"You'd leave Earth?" Lyda asked. "And start your own pantheon?"

"Not necessarily a pantheon," Cyrus said. "But yes, I would leave Earth. I'd probably be a little more strict than Rynovar is for who can be on it. It would save me some hassles. Maybe, one day, I would take a god as a lover, but I'd have to trust them to stay with me for a long time. I'm not like Rynovar and Selar, who are soulmates. I don't have one of those."

"Soulmates are real?" Lyda asked. "But only some have them?"

"Very few," Cyrus shrugged. "I don't quite know the full details, just that Selar was informed by a phoenix before Rynovar was even born that he was her soulmate. I've no idea how rare soul mates are, but they're the only ones I know of."

Lyda went silent for a few seconds, and Cyrus took another drink of his tea.

"Why would you leave?" She asked. "Establish yourself as godking?"

"I would be able to live in relative peace," he answered. "Establish a life for myself. We gods don't possess a divine presence or anything of the sort, so no one would really notice who I was. I'd just do my own thing, and if another god showed up, tell them to leave. They'd have no choice."

"Why not?" She asked. "What if they-"

"A godking or godqueen can permanently kill any god on their world," Cyrus stated. "If a god traveled to another world and was personally told by a godking to leave, pushing it could end them. For good. The reset spell won't activate if a godking kills on their own world."

Cyrus could take things a step further and severely damage or alter the mana veins of a god. It was even possible that he could turn them mortal, but he had no plans on testing that theory of his.

"You prefer a simpler, more peaceful life," Lyda remembered. "You only deal with your brothers because they cause problems for others."

"Yeah," Cyrus nodded, then sighed as he stared into his tea once more. "Four hundred years. For four centuries, Mother waited before looking through the paths of time to see what the best route would be to break me free of this hold I put myself in."

"Look through the paths of time?" Lyda asked. "There are multiple timelines? When you-"

"There's exactly one timeline," Cyrus shook his head. "Mother's special among chronomancers in that she can see how the past would have been, had a different set of actions been taken. If a single action was altered. It's similar to resetting, but without actually doing so. As a god of war and peace, it's somewhat necessary to know how to alter things to achieve the result of war or peace."

"Oh," Lyda said. "Resetting doesn't create a new timeline?"

"Correct," Cyrus answered. "Resetting erases everything which happened after the reset point."

He tapped his glass as he thought over an explanation.

"When a god resets," he told her. "They are actually performing two types of magic woven into a single spell. Chronomancy and soul magic – the latter is something only gods can perform. We all have the reset spell innate to us, but otherwise, almost no god can perform soul magic. Rynovar can, but only mildly.

"A soul," Cyrus continued. "Is a blank slate. There's nothing there. At all."

"What?" Lyda asked in confusion. "That's not possible. Souls are what-"

"Make people unique?" He asked. "That's what the common belief is. In reality, the soul itself is a storage thing produced by something outside of the universe. Souls are blank, and nearly everyone has an identical soul. Mortals, gods, ants, dragons – everything with a soul, the soul is the same."

"But then why do they exist?" She asked. "If it's not what common knowledge says it is, what is it?"

"A storage device, as I said," he told her. "It holds your knowledge, your memories, your experience, your mana – all of that."

"Mana?" She asked.

"Mana veins, specifically," he nodded. "They're attached to the soul, even if they're inside your body. Manipulating them requires a mixture of aether and soul magic."

"Which is why Rynovar can do it," she said. "Because he can use both."

"Correct," Cyrus drained his glass, then set it down and took a deep breath. "When a god resets time, they copy all of that information stored in the soul, move it through time, overwrite the previous data, compare it to the reset activation, ensure they match, then erase everything that occurred after the reset point. So they keep their memories, their knowledge, their training, and stuff from a time that technically never happened.

"One interesting quirk of it," he held up a finger for a moment, then indicated up. "Is something Rynovar took advantage of when he was a little younger than me, if you go by his body's age and not his full age with the resets.

"If you travel through time," Cyrus told her. "Which involves actually going into the past, rather than simply moving your soul information to a previous point in time, do stuff, then return to your own time, then reset to before when you cast the time travel spell, the stuff you did in the past remained.

