Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing particularly magical about elven breads. They’re just excellent bakers. Not a method of obtaining extra powers or secret classes.

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Jair didn't want to force anything with Lilin, since this was new territory and he worried about pushing her away, but he also knew how hard it could be to move away from everyone and everything you knew.

He knew he'd had a hard time adapting to being in the city, at the Institute with all these ambitious nobles, and that was even with Raina befriending him almost immediately. Not that his memory of the time before he was looping was particularly reliable, but there were a few highlights that stood out. He'd also seen other people repeat the same patterns over and over throughout his years.

She would need to forgive herself for what she saw as a betrayal, even though it was the right thing for her future. She may need to forgive Jair for pushing her to the edge of the decision, or Raina for making her doubt her commitment to her family.

It wouldn't be something she could just flip off overnight, and he couldn't expect her to. Though his personality shift appeared instant to anyone on the outside, it had taken hundreds of years to transform him from the person he'd once been into who he was now.

So when he walked by her room and heard her quiet sobs, he pushed away all the calculations and plans for the future and gently knocked.

She cut off in startled silence, then, "Who's there?"

"It's me. Mind if I come in?"

"Go ahead."

He pushed the door open and stepped inside. She'd scooted up to a seated position on her bed to leave room for him. She smiled, though the redness of her eyes made it hard to pretend it was genuine. "Hi."

"How you doing?" He slid his hand toward her, and she took it with a huff of tearful almost-laughter as he twisted two fingers around hers. "Been a while."

"I don't know." She stared out the window at the moons. "It doesn't feel real."

"I know that feeling." Even now, he had to frequently reinforce the idea of which timeline he was living in. "You'll be fine. I'm here. Raina's here. We'll do whatever it takes to keep you safe and help you find your way forward. Okay?"

She nodded. "I don't..." her voice was faint, choked. "I've never seen him that mad. I don't think... I don't think he even knew who I was, when he..." She gripped his hand tighter and wrapped her other arm across her chest. Tears started to gather in her eyes. "I should be there."

"No. They're not your responsibility."

"They're family!"

"Then they should have known better."

"It was one time. You pushed him—"

"Because he was trying to shove me around to get his way, keep his sense of self-important power. All he has is his delusions of control, and playing along does no good for any of you. He won't change, and you'll be more and more convinced that you have no other options. That isn't where you belong."

I never figured out why you disappeared, but if this is your life... I can think of a few potential reasons.

Lilin scooted closer, and he shifted back to let her lean her head on his shoulder. "But even if Father isn't going to change, we didn't have to leave Mom there."

"She's made her choices. She keeps making them every day. She could walk away at any time."

"No she can't. There's nowhere for her to go, what could she even—”

Jair held up his hand. "If she really wanted to, she could leave. Zaen isn't wholly a monster and he does love her. He probably even thinks he loves you and perhaps even me. She doesn't want to live on her own, she wants people to love her and take care of her. And you're so well trained, she comes in and you're already jumping to give her whatever she wants. She plays you two against each other to always stay the one who needs protecting and care, and you fall right in line."

Lilin's hand tightened on his. "That's not how it is."

"It is." He leaned his own head against hers and reached around to put a hand on her shoulder. "I know it's hard. You can love someone and still acknowledge that they don't belong in your daily life. They don't need you nearly as much as you think. They'll be fine. They'll adapt. You'll recover. But that starts with staying strong now. You can't go running back. Please. Stay with us at least a month or two, give yourself a chance to breathe."

"It wasn't that bad," she mumbled, sniffling, into his shoulder. "It's not that bad."

"I know. I'm sorry."

For a time they only sat there. He wasn't used to seeing Lilin like this. Sure, there'd been bad days when they were kids, but those were facts he remembered only by rote. After he started looping, any time he'd forced a confrontation, it'd driven her closer to Zaen rather than further away.

Something in what she and Raina had talked about must have changed her mind that tiny amount. At least introduced a grain of doubt. Perhaps it had taken an outside perspective, Jair's point of view was too easy to perceive as biased. He'd always been at odds with his parents, and couldn't be considered the most objective. Sure, he'd been through so many lifetimes by now that he could treat them entirely without emotional bias, but there was no reason for Lilin to know that.

So he held her silently, lending his presence in the only comfort she could accept right now.

"You'll come through," he told her. "I know you. You're strong and bold. You can do this."

"But it's not meant to be about me. I'm abandoning them. Running away." She sniffled and sat up, tearily meeting his eyes. "I couldn't even talk to them when I went back for my stuff. I snuck in the back door when they weren't looking. I... I already felt like an intruder. Like I didn't belong. I hate it. We're family."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"As Kyami is constantly reminding everyone, in case we forgot," Jair said wryly. He smoothed back her hair. "Lil, it's going to be fine. I promise. I'll look out for them. Their business won't collapse, they won't become destitute. Everything will go on."

"It doesn't feel like that. It feels like I've made an awful mistake, one I can't take back, and everything is just getting more and more out of control."

"Do you want to take it back?"

"I..." she swallowed. "I..."

"It's okay to not know. I know it's confusing and hard. This is the furthest you've been from home in your life, and we're only going to be going farther. But this doesn't have to be an ending. If you decide after a month that you want to go back, once you've had time to get away from it all and reconsider without the heat of the moment, I'll get you home safely. And if you decide to stay with us, I'll protect you. No matter what you choose, you won’t be alone.”

"I'm glad you're here." She mumbled into his arm. "I missed you."

"Did you? Even if I'm such a disruptive and provocative presence?"

"Yeah. You're a good kind of disruptive, most of the time."

