In this loop, Burn had a plan.
Here, the grand strategy session of Emperor Burn, where ambition, wit, and strength led to an underwhelming lack of success.
He, the emperor, armed with the foreknowledge of three years and the determination of a man who’s been through too many déjà vus, decides it’s high time to put his imperial resources to good use.
Burn mobilized his intelligence bureau and the information-selling guilds, organizations that thrived on secrets like plants do on sunlight, except these plants were growing in the shade of his impatience.
His instructions were as clear as the perplexed looks on his aides’ faces: “Secretly find the woman who has the gall to loop my life like a bad remix of my greatest hits.”
He had her painting he made with his own two hands, after all.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks into a montage of fruitless efforts, Burn’s confidence waning like a poorly-attended bonfire.
The information network, with all its spies, contacts, and dubious allies, could have found a needle in a haystack but apparently not a mysterious woman in a realm they knew like the back of their hand.
“Perhaps she’s a ghost,” suggested one informant.
“Or maybe she exists in dimensions our feeble minds can’t comprehend,” mused another, pointing to the sky and likely talking about the invaders. “In this age, anything is possible, right?”
Disappointment was an understatement for what Burn felt; it was more like ordering a banquet and receiving a single, stale cracker. It was also like this in his previous life.
Fine, if finding her was akin to grasping smoke, he’dl just make sure to catch her when she appear and... creatively discourage any self-destructive tendencies.
Off with another three years!
Here we go, in the tragic aftermath of the Wintersin Empire's spectacular fall—now less an empire and more a cautionary tale about challenging Emperor Burn—he found himself amidst the ruins, not to mourn, but to lay a peculiar kind of ambush.
As the dust settled, literally and metaphorically speaking, Burn had chosen this apocalyptic backdrop, not for its aesthetic appeal (though, admittedly, there's a certain charm in post-battle desolation that can't be matched), but for a rendezvous with destiny.
Or, more accurately, a rendezvous with the architect of his temporal torture chamber.
TAP!
There! True to the script, she appeared, like a star making a stage entrance, albeit one significantly less glittery and far more morbid.
Her timing was impeccable, her resolve unmistakable, and her intention to plunge into the grand finale of self-destruction clear. However, Burn wasn't in the audience for another rerun of this tragedy.
With the flair of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, except significantly less adorable and more "I've had enough of this nonsense," Burn unleashed his surprise—
A flurry of magic scrolls that would make even the most seasoned magic librarian weep. These weren't just any scrolls; oh no, these were the magical equivalent of industrial-strength zip ties.
“BIND!”
As the scrolls tore through the air, unfurling like the world's most aggressive party streamers, they bound the woman with magical chains that not even a master escapist could wiggle out of.
“AH!”
There, the ethereal beauty, her presence a stark contrast to the desolation that surrounded her. With hair as golden as the first light of dawn, cascading down her shoulders in a tumultuous waterfall of sunbeams, she seemed like a creature born from the very essence of light.
Her eyes, pools of the clearest blue, held the depth of oceans and the serenity of the sky on a summer day, sparkling with a mixture of defiance and amusement.
Bound by magic, she appeared more an unwilling goddess than a prisoner, her elegance undiminished, her posture regal, even in chains.
But, oh, the performance had only just begun. With a twist of irony sharp enough to cut the tension, she smiled—a curve that promised the unraveling of carefully laid plans.
It was as if she found the whole situation not just absurd but amusing.
Burn blinked, provoked by it. They only had met five times including today, but she could stir him this far. He, Burn!
Then, with a flicker of her gaze, sharper than the edge of Burn's sword and more potent than any spell inscribed on those now-quivering scrolls, she shattered the magical chains.
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It was not with brute force, no—that would have been too mundane for such a spectacle. Instead, she unraveled them with the elegance of a maestro conducting a symphony, each gesture a note, each spell a melody of liberation.
The scrolls, those paper tigers that had dared to confine her, crumbled into dust.
“Ahh, those were expensive…” Burn muttered, recalling how they were at least five circled spell scrolls. “But I’m not a stupid man who thinks that those spells could bind someone who can regress time.”
SLASH!
Unsheathe his spare sword, he did, with the flair of a chef unveiling his knife before an unsuspecting fish.
There was artistry in his method, a sort of precision as he went about the task of ensuring the woman before him would no longer be participating in any form of running—or, frankly, any activity that required limbs, but also ensuring her not to lose too much blood.
