“Lev, why do you read books like that?” Bug had never once asked. It had hit loop 40, and they were in one of the town’s smaller libraries (this being one of the loops where they had pressed Aerensa too hard) and had been since dusk. Bug had figured they would’ve gotten kicked out hours ago, yet the woman asleep among the book stacks had yet to say a word against them staying. Bug was cagy about potentially breaking the rules; however, Lev found it comical.

  “Like what?” Lev asked, shifting in his spot on the floor, pale wings wrapping him in a blanket of sorts. Bug was more than a little jealous of the insulation.

  For as long as they had been looping, Lev read in one very specific way: aloud. He wasn’t reading to Bug or pointing out a specific passage. He would very carefully and fully sound out each letter of each word, fully enunciated to the point of mispronunciation. He would clearly struggle as he went as well, moving one book for every four of Bug’s. Yet, he seemed literate. He could comprehend and recall everything. Even larger, more esoteric words were butchered, repeated, and understood in that order. Since it didn’t pertain to their work, Bug hadn’t bothered with it, but he worried the woman in the stacks would hear Lev’s stories.

  “Out loud.”

  “Oh.” Lev’s stare was blank. “Do you not know?” Bug tightened his grip on the book in his hand. “Clearly, I don’t.”

  “It’s for Raphael, so he can translate it for me. Raphy can’t read my mind; he can only transform external sounds, so I need to speak everything aloud.”

  “Who?”

  Lev squinted. “Raphael! The rock in my neck! The one Raz is always going crazy over.” He pulled aside his ever-present red scarf to point insistently at the yellow crystal embedded in the hollow of his throat. Bug had known it was there, knew Raziel was interested in it even, he had simply never wondered why that was the case. Leaning closer, he realized something, seeing the gentle, pulsing light from within.

  “By the Brass that’s Arynthrite. How did you… Where did it come from?”

  And so, with a large sigh of exasperation, Lev told him of the ruins of Karkrish. Of horrible, stitched abominations and fear and a dog and amnesia. Of killing a man for the first time and pressing that same man’s soul into his own skin. Of Raphael, the monster that spoke to him at all hours of the day and night. The one he relied on for information. Almost four years, and Bug had no damn idea.

  It brought light to why Lev was so open to accepting his time loop story. If you’ve already spent so much time in the ocean, an extra ton of water isn’t going to change much.

  A language Arynthrite embedded in his neck with the consciousness of a madman inside, it translated the words of people around him into his own language and his into ours. He wasn’t literate; he was sounding out the alphabet one letter at a time and having Raphael put together full words. Bug would not have believed it before his sentencing began. Lev had a concept for it; hell. The Sotver idea of what happens to bad people when they die. There were different iterations on it through different groups, but the underlying idea of an infinite torture was consistent. Bug’s own hell made Lev’s a little bit more believable. The world was just cruel like that sometimes, he supposed.

  He stared down at the painted gold plate of what stood where his left leg had once been. Cruel indeed.

  “I am sorry.” He ran his fingers down the cool metal, dark fingers warm against it. Since meeting The Nurse, he hadn’t spared much thought for the prosthetic.

  “For what?”

  “For never asking you something so important.”

  Lev’s favorite color was green. He liked sweet things, hated beaches, and once failed so tremendously at a sport called ‘soccer’ his ‘coach’ pulled him aside and told him he was banned from participating in that field ever again. Bug didn’t quite get it so he explained it to be something akin to a soldier so bad at fencing that he was told to pick a new discipline. Bug winced.

  His real name was Lev Ramone, and he was from a faraway place called ‘California.’ He said the roses there were prettier than any Bug had seen in his life, bet on it even.

  On loop 54, Lady Aerensa revealed the bottle of scotch she had tucked behind the ‘History’ section as nobody ever goes there. On loop 55 they drank it. On loop 56, she revealed the second bottle, and it all went quite downhill from there.

  She was, frankly, a piss poor noble.

  The Lady hated her job, she hated sucking up to those of a higher standing, learning enough languages to make her head spin just to suck up to even more higher-born assholes, and wearing drab dresses. She liked mauve gods damn it, not brown! She was in the library studying for her true passion: monsters. Skin spiders in the jungle, Ethious up in the swamps, Unomatse across the world in the forests of Karkrish. All of it, enraptured didn’t even begin to describe the extent of her love. It was a bit of a cheat, coming into the library on a new loop, educating Aerensa on monster lore she would have herself read only a few weeks into the future. She’d snap whatever she was reading closed and nearly leap across the room, begging for a good conversation. And a good conversation she would get.

  Talk was drab when you spent a month hearing from someone the same things they had told you a dozen times in different years. Or, at least, that was what Bug had first expected. What he hadn’t taken into account was the fact that there was a whole lifetime of words contained in that one person, with only a few years to hear it all. There was repetition, and a lot of it, but for someone with so much of that under his belt, it had grown… Not quite bearable, but not indigestible either. Like pain wearing from a sharp, fresh cut to an older bruise that flares up frequently. They’d go on walks, see new sights, range between everything from war to work. Lev and Lady Aerensa both confided in him at different times that they were happy; it felt as if he knew them already, like he just got it. Hearing Aerensa, his friend of years at this point, say it was vaguely sickening.

