Chương 21: 21 Loop 1, Part 1

I woke up. Damnit. I could hear my roommate, Finn, placing something in front of me. Finn was placing something in front of me. Finn, who had just died a few hours ago. What? I blinked a few times and then pinched myself. Had that been a dream? Was I dreaming now?

"Laz. Laz. Hey, Lazlo." I kept my eyes shut. Laziness was part of it, sure. It was always part of it. But this time, I had a better reason. I knew exactly what I'd see when I opened them, and I wasn't ready to be wrong about it. This can't be real. I hadn't been able to give myself the proper time to grieve, and now my dreams were torturing me. I pinched myself again.

"Laz, wake up, Lazlo." The voice drilled in with that staccato beat. The one I'd hated for almost two years. And would have given a limb to hear again just an hour ago. The dining hall was exactly the same. Every sound landed in the same place, every shadow fell across the same pillar reaching up into nothing. It smelled exactly like toasting bread and too much cheese, which is what it had smelled like yesterday morning.

Every morning, there was a different scent that permeated the most, and Monday's had been bread and too much cheese.

"I know you're awake, dumbass. Your breathing's changed." I opened my eyes. Finn Merick was sitting across from me, still alive, with a plate of sausages and a faintly wounded expression. His hair was combed properly and his robes didn't have a single wrinkle. There was a smear of egg on the table near his elbow. I looked at him longer than I should have. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

"What?" Finn said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" There were a lot of ways to answer that question. Most of them would have gotten me a one-way trip to the infirmary for an evaluation. And the infirmary was a place I had pretty complicated feelings about now. I wanted to say, because you were dead, and now you're not, and I don't know what's going on.

"A weird dream," I said instead.

"You always have weird dreams. You told me last week you dreamed you invented a spell that made stairs illegal."

"Oh yeah, that was a good dream. Stairs should be illegal." I sat up properly and rolled my neck, which cracked in three places, like an applause line.

"No, this dream was longer."

"Longer how?"

"Mm, longer like a textbook. Bit boring in the middle. I actually had to do things. Blah effort. Terrible ending." I picked up my fork, mostly so my hands would stop wanting to reach across the table and confirm he was solid.

"Forget it, what were you saying?" He hadn't said anything yet. Really. I knew that. I could have mouthed the words he was about to say a second before he said them.

"I was saying, you've barely touched your plate. Do you want a repeat of last May? You almost missed the final exam for Alteration." And there it was, word for word, confirming my suspicions. I considered the question with the weight it was due, which was none, and which had been none the first time too, and waved my hand in the air.

"I ate recently enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one you're getting." I hadn't finished my first bite of bacon and I was already sentimental. Horrifying. I wanted to hug him. Just reach across the table and hold on until the shaking in my chest stopped. But Finn would ask why, and I'd have to answer, and the answer was you died on a marble floor and I couldn't stop it, and that was going to go over about as well as lighting yourself on fire in Grimm's library. I picked up my bacon instead. I am not a fast study. I want that on the record.

People assume that because I'm clever I'm also quick, and those are different things. Clever is what you do when you finally bother. Quick is doing it on time fast, and I have never done anything on time or fast in my life. But even I could do this math. Things were repeating, which meant one of four options, magically speaking. One I was in a magical dream and a Maran was eating me, but all the details were right, which ruled that out. Two, I was having a normal dream. I pinched myself again. Three, I was dead.

I didn't feel dead. And four, as outlandish as it might sound, was time travel. It had been rumored for years that Therumia's overwhelming power was because of time travel. Alteration was the school everyone pointed to. Professor Mela had spent entire lectures selling temporal manipulation as the discipline's theoretical ceiling. Change what exists. Time is a state that exists. Therefore, in principle, blah blah blah. But Alteration couldn't do this.

The school's best tricks topped out at frame adjustments and duration manipulation, maybe restoring a previous state under controlled conditions. Full rewind sat outside the theory entirely. I was waking up at the same breakfast table with the same smear of egg near Finn's elbow. If this was real, it belonged to whatever fifth school the fringe scholars had been whispering about for decades while the faculty pretended not to hear. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen.

Report the violation. Okay. So. I've traveled back in time. I pinched myself again, I still wasn't dreaming. What. The. Fuck. I was overjoyed. Fucking time travel is real. I wouldn't have to make any decisions at all for the next 48 hours and everything would play out exactly like it had before holy s— I cut myself off. Shit. Everything would play out exactly like it had before. The consequences of that were staring me in the face. My joy died immediately.

I shot a quick glance at Finn as he took a quick bite, I put on a lazy smile, and continued my half of the conversation. Right on cue, I pulled out my wand. The blue crystal flashed with a jolt of mana as I picked it up, and the HUD appeared in its usual blinding kaleidoscope before I shoved it to the corner and let it settle. I'd done this thousands of mornings.

[STATUS: LAZLO YARROW] Second Year, MIRKS Mana: 278/370 (92 reserved) Mana Regen: 25% per hour while sleeping (50% while Meditating) Enchantment --- Level 49 Alteration --- Level 49 Soul Magic --- Level 24 Manifestation --- Level 24 Prestiges: 7 [Efficiency I] -5% mana cost on spells and enchantments. [Mana Pool 2] +70 mana [Mana Flow] +5% mana regeneration during rest or meditation. [Dual Weaving] Cast any two spells simultaneously.

