Before the time loop, Zorian had never frequented the taverns, restaurants and other establishments that were so common in Cyoria. They were a waste of time and money in his opinion, and it wasn’t like he had any real friends to go drinking with. It didn’t help that he had seen more than one of his classmates succumb to the lure of big city life in his two years of education. Rural teenagers like him were especially vulnerable, since they had little to no parental supervision and were unaccustomed to the luxuries and opportunities that existed in Cyoria. Zorian did not want to follow their example, especially after it became obvious that his brother Fortov had fallen into the exact same trap as they had.

Amusingly, the time loop had pretty much made him worse in this regard, and he was now familiar with virtually every alcohol-serving establishment in Cyoria. This was mostly Zach’s fault – his fellow time traveler loved drinking and despised the static nature of the time loop, which meant he dragged off Zorian to a different place every time they had to meet or talk.

The situation was similar at the moment. Once they’d both had a chance to gather their thoughts, Zorian tried to pursue the topic of Zach’s angelic contract and the restrictions he was laboring under, only for his fellow time traveler to insist he needed a drink. Zorian himself had never understood the appeal of alcohol, but he also knew it was pointless to argue about things like that with Zach. He just let his friend lead him to a small but lively tavern, where they claimed a table and erected simple privacy wards to ensure some privacy. Still not the safest location for this kind of thing, but it would do.

“Ahh..” said Zach in satisfaction, slamming a beer glass on the table before wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Zorian’s mouth twitched at the sight, but he said nothing. He was already used to that kind of behavior from Zach, really. “I really needed that.”

“So. Can I spoil the mood now and dig a little more into this whole angelic contract thing?” Zorian asked him, folding his fingers together in a thoughtful gesture.

“I guess,” Zach shrugged. “Though I really don’t think I’ll be able to tell you much.”

“I just need some things confirmed,” Zorian said. “You said you can’t talk about the contract thing.. that it physically stops you from saying the words.. but would it stop me from picking it up from your thoughts through telepathy?”

Zach looked uncomfortable for a moment, his eyebrows twisted into a thoughtful frown.

“It shouldn’t,” he eventually decided. “I mean, we communicated through telepathy quite a few times in the past. You read my surface thoughts more than once, and I never felt any urge to attack you. Let’s try it.”

Zorian felt Zach lowering his mental berries and immediately started looking through his surface thoughts. Which.. appeared to be completely empty.

Blank, even.

“Are you thinking about the angel contract at the moment?” Zorian asked, frowning.

“I’m thinking of the ‘mysterious rules’ that I’m laboring under,” Zach told him. “If that’s really a death pact with the angels like Silverlake was saying, then yes, I’m thinking about it. Why?”

“I can’t read anything from you,” Zorian admitted. “It’s like you have no thoughts at all.”

It didn’t work. No matter what trick or method they used, Zorian could not get anything about a contract from Zach’s surface thoughts. It wasn’t that he could not read the boy at all – he could interpret Zach’s thoughts just fine when he was thinking about mundane things, like how his hand itched or how cute the passing waitress was, but every thought that involved the ‘mysterious rules’, as Zach called them, was invisible to Zorian.

The effect was both subtle and sophisticated. There was no indication that Zach’s thoughts were being magically blanked out, and it looked mostly like Zach was deliberately blanking his thoughts or just plain not thinking of anything. If Zach tried to embed a few relevant thoughts in a larger stream of consciousness, the restriction would not only unerringly pick out the offending parts, it would do its best to quietly erase them without leaving any suspicious pauses or other evidence of tampering. Unless someone spent a lot of time scrutinizing Zach’s thoughts or already knew what to look for, it would be very easy to overlook the fact that some of the thoughts had been tampered with.

How was the contract even doing that? Zorian had no idea how something like that could get accomplished without the contract itself being sapient in some fashion. But that couldn’t really be true, right?

“What if I tried to read your memories?” Zorian asked.

“No!” Zach immediately and reflexively protested. He stared at him for a second before shaking his head, seemingly reasserting control over himself in that one moment. “No. Bad idea.”

