Chương 51: BECMI Chapter 50 – An Immortal Visitor

I swapped out our light exercise clothing for my Robes and Cirru's armor, cleaning up the sweat at the same time as I recalled Dread to my hand. Cirru's real talent in combat was in open-hand fighting, what they called a Mystic Tradition on this world. Attempting to replicate her natural weaponry and fighting techniques with humanoid limbs was startlingly effective and instinctive to her, and she gobbled up unarmed combat techniques with speed and zeal.

With enough years, she'd actually eclipsed me in some aspects of unarmed combat, since I tended to focus on Sun and Moon, and she enthusiastically borrowed from anywhere and anything she could. The south wall of the taproom was open and exposed to the Distance Distortion, and would likely pique the interest of whatever had intruded. We just stepped to the corner and waited. Cirru was a LOT tougher than anyone would have any right to expect normally…

but this person had seen right through the Illusions concealing the Inn, which likely meant some form of True Sight, and would thus likely see Cirru and know what she was. I had a Veil up still, and even if it had been fifteen years inside here, I still wasn't a physical adult by any stretch. I'd need probably thirty years to actually 'grow into' my true appearance, so I had a Veil on specifically to defeat True Sight and other such revealing spells for just that purpose.

Someone stepped out from inside the taproom, looking around with great confidence. Sharp blue eyes settled on the two of us. He looked mostly human, with frazzled hair gone gray, lines on his face, and an expression that hinted at intelligence and a roguish set of mind. His clothing style was in none of the styles of any of the current cultures that I knew of… and looked remarkably like a natty cheap British suit from the twentieth century of Earth.

"Well, what do we have here?" he exclaimed in a tone friendly and absolutely sure of himself.

"An elf and a dragon, trapped inside a time loop? Not something you see every day, is it?" he remarked. Cirru looked at me, already uneasy as I studied the fellow. Anti-magic around him, and some Divination Wards. Not much there to read at all.

"Every single day, as a matter of fact," I replied shortly to his remark, earning an instant toothy smile from him.

"Oh, that must be so true, so true!" he agreed with an easy nod of his head, strolling towards us with his hands in his jacket pockets, clearly not afraid of us in the slightest.

"I am The Doctor. Might I inquire as to your names?" he asked pleasantly. That was NOT a British accent. A good attempt at one, maybe. Truth made me very aware of verbal untruths, and that most definitely was NOT his Name or title.

"I am the Lady Edge. This is Cirruluxul," I replied without batting an eye, my attention more on his hands than his face, looking at the magic around him.

"What do you want here, Doctor?" I asked calmly. He studied me and my completely unimpressed expression with clear interest.

"Well, I've something of an interest in Time, and this place has been on my list of places to clean up for some time, Lady Edge. I thought I'd pop in and see what was going on here, and perhaps take care of the problem." I tilted my head slightly, considering his words. Some sort of temporal adjudicator?

"I have already killed Benjamin Horst." His expression immediately hardened.

"The temporal vortex is in flux and not manifesting, and likely can't for another decade or two. I am in the process of closing the temporal loop, but I've another thousand years into the past to go at the very least, and can't do so until the Portal manifests again.

As the Inn exists over a thousand years more into the past, and over twenty-five hundred years into the future, you cannot wipe it out without causing a temporal paradox and broken timeline, which is likely considerably worse than anything the Inn is generating in its current condition.

"There's nothing for you to do here, Doctor. If I fail, you'll have to wait three thousand years to greet the far side of the loop and ride it back to close it. You're far too early… so if you are planning to do anything to the Loop, it must be to break it and cause chaos." His bright blue eyes remained focused on me, and his smile grew wider.

"Oh, a clever one, and a time traveler, no doubt, constrained to live within these very walls unless time should wipe you away?" He laughed slightly, clear cunning malice starting to percolate around him.

"I hadn't expected a mortal to be so well-versed in temporal mechanics, Lady Edge."

"I hadn't expected an Entropic Immortal of your lack of power to get himself involved in temporal matters." His toothy smile slowly went away as he stared at me unblinkingly, his care-free countenance slipping.

"You aren't going to be allowed to threaten the timeline, and the Inn clearly stands for another three thousand years. You either don't have the power to destroy it, or there's Immortals backing it which are beyond your power to affect… or your courage to provoke!

"Your potential recruit is long annihilated. You can do nothing else, and messing with mortals on the Prime is against Immortal law, as I understand it. You are wasting your time here, even if time means nothing to you." I looked him up and down, visually dismissive of him.

"You're also a fifth-dimensional being. A Time Portal that has trouble conveying us mortals around is going to be absolutely unusable by you." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Well, well, well. A little mortal who thinks she knows some things." There were shadows growing on and about him, starting with his eyes, which began to blacken. All friendliness was gone, and had turned into mounting malevolence.

