So, it turned out that Ehn actually hadn''t been aware of what Liam had been planning. I asked him about visiting the future using his time travel so he would know this sort of thing, but he said that was a terrible idea. If he went to the future, he would be ‘locking in’ those events so that anything else he did to change them would create a different timeline. He didn’t want a different timeline, he wanted to stay in this one. I wasn’t exactly sure what the specific difference was or why it mattered that much, but he insisted there was one. He was okay with using certain types of prophetic magic to get hints and whatnot, but going into the future to see for himself was a no-go.
Fair enough, I didn’t really expect anything useful to come from that anyway. And the point remained, he didn’t know about the Liam thing even with his prophetic magic. Maybe that meant he was dealt with before it became an issue? I wasn’t sure, but what I did know was that Ehn seemed just as annoyed about the prospect of what that man was up to as I was.
“There is time… plenty of it now,” he reminded me. And yes, I was pretty sure he was making a joke, such as it was. A slight smirk crossed the man’s face before his expression hardened once more. “I promise you, the temporary headmaster will not succeed. When we return to the present, he will be… dealt with, whatever it takes.”
“You can’t kill him,” I shot back. “He’s Sarah and Sands’ dad. They might have… he might be an asshole, but you can’t just walk in and execute him. We can stop him, but he stays alive, no matter what. That’s the deal. No killing him.” No matter what issues I had with the man who had betrayed my mother and set this whole thing in motion, there was no way in hell I was going to sign off on murdering the father of two of my closest friends. Friends I was missing even more with each passing day, to be honest. I wished the twins were here. I wished my girlfriends, my--fuck. The list of people I wished were here with me wasn’t exactly short.
If Ehn felt anything one way or the other about me attempting to dictate who he could and couldn’t kill, he didn’t show it. Instead, the man just reiterated, “He will not succeed. You and this place you’ve created are entirely too important.”
“Yeah, and so are my family and friends,” I reminded him. Did he have anyone he cared about like that? Did he have any loved ones? Or was his entire life just this plan of his? The man wasn’t exactly an open book. For all I knew, he had a whole family he was keeping hidden from me. Which was a confusing thought. It was hard to look at a man this single-minded, this powerful, and picture him on a date or something.
Still, I pushed all that out of my head and focused. “Anyway, now you know what he’s up to. And you’ve seen this place.” My hand gestured around the school grounds I had just spent the past little bit escorting him through. “What do you think?” Honestly, I wasn’t sure how much I actually cared about his opinion, but the fact remained that he might have some ideas that could improve this place. I’d just have to make sure to take his suggestions with a pinch of salt. Or maybe a whole dumptruck full.
Ehn was silent for a moment, looking around. We were back out in front of the Haunted Mansion at the center of the complex. “You''ve truly done a fine job setting this up,” he noted thoughtfully. “I can give you some advice on installing alarm magic around your exterior, as well as extra defenses you might not have taken care of. But as far as making the place livable and useful as a school goes, I believe you have it covered. All the spirits here are volunteers, you said?”
Before I could respond, Laein jumped in (literally, she hopped from a few feet away to land directly between us) “That’s right! They know how to support the winning side! They know that simply to be part of this army will be the greatest achievement and honor of their entire existence! They know that our power shall soon spread across the universe, and that they stand on the precipice of being some of the earliest members of the greatest army in the history of all existence, whose very name shall be spoken in hushed whispers for the rest of eternity!” And yes, she did a quite impressive cackle at the end of that, throwing her head back and making that cape billow out behind her. Hell, there was even a krakathoom of thunder in the background thanks to a spell that I was pretty sure she had managed to set up to trigger simply with her laugh. Now that was devotion to her craft.
Coughing slightly, I nodded to the man. “What she said, basically. Well, the part about them being volunteers, that is. We made it clear that they''re allowed to leave whatever they want. And they can take breaks when they need to, when they’re not… ready to be out there. Or, you know… when they want to move on, I’ll help them do that. But for the most part, they’re all in on this. They want to help. They know… they know how important it is, what we’re doing.”
“Good,” Ehn replied easily, “you’ll have enough things occupying your attention and vying for your power. Forcing your troops to remain loyal against their will would be a distraction you don’t need. That’s one reason why Fossor would never have been an acceptable part of this endeavor.”
“Well, that and that whole ‘being an irredeemably evil piece of shit,” I noted in a flat voice while staring intently at the Dragon-bonded man. “That’s kind of a deal-breaker too, I would hope.” Yes, I knew Ehn was more than willing to work with monsters. Look at some of the lieutenants he had put together, like Kwur. But this was more about me making my own position on the subject clear, if it hadn’t been already.