Zorian nodded slowly, making a placating gesture.

“Alright,” he said carefully. “But you know, someone has already read your mind once. As well as erased a bunch of things in it...”

“Red Robe,” Zach nodded.

“Yes,” Zorian confirmed. “Doesn’t that.. make you murderous, I guess?”

“Well, it kind of did,” Zach said, scratching his hand. “Remember when we first met and I told you I had a confrontation with Red Robe for the first couple of restarts after he disabled me and read my mind? I made it seem like he was the aggressor all the time and I was just an innocent victim, but.. I may have been simplifying things just a little bit. I basically made it my life’s goal to destroy him for a while there. I hounded him relentlessly for at least two restarts. It may have been one of the reasons why he decided to leave the time loop entirely after a while.”

“Oh,” said Zorian. That.. made a lot of sense, actually. “But you were both time travelers. What would you even do to him if you managed to catch him?”

“You don’t need to be a master mind mage to erase the victim’s entire mind,” Zach told him. “Or scramble it beyond all repair. There are spells for that, and I got ahold of all kinds of illegal spells while looping.”

“You got me there,” Zorian admitted. The sort of effect Zach was describing did not take much skill and sophistication; just power. “I notice you aren’t frothing at the mouth right now at the thought of Red Robe being present again, though. Does the effect run out or something?”

“Yeah, I calmed down after a while, since I could no longer find him,” Zach said with a shrug. “Even after I left the time loop and saw Red Robe again, it didn’t start up again. I guess the angels didn’t want me to become useless if someone read my mind and then fled beyond my reach.”

“So I should have just forcibly read your mind and then spent a few restarts running away from you?” Zorian mused.

Zach scowled at him.

“What? You have to admit that’s a reasonable interpretation of what is happening,” Zorian said.

Except that he was not at all sure he could have successfully evaded Zach for several restarts. His fellow time traveler had vastly more endurance than Zorian did, and knew most of the places and escape routes Zorian could come up with. Zorian might have still been able to avoid any permanent consequences of being caught if he forced a restart every time he was forced into a corner, but doing so would rapidly burn through their remaining restarts.

“Anyway, what about the first time Red Robe messed with your mind?” Zorian asked. “You know, the one where he erased Veyers out of your mind and gods know what else?”

“I don’t know,” Zach said, frowning. “I don’t recall going on that kind of hunt for someone before we met. I guess since I had no idea who mind raped me, and perhaps didn’t even know there was a specific person behind my amnesia, the effect never kicked in.”

“Hmm,” Zorian mused. “So if I never find out that you had your memory read or never see your attacker–”

“It won’t work. I’m no longer the same person I was back then. I will know I had my mind tampered with, and I’ll know it was you,” Zach warned him. “And not just because you just stupidly clued me in that you’re considering it, either. I mean, who else but you could pull it off? Even if I had absolutely no proof, my first instinct would be to blame you.”

“And then you’d try to kill me,” Zorian guessed.

“That, or erase your relevant memories,” Zach said. “But we both know how impractical that option is on a mind mage like yourself. In practice.. yes, I’d have to kill you.”

So. The contract could mask Zach’s surface thoughts to eliminate any mention of itself, but it couldn’t do the same for his long-term memories for some reason. Thus, anyone who looked deep into Zach’s memories had to be.. silenced.

In whatever manner was practical.

“Who determines who has to be memory wiped and who has to die?” Zorian asked.

“What do you mean?” Zach asked.

“What if Ilsa read your memories?” Zorian clarified with an example. “Would you memory wipe her or kill her?”

“Memory wipe her,” Zach said immediately.

“Really? But she has some pretty advanced knowledge of mind magic under her belt,” Zorian pointed out. “She’s possibly even better than Xvim in that regard.”

“Really?” Zach said, surprised. “Huh. I would have never guessed. Damn.. I guess I would have to kill her in that case.”

Zorian stared at Zach for a second.

He lied. Ilsa had no advanced knowledge of mind magic. She knew how to cast telepathy spells, and that was it.

