Cycles of Entropy

Day 2

Harrison didn't want to search anymore. After the Quieted attacked his home the night before, after they burned... everything, he didn't have the same spark in his eyes. The determination was gone. He was certain his neighbors had died because he was asking questions. I wanted his help anyway. I didn't know how much I could do alone. My mind kept going back to that room when I had been certain there was nothing I could do... until I heard the girls cough. Until I had someone that mattered more than myself. Until I could step into Camilla's shoes, and do what she would have done.

So I wanted Harrison's help. Or I wanted someone to count on me. To keep me moving when I got caught in my head. But he blamed himself for what happened and, well, I understood the feeling. I understood how debilitating it was, especially when the realization was fresh. I didn't even know that he was wrong but... I knew what was coming. I had seen the end of Beddenmor, and I didn't want to see what new version this twist of reality would create. One man had crushed me beneath his boot and all I'd done was stand in his way. Well, that and knock a flower pot over.

On the third day, everything was going to be... there would be nowhere I could hide. Nothing I could do. And it was coming whether I asked questions or not. I had to do whatever I could before that happened. And I had to desperately hope what had happened was... reversible. I didn't understand the loop yet but I had a small hope. Something that started when I collected the teal sparks of aura outside Harrison's home. I hadn't just felt alive and happy, but... It's hard to describe. Invigorated? Like I could cast my new variation of Still World again with a wider diameter.

If I made it to the end and the loop started over, I thought I might be able to stop more fires. Save more people. It was strange but what happened didn't feel as final to me as it did to Harrison. Like it was still an event yet to happen. The usual guilt I would have happily accepted didn't settle on me in the familiar way. It still felt preventable. Then there were the streams of aura. Little teal sparks flowing along the ground. I felt that, if I followed them, I could do even more. Because although the relief they brought faded, they hadn't. I thought that was why I could still see them, all around me. They still flowed through my veins, granting me not just the ability to change things, but a little bit of the will I needed to do it.

That's what I thought at the time, anyway. But it didn't matter if it was true. It felt true, and it gave me hope. So that's what I was doing. I was following the streams of aura around the city. It was a frustrating endeavor. I would walk for nearly an hour and the stream I was following would blink out like a candle. Whatever was causing them, wherever it was causing them, was stopping before I made it. I wasted half the day fruitlessly following phantom streams. I began to think I was imagining them; it wouldn't be the first time I'd seen something that wasn't there.

As I walked I worried. It wasn't typical for the source of such visions to be hopeful, but I had grown used to the others. I always knew what they were. No one was actually glaring at me when I cast Undone. The smells and the whispers were all remnants of home I couldn't, or wouldn't leave behind. But they were scars of my lowest moments. That day was different. Somehow, despite the traumatic events of the night before, it wasn't a bad day. Not the type of bad day people usually mean when they use the phrase, it was certainly that, but in a more personal sense.

I had low lows and high highs. The lows ruled my life but the highs did, occasionally and briefly, exist. After a dream of a pleasant memory or a reminder of kinder days. Before I'd betrayed the only person who had ever actually cared about me. They usually faded whenever I remembered how I got from there to where I was. But that warmth I had felt when I accepted the aura... it was like a hand had reached out and offered to support me. Like it wasn't me moving my feet forward. So while the day was without a doubt bad, I was at something like a high point.

I wasn't happy, but I was... something. It wouldn't last forever, however. I followed the aura to the strange theatre troup, whose performance yet again tried to call me in despite a lack of interest. But it disappeared, just as the performance ended. I followed it to the wealthy district as well as half a dozen more residential areas. I followed it to a brothel, a gambling den, and even a fighting ring. But before I actually entered or really approached them, they would vanish.

I realized they would grow brighter before I lost them. Most would be faint, barely perceptible, and nearly impossible to follow. When one grew bright enough to reliably track, it would vanish not long after. I'm not sure when I realized why. I did at a certain point, but I didn't want to believe it. I spent hours following them, and the number that I had failed to find the end of made me want to deny the reality of them. It would have been better to believe I was imagining them.

When one began to lead me to the market district, I felt a disquieted turn in my stomach. My heart began to beat the closer I got. I passed the children that I always saw playing in the square. I passed the tired looks from weary vendors. The lonely people in quiet corners. The stream grew brighter. I recognized it as the sparks grew more frantic, and it blinked out. I knew where it was leading me, however. I remembered what it was leading me to.

