«No, of course you don’t remember,» Zach sighed. «Do you at least feel a little different lately or something?»
«Come to think of it… yes,» confirmed Zorian. «I chose different electives than I intended to, for no good reason really, and I did a bunch of other strange things ever since I came to Cyoria.»
Zorian’s motivation for saying that was two-fold. First of all, he wanted to see how Zach would react to the idea of another person going through the time loop with him. Secondly, he wanted to lay the groundwork for an explanation why he’d be acting differently in every restart, in case he decided not to tell Zach about himself.
He was surprised that Zach was so willing to believe him, though. Apparently even after all this time (nearly 17 years, if the other boy was to be believed), Zach still haven’t developed an ability to effectively read people. That, or Zorian really was that good of an actor.
«Strange,» was all Zach said.
«Yeah,» Zorian agreed. «So… any advice a time traveler can tell a mortal like me? A secret spell of awesomeness, maybe?»
«To be honest, most of the spells I know are combat ones,» Zach admitted. «I’m really good at combat magic, which is good because I need to be good at it. There is… something I’m trying to stop.»
«Something involving the mysterious adversary that messed you up?» tried Zorian. He really wanted to work the invasion into the conversation but didn’t know how to justify knowing anything about it. «Do you remember how that happened, at least?»
«Ugh,» grunted Zach. «Mostly. I distinctly remember you being there, but you probably died right at the start of the battle — no offense Zorian, but you aren’t much of a fighter — and then I stupidly charged in, thinking myself invulnerable.»
«Why would you ever think that?» Zorian asked, honestly confused. «That you’re invulnerable, I mean. Doesn’t it strike you as dangerously arrogant to perceive yourself as invincible?»
«Do you know how many times I’ve died in these reverts?» protested Zach. «My memory is failing me again, but it was a lot. You tend not to take it too seriously after a while. And it’s not like I was too far off — I just have to watch out for necromancy next time, right?»
«Not just necromancy,» Zorian replied with a heavy sigh. «There is also mind magic to worry about. Aside from the obvious possibility of ending up as a mind thrall, you could also end up with more than a few gaps in your memory — you could have your whole mind blanked out. Then there is a possibility of having a geas forced upon you if you’re too careless, which also bind to the soul as far as I know. Some creatures, such as wraiths, eat souls — that’s another thing to worry about. And there are a couple of methods of sealing away a mage’s ability to do magic, which might very well stay with you when you… ‘revert’.»
Zach was silent, but Zorian could have sworn he had gotten even paler as he listened to Zorian speak.
«And that’s just a couple of points off the top of my head,» finished Zorian. «I’m only an academy student, and I don’t know anything. It’s obvious w- err, you are not invulnerable. Okay?»
Zorian swallowed heavily. That was close. It was fortunate that Zach was so oblivious, because had the situation been reverse, he would have called Zach out on it ages ago.
«Wow, you almost sound like you care,» Zach finally said with a nervous chuckle. «You really do believe I’m a time traveler now, huh?»
Zorian shrugged. «I’m not completely convinced, but it’s not something that’s worth fighting over in my opinion. If you say you’re a time traveler, then we’ll pretend you’re a time traveler.»
Yes. Until he got a better feel for Zach’s character and understood what the deal was with the time loop, he would pretend.
When Zorian finally returned to school, having missed both the remainder of essential invocations and the following lecture about magical law, he was beset by curious classmates and Ako. Ako was easy to deal with, since she only wanted to scold him for taking too long and warn him she recorded his absence in the attendance record. Zorian was pretty sure the only person, teachers included, who cared about what was written on that list was Akoja. The ones that wanted to know what’s wrong with Zach were also easy. It was an alchemical accident.
What? It’s the excuse Zach used!
Unfortunately, many people also wanted to know why he had suddenly volunteered to take him home, or what had taken him so long. Nosy, nosy people. And they were persistent too, refusing to leave him alone for the rest of the day. When Zorian finally reached his room he immediately locked his door and breathed a sigh of relief. He finally had enough time to think about what he found out today.
Zach was confident he would be fine by tomorrow, and that his memory would come back to him. Zorian was not nearly as confident. That Zach had a 7-month gap in his memory (and possibly existence) suggested something very serious had been done to him. Why hadn’t Zorian suffered anything of the sort? Well… maybe he had. He had felt uncharacteristically tired in his first restart, but had written it off as mental stress. Maybe he had only been caught at the very edge of the spell and thus only suffered minor damage, or maybe his ‘first restart’ was only the first one he had memory of.
It was a disturbing possibility, but there was not much point in dwelling on it much.
It really wasn’t that unexpected, when you really thought about it. The strange time travel effect he and Zach were under had essentially turned them into soul entities. A lich was, at its core, also a soul entity. They were mages that ritually killed themselves and tethered their souls to an object — their phylactery — before it could move on into the afterlife. If the form they currently inhabited ever got destroyed, they’d snap back to their phylactery, and simply possess someone. It would make sense for a lich to know how to fight another lich. And a method that worked against a lich would work just as well against him and Zach.
And Zach had stupidly said as much to the lich at the end of their battle! ‘It’s not like I’ll be dead for good,’ indeed! The lich may not have known what Zach was exactly, but a statement like that strongly suggested he was either a lich himself or some kind of a possessor entity, and from a practical standpoint it wasn’t that far off.
But that was all neither here nor there. The real question was: what was he going to do now? Even if Zach regained his memories (doubtful), he would no doubt want to keep the time loop going until he found a way to defeat the lich. If the boy’s previous altercation with the undead mage was of any indication, that could take a while. And that was assuming Zach was the originator of the spell in the first place. If it happened once, it could have happened twice. He had a sneaking suspicion that Zach might be as much of a stowaway as Zorian was. Was there a third looping person running around?
Suddenly, he didn’t feel as desperate to get out of this thing as he was at the start of it. Getting out might not necessarily mean going back to normal. The invasion was clearly more than a random terrorist attack, and Zorian somehow doubted that stopping it would be the end of it. Something very big was happening, and Zorian was a very small fish. A roach, as Taiven would charmingly say. Inside the time loop, he had a chance to secure his future. Outside of it, he was just another victim.
Besides, if Zach was to be believed, ‘normal’ for Zorian meant getting killed at the start of the invasion. He didn’t care much for that kind of ‘normal’. In fact, the more he thought about it the more it seemed to him this whole thing was a giant opportunity rather than an annoyance. Once upon a time, when Zorian was younger, he dreamt of being a great mage. The sort that legends were made of, the kind that revolutionized whole fields of magic all by themselves. In time this dream died as it became clear he didn’t have the talent, the work ethic, or the right connections to make that happen. He was just a slightly above average civilian-born student with no special advantages to his name. But now? He had all the time he needed to build up an advantage over his peers and become truly great. Greater than Daimen.