(SEVERAL HUNDRED LIVES AGO)

Jair Welburne had once assumed that one life-shattering disaster would be enough for a lifetime. He'd also been an idiot at the time. These days, he didn't put too much stock in his past self's assessment.

In retrospect he probably would've been happier if he could divorce his sympathy from Veor entirely. What had the continent ever done for him anyway? Sure, his family lived there, he'd grown up there his entire life, but did all that really matter when weighed against his sanity?

But after he failed to save Raina, he couldn't stomach the thought of giving up. Something at the back of his mind was always searching for the unknown power that would let him go back and prevent that first disaster from ever happening to begin with.

Each successive challenge that he folded under, gave up on, or failed to confront, would push him one step closer to admitting that everything he had done and everything he ever would do was futile. That one man couldn't change everything, no matter how hard he tried.

That was not a truth Jair could accept. If he accepted that, it would be the end of him.

With the dragon temporarily shelved while he grew in power and strength, the conquest and subsequent destruction of Veor by a charismatic tyrant was exactly the kind of thing he needed to confront and defeat before he could move on.

So far, it wasn't going very well. Sekir’s nasty habit of resurrecting himself every time he got killed—and coming back with increasingly scorched-earth policies with each successive life—was something Jair didn’t know how to counter.

Archmage and arch-sorcerer, they were evenly matched in magic, and Jair’s blend of elemental and force spells were ineffectual against Sekir’s disruptive and illusory setup. They could fight for hours without either claiming victory, but every time Jair figured out a way to win, Sekir would come back a few days later stronger and angrier than ever.

The temptation to call it a loss and move on perpetually nagged at him, but Jair knew himself well enough to reject taking the easy way out. Once he started down that road of excuses and compromise, he would lose himself to it.

However much it burned, however desperately he wanted to shrug and leave Veor to its fate, this was how he proved to himself that he hadn't given up.

Veor didn't have the resources he needed to defeat Raina’s dragon, not in the four days he had, but this Sekir issue wasn't nearly so limited. He had years to prepare, all the resources of the world and its moons to draw upon.

Jair had no reason to fail. Even if it felt impossible, if he let himself fail, it would be just that. His own choice.

He stared up at the magnified view of Almas above him, the engaldria slashed by a broad channel dividing North Khel from South Khel... and the square of water below that was all that remained of Veor. Only the dragon mountains remained, a tiny island in a second Death Lake.

Countless times Jair had fought this same war, and every one of them he failed. And Veor died without him.

Time to try again. But he needed a new angle. Sekir was simply too powerful, and Jair had gotten himself mentally hung up on brute-forcing this solution. He’d lost perspective.

So this time, he decided as he fell backwards through golden light, he wouldn’t fight. He wouldn’t even interfere. He needed to reassess, with what he knew now, and observe exactly what happened when.

Ryenzo destroyed the academy, killed Raina and another twenty people in her brief rampage, and Jair listened with breaking heart and dry eyes from a building safely out of the way.

He’d hoped to skip this part, but his timefall didn’t have a suitable shelf.

If anything, this only reinforced his determination to figure out some way to deal with the sorcerer.

Months passed. King Farshen descended further into his maddened grief, hunted for his missing son and ignored his missing daughter.

Jair attended class.

He sat through the same lectures he’d heard a hundred times. He built up his web of connections. As a nobody, he’d be hated more the higher he rose, so he didn’t try to rise. He played the lackey, became Lian’s errand boy, and bore the richer boy’s exploitation and dismissal with the same silent fire that seemed his only remaining emotion.

He wouldn’t be influencing anything, but he’d be in a position to listen.

It’d been too long since he played through the entire scenario without interference. He’d been trying to deflect Sekir, delay him, but though he changed the timing he never changed the outcome.

With the exception of the months where Sekir simply disappeared, only to return with Princess Fahla firmly on board with his agenda, Jair could map out his movements with almost complete accuracy.

In another half a year, Sekir would appear as one of King Farshen's advisors. Midway into the extreme economic collapse, just in time to start advocating change to an eager audience.

Prior to that, the man didn't exist. Over the years leading up to Sekir's appearance Jair had circulated descriptions of him through every channel he knew, legal or illegal, and the man had no presence anywhere.

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He wasn't an existing political lackey, he wasn't an upstart noble from a forgotten line, he wasn't an outlander. He also didn’t appear on any transit platform.

At one point, frustrated with the lack of information, Jair spent one lifetime after another simply sitting outside each transit terminal and watching every single person to come in and out for the entire two-year period. Sekir arrived at none of them. He walked in the front gate from the desert.

Sekir climbed out of a sandshark as if it were his custom chariot instead of a violent predator, and strode into the capital as though he owned the place. Unless Jair involved himself, Sekir didn't divert from his course in the slightest. He walked to the market, purchased a specific outfit, and then walked to the palace. He went in, talked to the king, and then spent the next several months reading, arguing in advisor meetings, and accumulating information.

Jair, by now still a mere two-layer mage, could not compete with this foreign arch-sorcerer. Any time he tried to infiltrate the place, Sekir quickly found him out and had him killed.

