Unfought Wars [Time loop Action Fantasy]

The area around the ambronite is clear. The mana vapors still circle the room, but they stay away from the blue glow. The stench of the teratome is clearing up. There are still bits of it everywhere, the clear liquid it bled coating half the massive room, but near the ambronite the flesh has turned to ash and the liquid evaporates or dries. It does leave disgusting stains on everything, but the smell isn't even as bad as normal blood.

My life has truly taken a turn somewhere, when being soaked with blood is an experience I can compare things to. I roll the ambronite from one hand to the other. It resembles the Time Gem somehow, being a chunk of rock that makes no sense whatsoever. It's clear, but so deep blue that I can't see through it at all. The light doesn't emanate from it, but flows into it, slow like honey.

"Stop staring into it. You worry me," Finna says.

I blink and wrench my eyes off the ambronite. I put it into my backpack and draw the string shut, hiding the stone and its blue glow from view.

"And now we're going to sit in the darkness? Great thinking," Finna says.

Hearn and Rworg chuckle and give each other a look. There's quite a bit of light coming from the mana that gets pulled in and out of the room. The ambronite's effect doesn't reach the ceiling, which might be a good thing. I'd prefer if we get to do that intentionally, instead of accidentally breaking the flow and causing who knows what to happen. This whole place could crumble, fall into the earth. Maybe nothing will happen. We're stumbling in the dark, almost literally.

"So, what happens now?" Hearn asks, turning to Finna. "The teratome is dead, but what were we supposed to do here?"

"Beats me," she says. "Let me just enjoy not having a headache for a moment."

"It came back that fast?" I ask.

Finna waves a hand at my bag. "The moment I got away from the stone."

"Rough," I say.

Rworg clears his throat, waving a hand at my bag as well. "This will not burn up or crumble?"

"No. It's ambronite," Hearn says, lifting a finger into the air. He frowns and draws in the air, but nothing happens. "It feels weird. Nothing… being there. I'm not a mage, but still."

"It does feel like something is missing," Finna says. "Better this way, though."

"I can feel no difference," Rworg says.

Finna throws him a dirty look, raising an eyebrow at him.

"I mean, compared to normal," Rworg says, pulling on his ponytail.

It's dark enough that I don't see if he's blushing, but he sounds like he is. "I don't either. It must be because we're bad at magic, like Lictor said."

Finna huffs. "Goddamn Lictor. Once we're back, I'm going to gut him at least four times."

"I'll help," I say, winking.

"I'm serious," she says.

I swallow and look at her. She really does look like she's serious. Her face is pulled into a scowl and her hair is matted, crowning her head like the mane of some dark beast, leaving her eyes in the dark.

"How can you gut someone four times?" Hearn asks.

"You would be surprised," Rworg says.

All three of us chuckle at that, the tensions breaking. Hearn watches us laugh with a confused look on his honest face. He scratches at his hair, and shrugs, smile creeping on his face as well. "You three worry me, but I'm happy to be here with you."

Rworg claps him on the shoulder, though he does it more gently than the way he always slams me. "The privilege is ours. You have left your home and guided us through this maze, helped us with your runes."

"Just one rune," Hearn says, then bows at me like I'm some sort of king. "I hope you'll keep me from exploding."

Rworg pats him on the shoulder again. "Rest easy, old. Folke will."

Hearn's face makes Finna and I howl with laughter. I'm twitchy after the fight, all the tension still escaping my body. My hands shake, and I can hardly speak from my face feeling so thick. I've held it together this far, but the way Hearn huffs and rolls his eyes at Rworg cracks me up.

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"Enough, enough!" Finna says, tensing her face to get it under control again. "Let's figure out already what we're doing and do it, so we can get the hell out of here."

"We could rest for a while?" I say. "I think we've deserved a bit of a break. I just rode a teratome."

"Now that you have the ambronite, we're in no hurry anymore," Hearn says.

"Forgot about the tremor, dummies?" Finna asks. Still, she flops back, moving her backpack under her head.

"A short break, then?" Rworg says. Then his face pulls into a worried expression, brows furrowing so hard his eyes are hard to see. "Folke," he says.

"Um?" I say.

"Where is my hammer?"

In the end, we manage to talk Rworg out of going to look for the sledgehammer. I must have left it at the place we found the ambronite. Rworg mopes for a while, but when Hearn suggests we freeze his sword instead, he snaps out of it. I try to nap, but it's hard as Rworg keeps sharpening the sword and the sound grinds through my sleep.

"You're going to make it brittle," Finna says. "That's way too sharp."

"No, no, listen," Rworg says. "It will be frozen. The edge will hold."