“Apologies for the inconvenience,” he quipped, though his tone suggested he was anything but apologetic. “But to stop you from running, or killing yourself, this must be done.”
With her rendered as mobile as a particularly decorative rock, Burn proceeded to the pièce de résistance of his plan…
A truth serum.
“Bought this from an outsider merchant. Swore it was the finest in all the realms. Let’s hope it’s more effective than my décor spell scrolls, shall we?”
“AH! GKGH!”
The serum, a concoction so potent it could make a mime spill his deepest secrets, was force-fed to the woman with all the gentleness of a parent administering cough syrup to a stubborn child.
“Down the hatch,” Burn threathened, with the enthusiasm of someone reading the terms and conditions out loud.
Glug!
Glug…glugh!
Kgh!
The man sighed as he grabbed the woman’s tongue with his fingers, preventing her from biting into it to kill herself with shock.
“Now, let’s chat,” he continued, settling down before her like a therapist ready to unpack years of bottled-up issues, except in this session, the patient couldn’t bolt for the door.
“My fair lady, don’t be scared,” even though Burn didn’t see any fear reflecting in her azure eyes, he still worded it out. “I am mad, but I am not crazy. Yet.”
“Tell me, what did you do to me? What kind of spell is this?”
Burn calmly asked, seeing how the truth serum began to weave its invisible threads around her. He let go of her tongue and…
She chuckled.
“How many times have you returned?” she began, her words floating to Burn's ears, as if carried by the gentle breeze of dawn.
Burn’s eyes faltered.
What?
“Looking at your reaction, it must’ve been a lot,” she smiled so sweetly, Burn was unable to even tell if it was dream or reality.
This woman…
“You made this spell, yet you didn’t know—”
“Well, it wasn’t a perfect spell,” the woman quipped. “A time loop, intricately woven from the fabric of destiny and my own deep-seated convictions. Each time I die before you, the loop resets, pulling you back to the start, before you can take everything away from me.”
Her confession, devoid of any defiance, was imbued with a strange tranquility—a resignation to her fate yet underscored by a subtle strength.
Her voice, though soft, carried the weight of her actions and the burden of the spell she had crafted. It was as if the very essence of her being was entwined with the spell, a testament to her power and her pain.
In that moment, her voice painted a portrait of her soul—haunted, yet hauntingly beautiful.
"Why? You're wondering if I've trapped you in a time loop? Without an escape…?" she inquired, as if discussing the weather rather than confessing to temporal manipulation. "It's not just a spell but a curse! Dear Villain, you are now Witchbound!"
GASP!
KGH!
AH!
The witch began to react to the truth serum in a manner most unanticipated.
HAHAHAHA!
Laughter erupted from her, a sound that danced between hysteria and mania, as if she'd just heard the cosmos's greatest punchline.
"Silly me! Silly, silly me!" she cackled, words laced with an insanity that suggested the serum might have been overzealous in its effects.
“Let’s… die!”
With only her voice, as though pronouncing the world's most tragic magic word, she cast a spell of the sort that really brings down the house—or, in this case, her head.
BLAAAAAAST!
Burn hadn’t even registered what happened when he saw her head emulating a particularly gruesome firework. He didn’t know a head could explode in that manner—
***
BLINK!
Chirp…! Chirp chirp…
Rustle…
KNOCK-KNOCK!
“Your Majesty, the preparation for the war is complete.”
As Galahad stepped into the room, he found Emperor Burn perched on the edge of his bed, embodying the picture of a man who looked as if he just realized his favorite novel series had been cancelled right before the finale.
Blue balled.
It was indeed a splendid morning outside, but here, within these four magnificent walls, the atmosphere was thick with the kind of calm usually reserved for the eye of a storm—or in Burn's case, the aftermath of realizing that time travel was a fucking scam.
The problem was himself.
Exhaustion clung to him like a poorly chosen disguise, making Galahad wonder, "What epic tale of woe could he be brooding over now?"
“Galahad, introduce me to an assassin organization. The best one.”
“Y-Your Majesty? There’s someone you want to kill?!”
“Yes,” Burn thought about it already.
The woman’s identity… as he remembered what she said about the spell, “Each time I die before you, the loop resets, pulling you back to the start, before you can take everything away from me.”
She was someone who wanted something to change—before the war. Before “he can take everything away from her.”
A woman who was able to create a time spell, albeit not perfect. A woman who was able to hide herself from the public eye with her face not easily recognizable despite how strikingly beautiful she was.
Morgan of the Fairy. The Infinite Witch.