Guess that answered his question – Zach was the one that made the decision. The contract may force him to act in certain ways, but it was Zach’s perception that determined things..

“What?” Zach asked.

“Nothing,” Zorian said, shaking his head. “Let’s forget that, then. There is something else I’ve been wondering. Silverlake said you have to make sure the time loop stays a secret or you die, right?”

“Right,” Zach sighed. “She did say that, didn’t she? Of course, I can’t really confirm or deny anything..”

“But it’s pretty much true,” Zorian surmised. “However, back in the time loop, I recall that you tried to convince pretty much everyone who would listen that the time loop was real. Or at least you told me you did so. Plus, you never had any issue with helping me convince people that the time loop was real.”

“Well yeah, I’m not compelled to keep it a secret,” Zach shrugged. “I can’t talk to people about the ‘mysterious rules’ that bind me, but everything else is fair game. I can tell people about the time loop just fine, I just have to keep in mind the potential consequences. And.. while the time loop was still going on, those consequences were a non-issue, you know?”

“Right. You only die if the knowledge of the time loop isn’t contained in the real world, when it actually matters. It doesn’t matter how many people you tell inside the time loop, because they’ll never get out of there anyway,” Zorian guessed. “Or at least that was the idea, probably.”

“Keep in mind, I had no idea how the time loop worked back then,” Zach said. “I didn’t know there was a real world and the time loop world, or any other details that we figured out later. I wasn’t lying to you when I said I don’t remember how I got in the time loop and how it functions.”

Right. That was pretty terrible design by the angels. If they could make sure that the contract they made with Zach was impossible to forget by any means, why didn’t they include some basic information there as well?

Alanic apparently wasn’t kidding when he said angels worked in mysterious ways.

“If you didn’t know how the time loop works, how did you know when telling people about the time loop matters and when it doesn’t?” Zorian asked.

Zach couldn’t answer him, of course. That would mean he would reveal some of the information about his contract thing, and that was forbidden.

“Well, we have no real choice here,” Zorian said. “If you can’t discuss these mysterious rules you are laboring under, and you don’t even have a solid idea what they mean, we’ll have to summon the angels for a talk.”

Zach gave him a surprised look.

“But you..” he began.

“I’m not supposed to be here, outside the time loop, yes,” Zorian said, nodding.

This was the primary reason they had been hesitating about contacting the angelic hierarchy, even though they had already suspected the angels were involved in the time loop. It was entirely possible that summoning an angel would just draw their attention to Zorian’s existence and give them a chance to finish what the Guardian of the Threshold had already tried and failed to do.

“We’d be risking a lot,” Zach said, frowning.

“No, I’m risking a lot,” countered Zorian. “And I’m willing to take the risk. We need to see if this contract of yours can be re-negotiated, or at least find out what it actually entails.”

Zach gave it a brief thought, tapping his fingers against the beer glass in his hand.

“Well.. it’s not like I was looking forward to dying,” Zach finally said. “Though if the angels immediately smite you dead upon sight, don’t come crying to me that I didn’t warn you.”

“I won’t be doing anything at that point, being dead and all,” Zorian blandly pointed out. “Anyway, Silverlake said you made a contract to stop Panaxeth from being released at the end of the month. If true, that suggests the angels care a lot about keeping Panaxeth in his prison. Killing me would interfere with that. Plus, silencing all the extra witnesses is impossible so long as Red Robe lives. Hopefully that will give them pause.”

Well, that all made perfect sense to Zorian, but it was obvious that the logic of angels was not the same as the logic of men. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the summoned angel just ignored everything Zorian said and tried to kill him anyway.

Would it be considered disrespectful if he sent a simulacrum instead of participating in the summoning personally?

“You really think there is a chance to renegotiate.. this?” Zach asked, waving vaguely over his chest.

It was unlikely. But hey, it was worth a try, right?

“The contract is probably divine magic, right?” Zorian asked, ignoring the question for now.

“I.. don’t actually know,” Zach said uncertainly. “It has to be. I mean, otherwise I would have managed to find it by now, right? The only piece of mortal magic I ever found embedded in my soul is the marker..”

