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Every day begins the same— exiting trance when the sun falls on her face, rolling over in bed for one last whiff of Bill’s cologne on his pillow, and then getting up to clean her face and do her morning skincare routine. Black diamond truffle in her under-eye cream, aloe and grapeseed oil in her moisturizer.
A serum special-ordered from Fallinel, for elasticity. A chilled jade roller for depuffing. Day cream to prevent stress lines from forming.
It's all kind of meaningless. She has looked roughly 28 for the last fifteen years. She will look roughly 28 a hundred years from now.
Still, having a ritual feels nice.
She downs the last dregs of the glass of white wine she never finished last night and goes downstairs.
Things have been— tense, since Fabian went to prison. The shame feels like a weight on her chest, but so does the fury at the injustice of it all. Her son is a child. He was doing heroic deeds with his friends. And this is Solisian justice? Locking up a boy and his friends in jail for weeks on end?
It’s too much to bear. It could bury her if she lets it.
So Hallariel doesn't let it. She asks Cathilda to fix her up a tray of finger sandwiches and tapenade, and then she draws a fresh bottle of wine from the chiller and absconds to her sensory deprivation egg.
It is not like Kei Lumennura inside, not exactly. Away from the sounds and sights and smells of Elmville, she finds the peace she was promised in youth. As a teenager, she fell into form with the veneer of tranquility the other young elves put on for the adults. Beneath the surface, though, everything was extremes. She lost her virginity to two boys at once, tucked away under a willow bough, chasing excitement and adrenaline and adventure.
In the woods where she came of age, risky sexual encounters were the closest one could come to actual danger. She used to wait until her father fell asleep to take his hand-crafted swords from off the wall, feel the weight of each of them in her hand. He gave her a rapier on her eighteenth birthday, and it was then that she realized that maybe he knew everything.
Everything is still extremes, now. Extreme violence on the high seas with Bill, extreme placidity here in the suburbs. Peacetime is like a drug; you start to need more and more over time. When it isn’t enough to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, she needs to seal herself away, cut out the outside world entirely.
Here, within this pod, she can finally reach the furthest end of the spectrum, far away from her swashbuckling days.
Here, she can hardly even hear herself breathing. Here her wine tastes sweeter, her skin feels softer, her thoughts sound kinder. It is easy to pass time like this. Sometimes it makes her understand the way her father experiences time. It feels like she could spend years in here. It feels like she already has.
It’s fine. It has to be fine. Everybody needs a self-care day here and there.
Hallariel’s reverie is interrupted when she starts to become aware of strange vibrations. No sound, nothing she can see, but there are ripples in her wine glass, erratic and jarring. As if the room is full of people stomping their feet and smashing against the walls.
She flings open her sensory deprivation egg and struggles to make sense of the scene before her— Fabian, looking haggard and harried, Cathilda slashing through the air with her daggers, and what appears to be a group of scarecrows. “What is all the hubbub?” she demands, confused about the assortment of people crowding around her egg. “I am trying to relax.”
And her darling son, who she’s never seen raise a hand to anyone, who used to worry Bill by being too soft, too forgiving— her darling son slaps her wine glass from her hand. It shatters on the floor. “Get it together,” he yells at her.
Broken glass. Her baby, furious and in her face, and oh, she hasn’t heard him raise his voice like that since he was a wailing infant, screaming from his crib and she was so lost, calling for Cathilda because what kind of a mother can’t stop her child from crying? What kind of a mother is she that her boy is screaming at her now?
She doesn’t know she’s about to cry until she’s already in it, sobs shuddering through her, tears pouring down her face. It’s too much to take— the shame, the guilt, the fear. Why are these men in her house? So many men in her house to hurt her, and yet it’s her darling boy scaring her the most.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” Fabian says, “but you have to fucking pull yourself together. You have to be some kind of person, alright? You can’t just be a thing that lies around my house.” And then he runs off, and she’s alone with Cathilda and the bodies of the scarecrow men littering the floor. She goes for the sword her father gave her, in its place on the wall. Something once used for combat, now a conversation piece. Like her.
“Get it together,” she whispers to herself, hefting the sword in her hand.
She’ll deal with the truth in Fabian’s harsh admonishments later. It hurts to hear the way that he sees her, but she can put it aside. Right now she needs to be the Hallariel that causes pain, not the Hallariel that feels it.
She runs out into the hallway to attack whatever intruders she can find.
And it isn’t enough.
It isn’t enough, it isn’t enough, it isn’t enough.
By the time she makes it to the courtyard, the manor is in flames. Fabian is speeding away on his motorbike, and her husband is dead.
When Cathilda finds her sobbing on the front lawn, she runs back inside to fetch a throw blanket she can toss around Hallariel’s shaking shoulders. There are sirens in the distance, coming closer. Her home is on fire and her husband is dead, and the fire brigade can only fix one of those things.
“Did he choose me?” Hallariel mumbles to Cathilda at some point. Everything feels like it’s happening to someone else— the drive to the police station, the briefing on the Harvestmen, the tense conversation with Alston Hughes. In the bathroom, the lights too bright, with Cathilda cleaning off the blood and wine and broken glass from her hands. “Fabian knew his father and I were both in danger. Did he choose me?”
“Oh, dearie,” is all Cathilda says.
Seacaster Manor has weathered many storms, attacks, invasions, explosions. When she was a sailing ship, she saw plenty of combat and rough waters. Bill would have liked it, Hallariel thinks, to know that the ship can still hold strong even now that it’s a house.
The bedroom she shared with Bill is ruined. But even if it were in pristine condition, she doesn’t think she could stand to trance there this night.
