

First, she lit the candle and fanned the smoke from it across the blade. Then the ribbon was loosely wrapped around and draped over the dagger. She set it on fire with the candle and it quickly burned away to nothing. Next, she prodded the blade and handle with her thin rod in several different places. Finally, she poured the green liquid over the weapon; it evaporated on contact with the blade.

Tia must have known what she was looking at or been able to see something Aaron couldn’t, because he learned nothing from watching the arcane procedures.

Well, he learned that Baby Bear was easily impressed by magic as he ooh’d and ah’d every time. That wasn’t all that surprising, though.

“I’m pretty sure this is a reaver’s blade,” she finally said. “A blade made of a mystic alloy called surripium. It’s sometimes called a drain-blade because it transfers physical power from the victim to the wielder.”

She took the dagger by the handle and held it out sideways. “And do you see the aura around it? That’s a very strong enchantment for sharpness and force. I’m not confident it could cut a drakus too badly, but I think it could break skin, which is all the assassin would need.”

“To activate the draining effect?” Aaron guessed. “We should test how strong it really is and add it to our armories. Do we have armories?”

“We do, but it’s not just the reaving effect that would come into play; the blade is also coated in a poison derived from the fruit of the peridexion tree. It wouldn’t be fatal, but it is one of the more effective poisons against drakus. It would have left you significantly weakened for a few hours.”

“This seems like overkill just to shank me,” Aaron said. “Except, now that I think about it, the super shiv was the backup plan. He tried to stick me with a regular knife but it bounced off my, uh, scales?”

“As good a word as any and it doesn’t sound as weird as saying it bounced off your skin or flesh or something,” Tia agreed. “Not to diminish the trauma of people trying to murder you, but the most troubling thing here is definitely that whoever sent these guys had at least two of these blades ready to be handed off. They’re very resource-intensive weapons.”

She pulled a flat metal box out of her bag and placed the knife in it.

“I’ll report on everything we’ve learned to Barret and Mallory. Between this and their ability to track you, you’re in real danger,” Tia said.

That raised the last major concern Aaron had been chewing over, one he’d let slip his mind repeatedly in the wake of all the other batshit insanity.

“Do we have any idea how they’re tracking me?” he asked. “It can’t be too precise or we’d have had more than just one squad of mercenaries on us.”

His question was met with a sigh. “That is the question. Whatever is being used can’t be too specific or you’d have been dead back in Sacramento. Most likely, whatever they’re doing doesn’t narrow it down to less than ten miles, fifty in a best-case.”

That offered some small comfort to Aaron, but apparently not to Baby Bear. “Isn’t Manhattan kinda small, like San Francisco?”

Tia nodded. “Two miles across and a little over thirteen long. It’s less than half the size of Frisco with twice the population.”

Aaron and Baby Bear, natives of central California — if you didn’t include wherever the hell Bear had been manufactured — both shuddered at hearing someone refer to San Francisco as ‘Frisco.’

“So it wouldn’t be very hard for people to find my Aaron, right?” Bear said, standing up on top of Aaron’s head. “Can someone get me a gun or a grenade or something? Ooh, maybe that extra murdery knife? I gotta protect my best snuggle buddy!”

Both Aaron and Tia reached a silent consensus not to suggest that arming the teddy bear was a guarantee of catastrophe. He probably wouldn't take that very well. It took them a few minutes to convince the bear that Aaron had excellent protection already, especially when he was at home, and that New York City was very built up and densely populated.

“Besides,” Tia added consolingly. “Aaron might be doing some travel for his last Tribulation.”

The stuffed bear was largely mollified and settled back down on Aaron’s shoulders, clinging to the back of his head. Aaron, knowing the kind of personality he’d always imagined Bear to have, wasn’t sure if the matter was truly settled or if the bear was playing a longer game.

As ridiculous as the idea of arming the teddy bear to help protect him was, it was nice to know someone was willing to do it for him, not for the position he was inheriting.

Only time would tell if Baby Bear was satisfied with their explanations and deflections, but Aaron thought it would be wise to grab on to the new topic Tia had brought up either way.

“This next Tribulation, I’m supposed to go get a magic golden stick, right? But it was hidden by the last Lizard King and the only way to find it is by remembering where he hid it, which I can do because he is also me.”

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Tia said, laughing. “We’ve got some ideas that might help you with the process, too.”

Based on historical precedent, the running theory was that Milton would have hidden the sceptre in one of the strongholds the Drakon had occupied over centuries, which Tia said were called temples for some reason.

Although their archives didn’t cover every new Primus Draconis’s Tribulations, what records they did have said the sceptre had been retrieved from one temple or another. The specifics of how each candidate gained access to the sceptre weren’t discussed, suggesting each Primus declined to share the details.

To better facilitate Aaron’s access to his inherited memories — and subsequent recovery of the sceptre — a collection of documents had been collected. They included selected journals, images, maps, and so on, each relating to one of the various temples, in hopes they would help Aaron form a connection with the memories.

“The biggest pain in the ass is that almost all the temples have fallen into disuse or been abandoned over the centuries and some have even been lost,” Tia said. “There’s a small chance this whole thing could turn into some kind of dungeon crawl.”

“Why were all these temples abandoned?”

Tia shrugged. “A lot of different reasons. Primus or Triumvirate fiat, magic run amok, and monster infestations have all caused temples to be abandoned, but the most common is that the location was compromised or thought to be compromised.”

Tia had returned her dagger-testing equipment to her backpack and pulled out several expensive-looking pocket folders. She spread a sample of the various documents they held on the table and showed Aaron how they were organized — first by temple, then by date.

There were a few old photos mixed in, but most of the visual records were drawings, sketches, and even a few paintings. The bulk of the material was loose sheafs of paper or journals recording the observations of previous Cordus and Animus Draconum.

Baby Bear had no interest in the historical records, so he climbed up and draped himself across the top of Aaron’s head. He might have even drifted off to sleep (if that were even possible).

Aaron wasn’t particularly excited to pore through all this stuff, either.

“Homework,” he said. “Rad.”

“Basically,” Tia said, patting Aaron on the arm. “Plus, Barrett and your security people want you to start combat training. After the ambush today, they want to make sure you can handle yourself.”

“So magic training with you, combat training with the goon squad, and studying historical documents on my own. It sounds like we’re gonna need a montage.”