March 28, 2026 — 1:38 am

Verity slept at the cabin and missed most of the early morning excitement. There was chatter across the party channel, which she’d largely slept through, the words coming and going with some annoyance on her part, never touching her mind. She might have mumbled something. If asked, she might have been able to piece it together, but it was a blur.

She finally woke up around first bell, which was still fairly early for her, and asked whether people had been talking while she slept, which was when they’d filled her in on the missing persons cases, and all the things that had gone on during a handful of undone days — the short version, anyway. The longer version came from Mizuki.

“Alright,” said Mizuki once Verity was back in the house. “So far as I know, we’ve been through this day five times already. One of those was Alfric’s, the other four were his aunt Penelope, who I think one of us got in contact with because of the similarities with her daughter that went missing and the stuff over there. Lin and Kell both left notes, and both took things with them, but it’s pretty suspicious. It also happened before the witching hour, which seems like it’s specifically an anti-chrono measure. We’ve had eyes on the past, but it seems like the enemy knows that’s something that we can do, because it’s been foiled in a couple of different ways. We did manage to track Kell down right up to the point he touched a totally random rock in the woods and vanished, which didn’t help at all, and trying to track him backwards was super rough.”

“Alright,” said Verity. She was having morning tea with short biscuits and a dab of jam. “So at this point … you have chrononauts, who have already experienced the day, combing the deeper past using entads?”

“Yup,” said Mizuki. “It’s crazy the amount of stuff they have pointed at this problem. After her daughter Kali was abducted or ran away — much more ran away, I think — the disappearances in Liberfell kind of stopped, or the character of them changed, it was much more, uh, deniable, I guess. Young people who were just passing through and never ended up getting where they were going, people who weren’t missing right away, they were missing a week or a month later or something like that.”

“But Penelope was working on the problem,” said Verity. “Preparing?”

“Oh yeah,” said Mizuki. “And getting the government involved, to the extent they’re willing. She’s got a significant portion of Inter’s ability to watch the past, spending loads of money, some of it borrowed from relatives. It’s a really pretty rare ability, as is information gathering, but we’ve got lots of stuff. And the enemy is one step ahead.”

“You’re not worried about Kell?” asked Verity.

“Oh, I am,” said Mizuki. She cocked her head to the side. “Why?”

“You just seem … excited,” said Verity.

“I mean, he’s probably fine,” said Mizuki. “The Editors don’t seem like they would have let mind control slip in, and if they had, there’s no way that you’d use it to pick up relative nobodies, right? No offense to him.”

“You think they’re all okay, somewhere?” asked Verity.

“I’m hoping so. There’s something that we got from Vertex, I guess in one of the undone days, where apparently they’ve been having a few hiccups with their party channel,” said Mizuki. “Messages that were spoken and didn’t come across, I guess. That might be nothing, but it might also mean that someone was listening in, or blocking the ability to talk, or something like that. Which is another lead! But good luck trying to find one entad out of billions, even if it went through a shop, which it probably didn’t.”

“And everyone else is trying to do things that they haven’t done before?” asked Verity.

“We’re going to do some pastwatch stuff, since a lot of the best entads need people positioned in a specific place at a specific time,” said Mizuki. “There are a few that work on specific items or whatever, but they’ve already been used, mostly. We watched Kell and Lin write their notes, apparently of their own free will. I mean, I didn’t watch it, but I was told that I watched it.”

“What do the notes say?” asked Verity.

“Kell just wanted to move on, I guess,” said Mizuki. For the first time, she seemed a little down. “I guess for him, he’d proven himself at wizard college, proven himself in Kiromo, proven himself by doing a bunch of dungeons solo, proven himself with Vertex, and it was just —” she let out a breath. “I don’t know. I read it this morning. I’m still trying to get my head around it. I guess I hadn’t realized he was that driven about things, or that he wanted to push on to greener pastures, whatever those might be.” She shrugged. “From the way Vertex tells it, he’s been talking about something like that for a while now, but he never said it to me.”

“Ah,” said Verity. “Sorry.”

“Nah, it is what it is,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “But the thing is, he didn’t say where he was going, which is incredibly rude, and didn’t even say that he couldn’t say where he was going. So why the mystery?”

“Yeah,” said Verity. “And should we really be hunting these people down?”

“I mean, of course,” said Mizuki. “That they’re doing this without anyone knowing where they’re going is — ah crud, you’re thinking about your parents.”

Verity nodded. “I left without saying where I was going,” she said. “I think there’s something nice about just … disappearing, not having to say where you’re going, making a clean break. If my parents weren’t rich, I’d have gotten away with it.”

“Kell had friends,” frowned Mizuki. “I mean, at least one friend, if you don’t count Vertex.”

“I think he might have tried to say goodbye,” said Verity. “We told you he came by when you were drunk off entad testing?”

“You did,” said Mizuki. She winced. “But I mean, I should have had more time, right? If he was offered some kind of deal — he took his mana stones with him, did I tell you that?”