It’s nearly midnight when Fabian pulls up on his bike, looking battered and scraped up but alive, okay. He’s wearing Bill’s eyepatch, the edges of a ragged wound dark with congealed blood. He looks like he’s lived a lifetime since slapping that chalice from her hand. And she’s never felt so fragile before.
They aren’t huggers, but she pulls him into her arms immediately, unable to stop herself. “I’m sorry,” Fabian confesses, face tucked into her shoulder. “I k— I killed him. He was dying, I didn’t want him to go slow. I’m sorry, Mama.”
She wants to tell him something useful, something smart. It’s what he would have wanted, maybe. Or, I forgive you.
But all that comes out is a wordless sob as she wraps around her baby, her husband’s killer.
“Are you okay?” she finally manages, pulling away to look at him, the scratches and scrapes, the familiar eyepatch covering a wound she can’t bear to think about.
Fabian, brave boy, brave face, nods. “I killed a dragon,” he says, making it sound like a brag. “Well, I helped. Me and my friends. And the—” His face twitches. “The ones who— did this. Broke in here. They’re not— they’re gone. They’re done.”
She cups his face in her hand, kisses his cheek.
She needs a glass of wine, or two, or five. But the memory of Fabian slapping her drink out of her hand, of the true and cutting accusations he hurled at her, stops her. If she’s his only parent left, now, she can do better for him. But fuck, does she need a glass of wine. She needs to trance. She needs Bill.
Hallariel locks herself in one of the undamaged guest bedrooms and sees that Cathilda has put fresh towels at the foot of the bed, like she knew. And a pang of adoration for her maid, her great defender, rocks through her and she is weeping again. If she’d been better, could she have prevented Bill’s death? If she’d been more than what Fabian said, a thing that lies around the house? If she’d picked up her sword from the start instead of hiding, could she have saved her beloved?
She’s pathetic. She knows it.
All that’s left to do now, if she can stop being so pitiful, is to try and do better for Fabian and Cathilda.
She slips away into blissful trance.
And she comes to in the master bedroom, back in the bed she shared with Bill.
“What…?” Hallariel wonders aloud, looking around at the familiar trappings of her own bedroom. It looks pristine, no singe marks or broken furniture, not the way she knows it looked last night. Did one of Fabian’s magical friends come and cast mending spells over everything? And did— did he carry her to bed while she was still in trance? It doesn’t make any sense.
It also doesn’t make any sense when the bedroom door swings open and Bill Seacaster, alive and well, steps through.
She’s in his arms in seconds, flinging herself across the room and bawling like a baby into his shirt, because was it a dream? Was it all just a horrible dream? “Darling,” he says, a hand in her hair, rich with the scent of leather and salt air. “I’d forget me coat more often if I knew it’d get me this reception.”
His coat is, in fact, still hanging over the chair in front of her vanity. She can’t remember if it was before, if he’d come and fetched it before she awoke from trance, if she’d been startled by the door closing behind him, if, if, if. It was a nightmare, wasn’t it? She doesn’t need to remember it.
“Here,” she says, unable to stop the tears from streaming down her face as she grabs his coat and drapes it around his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, dearest, I just— I had a terrible dream.”
He brushes a lock of hair from her face and kisses her, hand cupping her cheek as he drinks her in, and, oh, tucked into his arms and bathed in his affections she feels whole, she feels safe. She holds him and knows that he is safe. “Since when do you dream?” Bill asks.
She swallows. Yes, she’s never dreamt before. Dreams are for people who sleep. Dreams are for Bill and Fabian and Cathilda, not for a high elf like her. But what else could the yesterday she recalls have been?
“I don’t know,” Hallariel admits, clinging to him. “Maybe— maybe I hit the bubbles a little too hard.” (Fabian, bashing the glass from her hand—)
Bill grins and laughs, raucous, and then he bends forward to kiss her cheek, beard rough on her neck. A goodbye. “Well, beloved, I best be—”
“Yes, what are you doing today?” she demands, drawing her robe around herself.
“Well, I have a meeting with that scrawny little banker,” he says, a hand smoothing over the silk of her robe, his grip coming down to rest around her hips. “But I can always cancel on the little fucker if you had… another matter for me to attend to?”
Sure, that’ll work. Nothing bad can happen to him if he’s here in her bed, in her arms, under her, on top of her. Easiest way to keep him in arm’s reach, isn’t it? She’s got ways to keep him here all day. Done it before. She can make Cathilda bring them crepes around lunchtime. For stamina.
“Lose the coat,” she commands, going to strip it right back off.
The attackers still break in, just like they did in her nightmare. And now she’s made sure that Bill is naked and vulnerable when they get to the bedroom. Hallariel watches men in scarecrow masks and men in red sashes team up to disembowel him right in front of her.
Everything is jagged and disjointed. She reaches for her robe, but her saber is all the way downstairs, and she fucked it up, she couldn’t keep Bill safe, she failed. Cathilda and Fabian burst through the bedroom door together, both slashing and fighting. Hallariel’s having trouble standing up.
Suddenly it’s still, quiet, and Fabian is holding her face in his hands, saying something. They’re both covered in Bill’s blood. “Mama, are you alright?” he begs, and she notes kind of distantly that he’s still got both eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says. Her husband’s blood is matted in her hair. This all feels so much realer and more visceral the second time around. “I’m sorry, baby, I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t fix it.” She had a heads-up, a warning, and even then she couldn’t avoid this horrible fate. What kind of a wife is she? What kind of a mother? “I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Fabian swears, pressing his forehead against hers. “I— you’re okay? You’re alright?”
Hard to say. She feels as if she’ll never be alright again. “They didn’t get me,” she says. “Why didn’t they get me?”
They tried. There’s a slash on her arm where she held it up defensively, because the men that broke in certainly tried. They had to get through Bill first, though, and by the time they were done getting through him, Cathilda had arrived.
