“I’ve always known it would be hard, but I wasn’t fully prepared for the reality.”
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Jair knew to the second when their time would be up. He’d lived this week so many times, it wasn’t even something he thought about. A constant countdown he couldn’t escape.
The angle of the light, the sound of the wind, the distant voices of students.
He hated that knowledge. Hated that he automatically brought their conversation to a natural end just in time to see Raina to laugh one final time.
Then the air trembled and the ground shook and Ryenzo’s wrath descended upon them.
Their house was torn apart in an instant.
Jair ran forward as the massive claws wrapped themselves carelessly around Raina’s fragile form, crushing her whole right side and cutting deep into her chest as the dragon roared its mantra of destruction.
The sounds would be incomprehensible to anyone else present, but in his many attempts to reason with the mad creature Jair had become one of the few humans who could fluently understand Draconic. He couldn’t exactly speak it, not without drastic adjustment to his body and some additional constructs for good measure, but if he could hear it, he’d understand it.
“KILL THE CHILD, BREAK THE MOTHER!”
He jumped and stabbed forward with Maelstrom, driving the weapon into the claw with all his meager strength.
Ryenzo’s burning green blood mingled with Raina’s, dripping down the oversized claws, but the dragon didn’t seem to even notice.
Ryenzo flew higher and the force of the wind drove Jair to the ground beneath.
People emerged from the buildings at the sound. Several of the other structures had been crushed or collapsed by Ryenzo’s claws or tail as the dragon made its approach. Shouts and screams. People pointed and stared in shock, while others fled toward the transit platform.
The dragon circled the academy, ignoring the tiny sword sticking out of its claw, and screamed its vengeance until it echoed from the walls and resonated through the cliff below.
“KILL THE CHILD, BREAK THE MOTHER!”
Once certain it had everyone’s attention, the dragon tossed Raina into the air.
It could have let her fall—could even have laid her down gently and allowed them to send for healers—and she wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes. But Ryenzo Draconis was here to make a point. Albeit one that even Jair didn’t understand.
Ryenzo’s tail came around and slapped the falling heiress as the dragon flew by, throwing her upward in an. Then Ryenzo made a tight circle, the dragon’s overly long and incredibly flexible neck darted down, and its teeth chomped down on the helpless tiny human.
Jair looked away, fists clenched, eyes burning.
He knew it was coming, but that never made it any easier.
For a few days, he’d allowed himself to pretend that this could be simple, that a little more information and strategizing could do the impossible.
He knew better. The hard part was only just beginning.
He activated Temporal Reversion and fell into the past in a flash of golden light.
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Try as he might, Jair couldn't calm himself down. He'd reverted, ready to start at the beginning.
Or, so he’d thought.
Nothing could change the fact that he was standing in a group of people he didn't trust and had to stay there for hours.
His body refused to believe that he was safe. Every bump or shift had his hand going to Maelstrom, ready to fight for his life.
Headmaster Larenok would steal Maelstrom if given the slightest opportunity. He could see it in the man’s eyes. Enemy.
It was all he could do to refrain from attacking the man on the spot.
Jair lived for so long as a fugitive among enemies, outnumbered beyond what even the greatest archmage could hope to survive, secrecy and swift retaliation his only advantages. To stand exposed in the open felt wrong. To stand unmoving with this many people so close felt even worse.
He dismissed Maelstrom back into his soul, removing it from reach, and turned stiffly to walk away.
Someone grabbed him from behind.
He reflexively shifted his grip, manifesting the sword in his hand. He stabbed it backward as he used the momentum of the man's attempt to spin him around to his advantage.
Only after he completed the turn and saw Professor Notek clutching his bleeding abdomen did Jair recognize the touch hadn’t been an attack at all.
Oops.
Jair dismissed his sword back to his soul and stepped to Notek’s side, helping the injured man to the ground. "Do you have any apprentices you can send for, Professor?"
"What's wrong?" Notek asked instead of answering, though his voice bore the strain. "You seem to be under a great deal of stress."
Jair laughed softly, humorlessly. "Of course the healer is more concerned with his attacker's mental well-being than himself bleeding out in front of half the continent's elite."
