I woke in a disoriented state, the light, the wind I had gotten used to, absent. I was lying on luxurious carpet, in a room lit by a soft, indirect glow.

Then my world snapped into focus as I remembered that I had made it to London, to the chambers of the Council. Deserted, of course, as they fled to another realm after defeating the Elders and ruining earth.

I looked upon the great library again with awe, when an idea came to me. Why should I hurry? I had all the time in the world, all the time in the universe!

The funny thing that most forget about time travel is that, once you travel, you can go back to anywhere. I could take 100 years and study magic here, use the batteries meant for far more people than myself, take energy from the artifacts filling the shelves to make my jump back when I was ready. Sure, the fare I could conjure was rather bland and limited, but if I wanted to succeed in this, I would need this knowledge and the training with it.

I was missing Alyssa and Stacy fiercely, yet at the same time I knew that when I went back, not a second would need to have passed for them, I could use my new skills to save them and put the Council in its place.

I could teach others, yes, we could win this. Finally, I found a way to win this war that I was drawn into without wishing for it. They may have started the war, but I would end it.

I took a full charge from a battery, then transported myself into the tube station at Seven Sisters. Settling down into a communications trance, I listened for Charissa. This time, I did not get to overhear any interesting conversations, so I called out to her.

"I am here" was the reply.

"I have made it to London", I said, "I am in a Tube station, but there is no exit from it. I may have to go along the tunnels."

She replied, "Could you not transport outside?"

I answered, "I feel like I have maybe one small jump left, then I will have no more energy. I will need that to get into the council chambers, so I can't use it here."

"True, true", she said, "then I suppose the tunnels it will be, for you."

"So, once I get there, what am I looking for? How would I even begin to know how to make my way back in time?", I asked.

"Time is a funny thing", she said, "it keeps wanting to go back to what it should have been.
"You will find, if you can just get enough energy, you will gravitate to the place and time you left. I myself am running low on energy, so I will retire now, please let me know when you're inside."

"Will do", I said, lacking any intention to do so. Instead, I transported myself back into the warm, cosy, lit and energy-filled chambers of the council. Let her believe the guarding spell got me, she won't hear from me again, I thought to myself, now it's time to study.

I looked at the library, the overwhelming size of it, and apparent no index I could see, and I had to remind myself who I was doing for to avoid sinking into a dispirited heap. But I felt it had to be this way, so I proceeded to pull the first volume out at random.

Horticultural magic. Not really what I needed. I pulled another book them the same shelf, same thing. One above, same thing, below, same thing. I stack to the left, same. Another to the left. Zoology and animals. I was beginning to see a pattern there.

Even without an index, the books were grouped in a sensible way and I may only need to check 6000 or so titles to map out the overall sectioning of the library. Yay, once more into the breach!

I had found a number of writing desks, with paper, parchment, vellum and another paperlike stuff that I suspected was the special material a sorcerer could use to spell an otherwise uncopiable spell onto. I hadn't yet found a hint of that spell, but Alyssa had hinted at it and I had gained experience with spells that could not be memorized, where a footnote said the to cast them more then once, they would have to be copied, one copy per cast, and read from scrolls directly.

A month went by, waking, eating the same few things, reading, sleeping.

I had a pretty decent map of the library by now, knowing which class of book was to be found where. I had found protective magic, defensive magic, offensive magic, disgusting magic and magic too evil to contemplate.

Nothing about time travel, or copying spells. I had found a small apartment in an annex to the library, having the usual amenities like a bed, wet room, something like a small kitchenette and a desk.

No food stores, though, and no fresh linen. I suppose cleaning was either done by servants outside the library proper, or by magic, but if it was magic, I never found how or where.

I did it the old fashioned way, in the shower, hanging it over the library banisters to dry.

About four months in, I made a discovery. A door that was so unnoticeable that I hadn't seen it until now, when opened showed a steel plate with a barely visible seam, otherwise completely featureless, with no lock or lever in sight. Opening it would likely need magic.

Six months on, my head was spinning every day. I would get up, do the necessary, study spells and transport out into the city to practice. If I had my life back, if I had company, if I had a teacher, this might have been fun.

It is not when you have to go it alone. If London hadn't been in ruins already, It would be now.

Over the course of the next twenty years, I kept coming back to the mysterious steel panel, but nothing would budge it. It would resist all magical exploration, seemingly stopping magic just below the visible surface as if that was a property of the material. There was no discernible spell and no magical device I could feel, explore or take apart. Using brute force only gave me a headache, but no other results.

I thought back briefly to the day I had arrived here, wondering if Charissa had known about the guardian spell on the library and thought me dead. I didn't dare stick my head out, it would have given my game away, so I would never practice trances anywhere but inside the library, which was shielded from the outside world.

