Corvis Eralith
The "wave" hit me like the death of worlds.
It was not water—could not be water—yet it drowned me all the same.
A current of pure, incomprehensible liquid force, vast enough to make the most catastrophic tsunamis of my lost Earth seem like playful ripples in a child's bath, crashed against my consciousness and swept me away like a small leaf in an apocalyptic hurricane.
What is happening?!
The scream in my mind was silent, swallowed by the impossible flood. I thrashed, I fought, I tried to shout and water, or whatever this substance was, poured into my lungs. I waited for the burning, the choking, the final, desperate gasp of a body denied of air.
But it never came. I did not suffocate.
My arms and legs pistoned against the current, desperate to find purchase, to propel me toward a surface I could not see. And in that movement, I felt it: wrongness.
Profound, disorienting wrongness.
These were not the limbs of my four-year-old body—the underdeveloped muscles, the lingering softness of early toddlerhood, the fragile bones I had learned to navigate with such careful precision thanks to Alea.
These limbs were powerful. Corded with strength I had never possessed in this life. I gave a mighty push, surging upward with a force that should have breached any surface, but the cataclysmic current held me fast, devouring my efforts with indifference.
Where is Jasmine?! Where is the Phoenix Wyrm?!
The last thing I remembered—
The beak. Opening wide and descending.
The wet, crunching sound.
The sensation of my head twisting from my shoulders, a puppet's strings cut, the world spinning once, twice, and then—
Nothing.
Panic clawed at me, a beast more terrible than any snarler, and then, with the abruptness of a slammed door—
I was seated.
At a table.
"We already gave our word to Elder Rahdeas. A contract is a contract. But we are… sincerely grateful for the Elder's generosity."
Helen Shard's voice. It pulled me from the drowning dark and deposited me into the solid, mundane reality of the Adventurer's Guild outpost.
The smoky air. The rough-hewn table. The Twin Horns, alive and whole and exactly as I remembered them from—
From yesterday.
Olfred stirred beside me, rising from his seat with that characteristic, economical motion. He looked down at me, his expression unreadable beneath its usual granite. "I will put the kid to bed. We will depart tomorrow by dawn."
My head snapped toward the Twin Horns. Angela Rose, catching my gaze, waved with that same amiable smile I remembered. Durden Walker offered his gentle, reassuring nod. Adam Krensh was already reaching for his food.
Everything. Everything was exactly as it had been the evening before we departed for the Red Gorge.
Was I dreaming?
Olfred's hand on my shoulder, firm and grounding. "Kid, are you okay?" His brows furrowed slightly—confusiom or concern, from this most stoic of companions.
"Y-yes. Everything is alright." The words came automatically, a script I had already performed. I shook my head, clearing the cobwebs of impossibility, and followed.
"Goodnight, Finn!" Angela's cheerful call chased us toward the stairs.
I moved on autopilot, trailing the dwarven Lance as he negotiated with the innkeeper—that same annoyed, slightly disgusted gruff, the same exchange of coins, the same dismissive wave toward our room.
Exactly the same.
The memories—of what happened earlier? later? never?—clung to me like grave dust. I could still feel it. The beak. The snap. The absolute, utter certainty of my own death.
I died. I was sure of it. It happened fast, too fast to process in the moment, but the image was seared into whatever part of me survived that impossible end: the Phoenix Wyrm looming over the resurrected observatory, Jasmine's desperate leap, her wind spell shattering against its scales like spun sugar, and then darkness, and teeth, and the wet, final sound of my own ending.
The only explanation, if "explanation" could even apply to this waking nightmare, was aether. Some Djinn art, some relic buried in the Red Gorge that had somehow—impossibly—reached across time and snatched me from death's threshold.
But no. No, that couldn't be.
Kezess Indrath, the Lord of the Dragons, hoarded every scrap of aetheric knowledge like a miser counts coins. If such an artifact existed outside the Relictombs, outside Agrona's control and right under his nose, he would have razed this mountain to its foundations millennia ago.