"You weren't trying to kill me. You were trying to disable me as quickly as possible, probably in precursor to escape, if I'm reading you right."
"Not this time. I'm done running. I'm here to make a stand."
Notek searched his face only a moment before nodding. "Good. I've always said you were the only thing holding you back."
The ground shifted beneath them, the stage breaking apart as the stone foundation deep below the sand rose up, splitting Jair from Notek and forcing them apart.
Firdon, elemental stone master.
“I’m not going to hurt anyone—”
“Too late for that,” Notek grunted.
“Give it a minute. You’ll be good as new.”
Golden light burst forth as he erased the past moments. With so little distance to fall, Temporal Reversion was a simple flash, gone before he could more than perceive its existence.
Jair arrived instantly back where he’d begun. Larenok holding out his sword, Jair’s own hand touching the hilt, time frozen as the stowaway silver spark in his soul traveled down his neck and along his arm to reunite with its past self.
He forced his breaths to stay steady, though it was all he could do not to stab anyone. Any thought of preparing to be charming and ingratiate himself with the gathered nobility disappeared. Survive, escape.
Jair needed to run, get to high ground, get behind a wall. He was exposed here, vulnerable, surrounded by enemies.
They're not enemies, he reminded himself. Even the adversarial ones. Not enemies, only obstacles. Resources. Potential allies.
He couldn't get his heartbeat under control. Couldn't shift himself out of the mindset that left him ready to fight at a moment's notice.
Deep breath. Slow. This was a school. Even if there was a threat of attack, the teachers were all at least advanced in their class. They could protect him.
The lie grated; he couldn't convince himself to even pretend to believe it. Old bitterness threatened to drown him.
To distract himself, he tried to focus on the people in attendance. He hadn't memorized the exact makeup of the small crowd of parents, friends, and relatives of the advancing initiates. Some were so insignificant that he couldn't bring to mind a single thing about them, despite staring right at them. Others, he knew their past and future so clearly he could predict their entire week flawlessly.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
One thing he didn't remember was so many people focusing on him. Pointing. Whispering. Staring.
It made him feel all the more on display, on edge, threatened. Conspiring against him.
No. He knew better. He was just another student. No one here knew what he was capable of. They had no reason to come after him. No money, no powerful allies, only a moderate quantity of blackmail material against people who wouldn’t be able to make a difference anyway. No spells. Only a sword of unknown qualities to separate him from any ordinary student. Even if that sword was spilling silver light everywhere like a miniature manaforge.
The future haunted him, paralyzing in its complexity.
He had to do something.
With a deep breath, Jair pushed away the discomfort and yanked his sword from the headmaster’s hand. He held up the weapon, still flaring unsteadily with pulsing silver light, above his head in a dramatic flourish.
“Hello, Astralla Mageblade Institute!” Jair announced. “I’ve come from the future with a grave warning!”
His actions elicited gasps and confused muttering from the audience of assembled nobility.
“Welburne!” the headmaster exclaimed, an angry scowl on his face. “What are you—”
Jair instantly had his sword pointed at the man’s throat, cold gaze daring him to argue. “Larenok, shut up. I will be talking now.”
Larenok stepped back, beginning to draw his own ceremonial sword.
Jair ignored him and turned to project his voice out over the gathered audience with full dramatic impact. "I know what you're thinking. Sit down and shut your mouth, swamp brat, you don't belong here anyway, who do you think you are? So I'm going to make a few things clear from the beginning. This isn't real. None of this, none of you. You only exist as long as I don't choose to erase your existence. So perhaps before starting your blustering speeches about dignity and useless compliance, consider that I hold the fate of your world at my discretion."
Naturally, several overblown nobles took immediate issue with Jair's proclamation of godhood, and the room got very loud for a few minutes.
“Welburne?” Professor Derall asked, confused, while several of the other teachers made to step forward. Healer Notek among them, Jair noted.
Jair swung the sword around at each of them. His playful tone dropped, voice hard. “I’ve become a blademaster, an archmage, and the first true master of the fourth tier. Right now, I have something to say, and you’ll stay quiet and listen.”