Zorian shook his head. He was pretty sure the marker did not include any divine energies or ‘mysterious rules’ in it.. because if it did, Zorian himself would have probably inherited them from Zach when he acquired his marker.

“It’s probably a part of the soul stabilization frame that boosts your mana reserves,” Zorian pointed out. “The divine blessing and divine contract probably came together as a package deal.”

Zach winced slightly.

“Yes, I kind of guessed that too,” he admitted. “But that whole frame is incredibly complicated.. it’s hard to figure out where the blessing ends and the contract starts.”

Yes, that was pretty much how Zorian expected it to be. The blessing and contract were probably intertwined in a way that made it impossible to remove one and not the other. That way, even if Zach found a way to remove the contract, he would have to give up the mana boost that came along with it.

An extra layer of security that would make just about anyone hesitate to tamper with the whole thing. After all, who would be willing to lose something as amazing as a divine blessing that doubles your mana reserves?

“Even if the angels agree to renegotiate, you’d probably have to give up your divine blessing,” Zorian eventually said.

Zach looked horrified at the thought, but also a little bit resigned. He seemed to have expected something like that to be true.

“Aw, man..” he whined, finishing his entire beer glass in one desperate gulp before ordering another from a nearby waitress.

“It’s better than being dead,” Zorian consoled him.

“I don’t know, man.. how would you react if you had to give up half of your mana reserves tomorrow?” Zach asked him sullenly.

Zorian blinked rapidly in surprise. That’s right.. Zach didn’t even know his mana reserves were a result of a divine blessing until relatively recently. The current situation had persisted as far as he could remember. His mana reserves felt normal as they were right now, and reducing them probably felt no different than a crippling injury..

“I’d be absolutely devastated, but it’s still better than dying,” he finally said, a little quieter this time.

Zach gave him a cranky grunt and said nothing else in response.

“How are we going to summon an angel, anyway?” Zach eventually asked, calming down a little when he got his second glass of beer delivered to their table. “Alanic?”

“Alanic can’t summon an angel,” Zorian said, shaking his head. “Only a few priests are capable of that, and he is not one of them. However, I happen to know someone in this very city who is capable of summoning angels, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Though we might want to invite Alanic with us, anyway.”

“Oh? Who is it?” Zach asked curiously. “I don’t remember anyone like that.”

“You wouldn’t know her. I haven’t really interacted with her ever since we teamed up,” Zorian noted. “It’s Kylae Kuosi, a priestess in one of the semi-abandoned temples here in Cyoria. She a bit of an obscure figure, but she’s a capable mage and she knows quite a bit of interesting magic. For instance, she is one of the ‘experts’ when it comes to forecasting the future through divinations.. and she also knows how to establish contact with the angels. It didn’t matter much in the time loop, since contact with the spiritual planes had been blocked there, but now..”

“Alright,” Zach said after a second of thought. “Let’s see what the heavenly bastards have to say.”

* * *

It took them three days to arrange for the summoning to occur. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but Kylae was understandably very suspicious about a couple of teenagers showing up on her doorstep and asking for her to summon an angel so they could talk to it. The fact Zach and Zorian were in a hurry and were pushing for her to set up the ritual quickly did not help matters. Thankfully, after bringing in Alanic to vouch for them and explaining several times that Zach had been given some kind of mission by the angels that he had forgot made her reluctantly agree to their request.

While this was going on, their other preparations continued. The Silent Doorway Adepts had finally agreed to open a passage to Koth, and Zach and Zorian used it to quickly claim the imperial orb. They did not establish contact with Daimen for the moment. The original plan was to evacuate everyone to Koth the moment a gate there was established, but that plan was now looking a lot less practical than it used to be. Talking everyone into cooperating with their plan while keeping them ignorant about the time loop was.. impractical, to say the least.

Zorian was still a little pissed off that Zach had never tried to stop him when they had been discussing doing that, even though he knew this was practically suicide on his part. But then again.. the situation was kind of hopeless. How would they ever be able to contain the knowledge of the time loop when they had no control over Red Robe and he had very little reason to keep things a total secret? Not to mention the problem of Zorian himself..

