Isyd was seating on his bed, eyes closed.

This couldn’t be real.

His first idea was that he was under a powerful Illusion [Hex], but he dismissed the idea quickly enough. Isyd was the only one who could see and hear Naeht and there was no way that whoever cast this [Hex] could have known to include her as well. It could be possible however that his surroundings and his sensations of it were not an outside creation but an inside one and that he was in fact imprisoned in his own mind. After all, Isyd knew that he was weaker than most to that kind of [Spells]…

“Well, there’s an easy way to know for sure…”

He reached down to his boots where a short, sheathed knife was strapped against his leg. He drew out the shiny blade in one hand and put his other hand flat on the bed. No matter how powerful the Illusion [Hex], they were all susceptible to being broken by powerful sensations, specifically the painful ones…

Without an instant of hesitation, Isyd drew a gash on the back of his left hand.

Nothing changed around him.

Drops of his dark blood stained the bedcovers and Isyd let out a sigh of frustration.

“Isyd, why are you hurting yourself?” Naeht asked him, worried.

“I had to make sure we weren’t under a [Spell]…”

“Is it really the past, Isyd?”

Isyd did not answer her. For a brief instant, he considered the idea that everything could have been a dream. The Rifts, the Obcys, the War, the deaths, all the life he remembered living past this instant in this inn of Vilriver, maybe he had dreamed it all and had only just woken up. However, his eyes landed on his new injury and Isyd realized that it wasn’t the case. His blood was darker than any human blood had the right to be. This meant that he had truly lived all of those events. His left hand touched the bandages that he could feel under his tunic, which covered the right part of his chest and the entirety of his right arm. Those bandages were the proof that he still bore the scars of what the Obcys had done to him.

“If we really had rewound time, you wouldn’t be here with me Naeht. And I would be my younger self, not with the scars. It is not that we rewound time so much that my present self was physically transported years before the War even started. For one thing, I remember everything…”

Isyd put his head in his hands.

He remembered his entire life. It had truly happened, he had lived through it. And yet here he was once again in Vilriver.

“Isyd…?” Naeht asked timidly.

“I can’t…I-I can’t l-live through it once again…” His voice was shaking, the air seemed to stick in his throat, choking him. “Not again… God, please… I-I can’t do it all over again…”

“Isyd…”

“Why me? What kind of sick game is this? Is what I’ve been through not enough? Am I to live through all of it again? They’ll come, I know they will! God, this has to be a joke, right? ‘Tis has to be a jest!”

Laughter shook his entire body. He laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed more than he could ever remember. He laughed until he thought he would never stop laughing. He laughed at the thought of everything that was to come in the future.

“Isyd…Isyd, why are you crying?”

Shaken by the hiccups, Isyd did not even bother to wipe the streams of tears on his face. Isyd did not know how long he spent laughing and crying at the same time. When it finally stops, he realized that he was thinking clearer. Naeht was standing in front of him, a frown of worry on her beautiful face. Isyd wished he could reach for her and pat her head to reassure her, but she was intangible even for him.

“I’m fine, Naeht,” Isyd told her as he got up from the bed. “I just needed this moment to take it in. It’s going to be alright.”

“Is it?”

Promise me, Isyd… you must save them… Promise me… A woman’s voice, tired and pleading.

“Yes, I promise.” He gave her a wide smile, then took a long look at the room they were in. “We were brought back in time, Naeht. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the fact of the matter is that we’re here now in Vilriver, years before the Rifts opened. I assume that it will happen this time as well, but this time we will be prepared. I am here with the knowledge of my previous life, and I swear that I will not let things repeat themselves. We have a few years ahead of us and we will use them to find a way to prevent the War to happen in the first place. I will save this world, Naeht. No matter the cost.”

Naeht took on a pensive look. She flew one way then the other, to finally come back around in front of him.

“It is going to be difficult, I think. Do you have an idea on how we go about saving the world in the first place, Isyd?”

“Yeah. First, we need to go to school!”