There are few powers more vaunted across Integrated Earth, and indeed all Integrated dimensions, than Chronomancy.
For this lore allows one to manipulate the flow of time, to twist and bend the very fabric of history, or so it would seem.
In reality, most times, Chronomancers simply do light adjustments to time, mostly affecting themselves, allowing them to transpose themselves back to a certain point in time that relates to space, or perhaps accelerating their movements while slowing others to a crawl. More commonly, they also skip ahead seconds in the future.
But Chronomancy is an immensely difficult power to wield, and even those with incredible amounts of power in multiple Skill Evolutions within Chronomancy find themselves exhausted, spent, and ultimately unable to reshape the past should they attempt to do so.
Reaching back in time incurs the System's wrath, but it does not trigger punishment directly. Rather, changing the past requires more mana than even the greatest gods possess.
Additionally, altering the past inevitably leads you to go against a dimension's Mana Stability Threshold. Because changing the past attacks the very foundations of the history that shapes a skill, the skills of countless people. Or the history that shapes a mana core or world…
As such, attempting to change the past in a vulgar manner leads to the catastrophic collapse and inevitably the destruction of whatever you're attempting to change.
No, if the past and history are to be changed, they are to be changed in more subtle ways, such as the mass rewriting of culture and mind. This, by far, is the more effective way of altering history.
Maybe… maybe that’s my way back home. Maybe if everyone forgets about me first, I can finally attempt another jump…
-[Notes of a Retconned Chronomancer]
76 (I)
Tome [I]
Shiv sealed away the left side of his body in a thin layer of bone. He coated his arm and leg, poured the malleable adamantine down along the hand he used to hold the Magebreaker, and finally made a mask to shield the left side of his face. By this point, it looked and felt like someone had spent the better part of a yearcooking on one side of his body.
Uva gave him a brief glance at what he looked like from her perspective, and it was bad enough to nauseate Shiv himself. “Well, now at least I don’t look like a half-melted plastic doll anymore.”
He did his best to hide how much pain he was in with the joke, but Uva bit her lip as she looked at him. He could feel how miserable she was at not being able to do enough. She blamed herself on some level for not being there at the end, for not being strong enough to spare him from performing that act of Necromantic self-mutilation. Shiv, comparatively, was pretty glad she and Adam weren’t there at all.
“Uva,” Shiv said, biting back a mental groan. He also gently prodded her with his weak Psychomancy, keeping her away from the deeper sections of his mind. He could feel her strands reaching for his pain. He didn’t want her to suffer any more of that. “There was no chance we could have won that fight. It was good that you and Adam got painted and taken away. The blast was huge, and the only ones who needed to burn were me and whatever the hell was controlling the Educator. I don’t regret it. I’d do it again—I'd light my entire soul on fire if it meant the damned Ascendant would burn.”
“And to save all of us again,” she said. She briefly reached out and squeezed his right hand. “You give too much. There is no hiding your pain from me. I am in your mind. I can feel how much it hurts.”
“I can take it,” Shiv spoke into her mind with a shrug. Because that was the truth of it. Pain was just a feeling, but hurting a god—even a forgotten one—was the prize. And keeping Adam, Uva, and everyone else safe was his responsibility. He was Deathless. He could and would take the hits. He would bleed with the enemy so they didn’t have to.
That thought turned Uva’s insides to jelly. As she looked at him with an intense expression on her face, she let out a shuddering breath. “I know.” Something smouldered inside her, then. It yearned to burn more and lose control, but she contained it for now. “I saw some other things as well. Things I—” She briefly eyed Adam as Valor pointed out a page in the tome to the Young Lord. “Shiv, what happened during that fight? For entire stretches of time, I couldn’t remember you at all. It was like you were a blank in my mind. What was that?”
“A new bullshit skill,” Shiv muttered. He turned his attention inward, but felt Rose just sigh. Despair emanated from her every fiber.
She cannot notice me, Rose said. I am no longer a thing that lives in the true world. I am only a fragment that exists within you. And here, things are… entirely separated. Distorted. Lost.
True to Rose’s words, Uva didn’t even notice the woman’s presence. But she did notice Shiv was thinking about her. “This is… I’ve never been this confused looking into someone’s mind before; it’s like entire parts of you are blank.” Uva’s eyes flashed with a spark of mana, and her frown deepened. “I cannot see your skill status anymore either.”
