Author’s Forward:

Short chapter today. I have the next two in the works, and planning stages
of chapter 9.

Chapter 6: This is Not the First Time

Where am I? I have lost time, it’s happened again.

I still remember the very first time at fifteen years old in boarding school.
All those centuries ago in my first life, and my mind still wants to slide
away, hide, forget to protect myself form what I did to save the rest of me.
For one single glorious moment, not being such a complete loser and
failure.

It started before the Sea Folk. I remembered speaking, being calm. There
are too many gaps. Zaida, the elderly Mistress of Ships. The blackout had
come without warning, seemingly before and after the Sea Folk negotiation.

Someshta, the Green Man, I need to see him. He was always so kind to me.

I came back to myself on a narrow medical bed in the Vault. The medical
ter’angreal above me was a lattice of pale crystal and carefully inset metal,
functional rather than beautiful. Goosebumps rippled across my skin in
waves as Saidar moved through me, cool and precise, leaving behind
prickles that chased one another along my nerves.

My hands were spotless, I feel as though blood should be all over me. I’m
too clean. Not a mark, not a tremor at all. Whatever had happened required
no struggle at all.

Lyra and Elia worked in practiced silence. Lyra lay half-reclined on a low
stool at my side, eyes closed, breathing slow and even as she maintained the
link. Elia stood at my head, her attention fierce enough to feel like pressure.
She wore a device strapped delicately over her face, a web of fine lenses
and filaments that made her look faintly insectile. I knew better. It was a
ter’angreal, one developed with Vanya and Taelen, designed to magnify
both flesh and the flows themselves, to do molecular level work.
The problem of course, is deeper than they realize. I still remember the very
first time at fifteen years old in boarding school. All those centuries ago in
my first life, and my mind still wants to slide away, hide, forget to protect
myself from what I did to save the rest of me.

“You said microscopic,” Elia breathed, wonder cutting through her

professionalism. “I would not have believed it unless you said so.” Her
fingers slid into my hair, thumbs pressing lightly at my scalp as she followed
something deeper, further inward. “Your Foretelling, Lord Masimon, is
incredible.”

Incredible, that was one word for it. Unforgivable was another.

Lyra’s mouth twitched, though her eyes remained closed. Both of them wore
their Second Age medical uniforms, simple pale gray garments cut for
movement rather than display. Scrubs, we had called them once, long ago.
A small mercy, that they did not have to play at silk and lace while doing
this work.

“As if you doubted me,” I said, smiling despite the strange, distant sensation
of my thoughts being rearranged. My smile was rehearsed and automatic.
The same smile I had worn in Mirror Worlds… No, I will not relive those
memories again.

Elia snorted softly and tapped my head with two fingers. “Quiet, Lord
Masimon. You wriggle.”

I laughed, then frowned as the sound faded too quickly. Something felt
wrong. Not pain. Absence. My thoughts slid, failed to catch. So many…
gaps.

It happened with the Sea Folk. That the wind whipped around me,
compelling dark laughter out of me before I could swallow it back. Too loud.
Too high. I felt my jaw lock open, my ribs spasm, laughter forcing breath
out in bursts I could not control.

“What day is it?” I asked.

Elia’s hands paused for the barest instant before resuming. Instead of the
light cuff I expected, she squeezed my deltoid, firm and grounding. “No
laughing.”

“Lord Masimon, please,” Lyra said, and there was strain under the words.
Both of her hands were on me, to keep me down.

I’m reminded that boarding school was where the pattern started, but not
where it ended.

Confusion deepened. As my awareness settled, I noticed details I normally

skimmed past. The slope of Elia’s shoulders beneath the fabric. The gentle
curve of Lyra’s cheek, lashes dark against her skin. I registered, distantly,
that both women were beautiful, undeniably so, in a way I did not usually
linger on.

That realization hit me like ice water. Not desire, dislocation. As if my mind
had briefly belonged to someone else. They were married to each other.
They were my colleagues, my friends, my family. Two of my most loyal
followers, from the very beginning. Centuries together, and my thoughts
had never strayed this way.