And Hallariel sat here, like a priceless gem to be protected. You can’t just be a thing that lies around my house!
Fabian wheels around and says something to Cathilda, and then he rushes away. That’s always been her dynamic with Cathilda— the family maid, and the mess that needs to be cleaned up.
Bill’s body lies lifeless on the floor.
“Fuck,” Hallariel gasps, “I need a drink.”
When the day starts over, she is back in the four-poster bed she shares with Bill.
No blood, no signs of distress.
She reaches for her crystal and checks the date, which confirms it— she is reliving the same day for a third time.
The day that cultists break into her home and kill her husband. The day that she fails to do anything other than wilt alluringly in the background.
She gets up and goes downstairs to fix herself a vodka and orange juice.
The prison is dreadful. She didn’t expect it to be nice, but— well, at least pirates’ brigs usually have mead and music going on. There is no flavor here, just concrete and banality. “Mama!” Fabian cries out when he sees her, jumping up, straightening his shoulders. Trying hard as he can to look refined and presentable when he’s been in a jail cell for a month. “You’re here!”
She’s going to solve this. She’s going to figure this out. Fabian needs his father.
“Darling, I’m not here to break you out,” she says softly through the bars. “I don’t even know that I could if I tried. But you are going to get out today.”
“What? Mama—”
“Shh, you need to listen to me,” she says quickly. “Later today, you are going to have a choice. I think. I think it’s— I don’t know, I didn’t think to speak with you after… but, just, when you get the chance to choose, alright? Don’t choose me. You have to choose your father, alright? Darling, you simply must.”
He looks frightened. “What are you talking about? Choose him for what?”
“You’ll know,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it, I don’t even understand, but— I need you to not choose me, okay?”
He squints at her. “You’re drunk, Mama.”
“Darling, always,” she says, pulling him close to press her forehead against his. “Remember what I said, alright? I have to go.”
She’s going to treat herself to an extravagant brunch at her favorite restaurant in Elmville before she goes home to die in Bill’s place.
Fabian doesn’t listen.
When Hallariel emerges from her sensory deprivation egg and sees him, she abruptly slaps Fabian across the face. She hates herself for doing it, hates how she can never seem to step up for him unless she’s copying from Bill’s playbook. “Idiot boy, I told you to choose him,” she shouts. “Him, not me!”
Fabian’s jaw is set, his stare defiant. His gaze flashes toward Cathilda. “You’re not the only one down here,” he spits back.
Bill dies.
Hallariel goes out into the courtyard with two bottles of wine and drinks until the next loop begins.
Hallariel is a swordswoman, not some kind of magician, certainly not an oracle. It doesn’t make sense that she is experiencing these— visions? Repetitions? The pattern, over and over, the same day. She’s not familiar with divination. But she has an idea.
She goes back to the prison where her son is being kept. When he sees her, he jumps to attention. “Mama,” he says, “it’s so good to—”
“I’m not here for you,” she says. “I need to speak with the elven maiden girl.”
Fabian visibly deflates. Well. She can deal with that tomorrow, if tomorrow ever gets here.
“You rang?” Fabian’s tiefling friend says, marching up to the front of her cell. She’s holding a harmonica in one hand, like she’s been in here playing shanties during the party’s imprisonment.
“Not you,” she sighs. “The blonde one. The oracle.”
“My name is Adaine,” the girl says, appearing in a cell behind her. “What’s going on, Mrs. Seacaster?”
She’s able to wheedle the guards into letting her speak privately with the girl— with Adaine. They sit in one of the interrogation rooms in the police station, with Adaine looking about two seconds away from trying to break the mirror in a rage. She tells the girl everything she’s been through so far.
“It sounds like it could be some kind of chronomancy?” the oracle muses, momentarily distracted from her fury at being contained in this place. “What are the things that always happen?”
Hallariel glances up in time to see the Molotov cocktail from the postman ignite the row of cells where Fabian and his friends are being kept. “That,” she says.
She’s still with the kids when they bust out of prison and get texted photographs of their homes on fire. She sees, peering over the goblin boy’s shoulder, the picture of Seacaster Manor in flames. And she’s not even home to burn.
“We have to go,” she says, tugging at Fabian’s arm. “We have to go. He’s going to— we have to go.”
She rides on the back of her son’s motorbike, back to the house. She hears Bill speaking through the crystal recording he left for Fabian. Apologies and amends. She wants to grab the crystal and smash it. There will be no need for explanations. Bill will survive this day, and he can tell Fabian all this in person.
Once at the house, she runs to fetch her saber and meet Fabian up on the balustrade. By the time she gets there, he is already plunging the Sword of the Seacasters through Bill’s heart, sparing him the suffering of a slow death.
On the sixth loop, she tries to spare Fabian the trauma of killing his father.
With the sword she once used to cut out Bill Seacaster’s eye, she plunges upward through his heart. “I’m sorry,” she sobs, his final words of love and admiration ringing in her ears. He’s dead. Dead at her hand. “I’m sorry, my love, I’m so sorry.”
She is clinging to him when his coat explodes.
A moment of oblivion, and then she emerges from trance back in her bed.
“Into the egg,” Hallariel declares, her sword leveled at Bill’s chest. “Or I’ll carve out your other eye.”
“Hallariel—”
“The testicles, too,” she threatens. “Get in.”
She wasn’t able to keep him safe in their bed, but this sensory deprivation egg is nearly impenetrable. She can fight off the Harvestmen and the Emperor of the Red Waste’s soldiers alongside Cathilda and Fabian while Bill remains safely inside the egg, like an unhatched duckling.
Of course he will hate her for this. If she makes it to tomorrow, he may never forgive her for the indignity.
But he will still be here when tomorrow dawns.
