AT AN INDETERMINABLE POINT IN TIME AND SPACE
The Warden had traversed seven thousand years in the space of fifteen minutes, yet she was no closer to catching her quarry.
At every step, the Silent Dreamer had eluded her, each time just a whisper too quick or too canny for the Warden to catch him once and for all–because once she did, it was no contest who would win the battle. He was still a full stage behind her, in spite of his knack for running away.
To say this irritated her was an understatement. The Lucida sector was her responsibility. Her mess to manage. Letting the Silent Dreamer escape would do more than reflect poorly on her. Even just by fleeing, he was altering the course of time in this Universe. Each particle he collided with would set it on a new path, and even though the changes were so minute as to be undetectable, the Warden could feel the flows of Causality shift.
Ten thousand years from now, this Universe would be largely the same. But in ten billion years? Unrecognizable.
The Warden saw this clearly through her mind's eye: the Universe as it had been, as it was, and as it would be. She could feel infinitesimal changes take hold of her as well as her own timeline changed–but only just. As a Transcendent, she was largely resistant to the flows of Causality, even if not wholly immune.
The Silent Dreamer, though, wasn't. And that was what worried the Warden the most.
The Silent Dreamer had to be feeling the impact of Causality much more harshly than her, and the effects would compound the further he went into the past. There was a real risk that a misstep would see him erased from existence entirely.
While the Warden would share no tears for her quarry, The Silent Dreamer did not particularly strike her as suicidal.
The Warden concentrated anew, pushing her speed to its utmost limit. She could not allow him to enact whatever plan he had in mind. If he managed to shake her off, and Abyss forbid, advance, that would make her job exponentially more complicated. Killing a Fathomless was difficult enough. Another Transcendent? An exercise in futility.
It was then that she ran into a wall. A metaphysical wall, as there was nothing in the vastness of space around her other than some very distant stars, but a wall nonetheless. Some ten thousand years into the past from where they'd started, the Warden's path was barred. She could progress no further.
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She could not even see past the block. Like a clouded marble, the time beyond this barrier was obscured, and she could get the barest flashes of activity–until she pushed further, and all was right again.
The Warden paused, backtracking with her senses. A month into the past, everything was clear. But the single month between her and then...
She pinched the bridge of her nose, letting out a sigh that reverberated in spite of the vacuum surrounding her. "Abyss beyond. He's locked himself in a time loop."
Because of course he had. She'd practically given him no other choice. And now the situation had gone from embarrassing to potentially Universe-destroying.
The Warden sat down, stretching the moment that was the time loop's boundary into infinity. "Think, think, think. What can you do about this?"
It was generally accepted that a time loop was a closed system–only actors already inside could affect it, and anyone outside it was out of luck. As soon as a loop was formed, the Universe around it would begin to fray and unravel, blocking out anyone from entering that portion of time until the time loop was resolved.
Unless the time loop didn’t resolve, in which case the Universe generally collapsed on itself and died.
The Warden had seen it happen, and it hadn't been pretty. She also had a vested interest in keeping this Universe alive–it was her Universe, and while she'd survive its dissolution for a while, Causality would eventually catch up to her and she'd die all the same.
She saw no way to affect the loop from the outside. But, perhaps, she could find one?
The Warden concentrated her senses into a narrow beam. Instead of a broad scan, she brought surgical precision, all in the hopes she could uncover a crack in the loop–something she could latch on. Brief impressions occasionally flashed through the fog, gone as quickly as they'd appeared.
Still, the Warden persevered. She had all the time in the world, and as long as a solution existed, she'd eventually find it.
Years passed within that brief moment. Millennia. Eons. The Warden still searched.
When the solution showed itself to her, the Warden was incredulous. It was so unlikely, and such a long shot, that it would take a miracle to pull it off. But there were no other options that she could take, only this once in a trillion fluke the Universe had offered to her on a silver platter.
There was a single person inside the loop that the Warden could see clearly–out of all the countless people who lived in it, from mortals to Enlightened. And what she could see, the Warden could influence, if only ever so slightly. To guide them along the path until they could break the loop from the inside.
What the Warden had in mind was a fool’s gambit, but she saw no other choice. Failure would mean her death, but then again, she was doomed either way.
The Warden pushed herself through the jagged cracks in reality and got to work.