Ehn, for his part, simply bowed his head in acknowledgment. “Quite so. If the universe is to be put back together and prosper once the Fomorians are defeated, we can’t have people like that in a position of power. We need more people like you.”
There was an awful lot I wanted to say about that, particularly when it came to his own choices of who else to align himself with. But I bit back the words and instead replied, “Well, since you like this place so much, I assume you’re ready to share that idea you had about what to do with it, and everyone we’ll have staying here, while we''re doing that whole time travel thing. You might think going ‘only a few months’ into the future to pick up this special ghost of yours is no big deal, but that''s still a long time to make people wait around. And if we''re going to be making bigger jumps after that, we definitely need a system. Plus, we need to know if Laein is going with us or waiting.”
The pink-skinned girl herself made an affronted noise at that. “As though I would leave our sanctuary undefended and unattended, its inhabitants free to mill about lazily rather than working to ensure our inevitable universal conquest! You may gallivant around gathering what and who you wish, I will ensure this home remains not only safe, but prosperous!”
Ehn gave her a curious, possibly somewhat amused look before nodding at me. “Indeed I do. As I said, we must locate a safe, out-of-the-way area for it. I will help you put up various boundary spells that should keep most people from paying too much attention to that location, and I assume its ability to stealth itself remains intact?”
“It can turn invisible, yeah,” I confirmed. “But having help keeping people out of the area seems like a good idea. I’m not sure how long it’ll be until this territory becomes more inhabited, but something tells me we should be okay for at least this short jump you were talking about. Maybe eventually we’ll find an island to stick it on, even if that might be a tad too on-the-nose for the Roundabout.”
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From the man''s slight smirk, he agreed on that last point. “I believe the best and most efficient solution to this place would be a slow time spell. It’s somewhat similar to a stasis spell, though not quite as dramatic. We wrap it around the barriers, and while it is active, time within passes much more slowly than time outside. In this case, it could make three or four days pass for anyone here versus months on the outside. In more dramatic cases, months or years would pass for decades and centuries. Still not immediate, but at least quicker and more manageable than waiting through the entire time. With the farms and water provisions you have here, that is sustainable.”
I thought about that for a minute, but couldn''t really come up with any substantial problem with it. He was right that having only a few weeks or months or whatever pass while we were jumping through decades would be much easier on the people that we would end up recruiting here. Hell, for all I knew, I would fail on that front entirely and wouldn''t be able to recruit anyone. But I was trying not to be pessimistic about it. I was going to find these budding Necromancers before Fossor killed all of them himself. I had to believe that this school and I were the ones responsible for there being so few Necromancers in the world.
Shaking that off, I replied, “I assume this whole slow-time spell works best if you know exactly how long you need to slow it for. You know, so you can put the right amount of power into it. And speaking of power, how much will it take for something of this size to be slowed down potentially for years inside?”
“A not-insubstantial amount,” he informed me dryly. “But I believe the structure itself contains more than enough power reserves for you to tap into. I will show you how. We can do that first, if you like. Though in this particular case, are you quite certain you wish to stay here alone?” He had directed the last part of that toward Laein. “There are no other living people here for you to stay with until some more recruitment is done. It could be… lonely.”
Puffing up her chest, the girl stared him down with narrowed eyes. “Maybe you didn''t hear me when I said I wouldn''t leave this home undefended. And not being around living beings hardly means I would be alone. I will have more than enough to interact with, and to practice my craft.”
Looking that way, I hesitantly put in, “He''s right about it potentially being lonely to stay in one place like this for a long time with only ghosts to interact with. Are you sure you''ll be okay?”
She gave me a dirty look then. “Would you kindly cease your excessive worrying? He said himself it would only be for a few days. I believe I can avoid losing all sense of sanity just from being alone with ghosts for a few days.”
Yeah, she had a point there. “Okay, well, let''s consider this a test run. It''s just for a few days, assuming the slow-time spell works the way it''s supposed to. And don''t even look at me like that, Ehn, I know how powerful and skilled you are, but you know as well as I do, probably even better, that spells can run into hiccups. Especially big spells, and this will be a big spell. This place is huge, and it''s full of Reaper technology. And if anything is going to interfere with spells in ways we can''t predict, it''s Reaper technology. So, we need a good test run. If anything goes wrong and things aren''t slowed down as much as they''re supposed to be, at least it''ll only be a few months.”
