98. Of repetitions, keys and a little bit of links

Cassandra Pendragon

The walls and ceiling were visibly shaking now and minor cracks appeared here and there, dust trickling down in swaths. A reverberating rumbling sound filled the air as if the island was taking a deep breath and sparks of unbound energy manifested all around us like a swarm of fireflies. I didn’t wait to find out what else might be coming and spread my wings wide. I slung a couple around Viyara and Reia and yanked them towards us. As soon as they came to a skittering halt at my feet I formed a loose net of energy around us and simultaneously used a dozen of my wings to support the ceiling above our heads. Death by a collapsing roof wasn’t exactly on my bucket list. I couldn’t use much force, as soon as I started bolstering my wings with additional energy they cut through the rock like a hot knife through butter but at least I felt a little better and I could easily keep the strange manifestations of magic away from us.

Somewhat safe behind the makeshift barrier we stared on wide eyed while the glowing dots of light started to move in intricate patterns, dancing faster and faster around each other until they exploded and a wave of multicoloured light crashed against my wings. From one second to the next the cave was bathed in the glare of a hundred miniature suns and I heard Reia and Mordred cry out in pain as their retinas were burned to a crisp. I hoped they wouldn’t blindly stumble off, I didn’t even dare imagine what would happen to anyone who was caught outside of the shaky protection bubble but I couldn’t spare much attention for them.

As soon as the brunt of the explosions slammed into me, I had to struggle to remain upright, my wings hungrily devouring every ounce of energy I could somehow squeeze from my core. I couldn’t maintain my hold on the ceiling, I needed every piece of strength I could muster to withstand the onslaught. Despite my efforts, light was slowly bursting through the holes I hadn’t plugged and one ray after the other pierced our little sanctum. Desperate I did something commendably stupid: I shifted my wings to channel the light onto my own body, hoping that my friends would be safe in my shadow and that maybe I’d get through unscathed or, since that was probably too much to ask, at least alive.

A part of my plan worked just fine, ray after ray hit my skin and vanished in a shower of sparks. Not a single one made it past, I became a living ward that protected everything behind it. Unfortunately I had slightly misjudged what was going on. I had expected some form of magic, maybe a little transcendent energy as well, but I wasn’t prepared for an onslaught of memories, emotions and regret. The very moment the light started dancing around my body it felt like I had been split into several pieces and now they all returned home, brimming with every impression they had collected along the way. Sparks of my own power easily overcame my resistance and memories from another life I hadn’t lived yet flooded my mind.

In a rush of colours and sounds I was pulled along a dark hallway with statues of an awfully familiar man with an ostentatious headdress along the walls. Here, the door wasn’t torn to shreds but had been opened as it was supposed to, our group just now passing the first pair of golems while I watched like an invisible ghost. Spying on myself while I lived through events that had never happened to me and couldn’t happen at all, I had destroyed the door, after all, was truly the strangest thing I had ever experienced. Without a warning the same greenish fire I had seen before ignited in the eyes of the statues just when we had passed the first pair and with a shudder they came to life.

None of us had the time to react before they jumped from their pedestals, hands reaching, while the ones further down the hallway began to form spell constructs with the same electric blue magic they had used to attack me when I had entered on my own. I had just enough time to witness Reia collapse, a bloody hole torn through her chest, before one of the golems managed to get his hands on “me”. My… mirror image? had barely enough time to cry out and manifest her wings before it tore her in two. A torrent of blood gushed from the ghastly wound, her wings flickered once and disappeared and Ahri let out a tormented wail. She rushed towards my corpse which the golem had thrown aside uncaringly while an unimaginable wave of agony tore at my insides. It felt like I had been the one who had suffered the blow.

I screamed but I didn’t have lungs, I tried to move but my spectral presence wouldn’t obey, I somehow needed the pain to stop. For an eternity or only a second, I couldn’t tell, I hung there, white hot flames ravaging my world while I watched my friends die below me one by one until merciful darkness descended on me. But it wasn’t the end. The pain vanished and again, I felt an irresistible force drag me forwards into another scene.

