Kaius sat in the sun, taking another sip of the odd drink that Xenanra had offered him. The ascendant had offered to talk, and he wanted to, but about what? He felt like he was swaddled in stride-thick blankets, yet his mind felt clearer than it ever had been before — a purifying fire burning within him.
All together, it left him feeling muddled.
He didn’t know how to start, or where to go.
Still, the drink was cold and the sun was warm. It was nice to just breathe, to relax and let his new awareness of his aspects settle within him. Slowly but surely, the memories of his experience were falling into place — separating, as dozens of identical runs separated into singular experience. The differences were there, when he looked — emotional context, slight changes, and a thousand other tiny discrepancies.
On one hand, it all felt like a dream — still felt like a dream. On the other, he felt more awake and more real than he ever had before. It was a juxtaposition, and one that left him feeling odd.
Not bad, just odd.
Kaius took another sip of the milky blue drink that tasted floral and fruity, enjoying the burn of it. He swirled the glass — watching the orange layer of the drink meld and swirl into the blue as ice clanked against the edge.
“What do you call these things?” he asked, raising his glass towards the ascendant.
She smiled over the rim of her own drink.
“A cocktail. Your world has them too, though you’re not likely to find them outside of large cities. They’re rather…cosmopolitan, and only really popular and accessible to the upper crust. Elves enjoy something similar, though theirs tend to be less sweet.”
Kaius nodded contemplatively. That sounded fun — he did like trying new things, though he wasn’t sure how regularly he could see himself drinking something like this. He wasn’t exactly a big drinker, and he usually preferred the bitter and sometimes floral notes of a good beer, but this was nice. Especially in the sun.
He blinked, rising out of the sudden tangent.
“What’s up with this?” Kaius gestured vaguely at his head. “The fog — it's getting better, but it feels even more noticeable than when I was in the trial.”
“The dissociation will continue to pass,” Xenanra replied calmly. “The trial itself had certain…guiderails. Methods to tune the difficulty and effectiveness of the challenge. It's been compounded by the side effects of temporal compression, and a number of other safeguards to help you integrate your experience. There would be no point pushing a potential ascender to the very brink, if the experience left them broken even when they succeeded.”
Slowly nodding, Kaius digested her words at his own pace. At least the fog would fade on its own. Dissociation was a good way to describe it. He felt oddly distant — like he was puppeteering himself from over his shoulder.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a frightening or uncomfortable experience — neutral, at worst. Even comfortable, when he factored in the sun and his drink.
Temporal compression, Xenanra had said. So there truly had been some sort of time magic involved, though perhaps not the violation of causality that he had suspected. A way to stretch out the time he had spent within, perhaps? He hoped so — it had been so long.
It was nice of the ascendant to answer his questions so freely. She really was agreeable in comparison to Ekum. Kaius blinked, watching the wind jostle the multi-hued canopy of flowering trees below him as he took another sip of his drink.
“So I wasn’t in there for as long as it felt like I was? And the loop — was time really resetting? I thought we couldn’t do that?”
The words fell out of him in a jumble, a stream of consciousness that slipped out before he could restrain himself to a single question. Xenanra laughed again; it was a nice sound.
“I’ll start with the latter two questions. Generally, no, you are correct in that causality cannot be broken. There are, however, exceptions to every rule, and things get a lot more murky when you consider isolated spaces such as this Crucible. Regardless, even with that, it wasn’t as simple as straight reversion of time — but for simplicity's sake, it can be considered an academic difference.”
Well, at least he could count on the fact that his understanding of the universe hadn’t been utterly upended. The ascendant had cheated. Still, a time loop — how novel. He doubted many people would get to experience one of those. Ianmus would likely be green with envy on missing out on something so unique.
Kaius grinned, imagining the mage spluttering at what he had experienced. It took him three more sips of his drink to remember the ascendant had said she would explain more — something about compression?
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Xenanra said patiently, winking at him. “Time is…somewhat malleable at the best of times, and here it is practically subjective with enough massaging. What is most important is that each challenger is kept somewhat in sync, which in your case required some heavy
compression, and parallelisation. It is almost a nonsensical question to ask how long you spent in there. For you? An age. For your friends? An instant. From outside, the answer depends on who’s asking, where they are, and when they are. My answer would be the most confusing. It was, and wasn’t a loop. You were brought back, so was the course, and time was squashed so much it might as well have been simultaneous.Kaius blinked, slowly chewing through her words. He could understand what she meant: it was all a hot mess. That all that really mattered was that he’d experienced a great deal — and that he hadn’t been stuck while his team raced ahead and left him behind.
That was good? It was good! He smiled — time sounded a lot less set in stone than he thought. It was interesting, in a distant sense. At least his friends hadn’t had to suffer through waiting for him to finish.