I looked up from the now blank ground where the stream had been. I was staring at the inn. I looked at the sun in the sky. It was that time. When I first became certain Undone couldn't save victims of the Quiet. When Marcus had died. Except this time... Screams rang out from the windows of the inn. They were muffled by the glass, but a few other people noticed. I was frozen in place. I had all the lightning in my body of a rabbit ready to bolt and a cat on the hunt at the same time.

I wanted to save Livia. I wanted to get away. I could do neither. So I watched, and I felt that low return. That misery. That self-loathing. A stranger who took a single look at me and took it upon herself to make sure I ate enough and had a place to sleep, even in the middle of all this. That's who Livia was. And She was about to die, while I stood a hundred paces away, fighting my own tensed muscles. I was only there for maybe a minute, but it was long enough. The door to the inn opened.

Marcus emerged from the inn, skin ashy and eyes bleeding. He paid no attention to me or anyone else. There was blood dripping from his hands, but he just walked just as Hadley had. I wanted to follow him. It was basically my entire plan the day before. But... Livia was in there. A trail of her blood was leaving her inn. I had let what Marcus had become hurt her. Kill her, most likely. I felt like the stones of the road had grown around my feet. But one step at a time, I approached the building.

The world blurred around me as my mind refused to process it. One moment I was a hundred paces away. I vaguely registered people fleeing past me, running from the inn. The next moment I was fifty paces away, then twenty, then five, and then I walked in. The air was thick with the smell of copper and my eyes widened. Livia was sprawled over her bar. Most of her was, anyway. Her arm was on the floor next to Marcus' stool. Her neck was bent at an unnatural angle and she stared at me with empty eyes. She wasn't the only one.

As I feared, the Quiet was far more dangerous in crowds. The man who had lashed out at me the first time was broken on the ground. He had a broken bottle in his throat. He didn't stare at me. His eyes were locked on nothing at all. It didn't seem like I had been frozen long enough for all of this to happen. I watched my body approach the ground. I didn't feel my knees hit. I didn't feel the trickling blood begin to pool around me.

'How many black things in the room?' I thought but... I couldn't count them. It didn't matter how many black things were in the room. I wasn't having anything like a high anymore. I had known this would happen. I had known all day, but I just... forgot? I didn't know. But I had let it happen. Mars the powerful mage. The familiar hateful eyes glared at me. 'What do you want with me now?' I begged internally. 'I'm not doing anything, why can't you just leave me alone?' I felt hot tears running down my cheeks and hot breath at the back of my mouth but... I realized why the eyes were black.

I hadn't realized it at first. My lips moved faster than my mind. But I was chanting. I was casting Undone. I didn't even realize it but as I witnessed my fists grip the cloth of my tunic, they were covered with blue sparks. My aura flowed through me like electricity. I looked up and saw Livia's body sparkling with blue as well. It was only Livia, I couldn't cast the spell on multiple targets reliably. Livia's neck popped and snapped back into place with a sickening crack. Her arm flew violently into the air and nearly assaulted her as it retraced its earlier path when it had first been torn from her.

As I spoke the final words of the spell I didn't remember starting, her body retook its standing position and life flooded into her eyes and she gasped, then immediately vomited onto the counter. She looked around frantically, desperately, and then her eyes locked on the body on the ground. She screamed and fell back against the shelves behind her. Liquor fell and shattered as she held a hand over her mouth. "W-What happened?" she pleaded and I, very slowly, climbed to my feet. It had worked. It had finally worked.

Teal sparks erupted from her and my theory was confirmed. These were part of the spell that caused the loop. As were the re-animated dead. The violent bodies must have had something to do with the intent of the other mage. But the sparks, they had something to do with me. I couldn't deny it anymore. These sparks were leading me to deaths I had caused. They appeared when I prevented the consequences of my own spell. They led me to them. "Mars, please, tell me what happened, I don't... I don't remember anything," she begged again and I met her eyes.

What happened? I had thought I'd saved this city. Instead, I'd made everyone's deaths more violent. I couldn't answer her, so I tapped into what aura I had left and began to cast again. I had more victims to help.