The Final Day

  Aethon didn’t care. I was unsure about so many things. I didn’t know if I truly wanted to find my sister or not. I didn’t know if I had any right to. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Margaret, or if her help was worth the emotional cost of her presence. I didn’t know which version of the play I’d seen better reflected the story of the gods. I didn’t even understand why the same performers would spread both versions. The loop itself was beyond my understanding.

  I was unsure about so many things. But one thing I knew for sure was that Aethon didn’t care. Luke had so many people to punish, and he knew them all by name. Each of them was a regular attendee at the temple. Each of them had failed to live up to their role as a child of Aethon, at least as far as Luke saw it.

  But Aethon didn’t care. He couldn’t have. No being could be so obsessed with such petty gripes and remain a god. No one with the power to grant life could possibly lower themselves to hate over such simple shortcomings. It was Luke. It was all Luke, and his need to control. It was so familiar. It was so much like my Grandmother, the way it seemed to hurt him when he couldn’t control someone.

  It was more like my grandmother, the way he used me as a weapon to pass his judgment.

  Divorce wasn’t the only sin he’d chosen to punish. It wasn’t even the only one he was willing to kill over. Although a slow death wasn’t the only possible consequence he might choose. I was used as a weapon against what must have been every congregant of every temple and meeting Luke had ever been to. The first pair hadn’t been the only children of Aethon to have a divorce. As far as I had been taught, there was no crime against Aethon in the act. I was still used to kill all of them. All of them. Others had simply been lax in their temple attendance, often missing multiple meetings in a row. These ones I judged in the garden, freezing them in time as I accelerated the lives of great trees. I trapped the offenders in the center to suffocate, never able to leave the temple again.

  Some failed to donate enough, or regularly enough, thus failing to show Aethon their love as far as Luke was concerned. These ones I didn’t need to kill. I simply needed to age everything they owned until it was turned to dust before their eyes. Their jewelry and their simple clothes, replaced with robes not unlike mine. They were tied to donation bowls around the cave as more and more of their things were brought in and turned to ash in front of them. Luke had so many ideas for my time magic. Cruelties which had never occurred to me. And I rose to the occasion, casting with a proficiency and skill I had failed to use since my grandmother first glared at me. And as I cast, her phantom failed to taunt me. Either because I was finally submitting or because I knew she wouldn’t hate me for what I was doing.

  Men without jobs. Women with necklines too low. Members who failed to volunteer for temple events frequently enough. Priests whose teachings failed to enforce Luke’s preferences. One man was punished for too often wearing his hat inside the temple, and another was judged for falling sick too frequently. Luke had so many complaints against so many people, and they all felt so small. But Luke… somehow he genuinely seemed to grieve for the so-called necessity of his victims' pain. It felt like he really wished he didn’t have to harm them. Like he was as much a prisoner as I was, but his cell was built with Aethon’s imaginary commands. I spent the rest of the day as his knife. As the tool he used to cut little bits away from them, until I was finally sent to sleep and recover my aura.

  This, of course, he failed to send as an order. That would almost have been a relief. Had I been ordered to sleep, I may have managed it. Instead, I spent the night tossing and turning in a strange bed, haunted by a dozen suffering faces and the smile I’d worn as I hurt them. Each desperate grimace had been carved into my mind with my own bloodied aura, and I didn’t think any time loop could ever remove them. I tried. I tried all night. I tried to free myself. To reach my aura and to command it to do what I needed. To break myself, and to start the loop over. I’d been reluctant to take that step. I knew once I did it once, I’d be able to do it again. But that didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that I owned my own body and my aura stopped ending and ruining lives. So I reached. I grasped. I begged and pleaded with myself to cast the one spell that would free me from this loop.

  For hours, I failed. Until Aethon’s grace touched the city again, and my exhausted body rose to get back to work. I was almost relieved that it was the final day. That so many people would die before I could get to them. That the Quiet would offer a quick end before I could prolong it. But, as I arrived in Luke’s office again, I learned he wasn’t interested in more judgment. He’d already punished every soul who’d wronged him by living their lives. He wanted my help with something else.

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  “The lies are spreading further, Mars,” he lamented as I stood in front of him. “Today, nearly every lost soul in the city is living in fear. None of them will leave their homes. None of them will live their lives in Aethon’s light. They have all bought the lie of a dying world. Of a curse that doesn’t exist. I need you to stop them. I need your aura to save these people from themselves. Can you do that?”

