Epilogue - Winding the Clock

More than a week later, I sat outside in the backyard of the inn that had become my home. I never ended up meeting with Kate’s parents. She and her brother spun some sort of story and Kate asked me to go along with it. Whatever they said, it had the same effect as the truth. The entire family now played AoA, with Kate playing mentor and guide to her older brother while their parents played together and asked for advice occasionally. She was both loving it and hating every second of it. They had a complicated dynamic I still didn’t understand.

Santa had come over to visit, and we were sipping beers in the sun. I spent a lot of my time trying to figure out a better path for myself. With my classes locked or broken, it reduced me to just what I could pull off without a class. Admittedly, that was still a lot, but the bonuses and skills from my classes were no longer functional. It made me realize that without the power of those classes; I was a goddamn mess.

In the past, I could have had both classes sealed and been just as deadly. I had a tactic for every encounter, a skill to match any foe. My blade work alone was at a level that put me near the top powerhouses of humanity. What made it all work was grace. I had a fluidity of movement and style that brought all my skills together, amplifying them beyond their individual strengths. I wasn’t the best warrior we had, and I certainly wasn’t the best mage. Hell, I barely made the top fifteen cultists on a good day. However, I was one of the top five most powerful humans, all because I knew who I was, what I had, and how to use it to the greatest effect.

Class skills and bonuses were useful, incredible even, but in my prime, I could have been almost as powerful without them. Now, well, I was durable, somewhat strong, and packed a lot of magical power and regeneration for my level. I was a magical brute. It might be impressive for now, but that wouldn’t last. I was used to fighting with control, brutal elegance, and foresight.

I had never been a brute at heart. It was a powerful style, an old acquaintance, Silmor the Avalanche, used to fight as a magical brute. In fact, I patterned my fighting off of him after I ended up as an earth-slinging druid. Where he could embrace the style, I could only mimic it, it wasn’t my own. Something that was a real problem, as Santa was happily pointing out to me.

“You need to stop trying to imitate old friends. Your stunt with the Shadow King was impressive, but that wasn’t you. Hell, you stole the weapons trick from DeadRatHunter the Iron Sage of the Battlefield, in the first place. You need to stop being so afraid you’ll relapse or something. Start from the beginning. As we’ve already seen, things are changing. Our info is getting unreliable. Hell, that weird rock thing didn’t exist at all! Supposedly there’s a Patch coming soon too. Who knows what that will do?”

He sighed and spun a sparrow out of snowflakes; the detail wasn’t great. His control still needed work.

“You’re trying to jump straight to a whole new style, abandoning what you built over twenty years. Its working fine at these low levels but you know as well as I do that won’t fly in higher zones. Find your Heart again, Laz. Build a Domain. Reforge yourself. We have some time before the next big problem we managed to remember. Violet and I can handle things for a while.”

I started to say something, and he cut me off.

“Yeah, I know it sucks that we can’t help the random people out there. People falling to soul magic and worse or letting monsters through to Earth. But you having a fighting style that is really just three dwarves in a trench coat isn’t gonna help anybody.”

I chuckled; he wasn’t wrong. After a sip of my beer, I responded.

“I get your point Santa, but its not so easy. My Style, my Heart, and especially my Domain, were all built to support the skills and abilities of a Death Knight tank. I know I don’t want to be a Death Knight again, hell I don’t want to wield any of the dark magics again, no matter how useful a Life Drain field or squad of Elite Bone Dancers are. I’m not sure if I even really want to be a warrior again Santa. What I know is that I will be the wall that breaks the charge instead of buckling, the line in the sand that can’t be crossed, the force that won’t die or quit. That much I know I can’t change.”

“Maybe I should look into Auras, I know the theory, but I haven’t used one- “Again Santa cut me off.

