Maelor raised a hand, and for the first time since I've been in this place, I felt his power move. It was precise, layered, nothing like Edrin's overwhelming pool of Aether. A scholar of Aether and their weapon. It was measured, elegant, with both light and memory and ordered force gathering around his fingers—
Edrin moved first.
There was no gesture beyond the smallest lift of his hand.
No dramatic preparation.
Just certainty.
"Chrono," he said.
The word hit the air and immediately started to distort.
This spell wasn't like the others.
Not like any of the previous affinities he had used.
Time itself seemed to hesitate.
The battlefield did not freeze. It misaligned.
Ash stopped falling and began rising. A drop of blood on Maelor's sleeve drew backwards into the cloth. The torn hem of his robe rethreaded itself for half a heartbeat before unravelling again. His shadow split into several versions, each one lagging behind a different second.
Maelor's eyes widened.
He knew what was happening.
That, more than anything, terrified me.
"Edrin—"
"Temporal Reversal."
The spell struck without sound.
Then the space around Maelor began to come apart from the present.
A dark grey distortion opened over him; it wasn't light or shadow, but a twisting absence that looked like the world had been seized and wrung by an invisible hand. The air warped inward in brutal, tightening spirals, each rotation sharper than the last, dragging ash, smoke, and loose fragments of stone into its orbit. The battlefield around him bent with it, lines of ruin curving toward a centre that refused to exist.
The vortex tightened with a sudden, vicious pull.
Maelor's form flickered again... once, twice, and then so rapidly my eyes couldn't keep pace. One version of him stood unbloodied. Another bent at the shoulder. Another turned half away. Another still had firelight on his face that no longer existed in the present. Each image surfaced for less than a heartbeat before being dragged under by the next, like time was rifling through him with ruthless, inhuman speed.
One second ago.
Ten.
A minute.
Then more.
The vortex sharpened until it no longer looked like twisted air, but a tear, a great vertical wound of dark spinning force, its edges pulsing in rings of crushed grey light. It didn't consume him all at once. That would have been mercy.
It peeled him backwards.
His face twisted.
Not in pain, but in understanding.
Because he knew.
He wasn't being destroyed.
He was being rewritten.
The spiral clenched one final time, the dark grey distortion folding into itself with catastrophic force. Maelor's body stretched into a ribbon of shattered afterimages, each earlier self dragged screaming-silent through the narrowing wound in time...
And then he was gone.
Not dead.
But removed from this present reality with such overwhelming violence that the space he had occupied seemed flayed open for a brief moment after, the air shrieking inward to fill his absence.
The battlefield didn't stagger around the vacancy.
Ash resumed dropping.
Smoke rolled on.
And the world continued as if it had already accepted that Maelor Veyrannis no longer belonged to this moment.
I stood rooted to the ridge, pulse hammering against a body that was not truly there, and stared at the place he had occupied.
Edrin lowered his hand.
The battlefield around him shook once, hard enough to fracture the memory itself.
Smoke thickened all at once. The fractured sky pulsed. The air became liquid with pressure.
Edrin turned slightly then, not toward the city, not toward where Maelor had stood...
Toward me.
My whole body went still.
"No— he shouldn't be able to see me," I mutter nervously.
This was a memory.
And I was a ghost within it.
And yet his eyes aligned with my position with impossible precision.
It wasn't recognition.
Not fully.
But awareness.
The sensation that, for one impossible instant, the memory itself had become aware that it was being witnessed.
My throat tightened.
Edrin's expression did not change.
But I knew... knew with an unprofound certainty, that if this moment lasted one second longer, he would step toward me.
Then the world gave way.
The battlefield split down the middle in a seam of white light, so sudden and absolute it looked less like brightness and more like reality being opened. Sound died first. Then the distance. The ruined city folded inward on itself, streets and flame and broken towers collapsing as a painted scene dragged through water. Smoke reeled backwards. Ash rose, reversed, and then vanished.
The memory had ended.
I was on the library floor, one knee slammed hard onto the ground.
The book snapped shut in my hands with a crack that rang through the archive like a struck bell.
For one wild, disjointed second, the two worlds overlapped.
I could still smell the battlefield.
Blood. Fire. Steamed vapour. Charred stone.
I could still feel heat against my face, still hear the ghost of a screaming, buried boy somewhere behind the silence of the shelves. My lungs pulled in air like they didn't understand why it no longer burned.
Then the library came crashing back all at once, the cool, dustless air, the hush of the bookstacks, the distant hum of Aether in the walls. It all rushed over me like cold water, clean and merciless, and left me kneeling there with my heart hammering as if part of me had still not made it back.