She fights. She bleeds. Bill yells and pounds on the interior walls of the egg, but he’s not getting through that arcane lock she found in the basement, one of many forgotten spoils of their seafaring days. Cathilda fights alongside her, defending the home they’ve shared for so many years. When Fabian arrives, he fights, too, his sword slicing through scarecrows and warriors. Eventually, Bill stops pounding on the walls of the egg.
Hallariel thinks that means he’s given up on trying to break it.
When the fighting is done, and the bodies of the men who would do her husband harm lie scattered around the chamber, Hallariel goes to release the lock and let Bill out of the sensory deprivation egg.
It’s not as if it’s so awful in there. Some women have a “she shed.” She has a noiseless pod where she can seal herself away when the noise and the longing and the anticipatory grief gets to be too much. She keeps finger foods in there, snacks to go with her wine. Some individually wrapped cheeses. A bag of grapes.
When she opens the sensory deprivation egg, Bill’s body tumbles out onto the floor, lifeless and unmoving.
It appears he choked on a grape.
Every day begins the same— exiting trance when the sun falls on her face, rolling over in bed for one last whiff of Bill’s cologne on his pillow, and then getting up to clean her face and do her morning skincare routine. Black diamond truffle in her under-eye cream, aloe and grapeseed oil in her moisturizer.
It’s all kind of meaningless.
Hallariel knows how this day will go. She’s lived it enough times by now. Today, Kalvaxus’s men will invade her home. Fabian will get out of prison. Bill will die.
What usually happens is the Harvestmen wear him down to nearly nothing, and Fabian finishes the job to spare his father a slow death. It’s not always like that, though. Sometimes Bill dies of asphyxiation, or else he takes a great fall from the crow’s nest. Sometimes the attackers get a lucky shot at him and he dies, not by his own blade, but by one of the cultists’ flimsy, flashy swords.
Over and over, he chokes, bleeds, burns, blows up.
Over and over, Hallariel is not enough to save him.
She tries everything— locking him away, fighting by his side, getting him out of the house. During one of the loops, she drags him and Cathilda across town to Strongtower Luxury Apartments. By now she’s learned that all of Fabian’s friends’ parents are in danger, so they might as well consolidate resources, right?
Which is how she, Bill and Cathilda wind up fighting these Harvestmen back-to-back with Sklonda Gukgak and Gilear Faeth. She cuts through them with her saber, exhilarated and terrified and kind of relieved just to be doing something different.
Her blade slices through Kalvaxus’s men. But then one of them— a policeman, by the look of his shoes— pulls a gun and shoots Bill point-blank in the head.
“Motherfucker,” she screams, lunging at the Harvestman, swinging her sword but more than that, reaching out with her bare hand. She wants to claw this motherfucker’s eyes out. She wants to rip his heart out of his chest. “Monster, scoundrel—”
Someone is grabbing her, pulling her into Sklonda Gukgak’s safe room.
“Get the fuck off of me,” she screams, scratching gouges into Gilear’s arms. She flings herself toward Bill’s body and Bill’s killer.
None of this really matters. Bill’s coat is enchanted to explode the moment the life leaves his body. Hallariel takes the immolation in stride and arises back in the master bedroom of Seacaster Manor.
It feels hopeless. Unwinnable.
She thinks, as the day repeats and repeats, about the way that her father always seemed to speak about time passing. How he could stand in one place for two centuries and hardly notice. How years felt like microseconds to him, how she grew up quite literally in the blink of an eye, for him.
Is that where she is now? She could be living this day for years, decades, and nothing would ever change and nobody would ever grow. She’ll just gradually lose her mind with each time she fails to save the man she loves.
At least this way, when she drinks all the wine in the house, the bottles are magically full again in the morning.
She’s careful to make sure she’s never holding a wine glass when Fabian arrives home. The memory of him slapping the goblet from her hand and yelling at her stands out among the rest of the repetitions. The things he said, true as they were— she doesn’t want to hear them.
“I wish I could stop it from happening,” she confesses to Bill, though she knows he won’t understand what she’s saying. Her hands smooth over the lapels of a coat that’s already killed her several times over. “I’ve tried, my love. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t figure it out.”
“What are you goin’ on about?” he asks, rough and strong hands holding her. “Stop what?”
“Your death.”
He grins, several gold teeth glinting. The smile of a dangerous man on his last day on earth. “Oh, my love, I’ve always known it was coming,” he says, bringing one of her hands to his lips to press a kiss to the back of it, like when they were young, like when they were courting. He used to kiss the flat of her blade like that, too. So honored to lose an eye to the beautiful sword of a ruthless woman.
What ever happened to that girl?
She’s like a ghost now, haunting her own home.
“I don’t have to live as long as you,” he says. “That’s what the boy’s for, isn’t he? I’m going to live forever, through him. We both are.”
But Fabian is young and fragile, just a baby. He needs his father.
She needs her husband.
“Let’s run away,” she says, clutching his hand. “Let’s go to Fallinel. Let’s just— leave Solace. We could do it.”
Bill frowns. “Uproot Fabian?” he says. “Uproot our lives?”
“What lives?” Hallariel hisses, on the verge of the breakdown she’s been teetering around for the past ten repetitions. “Getting attacked in the home we made together, every single fucking day? Watching Cathilda fight for our lives, the way she fought for her husband and her children? Watching you die? Losing you, over and over and over and over and over again. My son telling me how disappointed he is in me? This isn’t a life, Bill, this is hell.”
He looks remarkably concerned. “What are you talking about? What attack?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, swiping at her eyes. “Nothing matters.”
He meets her gaze, looking truly stricken. “You’re going to have to put up with me for a good long while yet, I promise.”
“No,” she says flatly. “You won’t make it past sundown.”