Ehn considered that for a moment before agreeing. “That is a fair point. I do have a small bit of experience when it comes to interacting with Reaper technology, but not nearly enough to consider myself even an amateur. And, as you noted yourself, this place only truly listens to you. So, you will have to be the one to do most of the work. I''m afraid that if I drew the spellforms myself, the structure might just erase it, or in some way disrupt the spell.”
In the background, I heard Laein mutter something under her breath about how it would be a very good building for doing that. I was starting to get the impression she didn''t exactly like him very much. Which I couldn''t really blame her for, but still. I was glad I had warned him not to take her seriously. And even more glad that he seemed content to ignore her barbs. Not everyone in his position would have been.
In any case, he made good on his promise to show me how to draw power from the construct itself. It had plenty of it, and apparently kept absorbing more as time went on. I couldn''t carry that power with me or anything, but I could tap into it in order to use magic around this specific area, or centered on the school itself.
And as far as the slow-time spell itself went, that one was probably the most complicated bit of magic I''d ever had to do myself. The whole thing made me think of what had happened with Sean, though his thing had been the opposite. He had been trapped in a prison with years passing while we only went through weeks and months.
And yes, the fear of this spell backfiring and reversing itself into something like that had been one of the potential problems I had been worried about. But Ehn assured me that the worst that would happen would be the spell having no effect. I really hoped he wasn''t lying about that.
It took me a couple days, even with his help, to make sure the spell was drawn properly. I had to put these intricate symbols, amounting to upside down triangles with lines coming off the top and sides leading into more triangles all the way around the whole place every few feet. And at the north, south, east, and west most compass points, I had to put much larger designs. Those ones were basically ten-foot-wide circles with dozens of hieroglyphic-like designs with them.
That would''ve been complicated enough just to draw, but we wanted this to be more permanent and reusable. So, I had the Reaper structure provide a flat metal surface sticking up out of the ground just beyond the wall. Everywhere I drew with my field engraver, the structure indented itself a bit. Like cracks in the metal in the exact shape of the spellforms.
All of that would provide the base of the spell. Every time we used it, I would have to plug-in the specifics at each of those four compass points to tell it exactly how long to slow things down for. Which, of course, required more power when it needed to be for a longer amount of time. And that meant connecting the spellforms themselves to the batteries of energy the Reaper structure was keeping.
In the end, even though it took a couple days to set all that up, I would be able to switch up the specifics for longer jumps in just a few hours. At least, that was the idea. Something told me it was going to take me a few more tries to become that proficient. And honestly, I almost didn''t want that to happen. The more times I had to do it, the more trips through time it meant I was taking. I had no idea how much that was going to happen. Especially now that I had told Ehn that I wanted to recruit Necromancers throughout history. That could turn into a whole thing.
But hey, apparently we were going to go backwards through time a bit as well, and when we did that, I didn''t need to do anything with this place at all. It could just stay where it was until we came back. And I had made it clear to the man that we were never to go past the point where this place was without that time-slowing spell in place.
Finally, it was done. I took some time with my army of ghosts, asking most of them to stay there and help train with Laein and her own collection. She was getting better about not being so demanding, and I was pretty sure Seth and Grover were both becoming pretty fond of her. I wasn''t sure how Doctor Manakel felt about anything, given how relatively quiet he had been lately. Besides, I was going to keep him with me anyway, along with a few others. I didn''t really anticipate running into too many problems while we were gone on this little trip, especially since I was going to be right with Ehn, but still. I would''ve felt naked to go without any of my ghosts. That was the same reason I was keeping Jason, Chaz, Emily, and Kaleigh’s ghosts. Well, that and because I had promised Royce and Miles that I would keep their old teammates as safe as I could on this trip.
Laein stood on the inside of the walls just beyond the gate, holding her hands up impatiently while I stood on the other side with Percy, Cerberus, and Ehn. Eurso was hanging out inside my little pocket lake with my sharks. He had a small island there he could prowl around on, complete with a nest for sleeping. He liked it in there.
“Well,” I announced, “see you on the other side of this, Laein. Good luck.”
With that, I put my hand against the symbol on the gate there and went through the thirty second incantation to trigger the spell. I had practiced it for over an hour under Ehn and Percy’s tutelage to make sure I could do it right. This time, I didn''t stutter or stumble at all. At the last word, I sent the final bit of power into the spell to trigger it. Immediately, the structure within was obscured by a thick fog. That fog eventually disappeared as the whole place turned invisible.
Exhaling, I turned to the man in charge of this whole endeavor. “Okay, I guess we''re ready. Let''s go see the place where Professor Dare was born so we can grab this secret super-special ghost of yours.”