The first thing I noticed as we walked into that fake pyramid was that it didn't look like the inside of a pyramid. Which wasn’t exactly a surprise since we already knew it was a Seosten-created thing, but still. They hadn’t bothered to disguise it from the inside. Actually, the space we walked into kind of looked like the interior of a spaceship. The walls and ceiling were smooth silver metal, and the floor under our feet most seemed like very strong, dark blue glass. It kind of rang slightly under our feet as we stepped on it, like gently tapping a small bell, which echoed through the space around us. A space that looked like a smaller pyramid. Yeah, the room we had walked into was like being inside a miniature pyramid, the ceiling only about twenty feet up.

  The main pyramid was definitely taller than that, so this wasn’t the actual tip that we were seeing when we looked up. The realization made me wonder if there were some upside down, smaller and awkwardly pyramid-shaped rooms on the other sides of this one, or how that worked. That probably wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things, but still. I was just curious.

  I didn't see the rift yet. Which also wasn’t surprising. I might have suffered a stroke if it had been that easy. No, this wasn't going to be as simple as walking and seeing the rift right ahead of us.

  “This is all Seosten technology,” Sariel noted, her eyes already landing on the only piece of furniture in the otherwise empty room. It was a tall tube of some sort, a glass chamber right in the very center of this space. Honestly, it almost looked like the tubes that Sariel, Larees, and the other prisoners had been kept in when we rescued them from Kushiel’s prison lab, or the ones Tiras and those prisoners had been in when we found them at that other Seosten prison.

  Gee, I was sensing a bit of a theme here, somehow. I just couldn’t imagine why that would be.

  “That’s a cryogenic tube, isn’t it?” I managed, starting to walk that way. There was no sense in sitting around waiting. Wherever the rift was, I was pretty sure it had to have something to do with what we were looking at. We might as well walk right up to it to see who or what was there.

  There was no response at first. Mostly, I realized belatedly, because Cassiel was waiting for the woman beside her to answer. But Sariel was busy trying very hard not to stare at her mother, so she wasn’t actually paying attention. And as for Korsmea herself, she was gazing around the room with what looked like a very apprehensive expression. She clearly didn’t want to be in this place, but she had come anyway. I couldn’t imagine what had to be going through her mind right then.

  In any case, eventually we reached that tube, and I leaned closer to try to see what was inside. Or who. Unfortunately, the glass part was opaque. I couldn’t peer through it. But that was okay. All I had to do was summon up a ghost and have them poke their head through the thing to check what--

  “Don’t.” That was Sariel, who had pulled herself free of her distraction and focused on me. Her head shook. “You were about to send a ghost through the tube to see what’s in there. I’ve seen Manakel try to do that with others like this. It disrupts the spells protecting the contents. Unless you’re absolutely certain you want to make sure whoever is in there doesn’t survive, don’t go poking at it with a ghost. Or any other bit of Necromancy. Just… trust me on that, please.”

  My head bobbed quickly. “Oh, uh, yeah, of course. Thanks for the tip. I don’t want to go breaking the cryogenic tube before we find out what it’s doing here or what it has to do with anything.”

  Sariel gave me a curious look at that. I could tell there was a lot she wanted to say, and even more she wanted to ask. But in the end, she simply corrected, “Not quite cryogenic. It’s about time stasis within the tube. Magic, not a matter of just… making things cold. Do they do that when you’re from? Have they really resorted to--never mind.” Quickly, she shook her head, looking appalled at herself for even starting to ask that. “I’m sorry, pretend I didn’t say anything.”

  Korsmea, who had walked slowly around the back of the tube to look at it from that angle, spoke up. “Clearly, I am from the earliest time here, and all of you are from different times and places. But you know more than I do about everything.” She leaned around the tube to look at us, her expression basically unreadable. “You know something important and dangerous about me, but you don’t want to say it because you’ll change the future. But you also do want to say it to change the future.” A brief pause followed before she spoke firmly. “Don’t. Don’t change the future. I don’t care how bad it is. Changing the timeline is unnatural. Leave it alone, all of you.”

