Fallen Mage Regressor

Mal walked up to the familiar steepled building. The church hadn't sent Vigil to escort him. Instead, there was nothing more than a letter, along with a time and date.

Mal had followed along, because ignoring a summons from the church was generally a bad idea, and that was ignoring the fact that they were nominally, at this time, allies.

And now he was here. He opened the door, stepped inside, then shut it behind him. Deacon Thoma turned around, hands hidden inside of his sleeves.

"Malfrasius." Deacon Thoma smiled, the lines in his face rough and the bags of his eyes dark, blackened. "I'm pleased to see that you arrived at the communicated time."

"It would have been rude to do otherwise. Now, what is all this about?"

"First, I want to congratulate you on your results in the first event of the Exodi triumph. Our faith in you wasn't misplaced. I've continued to work on obtaining the items you requested."

Mal nodded. "Cool. But I can't imagine you called me here just for that."

Deacon Thoma went silent.

"I wish that I could give you good news," he said. "Unfortunately, I can't change reality."

"What is it?"

Deacon Thoma turned around, eyes faced away. "Nima escaped."

"Wait, Nima?" Mal furrowed his eyebrows. "I thought he was going to be executed."

"He was. They were taking him to a secure location at the time of the attack."

"But?"

"But the cult had assets higher up the intelligence chain than we realized," he said. "Not only that, but they were willing to burn those assets just to get Nima away from custody."

Mal frowned as some of the implications became clearer.

"How high level are we talking here?"

"A count was implicated after Nima's escape," Deacon Thoma said. "A high-ranking one, who worked under a direct advisor to the kind. The nobility is in shock, and it won't be long before you likely start hearing rumors of what occurred. We don't know how long he was involved, but—"

"The fact that the count was a servant of one of the king's direct advisors and they were willing to throw that guy under the bus must mean that Nima is a much bigger deal than I thought," Mal said.

"Indeed. It's extremely strange behavior. Everybody had been under the assumption that Nima had been nothing more than a low level cultist. The fact that he's apparently of such high priority is bizarre, to say the least."

"Do you think he's going to come back after us?"

"I think it's very likely. What's more, we've heard rumors from the north." Deacon Thoma turned back around. "How much do you know about what's been happening in the Violeko Empire?"

"I heard rumors of it when I was in the Elven Kingdom of Haran," Mal said.

"The rumors are closer to reality than the church would like to admit. We've been attempting to organize a task force, but for political reasons, the Violeko Empire wouldn't allow us into their borders. In the meanwhile, the Tenth Vessel has been wreaking absolute havoc."

Now that was a word Mal hadn't heard in some time.

Mal thought back to the first time he'd run across each of the vessels.

Even in his past life, he knew very little about them, other than that they were the highest ranked of the cult. Ten individuals, each specializing in a particular area of dark magic. The second in command was a master mind mage. The third was an eldritch contractor, similar to Mal in type, but much worse in scope. But they'd stayed out of Mal's way, for the most part.

Despite that, Mal had hunted them down, and had even successfully managed to take down five before his own end. One of them had been the necromancer. The fight had been short—Mal had cornered the man outside of a farmhouse, similar to the time Mal had first encountered a necromancer creature in this timeline, back with the elves. Mal had locked the door, reinforced the walls, then set the entire building on fire.

The challenge had been separating him from his little army of corpses, but once that had been done, the necromancer was less than useless.

"You seem unsurprised."

Mal jolted. "What do you mean?"

"As far as I know, young ones such as you have no awareness of the vessels."

Damn it, damn it, say something!

"I did research." Mal blurted. "After what happened with Nima, I learned as much about the cult as I could."

Deacon Thoma nodded easily, "You're a wise boy for seeking out knowledge like that."

Mal let his shoulders relax by just a hair.

He was already terrible at remembering what he was supposed to know at this current time, and he'd only been back in this timeline for a few months. Mal dreaded what would happen the longer he went through this experience.

I'll need to start writing stuff down in a journal just to keep track of it all, he thought.

"So, what about the Tenth Vessel?"

"Yes, the Tenth."

Deacon Thoma's gaze hardened, muscles flexed underneath the thick brown robes, and something in the air crackled with energy.

"The tenth specializes in necromancy, taking advantage of Withering-type mana to achieve his aims," he said. "Desecration of the dead, the absolute lowest of the low, and he's not even particularly good at it."

Damn. What a burn, Mal thought.

"You have experience with necromancers?"

"Plenty. There's always some idiot who thinks that he's going to conquer the world with an army of the undead. The church ensures that those delusions of grandeur stay delusions."

"But Vessels are supposed to be the strongest, aren't they? How did he receive that role if he's so weak?"

Deacon Thoma sat down on one of the pews.

"Perhaps he's a shade better than the other necromancers of the past I've seen," he said. "But it's nothing compared to what a real wizard can do. All the man does is rely on sheer numbers. That's how the Violeko Empire has kept him suppressed."

"So what does all of this have to do with Nima?"

"Nima was spotted in the north," Deacon Thoma said. "Not too far from the last known location of the Tenth Vessel. It's likely that the two have met up, and given Nima's connection to the school..."

Despite himself, Mal couldn't see the danger.

"I think we'd see an army of zombies marching on us pretty quickly. And that's ignoring the fact that the Violeko Empire would have to deal with it and thin out the herd since it's happening in their borders."

