Magium

by Chris Michael Wilson

  “You dare to say all this to my face?” Meridith says, with a furious look in her eyes. “And you even present these barbarities to me as if they were some sort of accomplishment, deserving of praise? What in the gods’ names is wrong with you? These are all children! How is it possible to be this cruel? When I saw how the experiments are run in this place, I already had my doubts, but I never thought you would go this far!”

  “But Lady Meridith…” the bearded lessathi says. “Lord Heksol has already approved—”

  “I don’t care what Lord Heksol did or did not approve!” Meridith says. “Give me all of your names. And give me a list of all your procedures. Bring them to me now. If I see any more insane ‘techniques’ like this written in your documentation, I’m going to cross them all out, and if you ever dare to use them again, you will answer not only with your job, but with your life, do you understand?”

  “Yes, madam…” the lessathi says, reluctantly. “I will bring the documents to you at once.”

  “And the rest of you!” Meridith says, while looking towards the other lessathi. “I will hear your sides of the story right now. You’d better not skip any important details. I don’t think you’d want to anger me any further.”

  “Wow, that was a pretty interesting development…” Arraka says. “Isn’t Meridith the lessathi’s current leader? I wonder how their management has changed in the years since she took over…”

  “Well, Diane is no longer wearing a collar, so some things have definitely changed,” I say.

  “Oh, you’ve met her, recently?” Arraka says.

  “Yeah, and she said that she was working with the lessathi of her own free will,” I say. “It didn’t really seem like she trusted the lessathi she was escorting at the time, but from what I heard her say, it looked like she was considering Meridith to be her ally, at least.”

  “Arraka,” Illuna says, “don’t you think we should be focusing on escaping this place instead of having casual conversations?”

  “I am focusing on escaping,” Arraka says. “The only reason why I’m continuing with the ritual is to calm my nerves, while I try to make an escape plan.”

  “Why can’t we just go out the way we came in?” Illuna says.

  “Because I’m not sure if it’s safe!” Arraka says. “Normally, I would waltz right out of here without a second thought, but this carelessness of mine is what got us into this mess in the first place. Now I’m double-checking and triple-checking everything. As long as we stay here, we’re fine, but if we try to exit without taking any precautions, we may alert the Magium by mistake.”

  “You think the exits could be booby-trapped?” Illuna says.

  “I don’t know!” Arraka says. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. I thought that the Magium was supposed to remain in a state of constant hibernation, unless you tried to mess around with the really important stuff, like that time when Memphir banished me from the magical plane. I didn’t think it would wake up just from me trying to reveal its true nature! And now that I woke it up, I’m not sure how long it will stay up, or what are the extents of its capabilities. We are going to keep spectating rituals for as long as it takes, until I can be absolutely certain that the way out is clear.”

  “Okay, fine…” Illuna says. “Do what you think is best.”

  While we were talking, Meridith was just getting done with interrogating the lessathi, and she was sending them on their way.

  “When you see the caretaker who was bringing me the documents, tell him to come to my temporary office,” Meridith tells the lessathi who are now leaving the room.

  She then turns towards her lessathi bodyguards.

  “Go on ahead,” she tells them. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  As her bodyguards are leaving the way they came in, Meridith approaches Kate, and she bends over, so she can talk in a low voice, in her ear.

  “What you did back there was very brave,” Meridith says. “But bravery by itself is worthless unless you also have the power to enforce your own ideals upon others. Remember this advice.”

  She then taps her lightly on her shoulder and she goes to follow her two bodyguards, out of the room. Shortly after Meridith leaves, the whole room gets covered in a bright white light, and as soon as the light is gone, I realize that we are now situated in Kate’s holding cell, where Kate is also standing somewhere beside us, looking around her, confused.

  “Ah!” Arraka says. “I think I get it now. What she needs to do to complete the ritual is to no longer intervene, and to let that caretaker rescue only the children that he got to save in the original timeline. That’s going to take her a while to figure out, I guess… Alright, let’s move on to the next scene.”

  We are then transported into Diane’s room, where we see Kate trying yet again to convince her friend that she knows some information from the future, and that they can escape the Beacon together.

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been sent back…” Kate says. “I can prove to you that I’m coming from the future. I know exactly when the caretakers will be bringing our meals, and what we will have for breakfast. I know when the caretaker who wants to help us escape will contact us, and I know what he will say. I know many things. And I also know that Olivia is an informant to the lessathi… We can’t let her know about our escape plan, or she will tell them immediately. I’m going to try and convince the others myself, but you need to be the one to tell your brother about this. He won’t trust anyone else…”

  “If you’re really serious about those things you said,” Diane says, “then give me a list of everything you know, and I’ll make sure to give it to Jason as soon as possible. I’m sure he would be much more inclined to take you seriously if he sees the proof with his own eyes.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kate says. “You’ll have the list. I’m going to make sure that everything goes right this time. I won’t fail again!”

  “Oh, she will fail again!” Arraka says. “Have no doubt about that. Let’s see if we can speed things up a bit, because there are going to be a lot of rescue attempts to go through.”

