Throne of Time - Chapter 2: Debts Come Due (Patreon)

Of all the students trapped in the time loop, the largest faction was the four from the Akrashic Union. They mostly socialized with one another and they had been consistently targeting the Perception department, which made sense because its throne had likely started the time loop. In other circumstances Suria would have been happy to work with them, but she was concerned about what their methods would entail.

"Are you sure you want to take the risk?" Suria asked. "I thought, since you lost someone in the library..."

"We can still manage it," Herriot told her. "Our target is actually a journeymage, not a professor, so with you joining the ambush it should be easy."

"I only have a few days with these books, wouldn't the next cycle be a bett-"

"Suria." Herriot folded his arms across his chest. "You only got those books due to our agreement. One of us died a terrible death getting them. If you won't help us now, you're making enemies in every future loop."

This had been the most likely outcome; she had just hoped to avoid the inevitable somehow. Suria took a deep breath, rubbed her eyes, and then nodded. "Alright. What's your exact plan?"

"The Perception staff members have been looking through the department's vault since they regained access, to take inventory and try to reorganize. We can't exactly rush in casting when that happens. But the journeymage who has the keys next will be going in after-hours tomorrow night. We can take them out, bind them, and no one will realize before the end of the loop."

"The others won't notice they're missing? I thought these vault keys were important."

"We've been looking into this for multiple cycles," Herriot told her firmly. "If we can win the fight without any alarms being triggered, we'll be fine. Hell, we could lock ourselves in the vault and we wouldn't starve to death before the loop ended. The department vaults are heavily fortified, including against divination, so they're actually the safest places on campus."

Obviously their plan carried a huge risk, but so did any meaningful accomplishment, and the very end of a cycle was the best time to try it. Suria had to admit that there could be critical clues in the Perception department's vault as well, so it was in her long term interests to figure this out eventually.

"You said tomorrow night?" she asked. "What do you actually need me to do?"

"Other than helping us fight, just distract the journeymage," Herriot said. "It should be manageable."

"And just who is it?"

"You already know him: it's Orinyan."

Suria's back stiffened and she glared at Herriot. "You knew that before, didn't you? You kept the information from me because I would never have agreed if I'd known."

"Come on, Suria." Herriot scowled at her. "It's the fact that he knows you that makes you a good distraction. Betraying him doesn't matter when it's all going to be erased soon."

Instead of answering, Suria wracked her brain for a way to get out of this without dealing with the inevitable consequences. But she had made an agreement, and the four Akrashic loopers could cause a lot of trouble for her if they became enemies. No matter how much she tried to tell herself that this could ultimately be for the best, including for Orinyan in future loops, she hated the idea of betraying him in this one...

"We shouldn't even need to hurt him," Herriot reassured her, "at least not if you do your job. My specialty is binding spells, and I've been improving them through all these loops. But if we can't take him off guard, we'd have to beat down his defenses, and that's when people get hurt."

"How long have you known it would be like this?" Suria asked, not quite willing to accept the inevitable yet. "You claimed you weren't sure about the keys, but you've been preparing for this exact scenario, haven't you?"

"We've been preparing for the vault," Herriot insisted. "The keys never go to someone without combat abilities, and taking down a full professor is too hard, so our options are limited. Our best chance is taking down one journeymage... we can do it cleanly if you play your part."

"Fine." Suria stepped away from him and gripped the door to close it. "I don't like how you approached this, but you did help me in the library. I get to look at the vault too?"

"We get first pick of everything we find, but if you help us end the fight cleanly, you can even take a share. We'll all meet in the Blue tomorrow night."

Suria nodded and closed the door on him. She returned to her bed, longing for nothing more than sinking back into her books, yet she realized that would be a mistake. If she followed that path and assumed that everything would turn out alright, she would most likely place herself in a terrible situation.

So she began practicing her inscriptions while she thought about the quandary in front of her. Orinyan had been one of the kindest people to her across many loops and she was going to betray him. She tried to convince herself that it was for the greater good, but that wasn't true: it was simply expedient for her to discharge her obligation with the Akrashic faction, not actually in Orinyan's interests.

Technically what she did would be wiped away when the loop reset... yet the idea still unsettled her. If everything went according to plan and Orinyan was just bound by some sort of stasis spell, that was one thing, but she couldn't assume everything would go according to plan. Or if she was more honest with herself: a morally lazy part of her wanted to believe that the plan would go smoothly even when that wasn't very probable.

If she actually ended up fighting Orinyan, much less hurting him... the idea made her feel slightly sick. No matter how many times Suria told herself that she could accept a temporary consequence, she didn't like betraying him simply for her own benefit. Wasn't that exactly the sort of amorality that led the thrones and so many others to treat all loopers as monsters? She didn't want to think she was taking the first step on the spiraling path with this, but each justification might make the next easier.