Deacon Thoma nodded. "I'm aware. And yet, I find myself deeply troubled. I don't see why else Nima would link with the Tenth unless he's to provide information about Exodi."

"I suppose. But again, they're not going to march an army here."

"Hear me out. If our suspicions are right, if Nima is being asked to guide the Tenth Vessel to this school... then why? It doesn't make any sense. The Tenth Vessel's skills aren't conducive to something like this, not unless they're planning a full scale invasion of the entire continent, and we would have heard whispers of that through our networks. It just doesn't seem right."

When it was laid out like that, Mal could see what was so worrying.

"Do you think that they could be planning to resurrect the dead while working from inside the school?" Mal said. "Maybe they plan to take the slow approach. Nothing but the Tenth Vessel and Nima here in the city, and one by one, they raise their little undead army until they're ready to wreak whatever havoc they have planned."

"We believe it to be unlikely," Deacon Thoma said, "but we've set up guards and watchers around all of the graveyards in the city. For that reason. If the Tenth Vessel intends to dishonor the resting, he will taste the full wrath of the Church of Eternus."

Deacon Thoma was a smart man. Of course he would have accounted for something like that.

Mal thought back to his own encounters with the disturbing mutated creatures in the forest.

"Come to think of it," Mal said, "back when I was in Faren and some of his creatures migrated down south, he wasn't using humans."

At that, Deacon Thoma stood up from the pew abruptly. "What did you say?"

"The first one I ran across was... some kind of... I don't know how to describe it. An experiment? It had a humanoid face, but it had fur and spider legs. The second time, it was this writhing vine creature capable of sprouting seeds inside of people and—"

Deacon Thoma looked pale as a ghost.

"We've received no reports that he had such capabilities." His breathing quickened. "If he can turn dead plant matter against us, then—"

At that moment, Mal felt a slow, creeping dread. Multiple little things began to add up, things that he hadn't realized prior. There was the immediate threat and realization that there was very little they could do about a necromancer capable of reviving dead plants. What, would the Church of Eternus scrub the entire city clean?

It was possible, but there was no way they'd put so much as a 20% dent in the amount of plant detritus in Exodi City.

More importantly, the necromancer hadn't had that capability in the prior timeline. He exclusively used human remains. Whether that was a limitation or an intentional choice, Mal didn't know. Either way, the timeline was already diverging.

But what could Mal have possibly done that could have somehow influenced the Tenth Vessel to embrace this new side of necromancy? It had only been a few months, as Mal had noted to himself earlier. It simply wasn't possible for Mal to have interacted with the man, even indirectly. Not unless Mal's mere appearance in the timeline had somehow created distant effects—distant, third order effects that he simply didn't know were even possible.

He half-snorted at a mental thought. Maybe when I came through when I went back in time, I sent out a beam of knowledge to all of my enemies that caused them to remember what went wrong?

Mal found that particular theory deeply unlikely.

But the idea behind it—that his mere presence had somehow created unintended side effects even from the beginning—that deeply unnerved him.

This attack was never supposed to happen. It wasn't in the previous timeline. That means I caused this.

“I'll have to request more aid,” Deacon Thoma said. “We will need the entire city stripped of any dead material.”

“Would that really help? Couldn't he just camp outside of the city walls and build up an army?”

“He could, but we don't think his ability has developed to the point where he can speedily create... do that sort of thing. Of course, our information is limited, but we have to work with what we know.”

Deacon Thoma's gaze turned a little pointed. “I was unaware that you ran into the Tenth Vessel's creations while you were in Faren.”

“Oh,” Mal blinked. “I forgot.”

Deacon Thoma's mouth shuddered up and down. “You forgot?”

“Yeah. It didn't seem that strange. It's only with hindsight that I realized it might be important.”

Deacon Thoma stared at Mal in silence for several seconds.

“You must have had a rather eventful life in your past,” Deacon Thoma said.

“Trust me, you have no idea.”

Deacon Thoma opened his mouth to respond, then he stopped. His gaze turned distant, and he looked at Mal, thought whirring behind his pupils.

"You know," he said. "It only now strikes me that we held a planning session just now. I started treating you like a peer, and I didn't notice until now."

An image popped into Mal's head. The image of a different timeline, of a small cramped room and an older Deacon Thoma laughing at a joke.

"Maybe I just remind you of someone."

The platform jolted underneath Mal. Under his armpit, his witchcraft journal was comfortably cradled, freshly pulled from his satchel for light reading and note-taking. The evening sun painted red and gold across the sky. Within a few minutes, the stone would stop and he would arrive at the top of Exodi mountain.

Whoever comes up with these names really needs to get some creativity, Mal thought.

He arrived at the top and greeted the guards. A spell washed over him, he gave them his identification papers as per usual. Once inside, he made his way to his dorms, when a figure stepped in his path.

“So,”

Mal backed up in surprise. “What? What are you—”

Cassandra stepped forward, a smile on her face, while her eyes were pointed, sharp as knives.

“Do you want to tell me,” she said. “Why I've started receiving messages from other witches asking if I know about anybody who's violated the gender prohibitions on teaching our craft?”

Mal frantically tried to think of an explanation. He instinctively adjusted the thick journal under his shoulder. Cassandra's eyes snapped over to it.

Her smile tightened even further.

“Apprentice,” she said. “How did you get a hold of an elven witchcraft journal?”

Although Mal didn't believe he'd done anything wrong, he couldn't help but feel that there was an unspoken rule about this sort of thing that he'd seriously violated. Multiple times.

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