Throne of Time - Chapter 35: The Terminal Option

There was an unexpected benefit to rooming with Kiznua: the veteran student knew the bureaucracy of Darkmoon inside and out. Instead of going to Convocation Hall, they spoke to different administrators in the Hall of Thrones, somehow arranging their room transfers in a single meeting. Even though Suria felt like she was barely keeping up with the details, she tried to remember all the tricks for future cycles.

Those benefits extended to their room, which was a cozy nook in the corner of the Taedric Building's second floor. It was out of the way of the main student pathways, yet had easy access to both an exit and the cafeteria. Kiznua was convinced it was the best room on campus, and she might know, since she'd tried even more of them than Suria.

Choosing classes was surprisingly trivial, because Suria was mostly sticking with what she knew. Foundations was required, Combat Perceptions to talk to Orinyan, and she'd keep working at Magical Analysis In Depth. Once she added Practical Elemental Enchanting, she had hit her limit for the term.

Everything went smoothly, with plenty of reading time, until the fourth day when it was time for opening ceremonies. Kiznua came into their room and stared at Suria as if she was insane.

"What are you doing?" Kiznua asked. "We're going to be late!"

"To the opening ceremonies?" Suria looked up from her book in confusion. "We don't have to go, do we?"

"But it's tradition! Suria... you're not going to make me go alone, are you? I've always gotten pushed by the crowds and I thought I'd finally have a friend with me..."

So Suria let herself be pestered into going, though she managed to convince Kiznua to skip the boring speeches. Instead they just attended the main feast, where Suria noted that Maut-mai was in attendance instead of going to the Water Society gathering. She ignored the other woman and instead spent her time looking over the professors seated at the high table and wondering what sort of conspiracy lay beneath the surface.

Eight thrones of Darkmoon University... six of them met in the basement and one of them perished, yet they all ate together to begin the term. Suria tried to analyze their faces and body language and it was difficult to tell much of anything. Professor Huen wore a perfectly civil mask, but judging from the way she sat, not speaking to the others, there seemed to be real tension between them.

When they had spoken in the previous loop, Professor Huen had said there were disagreements over what Darkmoon University should fundamentally be. Was that a hint slipped to a student who couldn't possibly have known, or just a generic phrase to put her off? Unfortunately Suria didn't have the knowledge or strength to really interact with archmages.

Just as Suria was thinking about the grand conspiracy, someone bumped into Kiznua and spilled a drink all over her. That turned into an ordeal, because it seemed to traumatize Kiznua, even after they went back to their room and got her cleaned up.

Over the following days, Suria began to realize that Kiznua wouldn't be as easy a roommate as she'd hoped after all. The other woman required constant reassurance and panicked any time Suria surprised her or closed a door too loudly. For a while Suria considered getting another transfer, but she decided that it was just for one cycle and she should view it as a learning experience.

As the term grew nearer, Suria mostly stayed inside and tried to read ahead on her textbooks. She felt a slight flicker of guilt that people were dying in the Medical Ward, but there wasn't much she could do for them now. Her plan had been to skip the krashorb tournament entirely, but that day Kiznua was being particularly frustrating, so Suria slipped away to meet up with other loopers.

Once there, she found Jeilin and Dsjaho-an standing on the outskirts and watching the matches as usual, so she came up behind them.

"Any good data?" she asked.

"This should be an especially good test," Jeilin said, taking her lack of greeting in stride. It was as if they'd just picked up the conversation from the previous loop. "There aren't any of the less predictable people here, so it's just the randomness in the matches."

"Don't cast or make any loud noises," Dsjaho-an told her. "We don't want to add any extra variables."

"I understand." Suria watched the flying orbs briefly, but they didn't hold her interest compared to the broader issues at stake. "I assume it's fine to talk about everything else? Jeilin, have you gotten anything out of the data I collected for you?"

