The Wizard of Time Trilogy (A Fantasy Time Travel Series)

by G. L. Breedon

  He sensed a space-time distortion nearby but ignored it and kept his eyes closed. Explosions and shouts followed, but he disregarded those as well. He could sense, through the psychic link, the elation of two Apollyons who had somehow managed to find the location of their attackers. Gabriel focused on these two men alone, knowing that if he could force them into unconsciousness, he would end their attack. He experienced, through the link, an emotion akin to deep satisfaction from the two as space-time warped nearby and the sounds of battle ceased. The elation lingered through the psychic connection for a moment. They had taken someone with them.

  Cassius, the reformed Apollyon.

  Suddenly, Gabriel found he could no longer locate the two Apollyons through the psychic bond. There could only be one explanation — they had severed themselves from the link to avoid falling prey to Gabriel’s Soul Magic attack.

  Gabriel turned his attention back to the other Dark Mages linked through the first Apollyon, still unconscious in his hands. He sensed a few more and redoubled his efforts to subjugate their minds into submission. As Gabriel felt the last of the Apollyons spread out across time fade from consciousness, the ground exploded beneath him, sending his body flying into the air.

  He opened his eyes as he hit the grassy hillside, rolling with the inertia of his fall. The Soul Magic circle no longer joined him to the other mages, but he still held the imprints of his own talismans and the concatenate crystals. He looked around to see fellow mages lying scattered throughout the billowing grass.

  He turned around, trying to survey the damage to his companions. Akikane and Nefferati lay unconscious beside each other as did Cyril and Vicaquirao. The Soul Magic seemed to have rebounded against them. Ohin knelt next to Sema, calling out for help, waving toward Marcus, who tended to Rajan’s burnt arm. Gabriel ignored the ringing in his ears as he called out for Teresa, his voice sounding muffled.

  He twisted in place and saw Teresa beside two of the fallen Soul Mages. The strange look on her face froze him. She shouted something and pointed, but Gabriel could not hear her words clearly. He spun to follow her finger, glimpsing someone for only a moment before following his instincts as they urged him to hit the ground and roll away. Heat blazed above him as he continued to tumble and leap to his feet to face his attacker.

  “Here is my retribution.”

  Kumaradevi, dozens of glowing concatenate crystals ringing her neck and arms, raised her hands to attack.

  “How could you escape your world?” Gabriel stepped sideways to draw Kumaradevi’s violence away from the others and hopefully allow one of them to flank her position. With most of the mages around him wounded and Kumaradevi possessing numerous concatenate crystals, defeating her would be unpredictable. Those crystals would likely be linked to imprints in the Primary Continuum now that her dark alternate world had been severed.

  “I escaped nothing.” Kumaradevi paced through the grass toward Gabriel. “That foolish Greek is not the only one who can make copies of himself.”

  Gabriel struggled to hear her words through his ringing ears and to make sense of them as they resonated in his mind.

  Kumaradevi had doubled herself.

  “Your world is not dead, even if you can’t touch it,” Gabriel said. “I severed it in a way that allows it to survive.” He saw movement from the side of his eyes. Ohin, Rajan, and Ling snuck through the grass.

  “What would I care if I cannot make use of the imprints I harvested there?” Kumaradevi glared at Gabriel as she flicked a hand and the ground exploded nearby, sending Ling and Rajan and Ohin tumbling into the air.

  “You are still alive there,” Gabriel said. “Probably.”

  “She is not me. She is nothing. And now you will be nothing.” This Kumaradevi did not want revenge for her lost kingdom, or the original version of herself. She wanted revenge for the loss of the power it had afforded her.

  A stream of impossibly bright energy erupted from the twin Kumaradevi’s hands and flashed toward Gabriel. He had no time to move and barely assembled his thoughts to form a shield of Fire Magic. He flinched as a thin wave of reddish energy struck the wall of blazing light before it could reach him. Kumaradevi’s attack bounced away, ricocheting like light striking a mirror. He blinked, confused. He knew he had not defected Kumaradevi’s magic. Her eyes flared, and Gabriel followed them to see Teresa standing twenty feet away. The Kumaradevi duplicate attacked again, casting her deadly Fire Magic toward Teresa.

