Losinda held her robes up by the fistful, careful not to let them get into contact with the muddy ground. The late autumn streets were muddy and moist, and were liable to spoil even the roughest silk.

She walked through the slums of Altaluvia, confident that her attributes would keep her safe as she made her way to an old haunt, one that she had found her eldest-born child in many a times.

Many would whisper about the Reizenbrahm curse, about how only daughters populated their halls, and that their lack of sons was evidence that Daiclovius was a poor noble. Losinda would argue otherwise. Her husband was the most principled, steadfast, and moral noble of them all. He had been given plenty of opportunities to bend the law as the highest bidder saw fit, to protect nobles for a high cost, and see the peons punished in the same vein, and yet he had always taken his own road, gone his own way.

Losinda had long-since come to peace with the fact that her family would never truly see success in the world of nobles, and would always be relegated to a backseat, and that was alright with her. If that was the price she had to pay in order to be wedded to such a man, larger than life itself, Losinda would pay it ten times over.

And as much as the people would say that her many daughters was just another result of Daiclovius refusing to play the game of corruption, Losinda saw that as just another blessing. Janina, ever the tempestuous and opinionated girl, who would always say her piece and let her thoughts be known, damned the consequences. Rosin, the sweet and kindly girl, who always sought to see the best in everyone and build bridges between people in conflict. The book-smart Rila, who one day sought to become a scholar, and always thirsted to increase her Intelligence and Wisdom, and walk the steps of her wise father. Then, the youngest Erlina, a Janina with more compassion, albeit with far less patience! There was never a boring day in the Reizenbrahm house with Erlina around, and Losinda could only thank her lucky stars that her daughters were so lively and present, where so many other noble houses kept their daughters as mere decoration, to be advertised to the richest suitor available.

Losinda knew how Janina looked at her, and her greatest regret since the young woman’s defection was that she hadn’t tried to make something of their rocky relationship, to have taken the first step and tried to understand her daughter the way her father had tried to do so many times.

And now, she was taking that first step, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of what Janina was up to in the war front, what she had lost, and what it would take to get her back, so that Losinda could one day hug her, and whisper into her ear that she never, ever meant to hurt her.

She dried away a tear and continued forward, until she reached the tavern of ill repute, a ‘Drunken Drivelbadger’. Questionable name aside, she walked in, and to her surprise, she found one of Janina’s best friends, seated by the counter, downing an entire mug of beer. She walked quickly towards the dark-gray-eyed boy and put the mug down. He looked up in surprise. “Madam Reizenbrahm?”

“Oneks, my dear Oneks,” she whispered. “It is so good to see you.” She held back her tears and schooled her features. She wasn’t here for her own feelings, but to investigate the recent happenings. “Your mother has been worried sick for you. Manalia wants you safe in her home, but I am prepared to house you in the manor for as long as you want.”

He looked at her in bemusement. “I doubt that you came here to invite me to your manor.”

“You are a hero, Oneks,” she reiterated, and she truly believed it. Were it up to her, the dutiful young boy would never have followed Janina to war, yet he did. He had been smitten with Janina, made to follow her and try to impress her every way he could, even if it meant risking his life. What a foolish boy. Brave, but ultimately foolish, for what could a person who would disregard the feelings of his mother be called? “Come, come,” she said, trying to pull him up. “The Reizenbrahm manor has no shortage of good drink and good cheer. Why don’t you leave this sad place?”

The bartender gave her an ugly look, but Losinda ignored it. It wasn’t like she was lying after all. The walls were rickety, the taverngoers all highly suspicious, and there was this insistent smell that reminded Losinda of vomit.

He whirled to face her fully. “If you want to talk, ma’am, take your seat next to me and we can talk. Right now, I’m staying put.” His bleary eyes still maintained a glint of steel, a determination to no longer be pushed around. He had been through a lot, that was for certain.

She sat next to him and nodded. “You may already know about Janina.” She said. It was her opinion that she and Daiclovius keep mum about the topic, but her stupid, righteous husband just had to report the issue and make it a bigger deal than it had to be rather than deal with it in-house.

And now, the world knew Janina not for a war-hero with so many accolades under her belt, but a cowardly deserter.

He banged his flagon on the counter. “Respectfully, ma’am?” He almost shouted. “I don’t believe a word of it.”

As much as that raised a whole host of questions on its own, Losinda did feel good about his opinion. At the very least, it meant that he would be inclined to talk with her. At best, it may even mean that Janina had never deserted at all.