"I definitely owe you a favor," Jeilin answered without taking his eyes off the matches. "Do you want to collect?"

"No, I was honestly curious about what you might have found."

"Well, there's no evidence of anyone obviously breaking in, aside from the Akrashic group you intercepted. But I did learn something useful: the university itself lost access to the office, the vault, everything." Jeilin turned away from the matches to smile at her. "When Professor Drazen disappeared, he took the keys with him, and they apparently don't have a master or skeleton key. So his office is completely impossible to access until they put together some magical resources."

"The vault might be a different situation," Dsjaho-an told her. "I'm still looking into that, but it sounds like access should be transferred to other professors in the Perception department."

"Yeah, it's hard to find out more about that because the Akrashic faction is also trying to get in. But we're making progress, and just being able to rule out other manipulation was helpful."

"How risky is that?" Suria asked them. "Is there a chance all these investigations will make someone suspicious? Do you know how many of the professors can cast a soul-killing spell?"

Instead of answering immediately, the two men glanced at one another. After a moment, Jeilin nodded to Dsjaho-an, who turned fully to her.

"I'm actually working on something." He reached beneath his shirt to pull out a necklace that looked fairly ordinary until Suria realized that it was enchanted. "This has a talisman embedded that will deliver a fatal spike of mana to the heart. It should kill basically instantly."

"The soul disappears when the body dies," Jeilin explained, "so you should be safe as soon as it activates."

"Uh..." Suria couldn't help but stare at the suicide necklace and had to ask the obvious question. "Can someone else trigger it? Isn't that a huge risk?"

"I doubt there's much of a risk," Dsjaho-an said as he tucked the necklace back under his shirt. "It would take a genius to figure out what the enchantment does from the outside, and even if someone did, you can't activate someone else's glyph. That's why I used mana instead of an explosive or poison that could be triggered from the outside."

"I guess that makes sense."

"We're working on making sure it's instant," Jeilin said, "and ideally painless."

"It only became refined enough to use last cycle," Dsjaho-an told her with some pride. "Once the design is perfected, I should be able to make one for anyone else, if you can handle the glyph. If you agree to owe me a favor, I'll make it for you at the start of every cycle."

Suria considered the offer carefully, trying to put aside her qualms about wearing a suicide necklace. She had to admit that she was still terrified of the way the professors had simply snuffed out Lirngelf, and if she was targeted by an archmage, there wasn't much she could do to fight back. If she had an option to painlessly kill herself, she might be able to do more exploration during the first hour of the loop without risking herself.

On the other hand, she didn't have enough mastery of artifact creation to be completely sure about the workings of the device. Even if the device lacked a mana-converting trapezoid, it could still contain a weakness she couldn't detect. And even if it was completely on-the-level, she didn't want to owe favors to other loopers.

"I'll have to think about it," Suria said. "Let me know once the design has been perfected."

"You should really find something," Dsjaho-an told her, "even if you don't use my design. If we can avoid a soul kill, we're completely invincible within the loop. Soul armor isn't practical in the near future, so this is the best defense available."

"By the way," Jeilin said, glancing back at her, "we're going to have a gathering tomorrow night, before the term starts. Do you want to come?"

"I don't know..." Suria shifted awkwardly and lowered her gaze. "I still have so much to read..."

"Well, I personally don't care, and I'll always be grateful for your favor last time. But you don't want to seem too unfriendly with all the others. Even the Endelythan group will show up for the celebrations sometimes, since Gerial has the best drinks and Nastoora throws the biggest events."

"I understand that, I just... the whole group is a lot for me." The truth was that Suria didn't particularly enjoy being with the full group, but she wasn't awkward enough to say that sort of thing out loud... at least not anymore.

"You need to let your hair down," Dsjaho-an said with a roll of his eyes, "but if that's not enough to convince you, we talk about strategy too. Wynchard is convinced that the answers are in Convocation Hall, so he wants to try something in the first hour. That's going to be relevant to you regardless of what you want, so you want to be prepared."

