Sins of the Past
Chapter Five
"One room for a week will cost four silver pieces," the innkeeper declared. "That fair?"
"That's fair."
As Sin walked to the stairs which would lead to the second floor where his room for the week was located, the innkeeper called out.
"Sir, wait!" Sin glanced back. The man gestured wildly.
"I heard you were an adventurer," the man whispered secretively. "Is is true?"
"And if I am?" Sin didn't like where this was going. Any number of things could go wrong. An assassin hired by his father might have found him. Even worse was Devyn could have discovered and tracked him down. The very thought gave him goose bumps.
The man, to Sin's annoyance, glanced around three times as if someone was listening in. He leaned in closer. "A man has been looking for someone fitting your description."
His blood turned to ice; his father had somehow caught on to him. Scanning for easy exits, Sin tuned out of the conversation. There was the front door-too easy. If an assassin truly was coming, he would be watching the front door closely. That left several windows; the problem was most of them could be seen from across the street, a prime location for his killer.
Behind him were the stairs, which he could take. Would the killer be watching the back windows as well? Sin couldn't be sure, and he didn't like his chances.
Approximately forty possible exits were available to Sin. Choices, so many choices, yet so few options.
His best chance of survival was to slip out through the kitchen. It was located facing an empty alleyway where he could mingle with the homeless beggars. From the alley there were two exits: going out the northerly exit led back to the front of the inn, to the assassin. So that was evidently out.
However, the southerly exit led to a lightly used side street occupied with a few merchants. That would be his best prospect.
The innkeeper's shrill voice pierced his thoughts. "Sir! Are you listening, sir?"
Sin blushed furiously. The man had been calling his name for over a minute. Lost in his escape plans, the man's yelling had gone unnoticed. Refocusing, Sin nodded and offered his apologies.
"Like I was saying, the man mentioned that he was looking for someone who could help him with a ghost problem."
Sin's face twisted in confusion. Ghost? His father hadn't paid an assassin to slice his throat? Feeling a bit sheepish even though no one had witnessed his deepest thoughts, Sin cleared his throat.
"Did he mention what type of ghost problem?"
Shaking his head, the innkeeper said, "No, he didn't. He gave me this slip of paper with his address, if you decided to help him."
"Could you tell me his name or anything about him?" Sin asked.
He started to shake his head, but he had just realized something. "Yes, his name was Artus Sorrai."
Sin grimaced at the name. Artus meant wizard, while sorrai translated roughly in to time. This time wizard hardly needed Sin to exterminate some specters, though Sin would never do any such thing. He cared for all spirits, and could most likely reach an agreement with them.
He thanked the innkeeper for passing the news along to him and set out for the time wizard's place of residence.
One hour later, Sin found himself standing in front of the largest house he had seen so far in Lumbridge. It rivaled even lugo's mansion. It was three stories tall and the front looked like the maw of some giant, ferocious beast.
The yard was so massive that to the naked eye, it seemed like it would require an entire hour just to reach the front door. That is, if one could locate their way through the seemingly infinite amount of trees that occupied the yard's space.
A massive iron gate stood between him and the stone path curving to the house. As far as he could tell, there was no latch on it. So how could he get in?
He explored the colossal, limestone walls that completely surrounded the grounds. Strangely there were no blemishes anywhere on the wall; none that he could see. If he were going to gain access to the time wizard's palace, he would need to get crafty.
A well placed bush gave him an idea.
Free from his earthly body, which was hidden in the bush, Sin drifted over the estate. Besides the draining experience that leaving ones body could exact, spirit traveling was fun.
The exhilarating rush you get when soaring thousands of miles in the air, speeding toward destinations unknown and exploring the spirigo; nothing could rival it.
He had gained entrance to his spiritual form, and now it was time for him to sneak into the house. He guided his spirit form to an open window on the second floor, seeping in past the curtains. Once inside, he morphed into a spiritual representation of his human self.
Peering around, he could make out an antique bed and a full length mirror. Other than those two furnishings, not much else stood out. This must not be a room used often.
He quickly headed through the hallway, searching each room for the time wizard. The house seemed big on the outside, yet even larger in scale from the inside. There were, at least, ten rooms on the second floor. Oddly each of the rooms contained the same two furnishings: an antique bed, of varying age, and a full length mirror.
What could that mean? There just had to be some hidden meaning. Even if it was an unconscious one. The monks had taught Sin early on that in life everything had a surface meaning, but peel back the layers and there would always be a hidden meaning; sometimes it was unknown even to the person who it belonged to. The monks had given him an example:
A man kills his wife and buries her in his backyard. Several weeks later, guards begin questioning the husband as to her exact whereabouts. No evidence is found. However, after some time had passed, a neighbor witnessed the man visiting his backyard in the middle of the night. Suspicious, the neighbor had alerted the guards.
