by nobody103
"We just want to know how this time loop works," Zorian said.
"Yes!" Zach agreed. "Just tell us what is happening here! If we are really the evil masterminds you imagine us being, then you'd be telling us something we already know anyway."
Ghost Serpent hovered in the air silently for a while, considering the request.
"Very well," it said eventually. "But after that, you must leave. And if you have any honor at all, you will never visit me again. Even after I have forgotten."
"We promise," Zach said easily. Zorian couldn't help but wonder if the boy really meant it. After all, the Ghost Serpent could be such a useful source of information…
"Promises are but wind, but they are better than nothing at all," Ghost Serpent said. "Watch closely."
The spirit shifted its gaze to the still waters around them, and a large sphere of water floated up in the air from the surface. After a few moments, the sphere flew over to where Zach and Zorian were standing and started writhing like it was about to burst.
Instead it unfolded into a crude diagram – a single horizontal line with an upturned triangle balanced on top of it by the tip.
"The bottom link is the Beginning and the End," the Ghost Serpent said. "It is the world you were born in, and the world you will die in. The triangle is the world of In-Between. It exists between the moments, constantly destroyed and recreated anew. A lifetime condensed in a moment. We are all trapped in this place, phantoms created for the Branded Ones like you to learn from and test themselves against. When the fires that fuel the world of In-Between run out, we will all fade away into the void… except for the Branded One, who will go to the End, to live through this month one last time, time, time…"
"Wait, are you saying this is all fake?" Zach asked incredulously. "That we're all some kind of illusion!?"
"A reproduction, not an illusion," Ghost Serpent replied. "If you could mimic a painting in every stroke and shade, would it not be as real as the original from which it sprung?"
"But that's-" Zach began to protest.
"Enough!" Ghost Serpent snapped. "I have given you what you asked for. Honor your end of the bargain and leave, leave, leave! Guards! Escort them out, out, out!"
And then, before either Zorian or Zach could protest further, the Ghost Serpent dived into the waters of the lake and disappeared from view. Despite its ghostly appearance, its dive caused a huge splash, forcing Zorian and Zach to quickly shield themselves or be thoroughly drenched.
Okay, that was just rude.
Regardless, the aranea soon came and politely, but firmly threw them out of the settlement. They both stood outside in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts.
"So…" Zach said. "What do you think?"
"I think that I need to open that memory packet as soon as possible," Zorian replied.
The Ghost Serpent's story had given Zorian a horrible suspicion about what Red Robe had been doing all this time…
Chapter 54
The Gate Is Barred
In the wake of their talk with the Ghost Serpent and their subsequent ejection from the aranean settlement, Zach and Zorian teleported away to a sufficiently distant and remote location and sat down to discuss what to do next. And that's when the arguments began.
Zorian really wanted for them to separate for a few hours. He needed some alone time to think about what they'd heard. To make sure his logic was solid. He had his suspicions already – terrible, terrible suspicions – but they weren't the sort of thing he'd want to blurt out lightly. In fact, he wasn't sure he wanted to confide them at all… to anyone. Even Zach.
Another reason why he wanted a short break from his fellow time traveler.
Zach didn't want to play along, though.
"We should talk about this now," Zach argued. "While the memory is still fresh in both our minds."
"I have a really good memory," Zorian argued. Indeed, he had specifically memorized the entire meeting with the help of mind magic, and would never forget any of it. He could review the memory in vivid detail as many times he wished. "It would be better if I had a chance to think about the spirit's words for a while."
"Well, that's fine," Zach said, giving him a dismissive shrug. "You can do that. Who's stopping you? But there's no reason why you can't do that here with me. I can be patient. I'll just… quietly sit here by the side and wait until you're ready to talk. It will be like I'm not even here."
Zorian gave him an annoyed look. He had serious doubts about Zach's ability to sit quietly like that for extended periods of time, and even if he could… it wasn't the same. There was no way Zach didn't know that.
"Look," Zach said, matching his annoyed look with his own. "I know how this goes. If I let you get away now, you'll use that time to think up some stupid story to throw me off with. You know something."
"I don't know anything for certain," Zorian protested, shaking his head. "And frankly, if I wanted to keep my suspicions to myself, I wouldn't have bothered to invent some kind of elaborate lie to deceive you. I would have simply refused to tell you anything."
Zach shifted uneasily for a moment.
"Okay," he said. "I guess I was being a little unfair there. Sorry. But still, you aren't seriously considering just leaving me in the dark, are you? After I informed you of that stupid snake and helped out with your mind magic training? Surely you realize how fast that would kill any sort of trust between us?"
Zorian looked away. Of course he realized that! But it wasn't that simple! If what he was suspecting was correct, then how could there ever really be trust between them?
"There can only ever be one winner in this game", Spear of Resolve had said in her fragmented message.
"Only one can enter, and only one can leave", said the Ghost Serpent.
If only one time traveler could keep the gains made in the time loop and the rest get dissolved into the void, like they had never existed at all, then how could they ever truly cooperate with one another? Any alliance would just be a temporary convenience, inevitably ending in betrayal.
