Jenna felt an immense amount of relief as Bob flew out from the rift in his manta form. She had been mentally measuring time, as she knew Bob only had one hour before the dungeon collapsed.

  “You did well,” she told him. “Still seven minutes left. Did you really create twenty-one new perks?”

  “I did,” Bob said as he resumed his true form, “but the last one was a bit silly — it creates a rain of flowers. I was saving it for your wedding, but since you’ve already claimed half of Billy’s landmines, I suppose it no longer matters.”

  “You have solved the third task. Only the last one remains,” Governance’s voice reverberated over the building. A door materialized at the far end of the room.

  “Open this door,” the voice said.

  The door was metallic, heavy, and entirely engraved with runes. It had no visible lock or mechanism. Jenna attempted to break it down with her enhanced strength, but the door absorbed the impact with no noticeable effect.

  “I suppose conventional means will not work,” Bob stated the obvious.

  “Had to give it a try,” answered Jenna. Conventional means did solve her own task, but that was a secret she would take with her to the tomb. She did not want Bob to have any effective countermeasure whenever she brought up the Frank Corrigan Bartering Fiasco.

  She enhanced her mind and studied the problem. “Ok, there is a clear pattern here. Each of the first three tasks involved two of us combining our powers to solve them. I think this one will require the three to do so. I have been trying to decipher the runes, but they are not a conventional language; it is a magical one. Mind alone will not cut it. Bob?”

  Bob drank from his Cup, granting a temporary perk, likely based on Truthfinding.

  Bob grunted with effort, and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead.

  “You are right, Jenna. The runes are fighting back. And they’re stronger than me. This is like wrestling a professional.”

  Jenna touched Bob and enhanced his mind via transference. The runes changed shape under their very eyes, forming a message in English. “The door can’t be opened, but it can be linked to another.”

  As Bob said these words, a second door, identical to the first one, appeared at the end of the hall.

  “I think that means you, Billy,” Jenna said. “Your mystic river dragon had Arcana that linked portals, didn’t it? The last Gestalt form in your test had a River Dragon component. Perhaps it is meant to be used as the key.”

  “Worth a try,” Billy grumbled. “I am not very fond of that form. It has a strong base of Fluid Explorer, and they are hard to control.” Billy mumbled as he checked his gestalt screen. “Here it is. Fluid Whisperer: two/thirds of Fluid Explorer, one-third of River Dragon, a few drops of Alchemic Master for control, and a taste of Headless Machetist to lessen the AP cost.”

  He disappeared in a flash of blue light and reappeared as something between an oriental dragon, whiskers included, and a centipede. Its limbs ended in human hands instead of claws. The thing was no bigger than an anaconda, constantly sprouting new heads that were then reabsorbed.

  The beast approached one of the doors and began whispering to it in a melodic, but inhuman, voice. Both doors opened at once. They showed the same inner chamber from different points.

  “You have solved the last task,” Governance’s voice, this time came through the doors, not from above.

  “It is finally time for us to meet,” it added. “Welcome.”

  The room beyond the doors was simple, almost frugal, more like a monk’s than a king’s. Governance was waiting for them, sitting at a table and motioning for them to join them.

  He was human-sized, with six arms and an enormous transparent skull through which his brain was clearly visible. Sections of it pulsed and shifted colors with his thoughts. There was very little about him that could still be called human.

  Jenna had always assumed that Governance was an Unfocused, just like Gala or Eleazar. To her surprise, she found out he was probably a Committed.

  “I am Governance, a member of the Coven of Immortals. Do you know what that implies?” he asked them.

  “That you are probably an insufferable jerk,” Jenna answered without thinking.

  “That goes without saying,” admitted Governance. “It also means that I will be Exiled if I break an oath sworn on the Compendium.”

  “I, Governance, the Immortal of Progression, swear on the Compendium that everything I am going to tell while in this room is the truth. I may leave parts out for reasons I will explain, but there is no intention to deceive in anything I say or do.”

  “I swear that my only goals are in the best interests of my own people, the Beli, and the people of Earth.”

  “I also swear that if I fail in what I am trying to do here, the consequences will be terrible, both for Belona and Earth.”

  “Finally, I swear I will never stand up from this chair.”

  “You were doing well. A bit anticlimactic at the end,” Jenna opined.

  “Do you know where you are now?” he asked them.

  “Belona. Possibly sometime in its past.”

