The dean’s teacup tapped a tattoo against the saucer as he set it down. He’d attempted to take a drink, but slopped half the contents on the floor of their makeshift meeting room. The three of them were in the stables—one of the outlying buildings in the Arcanum that hadn’t been affected by the magical blowback of the battle mages’ attack.

The school had been evacuated.

“I—um—,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I want to apologize. On behalf of all of us here at the Arcanum. We didn’t know—”

Willow held up a hand. “We’re not here to kill you,” she said. She looked at Leopold and saw that the dean probably had the opposite impression from the way her husband’s eyes bored into the administrators’. She put her hand on his and he took a deep breath.

“Right?”

“Yes,” Leopold muttered, then finally took a sip of his own tea. Willow mirrored him.

“Then what are you here for,” the dean asked. Rain, his name was, although Willow didn’t imagine needing to know it for long. The nice thing about dealing with people with fancy titles was that you only needed to know their title to get word to them.

“Research,” she said. “What you’re supposed to be good at. We’ve come with several existential problems that we need answers to, and fast.”

“But what… what kind of problems?”

Their introduction had been necessarily curt as Willow frog-marched the dean out of the crumbling Arcanum and toward the stables. Only his frantic shouts had stopped his crack team from releasing another futile volley in their direction.

Eventually, the tea had come, but not before she’d sat him down on a bale of hay and summoned two more for seats. The small table had come with the tea via a couple of harried assistants who retreated as fast as they possibly could.

“Have you heard of doorways in the night?”

“D-doorways? In the night? Do you mean normal doors?”

Willow shook her head. “What research have you done on portal magic.”

“Very,” he cleared his throat. “Very little. That was always more of Asche’s direction. As long as we had anti-portal wards—”

“Alright. Then what do you know about time?”

“Time,” the dean asked, then leaned forward the slightest amount. “Why, that’s our specialty.”

“Good, then we can start there,” Willow said. “Take us underground. Show us the things you can’t afford anyone else knowing.”

The dean swallowed hard.

🜛

They passed dozens of warbeasts on the ride down. Willow tried not to sense their despair and insanity, but it was impossible. Some muttered the names of far-off city states, others specific regions. And still more didn’t speak, whether they were too insane to do so or just sane enough to resist the temptation was unclear. What was clear was that they all turned their heads at her passage in the floating cage.

She made a mental note, as if she needed one to remember that horror.

Down they went, deeper into the earth. Past layers of magically reinforced soil and sand, to clay and stone. They passed bedrock and descended until the elevator stopped without a sound. The door hinged open and the dean led them into a stone workroom thirty feet high filled with at least fifty floating, glowing spheres.

“This is where we research time,” the dean said. “Where we learn to manipulate it, to shape it to our will.”

“And these,” Willow motioned to the spheres.

“Time-locked experiment spaces. They’re warded so that they’re almost completely unhinged from the universe at large. The glow you’re seeing is the wards themselves—the contents are so far removed from causality that you wouldn’t be able to view them.”

“And that’s to prevent any kind of runaway effect,” Willow asked. The dean nodded.

“Messing with time is a dangerous business. When the Arcanum was established in Raly, it was decided on this course of study only once the wards had been sufficiently researched. To manipulate time in any significant way could have disastrous effects.”

“What is the extent to which you’ve been able to bend time?”

The dean sighed. “Probably not as much as you’re expecting, especially after seeing your… husband here. We’ve developed several spells that can slow time down by an increased factor, and a few that can speed it up for the mage even more than a standard acceleration spell. How he’s able to achieve the effect I saw, I have no earthly idea.”

“Layering,” Leopold said.

“Just… spell layering? Isn’t that how you cast the acceleration initially?”

“No. Layering accelerations on each other.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You can—,” the dean cleared his throat. “You can cast multiple spells at once?”

“It’s a hard-won ability,” Willow said. “And one that I have no doubt you will attempt to research once we depart. But what we need now is any information you have on these time spells. Preferably ways to trap things in time, or suspend them as such.”

“I’ll have a folio drawn up for you.”

“And another thing. You will release all of your illegal warbeasts and halt your incubation program.”

The dean blinked in shock.

“But we… we can’t just let them go. They’ll rampage unchecked if we do that, attacking their programmed targets. We don’t want to start another war.”

“There’s already a war on, you just don’t know it yet,” Willow said. “They may yet choose to accept a different target if asked by the right person. If they don’t… we’ll come to that crossroads in time.”

The dean looked between Willow and Leopold nervously, then nodded once and hurried away.

🜛

“What do you think the chances are that they’re planning to double-cross us,” Leopold asked as they studied the thick folio the dean had returned with.

“Almost certain,” Willow said. “Did you see that gleam in his eye when you mentioned layering? I’m sure he’d love to have you on his slab.”