“No! You’re doing it again, reaching for powers you’ve seen others use effectively, without having a basic skillset to build on. You aren’t them and you shouldn’t try to be. Even if you end up with a similar powerset, you need to do your own thing. Its amazing just how different your younger self is. I can see why you have so much trouble. You can’t stick to anything. How the hell did you manage to stick with something long enough to not die the first time? Never mind, I think I know; you didn’t have the skills to do anything other than be a warrior and then picked the quick and dirty Death Knight powers to stay alive. Now that you have skills and options you are practically paralyzed.”

He drained his beer and pulled a fresh one from his inventory.

“If you want to be a mage and a tank, do something that will advance your Primordial class one before it unseals itself. If you want to be battlefield control, again go pick up warding or spatial magic or something, you don’t have to settle for the lower elements with your knowledge as a starting point. Remember, we have time. Most of the threats weren’t as overpowered as the shadowfucker this early. By the time they come around, you will have had plenty of time to get your head on straight. You’ll be picking up titles and saving the day on a weekly basis again.”

“Oh, come on, I wasn’t that bad.”

“I distinctly remember a week in which you not only stopped a doomsday cult with actual brains but also slew a mad lich and stopped the collapse of that roman empire knockoff. You were definitely that bad.”

“How the hell do you even remember that? You were blackout drunk the entire week? And the cult was easy. I threw a rock into their ritual, and they all melted from the backlash. The lich was an honor thing, he claimed he was a better necromancer than me when he could barely make a decent Ivory Horror, and that empire fell to a magic plague within a year, so they don’t count.”

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He cracked up. “I noticed you didn’t deny the titles. My personal favorite was when that weird tribe of twenty-foot-tall lightning squirrels declared you to be the ‘Corpsedancer General’. Oh gods, that was amazing. Or those animated pixie statues that named you Bonethruster, that one was priceless.”

“Yeah yeah, laugh while you can ‘Tiny Pricker’, or should I remind you of the dragonkin that named you ‘Frosty the Unclothed’?”

“Hey! Those giants were barely able to understand what a sword was, it’s not my fault my hands are smaller than their swords, and those lizard bastards only took into account their own clothing, and it was made of fire!”

After laughing at him for a bit, he continued. “Anyway, the main point is you need to figure out who you are without all the death stuff. If you want to embrace this Primordial class then fine, but do it as you, not as a bad copy of an old comrade.”

I sighed; he was right, after all.

“By the way, what was that rock thing you mentioned earlier?”

“Oh yeah, you have been holed up here so you wouldn’t have seen it. It’s some weird thing they added to city plazas and supposedly random places around the world. Some sort of small change before they implement the patch. It analyses you when you touch it and gives you something called a Trait, one personally tailored to you. I don’t know much about it yet. People have been getting things like Affinities, Personal Spells, even Extra Stats. You can only benefit from it once, though. I heard someone say there was a rumor that at higher levels you could activate it again, but I don’t know how much credit to give that. I personally think its something to make up for whatever nerfs they are going to make when the Patch hits.”

He finished his beer again and put away the glass. “I won’t lie Lazarus. This Patch business scares me. It wasn’t there before, and was probably caused by the mess with the shadowfucker. Is it better that the world changes in unpredictable ways than if we had let millions die? I just don’t know, man. I guess it depends on the changes. How bad is it going to fuck us over? What will change? Do they even have enough access to implement large world-level changes anymore? It unsettles me something fierce, that’s why I’m heading out in the morning. I want to get something, anything, done before we potentially lose our advantage.”

After finishing my own beer, I inject mana into the glass, just to watch it sparkle in the fading light.

“Where will you go?”

“I was thinking of tackling the King of the Shattered Throne.”

That’s a big one, but possible if they take long enough to release the patch.

“You know I can’t help you with that questline, right?”

“Yeah, its fine though, I did them before when I was a lot less experienced, more powerful sure, but I was a damn amateur.” He grinned. “It should be a fun challenge and head off a future problem at the same time.”