  ’No! The Quiet is real, and so is the pain it’s causing. It may be paralyzing to live in fear of everything, but people are owed the right to fear the thing with actual teeth! No spell I know or invent can change reality. Nothing I can do will offer them the world you insist they live in!’ My thoughts were desperate like a dry throat in the desert. My mouth defied them anyway. “Of course, Elder Luke,” I agreed happily. “I know just the spell.” My heart sank.

  “Good, you are a faithful servant, Mars. See to it that your faith never fades. Do what you need to do. You have Aethon’s blessing. Heal this city of its fear. Show them whatever you need to show them. Bring light back to this city in your own way, and I will do it in mine,” he responded, clear notes of almost fatherly pride in his voice. I didn’t move for a moment. I could feel Luke’s mother, as silent as ever, watching me. I wondered if she knew, too, what he meant by ‘his own way’. If she knew he meant to abduct and baptize as many as he could, forcing them to live through hollow shells of the life he wanted them to pretend they had. I wondered if she wanted to stop him as much as I did, or if she was simply relieved not to be forced into the same level of complicity as me.

  I turned and walked back to the room I’d been assigned, my heart steady and a lingering smile tugging at my lips. I knew exactly what my body planned, and I couldn’t stomach it. I entered the sparse room and pulled my grimoire out. It was worn and familiar as my hands ran across the surface against my will. I didn’t want to do what I was about to do. It was a spell based on the way I summoned Margaret. A way to interact with other threads of time. Past and present. I began to reach out to the loop with my Aura, brushing up against the loose threads of the world. So many people lived at some point during those three days, and I could reach all of them. Not Margaret, but those already taken by the Quiet. Those who’d never feared it. Earlier versions of the people who hadn’t, but when they also hadn’t believed in it.

  I was trying to populate a city with ghosts. To let the dead live their lives alongside the living and to force them to lie. I wanted to bury the reality of the city's death so deep in the bodies of its victims that it forgot to fear the future. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Because Luke had ordered me to see to it that my faith never fades. I could already feel my aura trying to follow that Aura. I didn’t even know it was possible to reach into the next loop. But I could feel myself trying. I knew that, once the final day ended, I’d have my body back. I would be in charge again. So to follow the order I’d been given, I was trying to reach myself in the next loop. To poison my aura with Luke’s influence before I so much as opened my eyes.

  I couldn’t allow that. The thought alone would have made me shudder, had I still the freedom to do so. To be trapped in service to Luke so long as the loop was active. To live these three days over, and over, and over again. To hurt people each time. To make them suffer only to die and do it again in the next loop. I would embrace the Quiet itself if it would stop that. I felt the threads of time. I had them in my grip—after reaching for them for so long. My aura was flowing, exactly as I’d spent the night wishing it would. It was doing the wrong thing, but it was close. It was so close. I just needed to change what was happening. I couldn’t prevent myself from creating the ghosts. But if I focused on one single task, I thought maybe I could add an effect.

  As my aura enveloped different strands of time, frayed and leading nowhere, I realized I could scrape just a little off of each at a time. By my own will. Like cleaning rusted steel with a fingernail. I could only shave a little bit off at a time, but there were so many threads, and I only needed one ghost of my own. A ghost built of the same event, happening over, and over, and over again. I couldn’t hide what I was doing. Not from my own mind. No more than the part of me under Luke’s control could hide her intent from me. So it became a race, and she was faster. But I had less to build. And as I built, I stole from her.

  It started with a broken finger. Snapped backward, like I’d been holding it against a wall of collapsing stone. My body smiled through the pain. Smiling was the only expression I was allowed, after all. Then it was a splintered rib. Part of me rushed to poison the aura of my future. Another part kept building that ghost. My leg snapped at the knee like a twig. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even cry, however agonizing it was. The efforts to summon the other ghosts slowed. The pain was too much. At least, for that half of me. It was what I was aiming for, and the pain only made it easier to realize.

  My collarbone cracked. Blood spilled from my eyes. My skull caved in, just a little. Each new injury felt fresh and familiar at the same time. They were all real. I had felt each one before. Because I wasn’t creating a ghost of someone else. I was bringing myself into the final day of this loop. The versions of myself, murdered by Margaret. Crushed under the earth, over, and over, and over. I realized my murder as reality, and the ghosts of myself in pain existed inside of me. Blood ran down my entire body, drenching the borrowed robes and the bed I sat on. Until finally, it was too much. I was, entirely, crushed by the broken earth of the past. I won the race with myself, and I died one more horrifying death underground.

  It was the greatest relief of my life.

  End of the Final Day