“Is that a threat?” The fool almost sounds excited. “What’s going on?”
“I’m reliving the same day over and over again,” she says, because there’s no point in lying to a dead man.
Bill nods thoughtfully. “Like in that Hallmark movie, ‘Round and Round,’ starring Dropout TV’s Vic Michaelis,” he muses. “That… sounds absolutely horrifying.”
“It’s dreadful,” she says. He hugs her, holding her head against his chest, and she can feel the rise and fall of his breathing, hear the thudding of his heart. He will not make it past sundown, it’s true, but he is alive right now. Alive, and holding her, and comforting her over the matter of his seemingly infinitely repeating pattern of violent deaths. “I can’t save you,” she confesses, hating herself for her weakness, her slowness. “I keep trying, Bill, but I can never save you.”
He strokes a calloused hand through her hair. “Okay,” he says. “Well, maybe… maybe I can save you.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t always die,” she says. “Only sometimes.”
“But you’re trapped here,” he points out. “Whether or not I can survive, you’re clearly— I mean, you said it yourself, you’re in hell. If today’s my day to die, then that’s one thing, but I don’t like to think about you suffering.”
She looks up at him, and right now he really looks like the larger-than-life storybook hero he likes to pretend he is— boisterous and bold, always able to take what he wants.
“Maybe it's a gift and I’m being ungrateful,” she says. Most of the good things she’s experienced in her life have been tinged with the sadness of their eventual loss. Why shouldn't it go both ways? Maybe this dreadful thing, this tortuous day, is actually just a chance to spend more time with her beloved husband. It sounds silly, childish even, but— maybe.
Bill traces around her cheek with the curve of his prosthetic hook, solid gold, cool to the touch, wickedly sharp at the point but always so gentle against her skin. “My darling wife,” he says gruffly, “does it feel like a gift?”
She tries to compare this hell to other gifts she's been given— her saber, her assortment of dwarven-made kimonos, all the pearls and gems and jewels Bill has showered her with over the years. Fabian.
And she shakes her head.
This is painful. This is unending. This is exhausting.
“No, I didn't think so,” he says. “Well, now you’ve got me in the know, yeah? We always work better as a team, love. An attack, you said? Well, let’s tighten up the defenses.”
(They get separated during the fight, Kalvaxus’s soldiers driving them apart. She watches Fabian sprint past her while she’s fighting back-to-back with Cathilda. When the explosion of Bill’s booby-trapped coat rocks the manor, Hallariel knows he is dead again.)
“What are the things you do every day?” Bill asks her, after she explains everything to him for the second time. He’s almost eager for it, the mystery, the puzzle. Like solving a time loop satisfies the same thirst for adventure as exploring a dungeon, trying to find all there is to find.
“I get out of bed,” she lists. “I eat breakfast. I always find you and talk to you, but this is only the second time I’ve told you what’s going on with me.”
“And these men, the bad bank, they attack at the same time every repetition?”
Hallariel nods. “I make sure we’re all somewhere else, sometimes,” she admits. “But they always find you anyway. Or you die in some other way.” (She’s still haunted by the grape that blocked his airway. It makes it seem like all this is more than just a sinister plot by a dragon, like there's something bigger going on. Fate, having a lark. A cosmic joke at her expense.)
He strokes his beard thoughtfully. “You aren't always in your egg when they come,” he says. “Do you eat the same food every day?”
She gathers her hair up behind her bed, feeling frazzled. “There are days where I don't eat a thing.”
“You drink?”
She looks down, remembering Fabian screaming in her face, broken glass on the floor around her bare feet. Get it together! “What does that have to do with it?”
“Anything could be a clue.”
“So, what, you're a detective now?” she demands.
“No, no, not at all,” he says. And then he raises an eyebrow. “We really could use one, though, couldn't we? A detective.”
Back to the prison. Back to the corridor where Fabian and his best friends are locked away. Fabian looks equal parts mortified and relieved to see the pair of them. “Papa, Mama,” he says, running up to the bars to greet them. “You came!”
“Yes, quite, darling,” Hallariel says. Since when are the lights so bright in jail? “Look— your father and I, we need— we need to speak with the Ball.”
Fabian’s best friend— Riz is his real name, apparently— looks exceedingly uncomfortable to be in the police interrogation room with Bill and Hallariel.
“You aren't going to hit Fabian again, are you?” he demands of Bill immediately. “Because that was really fucked up. I’m sorry, sir, I just— I mean, that was really fucked up.”
Bill’s face is stormy when Hallariel turns to look at him. She never asked about that day he came home from visiting Fabian in jail, looking bruised and battered, a sizable lump on his head. She never asked what all he’d said or done to make their boy finally strike back.
“Ball,” Bill says, leaning forward over the table, “I’ve already told my darling wife she needs to let me die, so you're truly helping my case here.”
Riz looks back and forth between the two of them for a moment, and in any other circumstances she would have found the look on his face hilarious. “What?”
“I’m in a time loop, or whatever,” Hallariel explains, massaging the center of her forehead as she feels a fresh headache starting to set in. “I’ve lived through this day over and over and over again, and every time, Fabian’s father dies, and I can't figure out how to save him or how to get to tomorrow.” She looks tiredly over to Bill. This conversation feels like it would go smoother if she had a glass of wine. “What were the other important things?”
“The vice principal,” Bill supplies.
“Oh, right, your vice principal is evil,” she says, waving a hand non-committally in Riz’s direction. “He’s Kalvaxus. Did you know that already? I can't remember. And Fabian might lose an eye today. Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t.”
“Holy shit,” Riz breathes, nearly vibrating in his chair. “Holy shit.”
“Yes, thank you, now we need you to do your genius detective thing that Fabian’s always going on and on about and figure out how to get her out of the time loop,” Bill says, banging his hook hand on the table for emphasis.