“Why don’t we just take care of them now,” Leopold asked. “This whole place is tainted with what happened up there. The warbeasts, how they tried to kill us. We could remove the administration. Let the Arcanum start over.”

Willow looked from the pages of esoteric time-theory to Leopold and saw that look again in his eyes.

“He’s not here,” Willow said. “You see him all the time, don’t you? I saw Carl the same way. The slightest thing would trigger it.”

“It’s being in this place. It almost feels like the Arcanum in Durum. Every time I see someone in a robe walk around a corner, I see him with that gods damned staff. I have to watch as he throws it at you.”

“You are the one who saved me from that,” Willow said. “Or don’t you remember?”

“No, Willow,” Leopold said. “You saved yourself. That spell capsule was yours.”

“If you weren’t there to cast it, I would’ve been his,” she said. “So no, I don’t accept that. You did it, you saved me. More times than I can count now. And you’re still trying, aren’t you?”

Leopold turned a page ineffectually and sighed.

“That house in the forest, the life where we can finally be at peace. It’s not going to happen, is it?”

“Of course it is,” she lied. “Just after we take care of my little door-shaped mistake.”

🜛

They studied night and day in the lower levels of the Arcanum’s vaults. There were so many pages of research and so few actual spells produced for all that effort. It appeared that an intricate understanding of time itself was necessary to cast the spell. You could concept the essence, shape it, but if you didn’t have the right mental construct of the effect it wouldn’t take hold in reality. Something about the nature of time rejected all but the most minor interference.

It wasn’t until Willow attempted to use the elevator to travel to the warbeast-housing floor that she discovered the time-lock.

The elevator wouldn’t summon, and when she looked up the shaft she saw a shimmering veil about forty feet up. She sighed in disappointment. The double-cross was expected, but disappointing nonetheless.

When she told Leopold, he flipped through a few sheets of the folio and then sighed.

“I should’ve known. He mentioned slowing down time, but none of this references the effect at all. They’ve excised whole avenues of thought just to catch us in this trap.”

“That’s the thing that’s the most annoying,” Willow said. “But the essential differential doesn’t feel very great. They’re casting this without their emergency reserves. It seems like we really did exhaust them. I doubt we’re being slowed down much.”

“But we’re wasting time,” Leopold said, and gritted his teeth. He got up, but Willow put her hand on his arm.

“We have all the time in the world,” she said, and he took a long breath.

“Right,” he said, and they began to layer on acceleration spells.

🜛

What was time? The direction of causality? The force that moved all things forward? Or was it something more? Was it… sentient in a way?

The question Willow had, that she kept coming back to, concerned the interlopers and what Jeremy had said about stories. About how stories of the future had somehow made their way backwards in time. That seemed to violate the very principles of causality that these research papers proposed, and something about the way they read made her certain that it wasn’t another trick. These people didn’t know about the interlopers, about the backwards propagation of information. They were truly ignorant.

With acceleration cranked up as high as she could manage she had plenty of time to think. Unlike Leopold, who could go much faster with many more layered spells, she was only comfortable with a double layer which nonetheless sped her up many times more than she assumed the time-lock was slowing them down.

“If information about the future can come backward in time,” she said. “It seems like it would violate some of these fundamental assumptions.”

“Jeremy seemed pretty certain about those stories,” Leopold said. “And the one he wouldn’t tell us.”

“That’s the one I’m most concerned about,” she said. “How far in the future did that story start? He only ever mentioned the doorways in the night, but not the pneumavores or the thing that came out after them. The Watcher.”

Leopold was silent for a while and she knew he was working up to asking a question.

“How sure are you that what you saw through the Watcher was the future and not an illusion?”

“I can’t explain it, but it had the certainty of reality. It wasn’t just sight and sound, it was like I was there, in time, seeing the Watcher as a fixed point. It moves along time like we move on the earth. To it they’re very similar, and it was certain of its destination.”

“The end of humanity,” Leopold said. “The end of all things.”

Willow nodded. “It’s certain to happen, but the when felt like it was variable. I think the key might be to slow these things down.”

“Great, all we need is an endless supply of essence and we’re all set,” Leopold said. “I can’t imagine how much they’re burning out there thinking that they’re keeping us slow.”

“Probably all they can,” Willow said. “I can intuit some things from even the research they gave us. For one, the effect requires much less essence if its cast from within the slow-space instead of without. But, critically, it could be disabled from there.”

“That’s why they cast it from outside,” Leopold said. “Cowards.”

“I think we’ve got all we need from them anyway,” Willow said and handed her sheaf of papers—half her own writing, half the Arcanum’s—to Leopold for storage. He stuffed them in his sling-bag as she struggled for a second to open a portal, then succeeded. The anti-portal wards had been much weaker than she’d assumed.

“Let’s go.”