Sure enough, we reappeared right back in that narrow ravine. Or most of us did. My parents weren’t there. I just--well I had to hope they were back in the spot they’d been at before our little trip (further) into the past. If we had been put back here in the exact place we’d been, they were probably put back where they had been, right? Yeah, I was going to go with that rather than let myself dwell too much on all the dark possible alternatives, because madness laid that way.

  At least I was quickly distracted, since as soon as we showed up, little Penny Dreadful bounded right up and tugged at my leg. She was looking pretty sickly by then, clearly running out of energy. As were the ghosts around us who had apparently all been keeping watch while I was gone. Maybe me being so far away drained them faster? I wasn’t sure, but I focused on pouring more energy into them, refueling ghosts and golem alike. Then I put a hand gently on Penny’s head, murmuring a reassurance that we were okay. More than a little confused, but still okay.

  Sometimes I wondered about Penny, to be honest. She had been a little girl when she passed away, but she wasn’t that young. She knew how to talk and everything. Sometimes she even did so now, as a ghost. But only in her ghost form. I had never seen her actually talk as a golem. Yes, her golem self could be possessed by any ghost, but it was usually her own ghost self that was driving. And no matter who was controlling her, they always made the Penny Dreadful golem act very animalistic. It had something to do with how I’d made the golem, or how the golem itself had been… well, trained or whatever. Because it had spent so long behaving more like a wild animal than a person, maybe that was the way it was most comfortable for the ghost inside the body to… uh, pilot it? Maybe the way the golem was trained to behave affected how the ghost within could most easily control it.

  Yeah, I really wasn’t sure about the details on that. And now really wasn’t the time to get into it. The point was, no matter who was actually controlling Penny Dreadful, she always behaved basically the same way. I had thought it was because other ghosts were simply fulfilling Penny Ghost’s wishes for how her golem self would behave, but part of me wondered if there was more than that. It was something to look into once I had more than three seconds of free time.

  But now we had to focus on what was happening around us. As expected, Korsmea was there. She was staring intently at the bit of buried machinery with that symbol on it. Which-- was she… had that whole thing with getting hit by those energy things just broken her memory within a few seconds of Sariel meeting her? After all, she’d just been very unintentionally yanked through time and space just by diving right in front of Sariel like that. Oh god, how was Sariel going to react if her mother’s condition came because the woman dove in front of her without even knowing who she was?

  As soon as she saw her mother standing there, Sariel started to move that way with her hand up, only to stop short. She stood there, looking uncertain for a moment. No, not uncertain. Fearful. She had the same thought I did, or at least a similar one, wondering if her mother had just lost her grasp on time.

  But no, apparently not. Or at least it wasn’t showing yet, because Korsmea finally tore her gaze away from the symbol on that tank, turning to look at Sariel, then to the rest of us. “Okay, what was that?” She straightened to her full height, giving us a long, lingering stare. “You lied to me, didn’t you? This isn’t some simple teleportation project. This is--this is… you’re from the future. This was time travel. I don’t--how do I know that? How do I know it’s time travel? This shouldn’t tell me that much.” Her hand waved, gesturing around the deep, narrow ravine we were in. “I shouldn’t know that just from looking at this. But I do. How do I know that? How can I know it? How did that knowledge get in my head?”

  Sariel froze at the question. It was clear that she didn't know what to say to the woman that wouldn't give too much away. And, to be honest, equally clear that she wasn't sure she actually cared about that. It was taking everything she had not to grab the woman and tell her absolutely everything as quickly as possible. I knew she had to be wondering if it would be worth it to create a future where her mother was actually safe.

  But, of course, that would change basically everything about the entire universe. And that wasn't an exaggeration. If Sariel’s mother didn't become infected by that memory curse, then Sariel wouldn't even have been born. She wouldn't have met Lucifer, and without her influence, he probably wouldn't become a scientist. Or even if he did, he almost certainly wouldn’t have joined the Summus Proelium project as an intern. Too much would have changed for that to be a thing. And without those two there, Chayyiel would’ve been lost forever in Tartarus. Hell, so would Cassiel, come to think of it. Without Chayyiel around, what else would’ve happened?

  Thinking further than that, Chayyiel might have been lost forever, but the portal into that place would have survived, so the project would have continued. How many more Tartarus-infected people would there be if the entrance to the place hadn't been lost back then? How many more Seosten would Tartarus have its hooks in if that project had continued through all that time?

