Cycles of Entropy

I stared at Marcus' corpse in horror. It worked. That spell had worked and his body had healed. But he was still dead. Still standing in front of the counter, holding out his hand to accept the bet he had just... morbidly won. I didn't understand why his fingers had just... snapped like that. When I'd touched Hadley he still felt human. I didn't understand why Livia couldn't get her hand back. It was like he'd been turned to stone with a layer of flesh. I didn't understand anything.

Something was missing. His time has been rewound to well before his death and he hadn't so much as moved. It took all the focus I had to cast that spell. The only thing it earned me were stares and open mouths. I was taken away from myself again. Floating behind my body, watching it gape at Marcus. 'Come on Mars. How many red things in the room?' I asked myself. Two earrings. One ribbon. Fourteen bottles. I took a deep breath.

"What did you fucking do??" a man yelled at me and I shook my head as I came back to the moment. "What did you fucking do to Marcus?" the wide-eyed man demanded, and I realized he was shaking me by my shoulders.

"I- I don't... I didn't" I protested but his eyes had grown bloodshot and he wasn't listening. I pulled away but he reached for me again, until Livia grabbed his wrist with her good hand and stopped him.

"She didn't do anything, you idiot! This happened before her... whatever that was. Can't you see she was trying to help?" she reprimanded but the man didn't seem to care. I hadn't seen him speak to Marcus once but... I had only been in town for a couple of days. I didn't know what to do and I fell over while trying to back away from him. There was a time when I wouldn't have been phased at all. When my confidence as a powerful mage would have carried me through and I could have frozen his hand in time until he calmed down.

As I was in that inn, however? Right after my most powerful spell completely failed a second time and left a man dead... I felt so, so small. So what if I knew time magic? It did about as much good for me as it did for Marcus and Hadley. And this man was just... he just wanted his friend back. It didn't help that I blamed myself at least as much as my assailant did. Fortunately, Livia was no longer the only one holding him back. Others from the bar had joined in in pulling him away from me. They threw the near-rabid man back, and another man pulled him into the corner. Their conversation sounded heated, but I couldn't quite make it out.

I tried to calm my rapid, short breathing as the room spun around me. 'What am I supposed to do now?' I thought while the walls closed in on me. Part of me wanted to run. To pretend there was nothing I could do about what I just saw. Whatever was happening in that city had nothing to do with me, and all I had to do was leave. Camilla wasn't there; that was obvious. If a beautiful flora mage lived in the city, people would know who I meant.

But... it was that kind of thinking that led me here. Turning a blind eye. Telling myself it wasn't my problem, or it wasn't a real problem. And I knew there was a clue about Camilla in that garden. Then again, maybe I was just playing that old game of 'claim the guilt'. I was a stranger. Yeah, I was technically a powerful one, but not in any way that mattered. It really wasn't my fault if this killed the city. No more than Marcus or Hadley were my fault. I didn't know what was happening, and I didn't know why. What could I do about it?

After failing to save two people, however, the iron chains had already settled around my neck. So I was asking myself what to do. For the city, for Camilla, for anyone. "Are you alright," Livia asked through a pained groan, and suddenly the obvious answer came to me. She was holding her good hand out to help me up while her broken and bruised wrist was clutched to her chest. All the wondering about how to do something to help. All that lamenting my failure to do so in the past... and I had been focused on myself while an injured woman protected me, the master mage.

I had to file away the self-loathing and disgust at the realization, or I would repeat the mistake. Instead of taking her hand, I whispered my spell again. This time it was smaller and covered a shorter amount of time. It still danced across her wrist, however, and before she had finished jumping back in shock, her bruising was gone and her bone was healed. I helped myself to my feet, using a stool as a crutch. Livia stared at her hand in awe.

"Sorry," I finally said, "I don't know why it didn't work for Marcus... I tried, I did, it just..." I trailed off while she stared at me.

"Sorry? What are you sorry for, that was amazing! I've seen very little magic, but what I have was nothing like that. How did you do it?" she retorted, still examining her newly healed wrist. The praise stabbed me like a knife to the chest and I looked away, sniffing as I forced back the sickly memories they inspired. Instead of answering, I look past Livia, to the dead man standing at her bar. Then I looked around the room. At least three people were gone.

"Did someone go to get the guards?" I asked and a few people looked between each other before one awkwardly half raised a hand and answered. Livia looked at me and her face fell. Her brief excitement at my small miracle faded as she was brought back to the situation at hand.

"I think Cal did," she offered.

"How long ago?" I asked and she put a finger to her lip.