He stood with unflinching confidence as he stared down the gathered teachers. Half of them turned to Larenok for direction, the other half simply stood back to observe, their advance paused for the moment.
Jair relaxed slightly. He gave his sword a casual spin, the wavy blade continuing to flare erratic silver light, and his cheery smile returned. “Once I’m finished, we can duel if you want. I’m mildly handicapped without my imprints, but I’m sure we can even the odds somehow.”
“This is absurd,” Larenok blustered. “Stand down, Welburne!”
“No.” Jair leveled his sword at the headmaster. The cold hatred in his eyes made the older man take an involuntary step back. “You never respected me or my achievements even one single moment of your life. In fact, you spent the entirety of my time here making my life as miserable as possible. I’ve made my peace with that. You’re a corrupt bastard, but you’re not worth my enmity. Give it a week and I’ll play your stupid games. I know the only way to get through this properly is to fit my perceived role and work my way up ‘the right way.’ Right now though? You stay out of my way.”
Larenok opened his mouth to protest. He didn’t get out a single word.
Jair lunged, one hand slapping the headmaster’s mouth shut, the other pressing his sword to the man’s throat. He put every ounce of weight into his stare as he regarded the man who’d once been his worst adversary but now seemed only an irrelevant obstacle. “I am not the boy you know. Understand?”
Larenok nodded, swallowed, and slowly raised his hands.
“Good!” Jair twirled his sword one more time, then spun to face the audience. His white robes flared around him, smile returning once again. “As I was saying—”
The ground cracked and split, a spear of stone rising up between Jair and the teachers, then spreading out into a wall. Firdon, again. Of course.
“I’m a time traveler from the far future,” Jair shouted over the interruption. “There will be three great disasters which I am here to prevent, the first of which begins right here at the Astralla Institute.”
The stone behind him grew rapidly into a solid cube around him, fully boxing him in. Reflexively he tried to activate Lift and Impose Weight on the ceiling at the same time, which should crush the stone into powder given enough energy, but once again his nonexistent spell imprints failed to activate.
Deep breath.
Not here to fight. Don’t kill anyone, be diplomatic.
Fresh from twenty thousand days of endless repeating war, he wasn’t in the best mindset to be adhering to social constructs.
He was here to make allies and take care of the one person who still mattered to him.
Focusing inward, he activated Temporal Reversion.
The last few minutes disappeared in a flash of golden light.
Reverting again, he went through the motions and as soon as he'd finished his own parts in the initiation, he sat down in the middle of the new initiates, sword in his lap, fists pressed to the ground on either side, and tried to get a hold on himself.
He couldn't. Not right now.
He didn’t know how much time had passed, but looked up when someone approached.
"Are you alright?" Notek asked, quiet to not interrupt the ceremony as it continued to its next students.
"Of course not." Jair answered calmly, though he felt anything but. "My soulspell is to reverse time. I've lived a thousand lifetimes since you last saw me."
Notek had nothing to say. He only stared, speechless, eyes glancing at the other newly-initiated students standing uncomfortably around them.
Right. Veor considered it the height of impropriety to discuss one’s soulspell in public. Jair could strip and dance across the stage and cause less discomfort.
Jair had no patience for it. He waved his hand. "I can undo it all, doesn't matter if they know."
Notek lowered his voice even further. "You should talk to someone."
"I will."
"Are there any other side effects to your soulspell unlocking?"
"None that impact me now. Please leave me alone for a while. I’ve spent years in a warzone and I need to settle myself."
Notek hesitated, but nodded and stood to go. Jair caught the telltale spring-green flash of light from his eyes as the healer activated his soulspell. Whatever Notek saw, he chose to ignore it, returning to his place in the line behind Headmaster Larenok.
Jair ground his fist into the dirt, breathing hard as he fought the past and future both trying to tear him apart. He needed to calm himself, not add to the existing tumult of emotions accompanying such a drastic regression.
"You're even more pathetic than usual today, I see."