And when all was said and done, Zorian was pretty sure that Zach was in a much better position to screw him over than Zorian was to do the same. The time loop seemed to recognize Zach as more legitimate, if nothing else.
Still, while a big part of him screamed at him to keep quiet about his theories at all costs, there was a small but equally insistent part of him that argued against keeping Zach in the dark. This situation seemed strangely familiar to him…
After a while, Zorian realized what was bothering him. The idea of him hiding this sort of knowledge 'until he could be sure' and Zach being bitter at him for doing so… it reminded him so very much of his arguments with Spear of Resolve before she was soulkilled. And for good reason – he was pretty sure his current suspicions were exactly what she had tried to keep secret from him. He was thinking of treating Zach the same way he had been treated in the past. And he knew how much he had hated the matriarch's secretiveness back then…
Did he really want to basically re-enact the matriarch's secretive scheme, despite the catastrophic way it ended up resolving? Wouldn't it be better to treat Zach the same way he wanted to be treated?
The trust had to start somewhere.
"Fine," Zorian sighed, turning back to face Zach again. "I'll tell you."
"Finally," Zach shouted in exasperation, raising his hands in the air. "I thought I'd have to hit you to make you come to your senses."
Note to self: talk to Zach about his unfortunate tendency to resort to physical violence to solve personal disputes. Right now they had more pressing topics to discuss.
"I should note that this has the potential to really destroy any chance of us trusting each other," Zorian sighed. "I mean, we already don't trust each other. You keep that mind blank spell up at all times when you're around me, for instance. That spell is harmful for your mind if you keep it up non-stop. I don't believe for a second that you don't know this. So you apply it up specifical
ly for our meetings because you're afraid I'll mess you up with my mind powers if I get the chance."
Zach flinched, his face morphing into a comical expression of surprise. It reminded Zorian of that time he had caught Kirielle raiding the kitchen pantry for sweets a few years ago.
"You don't have to feel guilty," Zorian interrupted his response, shaking his head sadly. "It's smart. I would have done the same in your place. But it helps illustrate my point – we already don't trust one another. How much more, then, would we be paranoid around each other if we knew only one of us could exit the time loop with their mind and magic intact?"
"What?" Zach asked incredulously. "How? Why?"
"The Ghost Serpent pretty much stated it outright – only one time traveler gets to leave the time loop," Zorian said. "The rest… disappear forever, I suppose. It makes sense, really – I don't think there was ever supposed to be more than one time traveler. Or 'Branded One', as the Ghost Serpent calls us. A reference to the marker, most likely. Anyway, if our situation is as unprecedented as the spirit suggested, and the time loop mechanism was only ever designed under the assumption-"
"Zorian," Zach interrupted him. "Don't take this the wrong way, but… your explanations suck. I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, okay, I kind of do, but still. Start from the beginning, please."
"Fine," Zorian sighed, trying to squash his annoyance. "The beginning. First of all, no time travel is technically happening here."
"No?" Zach asked, frowning. "How is that? The illusion world thing?"
"There is no illusion," Zorian said, shaking his head. "It's all real. We're real. Flesh and blood and soul and everything else. We're not living in a spell construct or some fancy dream."
"That's good," Zach said, breathing deeply. "It would just kill me inside if it turned out that everything I've learned in here is fake and that I'll be the same old Zach I once was once I wake up in the real world. So what is this, then – an actual copy of the real world?"
"Why not?" Zorian asked. "The gods have been known to copy people completely, duplicating them down to their souls and all. Plus, it seems that even mortal mages once knew how to conjure actual matter from nothing. Here, let me show you something…"
Zach took out a piece of paper and some alteration tools out of his backpack and created a copy of one of Kirielle's drawings in front of Zach, explaining how the spell functioned to the other time traveler.
"That's a damn useful spell combination," Zach said. "I can't believe I never learned about it in all this time. This would have made so many things easier…"
"Yes, well… I can teach you how to cast the spells later," Zorian said. "Anyway, this is what I believe the time loop is essentially doing, albeit on a much greater scale. Whatever is behind this took a blueprint of the world, much in the same way I did with Kael's notebooks and my little sister's drawings. A mind-bogglingly detailed image of a single moment in time across the entire planet. Possibly beyond. And it is repeatedly producing a replica of the world based on that blueprint, allowing it to run for a month before destroying it and starting over."
Zach stared at the drawing Zorian recreated, lost in thought. This particular one depicted two sparrows in the middle of fighting one another. It was pretty impressive how perfectly Kirielle managed to capture this one moment of their battle in a static image. If only she was as dedicated in her magic studies as she was in her art…
"That's crazy," Zach eventually stated.
"And time travel isn't?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow.
"I don't know, it somehow sounds more plausible to me than this," Zach said, sighing. He handed the drawing back to Zorian. "I guess it does make a lot of Ghost Serpent's ramblings make sense, though. But here is what doesn't make sense - if our original world is real, and this copy we're living in is also real… where are we exactly? An entire world takes up a lot of space, after all."
"In a pocket dimension, I'm guessing," Zorian answered. "I have no proof, but hear me out. It is clear that, in order for this whole setup to work, we have to be under an insane amount of temporal acceleration right now. Otherwise, how could only a moment pass in the real world while we spend decades or even centuries in this… looping world?"