  Gabriel screamed and watched as Teresa created a thin wedge of blazing light, splitting Kumaradevi’s bolt of energy and driving it to both sides, the overwhelming onslaught of power forcing her to her knees.

  Gabriel threw a wave of Soul and Heart-Tree magic at the duplicate Kumaradevi, intending to cripple her. She ceased her attack on Teresa and deflected Gabriel’s magic. She commanded far more imprints than he could access. He rolled to the ground again, hearing her shriek in rage. He lifted his head as a massive wave of light filled the world and temporarily blinded him.

  As his eyesight recovered, a scream pierced the air and drew his attention briefly away from where he had last seen the duplicate Kumaradevi. Vicaquirao sat on his knees, his heat blistered face stricken in horror as he looked at a long pile of ashes scattering in the breeze — all that remained of the man who had been Cyril.

  Gabriel turned back to see the twin Kumaradevi’s open hands once again aimed at him. He unsheathed the Sword of Unmaking, preparing to jump through space and attack her directly, when the blade flashed from his hand, ripped from his fingers by an unseen force. He thought for a moment that the duplicate Kumaradevi had used Wind magic to yank the sword from his grasp, but the thought faded as he saw the hilt of his sword sticking from her chest. She blinked in wonder as she looked at the ancient blade buried in her heart. Then she toppled sideways, dead before she hit the soft grass below her feet.

  Gabriel looked around, confused at what had just transpired. He saw Vicaquirao, eyes fierce with pain, nod to him and then turn back to the remains of the man he had raised like a son from the age of twelve.

  Gabriel swallowed. Vicaquirao had used Time Magic to take the sword from Gabriel’s hand and place it inside Kumaradevi’s chest, killing her almost instantly. Or at least he had killed a copy of her. Gabriel swallowed again with that thought. He had never considered the possibility that Kumaradevi might have a double kept somewhere in case of an emergency. The duplicate Kumaradevi had probably been held in a time stasis field, like a permanent space-time bubble, and released when her alternate world was severed from the Primary Continuum. A cunning back-up plan. How many versions of herself had she hidden throughout time? And how had she found him? Through the Apollyons? Had they helped her knowingly, or had she ghosted their trails through time? How had she known which ones to follow? Had she made more than one duplicate of herself?

  Gabriel ignored these thoughts. The wounded required assistance. They needed to find a secure place to regroup and assess what had happened. There were still the two Apollyons who had captured Cassius to deal with, as well as those trapped in magical comas. Someone had to get the Grace Mages organized and on their way. Someone needed to lead.

  “This place is not safe.” Gabriel raised his voice to carry across the hillside as he walked over to Teresa and helped her to her feet.

  “Thank you.”

  He stared into her eyes, trying to forget the white-hot wave of energy that had nearly turned her to dust and cinders.

  “She should have picked a different magic to try to kill you with.” Teresa held his hand a moment longer than necessary. “We’re almost even again.”

  Gabriel discarded the thoughts her statement caused to saturate his mind. He turned to the others. “Everyone gather here in the middle. We’ll tend to the wounded once we’re clear of this place.”

  He used Wind Magic to help carry unconscious mages, Akikane and Nefferati among them, to one of the few swaths of grass not smoking in the aftermath of the duplicate Kumaradevi’
s attack. Marcus carried Sema, still-unconscious but no longer bleeding, to the assembly area.

  Gabriel strode over to where Vicaquirao gathered the ashen remains of Cyril into a small pouch.

  “We need to go.” Gabriel placed a hand on Vicaquirao’s shoulder.

  “I wanted to gather some ashes.” Vicaquirao stood up, breathing deep and wiping muddied soot from his eyes. “For Semele.”

  “Thank you.” Gabriel walked with Vicaquirao back to the others. “You saved me.”