  Now Sariel really wanted to say something, but once again she stopped herself. Instead, she looked at me. “I think I can find out what’s in here safely, but it’ll take a few minutes. The rest of you should look around and see if there’s anything else to find. Try sending your ghosts through the pyramid, but be careful. If you see anything else like this, make sure they leave it alone.”

  It was kind of funny, or just strange. The words she was saying sounded close enough to what I might imagine Sariel from the future saying, but there was a hesitance there, an uncertainty or awkwardness that definitely wasn’t part of the Sariel I knew. It was clear that she wasn’t really all that accustomed to taking the lead like this. Maybe that was just how she was with someone she had barely met and knew very little about aside from the whole being from the future thing. But either way, I could tell she felt like I might not even listen to her and was wondering what she would do in that case.

  “Uh, Korsmea, could you come help me with this?” That was Cassiel, beckoning for the woman to go with them over to the far side of the room. It wasn’t exactly the most subtle way of pulling her away from Sariel so she could focus on the tube better, but maybe that was just because I knew the whole story. At the very least, hopefully it would ensure a bit less of a distraction.

  Meanwhile, I did as Sariel had suggested, summoning ghosts to send through this place while making sure they were being careful not to break anything if it was similar to that tube. Part of me almost expected the walls to block even their intangible forms from passing through. That did seem like it would be in keeping with how things had gone so far. But nope, they easily went through the floor, walls, and ceiling, spreading out through this structure while I stayed there.

  Part of me was listening to Sariel murmuring to herself while she set up several analyzing spells, drawing them on the floor around the tube as she worked on trying to probe the tube’s defenses safely. The rest of me kept shifting my attention through the eyes of each of my ghosts, getting an idea of what the rest of this place looked like. And as it turned out, there were not actually upside-down pyramid rooms on either side of this one. Instead, most of that space was taken up by what appeared to be a series of tube-like crystalline structures with a variety of spells inscribed over them. Seriously, we were talking about what had to be hundreds of feet of winding, interweaving crystal pipes with enough magical runes on them that it had to have taken thousands of man hours to get it all done. From what I could tell, they were very intricate spells too. This wasn’t just a bunch of first-year Crossroads students doing basic magic. If something like that would be considered algebra, this was advanced trigonometry. Actually, no, this would be like third grade multiplication compared to trig. The only time I had seen anything like this, as far as I could remember, was when that anti-possession spell had been cast back at the Fusion School, and that had taken a bunch of the very best magic people months to put together.

  The few ghosts I had in that open space where all the crystal tubes were tried to look closer to decipher what was going on in those spells, but the most any of us, even with Story’s help, could figure out right then was that it had something to do the rift itself as well as some sort of very dedicated, specific timestop magic.

  Meanwhile, the ghosts who went up found even more of that open space with the crystal tubing and spells. Going beyond that revealed… eh, the exit. Nothing much important out there, except for a reminder that things were still pretty chaotic. Though now that I had an idea of why this stuff was happening, that the rift was trying to bring back pieces of what it thought would be familiar architecture or whatever for me, it was a little more understandable. If that was right and the rift was just confused about when and where I was actually from, thanks to all the different versions of me that were spread across the timeline, then this made some vague sort of sense. It was still complete absurdity and chaos, of course, but at least I had a better idea of why it was happening. Or rather, a better idea of what was happening. I still didn’t have a clue as to why the rift would be trying to ‘help’ like that. Something very, very weird was going on there, and I really didn’t think it was how the rest of the rifts were operating.

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  Something had changed about this one. And I had grown even more certain as my ghosts looked at the spells that it was thanks to this pyramid. The place was made out of Seosten secret material, it had some sort of stasis pod in the middle of it, and was filled with one of the most complicated spells I’d ever seen.

  Then there were the ghosts that went down. They had found a series of much smaller, interconnected orb-shaped rooms underneath this pyramid one. Each of those chambers was only about ten feet or so in diameter, and the space between the orbs was filled with, yeah, more of those spell-covered crystal tubes. As for the interior of the orb-rooms themselves, each had some sort of power generator in it that was pulling in energy from something nearby and spreading it through those crystal tubes to keep the spells that were inscribed on them going.