No. She told herself not to craft theories before she at least knew some of the facts. “Did… did Janina love anyone? In the war front?” She asked.

He turned to her slowly and looked at her expression. “Who told you?”

She furrowed her brows. “What-what do you mean?”

“Do you not know?” He asked.

Losinda thought for a moment, before deciding to reveal what little she knew. “I know that he is dead.”

He barked a harsh laughter. “’He’, you say.”

A bolt of lightning struck Losinda’s heart. “What?”

Was it not a man, but a woman? And… did that mean that Daiclovius had lied to her? No. Her husband could never lie to her. She would have noticed it if he died. He was never the Charm-specialist, and not a liar neither. Someone else must have lied to him.

“Oneks,” she said, leaning towards him. “I need you to tell me the truth right now.”

He looked at her for a few moments before sighing. “Scarlett. Remember Scarlett?”

Janina’s dancing instructor’s daughter? Janina was in love with her? “…Why didn’t she tell me?” she whispered. It was a mistake, because Oneks now looked at her in open contempt.

“Why, maybe it’s because she knew how much you demanded an heir out of her?”

‘I would have reconsidered!’ she almost roared. Janina was never open about her affairs, even in her happiest of days, so how could she have known that her eldest-born daughter did not hold a preference for men at all?

Losinda had faced the choice of either marrying a poor man that she loved or a wealthy man that she did not even know, and she had chosen the latter for her family, only to one day, serendipitously find that the wealthy man was ten times the man that her lover of no repute was.

She had hoped the same for her daughters, but she should have known that it was not realistic to do so. At the very least, she should have let her children enjoy the same happiness she herself enjoyed, the same marital bliss of being partnered with a person that they would love to spend the rest of their lives with.

“I love Janina,” she said. “And… I don’t care what she would have wanted, so long as it made her happy. I may not have been perfect, but I am looking for her right now, so if all you can do is sit there and pass judgment, then you are of no help.”

Oneks grimaced, pressing his forehead to the rim of his flagon. “They… they treated her like shit, you know.”

Losinda leaned closer as he spoke.

“A woman that could outclass a hundred mundane fighters was one thing. That she also loved a woman? The army wanted to throw her away at the first opportunity.”

Memories of Janina’s letters to Daiclovius flashed into her mind. She would always complain about her commanders, the unfairness of army life, and how she felt she was being underutilized. Losinda had always believed her, and her solution was always to donate more to the commander’s family, or try and raise awareness of the plight of women in the army, to no avail.

It never occurred to her that she should have defended those of unusual romantic proclivities. After all, she never thought that applied to her family.

It was the work of the divines, no doubt, punishing her for the unfair goodness she meted out, the goodness that only affected people like her daughter rather than all those who were downtrodden.

She should have done more, been more.

“They never respected her,” Oneks continued. “A level thirty Elite Swordsman,” he chuckled dryly and shook his head. “You realize what sort of terror she would have been in the battlefield? Can you guess how many people of her rank was stronger or as strong as she was? No one. Not by a mile. She was a captain when she could have been a major. Her father was a godsdamn admiral at her level, and Janina…” he scoffed. “She was still a damn hero, everywhere she went. They put her on leave so they could try and kill us. Scarlett. Her friends. Me.” He started sobbing into his flagon, his words growing increasingly incoherent.

Her heart swelled at what she had heard. She always knew, in her heart of hearts, that Janina was a force to be reckoned with wherever she went, a force of nature unto herself. Losinda had never lost that faith.

To hear her very own country denigrating and putting her down for no other reason than because she was different, in the midst of a war that they were losing? Losinda could kill a man right there. That was how angry she felt.

“Missus Reizenbrahm,” Oneks said. “Your daughter was a hero. Whoever made her desert, I suggest you start with the colonel general’s family and work your way from there. I doubt that she would have deserted even after Scarlett died. No, she would have fought on like the madwoman she is, and carve her way through those wretched Goldman legions!” He smashed the flagon on the counter. “Confound them all!”

Losinda put a hand over Oneks’ own. “Come to the manor, child. Rest. See your mother. She would like to see your face.” Oneks looked at Losinda, and tears welled in his eyes. He nodded, sobbing despite himself.

She left the locale, and plotted her next course.

000

My body modifications had continued far into the night. I had enforced all of my muscles and bones to the point that it took a considerable amount of force to damage them, and with my boost spells, I could even raise my effective attributes to a level that made me immune to all sorts of damage.