“No,” said Verity. She felt as though Mizuki was perhaps not the best one to be giving a rundown, but she liked Mizuki, and personal affection went a long way.

“So that means he’s going to go be a wizard somewhere,” said Mizuki. “He’ll still be working, basically. It just feels like, I don’t know. Bad.” She frowned. “So when we do find him, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Do you think we’ll find him?” asked Verity.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ve got the Overguards on our side, right?”

“All of them?” asked Verity.

“No, not all of them,” said Mizuki. “This is probably the last day, the real day, actually, unless we can get more on loan. Which sucks, because that means that Alfric’s parents aren’t helping.” She frowned. “Apparently I used the ring to get in touch with Ria, and she came to help out, but let Penelope take the reset, and told Alfric that she wouldn’t be spending days on this unless there was a real need, so … I don’t know.”

“Sorry,” Verity offered. “I know that Kell was a good friend.”

“Is,” said Mizuki. “Kell is a good friend, just one who’s being an ass.”

“Right,” said Verity. “And you don’t think that, ah, maybe this has something to do with him maybe having an unrequited crush on you?”

Mizuki sighed and looked away. “It’s been mentioned.”

“Then I guess I don’t need to mention it,” said Verity.

Mizuki looked back at her. “Thanks.” She looked at Verity’s empty plate. “He didn’t say anything, in the letter, about me, though if you read between the lines … I mean we were friends, I don’t know what I was supposed to do, date someone I wasn’t really interested in dating?”

“I don’t think anyone is saying that,” said Verity.

“I mean, I guess we could have talked about it,” said Mizuki. “I could have said, ‘hey, I don’t know if you’re interested in dating me, but I definitely don’t feel that way about you’.” She chewed on a nail. “Maybe that would have been better?”

“I think he knew,” said Verity.

“I hope he knew, I mean he had girlfriends before,” said Mizuki. “But if I was into someone and they weren’t into me, I wouldn’t just … you know. Leave.”

“No?” asked Verity.

“Because of the house, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I really love this house.”

“So if you didn’t have the house … ?” asked Verity.

“I mean yeah, running away from all your problems?” asked Mizuki. “I can definitely see me doing that, as much as I love Pucklechurch. And I guess that’s the endgame for us, once we’ve mined out all the dungeons in the area.”

“No,” said Verity. “We’ve got the Commute Lute. We have a decade of dungeons, even at one a week.” She hadn’t actually done the math.

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right.”

“If we’re still doing dungeons,” said Verity. The conversation from the night before had rattled around in her head, as much as she’d tried to stop it. Hannah had said that sort of rumination was bad, that it was better to be mindful of thoughts and focus them elsewhere, but that was hard. What did you do after a bad performance? You reviewed it, noted the places where things went wrong, and thought about the proper way to do it. What did you do when you had a performance coming up? You practiced until you were too sore to go on, or until it came out perfect every time.

“I’d just not worry about that,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ll figure something out, I’ll fight Alfric if he tries to pull you off the party or whatever, it’ll be fine.”

Mizuki could sometimes be really bad at reassuring people.

“So, how can I help with Kell?” asked Verity.

“Pastwatching,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got a bit of a plan, you’ve got, ah, twenty minutes or so to get to the general store, which is where you’re going to follow Kell, three days ago.”

“Okay,” said Verity slowly.

“You’re going to have a little window frame, it’s pretty light,” said Mizuki. “You’re also going to have some glasses, which will let you hear silent things, like the window frame. So you just look through the frame, holding it up, watch Kell as he goes into the general store three days ago, then follow him around for the rest of the day, I guess, and hope that, uh, he talks about where he went and why, or better, that he has a meeting with a cloaked figure, or looks at a map, or whatever.”

“Alright,” said Verity. “If that’s how I can be of use. And everyone else is … ?”

“Alfric is at the site of the stone that teleported Kell,” said Mizuki. “His entad is a stake that gets driven into the ground and then, I guess, lets him see backward in time at one second per second? So like, he’s seeing the present, which is moving forward at a second a second, and he’s also seeing the past, which is moving backward at a second a second. He’s watching the present moving forward but also this kind of alternate present where time is running in reverse.”

“Uh huh,” said Verity. “So the upshot is … that he’s watching the forest, but also the forest but in reverse?”

“He says it’s super boring,” said Mizuki. “Which is why he picked it for himself. Isra is going wandering with the Commute Lute, expanding her senses as far as she can, scouting with birds, that kind of thing, just in case they’re within the uh,” she made a shape with her hand. “The spiral.”

“The spiral of hexes?” asked Verity.

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “She took our map. She’s also talking to censusmasters, where possible. But she’s done this a few times, and is on the outer edge of the spiral, so,” she shrugged. “We probably won’t be seeing her today, except for at a late dinner. And then Hannah is off talking to clerics, which she volunteered to do and which doesn’t seem to be related to anything but Lin being missing. I think she’s helping to get a replacement.”