Riz’s ears twitch. “Fabian goes on and on about me?”
“Oh, constantly,” Hallariel says. “‘The Ball’ this, ‘the Ball’ that. For awhile I thought he had an obsessive preoccupation with some sort of magical sphere he’d picked up somewhere.”
The boy looks as if learning this information is having a revelatory effect on him, but Hallariel’s in a hurry. He can have whatever profound realization he’s having in his own time loop.
“So, do your thing,” Hallariel says. “Solve my mystery.”
“Okay,” Riz says, hands splayed out in front of his face like he’s trying to organize his thoughts. “Okay. Okay. Tell me exactly what happened on the first day.” He grabs a dry-erase marker from the desk behind him and begins to write on the interrogation room’s mirror. “We’ll call that sequence of events prime.”
Despite her impatience, Hallariel is halting in her description of that very first day. The day when she didn’t know that Bill’s death was coming, didn’t know what Fabian would say to her, what he would have to do. It feels so silly and frivolous now, the things she cared about— having Cathilda fetch her snacks, hiding in her sensory deprivation egg. (How long did she spend hiding from a life she’s desperate to get back to?)
Riz sketches out the details in a frenzy, adding stick figure sketches and arrows here and there to illustrate all the different alternate realities she’s stumbled through each time she changes something about this day. The questions he asks are insightful, perplexing, things she never would have thought about. Like whether she has any potentially enchanted objects in her bureau or elsewhere in her bedroom, like what she can remember the night before this day started to repeat.
But what he finally concludes is that the best move forward is for the little elf girl to cast Detect Magic on her.
So Hallariel goes back into the block of cells where Fabian and his friends are being kept.
Once again, her son surges forward to greet her. He looks fed up, though. “What’s going on?” he demands. “Why do you need the Ball?”
“Well, now I need the oracle,” she says, pointing to the girl.
“Her name is Adaine, Mama,” Fabian says. “And— and you can’t have her!”
“Fabian,” Adaine says.
“No, I’m tired of this,” her son says, a fire in his eyes. He takes more after her than his father— he’s got her ears, her hair, her slender build. But that fire. She hasn’t had that in her for so many years. Bill never lost it. “You come in here, you treat me like I’m not even here, you pull my friends out for, what? One-on-ones? I mean, this is insane. You have to tell me what’s going on.”
“Oh, like you always tell me what’s going on with you?” Hallariel finally snaps, feeling the years, feeling the day, over and over and over again. You have to pull yourself together, he had shouted at her, or will shout at her, or never will have shouted at her. “How many times did you come home from school this year and I would ask you how your day was and you just said ‘fine’? Meanwhile you were off, having adventures, doing murders, doing whatever it was that got you locked up in prison, stopping apocalypses and having first kisses, all these things you could have told me.”
“Who was I going to tell?” Fabian yells back. “The— the drunk stranger passed out on the couch? The woman making inappropriate passes at my fencing instructor? If you wanted to know anything about what’s been going on with me this year, you could have just—”
“Asked you?”
Fabian stares at her. His friends are so, so quiet. The cell is so, so quiet. “You could have just asked Cathilda,” he says.
He is an excellent swordsman. He knows how to hit his mark.
(He has told her these things, of course, about his freshman year, about his life. He just doesn’t remember it. She’s had time to catch up with him, little by little, in the time that she’s been reliving this dreadful day. But there’s something to be said for being too little and too late.)
Hallariel turns away from her son. “Adaine,” she says. “The goblin boy has requested you.”
From behind her, she hears Fabian say flatly, “His name is Riz.”
Back in the interrogation room, Adaine casts Detect Magic on Hallariel and shares her findings with Riz. Hallariel sits in the chair beside Bill, glum but guiltily glad she doesn’t really have to resolve the argument with Fabian. Today will restart eventually, and she can try again with a son who hasn’t quite yet reached the boiling point of resentment and disappointment.
“Well, nurse, what’s the diagnosis?” she asks the elven maiden. Bill squeezes her hand, as if she’s about to find out she has magic time loop cancer or something. As if he’s not the doomed one.
Adaine’s eyes flicker from stark white back to their normal crystalline blue. She really is beautiful. The kind of girl she’s always imagined Fabian would bring home one day. Although maybe that’s short-sighted of her, to assume he even likes girls. Given his obsession with Riz— given the way he used to dance around in Cathilda’s apron when he was very small— it’s entirely possible he’s gay. Maybe she can address that somehow, next time around. Tell him it’s okay, and she loves him no matter what.
Maybe then he won’t be so angry with her.
“Chronomantic energy,” Adaine announces.
“You said something like that to me before,” Hallariel remembers.
“I did?”
“Oh, right, I didn’t explain. I’m living today over and over,” Hallariel reels off. “During one of the repeats, I came to you because I thought my problem might be divinatory in nature. And you suggested that it might be some kind of chronomancy.”
“Why didn’t I cast Detect Magic then?” Adaine wonders.
“Um,” Hallariel says, remembering the halfling postman and his Molotov cocktail. “We were interrupted.”
“So you’re saying a spell was cast on my wife?” Bill asks.
Adaine frowns. “I’m not… I’m not picking up a specific spell cast on you, Mrs. Seacaster. It’s more like… ambient chronotic energy? It is the signature I’d associate with some kind of repetition, similar to what illusionists use to make a manifestation repeat the same loop.”
“Like your sister’s elemental cheerleaders,” Riz says. “They kept repeating themselves.”
“Yes,” Adaine says. “Repetitive chronomancy, a closed loop.”
“I’ve heard about this,” Riz says, turning back around to scrawl some more stuff on the mirror. “Forgers sometimes use that kind of magic to artificially age fake documents. It’s also been used to mature cheese. Some vineyards use it to age their wine.”