My greatest downfall thus far had been my inability to bring a level of offence to bear, something that could match the might of Reizenbrahm. That had manifested numerous times so far in my journey. Had I been strong enough, I could have eviscerated the old man and fled the carriage that time he threatened to kill me. I could even have killed Janina, or stab Reizenbrahm before he could even react, preventing him from raising any sort of fuss.

Unfortunately, I had been at his mercy all those times, too weak to resist his Sentencing. I had researched the topic, and the spell required that he keep me imprisoned some way, and also such that I could not escape. I had been in the underground librabry, enclosed on all sides by stone walls, and my warden was that self-same man, with a Power quotient in the thirties. My evocation just couldn’t have matched his speed at the time.

Now? I didn’t need it to. My appendages were fast enough to stop him, hurt him even, and pump him full of toxins faster than he could dodge away.

I was only scratching the surface, too. My Focus was making progress in terms of attributes, and was gathering progress in terms of leveling up as well.

Name: Focus

Class: Familiar

Title: None

Level: 1 (85%)

Attributes

Power 0

Endurance 0

Intelligence 4

Wisdom 4

Unspent points: 0

And now, it was time to gather even more power. I checked in at the crack of dawn, down at Reizenbrahm’s in-house dungeon, and prepared to commune with a demon, above the chained and unconscious form of Janina. Reizenbrahm had allowed me to keep her as clean and healthy as possible, meaning that despite not having been unchained for nigh-on an entire week, she was still free of excretions and other issues like starvation.

Keeping someone at a special warrior class of level thirty free of chains in a prison was extremely difficult. Attributes made it a nightmare to keep them from escaping, so most of the time, high-leveled criminals were just executed or exiled out of hand.

After giving the imprisoned woman a clean bill of health, I evoked the spell for ‘Commune with Demons’. I ignored the notification stating I had invented the spell, something that bore investigation in its own right, and was just about to speak the name when I heard another voice.

“My, you are so visible right now, I could just eat you,” a form, sat crouched over Janina’s unconscious form, leered at me. She was dressed in a leotard striped with black and white, and bizarrely enough, looked more conventionally attractive than her corporeal counterpart. More shapely, at least, and less muscular.

I held off on trying to formulate hypotheses on why that was for the moment. Instead, I tried to figure out the best avenue of communicating with this being.

What I already knew was that they were timeless, meaning they already had perfect knowledge of our world. I also knew that they were ambiguously limited by the very nature of their existence, their inability to… learn being one such thing.

What exactly that constituted, I wasn’t sure? Could they not learn the details of someone they had just met? Could they not learn about anything that was not already a part of their base of knowledge? How could they possibly function if so?

Questions. Far too many questions.

“What is your name?” I asked it.

It smiled so widely that the edges of its mouth left the bounds of its face, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth. “Jogmomich.”

The blowback of hearing its name was gentler than that of my own counterpart, but it still hurt like a punch to the gut. “I would—”

“Like to make a deal with me, no doubt,” it said. “You would trade something of value so that I could manifest phantasms of some sort, things that would allow our dear Janina to empower her Wisdom and become more than she currently is. Correct?”

“Would you not benefit from that?” I asked, my mind racing at the fact that my entire gameplan was exposed to her. “Surely, you—”

“You know nothing of our ways,” she laughed. “Sad, but understandable. Our current era is…” she looked at her bare wrist. “Far too late since the Era of Madness, and far too early for the Era of the Mother.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

She rushed towards me, and it was all I could do to recoil before her far-too-wide smile was in my face. “Knowledge of a displaced time, my girl? Is that what you want?” She pulled back and clicked her tongue while shaking her head. “Naïve. Far too naïve. And stupid. Don’t you know that would cost you something?”

“I don’t need that,” I quickly said. The guards at the door were staring at me in open shock now. “I need you to do yourself a favor and—”

“Whatever you have in mind, spare me,” she said, holding up a hand to forestall me. “You have noting that I want. Oh!” She raised a finger. “I would love to see you squirm and whimper a little!”

My mind raced for solutions, until I came upon one highly dubious one. “What will you dare do?” I asked. “When the great Rezdnaq Qandzer still requires much of me?”

“Simple,” she said. “Tell you of your future!”

Reizenbrahm seized a handful of magic and shot it at me, a maddened expression on his face, a far-cry from his usual scowl or pensive frown. The Reizenbrahm manor burned down to its foundations, while the city of Altaluvia was sacked by invading Goldmen. All of Reizenbrahm’s family, dead. Losinda died by a knife to her throat, and the children were ripped limb from limb by the marauders.

