Damn it, Sham. Let me drop the preachy act.

I’m trying to help you. I really am. That’s what all this is in aid of, here. Helping people through what can only be described as a traumatic event.

No, of course I don’t believe all that about the Loop being the will of the gods. But don’t underestimate religion as a power to soothe the masses. People want to believe that these things happen as a result of some higher power. And that this higher power has a plan.

If all this is part of a plan, then it can’t be wrong, can it? If all this is part of a plan, then those who remember it are safe. Are in the hands of the gods. Who am I to deny them that glorious, glorious lie?

History was repeating itself.

In a way, at least. Events were certainly repeating; the last few weeks had been proof enough of that. But to claim that these events had been written into the history books would be to miss the one fundamental truth of this new sort of madness: nothing mattered.

Ariel could kiss a stranger, could rob a bank, could bare her arse in the middle of Government Plaza, and in fewer than nine days, only the voice in her head would remember. Not that she had done two of those things; she had some dignity, after all.

And so it was that she came to the source of the explosion: Julya. Ariel tracked her in reverse chronology. First at the Tower, where her inevitable siege could have only one potential conclusion. Ariel stood back and watched before deciding on a course of action, looked on as Julya consumed those skill vials during her attacks on the Citizen’s Police, and saw how they made her die. Made them all die.

She asked around on the Loops that followed; she still had her connections from her father’s house, after all. Those in low places who still owed the Marsh name some favours. It took many a Loop, but soon all the whispers pointed in only one direction: a dingy, dimly lit warehouse on End Street, down in the Harbour District. Only those dwelling there could have stolen enough of these skill vials to fuel Julya’s siege.

And so it was. On the next Loop, Ariel watched Julya enter, watched her take—politely or by force, it wasn’t clear—the vials from the suspicious sorts that worked inside, that which would afford her the explosion. Ariel sized the warehouse up on the next Loop, borrowed revolver in hand. But there was no way she would be able to take them on. Not here. Her investigation had to continue, backwards, into the past.

In the next Loop, as she staked out the warehouse on End Street, she saw the vials arrive. What else could be contained in such a large automobile? What else could those crates contain? And so Ariel followed it backwards with every Loop, patiently watching the streets for signs of the vehicle, as she tracked it back one turn at a time, one turn every nine days.

Ariel was nothing if not a patient woman.

Finally, she found it: the moment where the vehicle changed hands. The street on which the automobile was seized from members of the government by people who operated in the shadows.

Here, where the criminals’ trap was set, she had the element of surprise. Here, she could spring a trap of her own. All she’d need to do was point that borrowed revolver at the short, round, puffy man that seemed to act as their leader.

By the next Loop, she was ready to play.

Ariel waited in the darkness, hand gently cradling her revolver, as she watched the criminals move into position across the street. An elderly woman—the thieves’ distraction—awaited at Ariel’s side of the road, and she’d been conscious to remain entirely silent from the moment she and her friends had arrived.

It took great pains to not shuffle in the shadows, not cough, not sneeze, but Ariel bit her teeth through it. And finally—as though her time spent waiting had been longer than all the Loops combined—the automobile began hurtling its way down the empty, silent street.

Ariel gripped her revolver as she scoured the darkness for the man in charge. She watched the old woman hobble directly in the path of the now-breaking automobile, saw the driver shout at her, and observed the leader emerging from the shadows.

She pulled her weapon.

‘Stop,’ a figure said, in that loud kind of whisper, or perhaps that quiet kind of shout. From the darkness, a woman appeared, dressed in the full black uniform of the Legion. She gave Ariel no moment to answer, grabbing her by the scruff of her jacket and throwing her against a wall, hand over mouth.

Silently, held firmly back, Ariel watched as the criminals seized the automobile and drove it off, presumably to the warehouse. Where Julya would find them. Where Julya would arm herself. Which would cause the explosion, and the Loop to repeat again.