  It would change everything, simply by doing anything to stop Korsmea from being affected by this memory curse. That by itself had led to so much. Sariel could maybe save her mother from that, but I didn't even want to think about how incredibly different the universe would be if that happened. Honestly, I was pretty sure either the Seosten or the Fomorians would have complete control of Earth by the time I was born. Not that I would have been born at all, most likely. The world would be too different. If she tried that, if she did that, the entire universe would change right in front of us.

  I could see all those thoughts, well, at least the ones she was capable of having, played out across Sariel’s face in those brief seconds while the rest of us looked on. She was too affected by this, we couldn’t just force her to try to respond to her mother like that.

  Cassiel and I exchanged a quick look. It was obvious that the two of us were going to have to jump in and try to get this train back on its tracks. Even if we had no idea where that train was actually going. Or what it was carrying. Or--yeah the metaphor was getting out of my hands.

  The point was, we had to do something. So, I spoke up quickly. “You’re right, but we can’t tell you any more than that, Korsmea. You know we can’t. That’s how this works. You can’t be told anything about the future, or something will change.” In fact, I really didn’t know how much she personally understood about time travel and the ramifications, but I was hoping the concept was at least known enough amongst the Seosten of her time for her to know not to change things.

  Cassiel spoke up after that, while the woman was still digesting what I’d said. “He’s right, we can’t tell you more than you already know. You need to go back to your time before anything else happens. We’re sorry we didn’t tell you the whole truth, but this is too important to worry about that. You know how this works, right?” They were already stepping that way, hands raised placatingly while giving a brief glance toward the seemingly frozen Sariel. “We need to fix this.”

  Korsmea was quiet at first, looking over her shoulder at the symbol on that bit of metal as though still being drawn to it somehow. Then she nodded. “Yes, I understand. I’m not an expert by any means, but even in the time I’m from, we have lessons about not changing the timeline if any accidental… travel happens.” Her face twisted a bit. “I just never thought I’d be involved in that.”

  “Believe me, we know how that is,” I quickly put in. “And I wish we could tell you more about what’s going on. We all do.” I managed that with a little shift of my eyes toward Sariel, then back again. “But we can’t. I think--I think the only way we’re going to figure out how to fix this is by getting into the pyramid we were trying to get to. There’s this… energy there. I think if we find that, we can maybe fix all this. I know, I know you don’t understand what I’m talking about. But please, just come with us and we’ll send you back to your time. I hope.”

  Yeah, I really had no idea if this would help or not, but I didn’t have a better solution. At least maybe if we made it to the rift and I went through it, that would put things back the way they were supposed to be. Maybe that would also include Korsmea. If it didn’t, then--uh, huh. Yeah, I had no idea what would happen then. Would the Olympians have to send her back themselves? Puriel could do that with enough power and preparation, right? But then they would have to wipe her mind so she wouldn’t know about this, and what if that was what screwed up her memory?

  With those confusing thoughts bouncing through my already overwhelmed mind, I tilted my head to look up toward the top of this ravine. The forcefield was gone thanks to the damage Penny had done, so we weren’t trapped here. We just had to get up and out. And that wasn’t exactly going to be difficult. At least, I hoped not. “Okay, people, you ready to get back out there?” As I asked that, my attention was primarily on Korsmea and Sariel. Those were the two I was most worried about, for obvious reasons. Cassiel--well to be honest, I trusted them to be mostly okay. Partly because of everything I’d learned they had already been through, and partly because I just really didn’t have the mental capacity to worry about them too on top of everything else.

  Korsmea was the first to respond, sounding far more determined and confident than I thought I would be in her situation. “Yes, whatever is actually happening here, I’m ready to get back to the time I belong in. I won’t--I will try not to ask too many questions or think too much about what this is. Or who any of you people are. Particularly how you know my name, which I never actually told you.” She paused pointedly before giving a short, firm nod. “I won’t think about that too much.”

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  “That’s probably smart,” I agreed, before gesturing for all of them to step closer. As soon as they did, I murmured a word and touched something inside my jacket before teleporting us back up and out of the ravine. None of that was necessary, obviously, but I wanted them to think my teleportation was a spell, not an inherent ability. I had to be very careful when it came to that, if I wanted Sariel in particular to continue believing I was Manakel’s son. I was pretty sure she and the rest of the Seosten were already going to have a few questions about how Charmeine had managed to get as far into possessing me as she did before the Flique kicked her out, given Seosten were supposed to need to have a direct blood connection to be able to possess each other. Would they think Charmeine was my mother? Or aunt or something? Maybe a cousin? I wasn’t sure how far the blood relation could go, or how many relatives Charmeine even had.