He wasn’t wrong. Taking out the King would be good. It wasn’t something we needed to do immediately, but it wouldn’t hurt either. In the future, someone had fucked up a ritual in a dungeon. We never figured out what they were trying to do, but they ended up bringing the dungeon back to life from the backlash of their failure. Needless to say, the fool didn’t survive. The dungeon had formed in the massive corpse of some ancient emperor; the emperor was both the champion of a forgotten war god and the ruler of a race of titanic humanoids. Not an actual Titan, but some sort of ancient cousin race.

With his divine empowerment it took a specific set of items to kill him the first time, and they were all sealed away in places that were supernaturally cold. Santa was the one that collected the artifacts the last time, since he was the only one able to face that level of cold without consequence. In the months it took him to get us a kill-shot, the nameless king destroyed 17 cities and 3 nations. The death toll was in the millions. We fought the bastard every step of the way, but it was just delaying tactics.

I’ve faced a lot of things, but that was the one time the fight seemed truly meaningless.

If Santa could assemble the artifacts and kill the King while it was just a dungeon, then it would never revive. It was something he was uniquely suited for since there were all sorts of restrictions in the quests you had to complete to get the damn items.

At the time, we eventually decided the whole thing was a bug or glitch in the game world. Some bit of lore from the past that was never supposed to come up again. The artifacts were just very nice rewards for completing some seriously difficult challenges. They didn’t even hint that they could be used to put down such a creature. It was only because Santa had spent time learning from some very specific martial societies that he noticed the connections between their legends.

Whatever that mad ritualist was trying to do had to have gone very wrong, and no one was able to figure out how it happened. The King revived from a corpse, but not as an undead or spirit. He just returned to the height of his power like nothing ever happened and stood up. Damage didn’t stick to him, it didn’t matter the type, not even the rarest damage form of all, True Damage, did a thing to him. To skills that could quantify health, the king just returned an error message. If anything, the revival may have made him more powerful that he had been originally.

The whole thing was pretty personal for Santa. He lost his lover to that monster mere hours before he killed it. He had been planning to propose, if I remembered right.

“Are you going to seek her out?”

The shadow of grief twisted his face as he replied, “No, I can’t. I’m not the man she loved, and she can’t be the same either. It would feel like a lie and a betrayal of her memory. Even though she lives again. What I can and always will do is protect her. I can at least do that much.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with his logic, but maybe in time Santa would change his mind. Once he destroyed the King, he should have much more time to figure things out.

“If you need a hand, let me know, even if you just want a friend with you, as you end the bastard. Feathers was family.”

He just closed his eyes and sighed. “Thanks, man, but this is something I need to do on my own. Closure, if you will. Anyway, I still have some shit to do before I leave, so I need to head out. Get your shit together before I get back, okay?”

After that he got up and left, leaving me to my thoughts. I watched the last rays of sunlight refracted in my glass fade. I’ll get right on that buddy, it’s such a simple thing after all.

As dusk turned to night, I really thought about what he had said, who I was, and what I wanted to become. After the whirlwind of time travel and the Shadow King, I finally felt I had a moment of peace to reflect on myself.

So here I was. A man with a wounded soul and broken classes, a hero out of time wandering in the dark. I looked at my affinity list. For all that I’ve done, one thing still stands out about it. Time. An affinity even my fellow time travelers didn’t get, one that scares me almost as much as my potential power if I abandoned all morality and reason.

Maybe Santa was right, and I need to start at the beginning. Walk a new path. I can pull off decent imitations of others but none of them fits. I’m not Hunter the Iron Sage, nor am I Solum Geostorm or Kerrana the Volcano. Fuck, I’m not even Lazarus Juggernaut of the Black Wall anymore. I was given a new path, a new chance, a new life. All that, I was given… but only I can choose to embrace it.

I gathered a ball of mana to my hand and focused. Slowly the mana changed into an ethereal mix of silver and gold powder, swirling about in whorls and eddies as they mixed but never merged. The world trembled at my might when I mastered Death. Let’s see how they feel about Time.