Kaius’s eyes drifted back to the sundrenched valley. The flowers looked nice — colourful. He bet it would be a nice place to walk.
“We can do that.”
Xenanra gave him a smile as he looked over. He blinked, and found himself on a gently worn gametrail that wormed its way through an underbrush of soft purple grasses. Blooms sprouted every stride, a wash of yellows and reds. The same setting sun shone through the canopy over his head — tinted as it pierced more coloured flowers, painting him in pinks, blues, and oranges.
Kaius stood up from his wicker chair, looking at the trees in wonder. They were short, gnarled things — he probably wouldn’t even have to stretch to touch their lowest branches.
Smiling widely, he wandered down the trail, sipping from his drink as he went. Xenanra followed close to his side, floating level with him as her pure white eyes drank in the forest with a reminiscent smile.
The underbrush rustled, and Kaius laughed in delight as a small beast leapt out of a patch of wildflowers. It was mammalian, lanky and sleek— and what looked to be half fur by weight, mint green with dark purple splotches that helped it blend into the thick grasses.
The creature popped up on its hind legs, assessing them for a moment before it darted off back into the trees. Kaius watched it go, he liked this forest.
“Where are we?”
“The forests of Terul in late summer — one of my favourite places in my homeworld. I had an estate built here late in my rise through the tiers. That was where we just came from. I always visited when I was in need of rest; I thought it would be appropriate.”
Kaius nodded, looking around with new appreciation. An alien forest — a gift of horizons he would have never otherwise seen.
“I can see why you like it — it reminds me of my own home, if a colourful and sleepy version of it.”
“That’s why I picked it. I’ve always found it a source of serenity. No major beasts or large predators. Just warm sun, endless flowers, and the vitality of life.”
As they kept walking, Kaius found his drink slowly seeping into him. He never quite got drunk, only a physical warmth that suffused him and unwound some hidden knots of tension that he hadn’t realised were present. Plus, it was pleasantly cool.
It was hard to say how long he wandered — staring at new plants, and watching the small creatures that called this place home flit from tree to tree. They were a special kind of wild — clearly unused to interlopers, or dangers. Fluttering bat-like creatures watched him with curious eyes, hovering in front of him just out of reach, while more and more of the earlier green beasts would run past, craning their necks for a closer look at the two strangers that walked amongst them.
A healing experience — and a soothing one.
Step by step, the fog lifted from his mind, until eventually he blinked — and snapped back into himself all at once.
One step, he was staring at a pink flower the size of a plate; smiling like a dumb idiot. The next, he was shaking his head — narrowing his eyes at his drink that was somehow completely full. How much had he bloody drunk?
“There he is,” Xenanra said, quickly floating in front of him and giving him a knowing grin full of pointed teeth. “Your first major brush with that level of temporal manipulation always feels like getting a lovetap from a warhammer, but you handled it better than most. Especially with some of those trial guardrails I mentioned earlier.”
Kaius ran his hands through his air. Rotten fucking roots, that had been weird. Like he’d been trapped in a lucid fever dream. He thought back to the trial of Mentis, new perspective making him realise just how strange it had been — and how muted and emotionally distant it all was. Especially the deaths. When he remembered the endless deluge of torn limbs, splattered blood, and shattered bone it was with a clinical separation that surprised him.
Where was the trauma — the warwounds, that lingered on those who had seen too much for too long? Sure, he was tough: he danced freely with death in a way that most people didn’t. But he was still human.
To spend so long dealing with death after death, wound after wound? Alone? It should have bothered him.
“And what would these mental effects be?” Kaius asked, furrowing his brow at the ascendant who floated in front of him.
“There were a couple in the trial itself. They helped make you less worried about the time spent apart from your loved ones, and of the natural consequences that would occur if you were kept apart from the world for so long. There were more, but those were the main ones that added to the…haze you felt. The trial is, after all, focused on if you can bear the weight of memory and repetition — not how well you handle feeling lonely. Afterwards, there were others that amplified your natural response to temporal manipulation — furthering the distance of your memories, and aiding you in integrating the experience.”
Kaius nodded slowly, unsure how to feel. On one hand, knowing that his mind had been casually rearranged made him feel so uneasy — especially with how calm he had been. On the other, it wasn’t like his memories had been stolen — nor had his thoughts and worries truly been altered. They’d just felt muted and distant.
He breathed slowly — digesting the experience. In the end, it was for the best if he set it to the side. There were still more challenges, and ruminating on his experiences when he had dangers to face would be folly. Taking his discomfort, he wrapped it tight and shoved it deep.
Better he spend his time on questions.
Walking along the trail, he took another sip of his drink — and pondered what he wanted to know next.