The children are focused on sketching out their theories and clues, and Bill is the only one in the room who notices the way the color drains from Hallariel’s face. “Darling,” he says, “what is it?”
“It’s me. I’m doing it to myself,” Hallariel says breathlessly. “The wine.”
Every day, every loop, whether she’s finishing the dregs of the glass on her bureau or pouring a chalice to go with lunch or draining a whole bottle in the aftermath of Bill’s demise, she’s been drinking wine. But—
“What makes today different from any other day?” she wonders aloud, hardly aware of Bill’s arm around her shoulders, his warmth at her side. He’s a ghost, even here, even alive. “I like what I like. It’s not as if I’ve been uncorking some new vintage I’ve never had before.”
Riz taps his fingers against the mirror, thinking. “It could be that the ambient chronomantic particles get triggered by a magical effect in your vicinity,” he reasons. “Ad, does that track?”
“Yes,” the elf girl agrees. “If there were some kind of hex or enchantment with a large area of effect… something like, I don’t know, Fireball, or—”
“Your coat,” Hallariel realizes, clutching at the sleeve of it now, at Bill’s arm. “Your coat explodes when you die.”
“That would do it,” Adaine says.
On the mirror, Riz draws a coat with lines going out from every side of it, then a plus sign, then a glass of wine.
“Well,” Hallariel says, smoothing her hands over the surface of the interrogation table, “we’ve solved it, then. All I have to do is prevent my husband from dying.”
Riz frowns. “Or… don’t drink.”
She meets his eyes and repeats, “All I have to do is prevent my husband from dying. And we can all make it to tomorrow.”
The boy opens his mouth as if he’s going to urge her toward sobriety, but then there’s a rattling, booming sound from elsewhere in the building.
The explosion reverberates through the whole station. “What in the nine hells— ?” Bill shouts, leaping from his seat.
Hallariel sighs. “Mail’s here.”
She goes home with her husband, and the two of them help Cathilda to shore up the defenses at Seacaster Manor, telling her Fabian’s oracle friend had a vision about the house being attacked. She’s by Bill’s side when the first of Kalvaxus’s men make it past the threshold. She fights back-to-back with him, swinging out widely to cover his left side.
They both fight valiantly, deftly, two dancers who have waltzed together a million times, two lovers who know each other’s bodies and patterns and footwork and blades. And yet, neither of them can stop the hilt of one of the Harvestmen’s scythes from cracking down on Hallariel’s temple, knocking her unconscious.
When she comes to, her home is in flames and Fabian’s worried face is swimming in her vision. One of his eyes is a mangled, gaping wound. “Please, Mama,” he’s begging, lifting her under her arms.
She blinks up at him. “Where’s your father?”
He makes a choked-off noise. “He’s— I had to kill him,” he says, tears mingling with the blood and vitreous fluid drenching his face.
“You had to,” she reassures him, letting him pull her up into a seated position. “You had to do it. It’s okay.”
A broken sob wrenches out from him, and though she’s rattled and shaken from getting knocked out, she has strength enough to drag his face down and press a kiss to his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for all that shit I said at the jail.”
She shakes her head. “I needed to hear it. Now, you go. You’ve got to get to the prom.”
“How do you… ?”
“Cathilda told me,” she lies.
She tries ten more times to save Bill.
It’s every time, every day, no matter what she does. Even if she can manage to stop the Harvestmen from attacking him, or spare Fabian from slaying him, he still dies of a heart attack of a blood clot or a rogue spell. She has never believed in fate before, and now it seems fate is offended.
Captain William Seacaster dies on this day, no matter what she does to try and change that.
Sometimes she tells him everything, sometimes she leaves him in the dark. Sometimes she retreats to her sensory deprivation egg when it becomes clear that she’s already lost this loop. Sometimes she puts on a brave face and keeps trying to fight the inevitable.
On one of the days where she tells him everything, Bill pulls her back into bed, kisses her lips, her neck, the inside of her wrist. Makes love to her “one last time,” and she wants to argue that point, that it’s the last time, wants to keep masquerading around with hope, but he’s always been able to see right through her.
What he tells her, as they’re redressing together, is that he can make his peace with losing his life, but not with her losing her mind. “You’ll drive yourself mad in here,” he says. “Love, I’ve spent my whole life cheating death. I don’t need you to do it for me.”
“I think I’ve been living through the loss of you for a lot longer than I’ve been reliving this day,” Hallariel admits. She hasn’t said this to him in any of the previous loops. There’s a feeling of finality this time, despite her meager attempts at optimism. “Letting dread of what I knew was coming overshadow any capacity I had to live in the moment.”
Even as a child, she was like this— scared of investing love and care into things that were temporary and ephemeral. Even if a song plays for two-hundred years, it still has an end. (The day she first held Fabian in her arms, and she could look down at her squalling baby and see the inevitability of his demise, whether it came in twenty years or a hundred.) Bill’s insistence that a man can never die so long as his works are remembered— it felt comforting.
At least, it did when she drank enough to believe in it.
“When you see me tomorrow,” Bill says, “or… today, I mean. When next you see me— don’t give away the end. Don’t warn me.” He cups her chin in his hand, and then he kisses her fiercely.
Every day begins the same— exiting trance when the sun falls on her face, rolling over in bed for one last whiff of Bill’s cologne on his pillow, and then getting up to clean her face and do her morning skincare routine. Black diamond truffle in her under-eye cream, aloe and grapeseed oil in her moisturizer.
A serum special-ordered from Fallinel, for elasticity. A chilled jade roller for depuffing. Day cream to prevent stress lines from forming.
It's all kind of meaningless.
Still, having a ritual feels nice.
