Cycles of Entropy

There were a few dozen of them, all with bloodied eyes and bulging veins. They were moving in different directions, but all with purpose. Several were approaching us and I jumped back from the window. "What, what is it?" Harrison asked, then ran to the window himself before I could answer. I couldn't have answered anyway. I didn't know how to describe it. I didn't know how to speak at all. I watched my frozen body from outside myself, but I didn't have the time for a coping mechanism. I had to act. I needed to force myself to move because I wasn't alone.

I could have run, if I had been alone. I wanted to run. The memory of... The end of my last loop was something I had pushed to the back of my mind to process later, or never, ideally. I didn't want to relive it. I had shut out the pain in the moment of panic and surprise, but it hadn't been absent. I glance out the window again and a moment later my mind follows. As I see the torches growing brighter and closer I feel the crack of my head against the bricks. I hear that strange, internal crunch that must have been my skull. My offset jaw that couldn't cast and the blood running into my eyes.

I wanted to run. "What is it?" Junia asked, a slight tremor in her voice. I wanted to run. "Miss Mars?" she asked again. I needed to get to safety. "Miss Mars, you are being scary, what's wrong?" she begged and I clenched my fists. They were trembling, but I couldn't run.

"It's alright, Junia," I finally answered. "You remember how you hid when... do you remember how you hid in your kitchen? You need to take Millie and do that again," I instructed and she bit her lip.

"I- is mommy coming back?" she trembled.

"I don't know, Junia. I don't know, but I won't let anyone scary get to you, alright?" I promised. I didn't know if I was lying or not. I didn't know if it was the right thing to say. I'd never known the right thing to say. But it was enough to get her to hide. She nodded quietly and picked up her sister. The younger girl looked so big in her arms. She held her close and disappeared into the next room.

"What kind of promise is that?" Harrison asked. "We don't know what they are going to do, or why. We don't know for sure that they need protecting, but if they do, I have no idea how to do it." I began chewing on my thumbnail and looking around the room frantically. I didn't know what I was looking for. It didn't matter; I had to keep moving or I would freeze again.

"We need to protect them," I answered. The confidence in that assertion far surpassed anything I had said since meeting Harrison, and he seemed to understand. He didn't know how I knew it, but he believed that I did. I kept searching and he moved to the table. He flipped it up and pressed it to the window. It wasn't much, but he had more of a plan than I did. So I helped. We collected chairs, a bookcase, anything we could find and blocked off the door.

By the time we were done, it was nearly too late. I had expected pounding on the door. Attempts to force their way in. But all we heard was shattering glass. Not from Harrison's house at first. It was from a neighbor's. Then another's, and another's. Then, finally, it was his. They didn't need to pound on any doors. They didn't need to break through any barricades. For the same reason each home only had one window shatter. A reason they became apparent as soon as the fire began to spread. We hadn't blocked them out, we had trapped ourselves.

I had assumed they would be like monsters. Mindless beasts. The brutality of my... murder made me think we simply had to keep them out. Harrison clearly thought the same just with a look at them. But that wasn't right. Hadley hadn't killed me like a mindless monster. It may have felt like it, but he grabbed my hair. He used the environment as a weapon. He made calculated moves to kill me quickly and without an immediate weapon. They weren't who they had been, but they weren't monsters either. They weren't the undead from children's stories about necromancers.

They were intelligent. And they didn't have to get their hands on us to kill us. To kill the girls. Our barricades were already on fire and we could touch them to pull them down. Harrison looked at me with panic in his eyes, and the question was clear. He wanted me to do something. I was the powerful mage after all. The expert in magic. The only one who could actually do something about this. Once upon a time, that had been true. But when I stared back at him with wide eyes, I could see the hope leave as he realized it wasn't anymore.

I couldn't do anything about this. I considered every spell I knew but I just saw those eyes, glaring at me from all directions. I heard the man I'd brought back from death calling me a liar and a cheat. I saw two paths. Failure and rejection. I couldn't do anything but hope that, when it was all over, I would wake up again and know this was coming. I was ready to give up but... I heard coughing. The coughing of a child. Smoke was filling the house, and two kids were counting on me. Two kids I had promised to help.

I closed my eyes. The heat of the fire assaulted me. I took a deep breath and my nose burned with the toxic air. Then, I began to chant. Blue sparks danced across my skin as I whispered my spell. At first, I wanted to rewind the house with 'Undone' but it would just provide endless fuel. I needed to stop it. So I cast 'Still World'. I would stop the world around me as I had done to sneak into the garden. This time, however, I altered the spell. I tweaked it as I cast and the blue sparks began to fly from my body in waves. They flew across everything but they only found purchase in one place other than my own body. The flames.

My body ached. It felt like threads in my skin were being pulled from every direction at once. The fire was speckled with blue and Harrison stared at me with bulging eyes. Then, I whispered the last word and everything stopped. Everything but me and, for a very brief moment, the fire. I had to hold my breath during Still World. There was no air to breathe when time was stopped. There was no air for fire to burn either. By expanding my spell to include the flames surrounding the house, I choked them.