And finally… Farhaan, lifeless, blue-faced, lying on the cold, hard ground.

“Stop it!” I shrieked. I sustained that shriek, waving my hands in shock and panic, too terrified to even engage my new bone-tipped tentacles.

“This is your most likely future,” Jogmomich said to me. “Barring a most miraculous divergence, this is exactly what you will see.”

“No!” I shouted.

She shrugged. “Well, suit yourself. I have gotten my fill of your fear and terror, so tell me. What would you want?”

“Nothing!” I shouted. “I wanted,” I inhaled deeply. “Nothing!”

“Would you throw away a whole favor from one such as me, because of some hurt feelings?” she pouted at me. “Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Go throw yourself in a hole and cease your existence as someone of your teeny-tiny stature may know it.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Brain waves, perhaps. Anyway, what I’m saying is, turn them off. Die.”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine,” I said. “Do to Janina what Rezdnaq Qandzer did to me. Show her memories of her past, and try to build her a more solid foundation for her wisdom so she may regain her sanity.”

“That!” she shouted. “That will cost you, my girl!”

“You said—“

“I said I owe you a favor, but not all favors are created equally. Some are worth one measly copper while others can be worth a million golden lurat! How can they be compared?”

“Then what?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“What can you give me?”

Nothing. I could give this… this being nothing.

Who could give this being something worth its while, though?

I only knew of one such being, one such person that I could leverage a debt from. “Rezdnaq Qandzer,” I said. “Ask her.”

What did I know about her? She wanted to make me a god. While I couldn’t make out exactly what that entailed, I knew that it meant she wanted me to stay alive at the very least.

I could work with that.

Jogmomich giggled. “You!” She wagged her index finger at me. “You, you, you! Truly.” She clicked her tongue and laughed again. “I need not tell you what could happen if she reneges on our agreement.”

Before I could reassure her, she continued.

“You will have that gremlin you call a child ripped from your arms and trampled upon,” she said, still not losing that untrustworthy smile. “And I will feed on your tears.”

“I will kill you,” I said. My wisdom warred with me, but I was done listening to reason or deferring to calm and reasoning. I could only see red now. “I will reach through time itself and,” I caught myself just in the nick of time, and began to speak only in glyphs, a language that she would most understand, but would remain unintelligible to the guards outside. [I will kill the Reizenbrahms while they are mere babies, and make sure, make absolutely sure, that you never manifest.]

[You cannot!] She laughed. [I am temporally displaced! The very fact that I could have manifested is reason enough for my existence!]

Reasonable or not, her protestations were nothing before my incandescent rage. [Believe me, Jogmomich. I will defy reason itself in my bid to destroy every trace of you.] For the first time, Jogmomich began to flicker in and out of existence, and her grin was shrinking by the second. [The very fact that I don’t know how to right now? It means nothing before my infinite ability to learn. I will rip you from that pitiful existence and cast you into the deepest recesses of improbability itself. Do not test me, beast.]

Her smile regained in prominence and she nodded. She no longer regarded me with the bemused interest that an accomplished academian would have looking at a six year old that knew long-form division, but as something almost akin to an equal.

[I hear you, Reza. I hear you. Well, let me not keep you for much longer. You still wish to speak with your big sister, no?]

Before I could answer, she disappeared, leaving me alone once more in the cell.

She was right. I still needed to speak with my ‘big sister’. For a few minutes more, however, I would pore over the memories of my interactions with Jogmomich, ponder all the times I may have blundered, and what I may have learned from our interaction.

One important tidbit, however, was the fact that despite all her swagger and know-it-all attitude, Jogmomich still salivated over the opportunity to gain favor with Rezdnaq Qandzer, proving that she was at the very least high on the totem pole of demons.

How high remained to be seen, but I had very few doubts that she was not one of the most important creatures there. She was me, after all, albeit in a limited sense. Moreover, she was a me with even more experience and power.

A me that was better than me. It was impossible to fathom how I could outsmart or overpower such a person, painful to even consider the fact that I every likely would not come out on top of this interaction.

Yet, I had to speak with her again. Unlike Jogmomich, she genuinely seemed to want me to develop in my own way, and didn’t put price tags on information.

I inhaled deeply, and exhaled, calming my thundering heart. I was afraid. Terrified was the better term. I had every right to.

But I would go nowhere at all if I didn’t take any chances.

I took a deep breath, evoked ‘Commune with Demons’, and plastered the name of my demonic counterpart into the ether, ready for anything.