"What exactly is he saying?" Suria asked nervously. "Does he have a specific plan?"

"Not yet," Jeilin reassured her. "It's a bit difficult because only a few of us start out close enough to really explore the building. Wynchard, me, Qinq... that's about it. Adwyrma can arrive soon if she sprints, but most don't want her there."

"I just had to choose rooms in Darmkael," Dsjaho-an muttered. "I can't arrive in time to do much."

The revelation killed Suria's mood and she only stayed with the other loopers long enough that she wouldn't be seen as outright hostile. It seemed terribly unfair that even when she was in a time loop, Suria couldn't escape social obligations. She needed to make sure that the other loopers thought she was shy or socially awkward, not standoffish, or she'd end up with enemies across timelines.

~

Suria woke up for her next day of classes feeling mostly stable, despite the unknowns, because she had settled into a routine. She would wake up before Kiznua and slip down to the cafeteria early, where the only other person would be one student eating his daily porridge. Everything had been going smoothly, but today was going to be special because it would break the routine.

The walk back through the mostly empty Taedric Building was enjoyable, so Suria slipped back into her room in a good mood. She saw that Kiznua was awake, huddled over her table reading her newsbook.

"Did you hear that the Glyphbreakers destroyed an alchemy lab?" Kiznua asked breathlessly. "They went after midnight and burned the whole place down!"

"Why do you read that every day?" Suria asked. "It just upsets you."

"Bad things are still happening if I don't read about them! This way I can at least have some warning."

Considering how difficult it was to completely grasp the events in one location during a time loop, Suria was skeptical about how much control anyone could have. She decided not to argue about it, however, and just collected her books and supplies on her way out.

Her first class this term had been Foundations, though she hadn't gone - Suria had finally realized that she was being foolish even attending. She still had an instinct that if she was so much as slightly tardy, they'd throw out the poor healer girl, but she'd come to realize that all the loopers skipped their required classes. Even if there were consequences for skipping eventually, they would take so long to develop that she wouldn't experience them.

Following that came Combat Perception, which was as variable as before, and Magical Analysis In Depth, which started with the same list of texts. Suria had already read them, but planned to review to make sure she had a strong understanding. She'd spoken with Qinq, who said that Professor Huen always started the same and then changed the textbook assignments depending on how students did. The current theory was that she was trying to teach a hidden lesson that no one had grasped yet.

None of that mattered now: Suria was going to attend a brand new class and meet another throne.

She could only hope that she was ready for a class that was so far outside her usual comfort zone. Combining the exercises she had learned, she'd built up her runic capacity to seven, which was impressive for her and not very much even for the basic combat class she'd taken in past loops. Based on what she'd heard, this one was much more advanced.

Practical Elemental Enchanting took place in the Bloodgrave Coliseum, which she had only seen from the outside. As Suria headed west, the circular building loomed larger and larger, its size deceptive because it was set apart from the center of campus. The bottom floor had multiple entrances as if to support large crowds, while the upper floors were split only by narrow windows. From this angle, the top was a vast concave arch, with each side spiking upward in a higher wall.

All the entrances were a bit confusing until she got closer and spotted signs directing students toward one of them. Suria walked through a surprisingly long corridor, suddenly cool and shady, before she came out in the center. The middle of the arena was entirely filled with oddly red sand, which she told herself couldn't actually be blood.

Around her, across the stands and the sands, she saw that the students for this class looked rougher than she had expected. Many were older, most carried weapons, and even those with runebooks had scars. If that wasn't enough to make her wonder if she belonged here, there was the professor standing in the center.

Currently beating the snot out of a student.

One muscular arm held the young man in the air effortlessly as the throne looked to the side, almost as if he was staring directly at Suria. "That's enough students," he boomed. "Welcome to Practical Elemental Enchanting - let's fucking enchant!"