“Yeah,” Shiv grunted. “Also a result of the new skill. I got a lot of things to tell all you guys. But we should wait for Valor to finish explaining what he just discovered firs—” A sudden jolt of searing pain nearly made him double over again. Uva caught him by the arm, and her presence was motivation enough for Shiv to stay upright. “It’s okay… I’m okay.” He noticed the rest of the group staring at him. Adam’s expression was positively wretched. “I’m okay. Just… keep talking, Valor.”
The Young Lord licked his lips. “Shiv, maybe you should—”
“The Woundeaters don’t work. Not on these wounds. Nothing works on these wounds. They’ll get better. I just need to face it right now. But I’ll be fine. In time.” He reached out and slightly punched Adam in the shoulder with his left hand. Pain exploded through his body, but Shiv just gritted his teeth. He knew that was coming. He did it anyway. Shiv wasn’t going to change how he acted just because of a little pain. “And wipe that sad puppy look off your face. It’s not your fault.”
“I should have done better,” Adam muttered. “I should have kept my hand on the rapier. I should have—”
“Adam,” Shiv said, gripping the man by his neck and shaking him playfully. “Shut up. No self-pity. And don’t pity me, either. Way I see it, I just lit a god on fire thanks to you.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Adam just stared at Shiv for a long moment. His eyes were wide, and his hair—dammit, he looked so much like Rose from this angle. There wasn’t a single doubt about her being his mother.
Adam… Rose said, her voice hoarse with sorrow. I love you. My son… My dear boy. I didn’t get long enough to…I wish you could hear me.
He will, Shiv thought. I’ll find a way to fix this. I’ll find a way to get you out. Or I’ll find someone that can fix this. He eyed Valor, who was now looking back at him with curiosity as well. The flames within the Pathbearer’s sockets were glowing intensely. Or maybe I just need to put that someone else back together first.
“Are you well enough to listen?” Valor asked.
“Yeah,” Shiv said. “Keep going.”
Valor nodded. And that was all that needed to be exchanged between them. Something told Shiv that Valor had done more than just burn his own soul to attain victory in the past. You didn’t become a Legendary Pathbearer by fleeing from discomfort or pain.
“Very well,” Valor said. He held the book high and gestured to the illustrated page he had shown them earlier. The edges were badly burned, and there were traces of corrosion at certain places, but Shiv found himself looking at a life-like recreation of twenty people standing before the Abyssal chasm, with one among the twenty being the Educator. Or at least someone dressed just like her.
Then Shiv noticed another thing about the twenty: they were all chained to each other. The material of the bindings appeared to be mithril, and the surrounding ruins of Lost Angeles looked different. In fact, while the city was clearly an old ruin at its core, parts of it looked… rebuilt. Shiv had delved into the remains of the old city, and he knew a good part of it by heart. It was a broken and dead place like no other. A place of echoes and old history—the ghost of what mankind was before the System’s arrival.
And this wasn’t that Lost Angeles. Not even close. What the illustration showed was a place slowly coming back to life. What happened here?
“Many of my memories were scattered along with my soul,” Valor began as he traced a crystalline, skeletal finger across the page. But rather than stopping at the Educator, Valor pointed to someone far to her right. Shiv couldn’t see any of their faces, as the drawing’s perspective was back-facing, but the one Valor pointed at was clearly a man. A man with a longbow slung around his chest. “But I recognize this one. I think I fought him at least once. And I believe we had a conversation at some point. The exact details escape me now, but I am sure this is Thaen. The Starhawk
.”Adam’s jaw tightened. Valor had clearly told him about this earlier in their discussion, but the Young Lord still had an expression of disbelief on his face. “I—the church said that before his ascension, he had long and flowing hair. Like a curtain of midnight.” He hesitated. “I asked my father about him once, but he never described our patron god in detail. Only his deeds.”
“That is because he likely never knew the Ascendant as a mortal,” Valor replied. “But I did. This is him. And this book… It is likely something similar to Starhawk’s Perch. A Sacred Phylactery that is meant to serve as a stable outlet for their power and keep them bound to this dimension.”
The Young Lord’s expression only grew more severe. “Explain.”
“The Ascendants are not true gods. Not in the sense of the Challenger, or even a demigod like the Composer.” Valor deliberately looked at Shiv when he mentioned the former. The Deathless realized the Legendary Pathbearer likely knew about his Blessing. “Their Ascension came suddenly and with an announcement from the System. And the System rarely declares someone to be a god. The only times I remember this happening were when I was traveling across other worlds. Worlds with far higher mana thresholds than ours, ruled by entities that can impose their power on the System itself to make decrees and changes for entire dimensions or worlds.”
