[Loop: 1]

“Okay. It is safe to say I believe you now,” said Grey as he looked down at the swarm of soldiers far below. “This is serious.”

Grey tried to keep his voice solemn. Oh how he tried. He might even have managed it. But the smile surely still shone from his eyes.

“Yeah. I’ve never stopped being kind of amazed how they’ve managed to stay undetected this long,” murmured Zuri.

“Just how many loops have you been through?” Grey asked.

Zuri crawled away from the rocky edge and stood up before he replied.

“This is my fourth.”

Grey’s estimation of Zuri’s competency shot up by a large margin. Only his fourth and Zuri had already tracked down the enemy encampment. Impressive. Granted, it was a large invading force, but navigating the Darkreaches to find them couldn’t have been easy.

Zuri had taken Grey down below Cyluria, deep enough to leave even the Royal Crypts behind and enter the Darkreaches proper. There, in that titanic continent-spanning cavern system, Zuri had guided them to the edge of a rocky outcropping; the tunnel they had entered from intersected with a far larger cavern, large enough to host a camped army.

While Zuri retreated Grey stayed at the edge, his head resting on his crossed arms and regarded the army below thoughtfully.

Was there a way he could use this entire situation to his advantage?

Certainly having a time traveler in his back pocket would be useful, but the invaders themselves were another problem. Could some use be made of their attack? Besides an increased chance of getting away with looting during the actual attack or right before, Grey couldn’t think of anything. It was sad, really. An army like that could achieve so much, if only Grey were the one leading it.

As Grey understood it, at the end of each loop, the human empire of Sulamarr attacked the Sunfall Dance and nearly everyone was killed, including Zuri. Except somehow, after his first death, Zuri woke back up in his bed some six months earlier and then proceeded to live out the entire six month academic semester a second time. Apparently, as Zuri relived the first semester of his second academic year, the jarring similarities to events he had previously experienced convinced him he had actually traveled back through time. Grey found this a reasonable assumption. Time loops did occasionally happen naturally, or so his some three trillion year odd episodic memory informed him. Though, to be fair, if you lived that long chances were also good you had a semi-bipedal mechanical pterodactyl spontaneously manifest in front of your eyes. Grey could distinctly remember that one happening. Statistics were weird and only got weirder the longer you rolled the dice.

Grey imagined that by the time Zuri had woken up on the same morning for the third time the “older” boy (boy with the older meat-prison) must have been well past the stage of thinking it all a bad dream.

Eventually Grey got up too and followed Zuri back to the tunnel that led back to the Royal Crypts and the streets above. It was surprisingly hard to move. The blackness that came upon him as he stepped away from the edge (and by extension away from the feeble light of the army below) was oppressive. He breathed a sigh of relief when Zuri’s Globe of Light spell ignited not far away.

“Sorry,” Zuri said, wincing sympathetically when he saw how Grey was squinting.

Grey smiled haggardly and waved his roommate’s pesky sympathy away.

“It’s fine. We couldn’t risk you creating light too close to the edge and having someone down there notice. Waiting was the right call.”

At that Zuri gave a curt nod and led the way.

With nothing better to do as they walked, Grey's mind churned.

Mostly everything he had learned made sense, but he went over it anyway. No one was better equipped to bamboozle non-time travelers than a time- traveler. Zuri’s story added up. Mostly. Something, though, didn’t mesh well for Grey’s understanding of the situation, so he asked: “You said you were surprised that the army remains undetected until they attack during the dance?”

“Yeah. It’s weird no one has found them. Given, they aren’t below the Ward,” Zuri answered thoughtfully.

Aren’t below the Ward? Did Grey’s roommate have a hole in his head? Was the sickness of Zuri's humanity disabling his graymatter with fever after all?

“Zuri, they are below the Ward. We are well below the Ward. That was part of the Darkreaches.”

The Ward was central to the city of Cyluria’s continued functioning since it kept the monsters that lived down here from going above and enjoying a feast of the city streets. Grey doubted a lot of people even gave it a lot of thought. But he did; because it was a pain in his ass. The Ward wasn’t a physical barrier. It wasn’t that kind of ward. Instead, things that crossed the Ward from below were afflicted with a powerful death curse. Which, naturally, killed most things. What the Ward didn’t kill outright it debilitated. Usually permanently. Nothing like a magically induced stroke to ruin your day.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Which is what the Ward did to Grey’s day when he had first been figuring out how to get the the Darkreaches. It wasn’t getting to the Darkreaches that was the problem, it was getting back topside without passing through the Ward. Luckily Grey had found the same trick the Sulamarrese army had: The Royal Crypts. They repelled magic from outside their stone walls and cut numerous paths straight through the Ward. The authorities had blocked off what they could, but a few had remained since the Crypts weren’t fully mapped.