This time I passed an obliterated door and hallway, deep cuts in the walls and floor and the annihilated remains of the golems still glowed along the edges as if a whirlwind of searing blades had sliced them to pieces. If I had had a body I would have smiled, especially with the vivid memories of the last encounter still circling my mind. Apparently I would have enough energy to fight my way through the room if push came to shove.

I passed the hallway in a blur of speed, the far end continuously approaching while I soared over a chaotic mess of broken stone and burned metal which reminded me of the shields, two of the guards had been carrying. Small flames were still gnawing at the deeper gashes and spreading across the most mutilated pieces, filling the air with billowing smoke. After about 2/3s of the way, the destruction suddenly ended. The pedestals were still empty but the floor and walls were undamaged and the smouldering heaps of rock and tangled metal were missing completely.

Without the smoking remains the air cleared almost instantly and I could see the end of the hallway for the first time.

A solid wall made of greyish stone with a reflective surface, almost like tainted glass, blocked the way. Precisely at the centre a narrow tunnel had been constructed, complicated runes and enchantments covering its mouth. I was whisked through much too fast to make out any details but the short glimpse had been enough to see sparks of the electric blue energy play along deep cuts that had broken the inscribed spells in several dozens of places.

A short stretch of utter darkness followed before I passed some kind of boundary. From one second to the next a dazzling, blue light disorientated me and I felt my flight come to a halt. Again I was hovering above another version of myself who had her wings spread around her like a halo of power while she inquisitively stared at a blue gem, the size of her head. It was the source of the light that illuminated a circular chamber, its walls decorated with stylised depictions of doorways, 6 of them, at regular intervals. The tunnel I had come through closed the circle as the seventh gate, the only one which actually led somewhere.

The jewel itself was resting on thin air, a circle of golden runes slowly revolving around its brilliant centre. I watched in silent wonder as each revolution made another doorway flicker, the tunnel mouth apparently jumping from one chiselled image to the next. My imaginary twin wasn’t paying much attention to the exits, absorbed as she was with the gem. Despite her flayed back, singed hair and a deep cut across her stomach, which she hadn’t healed yet, she was seemingly trying to decipher the runes. Unfortunately I knew the exasperated expression that was slowly creeping across her face very well, even though I usually wore it during stretches of boredom or frustrating conversations. Apparently her efforts weren’t exactly successful.

Her scowl deepened by the second and I could practically see frustration leak out of her twitching ears. Oh oh, I knew myself well enough to realise that very soon she’d… with an animalistic growl she pushed more energy into her wings. Fresh spurts of blood shot from her mutilated back when the torrents of silvery blue energy swelled and slithered around the floating jewel. It resisted, for a moment, before the sound of breaking glass echoed around the chamber. Darkness followed.

For a moment I thought I was crossing over into another scene but the unimaginable chaos when the walls and ceiling collapsed simultaneously, along with the excruciating pain of being crushed underneath half the island set me straight. Of course it had to end properly…

When my consciousness finally fled and instead of soothing nothingness another version of the door and hallway welcomed me, I was beginning to wonder how many variations of this loop I’d have to suffer through and if there even was an end. Maybe my heroics back in the antechamber had killed me and I was experiencing my own personal form of hell? Condemned to watch my love, my friends and myself die, over and over…

Either that or the time stream had gone wonky and I was living through alternate versions of the same moments in time. That would also explain my strange behaviour from before. A little bit of knowledge had tricked through the collapsing membrane between different tributaries and had cause me to act on something I’d have eventually found out in the future or under different circumstances.

Since there wasn’t terribly much I could do if I had already arrived at my final destination, I was going to go with the “damaged time stream” theory, which was slightly less scary, in any case and gave me a fighting chance. I could either wait and hope that I’d be carried back to where I belonged sooner or later or I could actively try to push myself out of the stream. The only way I managed to come up with was to forcefully spread my wings and try to either tear down the walls of each scene I was catapulted into or maybe anchor myself in the real world somehow. Not exactly much, but at least something I could try. The question was, should I? If that really was some kind of alternate timeline I might be able to simply watch how things would turn out. Admittedly, dying hurt like hell but it wasn’t permanent and the further my “copies” got, the more I’d know about what we would have to face. Maybe I could even get a glimpse at the source of all the trouble since I highly doubted that the gem I had destroyed in the last scene was anything more than another obstacle. The explosion of something that could manipulate time would cause much more harm than a simple cave in, I imagined.