  “No.” Vicaquirao’s voice sounded harsh, like metal rasping against stone. “I don’t believe she would have beaten you in the end. But I also don’t think you would have done what needed to be done.”

  Gabriel had no reply to that impression of events. He took a relic from his pocket, a small button from a coat he would never see, and began to bend the fabric of space and time to carry them all away to someplace safe. Someplace where they could evaluate their losses and determine how to secure their future.

  Vicaquirao turned to him just as the first Cimmerian phase of time travel swallowed them.

  “The two who are left will try to kill you now. That is their only remaining hope for destroying the Great Barrier.”

  Chapter 25

  The smell of burnt wood and charred brick filled the air, stinging Gabriel’s nose and clinging to his clothes. He crouched next to Nefferati, both of their hands resting on Sema’s head as she lay on the soot-stained concrete floor. He had brought them through time to a bombed-out and abandoned building in 1943 London in the midst of World War II. While he trusted Vicaquirao more than his Grace Mage companions, he did not think it wise to let the man know of the existence of their new fort.

  Gabriel probed Sema’s mind with his magic-sense, assisting Nefferati in attempting to revive her. He had managed to easily waken Akikane and Nefferati from the effects of the blown-back Soul Magic that had thrust them into unconsciousness. Waking the other Soul Mages had also proved straightforward. However, Sema had been affected differently. As he focused on delving Sema’s mind with Soul and Heart-Tree Magic, he felt a mounting frustration begin to consume him. There seemed no good reason for her continued slumber. It reminded him of the magical coma that had afflicted Elizabeth for more than a year. The cause appeared clear, but the cure elusive.

  He thought through the last moments before the Apollyons’ attack, trying to remember exactly how he had been blending the magic to infect their minds and put them into deep sleep. As he did so, the obvious occurred to him. He had not simply been weaving Soul Magic, he had been merging imprints of Grace and Malignancy to create that magic.

  Gabriel opened his eyes to see Vicaquirao standing nearby, looking through a large hole in a wall, gazing out over London as the sun dipped behind the tallest of the buildings.

  “I need one of the tainted concatenate crystals back,” Gabriel said.

  Vicaquirao turned from the cityscape, his face shifting from a look of curiosity to sudden understanding. He reached in his pocket to retrieve the crystal Gabriel had given back to him only minutes ago. Gabriel accepted the crystal and embraced its imprints as he held to those of his pocket watch.

  “Are you certain of this?” Nefferati opened her eyes.

  “Certain of what?” Marcus asked, his face wracked with worry. He sat next to Sema holding one of her hands in his, stroking it gently.

  “It makes sense,” Gabriel said. “I was using both imprints for the magic that knocked her out. It might take both to wake her.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes again and returned his concentration to the task of examining Sema’s mind with his magic-sense. Now that he embraced both negative and positive imprints, the play of the Soul Magic across Sema’s mind appeared clearer. He could see how the different aspects of the magic folded around her consciousness. The two forms of imprints manifested themselves differently when worked together. He imagined them like a web of knots enclosing Sema’s mind, and he fashioned a slender scalpel of Soul Magic to snip the threads that bound her in a state of unawareness. Unable to do more, he released the magic and the imprints as he opened his eyes.

  “Anything?” Marcus asked, his eyes damp with concern.

  Sema’s eyelashes fluttered and she took a deep breath.

  “Oh.” Sema looked around at the faces of those beside her. “We’re alive then. That’s good.”

  “Very good.” Marcus laughed, wiping his arm across his eyes.

  Gabriel rose to his feet, helping Nefferati up and stepping away to give Marcus and Sema time alone. He walked with her to where Ohin stood with Akikane and the rest of the team.

  “Ohin, I need you to go back to the fort and bring Elizabeth here,” Gabriel said.

  “You think using the two imprints may wake her?” Nefferati asked.

  “Maybe,” Gabriel said. “I was thinking that if Elizabeth had been attempting to use Soul Magic on the two Apollyons it might take both imprints to revive her.”

  “Why bring her here?” Ohin asked.