"This," Cyrus said. "Is because the actions you performed in the past occurred before the reset point, even if the actual act of going to the past occurred after. Rynovar traveled more than a century and a half to the past, then returned to his own time, then immediately reset the past decade. The stuff he did in the past remained as having occurred."

"That doesn't make sense," Lyda said. "If he reset to before he traveled, then wouldn't what he did when he traveled reset?"

"No," Cyrus said. "As I said, the actions in the past occurred before the reset point. The reset spell only erases what happened after. So even though he never traveled to the past, he was in the past. Kylnar believes this is to ensure continuity within time. There's a law of static past when it comes to time."

"Static past?" She asked. "What does that mean?"

"It means," he explained. "That what happened in the past had always happened. If someone travels to the past, they are not performing new actions. Rather, they are performing actions which they had already performed. Their own actions.

"Honestly?" He asked. "We aren't sure why it's even possible. Let's say you came here from the future. The future hasn't happened yet, though. So why would you be able to be here? You don't exist in this time, yet you're here anyway."

Stolen story; please report.

Cyrus stood and picked up the empty glasses, then took them to the kitchen as Lyda thought over what he said. He washed, rinsed, and dried the glasses, then put them away before returning to the couch.

"The answer," he said. "Is that we believe an outside force is at play when it comes to actual time travel."

"An outside force?" She asked.

"Something outside the universe," he nodded. "Back to the example of you being a time traveler, here from five hundred years in the future. Why would you exist before you existed? Sometimes, the simplest answer is the best answer.

"My theory," Cyrus told her. "Is that a force outside the universe created you, complete with your background, history, and so on. In an instant. Then, it placed you in a point in time before your 'own' time. You did stuff. Then when you activated the 'spell' to return to your own time, that outside force then took you out of the universe, put you in stasis until 'your' time arrived, then when you 'travel back in time', place you back while erasing your old body, updating your soul information. When you're born, it moves your soul into the infant – well, into the fetus, as souls are acquired during pregnancy – but without the data. It just has the base you had in the history created for you."

"But wouldn't that require-"

"Being able to look at time like a book, know how things are, and implement that into your knowledge?" Cyrus asked. "Yes. I believe that time travel does actually use some information from the future, this outside force altering the soul in the past once the actual 'present' arrives to include the soul's data from the travel point. And when it returns, updates the soul's information again. It may actually involve manipulation of events to ensure the traveled soul has mostly correct information initally."

"So time travel," Lyda said. "Isn't a spell a chronomancer is actually casting."

She wasn't too sure on Cyrus's explanation, as it still raised a few questions, but she wasn't going to question him on his theory.

"It's more like a signal to something outside of the universe to mess with time," Cyrus said. "Which is why it costs less mana than resetting time. But as I said, that's purely my theory. It's not necessarily fact, and no one, not even the phoenixes, knows for sure the full details of how time travel works."

"I see," Lyda said, then thought for a few moments. "Resetting costs more mana?"

"Yes," Cyrus nodded. "Though it doesn't actually matter in the first place. The mana is pulled from the 'current' body, and we're immediately put into the reset point's, so we have as much mana as it did at the time we arrived. Mana itself isn't actually stored in the veins, just the information related to our mana veins, such as size, amount, strength, and so on."

Lyda nodded, understanding that part.

"Hey," she said. "How old are you actually? How many times have you reset?"

"I've never used the spell," he told her. "Though I suppose… twenty-four, if you include the resets I've been through."

"The spell can be cast on others?" She asked in surprise. "It's not limited to just the caster?"

"Sort of," Cyrus answered. "A god who has enough mana can take another person with them, but they need to actually know soul magic to do it. As far as I know, only Rynovar, Kylnar, myself, and a god not on Earth right now can perform it. She visited us a few years ago to teach the three of us a little more soul magic than we know, for reason I won't get into."

He didn't particularly want to relive the memories relating to when he was learning necromancy, and Rynovar and Kylnar had her visit the floating island after Cyrus learned what he needed to know. They never told him why they learned additional soul magic and he never asked, so he couldn't explain the reason for them to Lyda.

"Then it wasn't your brothers?" She asked. "Huh. I would assume you going through an additional four years in resets without doing it yourself would be because of your brothers. Did Lord Rynovar do it as some sort of prank? I know it's wrong to think stuff like that, but with some of the pranks he pulls on us mortals, I can imagine him doing that to a god."

