Throne of Time - Chapter 1: Extracting What Time Remains (START OF BOOK #2!) (Patreon)

The likely title of the second book is "The Unfinished War". After getting various comments on formats, I have decided to group the Book 2 chapters under a new Collection. And with that having been said, no further notes, so please enjoy. ^-^

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Suria had walked across Darkmoon University's campus countless times, including many times while contemplating the time loop she was trapped within, but never like this. Part of her still wanted to tear open her satchel and return to the books that had cost her so much. Only the exhaustion finally taking its toll kept her walking instead of reading.

When she got back to the primary dormitories, she found them as dead as they usually were this early in the morning. Everyone seemed to be asleep - except for Maut-mai, who was fussing about the room, then brightened when Suria entered. That earnest reaction encouraged Suria after the gauntlet of the Sequential Library... and made what she needed to do more painful.

"There you are!" Maut-mai rose to her feet, cheer turning to worry as she checked over Suria. "What have you done to yourself? Just what is going on?"

"I can't explain everything right now," Suria said, "but I need to thank you."

She reached into the neck of her ragged peasant's cloak and pulled out Maut-mai's amulet. Her roommate had been about to lecture her, but at the sight of the cracked amulet spluttering sparks of mana, she gasped and went to examine it.

"Just what have you been doing?" Maut-mai demanded as she peered at the amulet. "I know I'm not a master artisan, but I expected my work to last longer than a few hours!"

"It saved my life," Suria told her. She reached down to pat the books in her satchel. "I'm sorry, Maut-mai, but I can't explain yet. I have these books and I only have five days to study them. But after that, I'll be able to talk to you again. I'll explain everything eventually, I promise."

"You were sneaking into the library? I'm... not sure that I approve, but there's no point arguing about it after the fact. Here, you need to get into bed before you fall over. Do you need your robes fixed up, or are you skipping class? I see you wore your old clothes, which was probably smart, because they're in dreadful shape..."

As Maut-mai fussed over her, and even made plans to help shield her so that she could read, Suria felt worse and worse about her deception. Instead of being suspicious, her roommate was immediately planning to cover for her in their shared classes. Suria had been braced for the possibility that Maut-mai would demand to see her books and potentially figure out what she was doing, but so far she had been entirely trusting.

Though Suria told herself that what she'd said was technically true, since she would have more time for Maut-mai after this loop was over, the fundamental dishonesty of it gnawed at her. This Maut-mai, the one who had spent two months supporting her, would cease to be when the loop restarted.

It was still the right decision, after everything Suria had sacrificed to get these books. The only thing she could do was protect future iterations of Maut-mai with everything she learned in order to - hopefully - salve her conscience for the deception.

"Will you be alright by yourself here?" Maut-mai asked after a while. "And do you need me to start fixing up the amulet?"

"No, I... sincerely hope that I won't be taking any more risks in the near future," Suria told her. "Don't worry about me, just get to class on time."

"Well, alright. I'll be back with the readings and notes."

Once Maut-mai left, Suria set a piece of paper atop the door handle, then crumpled back onto her bed and just lay still for a while, contemplating her next decision. She might actually have made a mistake reassuring Maut-mai, since she wasn't sure how much of a risk the Akrashic faction intended to take. Suria had no intention of chasing them down to fulfill her obligation, however, and would make all the progress she could before they called in her debt.

Until then, she needed to maximize her productivity... and that meant she needed sleep. Suria set up her alarm again, combining the same sound and timing inscriptions as before, and then lay down in bed. She got into position and then cast healing sleep on herself...

And opened her eyes, groggy and disgruntled. It felt like no time at all, and Suria's body wanted to go back to sleep, with or without any spells. But as she forced herself to get up and stretch, she knew that the limited few hours she'd gotten had restored her enough to keep working.

The paper on the door handle was aligned exactly as it had been before, so no one had entered the room, not unless they anticipated the paper and used some kind of divination to figure out its exact orientation. That was more than she had been able to imagine in her sleep-deprived state and Suria still wasn't sure how exactly she could deal with someone who was that prepared.

Instead she washed her face as she contemplated how to use the time remaining to her. With a little rest, she immediately realized that she needed to rearrange her priorities slightly: the rush of desperately trying to learn anything she could from the books wouldn't be as effective in the long term, so she needed to choose more carefully. The most time-sensitive factor - in her weary state the unintentional pun struck her as absurdly silly - was inscriptions, because she could only master and internalize so many before the books were lost to time.

So the instant she was refocused, Suria returned to her satchel and began looking through The Immensity of Time. She had been able to cast from the core time inscription, so she only needed a little more work to make sure she wouldn't forget across cycles. That was unquestionably her top priority.

After that, her goals became less clear, because the book featured hundreds of inscriptions and she couldn't possibly master them all. She decided that this wasn't the time for the highly precise augments and variations she'd learned in some fields, like the loop she'd spent in the Medicine Department; she needed to pick several core inscriptions that would fundamentally alter her capabilities.

