Chains of a Time Loop

Loop 15

"The 'sect gazing inward' from the Ptolkeran Mountains?" Iz scratched her head. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"I couldn't find anything from the library," Myra said. Though, it was only now that she actually had their name, so she could potentially try more targeted searches. And she even had the name of the leader. It had been, like, Koil? Or maybe Quoil? Yeah, it would be worth returning to the library and casting her favorite search spell.

"I can try to look around," Iz said, rubbing her nose. "The other thing you asked about—It sort of reminds me of something. The Followers of Jant supposedly developed a technique that could keep anyone alive at the brink of death. I dunno if it was anything like what you described… but they were around the Ptolkeran Mountains, obviously. That's the only reason I bring it up. Uh, what was the context for all this again?"

There had, in fact, been some context—some zany excuse so she could tell Iz this ridiculous story and get the wheels in motion—but frankly, Myra didn't remember it either.

"Good question!" Myra said cheerfully. Approaching the training hall from down the street was Nathan Talzatta. Ugh. She didn't want to see Nathan right now; based on what Benkoten had said, his nosing around had probably been the reason Ben had known that she would be at the murk bogs' camp.

"Why don't you think about it, by the way there's a gift I wanna give you I'll be back in a few days see ya!"

The gift, of course, would be the dead sage's journal, since that had in fact worked extremely well. As before, though, she wouldn't be going to Jewel City immediately. Not if she wanted to get to Unkmire to finally get some answers from Lukai.

◆

Two loops ago, Lukai had showed up. One loop ago, he hadn't.

So. What gives?

There was no need to overthink it. In the last loop, Myra had called the murk bogs and asked to join as a runecrafter. Lukai was the current runecrafter. Obviously, her call had prompted the murk bogs to kill him earlier than they otherwise would have.

Nailed it. They should just go ahead and give her her detective's badge right now.

I mean, really. Myra might not have had all the details, but she had pretty much got the thing figured out. The murk bogs kill Lukai and dump all his stuff over the edge of the platform. Due to the Curse of the Abyss, they all forget about him. Lukai was probably the murk bog's runecrafter. So from their perspective, it's like they just wake up one day and realized they were critically missing a runecrafter. What a mistake, they must have thought! What have we been doing all this time? So they hired Myra.

Then there was the end of the loop. The murk bogs were set to do security for the Unkmirean government, and that was a big problem for the mastermind. So the mastermind sends Ben to bribe Geel to ditch the contract, and he uses The Well to wipe everyone's memories of the contract they were supposed to be following. Then they don't have anything to do, so they sit around and party and try to rob a bank until the volcano erupts. And hadn't they been investigating the volcano, too? They probably cause the eruption, somehow. She still didn't see how Geel could have wiped people's memories without being able to chuck anything into the abyss, but he was a psycho psychologist. He probably had a way.

The question on her mind right now was why they had killed Lukai, and how (or if) it connected to the end-of-the-loop scenario. That's what she was here to figure out, together with her lovely assistant.

They caught him outside the vault, just where she expected him to be. It actually caught her off guard when she approached, having half-forgotten just how ill Lukai looked. Shaking and sweating profusely, ready to scurry off at the slightest spook.

"Hey, there," Myra said softly. "It's gonna be okay."

"Is it really?" he asked, eyes wide like a lost puppy.

"Absolutely!" Myra said confidently. It was easy to be confident when you were in a time loop. Why had she never realized this before? "Come on, why don't you tell us what ails you?"

"M-Myra, we should introduce ourselves."

"Sure," Myra said cheerfully. "I'm Myrabelle, this is Shera. We're visiting from Ralkenon."

"Shera's short for Sh-Sherazyn."

"Ah. I'm—I'm Lukai." Lukai was conspicuously eyeing the path out. Myra also remembered that he could teleport; it was important not to spook him.

"Come on. Why don't you tell us what's going on?"

"I'm sorry, I—" He looked back at her but flinched away immediately, as if the very act of eye contact had delivered a static shock. "I don't think either of you can help me." He twitched. "It's… far too late for me."

"I don't think that's true at all."

Myra had had a lot of time to think about why the murk bogs might kill Lukai. The most obvious possibility was that he had failed to make any headway in the vault and the murk bogs had decided that his incompetence was unacceptable. She could help him with that. They could be done with that by the end of the night. But how could she bring it up?

She eyed the notebooks that Lukai was holding tightly under his arm.

I bet he has all kinds of notes on the vault in those books, Myra thought to herself. If I could get a look inside, it would be a good excuse to start talking about it.

"Come on, let us take you to dinner. You look like you could use a good meal."

His face turned a little red. He was tempted. "I dunno, I need… I need to go…"

"You're not gonna turn down two beautiful girls trying to take you out, are you?"

