"When did you figure out who I was?" Ulren asked, and I - metaphorically - let out a held breath. For a second I had thought he was going to say "who?" and I''d have to re-calibrate and come up with another theory, which wouldn''t have necessarily been a bad thing; I wouldn''t have been sad to learn Ulren actually was dead. Still, it was reassuring to know I was starting to get a handle on things. I''d heard this evil-looking motherfucker talking to Harmid about a report for the ''dean'' and saying he''d been on sabbatical. Then Sentortzi had told me Harmid was working on something Ulren had started, and that he''d not told anyone what Ulren had been involved in or that he was dead.


    But really, the thing that had made me sure was the sound of the chains from the rig Connie used to wear, the one she''d taken from Ulren''s lab. Now I was desperately trying to think of what it was supposed to do before she repurposed it, and what vulnerabilities it might have. I knew where I could have the best chances of breaking it, but jabbing the metal chains with a knife was unlikely to work and manually unbuckling it would be hard unless I could get his robe off. Best to just stab him in the face, probably.


    I didn''t feel like directly answering his question. "So you know I didn''t recognize you, despite our... history."


    "I know you''re not the one that almost killed me, yes. I''m still going to have to destroy you, of course - when I realized Sentortzi had summoned you I thought I''d have to leave you for later, but even if you had been sent somewhere from his private teleportation chamber I would have murdered you at some point."


    Having caught my breath and concealed the knife, I turned to face him finally. "And you still would have poisoned Harmid."


    He tsked. "Not if I''d known you were going to come here. I did that because I had to hurry and ambush you on your way to be collected by Lord Protector Hammersmith at the teleportation complex - and then at the last second you made me expend a lot of energy to get back here in time. I didn''t expect you to get away from the guards somehow and run back the way you came. You must be quite slippery."


    He hadn''t seen the actual fight, then.  He might not know the guards were right behind me.  "Sorry for the inconvenience, I''d hate to make my assassination more work than it needs to be. But... wait, if you weren''t going to otherwise, why poison Harmid now?"


    "I''m leaving after this, and he''s one of the only people that saw me after my ''death''. But a professor brutally stabbed in his own office draws too much attention, whereas it''s plausible he got a tainted batch of kul''quet." He smiled and pulled out a long, thin dagger. "Someone having you killed, meanwhile, is so likely it wouldn''t cause much of a stir at all - so I was free to use whatever methods I wanted. Had I known you''d be here, killing Harmid by more direct means would have been fine as they would consider him an unfortunate bystander. This is actually the least convenient combination, but... well, maybe they''ll think he was poisoned so the assassin could lie in wait for you here? I''m sure it will all work out."


    He seemed to enjoy monologuing, like this was a fucking movie. That was fine by me, I just had to keep him talking for another minute or two. "So you... did something to the report he was writing, to mislead Sentortzi somehow. And you want me to not go with Hammersmith to stop Halenvar, because you want to destroy the world again and go back in time yourself. But... why not kill me sooner? Why mess with Sentortzi?"


    "I only... recovered... recently. Your other self did quite a number on me; I was very nearly destroyed. Her and her little team shouldn''t have been able to get to me, they should have been focused on Gilbrecht Halenvar. I had assumed they would all go towards him and be either killed by Tindelus or obliterated when the Hierophants of Oblivion set off the device, but the Endless Empire spared a strike team for my laboratory. I''m flattered, really."


    That... would imply he was the original Ulren, from the previous timeline. That should be impossible.


    "As for Sentortzi," he continued, "I barely misled him at all. If anything, I worked to make some things a bit more obvious to him. Did he tell you that the world will end if you stop me? I doubt you''ll believe me, but that part is true. You''re going to die either way, and so my killing you here is doing the world a favor. I need to ensure that I get to do things right this time, a task your duplicate has made... exceedingly difficult. Still, I have time."


    "Yeah, he said something about that, but honestly I think both of you are full of shit. He''s going off the intel you gave him, and you''re pretty motivated to lie. You want me to believe all of reality is on the verge of collapse, but the most I''ve seen is someone go back in time in a very localized way like... thirty seconds."


    "Oh I assure you, the state of things is... dire. This isn''t entirely your fault; the Clockmaker made a mistake, I believe, and was unable to fix it before his empire collapsed. All of the damage to time, the fragile nature of our current existence, is because of this. Your twin''s fumbling and misuse of my device would also be a problem, but would not have been possible if reality had been in a healthy state. It''s of no concern, regardless. I will go back, all the way back, and prevent this disaster before it can happen. The only remaining paradox will be myself, and while that would already be within tolerances it can also be remedied with the use of Yesrin''s Loom. I had hoped you would go and obtain that for me, but... I will find another way."


    "So, what, you want to re-write all of history back to the last Grand Alignment?"