  Oh, right, it was the rift itself. This pyramid had been planted right on top of the rift, and the machines in those circular rooms were sucking energy out of it in order to keep the spells on those crystal structures active, while the spells themselves were doing something specifically to that magic timestop not-quite-cryogenic tube in the middle of this room. This whole structure was set up specifically to take energy from the rift in order to keep that timestop spell going. A timestop spell that was centered around whoever was inside that tube. Hell, the pyramid was made out of that Phex stuff that was meant to contain the energy that rifts gave off. That was a lot of effort to go through for whoever they were. I was feeling really anxious for Sariel to identify them.

  While I was busy with that, Cassiel and Korsmea were on the far side of the room, examining what looked like some sort of hidden control panel for the entire pyramid itself, a console that folded out of the wall when they had approached it. From the sound of things, they were being very careful about what they touched, but had at least managed to work out that while this was Seosten technology, it was definitely future Seosten technology. They weren’t capable of this sort of thing in this time. Which tracked with everything we’d seen so far.

  I couldn’t absolutely swear that it was actually a Seosten who had built this whole thing, but whoever did had, at the very least, done so based on a very advanced version of their tech.

  Penny Dreadful, perched by my side that whole time, gave a very soft whine and nudged me. When I looked at what she was trying to indicate, I could see waves of almost invisible energy pulsing out from the walls surrounding us. It almost seemed like vibrations in the air, like the way severe heat would make the air seem to distort a bit. The energy those crystal tubes were pulling off the rift wasn’t completely spent on the spells embedded in them. Some of it was leaking off, going through the pyramid, and out into the world beyond to create the anomalies. Apparently this Phex material wasn’t one hundred percent effective at containing it.

  By that point, the ghosts that I had sent down into those circular rooms had descended further to check if anything else was down there. And boy was there. Below those chambers was a cave that this pyramid was on top of. Inside the cave, unsurprisingly by that point, was the rift that we had been looking for that whole time. There it was, with this pyramid planted right on top of it. Just as I had expected, those power generator things were pulling energy right up out of that rift. This whole thing was absolutely meant to keep the timestop on that stasis tube going. I had been pretty certain of that before, but now that I could actually see the energy being pulled off the rift, it was confirmed. Which didn't answer the major question of who was in that tube, or who had gone through all the trouble of creating this to keep that spell active, but one step at a time.

  Turning first to look at Sariel, then the other two, I spoke up. “Okay, I found the energy, the rift. Tell me you guys have a better idea about what's going on here. Because as far as I can tell, everything in this pyramid is meant to take power from the rift and put it into that tube right there. I’d really like to know who’s responsible for this, and what they want. Because I’m still confused.”

  Korsmea was the first to respond, head shaking. “I’m not a scientist, I’m just a scout. I go in places, draw maps of what’s going on for the soldier types to use, or just plug my memories into them if it’s very complicated, and let them handle the rest. I can survive on my own in any environment you toss me into, and believe me, if this was about that sort of thing, I’d love to help. But this? This is so far above my paygrade, I might as well be looking at a distant star.”

  Beside her, Cassiel added, “All of which is to say, we barely have the slightest idea what this does. But we think this console here was meant to set the autopilot on this thing to bring it here and set it all up. Whoever did this didn’t come with it. There’s nobody else here but us. And when I say sent it here, I mean through space and time. This thing was definitely built pretty far into the future. And whoever’s in that tube, they’re from the future too. They’re just… in stasis right now.”

  Sariel, intently not looking toward her mother, glanced over her shoulder at me. “I’m getting somewhere with this, I just need more time. There’s something familiar about all of it, beyond being based on Seosten technology. But it’s going to take me another few minutes to sort it out.”

  Nodding to that, I gestured toward the floor. “I think there’s some more stuff down in the cave where the rift is. There might be answers there. You keep working on this and I’ll teleport us--”

  “No need to teleport.” That was Korsmea again, raising a hand. “I think we found the lift.” With that, she touched something on the wall by the console. Sure enough, part of that wall slid aside to reveal what looked like an old metallic elevator. It wasn’t one of the forcefield kind. Maybe because whoever built this didn’t trust something like that to hold up with all that rift energy being sent into the tube. Honestly, I really couldn’t blame them. But either way, there it was.