  In any case, I teleported us out of the ravine. Instead of putting us back where we had been, I put us on the opposite side, where we had been heading. It was as far as I dared move us for fear of how much the spatial distortion effects would screw with my transportation power. Even then part of me was worried that it wouldn’t work, or that we’d end up somewhere completely wrong. But thankfully, a quick glance around seemed to confirm that we’d made it to the right spot. The ravine was behind us, and we could see at least a dozen examples of buildings from various time periods in every direction, along with various Seosten and pieces of the Olympus. All of them were so distracted dealing with their own problems or trying to figure out what the hell was going on that nobody noticed our sudden reappearance. The entire area had been completely engulfed in chaos, and it didn’t seem like that would be letting up any time soon. And if we were right about the idea that the energy from the rift was somehow reacting to what people were thinking or feeling and was trying to bring them things… yeah, it was really no wonder everything was so screwed up right now. We had to deal with this, before everything collapsed even more. So far, it seemed like ‘just’ splitting apart the Olympus was the only major thing that had been done with what these other Seosten were thinking, but I didn’t trust things to stay that way. Maybe the rift was building up to something. It had already sent Sariel back in time and across the universe to her mother just because she was thinking about her. Who the hell knew what else it was capable of doing if it latched onto a thought one of the others had.

  Fortunately, Sariel had recovered enough by then, or at least she was very good at pretending she had recovered, to start moving. She beckoned with one hand, voice cracking just a little. “This way, we need to get to the pyramid. You better know what to do with that energy when you get there, Jacob.” Her gaze shifted to me with a rather pointed look. “We have to fix all of this.”

  Penny bounded ahead of us to scout things out, while my swarm of ghosts went in every direction. I tried to silently impress on them not to get involved with any of the Seosten situations they saw and just to make sure we had a clear path. The only thing that mattered was getting to that pyramid. As long as we did that, I had to hope that all of this utter madness would just stop.

  With Sariel leading the way, we raced as quickly as possible across the ridiculous landscape. I tried to ignore everything else that could have distracted us. It didn't matter. It couldn't matter. We just had to keep moving and find that pyramid. Anything else would just be distracting from that goal. It wouldn't accomplish anything useful.

  I could see Korsmea looking around in bewilderment as we moved. A couple of times her mouth opened as though to ask something, but she kept stopping herself. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to be in her situation right now. Hell, I was surprised she was dealing with this as well as she was. She didn't even really have any reason to believe we were on her side, but she was still just going along with this. Did some part of her instinctively trust Sariel as her daughter?

  Whatever the reasoning, I was just glad we didn’t have to sit around trying to convince her. Gift horses and mouths and all that. Though come to think of it, what did that saying even mean? Because wouldn’t it have been a good thing for the Trojans to look inside the wooden horse?

  Actually, it’s not about the Trojan Horse at all, Story informed me while we were racing past the length of an old windmill. That saying is about not checking the teeth of a horse you were given to see how old it is. You know, because it would be rude to try to find out how much a gift is worth. It’s the equivalent of saying ‘don’t check the price tag on your present.’

  I thought about that briefly, just before we rounded the corner of an actual wooden sailing ship that looked like it had come straight out of an old pirate movie or something. It was just laying there half on its side, as though it had been picked up right out of the ocean and dropped there.

  Was our hypothesis right? Were all these random buildings, that boat, and all the rest of this architecture from across the timeline just this rift trying to bring me pieces of what I would see as home and getting confused by all the different versions of me that were scattered throughout time? If so, why was it doing this? The other rifts weren’t doing that, were they? Because if every single rift was dragging pieces of other timelines to it, then… no, I had to hope this was just a thing this one was doing. Which raised the obvious question of why it would be doing that at all. What had made it start shooting out that energy that caused all this? What the hell was going on? We had to get in there. We had to get to that pyramid and figure this out.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait much longer for that. Because just as we rounded the front of that ship, I saw the tip of the pyramid. The thing was sitting down in a crater of some sort. Yeah, a crater, it literally looked like something had come out of the sky to pulverise the ground, leaving a round hole a good thirty or forty feet deep and several hundred feet wide for the pyramid to sit inside. Which raised so many questions, including whether the whole pyramid had simply disappeared when the ground was hit and then came back to the nearest spot, or if the Earth itself sank and took the pyramid with it and there wasn’t any impact at all, or… or what.

