“Who keeps doing this?” A crone’s shrill, frustrated voice echoed through the void. “Time is not a toy.”

  “Did your seers find anything?” asked an ocean of rolling waves.

  “No. The time-hopper might even be from a different world, but they jump back in time around one hundred and sixty local years. We have clues, and our minions have slain all likely suspects multiple times, but none of their deaths have triggered the jump so far and leaving them alive didn’t change anything either.”

  “Should one of us descend?” Crackle and breaking of rock and glass formed the words, but the entity wasn’t the only one considering the question.

  Four of them stood around a tiny golden crack, peering inside, each longing for the warmth and life beyond. The void remained quiet until the crone spoke again.

  “Only I can find them, but entering the lower plain would come at a cost, one which both I and our worshipers have to pay.” The silence stretched, and the crone continued, her voice that of a merciless extorter. “A considerable cost.”

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  “What do you want?” the waves asked.

  “Another fifteen percent.”

  “Too much!”

  “Greedy!”

  “You’re insane.”

  The protests came, and the crone let them come. She knew they were aware the chance might slip if she didn’t act. Hundreds of thousands of years had passed in waiting for their plan to unfold, rapidly approaching a million, but the time hopper ensured their plan had only progressed a blink during those long millennia they had spent in the void.

  The others knew it too, the longer they waited the greater the odds of others finding them, or worse, someone more powerful stumbling upon them. But they couldn’t accept such blatant robbery. They begged and tried to barter, but she remained adamant.

  “Fifteen percent.”

  Finally, they yielded, and sent instructions to the lower plain. Their followers would take years, decades, and with the time-hopper, nobody dared imagine how much time would pass in the void.

  But it had to be done. A huge tribute in life and energy needed for an outer god to descend ahead of time had started along with another loop.