‘How did you know?’ the officer said, finally releasing Ariel after the automobile was gone from sight and hearing.

‘They stole it!’ Ariel gave as an answer, her voice strained as she could not believe what she was hearing—from a member of Legion, no less.

‘Yes,’ the woman replied. ‘Just as Enoch wanted. I ask again: how did you know?’

‘I—’ Ariel started, but what could she say? There was no good answer. No answer that didn’t make her sound insane. No answer that didn’t involve the words “because I am trapped in a time loop”.

And so she said nothing.

The officer of Legion brought Ariel before the Tower, dragging her by the upper arm across its empty atrium and towards the ministerial elevator at the rear. It didn’t bode well, Ariel thought, that she was being ushered to the premises of the Prime Minister himself rather than to the jails. That it was a matter for Enoch Chambers meant that she’d stumbled across something that maybe didn’t result in jail time. Maybe it resulted in disappearing, instead.

Ariel gulped as the brass grate doors clanged shut behind them, and the elevator whirred into life, sending them slowly but surely towards the ministerial chambers at the top of the Tower.

A man in the same black uniform nodded to his colleague when the elevator doors opened at the top, then snarled down his long nose at a sheepish Ariel. ‘He’s free,’ the man said.

‘Good,’ the first officer replied, and then continued to painfully drag Ariel across the interior of the Tower, into the Prime Minister’s private office.

As the member of Legion pushed Ariel inside, she watched a pretty young woman whisper something in the supposed “Great Man”’s ear. Enoch Chambers smiled back at her, gave her a kiss on the lips passionate enough that it had to be a new love, and then silently gestured for her to leave.

‘Well, well, well,’ the Prime Minister said, turning to face Ariel. ‘Just what do we have here, Ros?’

‘You said to let you know if anyone tried to wrestle in on the robbery. Of the vials?’ the officer replied.

Enoch Chambers’s eyes lingered on Ariel for a moment, sending an uneasy chill trickling down her spine. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Oh, really?’ he said, his eyes flicking to the member of his personal police force. ‘This one?’

‘This one,’ Ros said.

The Prime Minister stood from his great leather armchair behind a large dark wood desk, and strolled over to Ariel, his eyes locked on hers. Ros held Ariel’s arms tight, and there was no escaping even if she’d tried.

‘It is rather a delicate situation, see,’ Enoch Chambers told her. ‘Everything must remain as it is for the Loop to perpetuate, you see?’

‘Sir?’ a confused Ros asked from Ariel’s rear.

The Prime Minister waved her question away. ‘Nothing for you to worry about, Ros.’ He turned back to Ariel. ‘Delicate, as I say. If events do not go according to plan, we risk the Loop unravelling. And then…’ The man trailed off, sighed. ‘Well, I do not wish to dwell on that. Suffice to say that it wouldn’t be good. For me, at least.’

Enoch Chambers trailed off, studying Ariel, as if waiting for her to speak. But too busy was she with processing the information that the Prime Minister had so casually offered.

‘So, with that in mind, I do hope you forgive that I must add you to the list,’ Enoch Chambers said.

‘The list?’ Ariel repeated. It was hardly the most pressing of her questions, but had the benefit of being the first she could wrap her head around.

‘Oh, the list, the list! The list that exists only in my mind until the first minute of the Loop. The list that I give to my humble servants, my brilliant Legion. The list of troublemakers. The list of those that would break my Loop. The list of those to be thrown in the dungeon.’

Ariel’s heart dropped. ‘The…’ she started, but the rest of the thought was lost to the depths of her fear.

‘Take her away, if you please, Ros,’ Enoch Chambers commanded with the flick of his hand, and just like that he damned Ariel to an eternity of suffering.

They tortured you, in the dungeons.

This was a truth that all those in the city of Haven knew to be true. They had seen those few who had been released, seen the damage to their bodies, to their minds, to their souls. Few made it through the next winter. None made it past their first year post-dungeon.