    "Of course! All of this is a mistake. The Clockmaker''s vision can still come to pass!  I assume Sentortzi instead wants to go back what, just the year and a half over and over?  Possibly a bit further, but if so he likely wanted to keep the rest of history the same. He certainly wouldn''t want to return to being a normal human librarian. He has too much to lose, and surely wouldn''t be willing to trust that the Clockmaker would reward him for saving the Old Empire. He is, in short, a greedy fool."


    "Oh, sure. You''re not greedy or foolish at all, you''re just destroying the whole world so daddy will tell you what a good boy you are. Gotcha."


    He sneered. "Well, if we''re done talking like civilized people I suppose it''s time to kill you. I hope you didn''t think this conversation was buying you time or giving reinforcements a chance to reach you? I assure you time is not moving for anything outside of this room, not beyond a crawl. No one is coming to save you, and you are bound by oath not to harm me."


    Okay so the bad news was that he was fucking with time, but the good news was that he thought the binding oath was still in place. Also good news, this dick was like Mr. Hoover from high school. The number of times I asked him questions about his stupid hobbies and got him to ramble on so long we skipped a quiz or homework was astounding, and it never stopped working. Even if nobody outside was ever going to arrive to help, I was at least giving myself time to think and learning stuff that could be important if I somehow lived through this.


    "I''ll get the Loom for you, if that''s what you want. My duplicate was able to use it just fine, but If any random person could they would have; it''s my understanding Yesrin''s Loom has just been a trophy piece for however-many cycles. What makes you think you don''t need me?"


    "First, it''s said that the Loom is fated to be used after the world is destroyed. I plan on forcing that condition, and will then be the only person available to use it; fate will have no choice but to settle on me. Second, the Clockmaker used it in a... roundabout way. It may have been the thing that led to the folk tales about the Lever of Ages, in fact. He, as you suggest, could not use it directly - but he incorporated it into one of his devices. He believed altering the future was easier than altering the past, and that he could take advantage of fate to set a particular possible future as the true one. It''s that device, actually, that Halenvar is after. He wants to finish what the Clockmaker started, and make a future where his kingdom is destined to be prosperous and rule over everyone else."


    "And he wanted you to fix it for him, right?"


    "Yes. I couldn''t, as it turned out, although I lied and used him to gather more and more resources. Parts have been destroyed, or hidden away, or sealed behind an impossible planar lock. It didn''t matter. I learned so much from it, and we obtained Yesrin''s Loom which was the only part I needed that I couldn''t make myself. But then your duplicate was too stupid to use the device properly, and rather than go back in time she somehow re-created the world from a random point in the past. Impressive in its own way, but objectively worse than using my creation for its intended purpose."


    So he also didn''t know it was the day I arrived on this world, and probably didn''t know about Earth at all. I stepped into my mind palace - specifically the divination room - and felt my mana just pouring out. It had to be something about the time manipulation. Was he speeding up time for us, or slowing it down for everyone else? It seemed like it would have to be the former, there was no way he was powerful enough to fuck with time across the whole plane.


    But that raised an issue, probably related to my suddenly spiking use of mana. I wasn''t on that plane anymore, not really - I was watching my body via the planar membrane from my domain in Ematse. That meant that as soon as I''d popped into my mind palace I should have been going at normal speed and, from Ulren''s point of view, just zoned out and stared straight ahead since my mind wouldn''t be sped up like he was. And yet, that hadn''t happened.


    I remembered talking to Cyne about the fact that some planes had different laws of reality, and he''d mentioned time passed differently in some and was even variable in a few cases. It made sense, for a plane built around the concepts of dream and thought. I focused, trying to make sure I would stay synched up with his speed. I hadn''t specifically unlocked any ability for this, but I''d been working on increasing my control over this domain in general and this should, in theory, just be part of that. Slowly I felt the mana use decrease, as if it was settling in, although it remained far higher than it normally would be. Hmm.


    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Okay, what else could I say to keep him talking? "She did more than just that. And she told me how to use the Loom, actually use it directly rather than needing to do some shitty workaround like the Clockmaker or your device."


    He seemed to be considering this, but he was still looking at me like he''d scraped me off of his shoe so I wasn''t hopeful. He looked up at the ceiling, the way so many people do when they''re thinking, and I decided there wasn''t going to be a better time. I stabbed him in the neck, which was shockingly easy - I''d been so worried, but this guy was a fucking professor.  He was the evil mastermind, and he hadn''t brought henchmen.  The knife went all the way through his throat, a killing blow for sure.  Problem fucking solved.


    And then I saw time revert, just like it had with Connie.


