Chains of a Time Loop

Geel was quick with his draw. His arm shot straight into the air, at Shera, and then at Iz. Fwip. Fwip.

Thump. Thump.

It didn't sound like a bullet—probably a tranquilizer?

He pointed it at her. He lurched forward as if to scare her—it worked, as she flinched back like she'd been shocked—and she almost pulled the trigger on her exit plans.

He put his pistol back to the holster at his hip, smirking sheepishly at his own little prank. "Sorry, it seems they wanted you conscious. Oh, I'm selling you out to them." He gestured with his head to the riches on his table. "I'll save you the trouble of working that one out."

"I didn't need your help," Myra grumbled.

The setup was all the standard stuff—Ben or someone else had put up a teleportation disruption field. She didn't see how to get out of it—did Ben know what she'd been learning with the murk bogs? Were Unkmirean disruption fields just different than whatever Ben learned from his mountain guys?

And of course, the group had wasted no time boxing her in, if the shuffling around she heard behind her was any indication. Well, this is over.

"So," Myra ventured cautiously, keeping a telekinetic finger on her failsafes, even while she reassured herself that it was unnecessary. Her razor-necklace would activate if it came to it. Keeping this in mind, she took a deep breath. Stay calm, be ready, and he can't do anything to you. "You were the one who called Geel last night?"

Ben quirked an eyebrow but didn't say anything.

"I—I genuinely didn't think you would be behind this kind of thing. Boy, I sure feel dumb, huh?"

"The only thing I'm behind is the quest to save you, Myrabelle."

"Save me? Fill me in there, how are those drugs going to save me, exactly?"

"Myrabelle, look at yourself. You've joined the murk bogs. You've dragged your friends into it. You almost got my brother involved."

"Nathan? I didn't even speak to Nathan this loop."

"Yes, well, he was awfully curious where you went off to. I had to talk him out of traveling down to Unkmire himself—oh, he's the reason I knew you'd gone to that country this loop. What did you think, by the way? Fascinating country, isn't it?"

Myra resisted the urge to get swept up in this argument. This wasn't even a real argument—the moralizing, the indignation, it was all performative, or mostly performative.

She looked at the elder, the one she was pretty sure was the group's leader. The one with the massive frame and untamed, wild gray hair. It was better to talk to him than to Ben; he could be reasoned with. If there was a weak point, it would be in whatever story Ben had told the old man. "What'd he tell you about me?"

"He told us enough," he said gruffly. "Enough to know that you're worth saving." Saving, again? Her eye twitched. They really think they're saving me?

"What if I don't want to be 'saved'?" she demanded.

Ben said nothing but smirked his smug smirk. God, that fucking face.

"What is it you really want, huh?" She looked at her friends, out cold on the ground. "You must need me conscious," she said carefully, "whatever it is."

"Why, what on Zyarth are you talking about, Myrabelle? We could hardly treat you if you were unconscious."

Okay… so his weirdo story this time involves me being sick?

"You don't seem to have similar compunctions about my friends." She tilted her head to the side, gesturing where they were still flat on the ground.

She was talking, saying whatever came to mind, trying to navigate the conversation to turn up something, but she didn't really know where she was going.

"Well—maybe knocking out Shera was overkill. Isadora, though—well, she's a variable I can do without."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Incidentally, by the looks of her, it seems she made it past the first hurdle. Offer her my congratulations." The old man looked a bit puzzled by this.

"Fuck off!" Myra said. "Why don't you explain that one, huh?"

Ben's eye twitched. That had got to him, sort of. He had said too much.

She turned back to Geel. "You."

Geel puckered his cheeks, putting on a ridiculous innocent-boy look.

"How'd you meet Benkoten?"

"Who, this guy?" He pointed a thumb in a fairly vague gesture that could have been directed at anyone in the room. "Never seen him in my life."

"You never knew him before he called you last night." Half-sentence, half-question. She tried to judge the reactions of the sect members. Did they know about his call? They were, however, completely stone-faced. Unreadable.

"Eh…" Geel put his hand over his mouth. "Certainly, I didn't know him before last night, no."

"Just to lay it out, then," Myra pressed on, "you just decided to betray your own employees for a pile of riches to a random guy you don't know who shows up in the middle of an op with a box of gold?"

"Yeah, of course."

