As I went farther away from the chaos behind me, I thought the sounds of slaughter should have diminished, but they did not.

I could still hear the cries of the dying, and I realized that I was unconsciously pushing my senses behind me, but I knew that there was nothing I could do to help, and even knowing this did not mean I could easily tear my mind away from it.

A part of me knew that I was listening for Bari and Dara, and it was almost impossible to tear my attention away from searching for the sound of their voices.

I had come down off the open ground to the south of the rock and into a shallow draw that ran south-west. If I followed this route for a dozen more miles, I should come across a small outpost with several Adepts waiting there.

Reporting what was happening was another step toward understanding what this entire calamity was about. There were powerful Mages in the Academy who had the power to stop this disaster before it got out of hand, and I needed to get to them.

I had moved maybe six thousand meters away from the chaos, and mercifully, the sound of combat had become whispers. I came around the curve of a bend at a run, with my staff in my right hand, and I almost ran into Rex Aldran.

He was standing in the center of the bend, fifteen meters from where the curve cleared the line of sight, with his staff in his hand and his field coat unbuttoned.

I suddenly thought that Rex looked older than I thought; perhaps it was the way he was standing that revealed a sort of maturity that a young man of seventeen should not have.

Come to think of it, was Rex truly seventeen? Sure, he looked young, but with the reach of the noble houses that could bypass some of the laws of the Academy, then this bastard could be in his twenties, maybe thirties. Some mages in their forties still looked like teenagers.

I blinked when I remembered that Rex seemed to be bad at talking to girls.

He did not seem surprised to see me, and he smirked when he saw my face... It was a good thing that he did not know what was going on in my mind, or I believe he would not be smiling.

I stopped six meters from him. The cold spot on my chest had not waited for me to register Rex visually. Death-Touched had marked him before I had cleared the curve, and the cold spot was sharp, coin-sized, centered over my heart. Rex had locked onto me before I had even seen him.

The foghorn sounded behind me again, as the deep mechanical pulse of Caelith Mourne resonated up through the ground and into my boots and through my chest, and the sky above began to darken.

I realized that I had lived longer than ever before, and this was the first time I was hearing the pyramid make this sound a second time.

The entire sky above the pyramid began to slowly turn red, as if it had been stabbed and its blood was slowly spreading across the entire heavens.

This did not even seem hypothetical, because the rhythmic pulse coming from the pyramid was like a heart beating in a body too large to comfortably imagine.

I did not turn back to look behind me, nor did Rex, as his smile had not left his face. The red light of the sky reflected in his eyes, and he appeared like a demon.

"Voss," he said, in the voice he used for the noble pleasantness he reserved for his inferiors, "I wonder where you have run to."

"Aldran," I replied, a faint grimace hiding my anger. "What an unexpected pleasure. Do you usually take in the morning’s atrocities from this angle?"

The slimy smile did not leave his face. "I had business in this direction."

I nodded as if I understood his point, which I did, "I imagine you did."

"You are far from your place, Voss. I had not realized your morning routine had changed."

"Events have somewhat overtaken my morning routine. As I am sure you have noticed." I tilted my chin a fraction toward the red glow behind me. "There is, you may have observed, a small inconvenience occurring at the camp."

A weird look crossed his eyes, "I have noticed."

I scrunched my eyes a bit, "You are remarkably composed about it."

Rex shrugged, "As are you."

I scratched my head with my free hand, "Oh, I have had some practice."

I saw him register the line, think about it for a moment, and then dismiss it, but his smirk flickered slightly.

The loop was one of the greatest mysteries about this whole affair; it was obviously related to the pyramid, and the question I had asked Rex was to see if there was any relation with this Ascension Ritual and my ability to return back in time when I die; however, he did not seem to know about it.

The pyramid pulsed again, and the light through the cloud above us briefly went from red to a deeper red to red again, and the temperature dropped six or seven degrees; the air itself seemed to be recoiling from what was being done to it.

The cold spot on my chest sharpened by a fraction, and Rex’s voice followed, but now it was a bit sharper; his fucking mask was beginning to slip.

"What did you see, Voss?"

A small smile touched the edge of my lips, and I knew he saw it, "Difficult question to answer. What do you think, Rex? I have never seen anything like this before, and seeing the earth break apart like crackers has to be something to pay attention to."

The smile slipped away from his face entirely. "What did you see that made you leave your tent earlier?"

"Oh, that, I just got tired of Aldis cooking, and I decided to stretch my legs."

"Voss."

"Pyramid. Black. Tall." I kept the angle of my staff casual. "You may have seen it on your way out. Hard to miss. There is a sort of red light effect at the moment that has been drawing a fair amount of attention. I mean, I would be a fool to watch this sort of thing up close, right? That is why you are here too... right?"