“If we do this, I get a clearer reading the more Briggs is NOT going to be involved with everything.”

-You’re killing me here!- Briggs /said from off in the distance, where he was helping work logistics and troop dispersals with the Shore Mages here, who were frankly amazed at just how damn good he was at the job, even after being associated with him for months. He had their entire command network down cold, even better than they did, which just impressed the shit out of them.

He wanted to know who to bitch out if things happened, so he’d made a point of finding out and keeping track of personnel transfers. Hells, he knew about people coming in faster than the commanding officers often did, most of the time. I didn’t ask about his sources in the Pentagram, and he didn’t say anything, although I knew he had at least a couple hundred people working there, in all the departments...

“You might or might not be killing here quickly, so let’s hear that promise, you fluffy ogre, you,” I said aloud to the corner of the ceiling where nobody was. Burt just smirked to hear it.

-I leave it all up to you. Let me know what you decide, but you two make all the decisions,- he /agreed without batting an eye.

I just sighed, looked down at the Circles and Runes on the marble block in the center of the room, complete with candles and incense and other fun stuff, all configured for White Necromancy and Speak with the Dead in particular.

“Burt, run get me Box Number Four from the supply room Divinations stack.” He zipped out of the room in a blur of Air Magic, already sending out ahead to get the box fetched and waiting for him.

I snuffed the candles, cleaned the dribbles of wax off them with TK, and set them in waste materials, to be cycled out and replaced. Ditto what incense was left, and the censers would need to be cleaned ritually with Holy water.

Then I focused on the marble, and the Circles and Diagrams on it began to flow and adjust themselves into a very different paradigm. If you were truly sensitive, you could feel the tweaks in the Manafield as an Element which nobody knew to tap was suddenly being sharply touched upon here, in preparation for touching another one.

Divination was a spell that touched upon Chronomancy, basically peering through Time and all its many, many alternate paths to find that which was likely to happen. There was horrendous spiritual pressure involved with keeping the spell open and looking through Time, and horrendous mental pressure trying to ride the timeline further ahead and not get shunted off down some irrelevant timeline that had spit-all chance of ever manifesting.

Spiritual pressure was fought off with Caster Level, and mental pressure with focus, will, and Concentration.

I still didn’t like using Prophetic Magic like that, and I really, REALLY hated things trying to use it against me, but nothing hereabouts actually had true Divination magic, so their ability to evade the usefulness of it basically came down to whether they knew it was happening or not, and so could shift decisions down an alternate and unanticipated path... which was harder than it seemed on the face of it.

I began to Hum, and the Sublime Chord and the Words of Creation began to play the threads of Mana all around softly, teasing out the magic probably nobody else on the planet realized existed.

Burt returned with the box. I opened it and grabbed literally everything with Zeben’s Telekinesis, then began to place it all in the Diagram as the magic began to build in some very complicated patterns.

Burt retreated to the side, staring at what I was doing and swearing despite himself. His Marked Intellect was at 22 now, which was basically super-genius territory for normal folks, but not excessively smarter than some of the higher-Tier and really gifted powerful Mages out there, which was unsurprising.

I was weaving threads of magic he couldn’t even see, so he was only able to perceive a tithe of the Pattern I was drawing. It was already giving him a headache, without even being Cast and multiplying the intensity of what was going on.

I spun the magic through the Pattern of the spell, beginning the process of wrenching open a path along the timeline forward, even as I reached out with Clairvoyance and focused my attention way over THERE, centering the spell effect in the location I wanted, hopefully a great deal away from Source interference, and pointed a finger at Sama.

She was the absolute opposite of a Source, locking in the past, making a timeline tighter and stronger, whereas Briggs made the future burning and unshaped until he got there, it swinging ever more strongly around his power and influence and desires in subtle fashions normal folks just could not sense.

I could feel it, as whatever he was doing in Boston was having an effect out there... and it wasn’t some casual sense of the news of a big ape in the Littoral Zone creating some excitement. No, these people were responding to his actions in a much more active manner, which meant it was fucking hard to see what they were doing, like looking through dirty glass at a fuzzy TV image while on a rollercoaster ride through fog.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Sama took the bundle of carved ivory rune-sticks in hand, swirled them around her fingers a few times, and then tossed them into the middle of the diagram.

Timelock!

Random chance solidified into absolute certainty. Countless choices from this one moment vanished from possibility. It anchored me as I drove my awareness forward and pushed aside everything that Briggs was doing to Time, looking for the decisions that would be made if he didn’t exist there at all!

Basically, they were threads very similar to what would happen if he keeled over or was killed right now by a meteor coming out of the sky or an assassin or something. They were hugely low-percentage odds, things that actually didn’t exist as long as he would live.

I was basically looking at timelines where Briggs was dead and not fucking stuff up.

There! Dark influence swarming all over the Timeline, erupting out of a confluence of chronal flows, different Timestreams rubbing against one another and sending fractal influences through the other. It was spilling out this way, growing, expanding at a major rate as something was torn open, and the Rift between the two Realms expanded. Dark energy began to flow out of the conflict point with more force and power...