“And what will you be doing, while I’m Kell-watching?” asked Verity.

“Touching stuff,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got an entad that works on paper, lets us see into the past, not wholly, just stuff that touched the paper. I’m flipping through a bunch of books, Kell’s and Lin’s. We already did the notes and got nothing from them. Did you want to trade?”

“No,” said Verity. “I’ll get going then.”

“Here,” said Mizuki. She waved a hand and the window frame appeared in front of her, which she caught. The frame was cedar, with plenty of embellishments, but two handholds had clearly been added later and weren’t part of the entad proper. “And here.” She waved again, and the glasses appeared. They were half-moon spectacles, and looked fragile. Verity’s eyes were drawn to the ring on Mizuki’s finger, which had three small gems, two of them dull but the last shining. “Entad!” said Mizuki. “A loaner, but exactly the sort of thing that we really need, since it would let Alfric dynamically swap weapons, or let you swap lutes.”

Mizuki was still assuming that they were all going to do dungeons again together. It might very well have been that they’d already done their final dungeon as a team though, with a hundred lutes and a successful deployment of the Overguard Maneuver to show for it.

“Who am I reporting my findings to?” asked Verity as she stood from the table.

“We’re all meeting back here at the end of the day, for dinner,” said Mizuki. “Penelope will be here. But like I said, it’s probably the last time through the day, because we’ve done basically everything that we can, and a lot of what’s left is just scraps.”

Verity felt like raising an objection to that, particularly the idea of her day being the collection of ‘scraps’ that would probably amount to nothing, and if the day was scraps, then it felt like a reset might be justified. She was in no mood to complain about work though, not with the breakup of the party feeling like it was hanging over her head.

She took her plate to the kitchen and washed it, trying to be mindful of the time, then put on the glasses and grabbed the frame. She hadn’t been told whether it was fragile, or how fragile, and it was hard not to think of the glass in it as being liable to shatter at a moment’s notice.

Even now, the window was showing the past. It didn’t seem like it was exactly three days, since through the window it was earlier in the morning. In the kitchen, the window into the past showed Mizuki cooking breakfast, and when Verity moved it around, she could see Alfric there, leaning against the counter, sneaking food when Mizuki wasn’t looking — or pretending to sneak food so that she could slap him on the back of his hand with her Anyspoon.

“I worry you don’t fear the spoon enough,” said Mizuki, and for a moment Verity was startled by the sound of her speaking. The window was giving a view into the past, and the glasses were giving sound to that image.

Verity set the window down, not wanting to see more. There was temptation, certainly, to keep watching this conversation that had happened without her, but she’d never had terribly strong voyeuristic tendencies.

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

This, of course, was what she would be doing with the rest of her day, but it was different with Kell, who wasn’t a friend, and when he would be in a public place.

Verity made sure she had her things in order. Since living in the woods, she’d taken to carrying a large bag like the one Mizuki often had, which she could stuff her things into. It was horribly unfashionable, and Verity liked it that way. A part of her itched for someone to say something mean about it, so she could tell them off, but that was the sort of thing that didn’t really happen in Pucklechurch. She thought about taking a lute, and decided against it, mostly because she knew that holding up the window all day was going to be a chore.

She warped into the center of Pucklechurch, which was relatively busy. It was a market day, and people were out shopping and chatting with each other. Verity suspected that half the reason market day existed was for the social aspects of it, as the sellers gathered together. Temple day was obviously the thing that brought most of the community together, but in a place like Pucklechurch, they’d take any excuse they could get.

The general store wasn’t far off from the warp, and Bethany was tidying up when Verity got there. Verity did almost no shopping, since Mizuki and Hannah took care of most of the food, and Isra took care of the rest. Verity’s primary contribution to the house was gardening, which she didn’t do all that much of, and a bit of needlework from time to time. None of that required buying things. The only time she really came into the general store was to use the travel wardrobe, which sat in one corner with a sign and payment bowl next to it, and she hadn’t done that in quite a bit.

“Verity!” said Bethany with a beaming smile. “It’s been ages.”

“It has,” nodded Verity. “Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” said Bethany. “I’m just happy that you haven’t gotten around to using entads for all your needs. I heard that you struck out with the lutes?”

Verity blinked. “No?” It felt to her like they’d had an astounding haul.

“No foods, few consumables?” asked Bethany. “That’s just what I had heard.”

“Oh,” said Verity. “I suppose. Good storage, good travel. A bit of food actually, or at least liquids.” She looked around. The window was a foot across, held in her hands, and Bethany hadn’t asked about it. “Um, Kell was in here, in the morning, three days ago?”

Bethany nodded. “And you’re here to look for him through a window into the past.”

“Right,” said Verity, feeling flummoxed. “You talked to, ah, someone?”

“Xy,” said Bethany. “She came zooming through here at dawn. She’s always good for getting the news around, it’s one of her better features.”