Prologue, Part 1

Time is a bit of a weird concept. Lots of people explain it like it’s a giant line, stretching into the past and future with little events interspersed to mark occasions. My problem with this is that for the future, time is always moving. It can’t be stopped, the “present” is nothing more than your mind reacting a few seconds too late to time’s passage to realize time has passed. Sounds weird right?

Well, it gets weirder. The future is malleable, and you can change it. But not the past. Believe me. If you, say, went back to thirty seconds ago and then told your past self not to travel back in time and they do it, you’ve created a paradox. Your time-traveling self would’ve needed to time travel to tell your past self not to time travel, but if the past self doesn’t, then the future where you do travel back doesn’t happen. So, how does the universe fix this?

They set the past in stone. Unmovable. Definite. Final. If you go back, maybe you’ll change the displacement of a few things, but let’s say, instead, your actual body is never transported back in time. Instead, only your mind is. So you mentally say, “no time travel”, and leave. And then what? Does the paradox exist now? Nope. Your actions are erased. Any memory of them is wiped from existence in order to consolidate all of the universe into one uniform time. The only way to enact a real change is to live out the new future. Which, at this point poses the question of whether the future you came from is wiped from existence, or if it

carries on in a separate, branching path. Frankly, I don’t know. But, I do know you have to stay in this “new” timeline to bring real change to the future. You don’t get to return to your future now having not made a choice, or maybe having prevented a cataclysm, and find the new and better world that would’ve been created if you’d stopped that tragedy in the past. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried and failed so many goddamn times to fix the past to save the future. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

Part 1:

My name is Renmur. I started life as the average son of an average noble family in the middle of the city of Bastion. I grew up believing that Bastion was one of the last cities in the world I lived in. My world is one of monsters and demons, often created by our own hands. For us, the residents of Bastion, the majority of life was lived inside the hexagonal pattern that constituted the walls that protected us from the demons outside. But the demons also come from the inside. You see, in order to fight the monsters knocking at our door, my people developed a way to enter one’s own soul, and by doing so, we were able to tap into the power of our soul. But of course, the soul realm is filled with everything that constitutes a person, including the inner turmoil of oneself, and so, our inner demons, the ones that we lock away to keep ourselves sane, were now able to use their own power and will to overtake our bodies. This results in the mutation of a person into, well, a demon. And it was my life long ambition to become a demon slayer. Someone who masters the power of their soul and conquers their inner demons, and in turn, uses these powers to fight the monsters of the outside world. But, I was an average person. I might have managed to be accepted into the Divine Palace Sect, but as time went on, it was clear that I was a middle of the road demon slayer with no real power. That always pissed me off, but I guess it saved my life. Because when Bastion fell, I wasn’t on the front lines. I remember that day clearly, I was patrolling the inner city with my partner Ye Jin when the alarm bells rang. There was an invasion of a Cataclysm-Class horde. The next thing I remember that day is that I heard the front lines had collapsed after some humans lost their will and let their demons take control of them, attacking the front line from behind and letting the horde into the city. By the time I had received the news, the evacuation order had already been sent, so I ran to my family, hoping that I could save them. But I wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t make it in time to do anything, much less help. A small group of demon beasts had already killed them all. I found them there, eating away at the corpses of my loved ones. My mind filled with the color red and the next thing I knew, I was holding my little sister’s body in my arms, surrounded by the corpses of the demon beasts that had taken her away from me. I buried Runa and the rest of my family and left to follow the rest of the survivors.

Throughout the evacuation, I was tasked with protecting civilians, trying to save as many lives as possible. When we finally managed to clear the city, there were less than ten thousand of us. For the next few weeks, the survivors fought against starvation, sickness, and often one another, with many falling to despair and turning into demons themselves. The only ray of hope through this time was when I met Yu Li. She had been one of my martial sisters at the sect academy, but she had quickly proven herself to be an exceptional talent and moved on to be a prodigy, trained specially to be a front line fighter. Our travels together were happy, and she, oddly enough, reciprocated my feelings when I told her that I loved her. After that, she made it her goal to train me so that I could fight on par with her, and since we had just about all the time in the world, I began slowly improving. With her innate skills and vast knowledge from her time as a prodigy, she helped me realize my potential as a demon type. But, much like the rest of my life, it turned to disaster. One day, out of nowhere, something appeared from outside of existence, opening a portal. What came out is what I now know as a time wraith, a being that exists outside of normal time and space in order to correct anomalies and prevent paradoxes. At the time when it appeared however, I didn’t know that. So when I tried to fight it, it passed right through me. But for some reason, a part of its power was planted within my soul realm. The unexpected surge in power created a new demon within me, and I lost to it. All I can remember is watching as my body transformed into a featureless monster and killed Yu Li. It was like watching myself in the third person. After I had killed Yu Li, I went on a rampage, at least, according to the rest of the survivors. When I was finally out of energy, my body was returned to me, and I awoke in a pool of blood. For my crimes, I was cast out, never to see them again. In that long period of solitude, I was forced to rely on the time demon’s power to survive, and I began to study and strengthen myself further. Because of the time demon’s unique nature within my soul, I was able to increase my power by freezing time relative to myself, training for hundreds of years while the outside world didn’t move. I traveled the world, trying to master every skill, learn every bit of knowledge ranging from sword techniques to alchemy. I learned several dead languages and found several ancient artifacts. One of these artifacts was a single page, torn from a book called the Chronal Historia. This specific page detailed how a user could step into the Time Realm, a place outside of time and space. So I prepared myself to step into this place outside of time, and when I did, I found myself standing in a black void. But the page of the book lit up and began to move, and so I followed it. The page came to a rest near a second page from the same book. I spent the next eternity searching through both realms for more of the pages, hoping it would help me to reverse time. It was only when I had everything but the last 13 pages of the book that I finally managed to find the person responsible for the fall of Bastion. Or rather, they found me. I can’t remember all of it, but all I know is that I died. And as I lay there, bleeding out and gasping for air, the only thing I could do was curse myself for not having done things sooner. For not having saved the ones I loved. For failing. I closed my eyes for what should have been the last time. The problem is, my eyes opened again. And when they did, I was almost 15 years in the past.

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