  She then began to show me the key events that happened next, except this time around, all of the actions were summarized much more succinctly, in order to be able to paint a larger picture.

  For the first few attempts, Kate tried to focus on two things: getting the elementalist siblings on her side, and trying to convince the other orphans to follow her escape plan, without letting Olivia know.

  Every time when she was flung back in time, Kate would try to convince Diane and her brother that she was coming from the future, by letting them know about very specific things that were going to happen, before they happened. This was enough to convince Diane, but Jason was always skeptical, no matter how many details she was providing to them, and he thought that she was either using tricks to find out the information, or getting some really lucky guesses.

  Convincing the other orphans to follow her rescue plan was even harder, because she couldn’t risk telling them about her travels through time, out of fear that they might give this information to the lessathi. Since she couldn’t really provide any genuine proof that the lessathi caretaker trying to help them was actually trustworthy, the children would only get more suspicious every time she insisted that there was nothing to worry about. Therefore, by the end of the day, Kate would either get ratted out to the lessathi by one of the orphans, or she would simply get sent back in time, without making any notable progress.

  It took Kate many tries to finally find a way to get everyone on her side, and to enact their escape plan flawlessly, but what she didn’t know was that this was only the beginning of her trial, since saving the orphans was the exact opposite of what she needed to do, if she wanted to complete her ritual.

  “Wow…” I say, as we are now watching Kate struggling to find a way out of her time loop. “I didn’t expect her to repeat the ritual so many times. She must have spent at least a few weeks in this place,
if not more. How much time has passed in the real world, while Kate’s been doing all this stuff?”

  “Probably only a few minutes or so,” Arraka says. “Time flows completely differently, in each of these worlds that you people were sent to. The dwarf, the mute girl, and the revenant already finished their rituals. The healer is still busy with his, though.”

  “So, are you any closer to finding a way that gets us out of here safely?” I say.

  “It’s hard to say,” Arraka tells me. “I’ve been making progress, but there are still a lot of verifications that need to be done. Like I said, I’m not doing anything until I can be absolutely certain that there are no risks.”

  “Right…” I say.

  As we keep watching Kate go back in time over and over again, her tries seem to be getting more desperate with each new time loop. She is now trying to save even Olivia from the Beacon, because she is under the impression that the reason why time is repeating itself is that she didn’t manage to save every single one of the orphans from their prison. Her tries have gotten her captured numerous times, but luckily for her, even in the cases where she didn’t get rescued by Meridith, the time would always reset itself at the end of the day, so the lessathi never managed to finish their preparations for her dissection, or her re-education process, before she was sent back.

  After many more attempts, Kate finally managed to get everyone out safely, including Olivia, although the time would obviously still keep repeating itself, even in the most perfect possible scenarios. The optimism that could be seen on Kate’s face after the first few successful rescue attempts was now gradually turning into despair, as she was slowly starting to suspect that completing her ritual would require a completely different course of action on her part.

  “Hmm…” Arraka says. “I think she’s finally starting to get what’s happening, here. I’m still expecting her to be in denial about it, for at least five more time loops, though. Anyway, never mind that. What’s more important is that I may have actually found a proper way out of here, but I need to time it perfectly. Get ready to experience some strong nausea, because our comfort will be the very last thing on my mind while we escape this place.”

  After Arraka finishes her sentence, I feel a strong headache, all of a sudden, and then we all get transported back to our real world, in the blink of an eye. Once we return to our regular, non-transparent bodies, we take a look around, and we see that we are still standing in the middle of the same forest where we were when our rituals started, next to all of our friends. It appears that the time is still frozen in this world, and that not everyone has managed to get out of their trance just yet. The ones who finished their rituals aside from us seem to be Melindra, Leila, Hadrik, and the revenant, who are all looking at us, while Daren and Kate are still staring blankly in front of them, with bright, glowy eyes.

  “We made it…” Arraka says, sounding both surprised and relieved at the same time. “We made it! We got out of there alive. Hahahahahaha! Take that, Magium, you son of a bitch!”

  “Could you maybe avoid taunting the Magium when we are still technically standing right on its doorstep?” Illuna says.

  “Relax!” Arraka says. “Everything is under control. I got us out of there alive, didn’t I? And besides, I wasn’t even insulting it. I was giving it a compliment, by treating it as if it were an actual person.”

  “You are acting as if you’ve already forgotten what can happen when you ignore my warnings…” Illuna says, in a serious tone. “Would you perhaps like me to give you a small reminder by transporting us back into the world we just escaped from?”

  It seems that Illuna’s question has rendered Arraka completely silent. After a few more seconds of waiting for an answer, Illuna continues.

  “You know that I can do it,” she says. “You’re the one who taught me everything I know, after all…”

  “Alright, you win!” Arraka says, in a somewhat panicked tone. “I’ll shut my mouth, okay? It was just a little gloating, that’s all… You don’t have to get so upset over it!”

  “Arraka sounding scared?” Hadrik says, with a grin, although I can see from the uneasy look in his eyes that he is still affected by whatever happened to him in his ritual. “Now, that’s something you don’t see every day!”