Jair didn't need to look up to recognize the speaker. Lian Teretho, fellow third-class initiate, and the one most determined to make Jair's life as miserable as he could manage.
Old instincts warned him to cower, hide. Jair’s early loops at the academy had not been pleasant. Even in later loops, once he learned how to play the sycophant and mitigate the worst of it, he had no happy memories after this initiation.
But that wasn't who he was any more.
Without thinking, he launched himself from the ground and slammed bodily into the young heir, knee driving into the boy's gut, elbow coming around to crunch his nose.
Lian wasn't expecting such a sudden, vicious retaliation. The Jair he thought he knew would never have dared. He crumpled to the ground, Jair on top of him.
"You really picked a bad day to do this," Jair told him, as Lian choked in shock and coughed helplessly where he lay.
Before either of them could do anything else, the ground shifted beneath them and heaved aside, stone reaching up to grab Jair's ankle and drag him away from Lian. He distantly heard shouting.
Fire burned through him, the need to keep moving, to fight back, to attack until there could be no possibility of retaliation.
To win, fully and undeniably. Tear them apart, body and soul, like he'd done to Sekir at Meliarn. Lian wasn’t weak and he wasn’t stupid, despite appearances. If Jair hadn’t taken him so thoroughly off guard it could have been a very different outcome. A threat left behind was a weapon handed to your enemy.
No. These weren't his enemies. They were students, future mageblades, essential to Veor's security in the years to come.
And right now Jair was too impotent to do anything about them even if he wanted to.
As the stone mage dragged him away, he closed his eyes and dove into his soulspell.
It was hard to convince himself to behave with restraint right now. When he'd put years of repetition into perfecting a sequence of events, when being forced to revert would lose him days or even weeks of progress, the cost was too high. But right now, at the very beginning again, he had absolutely nothing to lose by doing whatever he wanted.
Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Jair spent the next dozen loops being forcefully reminded that, though an incensed archmage would bring this entire academy to its knees, right now he was only an incensed newly-initiated year-three student with the memory of being an archmage. For all his knowledge and future-potential power, here and now he was a nobody from nowhere being uppity.
Twice, someone stepped a little too close, or came up in his blind spot, and he reflexively lashed out. Hard to explain to the teachers why he was violently incapacitating his fellow students. He reverted to the start again, which only prolonged the experience.
Anger would not serve him here. He couldn’t force anyone to listen to him. Jair the new initiate was no one worth the time.
Like it or not, he had to at least pretend to play by the rules.
He’d survived a solid week of driving himself to the very edges of his capabilities, repeated so many hundreds of times he lost count. He could survive one morning of dull speeches without losing his mind.
Probably.
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Silver flared as his sword morphed into its ascended form. Jair spun to face the crowd, raising the sword above his head.
“The future! I have seen it!” Jair collapsed to the floor dramatically, staring straight up at the sky with his best wide-eyed imitation of mad seers.
He couldn't force people to listen to him, but he still had to try. Couldn't forgive himself if he didn't at least give it a try.
Or that was his rationalization. If he were honest with himself, he was incredibly tired and unbearably frustrated. The sight of this place stirred up visceral instincts of submission and concealment that he'd thought long overcome. His own body and mind were betraying him, reverting to weakness in more ways than muscle and mana, and that only made him angrier.
“If you’re from the future, why don’t you prove it!” The shout from the audience snapped Jair back to the present.
“Easy.” He proceeded to rattle off a list of events that would take place over the next several hours, all independently confirmable and impossible for him to have arranged. “...and the price of frostvine rope is about to significantly increase, but that one I can claim direct responsibility for.” He ended with a smile and flourishing bow. “Go forth, confirm my words. Come to me once you believe me.”
He hopped off the stage and started for the dome’s nearest exit.
Logically, reasonably, Jair should avoid making a scene. That was the plan. He should delve deep into his memory and pull up the information he’d compiled over so many loops to navigate the social and political situation at the Astralla Mageblade Institute with grace and conniving. Play the part of an upcoming prodigy, keep his head down, and avoid causing unnecessary ripples.
Which he would do.
Later.
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