"What is everybody else gonna think, then, huh? How is anyone going to trust you when they know you'd do the same to them with so little thought?"

The corners of his lips twitched. "Oh, come now, Myrabelle. We both know that they won't be thinking any such thing."

Oh.

Of course.

"You mean the memory shit? Tell me, how is that gonna work, exactly?" she snapped at him. "How are you gonna throw me overboard when you've given me up, eh? Was that part of your deal?" She looked back at Ben. "Does he get me back as a corpse?"

Ben didn't even answer, decidedly disengaging with Myra's attempts to fish for information.

It was Geel who said, "Myrabelle, I have no idea what you're talking about. Throw anyone overboard? Do you even know anything about our country? Nobody ever falls off the edge. Ever."

"Are you all done?" Bentoken interrupted impatiently. "You've got the money, so hand over the girl, and let's get out of here." He glanced at his watch. "I don't want to stick around here longer than I have to."

He checked his own watch too, seemingly prompted by Ben. "Ehh… yeah, get her out of here."

"Hang on a minute!" Myra shouted, still addressing Geel. "Do you really not care about anything other than money? I thought you were a scientist! I thought you were a philosopher!"

"Now, now, Myrabelle. I told you, I wanted to see what would happen. And what happened is I got a pile of riches." There wasn't a trace of remorse in his voice, not even a hint of wistful curiosity. "Pretty successful experiment, no?"

"You piece of shit! You said we'd—said we'd done good—"

"Come on, Myrabelle," Ben said, grabbing her by the arm. "This is a little embarrassing, honestly."

He was right. She'd known what kind of person Geel was. Geel was a terrible person, that wasn't up for debate. He harmed people for money, that was his job, and he had harmed people for science. He was a child abuser, and he had probably killed Lukai. She had bigger problems, and there was no reason not to let this go. It was embarrassing, to think she might be saved by any kind of sentiment from Dr. Geel Hattuck.

Benkoten reached into his robe and pulled out—what else?—the syringe with the red drug.

Yes, it was time to just… go. Exit.

What did he think was going to happen?

Myra crushed her own heart, and she activated her necklace to slice her own neck off. She really didn't need to do both of these things. It was just good to be doubly sure. Having her neck sliced through was extremely painful, but at least she could look forward to waking up in her warm dormitory bed. Honestly, slicing her head off was a lot more painful than she expected—she had thought the death would be quick. There wouldn't be time to feel anything! Her head would be cut off! She'd be dead!

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Well, she'd be dead any second now.

…

…

…

Any second now!

The room was kind of blurry, but that was all that had changed. She definitely had cut her own head off, right? She couldn't feel anything below the neck, and she had her own body thump to the ground below her.

Frantically as she tried to figure out what was going on, she noticed that the old man had sprung into action. What he was doing was uncertain, but he seemed to be in a deep focus, arms out in a spread-out casting stance, eyes wide and fixated directly on her.

"I know you must be scared, Myrabelle!" the old man roared. He was loud, but he didn't move a hair from his position, didn't break his concentration in the slightest. "I know things might seem hopeless right now! But I believe life is always worth living! I believe you can't give up!" Oh god what.

◆◆◆◆◆

(Hours earlier)

Ben and his allies had made their camp some kilometers east of where the action would be, familiarizing themselves with the terrain and preparing to make their approach. Ben wasn't worried about the approach—he knew how to deal with Dr. Geel Hattuck. There was just the one issue.

"Master," Ben started. "You mentioned earlier that you had a solution to… my concerns about Myrabelle Prua-Kent."

"Indeed," he said without elaboration.

"Yes, so… what is it?" Ben was trying not to sound frustrated or impatient. But the fact was that, despite the Master's initial declaration, he had been oddly reticent to provide more information, dodging the question all morning. The master wasn't in the habit of dropping the ball on his promises, so it was an unusual situation for Ben.

The old man pushed himself to his feet. "Let's take a walk," he said.

Ben followed the sect leader as he idly chose a path through the wilds. A walk-and-talk was hardly unusual with Master Quoil, but he still couldn't help but feel the master was stalling on something.

When he finally started, it was through a personal direction Ben hadn't been expecting. "When I was a young man," he began, "I joined the army during the Three-Year Kralenan War."