She pours the last dregs of the glass of white wine she never finished down the drain and goes downstairs.
Today is her last day trapped here.
It’s what Bill wants, and she will not deny the man she loves his dying wish.
So she doesn’t touch a drop of wine. She polishes her sword. She’s used it nearly every repeat, but before that she hadn’t touched it in years. So it needs some tender love and care. She’s resolved not to stop the hand of fate, not this time, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t take some of those Harvestmen with her.
Still, the idea that this is the last time she will relive this day. The last day Bill Seacaster’s boots will fall upon the same plane where she stands— it’s very nearly too much to bear. As the attack draws nearer, she retreats to her egg. She’ll have the element of surprise from in here. (And she won’t have to endure Cathilda’s questions about why she can’t stop crying.)
Despite the way her egg seals everything else away, she finds she can’t possibly feel calm right now. The sound of her own thudding heartbeat is deafening. She’s hopelessly overstimulated, from the fear-sweat at the nape of her neck to the cloying smell of her own perfume. She curls her knees in toward her chest and nibbles on a cracker, reminding herself that it’s what Bill wants. He wants her to make it past this wretched day. He wants her to live, even if he can’t.
And what about what she wants?
After so many years of marriage, after countless repetitions of this fucking day, does Hallariel not get a say in this? Would she have so swiftly bowed to Bill’s wishes at the start of all this, that first day? The second loop? Has she lost something of herself?
Her resolve wavers, or maybe it sharpens. Hard to say. Everything’s become so muddled. All she has to do to make sure she doesn’t escape this infinite moment is to pour herself a glass of wine.
And she’ll have another chance to figure this out.
Ten chances, a hundred.
Just because she’s already lived through it more than thirty times doesn’t mean she can’t keep trying, right? Maybe she missed something. Maybe there’s a clue that neither Riz nor Adaine stumbled upon. Maybe, maybe—
She reaches with shaking hands for her emergency wine and pours herself a cup, bringing it almost to her lips.
The surface of the liquid ripples.
Beyond the walls of her sensory deprivation egg, blades are clashing. Cathilda is in motion, and she knows that Fabian is here now, too.
Hallariel emerges.
Her son knocks the wine glass from her hand, and in doing so as good as kills his father.
“Get it together,” he pleads, and this time she can hear the love and longing behind the anger. “I’m sorry, Mama, but you have to pull yourself together and be some kind of person.”
Tears stream down her face. “Why do you always choose me? And don't say it's because Cathilda is down here, too, because sometimes she isn't, sometimes I make her go and defend Bill and you come and find me anyway.” She’s looking up at him a little. He’s taller than her. When did that happen? “Why do you choose me every time?”
It can’t possibly make any sense to him, what she’s saying, but she hopes he’ll attribute any strangeness to the alcohol.
“You’re my mom,” he says. “And I don't even know you.”
She tugs him down and kisses his cheek, then pulls back to look at him and really see him. And know that she’s seeing his face unmarred, unscarred for the last time, both eyes intact and round and full of fear. “I’m going to fix it,” she swears.
If she can manage to make it to tomorrow this time, she’ll fix everything. She’ll be better. She has to be.
Fabian tears off toward the crow’s nest, and she goes for her sword in the spot where she placed it, ready to wield it alongside Cathilda and cut down the scoundrels who would dare invade her home. They came to Solace to get away from this chaos.
And yet, as she tears through blood and bone, as she swings her sword and slices through Kalvaxus’s men with grace and agility and viciousness, she wonders if that was always the problem.
She’s never been made for peacetime.
Hallariel fights with a passion, knowing when she hears the explosion that Bill is truly gone.
In the morning, Hallariel wakes in one of the guest beds in a room that was left mostly undamaged by the fires.
There’s a moment of utter, overwhelming relief before it hits her that, now that she’s gotten out, she has the rest of her life to live.
She’s weeping when Cathilda comes in with a tray of toast and morning tea. “He’s really gone,” Hallariel says, needs the confirmation.
Cathilda’s eyes are red-rimmed, too. “He is,” she says, “and if you and I sit here bawling about it like a couple of old widows, he’ll come back and kick our arses, and you know it.” She sits on the edge of the bed and holds the tray out to Hallariel, who selects a piece of marble-rye toast and passes it to the maid. She’s always known Cathilda’s favorites.
They sit together, and they try not to cry, and they eat breakfast.
With Bill’s coat destroyed, none of the wine in the cabinet poses a threat to the standard flow of time around Hallariel.
But she gets rid of all of it, anyway.
Fabian arrives home about midday. Apparently he spent the night at Strongtower Luxury Apartments. She should have known that, maybe. She should be more keyed in to his comings and goings. One thing at a time.
“You were right,” she tells him, hand on his face, studying him, her thumb skating over his father’s eyepatch. “What you said. I… I want you to know me. I want you to know, first of all, that I am so, so proud of you. The person you’re growing up to be. I love you. You’re your father’s son. You’re my son, too, and I… I swear, Fabian, I’m going to start acting like it. I’ve been… I’ve been dreadful.”
“It’s fine, Mama,” he shrugs, always deflecting.
She sandwiches his face in her hands and looks right at him— older and stronger, but still a boy, still so young and vulnerable. “I’m going to be better,” she promises. “I want to go see you play on the… the bloodrush field. I want to meet your friends.”
“You’ve met my friends.”
“I want to… to put energy into remembering their names, this time,” she says. “I don’t want to hide from my life anymore, Fabian. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be putting all this on you, it’s—”
But he interrupts her by throwing his arms around her and squeezing her tight. Her baby boy. He’s so wise, and so forgiving. Where on earth did he get that?
Hallariel hugs him back, grateful and mournful at the same time that she can never go back to yesterday.