B3 Chapter 365: Warm Haze, pt. 1

Kaius sat in the sun, taking another sip of the odd drink that Xenanra had offered him. The ascendant had offered to talk, and he wanted to, but about what? He felt like he was swaddled in stride-thick blankets, yet his mind felt clearer than it ever had been before — a purifying fire burning within him.

All together, it left him feeling muddled.

He didn’t know how to start, or where to go.

Still, the drink was cold and the sun was warm. It was nice to just breathe, to relax and let his new awareness of his aspects settle within him. Slowly but surely, the memories of his experience were falling into place — separating, as dozens of identical runs separated into singular experience. The differences were there, when he looked — emotional context, slight changes, and a thousand other tiny discrepancies.

On one hand, it all felt like a dream — still felt like a dream. On the other, he felt more awake and more real than he ever had before. It was a juxtaposition, and one that left him feeling odd.

Not bad, just odd.

Kaius took another sip of the milky blue drink that tasted floral and fruity, enjoying the burn of it. He swirled the glass — watching the orange layer of the drink meld and swirl into the blue as ice clanked against the edge.

“What do you call these things?” he asked, raising his glass towards the ascendant.

She smiled over the rim of her own drink.

“A cocktail. Your world has them too, though you’re not likely to find them outside of large cities. They’re rather…cosmopolitan, and only really popular and accessible to the upper crust. Elves enjoy something similar, though theirs tend to be less sweet.”

Kaius eyed his glass with surprise — what were the chances that the same drink would be found twice? He doubted the ingredients would be the same as what was found on a whole nother world.

He looked up as he heard the sound of crystal chimes. Xenanra was laughing.

“Not like that. It’s just a style of beverage — mixed liquors and non alcoholic flavoured liquids. Like a regional cuisine or brew, there are lots of different styles and variations. The dukedoms have a fair few, if you want to try more.”

Kaius nodded contemplatively. That sounded fun — he did like trying new things, though he wasn’t sure how regularly he could see himself drinking something like this. He wasn’t exactly a big drinker, and he usually preferred the bitter and sometimes floral notes of a good beer, but this was nice. Especially in the sun.

He blinked, rising out of the sudden tangent.

“What’s up with this?” Kaius gestured vaguely at his head. “The fog — it’s getting better, but it feels even more noticeable than when I was in the trial.”

“The dissociation will continue to pass,” Xenanra replied calmly. “The trial itself had certain…guiderails. Methods to tune the difficulty and effectiveness of the challenge. It’s been compounded by the side effects of temporal compression, and a number of other safeguards to help you integrate your experience. There would be no point pushing a potential ascender to the very brink, if the experience left them broken even when they succeeded.”

Slowly nodding, Kaius digested her words at his own pace. At least the fog would fade on its own. Dissociation was a good way to describe it. He felt oddly distant — like he was puppeteering himself from over his shoulder.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a frightening or uncomfortable experience — neutral, at worst. Even comfortable, when he factored in the sun and his drink.

Temporal compression, Xenanra had said. So there truly had been some sort of time magic involved, though perhaps not the violation of causality that he had suspected. A way to stretch out the time he had spent within, perhaps? He hoped so — it had been so long.

It was nice of the ascendant to answer his questions so freely. She really was agreeable in comparison to Ekum. Kaius blinked, watching the wind jostle the multi-hued canopy of flowering trees below him as he took another sip of his drink.

“So I wasn’t in there for as long as it felt like I was? And the loop — was time really resetting? I thought we couldn’t do that?”

The words fell out of him in a jumble, a stream of consciousness that slipped out before he could restrain himself to a single question. Xenanra laughed again; it was a nice sound.

“I’ll start with the latter two questions. Generally, no, you are correct in that causality cannot be broken. There are, however, exceptions to every rule, and things get a lot more murky when you consider isolated spaces such as this Crucible. Regardless, even with that, it wasn’t as simple as straight reversion of time — but for simplicity’s sake, it can be considered an academic difference.”

Well, at least he could count on the fact that his understanding of the universe hadn’t been utterly upended. The ascendant had cheated. Still, a time loop — how novel. He doubted many people would get to experience one of those. Ianmus would likely be green with envy on missing out on something so unique.

Kaius grinned, imagining the mage spluttering at what he had experienced. It took him three more sips of his drink to remember the ascendant had said she would explain more — something about compression?

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“I did say that, didn’t I?” Xenanra said patiently, winking at him. “Time is…somewhat malleable at the best of times, and here it is practically subjective with enough massaging. What is most important is that each challenger is kept somewhat in sync, which in your case required some heavy compression, and parallelisation. It is almost a nonsensical question to ask how long you spent in there. For you? An age. For your friends? An instant. From outside, the answer depends on who’s asking, where they are, and when they are. My answer would be the most confusing. It was, and wasn’t a loop. You were brought back, so was the course, and time was squashed so much it might as well have been simultaneous.

Kaius blinked, slowly chewing through her words. He could understand what she meant: it was all a hot mess. That all that really mattered was that he’d experienced a great deal — and that he hadn’t been stuck while his team raced ahead and left him behind.