The guards confronted the man, forcing him to dig up his backyard. Eventually they discovered the rotting corpse of the man's wife, who he had killed and buried in the backyard. When interrogated as to the reason he killed her, he stated that she'd been sleeping with his best friend and was tired of her flaunting it.
But, with much probing, a buried reason surfaced-the man had lost many of his relatives to disease and war. So, he was subconsciously worried that he would lose his wife. Thus, to prevent this from happening, he had killed her so he couldn't lose her. Sadly, he discovered that his wife had never slept with his friend.
The story had haunted him as a kid. Some may argue that the monks were unwise in telling him such a story at so young an age, but he would dispute that claim. He knew there was no abstract lesson in the story; it was just an example. However, that was merely a test. Like the monks had said, everything in life had a secret significance.
In his spirit form, Sin pressed on, ever vigilante for danger. Not much could harm him in his current form, but that did not mean he should throw caution aside.
No, that meant that anything that could harm him was that more dangerous to him.
At last he had reached the end of the hall and turning the corner saw the stairs leading down onto the first floor where who knew how many rooms awaited him.
He floated down the stairs and the first thing he noticed when he entered the first floor was the distinct lack of any furniture. It was almost as if nobody even lived here. Taking even greater precaution, he risked traveling further into, what appeared, a trap.
To his left was the kitchen, and a living room to his right. He mentally flipped a coin-heads. The living room it was.
The living room was the same as the foyer: no furniture, except a chair. Sin figured it was a sofa chair, made during the Second Age. How it had come to remain so perfectly intact, he could only hazard a guess.
Something stirred to his right. He spun around and came face to face with an imposing figure. A man with black hair seeming to have been dipped in white paint stood poised before him. The man had a taste for the extravagant, for he bore a traditional, Al Kharid royal robe: beige shirt with red sleeves; white baggy pants with the trimmings in black, though the black was not traditional; and a red cape, a silver eagle blazoned on the back.
It was the time wizard.
"I see you've let yourself in; how very quaint," Artus said with an intentional fake drawl.
Unwilling to show his surprise at being seen, Sin simply said, "You can see me."
"Surprised?" laughed Artus. "To an untrained eye, you would be completely invisible; however, I am not untrained."
Sin frowned. "You are a time wizard."
It was Sorrai's turn to frown. He growled savagely. "You speak the language of the chrono?"
"I was taught the language by monks."
An unsettled smile appeared on Artus' face. "Were these monks Mandarin?"
"So what if they are?" Sin asked. "What would you know of their ways?"
Sin's remark elicited a chuckle from Artus. "As you have so said, I am a time wizard, one of the last of my kind. The humans call us time wizards, but as you also know, we are chronos. We monitor the time stream itself, watching for anomalies or simply passing the time to the next time wizard.
"I am the 6677th time wizard. My race was wiped out by a rip in the fabric of time."
Sin had grown impatient with the chrono's ramblings, and had interrupted. "Speak, what does this have to do with me?"
Artus shushed him and continued as if he'd never paused. "This rip happens exactly 1.4 years from today. Before my home was destroyed, I traveled back 1.4 years to save the world from destruction."
"I don't believe you," Sin said. "A time wizard could simply erase the rip, if he so wanted."
"Exactly, but I can't."
"Why?"
"The rip couldn't be erased," he lamented. "I tried and tried, but nothing worked. Eventually I learned that something, or more to the point, someone was interfering, causing static."
"And that's why you've come back? To figure out what is causing this interference."
Smiling sadly, Artus asked, "You don't believe me, do you?"
"The monks have taught me that time wizards are vain creatures who lie as naturally as they breathe. To believe one is to seal one's fate."
Sin watched as Sorrai paced back and forth for several long minutes, saying nothing at all; which, in and of itself, is very strange. Time wizards were a talkative race, never one for long pauses.
The fact that he had said not one thing for the last five minutes was disturbing, seeming to solidify his explanation for returning. Maybe this, the last of his species, chrono could be trusted.
"How can I help, chrono-gu?" Sin asked, deliberately using the respectful connotation.
Sorrai slowly turned around. After a moment's surprise, he smiled. "I will tell you."
"Speak plainly, then."
"After coming to this time period, I have discovered the cause of the interference. I was wrong as to what it was, however. By this I mean there are now two interferences."
"Two?"
"The first interference led to the second. I've identified the first as a mage and the second as an unknown entity from the future."
Sin raised his eyebrow expectantly. "Ok, but what can we do about it? The first seems like we could easily, by comparison, track him down; the second one is out of our reach."
Revealing a chalkboard from a supply closest, where none had been there before, Sorrai began to draw two individual lines. The first line he labeled 'Timeline A' and the second one as 'Timeline B.'
"Years into the future, humans will begin to consider time travel. At first it will simply be to relive history, to see how a historical figure lived. Nothing good lasts forever, though, and there will be those who seek to use it for evil purposes."