Zuri was quiet as he processed where they really were..

In a way, Grey didn’t fault him. Few people really needed to know how to reach the nigh infinite collection of gigantic caverns and maze like tunnels beneath their continent. Grey, though, had a habit of collecting any information that could give him an edge in life. He also had a fondness for monsters. Given that the Darkreaches made for a historically lucrative way to transport illegal goods (like corpses) and were also known to have a thriving ecology of monsters, it was Grey’s kind of place. It was only natural for Grey to know how to get in and out. Even if he had never chanced actually going into the Darkreaches before, he had studied several ways of getting there. Which begged the question of how Zuri had found the encampment in the first place.

“Aren’t the Darkreaches much further down?" Zuri asked. "Three leagues is a lot of distance.”

Grey shook his head.

“No, you’re probably turned around because the Royal Crypts actually slope downward. It’s almost undetectable but they do, and they use spatial magic to distort the distance they span. The people of old Xylur were ingenious for their time. You can store a lot more materials in one place,” Grey explained patiently.

“Grey?” Zuri’s voice carried a long-suffering tone.

“Yes?” Grey replied, genuinely curious what his roommate would ask of him.

Zuri took a deep breath and continued: “I might be used to your eccentricities after sixteen months of being your roommate, but please don’t refer to the dead as ‘materials’.”

Grey nodded solemnly, “I’ll try not to do so in your presence since it bothers you.”

Speaking of the dead, when Zuri and Grey rounded a sharp bend in the tunnel and a regal but simple archway of carved limestone came into view. It sat half recessed into a craggy wall which marked the natural end of the tunnel. Beyond the archway, a hallway of smooth stone continued. Up ahead, Grey could see a handful of draugr milling about. They had made it back to the Royal Crypts.

The Crypts were a fascinating place. Truly, they were. No matter how many times Grey visited he found the inhabitants as utterly delightful as he had the first time.

“You know how they say it isn’t the place? It’s the people?” Grey murmured.

“No. Grey. Just no.”

“Zuri, please, open your eyes. Look at that!”

“I would rather not,” Zuri groaned.

“No really. Observe,” Grey, enjoying the boy’s reaction, smiled wider and played up his joy, “This is fascinating! That one is displaying scavenger behavior!”

He didn’t have to exaggerate much. The draugr in question was displaying some interesting behavior. While the rest in its group were standing lifelessly and staring off into the middle distance, this one crouched like a human man playing dice in an alleyway and collected small rocks. When it found a pebble it liked, the mummy popped it in its mouth and chewed for a time before giving up, spitting it out, and trying its luck with another rock. The creature was amazingly dexterous for something whose tendons locked in rigor mortis in centuries past.

Suddenly, the creature rocked back on its boney heels and snapped its head ceiling-ward. Even Grey jumped when it let out a keening wail like nothing Grey had ever heard in his human life. It was more than a sound, it was Despair. Pure and complete. It was the sound of something that had lost everything it loved and held dear, the sound of something precious and irreplaceable being lost forever. The sound of all hope dying.

And it brought tears to Grey’s eyes because he understood. He felt that same scream clawing to escape his throat every morning and only barely held it back most days.

Grey didn’t remember deciding to move, he just did. He crouched by the draugr as it wailed in anguish and wrapped his arms around its boney frame. He gave what comfort he could and it wasn’t as gross as he expected since all moisture had left long ago. The thick robe around its body actually smelled worse than the eyeless corpse did.

Finally, when the draugr stopped its wordless cry and went back to eating pebbles as if nothing had changed, Grey gave its head a reassuring pat, stood, and rejoined Zuri.

Zuri shook his head.

“I can’t believe you did that.”

Grey scowled. He hated people who discriminate without cause or reason. Why should only the living be allowed comfort? It was the dead who had truly lost something. Still, Grey held back his rancor. Disposing of Zuri’s body was not an option. He needed the time traveler alive.

So instead of lashing out, Grey opted to reeducate his involuntary friend.

“Why not? They aren’t dangerous.”

Zuri didn’t even turn to look at him when he gave an answer Grey should have expected. It was stupid enough to come from a human.

“No. But they are disgusting.”

For the rest of the trip back to the surface Grey kept his admiration for the dead–and the occasional undead–around them to himself. Instead he focused on understanding what his next moves should be. The time-loop they were apparently trapped in had the potential to accelerate the time table of his plans nicely.

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