Stepping into the future was like jumping into a lake. Not because of the sensation of cold water wrapping around my body, but because of the lethargy, the slowness with which the world around me seemed to move in the instant between which I moved from the ‘present’ into the limbo of space time.

In limbo, I couldn’t be touched and I couldn’t touch anything else without jumping into that period in time. The Simurgh’s rainbows and the Evil Eye’s red beams of light crisscrossed over my body, passing right through and crashing into the water, sending up yet another plume of water vapour. The steam sizzled and filled the air with sound and sensation. The attacks went on to the bottom of the shallow waters, digging up sand and dirt and crushing rocks into gravel. The crunch added onto the sizzling water to create a deafening roar that would have been devastating for my ears if I hadn’t been shielded by limbo.

And then the tugging began.

First as a light brush of feeling, as if a few strands of hair had blown onto my shoulder.

Then, there was a poke and a prod on my lower leg.

A push on my lower back.

A shove in the neck.

A punch in the gut.

A walloping kick, a truly powerful and punishing physical attack that made my teeth rattle and my eyes roll and the inside of my head went spinning, spinning, spinning.

I felt like I was being dragged through the ground, sharp grating pins lacerating my skin, while a blunt weapon hammered my muscles and bones and threatened to break my body into a million pieces.

Yet, I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t moving an inch.

I was still in limbo, standing precisely where I had stood when I heard Madness’ chuckle. Except, the Simurgh wasn’t moving and the Evil Eye wasn’t attacking me with its red beams. I couldn’t see the Evil Eye, but I could see the Simurgh, and it was towering over me with its rainbow eyes trained right where I stood.

It could see me.

No, it couldn’t see me in my physical form. But it could see my domain. It knew where I was in a metaphysical sense. I suspected this was true for the Evil Eye and for Madness as well.

The pain was unceasing, but even amid the pummeling, I could isolate two types of attacks. There were heavy blunt attacks and the many sharp but less noticeable attacks. I quickly recognized that these attacks were coming from what felt like two distinct forces. Or perhaps, two distinct beings.

I knew instantly that the blunt one was the Simurgh, for although the blunt attacks were powerful and punishing, pushing back against this force felt like pushing against a pillow. On the other hand, the sharp attacks had to be coming from the Evil Eye because pushing back against them felt like pushing against something slimy and gross.

But then where was Madness? I hadn’t noticed any sign of the powerful Immortal since that one mirthless chuckle. Was he biding his time? Did he not want to fight me? Or had he realized that I had been goading the Immortals into attacking me this way, and that I was enduring their attacks right now, all so I could understand how to take their other domains from them?

I let out a voiceless scream. The pain was unbearable. A searing whiteness filled my head and emptied my thoughts and overwhelmed my every desire. I did not know it was possible to feel this much pain. It was like every inch of my skin was being ripped from my body, all while every fiber of my being was being meticulously removed by a steel comb tinged with venom, acid, and pure malice.

I let go.

A gentle salty sea breeze brushed past my lips.

Soft early morning sunlight landed on my shoulders.

I let out a breath of stale air. My heartbeat kept racing at an incalculable speed but now I could hear its thumping against my ears. I could feel the water lapping up to my knees. I could feel the sand, the gravel, the rocks underneath my feet. And I could see the world in sharp relief as if a murky veil had been lifted off of my eyes and my soul, which had been flailing like a sail in a hurricane, had finally dropped to the ocean floor like a solid metal anchor.

The Simurgh stood in front of me in a daze. The Simurgh’s eyes listlessly stared at the sea in front of it, a few feet from where I was standing. I hadn’t even noticed it in my pain, but I had apparently retreated while struggling against the Immortals. The retreat must have happened without any flight magic on my part, which meant I had fallen into the sea, pushed against the water, and changed something in the limbo of space-time, which had made me move permanently into the future by a few seconds.

I had, quite literally, fallen out of my predicament.

I calmed my heart. The Simurgh was still stuck in whatever state it had gone into in order to challenge me for the temporal domains. I observed the Immortal as closely as I could. I saw the way its eyes glossed over, the way its body stood still against the waves, and the way the water could not stick to its feathers or feet even though they had seemed to be playing with the rainbow colors before. The Simurgh’s state reminded me of the state I had been in while in the limbo of space-time. It was as if its soul or mind had left its body, and its body was stuck in a place separated from the physical world.

I now knew all that I was going to be able to learn from this experiment. Well, I knew almost everything. There was still one more thing to check.

I prepared a ball of plasma and made it as energetic and dangerous as I possibly could. I also prepared an electromagnetic rail gun, one that didn’t require the metal rods and other instruments that my previous design had used, and which could accelerate a projectile to ridiculous speeds. With a few explosive charges and a net of phantom limbs preparing similar spells all around the Simurgh’s frozen body, I lined up the shot.

And fired.

The projectiles raced through the air towards the Simurgh, whizzing through the air and kicking up the scent of vaporized sea water and even a little ozone. The wind blew rapidly against me and I took a step back as the recoil of the rail gun caught me unawares.

“No!” came a menacing cry from all corners of the world, reverberating in my ear like a divine decree and making me wince in pain.

The world froze yet again, only this time, I knew it would only be for a moment. Why did I know this? Because I began feeling inside my own mind and realized how much of my domains had been taken from me.

The domain of the past, that had previously belonged to the Simurgh, had been mostly ripped away from me. I could still observe the past in bits and pieces, but traveling backwards through time was no longer possible. Not for me and not for the Simurgh, either.

The domain of the future, which had previously belonged to the Evil Eye, had been only sort of split between me and the Immortal of Evil. I could still jump from one point in time to another as long as it was in the future, but not every point in time was available to me, and the Evil Eye would still be able to attack me in limbo, which meant it was no longer a safe option for escaping attacks from the Immortal.

But my heart skipped a beat as I realized that I could not sense the domain of the present at all. It had been an important part of my complete temporal domain, and yet, now it felt like I had never possessed it at all. Still, this was the domain that I understood the least, and although I knew it was incredibly powerful, I still had no idea how to use it to my advantage in a fight. So perhaps this loss wouldn’t be that bad.

In the frozen moment in time, I noticed all of my attacks fizzling out or blinking out of existence as if they had been wiped clean with a big eraser. The explosions, the rail guns, the plasma, everything disappeared as if they had been plucked out of this world by an invisible hand. An invisible hand that then reached across the battlefield and smacked me on the head.

The smack felt like it should have been a light one, but it sent me sprawling away into the deeper waters of the ocean. My body began to scream out in protest and my vision wavered as if I had succumb to nausea.

A clear voice filled the air, “You cannot hurt my beloved.”

But I did not care about the voice, the strike, or the disappearance of my attacks. Even as Madness finally appeared on the battlefield, looking at me with a wild look on his face, I didn’t care about what was going on because my mind was racing because of an image I had captured in the corner of my eye.

The image of a gust of wind that had been created by my attack, brushing past the Simurgh’s body, and making one of its frozen feathers move.