I closed my eyes deliberately and let my breathing slow. This was the taint.
It had to be. Subtle distortions, misalignments of attention. Dangerous
precisely because they felt harmless. Inside my skull, the tingling
intensified. Elia pushed deeper, following threads only she could see, and
Lyra’s presence anchored her, steady and relentless. I felt them peel
something away, strand by strand, like removing rot.

Behind my eyes, it felt as if my head had been scraped clean. Not healed.
Erased.

“We will do this bi-weekly,” Elia said, her voice tight with controlled
urgency. “And not a day later. Three months was far too long.”

“That bad?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Worse, Lord Masimon,” Elia replied. She stroked my hair once the Healing
eased, a familiar, affectionate gesture as if I were her cat. “The taint is a
networked entity. It embedded itself in your brain and nervous system.
Almost parasitic. We can clear it, but not if you let it settle.”

Networked, plural. Worse than madness, a collective will overriding my

own.

Lord. The old affectation slipped easily from her lips, a remnant of the long-
ago society that had grown. A society becoming a Movement, becoming…
this.

“I do not remember the last few days,” I said slowly. “What did I do?”

The room changed. Subtly, but unmistakably. Lyra turned, blinking her eyes
at the wall. Elia removed the lenses and set them aside with careful hands.
Both women exchanged a glance heavy with unspoken agreement.

That glance was the same one I had seen before from them on battlefields,
in labs. Right before someone decided not to tell me what I had done
because the truth would break me. Worse, at four centuries old, I still
occasionally misread women and didn’t understand them.

“Lord Masimon,” Lyra said gently, “you are better. And you have work to
do.”

They were not going to tell me. That confirmed it had been worse. Bad
could be explained.
Bad could be justified. What I’d done required silence.

Swinging my legs off the bed, I sat up, the world steady beneath me. “Come
here,” I said, opening my arms. “I am grateful. Truly.”

They hesitated before stepping in. Elia first, then Lyra, their familiar
warmth grounding me. For all my plans, for all the weight of the world
pressing in, this was real. Friends. Allies. Family. As they stepped back, a
flicker of unease returned. A sense of something misplaced. Not gone,
exactly. Just… out of reach.

I frowned, already searching my mind for what did not want to be found.
Again, I asked quietly, “What did I do?”
Elia’s shoulders stiffened. Lyra did not answer at all. That told me more
than words could have. In that silence, images pressed at the edge of my
awareness. The fuzziness of being on a large sailing ship with dozens of
kneeling figures before me, weeping.

The floor felt solid. Too solid. My balance was perfect, my thoughts orderly,
my will intact. Whatever I had done while the taint held me had not broken
me. That was almost worse. Broken things were easier to identify. I am
whole, but unclean.

“There is no time for such luxuries,” I said, leaving the room.

They followed me out of the medbay into the Vault proper, its vast
chambers silent as the tomb it was. I could see my quantum laptop
remained where it should be in a makeshift office. The holo-display came up
and let me know where we were in the timetable, I’d lost seven days. The
day after we left for another Saniago Estate, just southwest of Godan. I’d
not sabotaged my status as a High Lord.

Lyra persisted, “Lord Masimon, you need rest.”

“We rested over three thousand years,” I replied. “I leave for Fal Dara
tomorrow.”

Fal Dara, May 1st. Rand would arrive somewhere in that first week, still
ignorant of his fate. Moraine would believe she was guiding him. Lan would
believe he was guarding them all. Every one of them would be wrong, in a
way that mattered.

“If I had not lost time,” I said, keeping my voice level through habit alone,
“would I have made the same choice with the Sea Folk?”

The question hung there longer than it should have. The faint rustle of
fabric as Lyra shifted her weight. I did not need to see her glance at Elia to
know she had. Elia, for her part, did not look away from me. I could feel her
attention like a pressure at my back.

“No,” both said at last, quietly. The word echoed without hesitation or
compromise.
The answer did not surprise me. That was the worst part. I had asked the
question already knowing what it would be. Still, hearing it spoken felt like
something settling into place, a final piece sliding home with a sound I
could not unhear.

I stepped out of the Vault anyway, letting the stone and wards fall away
behind me into the Estate at Godan. Whatever I had done could not be
undone by hesitation now. But it would be paid for.

Fal Dara, Someshta the Green Man could not wait. And neither, I suspected,
could the consequences of what I had already set in motion.