  “Trust me, if you’d have gone through what we just did, you’d be panicking like that too,” I say.

  “Well, you know me, Barry,” Hadrik says. “Even if I’m scared out of my wits, I still could never pass up a good challenge!”

  “Is that so?” Arraka says. “In that case you must have absolutely loved your ritual! Because from what I saw, to say that your trial was a challenge would be quite an understatement.”

  “What do you know about my ritual?…” Hadrik says, as he regains the uneasiness from before in his eyes.

  “More than you think, dwarf,” Arraka says. “And I’m not talking only about your trial from the God of Time. I’ve looked through some of your memories too, since they were pretty much out in the open, when you were trapped in there. I saw some very interesting things, while I was looking through the memories that were related to your ritual. Want me to tell you what I found out?”

  “You’re bluffing,” Hadrik says, as I see him starting to sweat a little. “You’re just trying to bait me into giving the information away myself. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Well, I don’t know, dwarf…” Arraka says. “How stupid are you?”

  For the next few seconds, the two of them remain completely silent, as Hadrik watches Arraka’s amulet intensely, while a few more drops of sweat form on his forehead.

  “But seriously, though, I was only joking,” Arraka says, all of a sudden. “I have absolutely no idea what was going on in your ritual. The only reason why I said all that was because you pissed me off, and I wanted to make you sweat like a pig. Who’s the one panicking now, eh? Aha- Ahahahahahaha!”

  “Blasted old hag…” Hadrik says, as he relaxes a little.

  “So, you really didn’t get to see Hadrik’s ritual, then?” I ask Arraka.

  “Nah,” Arraka says. “There were just too many of them for me to have time to see them all. Well, anyway, it’s pretty obvious that his ritual wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows either, but I guess we’re just going to have to wait until he feels like telling us about it, if we want to find out what it was. Personally, I don’t mind all that much. It’s not like we don’t have anything better to do at this point than to listen to his sob story, you know what I’m saying?”

  Not long after we finish our conversation, Daren’s eyes lose their bright yellow color, as he finally exits his trance as well. From the look on his face, I can easily tell that he’s pretty upset.

  “Oh, look, the healer is out!” Arraka says. “How’s it going, Daren? Had fun in your ritual?”

  Daren chooses to completely ignore Arraka’s question, and he turns to me, instead.

  “How many are still inside their rituals?” Daren asks me. “Only Kate?”

  “Yeah, only Kate,” I say. “You can tell from the glowy eyes. I think that we need to wait for everyone to be done with the first stage, before we can pass on to the next one.”

  “I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it,” Daren says. “Where is the God of Time? Is he still watching us?”

  “No, he went back to the magical plane,” I say. “He’ll come back again at the end of the ritual, according to Arraka.”

  While Daren and I were talking, Kate managed to get out of her trance as well, but the expression she has now on her face is very painful to watch. Leaving aside her strong feelings of sadness and regret that can be easily seen at a first glance, I think it’s the look of resignation from her eyes that really shows just how much this ritual has gotten to her. Realizing that she is no longer alone, Kate immediately changes the expression on her face to one of only extreme fatigue, as she asks us the same questions that Daren asked, a few moments ago.

  “Is e
veryone else already done with their ritual?” Kate says. “And where is the God of Time? I thought he was supposed to oversee these trials until their very end.”

  “The first stage of the ritual is done, and now we’re waiting for the second,” Daren says. “The God of Time apparently went back to the magical plane, and he’ll only come back at the end.”

  “If that’s true, then maybe we can make some plan against him,” Kate says. “Maybe we can find a way to sabotage his ritual while he’s not here to keep an eye on us…”

  “You can’t sabotage the rituals…” Melindra says. “Eiden has tried and failed in the past. If he couldn’t do it, then how could we?”

  “Eiden isn’t all-knowing,” Daren says. “Just because he failed, it doesn’t mean that we won’t succeed.”

  “Oh?” Melindra says. “Then how do you propose to start this ‘sabotage’?”

  “We’ll… figure something out…” Daren says.

  “If you say so,” Melindra says.

  “If you’re looking to sabotage the ritual, then I might be able to offer some assistance,” we hear Rose’s voice all of a sudden.

  We’d all been ignoring the revenant until this point, but now that she spoke to us, everyone’s eyes immediately turned to her.

  “And why would we want any help from you, revenant?” Daren says, in a disgusted tone.

  “Because this ritual is as much a problem for me as it is for you,” the revenant says. “…And also because as much as I’ve tried to avoid it, there are traces of your friend Rose within me that will always be a part of who I am. At the very least, I know that Rose would have wanted us to work together, despite our differences, since nothing would have been more important to her in this situation than to make sure that you are safe.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about Rose as if you knew her, you undead monster,” Daren says, with fury in his eyes. “Who are you to say what she would have wanted, after you stole her body and went to serve some sinister god, while leaving her siblings to cry their hearts out at home, due to their sister’s death? I don’t care if you look like her, or if you have her memories. You will never be anything other than an empty shell. You will never be anything like Rose. Do you understand? Never!”