"Ah—" He twitched vigorously.

Hehe, got 'im. She was unprepared for Lukai to become seemingly a different person.

"Geel sent you, didn't he?"

His face hardened, and his evasive eyes sharpened into pointed daggers.

Uh—

"What—What gives you that idea?"

"So you do know who he is." Oh. Did I give that away? "You approach me claiming to be tourists—Who the hell are you, really?"

"No no!" Myra rushed. "You're right—we know who he is, but—" Crap. She looked at Shera for help, but for reasons unknown, she seemed to be having a mental short of her own. "Look, we weren't trying to hide who we were, we were just trying to find the right moment. I'll cut to the chase, we were here looking for you, specifically. The truth is, we came to find you because your life is in grave danger."

"I… see," he said slowly.

He believed them? Or, no, he wanted to believe them? It was hard to tell what was going on in his head, but he seemed to melt, his brief accusatory spell was just that—a spell.

"My life's in grave danger, huh?" He leaned against the village railing, lifting his glasses to rub his eyes. "Well, you certainly don't need to tell me."

Myra blinked. "You know about it?"

He tilted his head, looking at her oddly.

"Um—"

"What is it you know, exactly?" he asked.

"Well, I know an awful lot!" Myra proclaimed, only to be met with a look of deep skepticism. "I know for a fact your life is in danger. It's just, I don't really know the details."

"Well, how about this, then," Lukai said. "Come back to my home with me, and I'll show you exactly why my life is in danger."

◆

Myra accepted, of course, and he led them near-wordlessly to the train. When they were sitting down, en route to the unnamed village, Myra and Shera on either side of Lukai, he had reverted to a jittery, nervous mess, clutching one of his long braids for emotional support, refusing to look anywhere but dead straight ahead.

It was the perfect time to get some answers.

"Lukai, do you mind if I ask why you decided to join the murk bogs?" Myra asked as the late-night train rumbled on.

"I don't remember."

◆

She tried again.

"You're the rune expert for the murk bogs, right?"

"That I am."

"What kinda tasks do you do? Do you go on jobs with them, or is it a hang-back-at-base kinda job?"

"Yeah, everyone goes on jobs. The murk bogs have a lot of runic equipment, and it frequently needs recarving. It's pretty common for them to need repairs mid-job… And of course, everyone's trained to fight." He sighed.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"Do you like fighting?"

"Do you think I'd be in the murk bogs if I didn't like fighting?"

"You're dodging the question."

"Okay, fine." He let out a much deeper sigh. "Yeah, I don't like fighting." He was left looking much more relaxed. Getting somewhere!

"Do you fight a lot?"

"I wouldn't say a lot… The worst was when we were hired for security by a retired politician who'd been exiled from Briktone. He was having some kind of… event at his mansion, rallying support for a return, and Briktone sent an assassination team. We were trapped in the place for a fortnight while we were besieged."

"Wow. Did the, uh, target survive?"

"Of course," he said. He dropped his voice to a whisper and looked suggestively at Myra. "I wouldn't be telling you about him otherwise."

Shera looked a little confused, but she asked a different question. "H-how did you survive?"

"I hid in the boiler room. I modified the runic control panel and played support for the rest of the team." He shrugged. "It's what I'm good at."

"I know the feeling," Myra said, seeing a chance to build up her rapport. "I plan to pursue a career in runecrafting myself."

"Oh, aye?"

"Yeah! I'm curious, how'd you get started with the craft?"

"I don't remember."

◆

"Do you know much about the village that used to live where the murk bogs are now?"

"What village?"

"You don't even know about it? I know it wasn't forgotten entirely. There are a few houses left. Only the name was forgotten."

"Is that so? It's too easy to forget what I've forgotten."

"Does everybody forget differently?"

"I don't remember."

◆

"Do you mind if I ask what's in your notebook?"

"Knock yourself out." He tossed it at her, and she opened it.

The front page had a topologist's diagram of a Klein bottle, covered in runes, and annotated in some kind of variant of morphwire, a textbook-standard diagramming method for runic analysis. Like most morphwire, it was incomprehensible to anybody but the author, full of shorthands and personal quirks.

"So what's this?" she asked.

"It's an interesting… topological rune device. A Klein bottle, embedded in 3-space without any self-intersection using the aid of a couple of portals. The interesting thing is that the object itself contains the runes that induce the portals, and the runic diagram is nonplanar, so it couldn't be inscribed on a normal surface. It's strange and self-sustaining, a mystery that asks how it could have been created in the first place."

Myra turned the page and found a copy of the gargoyle liar statue puzzle, and another eight pages of theories and grids, half or more of it crossed out with increasingly furious ink marks.

"And this—"

"Some ridiculous bullshit," he said bitterly.