  At that moment, I felt a tug from one of my ghosts that I had sent out to search the surrounding area. When I took a second to look through his eyes, I could see my parents. A sense of relief washed over me. There they were, a couple thousand meters to the west beyond even more random buildings and near several Olympian crew members who were trying to deal with some other problem that had been created by the ship being split apart like it was. Things like that were going on all over the landscape. There were at least a dozen places where the Seosten were stopping total critical meltdowns that could explode at any second.

  We couldn’t help stop each of them individually. We had to get into that pyramid and end this whole thing for good. So, I urged the ghost to get my parents’ attention and lead them this way, even as our group continued on toward the pyramid itself.

  “At least doing all this seems to have stopped that spatial effect it was doing to keep everyone away from it,” Cassiel pointed out. “Maybe dragging all this stuff through time is taking up all the energy it has. Just, you know, nice that it has some sort of limitation.”

  Sariel glanced toward her mother, looking like she was going to say something to that before stopping herself. Her expression twitched a little, before she exhaled and simply asked, “How do we get inside?”

  I was already on that. Or rather, the ghosts were. From this spot at the edge of the crater, we were facing the part of the pyramid that was about a third of the way up. My ghosts had spread out, surrounding the whole structure as they searched for any sort of opening. All while I did my best not to get distracted by all the chaos around us. Let the Seosten handle it. We had to let the Seosten handle it.

  There, Grover found it. There was a doorway-sized opening about three-quarters of the way up on the eastern side. As soon as he tugged for my attention and showed me where he was, I told the others to brace themselves, then transported us over there with another quick nonsense fake-spell word.

  Once we appeared there, standing on the wide steps of the strange pyramid right in front of that simple opening, I gave the others a brief look. “Let me go first. When we get inside, listen to me. We’ll find the energy and… deal with this once and for all.”

  It felt weird, being the one to tell everyone else, especially Sariel (and her mother) to let me take the lead. But I was the one who had the best idea of what was going on here. And, if it came down to it, I had to be the one to jump into that rift to put a stop to the whole thing.

  So, one by one, we started to walk into that pyramid. A very young, barely adult Sariel, her still-functioning mother from even further back in the past, a human-turned-Seosten from a universe that would be created by the future Sariel’s sapient spell child, Penny Dreadful the ghost-piloted golem, and me. One way or another, we were going to put a stop to all this.

  Except we’d barely taken a step or two before I paused right at the entrance. A frown came then, as I reached out to touch the nearby surface. “It’s not stone. Look, it’s metal. This isn’t--this isn’t--the pyramid isn’t real. It isn’t from now, I mean. It wasn’t made by the native inhabitants of this world. They aren’t this advanced. This pyramid is made of metal, like a ship.”

  “Not just that,” Cassiel informed me while running a hand along the surface as well. “I know this metal.” They flicked their finger against it, and we all heard a pleasant chiming sound, like tapping a wine glass. “It’s a special alloy--” They stopped after saying that, glancing away briefly before pushing on. “Um, yeah, it’s a special alloy that’s supposed to…” They trailed off.

  “That’s supposed to what?” I finally had to prompt.

  It was Sariel who answered. “Phex. It has a longer name, but just call it Phex. It’s supposed to shield anything inside from the effects of being too close to great spatial distortions, dangerous rips in space and time. Not only that, but… the alloy is meant to safely absorb and conduct that energy. There really is a rift here. There’s a hole in the universe, and this entire structure was built to not just safely perch on top of it, but to absorb that energy and channel it into… something.”

  Korsmea spoke then. “Phexaunekh Muhles Sabonium. This much, enough for something this size would have bankrupted a small planet. I should know, it’s how my family made their fortune. My ancestor created it--discovered and perfected the process of refining it. And as far as I know, our people never shared the process with outsiders. Unless…” She looked toward us almost hopefully.

  “No, they never did,” Sariel informed her. “Which means there’s only one group who knows how to make this alloy, let alone put this much of it together. Seosten.

  “Our people made this pyramid. Seosten scientists put this here.”

  Joke Tags: Boy I Wonder Why Cassiel Paused After Saying Alloy And If The Answer Might Be In Summus Proelium For People Who Haven’t Read That Cough Cough