    Before, I had seen it because we were somehow connected. This time, I was sure it was because I was piloting my body from Ematse and the alteration of time simply didn''t reach other planes. I immediately swung again, but knowing he''d guard his neck I tried to cram it upwards under his rib cage - sure enough, he leaned back and moved his own dagger into place to parry and was totally caught off guard by my change in tactics.  Again the hit was solid, and while it wouldn''t kill him quite as quickly as the neck shot - the knife wasn''t long enough to get up to his heart or anything - it should be enough to fuck him up.


    He rewound again. No wonder he''d been fine with chatting so much, he could go back multiple times. How could I ever kill him? This time I feigned like I was going for the neck again but slammed my knee into his balls and stabbed into his side, and then time... stopped. I was still able to watch, since I''d locked that flow of time in, but I couldn''t communicate with my body. Ulren stepped back, clutching his perforated liver and staring at me in horror.


    "How... how could she... ugh. Fuck! Okay, okay. This is fine. I can just kill her now. Filthy brat will... shit, that hurts."


    He seemed to be trying to decide on the best position to be in, and I suspected he wasn''t able to just murder me while I was frozen. He''d waited a second to freeze me, in fact, until I had pulled the knife out to stab again. Maybe we couldn''t be too connected or he wouldn''t be able to isolate himself? I took a second to pull his robe off - not in reality, just in the divination replica - and got a look at the temporal harness thing. It looked basically like it had when Connie had it, but I noted that the time mana was in three smaller containers rather than one larger one. They were totally opaque, so I couldn''t tell if he had visibly degraded the mana by doing all this crazy shit.


    His robe flickered back into existence - that sort of thing tended to happen when I was looking at a live view - and I tried to get ready. Mentally, anyway. Physically I was still a fucking statue. He got into position behind and to the side of me - the small office made it impossible for him to be completely at my back - and prepared to jab the dagger directly into my brain. I focused and could see, just barely, my muscles starting to tense. Time was clearly still flowing around me, albeit extremely slowly. I had questions about how this worked with the air - shouldn''t it be a solid wall all around Ulren? How was he talking and moving? But the answer was probably something unsatisfying about Imperial magic taking shit like that into account somehow.


    Time sped up, slightly, although he kept himself faster than me. Dick. That was going to mean I couldn''t stab fast enough, or dodge. And then there was a light, a glow that filled the little office as a worm of blazing blue energy zipped through the air towards Ulren. Time nearly stopped again, but while the jagged line slowed it was visibly moving even as everything else seemed to halt. After all, electricity moved pretty fucking fast. One of Harmid''s eyes was open, just a slit, and the blinding arc of electricity was originating from his outstretched finger. Hell yeah.


    Ulren panicked and moved, but the line shifted to follow him. He was faster than it, but only barely - and he was painting himself into a corner. Finally he grabbed a metal tray from a sort of tea service and flung it at the lightning - the tray stopped in the air as soon as he let go, but the lightning connected to it and shot out wildly, no longer able to follow him and instead seeking only to ground itself. A stray thread of it still hit Ulren and he yelped, and for a moment time returned to normal - the lightning was immediately gone, and I lunged forward and did the only thing I could think of - I stuck a finger into his side.


    He howled from the pain and tried to shake me free, but I''d hooked my finger deep into the knife wound and was already stabbing from the other side - I''d ended up behind him, and while he managed to jab me in the arm it was a terrible angle and didn''t do a lot of damage. I could feel, somehow, time shifting around us - but as I''d hoped, with my finger literally inside him he couldn''t disentangle my body from the magic and was taking me with him. Get fucked, asshole.


    He slammed me against the wall and I lost my knife, but I just reached around into the opening of his robes and fumbled for the release on his harness - I knew exactly where it was, after all, and I''d watched Connie take it off plenty of times. Just as the latch flipped he knocked me loose and I fell to the ground, but before he could get the latch fastened again the door burst open and a ripple of purple energy slammed him against the far wall where he shattered a bookshelf and - from the sound of it - most of his ribs.


    The wild mage was standing in the doorway, face invisible behind her mask. I wondered, not for the first time, how she''d gotten our hair to be that crazy green color. "She is mine," she said, and red lightning shot out from her hand into Ulren''s collapsed body. It wasn''t like the clean bright bolt Harmid had made, it was a web of spidery mini-lightnings that crawled all over him and lit his robes on fire.


    I heard a click as he somehow snapped the harness back into place, and watched from Ematse as he smacked the burning bits of his robe and then shakily stood from the floor. His nose was gushing blood, and he was limping badly as he carefully navigated around the wild mage who was very nearly blocking the doorway. Getting past her was clearly agony in his badly injured state, and he made the most pathetic whimpering noises I''d ever heard. Good. He did finally get past, unfortunately, and I heard him limp away a few steps before time snapped back to normal. The wild mage stepped back into the hall and looked around, then came back in. "He is gone."