“You are saying someone else made the Ascendants gods?” Adam asked.
“I outright suspect the Great One anointed your Ascendants with the status and power of divinity,” Valor replied with a dark chuckle.
“But how—that’s not what the church said.” Adam’s eyes darted about the room as he struggled to process what the Legendary Pathbearer was saying. “They said that the thirteen each proved themselves to the System and ascended in a grand Quest to save our world. To save Integrated Earth itself. Even Father has never denied this.”
Valor hummed. “And it might be a partial truth. There must be some pattern of consistency to follow for a faith, after all. But look at this page. Look at their number. Twenty. Twenty, rather than thirteen. With one among their number being the god that attacked us. One you and even I have never heard of.”
“Yeah,” Shiv grunted, bracing himself to reveal some very uncomfortable details. “About that. I tried draining the Educator’s vitality, and… Well, she was hollow. She isn’t a real person. Frankly, she’s more of an animated illustrationthan anything. When I drained her, I just ended up siphoning vitality from that massive, shrouded god. The one we briefly saw in the children’s painting.” He drew in a breath. “Uva. Can you show everyone my memories from the fight?”
She nodded, but as she delved into him, she paused. “There are… pieces missing here as well. Like stretches where you do not exist.”
“Yeah,” Shiv said with a sigh. “I kind of expected that. It has to do with my new skill.” There was nothing for it. Adam needed to know, and Shiv wasn’t the kind to keep hiding things from people if he could help it. “Adam. My Foreshadowing Skill came from your mother. I don’t know how, but the Educator said it was from her soul and somehow ended up inside me.”
The Young Lord looked like someone had just slapped him across the face, but he nodded. “I heard what the Educator said, but I thought she was just trying to break my focus.”
“She was probably trying to do that too, but she also wasn’t lying. And she kept attacking me with visions.”
“That’s how she stunned you at the start?” Uva asked. She blinked rapidly. “I thought she was simply using a subtler form of Psychomancy than I could perceive.”
“No. But she did attack me with a Psychomancer who was of a race I couldn’t recognize. It was tall and thin. Maybe Master-Tier. Not nearly as powerful as you or the Jealousy. It was an illustration as well. After you both were painted away, I was attacked by hundreds of illustrations. Most of them were other Educators, but there were dragons and orcs, and they all had their own skills.”
“That is likely a Legendary Skill. At the least.” Valor’s words came as a whisper. “To recreate another Pathbearer as a living painting is power beyond what most can fathom.”
“Yeah, but there were limits. She needed to finish the painting.” Shiv paused. “She also could designate boundaries to the world with strokes of a pencil. It was pretty damn strange. And real annoying.”
“How did you even survive long enough to cast yourself against my rift?” Adam murmured.
“That’s partially the Educator’s fault,” Shiv said. “She tried to make me develop Exposition by hitting me with so many visions at once. Foreshadowing leveled pretty quick, and I killed myself to try and break free. But when I did, and I reached the Skill Evolution, the System gave me an Error notification, and I failed to evolve Foreshadowing into Exposition.”
“What? Why?” Uva asked. “You failed? I—failing a Skill Evolution… It’s practically unheard of.”
Valor let out a breath. “It failed because of Shiv’s soul… His soul and vitality cannot be separated.” Seeing the confusion on the group’s faces, Valor continued. “This is a skill that accesses the collective history of an entire dimension with your own. It feeds you details from the deeds others have performed—and allows you to tap into it at will. But the shape of the skill leaves one’s soul with a jutting edge, so to speak. An edge that extends beyond their vitality and mana field. It must remain connected to the surrounding dimension to constantly receive more details. But you do not have a pure soul or vitality. Yours is Vitae, one fused to another.”
“Yeah, something like that.” Shiv grimaced as he remembered how bad it hurt when the skill hatched inside him. “It felt like my soul was breaking…”
“Like your insides were being remolded, and your bones were shifting and slicing you from deep within?” Valor asked.
Shiv raised an eyebrow at the aptness of the description. “Exactly.”
“That is the feeling of a skill shattering,” Valor said.
“Well, it didn’t stay shattered,” Shiv replied. “It adjusted itself and ended up becoming Outside Context Problem.”