  Soon, Korsmea, Cassiel, and I (with Penny trotting along at my side) went down into that cave through the lift. I almost felt wrong about leaving Sariel alone up there, but then, she wasn’t really alone. I had ghosts watching out for her. Plus my parents would be there soon, as I’d already confirmed with a quick check through the ghosts that were escorting them this way.

  Besides, we didn’t have time to waste. Not with all the chaos going on out there. If there were answers about what was going on down in that cave, I had to find them. And if there weren’t-- well honestly maybe I would just need to go through the rift anyway and hope it worked out for the best. I would really rather have had a better idea of what was happening here, but if it came down to it, I might have no choice but to wing it. Especially if the situation out there got worse.

  Once we reached the cave (it looked like the pyramid had actually extended some sort of long drill through the ground to reach it, which this elevator was attached to), both of the others immediately focused on the rift on the other side of the giant, four hundred foot wide cavern. They were gaping at it in disbelief, just taking a moment to absorb the sight of what turned out to be a ten foot tall, fifteen foot wide ripple in the air. It looked like… sort of like static on an old television set, flickering through reality. And in my very inexpert opinion, the thing looked… sick. It kept shifting colors and just… yeah, it just gave off a very sickly impression. I didn’t know if this was what the rifts were supposed to look like, or if this one was being affected by the energy this pyramid was leeching off it.

  “Yeah, it’s impressive,” I agreed while Korsmea and Cassiel both continued to gape that way. “Let’s see if there’s anything else down here besides the big glowy rip in reality.” After a brief pause I grimaced before adding a weak, “Boy have I been jaded or what?”

  Korsmea obviously had questions about-- well everything, most likely. But she held off and simply helped us look around the cave. We could see the energy being sucked right off the rift and dragged into the pyramid, but if there was any sort of relevant information, I couldn’t--

  Abruptly, I felt a tug from one of the ghosts I’d left upstairs with Sariel. Focusing on looking through his eyes, I saw… a hologram that had appeared right next to the tube. Apparently the Seosten woman had managed to trigger a message or something in the course of her work. Except the hologram that appeared… was of Sariel. Yeah, I was looking at the current, living Sariel interacting with a hologram of herself from the future. Probably not my present, at least, but definitely further into the timeline than where we were right now. Which was confusing enough, but then my ability to hear through the ghosts actually kicked in.

  “---stop him,” the voice of the hologram was saying. “Jacob is a liar. Whatever happens, you can’t trust him. He is the one who will be responsible for Manakel’s death. And he’ll try to stop you from making this work. But it will work. You can fix things--we can fix things. We can change it. That’s why I set this up. We can fix it.”

  Fix it? Fix the timeline? Change the timeline? Oh shit. Wait, wait, what? She wanted to change the timeline? Some future version of her wanted to change all of it?

  Sariel was the one who did all this!?

  In that moment, even as I was reeling from that and trying to figure out what the hell just happened, the physical Sariel abruptly turned to look straight at the ghost I had watching her. She snapped one hand up, and I caught a glimpse of some sort of metal tool inscribed with a spell. Then she said a word and my ghost vanished. All my ghosts up there vanished, actually. She was using an anti-Necromancy spell.

  Stumbling backward from the force with which she had dispelled my ghosts, I pivoted toward Cassiel and Korsmea, mouth opening to say something before I hesitated. What was I supposed to say? How could I explain what just happened? That message obviously wasn’t from the Sariel I knew in my time. It was from some Sariel beyond this point but long before I met her. She had part of the information, how I had no idea, but just enough to make me look bad.

  In the end, all I could do was be blunt. “It’s Sariel,” I snapped, even as the chime from the nearby elevator indicated that she was starting to use it to come down here. “She’s the one who made all this. Sariel from the future, I mean.

  “Sariel built this whole thing because she’s trying to change the timeline. And now we have to stop her.”

  Joke Tags: Boy It’s Fun To Outright State That Sariel’s Family Literally Patented The Material The Pyramid Is Made Of And Still Manage To Pull Off A Twist Like This