Princess was claimed as normal and bound to Zorian. Zach’s situation was deemed too unstable to have Princess depend on him. They had no idea how the bond with Princess would interact with his ‘mysterious rules’, and whether its presence would make it more complicated to adjust the contract he had with the angels. Plus, if Zach was compelled to go to a rampage or something, it was best he didn’t also have a loyal hydra at his disposal as well. His current skills were a headache enough.

Xvim also joined their little group of time loop aware individuals. They had already started talking to him before Zorian found out about the contract, so it was pointless to back off from him now.. plus, they could really use his help.

Finally, the scheduled day of the summoning had arrived. Zach, Zorian, Alanic, and Xvim came together to Kylae’s temple, where they were greeted by Batak, the friendly green-haired priest that Zorian had met so long ago. Even though Zach and Zorian had been kind of rude and impatient these last few days, the young priest had never lost his temper around them and remained polite and helpful to the very end. He led them to the interior of the temple, which had been dramatically rearranged in the preparation for the summoning ritual.

The chairs and furniture had all been shoved to the walls to make space in the center, and a complicated circular spell formula had been inscribed on the floor in blue paint. Kylae was not the only priest present inside – eight more lower-ranking attendant priests had been brought in from elsewhere, and were currently scurrying around the modified main hall, double-checking the spell formula circle and making last-minute corrections. Additionally, there was a tall, male priest observing the proceedings with a cool, detached look on his face. His fancy blue robes, decorated in gold and silver, meant that he was someone pretty high in the Triumvirate Church hierarchy. He gave them a chilly, unfriendly look when they entered the hall, and then purposely ignored them.

“This is more involved than I thought it would be,” Zorian whispered to Batak.

“Ah-ha.. I don’t think you really realize the sort of thing you started,” Batak told him with a quiet, nervous chuckle. “Even in the Triumvirate Church, it is not every day you get to summon an angel for a talk. This is a big deal. It’s especially a big deal when someone pulls as many strings as you did and does it all on such short notice. This has lot of people sitting up and taking notice, I hear.”

Pulling strings? Zorian didn’t remember doing that..

He looked at Alanic, who noticed his look and gave him a small shrug.

“You said it was important,” Alanic said unrepentantly. “I agreed with you.”

They eventually retreated to the side and let Kylae and her fellow priests finish things. The preparations were lengthy, however, and Zorian couldn’t help but wonder if all of this was really necessary. There were lots of chanting and arcane rituals being performed, such as burning of incense and ritualistic bell ringing. Very little of it resembled structured magic as Zorian understood it. That was interesting because as far as he knew, angels could be summoned through any old summoning spell; it was just a matter of knowing how to contact them properly and them actually deigning to answer the summons.

Did all these little rituals count as proper contact procedure or was this just empty tradition that the Triumvirate Church insisted on following?

He didn’t actually ask that question, though. He had antagonized them enough recently with his request, and he knew from Alanic that the Triumvirate Church had some very scary resources to call upon when someone angered them enough. He wasn’t in the time loop anymore.

After what felt like an hour, the actual spellcasting began. Neither Zach nor Zorian had much experience with summoning spells, as they were useless and impossible to train inside the time loop, so the whole process was largely a mystery to them. All they saw was the circular spell formula on the floor lightning up with a soft glow and the air above it rippling like hot summer air.

“We’ve decided to summon a low-ranking angel to start with,” Batak explained to them in a low voice. He wasn’t involved in the summoning and seemed to have assigned as their guide and minder instead. “Even if it cannot help you, it will inform its superiors about the issue and they’ll decide what to do about it from there.”

“That’s fine,” Zorian said. Low-ranking was fine. Less chance of it completely overpowering them that way.

“..servant of the Highest Ones, I implore you to grace us with your presence,” Kylae intoned solemnly. “We, the lowly children of the dust, have a need for your infinite wisdom and guid- urk!”