But although Ariel knew this, she hadn’t known it. She hadn’t known how painful the blades would be, the archaic machinery, the… Even a substantial time later, as she headed the Church of the Loopkeepers, she shuddered to think of it.

And the fear, too. Such fear. Never before had she known terror like being awoken on the first day of the Loop by being yanked out of bed by a gleeful Ros. And then again. And again. And each time, Ros experiencing it like it was the first time. Each time, Ros being fresh, being assiduous, being… enthusiastic.

Then, when she was tossed in the dungeons, the pain began again.

It was excess to requirements, the torture. Though it did damage enough to bend Ariel to her keepers’ will, she would not have been able to escape. She would not have been able to break the Loop. She was trapped in a web of fate, and the most painful element of all was not the thin blades that they left in her flesh, but the fact that she’d been doomed to this for a very literal eternity. And all at the whims of one man.

Over the months, Ariel became more and more able to lose herself in the memories, more and more able to reduce the pain by detaching herself from her body. She floated through times before the Loop, in memories good and in memories polished by the gold-tinted spectacles of distance.

Mostly, she lost herself in her youth.

As a child, Ariel had been a member of a religious family. Her father, a revered and great man—truly great, unlike the man who had condemned her—had given daily sermons at the Temple of Zeus in Dripcanal. He aided the less fortunate, championed charitable causes.

There had been a time—a time that Ariel dwelled in, now—that a sick man had entered the church during session. A man in rags, a man with a madness in his eyes, a man whose every movement screamed trouble. He coughed, he’d spluttered, and those in the pews had pressed themselves away from him.

Only Ariel’s father had approached the stranger with kindness, wrapping his arms around him and assuring him that all would be well. That he, personally—with Zeus as his witness—would help the man heal.

That was the first time Ariel remembered feeling proud of her father. Of her last name.

That night, for the first time in a great many years, she prayed.

‘Had enough?’ the Wretched Man asked, as he had many times before.

Again he pierced Ariel’s flesh without awaiting an answer. Again he took joy in it.

The tiny blades cut deep, and Ariel did her best to ignore them. ‘Fuck you,’ she spat.

As ever, the Wretched Man replied, ‘Fuck you, sir,’ and then stabbed her again. She’d tried not saying it, but it never did any good; the Wretched Man was always going to do what the Wretched Man does.

She’d called him by name, once—Warren—and that had done her no good. It only upped his efforts, made him determined to know how she could have learned his name. How could she explain to the Wretched Man the existence of the Loop that he was trapped in?

‘Why?’ Ariel shrieked as another thin blade pierced her skin. ‘Why do this? Why… why?’

‘Why do we do what we do?’ the Wretched Man crooned. ‘That’s like a philosophical sorta question, isn’t it? Guess we do it for survival, and if it’s not that, then we do it for… joy.’ With a wide grin the man in black pushed another tiny blade into Ariel’s shoulder, and she retreated into her memories once more.

She found herself in the ruins of north Haven, standing at her father’s side, her hand in his. A cold wind bit the air, and the harshness of it Ariel could feel even now.

‘Do you remember what happened here? What I told you?’ her father said, gesturing to the ruined buildings in front of them.

‘You said they don’t teach us this in school,’ the young Ariel replied.

‘Yes, but what don’t they teach you?’

Ariel looked out at the buildings. Ruined. Old. Abandoned. This was, surely, the quietest area in the whole city. In front of them was a taller building, not as crumbling as the rest, which faced out onto a makeshift square. At its front there were the shattered remains of stained glass. ‘It was… the war,’ Ariel said.

‘Very good. Between who?’

‘The… the king, and the government. Monarchy versus diplomacy.’

‘Democracy.’

‘Yes, democracy. Democracy versus monarchy.’

‘Again, excellent,’ her father said. ‘And who were the good guys?’

Ariel smiled up at him. ‘There’s no such thing, Dad. I know that.’

‘Oh, so we’re all bad?’