"And if your purpose is to be entirely confusing explaining this, then you've won," Sin muttered with sigh. "Would you please get to the point?"
"Fine!" the time wizard sighed. "Timeline A represents our time and Timeline B is our time, but altered by an event."
He drew in a dot on the first line, then on the second line, and connected the two with a thick white line.
"Now I have created a tangent. This is where the timeline splits off into another timeline resulting from that one action. Now normally this happens daily on a regular basis, so imagine an infinite amount of lines splitting off into an infinite amount of other lines. You get a web of time.
"From there it's quite simple to figure out where we would be. The rip is also an action that can cause a tangent, though with catastrophic results. While a regular tangent merely 'alters' the timeline, the rip destroys the timeline."
"So you're not really from this timeline's future? Merely a possible future?" Sin asked wide-eyed.
"You're getting it! But my tangent timeline, which forks from your own, has been destroyed. If we don't do something, this could destroy your own timeline."
"I don't see how that could happen."
"If events keeping happening like they currently are, it will come to pass. Your timeline will split into mine, then be destroyed by the time rip, killing everyone."
"So how can we stop it?" a worried Sin asked.
"We need to create our own tangent," Artus said boldly. "Doing that will create another tangent and prevent this current time from being obliterated."
"Here is how that will happen," he continued. "The two events that, together, create the rift are from two different time periods. The mage is from our current timeline, but he's ancient. The second is from a possible future. He is using some sort of machine/magic hybrid to transport an astral of himself back to the past to communicate with a boy named Solo."
"And you want me to stop this boy from contacting Solo?" Sin asked.
"Yes, and while you do that, I will continue to perform time experiments to gauge exactly when the rip begins to appear."
Sin was unable to fully comprehend everything he had heard. It seemed so incredible and unreal, but that was due to the complex nature of time. Compared to time, spirit traveling was as simple as breathing. He wasn't entirely sure he could trust the time wizard, yet he didn't see any other course of action for them.
Artus could have been lying about the rip, and therefore using Sin as a pawn in some hidden agenda. What the agenda was, Sin couldn't be sure. What he could be was careful and cautious, always keeping one eye open.
Back in his body again, Sin stretched out all the kinks that had arisen because of how he had laid it.
He groaned as a particularly hard kink was finally removed. A glance revealed that it was very late; the moon had come out and the howling of distant dogs reminded him to be on his way.
His quest to find his father had just been complicated. Caught up in the moment, he had agreed to help Artus save his timeline and theirs, but now he began to have doubts.
The entire reason he left Mandar was to find his father, not get caught up in some time travel scheme. He was beginning to feel like a fish out of water and he was drying out quick.
Maybe he should just forget all about Artus and 'saving the world,' and just move along. The idea appealed to him; traveling the roads of the world, searching for Rorin, sounded like a good idea.
He stopped where he was. He was close to the inn, but he needed more time to think. And with a beautiful full moon, how could he be indoors?
At a time like this, Sin would normally have switched to the spirit world for advice, but he had already used up all the energy he had. So he had nothing else to do but sit and think.
When departing on his quest, if someone had told him that he would be helping to save the world, he would easily have thought them insane. He'd only been after his father, nothing else.
Nothing else should have mattered.
Sitting on the sidewalk, Sin didn't notice a newspaper fluttering in the breeze, until it smacked him in face.
In bold print read: ZOMBIES MARCHING TO VALOR!
Valor? If his geography wasn't rusty, Valor was home to the illustrious and famed White Knights. The knights were known for their valor, bravery, loyalty, and honor.
Being a kid, Sin had always wanted to be a White Knight. Rescuing damsels in distress, fighting fiery dragons, and plunging through fortresses in search of treasure had been his desire.
What kid didn't want to be a shiny warrior riding into battle, sword raised high?
Sometimes when his class sessions were over he would head to the beach and pretend he was a knight fighting an evil overlord. The monks didn't let him use real weapons at that age, so he had to make due with a stick.
He would swing that poor stick this way and that way for hours. The monks would usually need to pry him from it just so they could get him into bed.
It was a surprise to Sin that reading about zombies in Valor would bring up feelings of homesickness. He hadn't known that when he left Mandar, that he might never see it again.
And the way things were going currently, that was likely to happen.
Walking over to him was a lady dressed in white, and as she neared him called out, "Good evening, sir! The wind blew my paper away from me and I've been chasing it for the better part of an hour. Could I please have it back?
Sin nodded, handing the paper over to her. She stole a quick glance at the front-page and gasped sadly. "Those poor people. I do hope they are able to evacuate the city."
With that she walked down the street, disappearing into the night.
It may seem like I stole the time-wizard detail from Doctor Who, but I didn't. I hadn't heard of the show at the time of this chapter.