Finna's mouth opens into an o. "Damn," she says, and starts to sharpen her daggers.

I press my eyes closed, try to block out the sound by laying my arm on top of my head.

"All ready, now?" Hearn asks.

"Yeah," Finna says. "Thanks for handling the freezing."

"Yes," Rworg says.

I shake my head. I'm more tired than when I tried to take my nap. "Yes, but what were we actually going to do next?"

Finna groans, pushing a hand into her hair. "Right, so we want to disturb the flow of mana. There's a lot of mana above us. Could we just… throw the ambronite up to the grills?" She pouts and frowns, for a moment. "No, forget I said that. That's a Rworg idea."

Hearn chuckles, but Rworg just nods.

"The mana is all going up somewhere," I say. "Where is it going? Have you seen stairs or slopes anywhere in here?"

"Not really," Hearn says. "Sometimes the corridors do slope a bit, but it's so slight that it would take days of walking to get to the height we'd need."

"We can smash the floor, look under the room," Rworg says, then looks at me from under his brows. "Or we could, if I still had my Temporal Tapper."

Finna snickers at the way he pronounces the name, but I shake my head. "We're not smashing anything. I would rather not get folded and squished."

"Agreed," Hearn says.

"So, what are we going to do, then?" Finna says.

I start pacing around. I notice the darkness following me and the ambronite in my bag, so I don't wander away from the others so they don't get flooded by the mana. "There has to be a way to access either where the mana is coming from or where it's going," I say. I slap my fist into my hand. "Ah! It doesn't matter that there aren't stairs! The corridors look like they stay on a single level, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything, not here."

"Ah," Rworg says as well. "That is true."

Finna draws in the air with her finger, brow furrowed. "Wait. Hmm, ok, I think I got it too," Finna says.

"So, we just find a corridor that actually ends higher or lower than where it started out?" Hearn says.

I snap my fingers. "Precisely. And I know how we'll decide."

"You sure about this corridor?" Hearn asks.

"Why does everyone always ask if I'm sure?" I say. "Look at the lights. Time gets slower in this direction. In most other directions, it gets faster or stays about the same."

"So?" Finna says.

"Ah," Hearn says. "Even if everything else fails, ambronite is always below."

I nod, watching the corridor stretch forward, straight ahead. It doesn't slope at all, but the light is dim, and the corridor disappears into darkness faster than I've seen any corridor do so far. The teratome room had four exits. We came into the room originally from one and went to find the ambronite through the exit opposite of that. I have no idea of the directions, down here, but I'm thinking this as going east, if we decide we come in from the south.

Once again, I think that getting out of here will be hell. Problem for a later time. At least now we have a direction to go toward again. The ambronite deposits lie deep in the core of the world. So logically, time running faster means we're getting higher, further away from the deposits.

Earlier, time shifted in definitive cuts, the borders between areas of fast and slow time clear like drawn with a razor. This time the change is gradual. That is probably a good sign. We're getting further away from places where the ambronite has sheared and moved because of the tremors.

Holding these theories together and trying to think what they mean is making my head hurt. I wish Mandollel was here. How I wish he was here.

"Nothing feels different," Finna says. "But this corridor is different. There are no intersections. Have you noticed?"

Rworg nods. "Let me test something," he says, springing suddenly ahead.

"Hey!" I shout, but he just waves a hand at me, running along the corridor.

After a few steps, he slows down. The sound of his steps turns deeper, into thumps, and he floats in the air for a moment between every step. He stops, and turns around, slowly, slowly.

Finna groans and hisses, as Rworg still keeps turning, head slowly creaking toward us, his face pulling into a delighted grin.

"You're absolutely infuriating," she says. "How is your brain so stupid even when there's no mana?"

"A-ha, that is what I was testing," Rworg says, eyes squinted into thin slits, smile wide. "The air is clearer. We must be moving up steeply."

"Steeply without a slope," Hearn says. He rubs his chin and sighs. "I wonder how fast time is running back home compared to us now."

I pat him on the back. "The sooner we reach the top, the sooner we can end this. Make things normal." I'm more relieved than what I want to show to the others. At the end of the day, it was a pretty wild guess that this was the right direction or that it would take us anywhere. But if time is getting so much slower and the air is clearing up as well, that means we're getting at least somewhere.

I'll take somewhere over being lost in the corridors forever. I can almost taste it. Seeing a tree, smelling grass. Eating something else than hardtack that tastes like mushrooms.

Finna nudges me. "He just said that the air is clear. You have no excuse to zone out anymore, zone out boy."

I shrug and smile a dumb smile at her.

She almost smiles back, but blows a raspberry and rolls her eyes, instead. "Come on. We're not out yet."