I had made sizable inroads into the library, I had learned so much. With new skills comes more power handling capacity, and that in turn brings more room to store spells, memories.

One day, I will be creating happy memories again, one day this will be over. That was all that made me get up every day, to the drudgery of learning, learning, learning.

It was about sixty years in that I found myself lacking the energy to get out of bed. I had lost all motivation, I conjured food and went to sleep again, leaving bed only for the necessary calls of nature. I would toss and turn, trying to not think, often succeeding. I was thinking I should just end it all, my memories of times past so dull and colorless, leached out as if illuminated only by the grey, pale light that ruled the world outside of this enclave of knowledge and despair.

This went on for quite a while, but one day I was drifting into another day of doing absolutely nothing, when, clear as day, I heard "Mommy, where are you?" I cried out in my mind, "Alyssa, baby, are you there?", but there was only silence.

I got up, noted that 2 years had passed, and went back to work, having remembered who all this was for, in the end.

I think I remember there is more to life than this. I managed to find a candle, set it on a saucer and lit it. This was my centennial celebration. Bread, lettuce, cheese, apples. Yay.

Today, I made a remarkable discovery. I found a reference to a door that cannot be opened. It was described as wooden, but otherwise matched the behavior of the steel panel that had been puzzling me, keeping me awake more nights than I can count.

It described a spell that would be cast on a room, which must have one and only one door and no windows. It would make the entire room impregnable, impossible to scry, impossible to transport into, impervious to any force natural or supernatural.

It further described that the door is sealed by the personality of the casting mage and that the only thing that could open it would be an artifact that was present at the sealing, and the caster's true, birth, name. Easy peasy, right?

Something told me I needed to get into this room, that it would have the secret or artifact that would let me fix the situation my world was in. Without it, I felt, history would be doomed to repeat itself. I was pretty sure that the caster would have taken the artifact with him, but the spell didn't really say that there would be only one artifact, it said, literally, 'an artifact present at the time of sealing'.

I decided that I needed to attempt to pick up the door's sympathetic vibrations. I made my bed in front of the door, leaning against it, and opened my mind to sleep.

I woke up feeling the same as every day. No mystic knowledge had revealed itself over night and an apple didn't seem to be the key to the door, but I ate it anyway.

Leaning back into the door, I did feel a slight resonance with something I had built inside of me. The door may not be the best and most comfortable place to sleep, but needs must. I heaved the mattress from the bed to the door, intending to read, study and sleep by the door, and mostly in contact with it when possible, for the foreseeable.

But damn, that thing was cold.

I had moved on from practical magic to history of magic, it appears that that is very important to know indeed, not from an abstract scholar's point of view, but instead because history can show me, in lieu of failing for myself, what has been tried and what didn't work. Trying to solve a situation with a spell where others had failed would get me killed or worse, and I now believe that 'worse' is a very real thing, from studying these spells. Oh yes, there was both a 'worse' and a 'much worse'. I didn't want to experience such outcomes.

I read about great magical warriors, august personages of peace, shining examples, abject failures, and magical criminals.

Eight years in, I found the volume that told the story of Charissa.

Charissa, as I had almost expected, was a child born to an offshoot of my family, in times humanity had forgotten. Even then my family had decided to renounce their powers and live normal, mortal lives for normal, mortal lifespans.

Not Charissa, though. Even though she was never told about her powers, the family itself having almost forgotten about them, she manifested wild magic and needed to be taught. In those days, the spells that could be used to permanently sever a sorcerer's connection to the magic world were not known, but even later those counted as controlled spells known only to the council. The only way her peers knew to prevent disaster was to teach her magic.

As the years went by, the family came to resent that decision because it caused them to be drawn back into the magical circles they had left behind.

Charissa turned out to be a manipulative woman and many in the family, quietly, held the opinion that the whelp should have been strangled in the cradle.

Charissa, as a child, took great pleasure in destroying things others held to be of value, and entering into her teens she deconstructed a number of complex magical artifacts. It went so far that she was barred and warded from entering places where such artifacts existed.

She did benefit from the fact that, in those times, the art of creating the artifacts hadn't been lost, not all of it anyway. Most of the damage was rectifiable and it was thought that she would mature and eventually let go of the childish destructive tendencies.

Alas, it was not to be.

During the celebration of the great conjunction in 1226, the great orrery was brought from the vault where it was hidden. The properties of the orrery ware such that it would follow the actual planets without a need for gears and mechanical things, and, at times of great conjunctions, would alert the magical community about dangers, upheavals and persecution to come for the time of the great conjunction to the time of the next one.

Charissa jumped the barrier and drained the orrery dry. It was the only one of its kind, it's origins lost in mists and no one could have recreated it, it being the result of the great celestial magics of the past.