"Right after... it happened, I think," she guessed and I looked at the clock. I don't know how, it felt like only moments, but a quarter hour had passed since the last toll of the clock. I slumped. It was too late to stop it then, they would be here any minute. So, I just sat back down at the bar. It was all I could think of. And Livia went back behind it. The man who had attacked me stormed out, as his conversation had ended, and not pleasantly, apparently.

It was a strange silence. A room full of people, slowly taking their seats and returning to their drinks while a corpse stood in the middle of it all. None of us knew how to respond, but for the rest of them, this is what they had been doing for days. As I watched Livia, I realized she didn't seem surprised. She was upset, and holding it back, but not surprised. In a moment of insight, I realized why.

Livia had never thought Marcus was crazy or lying. She'd never thought there was nothing to worry about. But she did work behind a bar, and even while the world crumbled around her, she did what bartenders do. She sold the illusion that everything was going to be okay. And once the guards came and collected Marcus' corpse, she would start selling it again.

"Can I get a shot," I asked, breaking the silence before anyone else. She nodded and retrieved a glass for me, filling it with... something. It didn't matter. We sat there together. Drinking in the quiet. With the quiet. When the guards showed up, they did what I expected. They ceremonially pulled the body from the building. They didn't even speak to anyone. No one asked what happened, and none of us offered an explanation. Because everyone knew.

The guards still wanted to hide it from the city at large, but the trick they used on me wouldn't work here. There were too many of us. Too many witnesses. So they did the next best thing. They ignored us, and trusted anything we said would be disregarded and ignored. Not that it made much difference, with the gate closed. Then, after they left, there were a few more moments of quiet. But eventually, people started whispering to each other. Then chatting. Then joking. Like nothing had happened. It made me sick. It reminded me of home.

I looked down at myself and closed my eyes. I ignored the growing noise and I drowned out the world. Just for a second. Then, I left a coin on the counter and walked out the door. Livia didn't even look to see where I was going or if I had paid enough. She was recovering more slowly than the rest. The part of me that was still alive, however, wanted to do something. Wanted to take the weight of this and use it to leverage my actual guilt off of me, for a moment.

So I didn't just leave. I left quietly, and I found the wagon with the guards who had taken Marcus. They moved slowly, and they were easy to follow. "Another one in a public place," grumbled the driver, and his partner spit over the side.

"The fourth one today," he confirmed. I crept along behind them and tried to get closer as the conversation grew more relevant. "I don't know what the Mayor is playing at, but we need to figure out what is happening. There are more of these every damn day!"

My eyes widened. This meant the frequency was increasing. It wasn't just one an hour. I just couldn't figure out why, or how, any mage would do this. More importantly, I had to know why my spell had failed. It was true, that spell had never done anything but bring me trouble and pain. But it was still mine. It was the thing I accomplished that no one else could. If even it was worthless... so was I. So I had to know.

I wondered if that was why I was following them. Was it guilt that didn't belong to me? Was it the desire to prove that, this time at least, I hadn't failed? Was it pure magical curiosity? I didn't know, at the time, but I was compelled to find out what was going on. Then, after a while, it connected itself back to my actual concerns. Because I recognized where we were going. We were headed straight for the garden that could lead me to Camilla. My heart started beating faster as they pulled around the corner from it.

I hid behind a nearby tree as they searched their surroundings before retrieving the body, wrapped in fabric, and carrying it to the garden gate. When they opened it and carried him inside, I began preparing another spell. This one was powerful in a different way, and hard to cast while whispering. With this spell, I could stop time around me. I couldn't travel far, maybe thirty paces at most, and I couldn't move anything while it was stopped. But for this, it would work.

After a few minutes, they re-emerged, greeting the guards at the gate, and just before they closed it, I released my spell. The world stopped and I was alone. Well, more alone than usual, anyway. I dashed through the gate and dove into concealment before releasing the spell and, as quietly as I could, gasping for breath. That was the biggest flaw in the spell, after all. I couldn't even breathe fresh air while it was active. As I caught my breath, I stayed ducked until I heard the gate close.

Finally, I emerged from my hiding spot in the garden I needed to investigate. The same garden I had happily taken the excuse to ignore. The world immediately spun away from me again. I was watching myself react from the outside. Because the garden was full. Victims of the Quiet were piled in the center of it like some kind of sick bonfire. There were dozens of them. more than a hundred, at least. Still, empty corpses, tucked quietly away in a once beautiful garden. Out of sight, and out of mind. They had been brought here to be ignored.