She flipped through the rest of the notebook. There was a lot of mathematics, some of it runic, some of it logokinetic, and some of it just math. Diagrams of complex, overlapping curves; geometric diagrams of spheres and hyperboloids, featuring detailed maps of non-Euclidean structures; infinite sequences of numbers, squeezed into the pages by repeatedly shrinking the text size.

She flipped past all of it quickly—she wanted to ask about the vault mission.

"Lukai, this Klein bottle… where is it from?"

He bit his lip. "You sound like you already know, and you're just trying to bring it up."

"It's from the vault, isn't it?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"Did you tell the rest of murk bogs that you got past the Klein bottle?"

He shook his head.

"Why not?"

"I know they're never gonna figure this out without me," he said. "So… it was spiteful, I guess. I just wanted to feel like I could control something for once." He sighed. He looked spent. "And also—this Klein bottle, it's a work of art. The runes, each perfectly placed… It should be on display in an exhibit somewhere, not locked up in that weird security system…"

"Okay… What's its artistic merit have to do with not telling the murk bogs, though?"

He closed his lips and shook his head.

Myra waited, hoping he'd elaborate, but he didn't.

"C-could I flip through?" Shera asked.

Myra handed it over, and she asked about some of the mathematical explorations later in the notebook. For much of the ride, she got him talking about everything from surreal numbers to mathematical knot theory. He seemed to enjoy talking about it, and the conversation got away from them.

◆

"Well, my home is just across this bridge," Lukai said. "Ah—if you want to turn back now—I didn't really expect you to come along, you know. I said it would be—well. The reason my life is in danger." His tone was wistful, maybe regretful.

What's he so worried about? It sounded like he was just going to show them the murk bogs' camp, but he already knew that they knew about it.

Surely, he's not expecting to just walk into a murder trap?

"D-don't worry," Shera said. "We c-came to find you, and we aren't turning back n-now."

Lukai looked very, very sad. He stepped onto the bridge, and they followed.

At night, the bridge was something else entirely. There was no light for kilometers, save the stars above. Step by step on the wobbly boards that she couldn't even see—it was altogether a new level of spook.

"Do you mind if I give us a light?" Myra asked.

She didn't imagine the answer would be 'no,' so she went ahead and conjured one, illuminating just a couple of meters around them.

"I would rather you not—" Lukai said. "Or, fine."

"This b-bridge is really interesting," she said. "What's it do?"

Lukai winced. "Nothing," he said. "Half the boards are warped." His voice grew fainter and fainter as he spoke, his words becoming more implied than audible. "Stupid idea to begin with."

"It's not stupid at all!" Myra said, in defiance of everything she had ever said or thought about the bridge in the previous loops. "I think it's an incredible idea! It's an incredible accomplishment to design something like this from scratch. How'd you even come up with it?"

"Well… I've always been fascinated by runic novelties," he said.

"Like th-the Klein bottle," Shera added.

"Yeah, exactly. Most of all, I've been fascinated by the Arch of Anangal. That was my inspiration. But I wanted to do the inverse of it, to make something that curved downward. I had this idea that it would be like an attraction. Families would come with their kids and ride on the bridge as it swung around, and it'd spread by word-of-mouth throughout Unkmire. It'd be a point of pride, tourists would come from everywhere… for me, it'd be a ticket to recognition. Fuck, I told you it was a stupid idea."

Myra blinked. Wait, that's actually cool.

And he has no idea I can get it to work in less than a day.

This is perfect! All I have to do is help him out and gain his trust.

"Maybe we can show you how to fix it," she said.

He looked away. "What do you mean? It's not broken." He sounded almost defensive.

"It's not?"

"It's not finished," he said. "I've been working on it for half a decade. It's a big project."

"How are you gonna deal with the warping?"

He frowned. "I'm not," he said. "I have a few ideas, but it doesn't matter. I'm never going to activate it. I told you, it was a stupid idea."

"Oh, c'mon. Why not?"

He looked at her, but he didn't answer for a long time.

"Geel," he finally said. "If I ever finish it, Geel's going to destroy it. He'll cut it loose at the ends and it'll fall into the abyss."

"What? No, he won't. Why would he do that?"

"If you really think he wouldn't, and you're not just lying to me, Myrabelle, then you obviously don't know anything you claim to know."

Of course, I know what I'm talking about! I'm a fucking time looper!

"Th-there's a lot we don't know," Shera said. "That's w-why we came to talk to you."

I mean. I actually know that Geel does not destroy the bridge when I finish it.

"I really want to believe you," Lukai whispered. "May I ask the questions for a bit?"

He did. He asked about Ralkenon, and then about school. He asked about Myra's home life, which she begrudgingly talked about. He asked about Shera's home life, and she talked about the difficulty of learning magic while not being able to enunciate, the same story she'd told Myra some large number of loops ago. Lukai talked about having to become bilingual in order to access the best education materials.