    With one threat gone, I remembered that I''d called in backup from someone who wanted to murder me. Time to be extra nice. "Thank you. So much. I owe you... well, more. You should go though, the guards are probably almost here and I know you don''t want to get tangled up in this. I''ll pay you back, I swear it."


    She glanced down at Harmid, then at me.  She nodded and left without a word, and sure enough a moment later some guards burst in. They found me covered in blood, in an absolutely trashed office, cradling the unconscious body of Professor Yanipliss. It probably didn''t look great, but what were they going to do? Arrest me? "Ignore the blood, he''s been poisoned. Get a healer, and if you see Professor Ulren you need to kill him on sight. I mean, I know you won''t listen to me on that part, but I want to be able to say I told you so when you don''t do it and he murders you."


    One of them gave Yanipliss a potion, but the other one clearly didn''t think it would do anything for poison and was already using some magical communication device to demand a healer. I just tuned them out. My mana had run dry, so I couldn''t fully ignore them by retreating into my mind palace, but they gave up on asking me questions pretty quickly. A healer arrived and took Harmid away, and almost as an afterthought reached over and healed my sliced arm - I felt a few more minor injuries I''d taken fade away as well.


    I made the guards take me to a bathroom where I stripped out of my bloody dress and washed up before putting on another outfit from my bag, and then it was time to head to my meeting with Hammersmith. Nothing had changed about that, and in fact if anything it was vital I get there so Ulren couldn''t show up again and kill me while time was frozen all around us. I figured with the extent of his injuries and the utter humiliation of his defeat he wouldn''t want to try right away, and in fact since he hadn''t rewound time again he was probably getting low on mana. Though he had to have used a massive amount to mess with time as much as he had.


    Actually, Connie had talked about how stabilized mana crystals gave off a little mana - like interest on a savings account - but using more than that would weaken the mana crystals and they''d give off less after that until you eventually used them up completely.  It was possible he''d burned through actual valuable resources in that fight, and would need to get more before he could do it again.  I couldn''t count on that, though.  Best to assume he had some unlimited pile of the stuff sitting around just in case.


    As we walked I made the guards promise not to punish Tig or Roran or any of the other kids that might have tried to slow them down or kill them. They said everyone was fine and, given the fact that Harmid really had looked like he was poisoned, it seemed clear I was trying to act in defense of the city rather than attacking it. It was a shitty way to apologize and, again, it wasn''t like they would have been able to do anything about it regardless since I''d been promised to Hammersmith. But whatever, at least it meant if I ever got away from the Endless Empire I could visit Sentortzi again.


    We headed out of the university grounds, to a huge building that reminded me of a train station. We marched inside, down a hall, and into a hexagonal domed room that appeared to be some sort of lobby with passages leading in all directions. Helma Patak was there, and smiled at me with only a hint of nervousness.


    "Hey, I have a message for Sentortzi. Say it just like this. The older Ulren is alive, and helped write Harmid''s report. Got that?"


    She was taken aback, but nodded and repeated it exactly. Good. I was still annoyed at Sentortzi, and was slightly worried that he would join forces with Ulren so he could offer the same deal he''d offered me, but it seemed like that was unlikely. They wouldn''t get along well enough. Patak and I just stood there for a moment, and I felt like I was forgetting something. I was so wiped out, I wasn''t sure I was thinking clearly. It was probably nothing.


    As the doors at the end of one of the halls were thrown open, I finally remembered. "Shit, also tell my friends! And, uh, get them under guard. Like, don''t imprison them if they want to leave but... fuck, here she comes."


    As nervous as I was, I was still floored by Hammersmith. The metallic silver skin, the enormous shoulders, the action hero muscles. The deep, vibrant blue of her perfectly tailored uniform with its cape and silver trim. She looked mad but relieved, like a disappointed parent, and behind her I saw a flash of light in the room she''d come from before more soldiers swarmed out. She wasn''t taking chances.


    Before she could reach me, however, there was a commotion and I turned to see Hugh marching at nearly a run. He was... in uniform? Hugh was wearing a golden breastplate, and had a magnificent red cape. His boots were polished, his mustache was waxed... he looked almost like an entirely different person. Hammersmith held an arm out to stop the soldiers that had been preparing to charge at Hugh, and raised an eyebrow.


    "Hugh. Are you... here in some official capacity?"


    Hugh bowed as he reached me. "I am, Lord Protector Hammersmith. I''ve come out of retirement this morning, yes? Pardon me for the interruption, this will only take a moment."


    He grabbed me roughly by the arm, and pulled the front of my dress down enough to slap the Dumine lock onto me. "Calliope Smith, you are hereby placed under arrest for conspiracy, treason, two counts of accessory to murder, and one count of robbery - for your involvement in the incident at the Golden Cask Auction House."