"You are absolutely right, of course. Immortal law forbids direct intervention on the mortal plane. However, that is only if we are caught!" Contrary to the threat in his voice, the way his Aura was starting to rise, and how Cirruluxul's knees were shaking in mounting horror, I looked up and around in interest.

"Oh, that is very, very good to know," I said into the darkness that was gathering around him.

"Do you mind if I use that?" He was a bit deep into his acting persona, and couldn't help himself.

"Mind if you use what?" he asked, rather nastily, his fingernails starting to slowly blacken, as did his teeth.

"The fact Immortals can't see what is going on inside here." He blinked. Bane of Legends lit up on Dread, and the black pits of his eyes grew very wide, his anti-magic swarming out… Invoke Magic went off on Dread, and Roses and Skulls erupted and went for him. Supposedly Immortals were immune to all mortal magic, but Bane of Legends immediately bypassed that.

His Anti-Magic Aura had an excellent chance of stopping my magic, too, except Invoke Magic sheathed my Greater Thornshards in power and cut through his Anti-Magic like it was butter, completely ignoring it and punching into his mortal form. With vivus, Banefire, and a LOT of Holy Force damage, along with the True Death I'd ladled into Dread while standing there. He exploded in mid-scream.

Holy Force energies ravaged his body and soul with powers he'd never had to face in all his existence, pure anathema to everything that he was and represented. His mortal facade was torn apart, and the spirit within was blown completely apart as Immortal energies were sliced through and completely disrupted by the Bane of Legends and True Death. The whole world went white, and swallowed us up.

I blinked, and opened my eyes. I was laying in a pit, washed white, square-shaped, exactly as deep as the basement of the Thisbean Inn. There was no Inn around us, completely wiped away and destroyed by the release of energy when I'd dusted that avatar of whoever, whatever. The walls were just hollowed-out stone in the ground, and nothing remained of the Inn itself… except the impassable wall of Time that had contained everything. That hadn't been a simple destruction of an avatar, either.

That thing had lost whatever amount of energy had been parceled out to its form, suffering complete annihilation and release. He wouldn't even know what had happened, only that he'd suffered a crippling loss and not how or why it had occurred. However, a permanent loss meant he'd run into something far more powerful than he was, something capable of stripping that power from him, which meant he definitely did NOT want to come back here and stir that force up again, whatever it was.

At least, that was my reasoning as I laid there, staring up at the sky. I looked over at a wheezing, and saw Cirruluxul in her dragon form, still out cold. She was several feet longer now than she'd been when I first met her, clearly aging towards her deep dragonsleep, ready to shed her scales and grow to the next size. She was also a lot more muscular than she'd been back then, basically having worked and invested herself into acquiring the equivalent of an Advanced Template, with +4 to all base Stats.

Truly an exceptional dragon, if completely crushed by the power of an Immortal. I guessed that the lich was finally registered as missing, and his Patron had come looking for him. He still wasn't going to know what had happened, but now he wouldn't want to investigate, and would be thinking something out there was aware of him and his schemes, and had punished him severely for them. Healthy paranoia would be crippling him badly. Still, I had marked his Aura. The sky was moody and cloudy, but that was fine.

I could feel the moon going down, the sky was lightening to grays and reds in the east, and dawn was coming. Time rolled, and magic set to work. Scattered dust dispersed through time wound back and began to gather. Carved blocks grew back into place on the stone all around us, and also under us, reforming something that had been completely annihilated. In less than a minute, the stones of the Thisbean Inn's foundation were all in place, and the wood began to materialize and gather.

Planks and arches, studs and boards materialized out of nowhere and fell into place in a kind of reverse explosion. Nails and screws zipped into place, splinters and flinders flashed back to restore broken boards, and the walls went up, then the roof, and the floors above us slammed down into place as the view of the sky above was cut away. I sat up slowly, and Assayed Cirru. She was at precisely 1 Health, hammered to within an inch of death, but not going over. Because of me, of course.

I tapped her, and let the Heal go off. Her eyes popped open as Sacred Healing energies poured through her, revitalizing and restoring the massive trauma and shock to her system. She went from hovering on the edge of death to back to full strength and vitality in but seconds, surging to her feet and looking around wildly for signs of the intruder. What she saw was the basement reforming around us, braces and struts moving into place.

Now the racks of barrels and the doors and stairs were being rebuilt, wine bottles reforming, and spirits surging out of nowhere into reconstituting barrels and casks as everything was returned and restored to what it had been. We'd seen the restoration before, but nothing quite as dramatic as this. Cirru said nothing for the long minute it took for everything to snap back to place and form, and then a cycling as the dawn flitted across everything above us, visible through a side window.

The Thisbean Inn had returned from being literally atomized. More stones swirled around us, and from nothing, the statues that were my Company, long-since acknowledged by the Inn as 'parts of it' by carefully tugging the magic to cover them, rebuilt themselves quickly and precisely into the dreaming forms of those waiting to get out of here, surrounding us once more in their careful rows of ready petrified bodies.