In dozens of loops spent with The Sect Gazing Inward, Benkoten had heard Master Quoil mention the Three-Year Kralenan War only once. As with many historical wars, to Benkoten that name was little more than words strung together, a historical event between polities that didn't exist anymore, a conflict over long-forgotten stakes. He understood that it was clearly formative for Master Quoil, but that was as far as he could say. The cultural gap spanning both time and place was too great for the knowledge to illuminate anything else about the enigmatic man.

"I led a team of talented mages stationed under a duke, a key decision-maker during the war. The Followers of Jant identified him as a critical target, and he became a focal point of their attacks. They engaged my team in combat on many occasions… and they frequently took prisoners." His voice grew quiet, his gaze parked off in the distance. "The Followers of Jant were desperate for information that could get them a leg up, and their intelligence division resorted to increasingly vile means of extracting it."

"You're talking about… interrogation?"

"I'm talking about torture," Master Quoil said. "Their masterwork was a technique that went by many names. The wedge between life and death. The forever-cusp, the hanging-between. A technique to keep someone on the border between life and death for as long as the caster can maintain the spell. An enormously complex spell, but the gist was simple. When a person dies, there is a window of opportunity that begins the instant their core protections fail." (The 'core protections' were what they called domain protections in the north.) "But before that window is up, it is yet possible to hold death at bay. The window is small, just a percent of a second. But if you seize that moment, that brief, brief moment… it is possible to take control. It is possible to enact the functions of their body to keep them alive through your own will. To keep them conscious, while blocking their defenses from returning."

"I think I've heard of this before…" Ben said slowly. That was true, although he had never connected it in his mind to the Three-Year Kralenan War. In the back of his mind, part of him had probably thought it was an urban legend. "But I thought nobody had ever mastered the technique since." Surely, Master Quoil wasn't bringing this up to suggest they learn the technique, in just a few hours…

"That's true," Master Quoil said. "The method required dozens of mages, all with rigorous training. The Followers of Jant may be the only documented case of a team trained with the requisite rigor. As I said, they were determined." He sighed. "I lost many friends to the agents of that team. Friends who suffered for hours, for days, stuck in the terror of the hanging-between, all so Jant could eek a morsel or two of classified intelligence from their heads."

He paused at this point, and he took a moment to regain his will to speak.

"When the war ended, I became obsessed. The intelligence division of Jant cut a deal and escaped the consequences of their actions. I was furious at the organization that broke the minds and hearts of so many good men and women. For a decade, I pursued a singular goal, to learn the technique so I could have my enemies suffer as my friends and comrades did. I honed the technique to its bare minimum. Rather than forcing the operation of the human body in its entirety, I focused my attention on the chemical interface to the brain. I had reasoned, if I could reoxygenate a person's blood through chemical transmutation, what use would I have for the circulatory system? I could skip that whole thing. My method would be far more efficient than that of Jant's. But for all my theory, I was one man, and the complexity still evaded me."

Ben was starting to see how the story ended.

"So you sought out the sect."

"That's right. I knew that what I needed was to multitask. Everywhere I asked, there was one name that appeared again and again. People spoke in whispers of The Sect Gazing Inward. So I sought it out. I joined. I put my nose to the grindstone. I studied. I learned. I sat in that meditation chamber day and night, until I fainted from exhaustion."

"And did you…?"

"I did. I created the technique." He exhaled deeply. "And I have never once used it. The sect opened my eyes. I suppose you could say all that time gazing inward, I got a proper look at myself, and I saw that I was the one hanging between life and death." He shook his head. "No matter the reason, I made peace and came to terms with the events of the war. I put aside that accursed technique. I put aside my quest for revenge. I devoted myself to the sect. Now I am here."

Just a moment ago, Ben had been frustrated by the master's evasiveness, and now he was caught off guard by his forthrightness. A personal story of his own failings and traumas, a story he'd kept to his chest in dozens of loops of Ben's joining up. But what's the point? For something so personal, for someone whose choice was so meaningful to them—Master Quoil wouldn't bring the spell out of retirement for this. Not to apprehend a criminal he had never heard of until last week. Not on Ben's word alone.

That's what Ben thought.

But the master thought about it differently.

"Benkoten, my son, today, I have realized something important. Ever since I gave up on my revenge, I believed that I would have no use for the hanging-between. And yet, still, I was blind." Finally, he looked back at Ben, his somber voice rising with a note of something positive. Something… hopeful? "Benkoten, I saw this technique as a tool only for revenge. As a tool for torture and harm. I failed to see the ways I might use it for good. To save someone."