"Ah, I get it," Zach said. "It's not that the time doesn't pass in the real world while we're here – it's just that time flows so fast here we that barely any time has passed in the real world."
"Exactly," Zorian said. "But this sort of temporal acceleration is on a whole other level than even the best temporal acceleration facilities currently in existence."
"Yes, so?" Zach shrugged. "Compared to copying the whole world, that seems pretty underwhelming."
"I guess," Zorian agreed. "But I suspect there is more to it than just the creator of this thing being ridiculously powerful. Time acceleration rooms have to be isolated from the outside world in order to work with any sort of efficiency. But this isolation is still done through magical wards and physical obstacles like walls, which means there is only so much you can seperate them from the rest of existence. A pocket dimension, on the other hand, only touches our reality in one particular spot – its anchor point. You can't get more isolated than that, and I bet the possible temporal acceleration is much bigger if you enclose the target area in its own pocket dimension."
"So, you think the time loop is actually a physical copy of the world, enclosed in its very own, temporally accelerated pocket dimension," summarized Zach. "The time loop has a ridiculously detailed image of the real world as it was at the start of this month, and it periodically recreates the whole world based on that."
"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "I'm only guessing all this, but it fits with what I found out so far."
"And here I thought this thing couldn't possibly be any crazier," Zach complained, burying his face in his hands. After a second or two he straightened up again and looked at Zorian. "So how does this affect us? How is this different from this actually being a time loop?"
"For one thing, it means that ensuring a perfect month is impossible," Zorian said. "You can't live through one loop, decide you really like how it turned out and then end the time loop and continue on from there. If you want to do things 'for real', you have to leave the time loop. You will then be flung back at the beginning of the month to try everything one last time."
"Okay, that is an important difference," Zach admitted.
"Secondly, the Cyorian aranea will almost certainly be alive and well in the real world," continued Zorian. "If everything here is a copy, and the pocket dimension is deliberately isolated from the real world as much as possible in order to facilitate temporal acceleration, then it's unlikely that anything done to people in the looping world affects their real life counterparts."
"He could always soulkill them again in the real world, though," Zach pointed out, frowning.
"I doubt he can," Zorian said. "I don't think the spell actually kills souls. I think it simply marks them in some way, letting the time loop mechanism know it should not recreate them at the beginning of the new restart. If the time loop is, as the Ghost Serpent believes, some kind of training mechanism, then it makes sense to include a function like that into it. It allows the Branded One to get rid of impassable obstacles by removing them from the loop entirely."
"What? That's so unfair," Zach complained. "Why does he get such an ability and I don't?"
'You might have had it at some point,' Zorian thought to himself. 'It's quite possible Red Robe got it from you and then wiped your memory of the spell…'
"Do you think it might be possible to… unmark them somehow?" Zach asked. "It's nice that the aranea aren't permanently gone, but it would be nice to have their help within the time loop too."
"I don't know," Zorian said. "It depends on what exactly has been done to them. There is still another issue."
"Yes?" Zach asked curiously.
"Considering what the time loop really is, I don't think we can just passively wait for the mecha
nism to run out of power," Zorian said. "It seems likely to me that staying inside the looping world once it runs out of power equals permanent destruction. If we want to survive the collapse, we have to deliberately leave this place before it's too late. Which is a problem, since neither of us knows where the exit is or how to access it."
Zach stared at him in shock. It seems he hadn't really considered this possibility.
"And on top of that, the Ghost Serpent said only one person can exit this place," Zorian sighed. "Meaning that the moment one of us leaves the looping world, all the other time travelers still inside are dead. Erased out of existence, really."
"We don't know this," Zach protested. "How would the stupid snake know something like that anyway? You heard what it said – it has no memories of anything that happened during previous time loops. It could be making things up to divide us. It certainly hates the 'Branded Ones' enough to try something like that."
"Still, what if the spirit is right?" Zorian asked. "What if only one of us can 'win' this?"
"Then neither of us leaves until we figure something out," said Zach immediately, straightening his posture. He gave Zorian a direct and determined look. "We'll figure out a way to get both of us out alive and well. There must be a way."
Though the boy was immune to Zorian's empathy due to his mind blank spell, Zorian could still feel the passion behind his words. Zorian had to give it to him – Zach could be rather very inspiring when he wanted to be. Unfortunately, there was a very important detail he had forgotten…
"The thing is," Zorian noted quietly, "it's not just the two of us who are here. Red Robe is in this world as well."
Zach paused for a moment, not saying anything.
"…shit," he finally concluded.
"Yes," Zorian agreed. "I think I know why we haven't seen any sign of him in all this time."
"You think he's trying to leave?" Zach asked, fear creeping into his voice.
"It's what I'd do in his place," Zorian said. "He thinks there is an unknown amount of other time travelers plotting against him, at least one of whom is a better mind mage than he is, and you have effectively slipped from his grasp. Why take the risk of confronting all that when he can just leave the looping world and erase all his enemies out of existence in the process? He's been in this place long enough that he's probably gotten most of what he wanted out of it, anyway."