Beyond?

“Our ancestors were wild and ferocious creatures. On their wings they dominated the skies and preyed on lesser beings with their magic. It was a time of hunters and prey.”

-Old research article.

***Free City States of Nict, Capital***

***Stella***

“How does this thing even work?” Azir stabs the sword into the thigh of the bound and gagged beggar. He watches the squirming beggar with interest and pulls the sword out, carefully avoiding to sully himself with blood. Then he casts a healing spell on the beggar. The poor guy had all his mana taken and his magic sealed after Azir caught him.

Because of the incident we called off the party and decided to deal with the issue at hand. It is hard to understand what's going on, but judging from Azir's behaviour the whole situation is very serious. He insisted on performing a magical ritual on Helen to release her from her blood oath to the Saviour. At first she didn't agree, but he didn't give in until she allowed it. The ritual didn't take long and Helen said that she doesn't feel any different from before. It was still hard for him to persuade her to release herself from a magical promise which was upheld for generations.

It looks like the Saviour isn't as heroic as we all thought. According to Azir following explanations the Saviour visited the palace in order to kill a lot of people and hinder Nict's technological development.

We threw him into the palace's jail and took precautions to seal his powers. The last thing we want is the emperor's son going on a rampage in the capital. Right now we have the whole immediate family gathered here. It doesn't happen often that we get to see a living legend, although this so called legend seems to have fallen very deep.

“Azir? Didn't you say that you want to interrogate this guy who is supposedly our Saviour? Why are you treating him like this? Why isn't he on our side?” I let my eyes wander over the person in ragged clothing. He is tall and his body is in good shape if you don't take his recent treatment into account.

The man in front of me looks like he is in his forties, but he has to be over a thousand years old. His hair shows the first signs of turning grey and there are a few wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.

His pupils are shimmering in several colours, exactly like the legend says. One of his horns broke during the fight, but the remaining one bears some resemblance to my family.

The horrible scar on his forehead didn't disappear despite our healing magic, not even Xander managed to fix it. Now our prisoner has to deal with a permanent scar in the shape of a clock on his forehead.

“Actually I just wanted to poke him with the sword. I already interrogated him in a previous iteration. There isn't much he can tell me which I don't already know.” Azir pokes the man's thigh and heals him up again.

I knit my eyebrows. “Previous iteration? Would you finally explain what's going on?”

“Of course. You see, I repaired this.” He dangles a piece of molten metal on a chain in front of me. “I used it to turn back the time. It took me fifty seven tries to achieve a perfect ending! The clock got destroyed in the process though. I have to rebuild it completely.”

Then it dawns on me. “What!?” I smack the clock out of his hand. “You promised me that you wouldn't use such dangerous items any more! Show a little more reason! We are parents!”

Azir points at the moaning beggar on the cell's only chair. “But he hurt you and a lot of people, though I don't really care what happens to strangers. He even hurt your mother. You just don't remember it. I had to use it.” He kicks the guy without holding back.

Helen sighs and holds me back. “It's alright Stella. Don't be too hard on Azir in this case. Somehow it disturbs me that I had a blood oath to a beggar like this.” She gestures at the prisoner.

The man stops moaning for a moment and gathers his power to wriggle the gag from his mouth. Then he spews a defiant answer at us. “I am Jeremiah Draco and not a beggar! You should all obey my wishes! I am the one who fought for your freedom. I am the one who is upholding the balance to guarantee freedom. How dare you to oppose me!”

Azir makes a perfect imitation of the man's rambling with his hand. “You ran through the world and played all nations and tribes against each other. Whenever someone got powerful enough to form a nation over a certain size you smashed them! Either by causing a rebellion or killing the leaders outright.”

The man pulls at his shackles. “The reason for oppression is power! Once a certain group gets too powerful it's bound to restrain the freedom of others. I am ensuring that something like the Empire of Nict can never happen again!”

Azir points at him. “You were the reason why the Southern Nations were constantly struggling with each other until recently! Of course the violence regularly crossed the borders to other countries. You encouraged the xenophobic behaviour of the nomads and you riled up the northern tribes against Quinn!

You are a big part of the problem! On top of it you didn't even notice your brother taking over the second continent and creating an almost continent wide war on this one.”

“What are you talking about? I killed Serenzar years ago.” He looks shocked.

I step in front of the pitiful excuse of an ancestor. “Apparently not! And from what I heard from Azir you even assisted him in his quest to conquer the world.” Then I continue telling Jeremiah about everything we deduced so far. He listens to me in silence. In the end I close my lecture with a request for Jeremiah. “So it would be good if you tell us where the other artefacts are hidden and what's inside the Emperor's vault.”

Azir shakes his head. “That's the only thing I never got out of him. I am starting to believe that he doesn't know himself.”

“How is that possible?” Helen asks with a doubtful voice. “It can't be that he forgot it? It has been a long time, but surely someone wouldn't forget something as important as that!”

A grin crawls onto Jeremiah's face. “Memory erasure. I deleted all my memories which could tell me what's inside the vault, so that I would never fall to the temptation of using it myself. The vault will never be unlocked. That's the only thing I've done right in my life.” His expression turns dark and he sets his eyes on Azir. “But your situation is surely grim if you rely on a dark spirit like that to save you.”

