Chapter 027
Cast Adrift
Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
“Good morning, brother!” an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. “Morning, morning, MORNING!”
Relief immediately flooded his mind, closely followed by despair. He did it — he kept his soul safe from the third time traveler and survived the encounter entirely unscathed. But his allies…
“Zorian? Are you alright?”
Zorian stared at his sister for several long seconds, a million thoughts racing through his mind. She looked uncomfortable with his blank stare and silence, but Zorian couldn’t really bring himself to care at the moment. His mind was still stuck on his desperate escape from Red Robe. On the fact that he almost got captured by a mass murdering psychotic necromancer with an untold amount of time looping experience. On the fact that said necromancer now knew there were other human time travelers running around and could be coming after him this very moment.
On the fact that the aranea were dead. Dead and never coming back.
He absent-mindedly pushed Kirielle off of him, put on his glasses and started pacing around the room.
Killing a soul was impossible. They could not be destroyed, only modified. Everyone said so — the teachers, all the books he had read discussing the topic, Kael the amateur necromancer… hell, even the goddamn lich had said so in one of his offhand comments back when Zorian was first brought into the time loop. How, then, did Red Robe manage to kill the souls of the aranea?
He supposed the simplest explanation would be that Red Robe simply found out something that normal mages hadn’t. He was a necromancer with a huge amount of time and an easy way to avoid the usual consequences of various grisly experiments. Perhaps he succeeded where other necromancers had failed. Zorian didn’t think this was likely — the lich seemed to be a better mage than anyone he had met thus far, Red Robe included, and he certainly considered a soul-killing spell impossible — but that just might all be wishful thinking on his part. He didn’t want the aranea to be gone for good. Dammit, he had grown to like the stupid spiders! Sure they’d had their disagreements, but he had really never wished them ill and he didn’t think they had wished him ill either. Novelty certainly hadn’t, and she couldn’t lie to save her life. If… if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he had practically thought of Novelty as a second little sister. But now she was gone, just like the rest of the aranea beneath Cyoria.
And the worst thing? He let it happen. He had spent the whole evening gathering the matriarch’s last message, oblivious and uncaring to what was really happening, while Red Robe was hunting down the aranea across the city. He had known he was dealing with another time traveler and he had never once considered that the man might have developed countermeasures against others of their kind. Gods, he felt so stupid now.
Although it was strange… First of all, if Red Robe could permanently get rid of anyone who bothered him with a spell like that, why hadn’t he used it more often? Surely the invasion would be a lot easier if he got rid of a couple of key stumbling blocks. Yet Zorian never heard of any notable people waking up dead at the start of each restart, and he had access to the extensive information network maintained by the aranea. There was an obvious answer to that, of course: there could be a significant cost associated with the spell which Red Robe was unwilling to pay. But the fact that he had gone out of the way to remove every single aranea in Cyoria made Zorian doubt that. If there was a serious cost associated with it, he would have made sure to investigate more thoroughly and soulkill only those he had to.
Secondly, the aranea weren’t actually time travelers, so the spell shouldn’t have worked! Zorian was quite sure that the time loop didn’t pull every soul back in time — if that was the case, every mage would feel the difference after a dozen or so restarts as their shaping skills miraculously increased overnight. Plus, there are ‘normal’ necromantic killing spells that forcibly banish the soul from the body to kill people and Zorian had occasionally seen them in use during the invasion. If every person whose soul was banished from their body ended up dead at the start of the time loop, the number of inexplicable corpses showing up at the start of the time loop would have started to pile up quickly and everyone would have realized something was very wrong by the time Zorian was brought in. So all in all, clearly the souls of regular people who were not time travelers weren’t affected by anything that happened to them in previous time loops. The fact that Red Robe’s spell affected normal people in future time loops was strange, to say the least.
Zorian stopped pacing and frowned, idly noting that Kirielle had left the room at some point. He was getting the feeling that Red Robe was exploiting the very nature of the time loop to somehow get the desired effect. Zorian himself had no idea how the time loop really functioned, but presumably Red Robe did. Without that knowledge, he was probably never going to figure it out. Like always, he needed more information.
…except his main source of information — the aranea — had been utterly wiped out by the enemy, leaving him with nothing except a cryptic, incomplete dying message.
Damn it.
Over the next few hours, Zorian simply went through the motions, trying to hide the frustration, shame and panic he was feeling and to appear as normal as possible. He had failed to keep his inner turmoil strictly to himself, if mother’s worried questions were any indication, but in the end she accepted his explanation of being slightly shaken from a recent nightmare and stopped bothering him so he took that as a win.
And what a nightmare it was! Aside from losing the aranea, there was a non-negligible chance that Red Robe managed to figure out his identity and was going to assault the house at any moment now. True, he had managed to hide his face behind a scarf and had never spoken, but there were ways nonetheless…
He didn’t even think about trying to immediately leave the house in panic, though. The first and main reason for that was that if Red Robe had identified him and was coming to Cirin, then his family was in danger of being permanently killed, just like the aranea, and he wasn’t willing to let that happen. Kiri had grown on him over the course of the time loop and while he didn’t like his mother very much he wouldn’t let some psycho murder her. No, it was bad enough that the aranea had paid the ultimate price for his mistakes — he’d be damned if he’d leave his family to save his own hide.
The second reason was that, while it was certainly possible that his identity had been compromised, it was just that — a possibility, not a certainty. Yes, it would be easy to track him down by noting which students from Zach’s class were missing and then checking them out one by one, but it was entirely possible that Red Robe wouldn’t think of it. After all, as far as Red Robe was concerned, the mysterious human time traveler was associated with the aranea, not Zach. There was no reason to search for him among Zach’s classmates. And while Zach probably knew that Zorian was a time traveler by now, Zorian strongly suspected he would be out of Cyoria when Red Robe came knocking. If Zach had even a smidgen of common sense (not a certainty, admittedly), he would skip town first thing in the morning upon starting a new restart. Considering Red Robe thoroughly trounced Zach during the invasion by bringing the lich as his backup, and that Zach actually remembered it happening this time, Zorian felt that even Zach wouldn’t be crazy enough to stay where the clearly superior enemy could find him.