‘I didn’t say that!’ Ariel protested. ‘It’s just, like you say… there’s good and bad in all of us.’

Her father tussled her hair. ‘Yeah, I’m just messing with you. Glad to hear that you listen to me, though.’ He turned back to the building they were facing. Gestured to it. ‘You see that? That was my old church, once. Before the war. Before we had to move. You know what we’re seeing, here? We’re seeing what happens when good men give up.’

If Ariel remembered what she’d said next, she couldn’t picture it—the pain was overwhelming.

‘Please,’ Ariel cried.

She’d begged Warren over many Loops, not that he could remember. She’d had occasion and occasion to work out how best to get to him, how best to pull on his heartstrings. The right approach? Realise that he didn’t have any; this man was a brute through and through. Instead, she’d got to him with a threat. ‘What would Enoch Chambers do to you if he found out you were the reason he didn’t hear what I had to say?’ It was a clumsy threat, but it worked.

And so Ariel was thrown before the Prime Minister. And so she’d tumbled to his feet, head bent in faux reverence, pitiful tears streaming from her eyes.

‘Yes?’ Enoch Chambers asked, not bothering to hide the impatience in his tone. ‘I’m told you have information?’

‘Not information,’ Ariel said through tears that she had only just realised were genuine. ‘An offer.’

The Prime Minister sighed, gestured to Warren, the dungeon keeper. ‘Take her—’

‘Please!’ Ariel said again. ‘Please, hear me out. I can help you. Please!’

Enoch Chambers’s gesture switched from a waving away to a signal to halt. He glared down at the prisoner at his feet. ‘Thirty seconds. That’s how long I give you.’

‘The, the…’ Ariel spluttered, taking a moment to gather her thoughts.

‘You really don’t have time to be messing around,’ the Prime Minister said.

‘There will be more!’ she said. ‘More like me. More people who remember that which even your Legion don’t.’

Enoch Chambers raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes. Indeed. Six more since you arrived. Did you not think your dungeon louder, these last few Loops?’

‘You’ll run out,’ Ariel continued. ‘Of space, or of time. How many people can your Legion really pick up from the streets every Loop? How long until you reach capacity.’

The Prime Minister gulped, leant forward; this problem had already occurred to him, it seemed.

‘What if I can keep them away? Keep them occupied, so you don’t have to?’

‘How?’ Enoch Chambers growled.

‘Faith.’

‘I’m afraid I have little faith in you.’

Ariel shook her head. ‘Not in me. In… in the Loop. I can have them revere it. Have them think it’s the will of the gods. The first will come easy—anything’s better than your dungeons—and the rest will come because the others did. This can work. I know it can. I can help you support your Loop… you just need to grant me one thing.’

‘Freedom,’ Enoch Chambers said.

Ariel nodded. ‘Yes. That’s all.’

An eyebrow raised. ‘And they will not attempt to break it? The Loop?’

‘Not if I do my job right,’ she replied. ‘And I learned it from the best.’

The Prime Minister rose from his desk, a smile on his face.

‘Oh, if your father could see you now…’ the voice of Recollection murmured.

And so the Church of the Loopkeepers was born.

Ariel found home for it in the ruins of her father’s old church, a building still in condition enough to fulfil her needs, while keeping her flock away from the masses.

She lucked upon clothing—what better than a uniform to bring people together? It had worked on the Legion, it had worked on the Citizen’s Police, and it would work on the Loopkeepers.

Her flock came quickly, at first. They patted at arms, at legs, soothed themselves of wounds suffered in the dungeons that had been undone by the Loop. They gave themselves totally and fully to the cause, and became some of the church’s most loyal followers.

When Ariel gave her first sermon to a flock of eleven, she repeated words that had been swimming around her mind ever since she’d conceived this idea. The church’s holy tenet. Their prayer.

‘We know how it ends,’ she said. ‘We know how we die. And then the Loop begins anew.’