  “Very good. You have traveled over six aeons in the past, eight years before my people fled this age and entered yours through the Black Tower. I was supposed to lead them there,” Governance went on.

  “It seems you changed your mind,” Jenna answered dryly.

  “It is a bit more complex than that,” answered Governance. “The Compendium was particularly cruel with us. The system it brought us shattered the minds of many of my subjects — many of us became monsters, not only physically, but also in our thoughts.”

  He sighed for a moment, recalling everything that had happened. “We would have turned each other apart if not for me,” he said it without a hint of pride or modesty, just stating an obvious fact.

  “They saw me as a prophet, not another progressor, someone touched by the hand of divinity. I gained my tenth evolution and chose the name of Governance, as the first ascended Immortal of my people.”

  Governance looked for a moment at the ceiling before going on. “It was evident we were on the brink of extinction. I tried to plead our case at the Coven, but they ignored me. Then I received an unexpected visit in my chambers: Necessity. Not the one I knew, his version from the future, and he had come to offer me a deal.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “He offered me a coffer filled with dungeon seeds that would allow my people to regain their powers, and the means to travel to a new world, where we would get a second chance.” He scoffed. “It was all true, and all a lie, as it is his way.”

  “He cautioned me against talking to the keeper of the tower, so of course that is what I did. He had deceived me. He had made me think that time passed more slowly in the tower, that I could use it to travel into the future thanks to a time dilation effect.”

  He looked at them.

  “As you know, the tower is an actual time machine; it not only allows travel into the future, but also into the past.”

  “But how is it possible?” asked Bob. “It would create all types of paradoxes.”

  “And it does,” Governance answered. “But paradoxes can be solved. Changes can be made to History, as long as they are not perceived—the Observer Effect. Someone could travel back in time and talk to your Julius Caesar, but if he stopped his assassination or gave him significant information, he would create a paradox. He would have significantly changed history, and that is not allowed.”

  “He would start emitting Dissonance, just as you do,” he said, pointing at Jenna.

  “Dissonance is that awful signal I sense?” asked Jenna.

  “Not only you, but all who have broken causality and messed with history do, just as I do, too,” Governance answered.

  He was right; she could also feel the same discordant sensation coming from him.

  “Let me finish my story, please; all will be made clear,” Governance said before they could interrupt them again.

  “I accepted Necessity’s deal, but that same night I entered the tower and made a deal with the keeper. The keeper offers directions through time, both the past and the future, but it always asks a price. Travel back in time and eliminate sources of dissonance.”

  “Those sources of dissonance are previous clients who travelled in time and got too creative with the changes they made. They are to be stopped before they can change history. It is a self-contained system, and it protects causality.”

  “I performed two tasks for him and gained the right to ask directions to two points in time. I first chose to go five years after we entered the tower.” A hint of sadness crept into his voice.

  “What I saw was terrible. Necessity had tricked me; I became Exiled as soon as I stepped out of the tower. The same reality can support only one Immortal at a time, and Discovery was already there. I had broken form, and the Compendium punished me for it.”

  “That means that on your try, the one you bought from the keeper, you entered the future at a point where Discovery no longer existed,” said Bob. “Otherwise, you would have been exiled again.”

  “That is correct, Discovery could not stand to let her people be murdered and tried to face the tribulations at the end, and was Exiled for it,” Governance explained.

  “You are not going to like the next part,” Governance cautioned them. “Eleazar did what he could, but all the dungeons created with the seeds provided by Necessity exploded into Tribulations one hundred days later. The whole royal family died. Andara died. Everything burned. Only Boral survived. Unkillable cockroach that he is.”

  Governance sighed, knowing that he was telling a grim tale.

  “Boral eventually became the Omega. He travelled to Earth and killed the holder of the Icosahedron, a 43 rank Knife Witch known as Joanna. He became Earth’s Immortal when he gave the Icosahedron to Necessity. The Belona Invasion was a tool to punish Discovery for trying to create three Abominations, even though her plan failed. The Losers were slain by the Chicago Tribulation just before it destroyed Babylon.”

  “That is not what happened,” Jenna protested. “We beat Paul. We survived the war and managed to turn things around in Belona. You are trying to tell me that you come from some alternate past.”

  “That is exactly what happened,” Governance told her sadly. “I am trying to tell you that you don’t exist.”

  A shocked silence filled the room. For a moment, Jenna felt as if the floor beneath her had thinned into glass.