I breathed in so hard that it hurt.
My hands were shaking.
The book felt ridiculously heavy now, its dark cover feeling icy against my palms.
The lamps above the restricted section still glowed their pale blue. The iron gate still hummed. The shelves were exactly where they had been before I was transported.
And yet everything had changed.
I was back.
Back in the Academy.
Back in the library.
Back in a world where cities still stood because a man called Alaric Edrin had not finished his war.
My pulse refused to slow.
I looked around sharply.
No Elya.
No Arielle.
No one around me.
Only the hush of the late library and the beating of my own heart.
"What…" My voice came out thin. I swallowed and tried again. "What was that?"
The Codex answered immediately.
[AUTHENTIC MEMORY-RELIC CONFIRMED]
[HISTORICAL RECORD STATUS: NON-PUBLIC / OMITTED]
[PRIMARY SUBJECT IDENTIFIED: ALARIC EDRIN]
I stared at the blank air in front of me.
"So... it actually was real. That was a real event that happened years ago in the past, before anyone could record it."
[CONFIRMED]
I looked down at the sealed book.
The leather cover had gone dull again. Dead, almost.
No glow, as if nothing impossible had happened.
My mind raced through fragments.
'Alaric Edrin.'
'The first all-affinity user.'
What he did to that city.
How Maelor Veyrannis could do nothing but watch while it happened.
And Chrono.
My gaze sharpened.
"Chrono," I said aloud. "That wasn't an affinity that I knew, or one that Ryn had mentioned."
The Codex flickered.
[CORRECT]
[USER MEMORY HAS MET THEOREM THRESHOLD]
I froze.
"What?"
The blue-gold light intensified at the edge of my vision, sharper and more precise than usual. Not a simple notification. A process.
Something opening.
Something unlocking.
[THEOREM SLOT UNLOCKED]
A second line appeared.
[THEOREM ACQUIRED]
Then, slowly:
[CHRONO: FIVEFOLD REVERSAL]
My throat went dry as I failed to take a gulp.
"What do you mean by Theorem Slot, and what's Fivefold Reversal?"
The Codex answered without delay.
[USER MAY REVERSE PERSONAL TEMPORAL STATE BY FIVE SECONDS]
My mind halted.
"…What? Wait, this is like—"
[THEOREM FUNCTION: PERSONAL TEMPORAL ROLLBACK]
[CURRENT LIMIT: SELF ONLY]
[CURRENT RANGE: FIVE SECONDS]
The library around me seemed to recede.
Five seconds.
I could rewind myself by five seconds.
My actual self.
My body.
My position.
My immediate state.
A shiver ran through my spine.
"That's impossible. This is basically like what that guy Alaric Edrin used on Maelor Veyrannis at the end of the memory. "
The User is incorrect. It is now possible to use this spell.
I almost laughed, but nothing about me felt close to laughter.
My gaze dropped to my own hands.
Hands that had touched a weird memory-showing book.
Hands that had watched a city die.
Hands that now… apparently held a theorem similar to one from where I witnessed the impossible.
"Because of Alaric Edrin?" I asked quietly.
[THEOREM ACQUISITION CONDITION SATISFIED THROUGH OBSERVED MEMORY-RELIC OF CHRONO EXPRESSION]
"So yes."
Not inherited.
Not gifted.
Acquired.
My pulse still hadn't normalised.
I forced myself to stand fully, one hand on the restricted gate to steady myself before remembering I maybe shouldn't touch warded structures while holding a time theorem in my head.
I removed my hand immediately.
"Can I use it now?"
Yes. However, the User will not be able to reuse the spell until 12 months after activation.
"Wait, you're telling me I have a 12-month cooldown for this spell??"
Yes.
The answer wasn't exciting. Instead, it made my stomach tighten.
The battlefield was still too close. The image of Maelor being unwound out of existence is still too clear.
I looked down at the sealed book in my hands one last time.
"Alaric Edrin," I murmured.
'He wasn't just a historical figure.'
He was a threat buried under the world's official memory reservoir.
And maybe, in some freakish, impossible way, a map.
He was a warning.
Or an answer.
To what I could become.
I slid the book carefully under my arm and turned toward the main reading floor.
Questions crowd every corner of my mind now.
'What happened to Maelor after he was sent away from the battlefield?'
'How had House Veyrannis preserved this memory if he had been reversed away from it?'
'How much does the official history rest on deliberate omission?'
And above all....
If the first all-affinity user had reached a level where time itself obeyed him…
'What exactly is this path that I had just set myself on?'