[Feedback Loop] When you alter an active spell, recover 10% of the original spell's mana cost. Active effects: [Soul Tether] Mana reserved. -25% maximum mana. Can not be dispelled. Family trait: [Soul Sense] Subconscious Soul awareness; allows user to interact with and detect Souls. I read it twice. What. My levels were erased, but I kept my passives. Which meant— I did some quick math. My mana pool was 370 because [Mana Pool 2] had leveled up. The +20 and the +50 were baked in. Good.

But [Soul Tether] was eating twenty-five percent of that, which was ninety-two mana I couldn't touch. 280, let's call it. I was too annoyed for precision. I dismissed the screen. Something else had my attention. A thread. Gold, faint, thin as spider silk, trailing from my chest and out through the dining hall wall. [Soul Sense] picked it up, the same as it picked up everything else. It was always on because I never bothered to turn it off.

My uncle called it a family trait, told me to keep it running and keep it quiet. For once the lazy option and the smart option were the same thing. The thread pulsed once, gently, in a rhythm that wasn't my heartbeat. It felt like breathing. Slow, shallow, distant. Someone on the other end of a line I hadn't asked to hold. That was a thought I was not having right now. I needed my spells up. I flicked my wand under the table and cast both at the same time, because I could now.

"[Wideview]. [Subtitle]." [Wideview - Soul] Cost: 54 mana. Change a caster's visual perception to a 360-degree field of view. 8 hours or until dispelled. [Subtitle - Soul] Cost: 47 mana. Creates physical subtitles based on speech around you. Passive. 8 hours or until dispelled. Both spells fired in a single pulse. [Dual Weaving] made it feel like flexing two fingers instead of one. Casting them one at a time would have felt clumsy after this. One hundred and one mana spent. I was down to 177 out of my usable 280.

More than a third of my available pool on two spells. Before breakfast. Because a quarter of my mana was being held hostage by a passive that wouldn't even tell me what it was for. I hated [Soul Tether]. I hated it with every fiber of my being. [Wideview] expanded, and the dining hall unfolded in every direction. Every seat filled the way I remembered it. Overachievers by the faculty table, scholarship kids near the kitchen, the dungeon track crowd by the yard exit.

The enchanted ceiling glass showed the same grey-robed man shouting unheard words in the Restralian parliament.

"Why are you staring at everyone like that?" Finn watched me closely.

"I'm not staring."

"You haven't turned your head once this whole conversation."

"Why would I? That's too much effort and you know it. Besides, with [Wideview] active, I don't have to turn my head at all." Inside I was giddy. Sure maybe I couldn't repeat everything, but I'd enjoy what I could, while I could. And this was amazing.

"You're using the battle spell, [Wideview], so that you don't have to turn your head?"

"Yes."

"That's horrifying."

"It's convenient." The conversation continued as Finn told me about his morning chat with Sara. I asked for salt. Finn passed the salt. I salted my eggs. The script was holding.

"You ever notice how nobody mixes?" Finn said, scanning the hall. He'd said it yesterday too, down to the phrasing. Finn noticed people. Healers couldn't help it. He went back to his sausages. I went back to mine. I was three bites into my bacon, egg, and cheese when the tray landed across from me with a single clean click. Sara Voss. Tailored robes, firm muscles, a jawline that put even my uncle's to shame.

Plate filled to the brim with egg whites, berries, beans, and that light brown flatbread I still didn't know the name of. The flatbread again, the overfull plate again, and that look she saved for me and nobody else.

"Yarrow. Merrick." She looked over the table like she was auditing it.

"The tournament brackets go up today. I assume you're letting your uncle down again?"

"Solid assumption. I plan to catch an extra nap today, thanks to the canceled class." Her jaw tightened.

"You could win, you know. If you actually tried for once. We all saw what you did last year when the Manafount erupted. You saved a lot of lives."

"Could. Won't. Important distinction." She stood with the exact expression she'd worn the first time, tight mouth and all.

"One day you'll run out of excuses."

"Probably, but I'll save that for tomorrow." I grinned at my own joke. She left. Finn turned his head to watch her go. I didn't need to. The grey man appeared by the faculty table. [Wideview] caught him exactly the way it had last time. Grey suit, statue-still, planted between the faculty table and the exit, where he'd stood last time too. Watching people who didn't know they were being watched. [Subtitle] didn't render anything from him because Vex never spoke. He just existed, quietly, in the periphery of things.

My uncle had cut his head off in a basement. Monday night. About fourteen hours from now. I understood the threat. Minister Creed had sent Vex, and whatever Vex had been doing in those Archives wasn't a social call. But decapitation was a long way past self-defense, and I still didn't understand what had pushed Corwen there. I'd let future Lazlo deal with that particular crumb. I had other things to worry about. Across the hall, in the loner section, Kalin Tuffet was eating by himself and Creed was approaching.

As much as I wanted things to play out identically, I couldn't let this go the same way, there were too many consequences as a result of this one stupid thing. In fact, things were going to go differently this time, I'd make sure of it.