"I never thought you'd be willing to admit it."

She hiccupped and shook her head. "I'm not that petty. I do love you, Jai, and I know that you're trying to help. I just wish your way of helping didn't break as much as it did."

"Hopefully I didn't break you too much."

"Well, you promised to help me get back together, so you'll have to live up to that if we're traveling together."

"You're not going to go running back home immediately, then?"

She hesitated, then shook her head. "I don't know how to feel about that. I still... I..."

"It's okay, you can take your time, you don't need to know what to say right away."

"I was so scared. I thought he was going to kill you. I thought you were going to kill him. I thought you did kill him. I never want to see my family fighting like that again."

"No worries. I don't plan on getting into a spitting match with Zaen again. I made the point I meant to make, and if he decides to cause more trouble it's on his head."

"You can't just say something like that and pretend to be not confrontational."

Jair shrugged. "When did I ever try to pretend I'm not?"

"I... guess I don't know. You never used to be. What happened?"

"Hmmm, that is a very long story. Do you want to have your entire worldview shattered again tonight?"

She chuckled. "It can't be that bad."

"It is. Worse, perhaps."

"Really?" She shifted, wiped her face, and tilted her head to stare at him. "You're not kidding, are you?"

"No. I'm serious. I want to tell you something ,but it's the kind of thing that will completely destroy the person you thought I am."

"Are you secretly a clone?"

"Why would you think that?"

"You don't act anything like Jair, but you're also undeniably him. So maybe you're a copy."

"That's surprisingly close. No, I'm just a lot older than you think."

"How does that work? Time doesn't pass differently in Astralla than back home, does it?"

He chuckled and grinned at her. "It only passes differently for me. You don't have to be surprised. I want you to know before we get into any situations where I have to use it. You saw how I stabbed Zaen and he reappeared in the same place he was, but with green fire?"

"Is that what happened? I couldn't really tell with all the flashing and moving and punching and slashing."

"I have two abilities.” Three technically, but he didn't need to get into whatever Integration was when he himself didn’t understand it. "Darkflame lets me move people anywhere in space and rebirth them into a cleansed and rejuvenated form. It's been able to do anything from repair lost limbs to cure depression and also... just do nothing. It depends on the person what it does and how much effect it'll have, which makes it rather hard to predict. But it's also able to be used as a teleportation which is what I use it for primarily."

"That's very useful. Getting around places faster will certainly save a lot of time."

"That's only the second ability I developed, however. The first... is Temporal Reversion. I can rewind time. Replay events however many times I need to to get the outcome I want."

"That's insane."

"Yes."

She stared at him. "You're not joking."

"Nope."

"You're... you’re Jair, how...? That's the kind of power you'd expect from an emperor, not a sandfisher's son."

"I don't know. My soul is incredibly strong by now, but whether that's a precursor to what my power developed into or something that came about as a result of all the reliving of the same years over and over, I can't guess."

"So you can go back in time and change things." Her eyes lit up. "You can go back to before we yelled at each other. You don't have to fight Father, we can just go our separate ways in peace."

"Yes. I could."

Her face fell as his tone got through to her. "You're not going to, are you?"

"No. I'm not interested in reconciling with Zaen by folding under his demands. We've seen how he reacts to being opposed, and it's not with graciousness and a willingness to compromise. If he can't let us walk away without throwing a tantrum, then he's not worth reversing our progress for."

"What progress? All we did was spend two days crossing the desert."

"You think I want to spend two more days crossing the desert? I'm almost to where I can use my manabody without burning myself out again, and I'd rather not start over again from where I was a week ago."

"You shouldn't have told me," she mumbled. "Now I'll always be thinking about going back."

"If you want, I can send you back. I don't have to return myself."

"How does that work?"

Jair shrugged. "I don't actually know. I haven't tested it before. But I can send you back to that moment if you want. You can change your mind. But I don’t want to be hiding this from you if we’re going to be traveling together. I am a time traveler, and I may well bring myself or others back regularly once we start hitting obstacles that can’t be easily solved with our existing resources."

"I..." she stared into the distance, eyes going distant and empty. "I don't think I can. I don't want to see that again. I think... I think it would be worse, the second time."

Jair wrapped his arms around her as she started to cry again, and he didn't try to continue the conversation for a very long time.

By the time Lilin had cried herself out and fallen asleep, he slipped out into the afternoon sun and darkflamed himself back to the oasis to get in a few hours of manabody gathering before it was time to meet Raina for dinner.

He had to rush things a bit, cramming the power in a bit more tightly than it wanted to, because his timeline was much tighter if he wanted to get it finished before they left. It wasn't much worse than his usual strategies for gaining more power faster, though, and he hardly noticed the aching strain that tugged at his soul as he forced it to substitute itself for the mana shell that the manabody should be providing on its own.

It turned him into something of a power magnet, drawing in power more quickly and strongly even if it was out of his normal aura range, but also strained his soul.

If he'd been anyone else, it might even have done permanent damage. Jair's soul had been through so much by now it took something very out of the ordinary to so much as scratch it, let alone actually damage it. Seascourge, the star hydra, the Zeluran beastlord, and a few other soul-attacking adversaries were the only ones that could hope to do it.

A little drastic training was nothing. It was more likely to rupture his fragile manabody in progress than harm his soul.

He did end up needing to revert once and start over. It’d been a long time since he did this particular method, and it was rather finicky. But on the whole, the afternoon went well.

Lilin hadn’t run away or demanded to be returned home yet, and after another couple days of this he’d be ready to start imprinting his spells by Terlunia right on schedule.

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