I paused and examined the frozen world around me for a moment. There was no moving air so I breathed in the silence and the calm. I had done it. Something only a much younger Mars would ever have even attempted. I altered a powerful spell in the middle of casting and saved everyone in the home. It was... exhausting. I released the spell and the breath I had been holding all at once, then fell to the ground.

"Mars, are you alright?" Harrison leapt to my side and immediately pressed his hand to my face, then my forehead. "What did you do? How did you..." he asked but I only moaned in response. I hadn't just cast a spell, I had essentially invented one. A derivative of another, yes, but that only made it easier on an intellectual level.

I stared up at the weary, furious glare that always followed my achievements. 'Please, just leave me alone!' I mentally begged. My head pounded and my aura reserves felt dry. It was like intense dehydration but the feeling of too-tight skin enveloped my mind instead of my body. I prayed to Luna and Aethon alike that I wouldn't be needed again. There were cries outside; people were begging for help and the homes around us collapsed. I had only managed to include the fire within a certain radius in my spell, and everyone else burned.

This time, I really couldn't do anything. Sweat matted my hair to my face and drenched my shirt. I couldn't so much as lift my arms, much less run out to save the other homes. Harrison left me there and began removing the charred barricades so he could help the people around him but without my help, it was slow going. I closed my eyes and listened. My head throbbed and my skin ached with feverish chills. I'd used too much aura. I listened to the crying, and the burning, and the wailing. Tears leaked, one at a time from the corners of my eyes, joining the sweat that ran down my cheeks and into my hair.

I felt guilty. Because I'd figured out a way to save myself while other people suffered, yes. But that wasn't what really clouded my head with shame. I hadn't only saved myself. I had saved Harrison, and two sweet, lonely children. I had reinvented a spell in a single moment. Not just any spell, but one of my most complex time spells. The feat alone would challenge any mage, but with a previously unheard-of and unstudied focus like time, it was practically mythical. I felt... proud. I was impressed with what I had done. Encouraged in a way I hadn't been since I was a teenager.

Meanwhile, people died a hundred paces away from me. Harrison struggled to break his way out of his own barricade while I reveled in my success. Two little girls huddled in some forgotten cupboard, trying not to breathe in too much smoke. And the eyes. Those hateful eyes burned. They no longer hovered across the room. They were inches from my face. I could see them through my closed lids and feel the hot breath of their owner on my skin. They were shovels, digging through my flesh and laying my soul bare. Exposing my pride while the entire world of the people around me turned to ash.

That was why I also felt shame. Not the shame of failure, but the shame of success. A far more bitter poison than any I had tasted since leaving my home and my studies in magic behind. I don't know how long I was there. It could have been hours and it felt like days. I'm uncertain if I was even conscious of all of it. But by the time I finally had the strength to stand, it was over. Harrison had made it out of the house at some point. I could tell by the unobscured, open door. I could also tell by the look on his face that he hadn't succeeded quickly enough.

I struggled to my feet and he ran up to offer me an arm to lean on. "You alright?" he inquired and I nodded weakly.

"The girls?" I asked and he tilted his head toward the next room. I followed his gaze with my feet and found the two huddled tightly together. They had emerged from whatever hiding spot they'd found and Junia was singing softly to Millie. Another warm tear ran down my nose, this time carrying nothing but relief as it left a clean streak on my ash-stained skin. Something else, caught my eye, however. Teal sparks, barely perceptible, danced around the pair. They floated through the air like dusk in sunbeams when Junia sang and followed her fingers as they ran through her sister's hair.

I focused and looked back at Harrison who had followed me. He had them too. Every step kicked them up like dust and sparkled across his clothing. "D-do you see that?" I asked, only to be met by a confused stare from Harrison and an inattentive glance from Junia. The incomprehension in their eyes made the answer clear. I began to walk toward the front door.

"Wait," Harrison called, "You may not want to-" he started but I ignored him. I walked outside and had to hold my hand to my mouth. Every home but Harrisons had burned. A few people sat around the ruins of their lives, their eyes as hollow as the Quieted. They were the lucky ones. Most hadn't made it out. One corpse bled in front of their burned home, indicating they had tried to confront the walking corpses instead of burning inside.

In a circle around Harrison's house were the teal sparks. Dancing and swirling and spiraling around us. Ending at approximately the diameter I had managed to include the fire in Still World. They were the same color as the time loop spell. I couldn't react to the carnage around me. I couldn't process the glares I got as I left the one intact home in the area. Instead, I reached out and put one finger into a floating cluster of the magic sparks as they swirled past me.

They stopped as I did, pausing for a brief moment, then converging on me. From all directions, the sparks flew and twisted into my index finger. As they did, all the pain, and worry, and guilt disappeared. It was like film on a window being wiped away as the world snapped into crystal-clear focus. I gasped and fell backward against the wall of Harrison's home. The air tasted like ice-cold water on a boiling day.