  “I’ll need Vicaquirao to help me,” Gabriel said. “It’s not about how many imprints I can control, it’s about how subtly I can use them. He has much more experience. I’ll need Nefferati’s help as well.”

  “Ling, I will need your assistance.” Ohin stepped back from the others.

  “Of course.” Ling joined Ohin at the edge of the group.

  Ohin nodded to Gabriel and Nefferati before he and Ling winked away into time.

  “We must speak.”

  Gabriel turned to the sound of Vicaquirao’s voice.

  “About what you said back on the hillside.” Gabriel’s eyes slid to the corner where the remains of the duplicate Kumaradevi’s body lay in the shadows. The Sword of Unmaking rested on the floor beside the corpse. He had removed the blade from her chest but had not had time to clean it in the rush to revive the fallen Soul Mages. Near her body, the captured Apollyon laid slumbering, his hands and feet bound tightly as a precaution.

  “Yes.” Vicaquirao followed Gabriel’s stare for a moment, then turned back.

  “I’m sorry about Cyril,” Gabriel said. “And Cassius.”

  “Cassius is why the Apollyons will try to kill you,” Vicaquirao said.

  “Explain.” Nefferati crossed her arms and moved closer to Vicaquirao.

  “He will likely be dead by now, but the two Apollyons who remain will have interrogated him.” Vicaquirao frowned. “Cassius will have confessed the suspicions that I shared with him.”

  “What suspicions?” A familiar chill began to expand in Gabriel’s stomach, a fear of revelations that would upend his world.

  “About the true manner of how The Great Barrier of Probability was created.” Vicaquirao’s eyes fastened on Gabriel. “I do not believe the Barrier was created by a large circle of Dark and Light mages working together. I believe it was created by one mage, wielding both magics.”

  “What?” A dizziness overtook Gabriel’s mind. He pushed aside the urge to sit on the floor.

  “One mage, no matter how powerful, could never control the imprints necessary to create the Barrier.” Nefferati shook her head dismissively.

  “Not one mage.” Teresa stepped up beside Gabriel, looking between him and Vicaquirao. “One mage who copied himself a hundred and seven times.”

  “Exactly.” Vicaquirao still stared at Gabriel.

  “That makes no sense.” Gabriel’s feet carried him backward several paces until he bumped into the remains of a wall.

  “Wild conjecture.” Nefferati’s voice sounded uncertain.

  “It would explain many things that are still unclear,” Vicaquirao said. “It is the most elegant solution to the question of how the Barrier came into existence.”

  “He’s right,” Teresa said, her face pinched as she considered the implications of the idea. “It is possible.”

  “Possible, possible,” Akikane had remained nearby, silent throughout the exchange. “But likely?”

  “The Barrier has always existe
d.” Gabriel’s heart beat evermore quickly in his chest. “How could I be responsible for creating it?”

  “It has always existed, but that doesn’t mean it always existed in your personal timeline.” Teresa scowled as she brought her fist to her chin in concentration.

  “I don’t have any idea how to create the Barrier, much less when to create it,” Gabriel said.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure out how, but I suspect the when will need to be soon,” Vicaquirao said.

  “Why?” Nefferati asked. “Why soon?”

  “Because of Cassius,” Vicaquirao answered. “In his interrogation, he will no doubt have revealed my suspicions to the two remaining Apollyon copies. They will unquestionably realize that their best chance for destroying The Great Barrier now lies in killing Gabriel before he can create it.”

  “That assumes I did create it,” Gabriel said. “Or do create it.” The dizziness only increased the more they discussed Vicaquirao’s wild idea.

  “This sounds like the worst paradox ever.” Rajan rubbed his forehead in obvious confusion.

  “Maybe so, maybe so,” Akikane said. “However, it may also make sense of the paradox presented by the Barrier itself.”

  “How would I know when to create the Barrier?” Gabriel asked, trying to figure it out in his mind. He usually had a good grasp of time travel and potential paradoxes, but this particular one, with him at the center of it, eluded his comprehension. “Do I wait for it to cease existing and then make it exist? Assuming I can figure out how?”