[Loop: 1]

Grey thought the rain was extremely indicative of his day. Not because he didn’t like rain, actually he did–the effect it had on his mood was the complete reverse it seemed to have on other people–it was just that he didn't like to be out in a torrential downpour.

“When it rains, it pours,” he murmured to himself, then laughed at the pun he made even as he lamented, for the fifth time, not bringing his umbrella with him to class.

When he noticed how the (few) other students in the courtyard were looking at him, Grey laughed harder. The two human girls passing by to his right walked even faster, obviously even more eager to get away from the crazy first year than they were to get out of the sudden rain. Being the great connoisseur of schadenfreude that he was, Grey's laugh became a full fledged manic cackle.

Yes, it was truly a testament to his true potential that he could scatter these disgusting monkeys from his path with his mere laughter. Sadly, that potential was still mostly unrealized, and it was starting to look like regaining magic was not going to change that nearly as fast as he had hoped. Mostly because the First Academy of Cyluria turned out to be a sad excuse for an educational institution.

Even conceding to the fact that it was only his first semester here, the amount of magic Grey had been taught, or rather the lack thereof, was inexcusable. What made it even more of an embarrassment was that most of the academy’s staff were Arkanik, not human. Grey held humans in pitifully low regard (despite nominally being one himself) but he had expected better of inherently magical races.

Hopefully this was not a trend. If every race in Grey’s new world was as hopelessly mediocre as humanity… he just might step in front of a bus. Well, not really, because where there was life there was also hope. He would, however, be sorely disappointed.

Sudden movement to his left caught his gaze on the left side of the courtyard. It took a moment for his vision to resolve what he was looking at. It was shaped like a student, with the shifting substance of its form mimicking the long flowing robes typical of the Academy's dress code, but that was where the resemblance ended. For one thing it didn’t seem to have arms, for another its robes and (maybe its entire body) were made of undulating black smoke.

Grey had read enough occult lore to know he was looking at a wraith. Instantly, he froze. It only took a moment for his brain to realize he was dead. Dead. Wraiths were drawn to fear, and unfortunately, Grey’s heart was already pounding in his chest. Grey blinked the rain out of his eyes and by the time he opened them again the Wraith had sunk low to the ground, as if on its knees. It turned its featureless head this way and that, looking for all the world like a hound scenting its prey. Slowly, it turned to stare directly at Grey. It had no eyes and no face, but Grey could somehow feel it looking at him. Looking INTO him.

An icicle of dread impaled Grey’s spine and tore its way up to lodge in his throat. He watched, paralyzed, as the Wraith flitted towards him. Rather than heading straight for him, the Wraith darted side to side. Each movement it made was too fast for his eyes to follow, but between each it paused, as if it wanted to be seen.

“STOP TOYING WITH ME!”

For a moment, Grey wondered what absolute tool thought shouting at a Wraith was a good idea. Then he realized the voice had been his.

The Wraith paused once more. Sinking low to the ground its frame distended, seeming to thicken. No longer was it an indistinct shadow; within moments it had transformed into a pitch-black mass of writhing muscle with foot-long claws at the ends of its bulky arms.

Droplets of black poured from where its mouth should have been. The Wraith was salivating.

Grey’s death blurred forward one last time.

***************************

Grey woke up in his dorm room, his pulse pounding in his throat.

“What in the Hells?” he murmured to himself.

What a horrid dream. How exciting.

Grey relaxed back in bed, enjoying the feel of adrenaline as it dispersed in his veins.

***************************

Grey had been sitting in the classroom for over an hour, listening to his teacher, Ms. Lee, drone on and on about runes. Normally, Grey was more than a little eager to learn anything that had to do with magic. After all, in his previous life magic had been one of the keys to his ascension to power. As a general rule he was obsessed with learning spells, charms, hexes, anything that might make him a more powerful mage. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Grey had no patience for basic runic inscription. The issue was that the subject required an extremely intensive understanding of basic algebra, which he was profoundly bad at. Never mind the fact that he found most calculus trivially easy.

Grey had been told repeatedly that math was a skill that built upon itself and magic was too. He didn’t believe it for a second. Those with enough creativity and ambition would always be able to find hidden paths.

Ambition was something Grey had in spades.

While most students were driven (if they were driven at all) by a desire for money, success, or fame, Grey was driven by a hunger he couldn’t describe. He needed progress and craved accomplishment. Not because he wanted recognition but because he felt that each achievement made in life opened new doors, and he knew that some of those doors led to some very exciting places. Though if he was being honest with himself there was a small part of him that wanted to prove himself to his mother, who had a tendency to (unintentionally) compare him to his overachieving older sister. Fen was only a year older than him and already a second circle magus.

Grey smiled at the silliness of his own thoughts. He had a tendency to talk to himself. Sometimes he even did it aloud. Which was rather odd because the person he was talking to was dead and had been for over a year. Grey had not always been himself. Grey wasn't even his name.