The shadows wafted towards me, and without a shred of hesitation, I abandoned the spell, feeling something extremely powerful and Aware behind that power, influence that reached through intersections of time and possibility and could feel interference, even way outside here where nothing could happen, would happen, the lightest brushing of a fly...

But it was a fly where there was no wind and no buzzing. I wasn’t going to take any risks on this...

---

“Mithar and his mighty Mutt!”

“Pwah?” I blinked, finding myself almost flattened against the wall. Well, I would have been flattened, as I was smashed back into Burt, who had smashed into the wall after catching me.

Sama was right in front of me, three of the four walls in the room were cracked and shattered, the marble Diagram that had been in front of me was riven in nine pieces, and shadows were dripping around the cracks from it.

Tremble’s point inserted in all the points of Dark Mana, and they ignited quickly. People were hurrying up to look into the room, wondering what had happened.

“Get her out of here,” Sama pointed to Burt, who kind of scooped me up as I blinked and wondered why there were a few thousand of him carrying me along, Sama the only absolute in the place. “Clean-up crew!” she ordered quickly. -And tell anyone from outside who asks that Lady Fae was doing some casual spell research and something went boom,- she /ordered mentally, while also making it obvious that was not what had happened...

Eyes flashed, and stories were set straight promptly...

---

“Finger.” Burt held his left index finger up, and I grabbed for it, missing badly. I swore, tossed out more overlapping timelines. He moved his hand, and I did it again.

It took me fifty tries to hit his hand, narrowing down the wide-open temporal view that had been wedged open for the moment, that moment helping me dump over half my remaining choices, and then I had him put up two fingers to further speed the narrowing down.

It was still another ten minutes of slow and unstable grabbing for his hands while interested parties watched me moving like a dazed puppet.

“Both!” I grabbed his hands, and my temporal line solidified, I turned my head, and promptly sprayed blood out my nose and mouth, while half the pores on my head broke open and wept red stuff, blood vessels in my eyes and ears bursting.

I didn’t scream, because it felt like my thoughts had turned to glass, and doing something like that might have shattered them.

Sama stepped up as everyone gaped at me in shock, forced my head back and mouth open pitilessly and irresistibly, and emptied a Healing Potion down my mouth and throat.

It wasn’t like the stuff could drown or suffocate me. It basically bubbled and steamed right there in my mouth, and began to froth and mist off of everything as it did its work. Heavy Healing vapors rose from my skin and face, went soothingly through my brain, and then some Healing Light was bearing down on my head from Red as he clasped his hands to either side of my face and exerted his own magic.

I sighed and let him, just letting my arms drop and letting the others keep me up.

“Sama,” I mumbled, “I really, really hate using Prophetic magic.”

“Timesighting for fun and profit!” she grinned mirthlessly, all sympathy, that Hag she was. “More to the point, how fucked are we?”

“You need to leave right now. Go. They are planning something big, and if you off a couple essential people, maybe we can stop it, or at least slow it down. Six hours, tops.”

“FUUUUUUCK!” She grabbed Tremble, looking west. “I need a Focus there, right now!”

“Driver!” I called out, and Sam hurried over to me. He couldn’t Cast a Teleport yet, although he could have chain-Blinked there pretty damn fast, albeit that would have exhausted a lot of his Void Mana. Noble snapped to my hand, and I kept my eyes closed as I brought up my recollection of my Lived-line, shunting it thirty feet off the road to the right. “You’re going to wind up in a ditch. Make the Focus down there, send it to Sama. Stay there and power it up when we call, keep yourself concealed.”

He nodded, not saying a word. I opened the pathway where both our Lived-lines tracked, he poured in the Void Mana, and fwip, he was displaced to the physical location of an earlier point on his Lived-line hundreds of miles to the west.

Sama waited, Sword down, Tremble chiming very faintly but happily as the Sword prepared to be used again so soon. It was maybe thirty seconds before Sama stepped forward, her image seemed to stretch into infinity in that direction, and she was gone.

“Alright, everyone listen up. I am taking the entire KIA fighting contingent away. I am mobilizing everyone at Coralost who can fight. That includes everyone else, except Briggs. Have Briggs inform General MacElroy in private that this attack was a diversion and there’s a Dark Rift being forced into existence on American soil in Ohio, it’s going to make the place as dark an Undead zone as Egypt and China have unless we hit it now.

“The General should record and register the conversation, but not issue a call to mobilize until the fighting has started, or the enemy will be alerted. We can assume they have complicit parties at all levels in the Hunter’s Guild and military forces there who will intercept and delay mobilization requests, or try to turn government forces against those trying to stop this event.

“We are the best people equipped to fight what is going to happen here, as we have vivus, and vivus is going to be our best weapon at slowing and shutting this stuff down.

“Gear up. Your enemies are going to be Shadows, possibly Undead, and human traitors with Dark Magic allied with them.”

I clapped my hands twice. People jumped and began to move quickly and urgently.