It took her some time to work through the text, particularly given the dialect, and decide which would be the best to pursue. In that time Maut-mai returned from class, and despite Suria's concerns that her roommate would be more insistent now, the other woman seemed quite understanding. She headed out again, promising to bring Suria food at lunchtime.

Once alone again, Suria made a list of the time inscriptions she would attempt to master in the order of priority:

1) Time enhancement augment

2) Time-linking augment (triangular)

3) Time-linking augment (square)

4) Pentagonal time inscription

5) Specialized time inscription (square)

6) Acceleration augment (triangular)

7) Mage's star (???)

First she would target an inscription suited for runic triangles that seemed like the most flexible augment for enhancing time spells. Her next choices were a bit less expected, but the book spoke about how time magic often required inscriptions to bind it into other effects; it offered a substantial number of different options that could allegedly do this and Suria picked two that seemed most likely to her.

After that, she was less confident in her decisions. There were many inscriptions available for other time effects and she picked out a pentagonal option that was said to be better-suited for ongoing effects. She wasn't sure how to cast it or what effect it might have, but if it was many cycles before she got a chance at these resources again, at least she wouldn't be stuck with a single core inscription.

Finally Suria listed types of inscriptions that she wanted, but that she thought she might be able to get from other sources. Time magic that accelerated things, such as the growth of plants, wasn't really forbidden and she might be able to learn relevant inscriptions from other sources. Inscriptions to improve herself, like the mage's star, might be the most powerful, but she wasn't sure that she could internalize such a complex inscription, much less cast the resulting glyph.

With her rough plan of study laid out, Suria set about to work on inscriptions until she drained her mana, then she would switch to reading the other books. She didn't flip through them anymore, instead trying to canvass the entire text to choose her passages carefully.

Now that she had more time, and could estimate her reading rate, Suria didn't think that she could read the books in full in the time she had available, not given her other duties. Worse than that, just because she read a page didn't necessarily mean she'd gleaned all the useful information from it, given the complexity of the text and how much it relied on other concepts. All she could do was try to target the sections that seemed most potentially useful to her and learn as much as she could.

She would have been glad to do nothing except read for the remaining days, but Suria didn't even make it a full day before she was interrupted. That evening while Maut-mai was gone, she heard a knock on the door. At first she ignored it, but it repeated, then...

"Hello, stranger." Xuhriha sounded chipper on the other side. "I know you're in there."

Groaning, Suria dragged her stiff body upright and opened the door. "Sorry, Xuhriha. I got books from the library and I need to read them."

"Oh dear." Xuhriha peered at her, leaning around to view her from multiple angles. "You seem very serious about this. I suppose you don't want to talk?"

"No time."

"There's news about Rije and his investigation into the conspiracy between the professors... does that change your mind?"

Suria took a deep breath and then shook her head. "Not unless you need me for this cycle. Can we pick this subject back up in the next one?"

"I suppose we can." Xuhriha sighed and gave a disappointed shrug. "And I was going to tell you about how things went with Kiznua... but I understand, your books will go away soon enough. Alright, let me handle the rest and leave you to it."

That left Suria alone for another hour... until it seemed like Xuhriha went against her former statement, because she was back. After ignoring several knocks on the door, Suria grumbled to herself and went to answer it, only to find the other woman bouncing around in her pink dress.

"Take these!" Xuhriha shoved a small box into her hands. "Some of them help you focus, some help you put off sleep, some just give a little energy. Normally I wouldn't advise using them much, because you will pay for it after they wear off. But in your case..."

"Oh..." Suria rattled the box gently and realized that it contained around a dozen glass potion bottles. "Thank you."

"Now I'm off! See you post-death!"

The gift was more thoughtful than Suria had expected and she realized that she hadn't been properly considering alchemical assistance. She should have, given how she had heard other students occasionally talk about such options in the past, but such potions were so expensive that she still instinctively thought of them as far beyond her means.

When Suria drank one of the potions that was labeled for focus and energy, she felt the rush almost instantly and dove back into her books. The effect was stronger than she expected and she wondered just how bad the aftermath would be. She could probably push herself a long time, between controlled periods of sleep and alchemical boosts. Taking a large enough quantity of potions could even lead to toxicity and serious consequences, according to her Alchemy and Medicine courses, but she should be able to dodge those via the loop restarting.

Her exhaustion would follow her, however, and she was going to have a miserable time after recovery. It was still the right decision, because she needed to maximize the amount of time she had with the time books.

She managed to read more of Seizing the Cycle, and though she didn't discover any immediately obvious facts about her loop, it was grounding just to have a better understanding of the theory. So far she hadn't really cracked The Greatest of Time Mages or how best to use it, but she would figure that out too, if only she had enough time before the loop ended.

The next time there was a knock on the door, it was loud and insistent. Suria wanted to ignore it again, but she knew this wasn't Xuhriha and that she couldn't ignore her obligations forever. In fact, this was probably the debt that she had been dreading.

When she opened the door, she saw Herriot leading the rest of the Akrashic faction.

"It's time," he said. "You need to help us break into the Perception vault."