His real name was something no mere language of humans or Arkanik could reproduce. If pressed he might have said it could be best translated into Akarian as “The Shadow of Change.” Of course, even that was a blasphemous abbreviation. His true name described all that he was and had been for nearly three trillion years. (Three trillion years–If he was accounting interdimensional time and correctly correlating it to the solar years of the world he now inhabited. This was a trick that was more educated guess work than math.) In the True Language, Grey's true name was short, concise and three syllables long; yet it would have filled thousands of books if translated and written down in the common tongue of his new world.

“Gray” had been this body's name when he found himself inhabiting it. It had been human and technically still was. Except the mind now residing within was not human in the slightest. One day it had simply happened. The body and its human soul, Gray, had been simply sitting in class when it had occurred. Without warning or preamble or even an explanation, the incomparably vast essence of The Shadow of Change was thrust into his current human meatsuit and fused to the soul that already occupied it. Gray, the human, was obliterated instantly as his soul was subsumed by a much larger essence. However, Gray's experiences, his feelings, and his knowledge had been absorbed into The Shadow of Change.

It was this knowledge that permitted The Shadow of Change to understand his new situation, even blend in. He knew how to speak Akarian, how to act human, and how to pretend as if nothing at all had changed, all thanks to the human Gray. So, sometime in the past year The Shadow of Change had decided to memorialize the boy whose soul he had devoured by taking a new name: Grey.

Grey. The same word with a small misspelling.

Actually, he was rather fond of the decision. Since “Grey” was pronounced the same as the body's original name he could continue to introduce himself the same. Thus, he could avoid drawing any suspicions all while remaining true to himself. It was a nice strategy that meant he could refrain from masking his true self with a false name. There was, after all, only so much pretending an unimaginable eldritch entity could do before it lost its ever-loving mind. Also, the Shadow of Change would never stoop so low as to call itself by a human name. This was a nice compromise.

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So, Grey spent all day every day pretending to be (mostly) a normal human. A member of a race he loathed. If Grey had had to also call himself by a human name…well, he would have screamed. All day. Every day. Out loud. Instead of pretending.

Yes. Calling himself “Grey” was his secret little act of rebellion. So what if the name he had chosen was basically the same as the body's original name? “Grey” was his in a way “Gray” was not. His secret triumph was sweetened all the more when no one noticed. No one made any remarks even after he started to sign his new name on assignments. His teachers never made a single comment.

“You utter fools,” Grey murmured under his breath, “I will devour your world and you will be the ones to teach me how.”

Suddenly remembering his dream from the night before, Grey winced. Yes. He would claim this new world he lived in as his… If he lived long enough.

His new body was so terribly fragile.

***************************

Grey’s dorm room was located on the third floor of the academy’s dormitory building. By dorm room standards it was fairly nice. It had a wooden door with a brass knob for an entrance and the room itself was cozy: To the right of the door when you came in, a fireplace crackled with magical flames. The rug in the center of the small room changed color depending on the mood of the occupants, and the walls were decorated with posters of famous magicians and paintings of magical creatures. There were two beds on opposite sides of the room, each with a comfortable mattress, a fluffy pillow, and a quilt that adapted to the temperature, complements of the Academy. Against the (not very) far wall from the door there were also two desks on either side of a small window that overlooked the courtyard. Each desk was covered with lamps, books, scrolls, and various magical tools and instruments, though their exact decorations differed greatly based on the inclinations of the two occupants.

Like Grey, his room mate, Zuri, was a workaholic academic and the two got along well. Grey's only gripe about his roommate was his wish that the other boy shared even a tenth of his ambition. Zuri was an excellent student and that was part of what made him an agreeable roommate. He was the kind of person who worked quietly from the moment he got back from classes until he retired at night. Best of all, he never pried.

If he had been the nosy kind of roommate, the kind that went through other people's things without asking, Grey would have had a hard time explaining the nearly complete set of canine bones in the small chest under his desk.

Currently, both the room’s occupants were at their desks. Grey had been intently focused on deciphering a set of treatises on a certain flesh-eating bacterium for the better part of an hour. Zuri had gotten back from class before him and had been tinkering with some kind of rune inscribed cube since Grey himself had returned.

Grey sighed. He had decided some time ago that he liked sighing. He liked stretching even more, so he did that, then got up to get himself some lunch.

At first having to eat regularly had just been another one of many flesh inconveniences which drove him to a blind rage. Now though? Perhaps there was something to it. The experience wasn’t the same as usurping the essence of gods, world souls, Terrors of Existence, or Sovereign Others, but it was pleasant in its own way.

There came a moment of quiet broken only by the sound of Grey’s slurping. Which was shattered rather brutally.

“Gray, what would you say if I told you I was a time traveler? What kind of evidence would it take to convince you?”

For a moment Grey froze and stared at the pasta he had just pulled out of the microwave. For a few seconds he felt like he could divine all the answers in the universe from the steam that wafted from his noodles.

And maybe he could, if for only a short time, because somehow staring at that steam cleared his mind enough to answer the (completely unexpected) question his roommate had posed halfway intelligently.

“I’d tell you to seek psychiatric help immediately,” Grey replied in an only half joking tone. He took great care to make sure his words were what you'd expect from someone who got such an absurd scenario dumped on them out of the blue… but instead of looking concerned for his friend and roommate, he was smiling–rather evilly. Thankfully, he had his back to Zuri at the moment.