He asked about entertainment in the empire. Art, books, plays.

He asked if they traveled outside the empire a lot. Myra told him about Fishnia. She told him about Tzurigad.

And finally, he asked: "Why did you come to find me?"

"I told you. Your life is in danger."

"That's the part you need to explain."

"You acted like you already knew about it."

"For some reason, I feel like you're talking about something altogether different." So, he had noticed the disconnect, too.

Well, I guess I should tell him before we reach the platform, Myra thought. "We think Geel is going to kill you."

"Geel?" He twisted his face in confusion, but after thinking for a moment, practically laughed it off. "Kill me? Not a chance."

"Lukai, Geel Hattuck is an extremely dangerous person. I know firsthand—he'd betray anyone in a heartbeat!"

He shook his head, laughing darkly to himself. "Are you trying to tell me about Geel Hattuck? I know how dangerous he is. But he would never, he would never—you don't understand anything."

"Wh-What's your relationship with G-Geel?—"

"I understand plenty!" Myra insisted.

"Then tell me why you believe what you believe."

"I—I can't!" She looked at Shera helplessly. The other girl was looking at the young man with deep concern. "It's too unbelievable!"

"I-I believed it," Shera said.

"You clearly mistrust Geel," Myra said. "You didn't tell him about the Klein Bottle. Then there's this thing I don't understand with the bridge. So why don't you believe that he'd betray your life?"

"I don't remember." A moment later, he stopped walking. "Here we are," he said quietly.

However, they weren't anywhere near the platform.

◆

By Myra's reckoning, they were probably about halfway across the bridge… and since the curved slopes of the suspension bridge had flattened out, that was probably exactly right. They had reached the nadir. The closest point to the ground.

"Do you mind turning off the light again?"

Myra turned it off.

The light had also been their only source of heat, and without it, they were at the mercy of the wind chill, floating in a black void. With only the moonlight, the outlines of her companions were all she could make out.

"Do you know why I like to come to this place?" Lukai whispered.

"I can't imagine."

"Because I can't see anything. Not looking back. Not looking forward. It's where I belong. Do—do you understand?"

He had spoken like this before as well, two loops ago when they had gotten dinner. Myra understood and she didn't. She could relate, certainly. The past and future for her were nothing but this same month over and over. But that was her life. She didn't have any idea why Lukai felt the way she did.

"We can still see the stars," Shera said, "They're so beautiful out here." The awe and wonder pulsed through her voice, as usual when she got like this.

Lukai didn't answer for a while. "You think so?" he whispered, reflecting Shera's contemplative tone back at her, not at all miffed at his metaphor made undone.

"Shera always thinks the stars look beautiful," Myra said.

"They always are."

"Do you enjoy stargazing?"

"All th-the time."

"Funny, y'know…" Lukai said, "my godfather used to love astronomy, too. That was a long time ago. Now, he can't even look at the night sky."

He looked for a long time, rotating in a circle to see the stars from all angles. "Thank you for reminding me."

Shera reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but he snapped away almost immediately, turning to look at two of them. In the dark, she could just barely make it out: a look of furious terror returned to his eyes. "I was right," he said quietly. "He really did send you."

"N-no!"

"Why do you think that?" Myra demanded.

"I wish I didn't believe it." There was a hitch in his voice, a sharp sense of betrayal reverberating through his words. "He's done this before. I'm sure of it—"

"Listen to me, Lukai. We aren't working with Geel. The murk bogs are going to kill you. They're going to kill you and dump your body into the abyss, and throw everything else you ever owned down there with you. We came to stop it!"

"See, that's what I find so odd about you. You know so much—you know almost exactly what's going to happen, you just don't know why!"

"I'm sorry, you're right," Myra conceded. "We have an incomplete picture. But we just want to help!"

Shera gasped lightly. She tried to say something, but Lukai got the last word in.

"The only thing that could help me now, would be to see that monster's face after he learns what I'm about to do." He leaned back against the rope railing, looking down over his shoulder into the darkness. He reached up to his left shoulder, seized it, and twisted. There was a pop, and his arm came off. "I was thinking I'd leave this here. They'll know something's wrong when they find it. But maybe I don't need to? You two can just go tell them." He dropped the apparently-prosthetic arm to the ground, where it clunked against the wooden planks.

Only Shera had caught on—she reached out, but Lukai was quicker, already against the rail. He just had to lean backward, and gravity did the rest. He toppled over the railing, sending the bridge lurching as he vanished into nothingness.

"Huh, so it was a suicide the whole time?" Myra mused aloud.

As the bridge still swung, Shera fell to her knees and started to sob.

"Don't worry," Myra assured her, "he'll be back next loop."