He put a hand on Benkoten's shoulder.

"You told me that Myrabelle Prua-Kent was likely to kill herself when confronted," he recalled. "That her despair was so great, she would end it all on the slightest of provocations. I want to assure you that, should the worst come to the worst, I will save her."

◆◆◆◆◆

Myra had been reduced to a head.

Myra had been reduced to a head, and she was still conscious.

I didn't even know this was possible, she thought.

In fact, thinking was all she could do. Her vocal cords were in shreds, and without access to her fingers, she'd lost basically all ability to cast.

"I know what you're going through, Myrabelle!" the old man declared, still watching her with a wide-eyed expression, unyielding and unblinking. "I was like you, once! Alone and angry, believing in nothing but the essential cruelty of the world. Every day, I thought about ending it! Every day, I was propelled onward by nothing more than my personal quest!"

What the FUCK did Ben tell him?

"Every day, I could see no way to carry on but to give even more of myself to my endeavor, leaving even less of myself to live. It was an unending cycle of agony and despair!"

Why did I crush my heart of all things? Why didn't I just smash my brain in? Neither one of those things could exactly be considered easy—deeply ingrained mage instincts were difficult to override. And the brain was harder even than the heart, and Myra was severely handicapped in her magic at the moment. With all her might she willed her brain to turn to soup, and all that will amounted to nothing.

"It was only by the compassion of my predecessor that I am here today. Master Piryata, founder of The Sect Gazing Inward, and the single greatest man I have ever known. He refused to give up on me, even when I was undeserving. I should have been beyond redemption, but I'm not sure he ever believed in such a thing to begin with. He brought me into his family. He taught me how to live again."

Ben was patiently waiting for the old man to finish. Geel had pulled out a notebook; he was taking notes.

"That's why I know. It is possible to return from the brink of despair. I can't claim to understand your circumstances, Myrabelle. I can't claim to know how you reached this point. But I have the utmost faith that we can recover."

What tools did she have at her disposal? She still had the lava marbles, for the passive telekinesis that held them in place had held up despite all odds. Unable to modify the spell, though, she found that this wasn't much help. Even if she were to try, she was liable to fuck it up and burn out her aura terminals—Oh.

Hm.

"Myrabelle, I, Master Quoil of The Sect Gazing Inward, give you this promise! I extend to you the same hand that my predecessor extended to me! I know you must be terrified now, but I believe you have a future! A bright future that we can work towards together!"

With a decisive thrust of her left eyebrow, she directed every remnant of her telekinetic prowess toward the lava marble. There was no care in it, and there was no finesse. She grabbed a hold of the marble directly, in every way that Instructor Yam had taught her not to do. The pain was shockingly intense, reverberating through her aura terminals right to her frontal cortex, flooding what little self she had left with the most excruciating pain she had ever experienced—

◆

Myra didn't know if she died, or if she just blacked out. Under normal circumstances, that kind of irresponsible magic practice wasn't likely to kill anyone, but her medical circumstances had been far from normal. Anyway, it was over. She was in her warm dormitory bed. Her neck was intact, and there were no mountain sect weirdos in her room.

Believe it or not, Myra wasn't that upset about the whole thing. Oh, she was frustrated about being on the cusp of all the answers about the murk bogs and having that yanked away at the last moment (though she thought she was about to put most of that together on her own anyway).

But most importantly, she had escaped Ben. Somehow, he'd found himself an ally who could pull out the most unholy anti-suicide spell Myra had never heard of, and she'd still gotten away. Even better, Ben probably had no idea what she'd done. He couldn't even plot around it for next time—he probably figured the whole thing was a bust—that it hadn't worked! And anyway, there were plenty of ways to improve her failsafes so she couldn't end up in that situation again. She just had to rearchitect them to target her brain first and foremost.

It was time to stop being so afraid of Ben.

For Ben had always been the snag in the time loop, hadn't he?

Myra had yearned to embrace the time loop: to internalize that her failures didn't matter, to understand that she could always try again, again and again and again. And that's why Ben had always been such a problem. Thanks to Ben, Myra always had to worry about the consequences. It was all his fault!

Now, though? She was the master of the Time Looper's Exit. There was nothing Ben could do. Ben didn't matter anymore.