While Jair couldn't personally observe him during those months—apart from a few times when he forced his way in only to be subdued by the Hyperion on and sent off to Crelys, always a fun time—he was forced to keep tabs on the man through bribery, rumors, and other such secondhand knowledge.

Still, even with only secondhand knowledge, he was able to piece together a nearly complete map of where Sekir was and what he did at any given time.

Without Jair disrupting the sequence of events, Sekir would spend three hours twice a week with the king, several hours a day with various nobles and advisors, and the vast bulk of his time in the library.

What exactly he wanted, Jair couldn't tell, since he worked his way through the entire library and never seemed satisfied. Attempts to question him invariably ended up being futile. Any time Jair showed up in person ended in a fight. Anyone he hired to investigate tended to mysteriously disappear without anything to show for it.

Then, a year or two into Sekir’s official presence, the king died and Sekir disappeared. It was time, he proclaimed, for him to go to Meliarn and search for the missing princess.

That word was the only hint anyone had.

As far as Jair could tell, Meliarn was not a person or an object, and did not exist.

Sekir’s claim to be going to Meliarn made it sound like a place, but through tens of thousands of interviews ranging from casual questioning to brutal interrogation over the course of several dozen repetitions of his lifetime, Jair found no one who knew what or where Meliarn was.

All he found was a single artifact in the royal treasury labeled in archaic script that could be translated to Meliarn – Melihane, specifically – but that was no answer. Only a confirmation of the mystery, and that it was connected to the royal family somehow.

But whatever Meliarn was or where, events were quiet until several months later when Sekir returned to the palace with the same abruptness that he'd departed with. He presented the princess, who promptly appointed him her premier and spokesperson before swanning off into noble parties like nothing had ever gone wrong.

Her father's death and brother's continued absence didn't seem to trouble her in the least. She’d clearly been fully ensnared by Sekir’s manipulations, but since whatever happened at Meliarn was beyond Jair’s ability to observe there was no way to counter them preemptively. Trying to find where she’d been before, say, at any point over the last two years, she’d only say ‘Meliarn’ and refuse to speak on it further. It was apparently a royal secret, and Sekir was the only outsider to have discovered its meaning.

Things continued to escalate as the months passed. The Veor Plague grew to catastrophic proportions, and even Sekir’s intervention was too little too late to save the out-of-hand rivalries and revolts that followed.

Jair itched to demand they simply enact proper quarantine procedures, or rather to slip the hint to enough nobles that they’d make it happen, but he held himself back. This loop was for information, not to satisfy his need to fix everything.

With Sekir in charge, everything was resolved eventually. It actually took longer for him to settle things to his satisfaction and begin his new mad scheme of engaldria-wide conquest than anything Jair had intentionally tried to block him with. The plague did it for him far more effectively.

That was moderately upsetting, but also good news in that it demonstrated that for all his obsession, Sekir would still prioritize protecting the people he was responsible for.

If only they could sit down and talk, the man seemed like he should be able to be reasoned with. But any time Jair caught his attention, Sekir immediately dropped everything to try and kill him.

It was intensely frustrating to see someone so powerful, driven, and misguided systematically rebuild Veor’s shattered economy and devastated population, only to get them all eaten in another few months when he enacted his mad plan of filling in the channels.

Veor was calm and peaceful, as far as continents went, and the channels were shallow and unobtrusive. They said stay where you are but did nothing to encroach further. One river to the north was gradually splitting the continent in half again, dividing the dragon mountains from the rest of Veor proper, but rivers always grew over time. It would be another three generations before the division was severe enough to be a problem.

Until Sekir set out to fill them in. The seascourge did not appreciate their warnings being ignored. Suddenly, coasts around the world were uncontested as every monster in the water surged to Almas, to Veor.

Jair escaped three days after Sekir’s grand unveiling of his admittedly impressive machine for tearing apart the unused mountains and throwing the pieces into the water, another to shift sand and earth to fill in the gaps between them.

In three days, he’d made enough progress for the land bridge to be visible from Zelura.

In eight days, the entire western coast of Veor had been seamlessly joined to its neighbor, reuniting the continents in the first act of true reclamation in a thousand years. But the river, formerly slow and peaceful, hadn’t been idle either. Even as western Veor reunited with its nearest neighbor, northeastern Veor was separated from it in its own little island, keeping Ryenzo and her kin on one side, and all the human cities on the other.

In fifteen days, the channels that had been filled in had expanded to nearly the width of the Khel Divide.

And when the lunar passage opened on the next Dark Night, none of Veor’s platforms were above water.

Jair was one of the last to have set foot on the continent to survive. Everyone said he was lucky to have left when he did. They shook their heads and speculated. What was it Veor had done? Reskas losing its protected polder was bad enough, but this? This was Death Lake all over again. Was the world ending? Had the monsters of the sea finally decided it was time to annihilate all life and claim the world for themselves?

But Jair knew better. It wouldn’t be the forerunner to a new invasion. It was simply retaliation. Sekir had tried to steal what was theirs, so they took it back with interest.

None of this would happen if Jair could figure out a way to remove Sekir from the picture.

There had to be something he was missing. No situation was truly unsolvable. He just needed to find the answer.

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