Even that alone did not lead to her current sentence, although punishment was applied.

It was in 1320, when the great witch hunts started, that the council, needing a scapegoat to explain the horrendous loss of life among those with powers, remembered Charissa and put her on trial for destruction of the orrery, which, they claimed, could have warned them.

Her sentence was to be brought out of phase of all magic by six degrees. She would exist forever in a void, slowly going mad. This was one of the most severe punishments meted out in those days, and she got it in spades because she got no release date.

So, now I knew. The council must have reached out to her after the dead age, to try and use her as an instrument to take back earth, believing her to be desperate for contact, subjugating her to their will, just based on her desire to have someone to speak to.

I didn't believe they had broken her yet, but if I had anything to do with it at all, she was not getting out of that cell.

Strangely, finally knowing brought no peace of mind. It was just facts from a book, with no human depth. My human depth was with my family, not in this one-dimensional life I lived now, but my day would come.

Ten years had gone by in a blink, grey day fading into grey day, when one morning, I realized that, slowly, over time, something had changed. The door now had a discernible magical feel, a frequency or signal, it wasn't blank anymore.

I still could not read it, I could not penetrate it, or drain it, but I could feel it and the feeling stayed with me even after leaving the door. That was certainly new.

Making my way to the artifact room, I started touching each and every one of them, over and over, looking for resonance. Artifact room was a misnomer if there ever was one, it was a chain of grand halls, lined with shelves of artifact that the council had collected over the millenia, or more likely, stolen.

It took two weeks worth of days, or thereabouts, to find it.

The resonance was impossible to overlook, it was impossible to not latch onto it. I sprang forward, my search finally done, and I gripped the cane that was giving off the strong signal.

A cane, how apt. Older members of the Council had, at some point, taken on an affectation of age, in order to emulate the Elders they wanted to supplant. If the caster was the user of this cane, of course it would have been present of no one would have thought twice about it. The cane, of course, was spelled, making it into a magical artifact, and thus was stored here after the late Councillor's departure.

Bringing the cane with me, I hurried through the halls to the door. These days I didn't really hurry anymore, why should someone who has all the time in the universe hurry? But this find had really kindled a material hope to rejoin my loved ones safely, to complete this mission, end this war, save earth. No small task but I felt as if I was only moments away from the tools I needed to complete it.

Reaching the door, I placed the cane against it, watching, with my magical sight, how vibrations began to align and tendrils of magic started to connect the cane to the door.

I had my in! The door had dropped the pretense of being an inert slab of steel, it started interacting with the cane and the cane, unlike the door, was not spelled to be impenetrable.

Using my special power, I tapped the power of the cane, not to unravel it but to ride piggyback into the very heart of the door's spell.

To say I was blown away would be saying a supernova is a candle. I had seen my share of artifacts, even ancient ones, and had taken them apart while having no knowledge of how they were made in the first place.

I had by now spent 160 years studying spells and I knew this spell well. I knew how to cast it and how it worked, but using my special sense of magic to actually see it, it turned out to be a piece of art, a thing of beauty on the level of other ancient spells which I had observed in artifacts here over the years. Knowing it is dry text, seeing it is poetry, I mused as I explored the carefully interlocking pieces that made this door so impenetrable. I would not want to deconstruct this, not because of its beauty, though, but because doing so would obliterate the contents of the room is was made to protect.

I hunted across the rooms and open spaces of the spellscape within this door spell, looking for the corner where the truth would be hidden, my heart full of hope that there would not be yet another set of impossible safeguards.

There were none. Few were known to magic who could read this and all known persons with the ability were dead or in eternal prison. There was no safeguard. When I found it, I tried to shout it out, but I found I could not. I had not spoken aloud for 160 years, I simply was out of practice.

I sat down, practicing basic vowels, breathing techniques, guttural and clicking sounds and started practicing reading normal English text. After about 2 days, I felt confident, although my own voice sounded strange to my ears, to say the words.

So mundane, a name, as the key, I spoke, "Nathaniel Edward Price."

Without so much of a click, the door opened, knocking down the cane still leaning against it.

The room behind the door was unlit, but the open door beckoned me like nothing else in a century, I gingerly took hold of the edge, opened it up all the way and cast a light.

There was very little in the room. Eight artifacts, about twelve books, chained to the shelf. A small reading desk and a light.

I sat down and took the first book of the shelf. A spell triggered, projecting into my mind. "You who have come to seek the greatest darkness of them all, beware for you will be changed forever. Never teach what you see, never try to take a book. Peruse, for the sake of magical knowledge but never use these spells. The world will end if you do."

I knew I had found what I needed when I saw the first book's title. 'A magical treatise on the in depth exploration of time'.

I turned the page. Time travel was real.