  Bob was the first to react: “I am sorry, but none of this makes sense. You say changing history creates Dissonance, yet Necessity brings an entire army from the past? That counts as a pretty drastic change for me.”

  “There is an exception: Limbo,” Governance explained. “It holds power even over time. If someone becomes Exiled in a timeline, that timeline becomes the true one. All dissonant events that led to it become regular events; they stop being dissonant and can no longer be corrected.”

  “That is how he did it,” exclaimed Bob. “The moment you became Exiled, the Imperial Army had to cross into the future; otherwise, it would not have happened.”

  “Necessity is a master tactician, a genius. I am loath to admit it, but that is the way it is,” Governance answered.

  “But now that you know the future, can you take different decisions?” Billy asked.

  “No, young Billy. The Observer effect also works for the future. Once perceived by a traveler from the past, it locks. It stops being a possibility. It becomes fate.

  Everything I have seen is doomed to happen, and anything I do to avoid it will become tainted with Dissonance and thus, vulnerable to change by any agent the keeper sends into the past. That is why you are here. I have not only traveled into the past. I created this temple, apart from prying eyes, and a few days ago, I made some changes to myself.”

  Governance tore apart his robe, showing some kind of pulsating light that seemed to emanate from the center of his chest.

  “It is based on advanced magical principles. The closest definition, in your terms, would be a nuclear weapon. Don’t look so shocked. Did you really believe that magic could not match anything discovered by your technology?” he asked.

  “But if they have access to this sort of thing, why haven’t they used it against Babylon?” Billy asked.

  “Because the Compendium forbids such gross intervention. It is a blatant Breach of Form,” Governance explained. “For reasons you will soon discover, this does not bother me in the least.”

  “The countdown ends in sixty minutes. It will blow away half of Belona, disrupting the timeline and making the invasion impossible. The keeper will not have that. I became dissonant the moment the countdown started. Of course, I have no intention of blowing up my homeland, but the chain of events I have set up made it so that the only possible way of avoiding that was if the Keeper sent you three here. When I created the bomb, I made it impossible to disarm.”

  “But how are you going to stop it, then?” asked Billy.

  “That will be made clear in a few minutes, young Billy,” Governance answered.

  “That is why you created this temple. You knew the Keeper would have to send someone to take you back, and he had to do it specifically at this moment in time. You designed it so that only the Losers could solve it,” Bob said.

  “Correct. And we are going to set things right,” Governance said. Then he turned to each in turn.

  “Jenna, you must ask the Keeper to send you into the past, before the confrontation with Paul. Bob has an alchemical compound with him that you can use to cross dimensions without his help. Use it. You must close the loop. You must enhance your past self before it reaches Babylon. That is the only way your past will become reality. Right now, it is only an elucubration.” Then he turned to Billy.

  “Billy, you must ask him to send you twenty-six aeons, four hundred forty-three thousand, six hundred and ten years, plus four months and three days into the past. You must build a time dungeon, where the water hits the skull. Use it to travel back to the present. It must have only the Temporal tag. The Motif must be Time Devours Change.”

  “Bob, you must remain here and follow the precise instructions I have left for you in this envelope. You must find the Scrollbearer. Only you can do it, and you will need a specific tool. This tool is in the possession of a very powerful progressor. You must obtain it.”

  “But why? Why is that creature so important, even if it is from Pantea?” Bob asked.

  “Because like you, it has no nerf module, and it knows at least one rank seven perk,” Governance told them, leaving them amazed.

  “But even if we do all that, what is the point of this? You are fated to be Exiled. Any action that alters that event becomes dissonant — and will be undone by other time travelers seeking passage from the keeper,” asked Jenna.

  “Because Necessity has made one mistake, a significant one,” Governance answered. “Limbo is hungry. It wants to be fed as soon as possible. There is something that can avoid a fated Limbo exile.”

  “That being?” Jenna asked.

  “An earlier Exile of the same person. What I am going to do is buy you a reprieve, which is not a permanent solution. If you do not empower yourself before you face Paul, you will become Dissonant again, and all will be lost. Seize this chance, Jenna. Do not let it be for nothing.”

  And Governance stood up from his chair. He was promptly enveloped by tentacles and sucked into a hole, along with his internal bomb, no longer a threat to Belona. He did not flinch.

  “Oh my god,” exclaimed Jenna. “I am no longer dissonant. The past has been changed.”

  “At least for now,” added Bob.