As her fingers mindlessly pushed through the inscription practice, Suria tried to determine her own moral lines. She decided that she would be willing to hurt someone if that was the only way to help them in the future, since the consequences would be limited by the time loop. It was similar to cutting a patient in order to heal them of a more serious condition. But betraying Orinyan now couldn't be justified when it was primarily for her own benefit.

But if she didn't help, then what? Making enemies of other loopers would be an absolute disaster.

Could she have pushed them harder prior to the agreement? In theory she could have, but she wasn't sure that it would have changed the outcome. Perhaps in the future she could be more proactive about getting other loopers in her debt first, so that she was never required to fulfill a favor afterward, yet at the moment all she wanted was to stay away from all of them.

There was no point reprimanding herself for past failings, not when she was sprinting toward a moral cliff. She needed a way to keep the Akrashic faction happy while simultaneously not betraying Orinyan, and that seemed flatly impossible.

Well... her mind couldn't help but consider that technically another solution would be to find some way to get the entire faction soul-killed. That would clearly be unethical, though, causing permanent deaths to avoid a temporary one. The very possibility was a reminder why she needed to remain on good terms with the other loopers, however: they might eventually master soul-killing magic, or worse, attempt to manipulate someone else to do it and risk everyone.

When she tried to look through her books for insight from similar conflicts, she got some useful information from The Greatest of Time Mages for once. It discussed a war between two mages with time magic during the collapse of the Glyphic Imperium, and in the process it explained some of the fundamental mechanics that had eluded her up to that point.

The theory specified that normal time was the fourth dimension, whereas time manipulation spells interacted with a normally inaccessible dimension, called the fifth or sixth depending on the theoretical framework. Because of how time loops interacted with that dimension, it was commonly considered impossible for there to be a loop within a loop, or for two loops to exist "simultaneously" relative to fourth dimensional time.

It seemed like there was some disagreement about that, but such academic debate was still beyond Suria. She was looking for a solution to her immediate crisis, not ultimate answers.

Due to those looping limitations, in the war between time mages one would repeatedly run through a loop of time that existed without their rival using their own loop. Since they were unable to eliminate their opponent permanently, the ritual ran out of power and they attempted their optimized plans in fourth dimensional time, only to be foiled when their opponent seized the initiative with a loop of their own.

This traded back and forth, with hypothetical decades of loops crammed into a period of just a few months in real time, neither time mage able to land a permanent kill. As they escalated, more archmages became involved and their plans became increasingly extreme - or so historians theorized based on the aftermath, anyway. Eventually one of the loopers was killed within their own loop, leading to its collapse and reintegration with fourth-dimensional time. Their victorious rival had taken actions they'd never intended to become permanent, thinking it was just another step in a long war, and ended up in a position having devastated cities and expended resources, leading to their own swift elimination before they could begin another time loop.

The temporal mechanics weren't useful to Suria, but the ethical problem was all too relevant. Even if her actions this time didn't become permanent, she was committing to a path. Continuing to read her books, which was oh so seductive, would also be committing, just without a proper plan.

Resolving that wasn't as easy as actually finding a solution, since the problem seemed intractable. When she realized that she was wasting time ruminating, Suria dedicated herself to at least making progress, hoping that her subconscious would find the solution that seemed invisible to her conscious mind.

As the appointed time drew closer, Suria tried to prepare instead of thinking about what she was preparing for. She already had all her best spells inscribed in her runebook, due to the library run, so she focused on trying to see if she could develop any of her new time spells to a viable stage.

She successfully mastered the second of the inscriptions - an augment specific to time magic - but that didn't make casting the time stop spell any easier. No matter how much Suria attempted to stop the grains of sand in her hourglass, it only worked 25% of the time at best. The problem was that there was so little feedback, unlike spells that produced fire or light, and none of her books provided practical advice on mastering time spells. Most likely she would just need to continue improving her senses for it and force the new capacity to grow.

Her current limitations made it difficult to do proper experiments on the spell itself. Dropping a talisman repeatedly made her average worse, since she was casting under more pressure, but she discovered that she could halt it in midair. The effect didn't last long enough for her to push the talisman or attempt to set anything on top of it, so all she knew was that the object resumed its path normally when time resumed.

Casting time stop on a person would likely be impossible, because the mana within a person's body naturally tried to resist outside influence. She didn't know very much about that - something else to study in future loops - but a complex effect like altering time would likely require a great deal more power to use directly on another mage. Even Professor Drazen had cast it on spells, not his opponents, though of course that could just be because the thrones would all have highly advanced defenses.

So she had inscribed a powerful time spell for herself, which should have been a great achievement, yet it did absolutely nothing to solve her conundrum.

When she was honest with herself, Suria accepted that she wasn't going to solve this problem with raw magic. She was just as trapped as she had been in the first hour of the loop, caught within the overwhelmingly powerful wards of Convocation Hall. There had been no way to blast her out of that, and she hadn't gotten out via force...

And then, all at once, Suria realized that she had a plan. Not a very good one, but she had a chance of making it through if she started acting immediately.