Something capable of... of turning back time? It would not have remained hidden for so long.
I sat on the hard bed, the straw mattress crackling beneath my weight. Olfred, true to the pattern established in the Darvish desert, simply closed the door and left me to my privacy. No questions. No prying. Just that quiet, respectful distance that I had come to value more than I could express.
In that moment, I missed my bed in Zestier with an ache that was almost physical. The soft sheets. The familiar ceiling. The muffled sounds of Tessia doing whatever she did in her own room through the walls.
A life that felt, in this moment, impossibly distant.
I looked up at the rough timber above me, and slowly, fragment by fragment, I pieced together what I had learned.
The dungeon would reset. That much was fixed, inevitable the ancient mechanisms of that place, corrupted but not broken, would awaken and unleash chaos.
And that reset, I now knew, would drive the Phoenix Wyrms—or at least one of them—into a murderous frenzy.
An idea, cold and bright as a shard of ice, crystallized in my mind.
I just had to wait. Wait for the tremors to begin, for the snarlers to swarm, for the chaos to reach its peak. In that moment, Olfred—a white core, master of earth, a Lance—would sense the Phoenix Wyrm's eruption and easily deal with them.
The Twin Horns would be occupied, evacuating miners, protecting the helpless. And I—
I would "accidentally" get lost in the chaos. I would follow Olfred's trail through the collapsing dungeon, through the resurrected halls, through the fire and the fury. I would be there when he faced the Phoenix Wyrm.
I would witness its death. I would claim its Beast Will.
It was insane. It was suicidal. It was the only chance I had.
I lay back on the hard bed, staring at the ceiling, and for the first time since I was... back from the deads? my heart stopped its frantic hammering.
I had died. I had died, and somehow, impossibly, I was here again. Whether by Djinn miracle or an unknown curse I had been given another chance.
I would not waste it.
I would not die again.
—
"Kid. Finn. Wake up."
Olfred's voice grated through the door like stone against stone, and with it came the first pale fingers of dawn, creeping through the rustic window to paint hesitant stripes across the rough floor.
I sneezed as motes of dust, stirred by some invisible current, danced through the light and invaded my nose. My eyes watered—not from emotion, never from emotion, just the dust, yeah I might be allergic to dust, I told myself—but I was grateful for the excuse to wipe them.
"Yes." The word emerged steadier than I felt.
First phase of the plan: delay.
We needed to arrive precisely when the reset began: not too early, not too late. Too early and we'd be sitting ducks, waiting in that antechamber for an event I knew was coming but could not predict with precision.
Too late and Drogo Lambert's guards, however friendly with Helen, might deny us entry. The window was a knife's edge, and I had to walk it blind.
I moved toward the door with what I hoped passed for casual compliance. Outwardly calm. Inwardly? Inwardly I was drowning. Dying.
The memory pressed against the inner walls of my head like floodwater against a failing dam—the beak, the snap, the absolute nothing that followed and then the flood itself.
I could not think about it. Would not. I stacked bricks of determination against that dark tide and prayed they would hold.
The Twin Horns waited outside, assembled before the outpost like characters in a play I had already watched.
We began the walk the same path, the same rocks, the same rising sun painting the same sky in shades of blood and gold.
I had no way to measure the divergence between this attempt and the last. Hours? Minutes? The difference between life and death compressed into increments too small to grasp.
So I walked slower. Deliberately, agonizingly slower. Each step purchased seconds I desperately needed, while my gaze kept dragging toward the horizon where the Red Gorge would soon appear.
How long? How long until the reset? The question was a splinter in my brain.
Angela's hand found my cheek, pinching with that same infuriating affection, and I squawked the same indignant protest. The repetition was dizzying—a script I had already performed, now forced to enact again.
But beneath the irritation, a cold part of me noted the time this bought. Every pinch, every complaint, every moment of "cute child" theatre was currency spent against the ticking clock.