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  Hearing Lev say it made him curl up and sob like a child the first time.

  Because he knew it was a sham. Lev knew the control Bug held, to just do or say anything and go back on it every month. It was a profound imbalance, Bug knowing everything as Lev knew only what he was allowed to know. Something akin to a man and his doll. And yet. Lev had said he was happy. He was happy that Bug ‘got it’ more than anyone. How lonely must a person be to say something like that? Bug never allowed the topic to rise again.

  The rot taking over his body reset as well. Every time he’d wake up, it'd go back where it came from. He cried for the first few months of realizing it.

  Not out of joy.

  Five years to find a cure, The Librarian had said. If he found nothing on his own, he could come back in five years, and the man was sure he’d have a solution. Bug had been in this loop for nearly seven.

  It wasn’t a mercy. It was torture. It felt as if he was being played with, teased, mocked, and humiliated. He was being kept here with a chronic condition causing more pain daily than a normal man might feel in a lifetime, unallowed to leave. He’d come across ways to mitigate the feeling somewhat. Salves, debridement, wrappings, and the occasional potion when it got too intense. And it did; despite supposedly being the same wound repeating every month, it still had unpredictable flare-ups and moments of blinding agony when he might least expect it. During one loop, he, very matter-of-factly, asked Lev to hold him down, and then took a sword to the remaining nub of his leg before cauterizing it. Bug didn’t know if he would be reset from death. He didn’t want to find out. But Gods, it hurt. It never stopped hurting.

  “Have you tried maggots?” Lady Aerensa had her legs thrown up over the side of a bench in the courtyard they sat in, tan dress poofing out in about a dozen different directions as she sipped a deep red drink that was just as likely to be wine as wyrm blood. Lev was doing some combination of flapping his wings and jumping in an attempt to reach a fruit from one of the many pear trees around them.

  “What would that do?” It wasn’t the first time he had confided his pain in her, but she had never said that before.

  “They eat dead skin; it would clean out that wound very nicely. Healers in Karcedol say leaving dead skin in injuries for too long can make them worse.”

  “Infection!” Lev shouted, snapping his hand out to catch a stray pear. Aerensa raised an eyebrow, and Lev shrugged. “Read it… Somewhere.” He was suddenly incredibly distracted in eating his pear.

  “I have not. I would be willing to try, however. If you have access to some.” Aerensa grinned. Her blue eyes shone. What self-respecting noble woman wouldn’t have a maggot supply? On the next loop, Bug told her everything.

  Maggots, as it turned out, were wonderful. A combination of Aerensa explaining and Lev correcting her led Bug to understand that quite a few of the ‘flare ups’ he had been experiencing were called infections. The eyes of the beast had been revealed. It was no beast at all. Just a rodent. A nuisance, a pest, and a lifelong agony to be sure, but a rodent nonetheless. He was in hell, and his bedfellow was an imp rather than a demon. Because of his friends. He wanted to cry again. He didn’t. The first time he had, Lev wrapped his wings around him and said it was all going to be okay. From Lev’s perspective, they had only met recently. Hearing that, knowing Lev’s only experiences with him had been weeks of coldness followed by an inane confession of being stuck in time, and yet still being treated with such care, it was nearly too much.

  Upon the hundredth loop, Bug felt different. Something unavoidable with the amount of time that had passed, yet it was more than that. Eight years of the same experiences over and over shouldn’t have allowed him to feel anything but the same as he had the day before, the month before. Other than an increasing sort of despair. Yet it hadn’t been the same experience, had it? No, because they were in the drawing room of Lady Aerensa’s estate. Lev was playing chess with Klaasei (who was beating him rather impressively), while Raziel and Aerensa hunched over the diagram of a ‘monster core’ they had been losing their minds over for five loops. Her ornate mauve dress was repeatedly stabbed by Raz’s excitedly lashing tail.

  It took him far too long to realize he was allowed to have company. He was allowed to share this burden. It was an odd sort of arrangement. Lady Aerensa had been far less open to the idea and even then, far less comfortable with the concept of Bug always knowing more about her than she did him. He tried not to use it to his advantage. He began repeating interactions he knew he’d messed up in because at the end of the day, that first conversation, that first reaction, was always the most genuine. He didn’t want to be the most charismatic man in the room; he didn’t want to use his foreknowledge to create the best possible situations to his advantage. He simply didn’t want to be alone. She warmed up to the idea somewhat, after making sure Bug would do his best to memorize and repeat her notes through each subsequent loop. He knew it was the last day of this, his respite; he knew everything would reset once again, and he would spend weeks convincing his friends of nearly a decade that he loved them. He knew the rot would start right where it had been. A horrible, repetitive life. But a living nonetheless. He would escape in time; he had found hope in that fact.

  1

  Bug Zinric, son of the lady Matral Zinric’a and Sorian Zinric’a, brother to Faren Zinric, woke up with a hoof indenting his cheek and a feathered foot pressed to his side. Some kind of ink smeared his brown tunic an unpleasant shade of black.