Azir's eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

“You may have taken my magic, but not my eyes! I see what you really are, no normal man could've created a spell like this! First the spell with which you scorched the nomads and then time travel! Did you already destroy worlds by using your knowledge so carelessly? From which dimension did a monster like you crawl into our reality? Do they even realize which being they invited into their fam-”

I kick the beggar without holding back, hitting him perfectly on the temple. Jeremiah tilts over together with his chair and is silent. “Nobody insults my husband, or tries to cause mistrust within the family! I think we've heard enough.”

Lucas nods, scratching his cheek. He kept silent until now, but finally he decides to speak. “Hm. Hmmm... I think we have enough on him to keep him locked up for a long time. Maybe we'll need him for something later. And he is still the only one who knows his brother. I'll have a longer talk with him once he wakes up.”

Valda nods and faces Azir with a stern expression. “Still, what he said is valid. Time travel magic sounds like it's too powerful to be played around with. According to my knowledge the theory says that unbelievable magical power is necessary for time travel. Are you sure that nothing went wrong Azir?”

Azir nods. “The spell works on the principle of influencing time by warping space with a gravitational wave-front. Normally what we perceive as time is created by the existence of mass warping the fabric of space and time. My spell focuses all its energy on inverting that effect. Imagine a flat sheet of cloth being deformed by a weight on it.

My spell makes that weight bounce for a moment. The surface of space time is inverted, creating a bulb instead of an indention and time flows backwards until the weight falls back to its former position. That means that everything is returned to its former state of existence. Even the mana which is used for the spell flows back where it formerly belonged to. My clock...” He bends down and picks up the clock. “The main purpose of this thing is to protect the caster's mind, so that he can remember what happened after performing the spell. It's absolutely safe.”

Valeria gasps and shakes her head. “I've also read theories on time travel magic. What you described is the absolute basis of all ideas, called time reversal! But there has to be a mistake to that theory because the spell does nothing when it is performed. There has to be a certain trick to it!”

Azir tilts his head. “Probably they performed the spell correctly. Casting time reversal alone isn't that hard, but how do you want to confirm the spell's functionality if you reverse yourself too? You need a way of protecting your mind from the effect.”

His sister shakes her head. “But if that's true, why aren't we caught in an unending loop of people casting the spell again and again?”

Her brother shakes his head and grins. “Didn't you listen? The spell reverses the flow of time until the physical laws return to their former state. It doesn't send you back to an exact point in time, time runs backwards and then forwards again. That means that some things might change since the law of uncertainty permits a certain amount of change. Your loop might happen if you travel through time, but time reversal reverses the flow of time. Time runs backwards, so it means that some minor things change from iteration to iteration because the caster acted slightly different. That's why loops have a self repairing nature in this case. They simply happen again and again until enough things have changed to stop them from happening. Don't confuse time travel with time reversal.”

Valeria just stares at her brother. Clearly she didn't get that explanation. I didn't either, but I am a little too tired to think about things like this. “How about calling it a day. From the looks of it we have Jeremiah safely locked away and according to Azir's story it would be okay to let him rot here.” I grab Azir's hand and pull him towards the exit, leaving the others behind. “The others can deal with the situation from now on. We still have business between the two of us.”

“Really!?” Azir's expression lights up and he follows me without further thoughts of torturing the poor beggar. I wonder if Jeremiah's exceptionally long life left some damage to his mental facilities. On the other hand the erasure of his memories might have caused the change too.

It doesn't take us long to reach our home by using a stepper disc, but Azir is strangely silent and that gives me time to think. What if Jeremiah's words are true and playing with such powers is really no good? What if Azir is really overdoing it with his egoistical experiments?

At home I decide to take a bath to cool my head. Getting your marriage party crashed is a real let down. While I am in the bathtub it dawns on me that we are getting dangerously close to collecting all of the emperor's artefacts. We already have three of the keys.

What might happen if we get all of them? Will Azir be able to restrain his curiosity? Whatever the vault is, it's dangerous enough that someone like Jeremiah takes measures like erasing his memories to ensure it stays forgotten.

Azir is by no means a person who can restrain himself when he finds a new toy. I get out of the bath and put on a bathrobe to search for my husband. Strangely enough my first guess is wrong. I was sure I'd find him in his lab, already studying the sword, but the lab is abandoned. Returning to our living quarters I find the kitchen and the living room also empty.

At the end of my wit I notice that the door to the new addition to our house stands open. We added a set of new rooms above the servant's quarters where Ivy lives.

At the moment most of them are empty, but we keep our eggs stored in one of them. Our children can use the rooms later on for themselves. I head to the room with our eggs and take a look inside. Azir is standing there, hugging one of the eggs and pressing his ear to it.

I smirk and awake him from his trance. “Listening to the noises is relaxing isn't it?”

Azir opens eyes and looks at me with an embarrassed expression. “No. I was just... checking on them. But everything seems to be fine.” He pats the egg and closes the incubation chamber, not admitting that he was worried about leaving the eggs alone.

No. He surely wouldn't do anything to put us at risk. Jeremiah only tried to play us against each other. I smirk and play with the belt of my bathrobe. “I thought about doing something pleasing for my husband tonight. Of course only if that stupid beggar didn't destroy the mood for you.”

Azir rushes over to my side and takes me in a princess carry. “I can choose? Then prepare for a long night!”

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