Uh oh. This doesn’t sound too good..

“What’s happening?” Zach and Batak asked out-loud at the same time.

“The summoning is getting hijacked!” the blue robed priest said in a panicky voice. “I don’t understand! We preformed all the rites correctly! The demons shouldn’t be able to–”

“It’s not the demons,” Kylae said firmly. She was calmer than the blue robed priest, but her voice still trembled a little. “It’s being hijacked by another angel. Someone high up in the angelic hierarchy has used their rights of seniority to substitute themselves with the angel we are trying to summon.”

She then winced and stumbled in place. The other priests followed her action soon after, some of them falling on their knees.

“It’s.. it’s too much,” one of the attendant priests gasped. “We can’t supply enough mana for this..”

In the center of the summoning circle, a vague fuzzy outline flickered in and out of existence. Every summoning spell had to incarnate the spirit being summoned into something. A shell, a vessel that would allow them exist in and interact with the material world. The more powerful the spirit, the fancier the vessel had to be to contain them and let them manifest their power.. and thus, the more mana one had to pay to create an ectoplasmic shell suitable for them.

The angel that had substituted itself into their summoning ritual was apparently very mana hungry to summon.

Before anyone could say anything, Zach pushed Batak aside and stepped up to the summoning circle. He observed the whole thing for a few seconds and then started pouring his vast mana reserved into the ritual. He may not have been familiar with summoning magic, but simply supplying power to the whole thing was not too difficult to figure out.

Zorian, Alanic and Xvim followed his example immediately afterwards. A few seconds later, Batak woke up from his initial daze and hurriedly joined them in trying to power the summoning.

Zorian’s mana reserves dipped dangerously low almost as soon as he started pouring mana into the summoning ritual. It wasn’t by choice – the angel on the other side of the ritual was aggressively pulling on every available mana source to fuel its descent on the material plane. No wonder the priests had reacted like they did. Having one’s mana reserves forcibly drained in such fashion wasn’t lethal, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience either.

Finally, after everyone in the room had run dry of mana, the fuzzy ectoplasmic form in the center of the summoning circle condensed itself into glowing white ball and then erupted into an explosion of fire.

A brief moment of panic surged in Zorian’s heart when he realized there was a wall of flames coming at them and that he was entirely out of mana and practically defenseless. Thankfully, the explosion of flames suddenly reversed itself before it reached them and collapsed into a writing ball of fiery ectoplasm before suddenly sprouting black branches and metallic surfaces.

Eventually the angel’s form stabilized and Zorian finally got his first look at an angel.

It wasn’t human-looking in the slightest. Most old, powerful spirits weren’t, but somehow Zorian didn’t expect an angel to look so.. strange.

The angel was shaped like a black, floating, cross-shaped tree with four sets of branches and no roots. Or maybe it would be more accurate to imagine four trees that had their lower half cut off and were then glued together through their trunk into a cross-shaped pattern. The branches were leafless, and burning orange eyes grew on them instead. The eyes were animated, constantly moving and taking in everything around the angel. Translucent orange flames enveloped the branches, coiling around them like a multitude of snakes and releasing crackling sounds reminiscent of real branches burning in flames.

Floating behind the tree of eyes was a gently spinning ring of silvery metal. The ring was densely covered in tiny golden characters that Zorian didn’t recognize, and which seemed entirely alien to his eyes, unlike anything he had ever seen. Behind it, several ghostly ribbons of multicolored light extended in all directions from the angel, straining Zorian’s eyes and blurring the angel’s form. If one squinted and tilted their head the right way, they kind of looked like six pairs of wings.

Zorian felt some of the eyes swivel in his direction, and he suddenly felt naked and exposed. It was as if the angel’s eyes has seen right through him and peered straight into the depths of his soul, observing, analyzing, judging..

Zorian instinctively took a step back from the angel, and then suddenly realized the entire hall was unnaturally quiet and still.

Only he, Zach and the angel remained in the hall. Everyone else was just.. gone.

Zorian was getting uncomfortable flashbacks to his first meeting with Panaxeth-->>

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