One more time, I decided. One more try and afterwards I was going to break out of the loop.

The door and hallway were in shambles, the golems destroyed. This time however, only a part of them had been cut and burned, the rest bore signs of spells and even dragon sized teeth and claw marks. Since I didn’t spot any corpses or larger puddles of blood, I thought we had done remarkably well. While I sped over the carnage I felt a pang of regret that I could not witness the fight, it would have been handy to know how exactly this group had managed to get through, presumably unscathed.

I was pulled through the tunnel and arrived in the same circular chamber, an identical jewel hovering at the centre. A small group was clustered around it, Ahri stood beside me with Reia and Viyara on the opposite side of the gem, only Mordred was missing. They wore stony expressions, Reia appeared nervous, and I heard my own voice, with a slightly different inflections than I was used to:

“You don’t have to, you know. There’s no guarantee the spider has told the truth. We can try to find another way in. Honestly, I’d rather dig through the walls than have you activate an unknown artefact on the say so of a creepy, eight legged woman you met in a dream.” Reia shook her small head.

“She’s been right about the entrance and the stairs and the golems. What exactly makes you think she lied? You didn’t see her, when she talked about Amon true hatred shone from her eyes. She will see him dead even if it’s the last thing she does. She said there’s a seed of the mana heart down there we can use against him, and I believe her.”

“It’s not what we might find, it’s the whole “only you can touch the stone or bad things will happen” schtick that I find hard to swallow. I’m not questioning if she exists anymore but I do question her intentions. What if there’s another reason why she wants you to touch that thing? Do you honestly believe that she means you no harm?”

“I don’t think she cares about me one bit. Whether I live or die is about as significant to her as the rain. The only thing that matters is this.” Reia raised her hand and I clearly saw the glyph that had been etched into her palm. A golden circle with eight protruding lines, similar to a spider’s legs, covered her skin, its glimmer visible despite the glaring light from the gem. Shit. That was the key and if I couldn’t find a way to bring it back with me, we wouldn’t be able to get past this room. Worse, considering what they had said, an ugly picture was forming in my mind.

A seed of the mana heart, whatever that was, had been hidden in the depth of this tower and now it was acting up, merging different time streams together. Better yet, it was connected to a spider who loathed Amon and my instincts screamed at me that it was the very same one who had helped him out all those years ago. She hadn’t contacted us in my timeline and since she couldn’t possibly find more willing allies, I had to assume that she hadn’t been able to, probably due to the fluctuating magic in the seed. Which begged the question who or what would be able to meddle with powers on that scale and unfortunately only one name came to mind. Considering that Pete had heard Amon proclaim that he was about to arrive on our continent in person, I could just about imagine that he was using splitters of the mana heart to facilitate the transfer. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to assume a seed would directly be impacted by a manipulation of the heart on that scale. Which in turn meant, that we’d have much less time than I had expected, the consequences of his actions were already time altering, after all. We needed that key.

There was a chance I was about to kill the Reia from another timeline, kill myself or fuck up in a million other ways but my basic idea was simple. Information and energy had already crossed from one stream to another, so why shouldn’t I be able to use that? The mark was probably similar to an enchantment and if I somehow managed to form a connection between this Reia and my Reia, the additional information, namely the glyph, might be added to my Reia, I fervently hoped. There was only one way to find out and I didn’t want to wait any longer, if I was right, the risk of even more severe breaches between different timelines was growing by the second.

The first challenge was to materialise some of my wings. I wasn’t exactly there, or then, and it felt like I was dragging a heavy kart through the mud with every torrent of energy I pushed into this reality. Every movement took an unbelievably high amount of effort and I nearly failed but my stubbornness wouldn’t let me back down. I bled for every centimetre and felt my strange, spectral body quiver and crack under the onslaught of transcendent energy but with a silent scream I slung two wings around the mark and poured everything I had left into the ones still in limbo. My vision split and the all too familiar sensation of branding irons on my back swamped my nerves.