"Oh, no," Cyrus told her. "It was my brothers. And it took four and a half years' worth of resets to get them to stop."

More specifically, that was how long it took Cyrus to figure out how to alter their mana veins to prevent them from being able to use the level of soul magic necessary for the reset spell. He probably could have sped it up by experimenting on people, but Cyrus hated such things. Instead, he studied his brothers' mana veins and his own, and once he was able to identify the soul magic aspect of the high magic veins, he nullified his brothers' pain registration while they were sleeping, then promptly weakened their affinity for soul magic below the threshold necessary to cast the reset spell.

It was the one and only time he ever used his aether to alter the mana veins of a person, and he did it to save himself the headache of involuntarily reliving the same day again. The automatic effect for if they died wouldn't change, as that didn't involve affinities at all. So his brothers would reset if they were killed, even if they couldn't perform the spell intentionally anymore.

"I don't understand," Lyda told him. "How did your brothers take you if they can't use soul magic?"

Cyrus scratched the back of his head as he thought over the explanation. It was rather simple, but he didn't know the why behind the explanation, and even Kylnar couldn't answer it.

"When my brothers use time magic," he explained. "All three of them are affected. If one slips out, all three do. If one travels to the past, all three would. If one resets, all three do. If someone uses such time magics on them, all three are affected as well. So if I froze one in time, all three would freeze in time. If I slipped one of them out of time, all three slip out."

"So at the shop," Lyda realized. "It wasn't just… whichever one that was? It was all three who slipped out?"

"Yes," he nodded. "The other two actually came out and watched the fight, then went back upstairs when they realized I was about to slip us back into time. And that was Luke I attacked."

"Do you really hate your father that much, you'd attack your brothers over them mockingly calling you that?" She asked.

"You saw me do that," he said. "That answers your question. Yes, I hate my father, and they do that to antagonize me. A good thrashing is one of the only things that gets them to stop that stuff once they get started. And it's the easiest way."

"Oh," she said. "And you hate him because he abandoned you?"

"That," Cyrus said. "And the stuff he pulls with my gifts. That book I gave the triplets? He left two copies with the Silver Oracle specifically because he knew I'd set the first one on fire. I always set the first one on fire. And he's apparently decided to start doing two because I do that."

"He only did one present," she told him.

"There were two boxes with the exact same sex toys in it," Cyrus muttered. "I only didn't set the second one on fire because Mother would have scolded me for it. The other one was one of the ones with red wrapping."

"Oh," she said. "So your father likes to antagonize you, too?"

"He's not really a fatherly person," Cyrus shook his head. "Anyway, back to the other question. There's another unfortunate quirk. The souls my brothers and I have are strange. The god who taught me a little soul magics said she'd never seen souls like them before. And it seems that I am unfortunately stuck with the time magics affecting the triplets. However, what happens to me doesn't happen to them. So I can slip out of time, and they won't. But if they do, I will."

"And they were resetting," she said. "Causing you to reset."

"Yeah," he sighed. "It was annoying. Want to know what Father did in response to finding that out? He sent me a clock and a calendar. Every. Damn. Reset. And there were a lot of them. That was when I began burning his gifts."

That was also when he began studying mana veins to find out how to prevent his brothers from being able to perform the reset spell. He was only ten at the time, and there was a limit to the amount of patience a kid could hold, even one as mature as Cyrus had been.

Especially when it was interfering with him obtaining a rare collectible.

"Now I'm starting to understand why you hate your father so much," Lyda told him. "Mine died when I was twelve, but I always had good relations with him."

"He died?" Cyrus asked. "Do you mind if I ask how?"

"Heart failure from overwork," Lyda answered. "We lived in poverty. Mom worked as a dancer at a club until a customer didn't like she wouldn't strip for him. It wasn't that kind of club. Skimpy outfits, but no sex or stripping."

"What happened after that?" Cyrus asked. "What did she do?"

"Get buried," Lyda answered. "The customer killed her for pushing his hand off of her. He was arrested, but left me an orphan. I went from foster home to foster home until I turned eighteen, then got dumped out. Stayed at a friend's place until they moved. I was already working at Madam Mara's at that point, so I rented an apartment after that, and you know the rest."

"Yeah," Cyrus nodded, then stood. "All this talking has brought back some rather unpleasant memories. I'm going to head to bed."

"Mind if I join you?"