Then the Red Gorge emerged from the morning haze, and I forgot to breathe.
I had seen it before—had died within its depths—but seeing it now, in this second chance, was different. The crevice that split the two slopes was not a natural formation. It was a wound. A deliberate, violent sundering.
This whole place was a cemetery, the desecrated grave of a murdered people, and the Indrath Clan had not even bothered to hide their crime. They had simply buried it, built mountains over it, and now we called the rubble "dungeons."
"Aren't we a bit too early?" The question slipped out before I could stop it.
Olfred turned, confusion etching faint lines across his weathered face. "Huh?"
"I mean... it's dawn... and... and..." I floundered, words failing. What could I say? I've done this before and I know we're walking into our... well my death... unless we wait exactly the right amount of time?
"Let's give the kid the time he needs, Malaisson." Adam's intervention was unexpected, almost kind. "Grown men cower and shake before adventures."
"He is not coming with us and you know it." Olfred's voice carried that familiar edge, the annoyance barely contained beneath his stoic mask.
"You are far too crass, Damien." Durden's gentle rebuke landed like a stone in still water. "You don't behave like that around children."
Olfred rolled his eyes—an almost shocking display of humanity from the usually impassive Lance—but he let it slide.
"Have you always been you five?" I asked, grasping for any thread that might stretch this moment longer.
How long had I been alone with Jasmine before the reset? Ten minutes? Fifteen? The memory was chaos, adrenaline and terror blurring everything except the moment of my death.
"We were more, once." Helen's voice carried weight I hadn't noticed before, the gravity of losses I knew from another life.
Reynolds. Alice. Lensa—whose death had shattered the original Twin Horns, driving two of its members to abandon the adventurer's life for the quiet of Ashber. "But now it's just us five."
"I need to bring the kid back home to Elder Rahdeas as soon as possible." Olfred's glance toward me was heavy with unspoken meaning.
Somewhere in Zestier, my Dad was probably already growing suspicious. Would he order Alea or Aya to search for me? What would happen to Albold who had helped me forge my "cover story?"
The thoughts were razors, and I shoved them aside. Later. I would worry later.
"Is there only one entrance to the dungeon?" Another question, another stolen second.
But Olfred had reached his limit. His hand closed around mine—firm, unyielding—and he began walking, pulling me toward the Red Gorge with the inexorable force of a landslide.
The Twin Horns exchanged glances behind us, smirking at some private amusement I could not share.
Damn it. I had died—yesterday? today? in an hour?—and now I was being marched back toward the same death with no way to explain, no way to warn, no way to do anything except trust that whatever impossible magic had saved me once would save me again.
But that was the thought that stilled my panic, even as my feet stumbled to keep pace with Olfred's stride.
The relic—or magic, or miracle—that had pulled me from that beak and deposited me here, alive, in a past that was also a present, proved something I had only dared to hope.
The Red Gorge held power. Power beyond anything the novel had described. Power that could rewrite death itself.
And if that power existed here, then the Phoenix Wyrm's Will—the fire I needed, the key to unlocking what my elven blood denied me—was not a fantasy.
It was waiting. And this time I would claim it.
A/N:
In the synopsis, I wrote that Corvis has "powers strangely related to Fate." Well, this is the first of them: [REtrocurrent].
I had wanted to give Corvis, or rather, the character who would eventually become him, a similar ability from the very beginning: a sort of time-loop power.
The idea dates back to December 2024 when I first started to think about a TBATE fic, when Season 6 of the webcomic reached its climax with the whole Rahdeas/Olfred situation.
At the time, though, I discarded it eventually leading to what became Meta-awareness in TBATE: Corvis Eralith.
It didn't feel very TBATE-like and the closest concept we had back then was the fourth keystone. I had briefly considered building the entire fic around it in a kind of Matrix-inspired direction but thankfully I decided against that.
Then TurtleMe introduced the Body of Fate and with it the River of Time, toward the end of the novel. That gave me the perfect in-universe justification to finally bring the idea back.