Grey fought hard to reign in the crack of maniac glee that had crawled from his lips, like the path woven by a deranged spider, to meet his eyes.

Finally, after getting himself under control, he turned around.

“I figured,” Zuriah sighed, clearly disappointed. The reaction was interesting to Grey. Because if anything it made Zuri seem defeated. Tired. Like he had asked many people the same question recently and had gotten the same result.

Grey leaned back against the tiny kitchen’s counter and watched intently as his roommate scooped up his journal and left the cube he’d been tinkering with on his desk, and stalked towards the door.

Fortunately, Grey had found he was almost frighteningly good at reading the thoughts and feelings of the mortal races he now shared a world with. He was, by his estimate, three or four times better at reading people than Gray the human had ever been–or at least that was what Grey could recall from Gray's memories. However, actually being able to predict how people would react to what Grey said and did have proven more than a little bit frustrating for him. Almost impossible, really. So Grey wasn’t sure what possessed him to say the next part. He just felt that the other boy had to hear it:

“...But I’d also believe you. Tentatively.”

Zuriah froze mid step. “What? Really? That easily?”

“As you have pointed out in the past, I have a tendency to collect dead things. I’m not exactly mentally stable myself,” Grey replied, setting his pasta down at his desk. That done, he turned to face his roommate. He hoped his face didn’t betray his maniacal joy.

If Zuri was being genuine, the last thing Grey needed to do was scare him off. Although Zuri didn’t seem to know about the sewerdog skeleton he kept in its chest under his desk, there had been one unfortunate incident where Zuri had caught him using their sink to clean the leftover meat and skin from some chicken bones Grey had liberated from the cafeteria. Most unfortunate.

Zuri shook his head, “Okay. What would it take to convince you?"

Grey thought about it. Recently, Zuri had shown an almost unnatural knack for combat magic for a second year. Combat magic was a class only available to second years and up, but Grey made a habit of peering into the gym at odd hours–often while skipping his own classes. As far as Grey had observed, most 2nd year students had trouble even casting a basic force shard. Zuri alternated between the more exotic variants of that spell like he had them all in muscle memory. So, unless Zuri had acquired a private tutor and an extra few hours to a diurnal period, his ability to cast combat magic was just a little too advanced. Then there were the other boy’s grades. Zuri was the third highest scoring student in his grade but only attended one of the two classes he shared with Grey.

What made this weirder was the fact these weren’t traits Zuri had had until sometime in the first week of their third month this year. Before that, Zuri had been ranked fourth in his, and had consistently and diligently attended his classes. At least, as far as Grey was aware. He’d have to ask around to make sure. The behavior change coupled with a sharp increase in skill was slim evidence (for time travel) at best, but Grey had wondered what had changed.

Two weeks ago, he had tailed Zuri to the alchemy labs when the older boy had snuck out one night. It was something Zuri did almost every night. The night Grey had followed he had watched silently from across the quad as his roommate somehow picked the magical lock on the building and slipped inside. Without setting off any of the academy wards.

Suspicious? Perhaps. But, more so, it was interesting. Especially in the light of the current discussion.

Grey shoved his excitement down and thought about what Zuri had asked. Now, if Grey were the time traveler, how would it set him apart from a normal person? There was one obvious answer.

“If you could accurately predict what a few people will do in the next few days, I’d be pretty convinced,” Grey said with conviction.

Zuri winced.

“That might be difficult. Every loop plays out a little bit differently. Small actions I take can make some pretty big changes.”

“Do they? Always? Or do some things seem more or less constant?” Grey asked as he looked over the other boy intensely. Zuri certainly didn’t seem older than he had at the beginning of the year. Not unnaturally so. As far as Grey was concerned that was a black mark against him being a time traveler. So was the excuse.

Grey suppressed a sigh. He really shouldn't have gotten his hopes up. Yes, this was exactly the sort of thing he had been looking for, but it was also almost certainly untrue.

Grey was a bit disappointed in Zuri on a personal level. Honestly, he didn’t know why he bothered. Perhaps it was Zuri’s witch-blood that let him look past the other boy's revolting humanity. Or maybe he had recognized, grudgingly, a kind of kindred spirit in the other boy’s study ethic and clandestine nighttime activities. He had honestly thought the other human male above this sort of pranking. Well, no matter. Zuri was probably so bored with his pitiful human existence that these kinds of lies and games were necessary to keep him sane. Regardless, Grey wasn't interested in playing along with such a thing.

He had real achievements to accomplish. Like divine Authority to reacquire and a world to literally conquer.

“There are. Actually. I can write down some things that will happen in the next three months, specific things people will do. I can also show you my magic and my alchemy. To be honest, I haven’t been in the loop long, but I do have a few skills that probably aren’t normal for a second year… and… I could probably show you something that would make you believe me.”

“Uh. Can I ask what you mean?” Grey asked.

Zuri took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’ll be blunt: In three months, at the Sunfall Dance, the city will be invaded. The Ashmark estate is at the center of the attack. Almost everyone will die.”

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