"Solomon made the status quo less absolute," he points out, "until it just became the new status quo."

"Counting on the fact that it's the next thing to impossible to work in your favor there?"

"If it fails to take at all... nothing changes. I might die or worse in pursuit of it. If it works, my name will carry enough power I will be able to enforce the new status quo."

"For a while, and wherever you happen to be.

There's very little risk of a success making the world worse off. What I'm worried about is if someone else comes along after you, and both seals together are less stable than Solomon's."

"Less stable how?"

"It's stood for a thousand years, being reinforced by each practitioner and most Others. Solomon succeeded hard enough that by now it's the way things are. Assuming for the moment that you manage to add to that, it means the status quo gets seen as changeable and that means it becomes more changeable."

"I'm not sure I see that as a bad thing—the status quo is kinda terrible and given that people change much faster than it does if it changed to keep up that doesn't sound like a negative. Moreover, even if something does change, my Seal's wording is tight enough that there will be very little room for the status quo to change in an undesirable direction, no matter what 'desirable' may turn out to become as time passes."

"If it's malleable, the next guy could make room. Mind, this is all unlikely enough that it'd be a waste of resources if I were inclined to try to stop you, but you had to have known that going in.

For now... this thing's safe from here on out, its time?"

"Probably, yeah. It won't eat any Practitioners, anyway."

"And the innocents are covered by the Seal of Solomon. Informed non-practitioners? We don't have any of those here at the moment, but they exist."

"Covered that, too—actually this thing's version of the oath is simpler than the one I made for things that can understand the most complex version, it's more restricted—" and he explains it.

"Clever. Signing Others on to a simplification and turning them loose does mean that which version reaches fixation is mostly out of your hands, but it's a step up any which way.

Most Others would be safe to leave alone, then, but you say it did eat you. Sixty years from now it might not have sworn yet. Without knowing how time works for it, we can't say when it turns dangerous again."

"Or whether it's even consistent, it could be dangerous in two thousand three but alright in two thousand four and not exist at all in two thousand five, as far as we know.—do you know what it is, by the way?"

"A guess. It'd be smaller than the specimens are supposed to be, but I might owe some crackpots in Chicago a letter."

"What's the guess?"

"Mythological whirlpool monster. When Charybdis is swallowing, it's completely inescapable. It's not just some force pulling toward the inside, it's that all possible future paths lead downward. It's got a very long serpent's body, but you can't see it because only the teeth are always pointed at the present. Or so the story goes.

I heard about it from some cryptid hunters wanting to know if that was possible. There aren't a whole lot of chronomancers to ask. I more or less told them no."

"It seems possible, though," he says, looking at the circle.

"Well, the completely inescapable bit would have had to be exaggerated. Other than that...it's as good a guess as any I've got."

"I had to be pretty clever to escape and I'm not sure I'd have been able to without the goblin club, so maybe it's mostly inescapable."

"There had to have been a possible timeline where you don't die, so the legend was wrong on that point.

I'm thinking it might be enough to just keep an eye on the monster, check whether it's sealed or not, and hold it inactive if it changes. That could keep indefinitely. Do you know if Laird knew about it?"

"He did, I heard about it because the, ah, 'corpses,' for lack of a better word, of the thing's victims started appearing and it was mentioned at a Council Meeting."

"Sounds like he didn't know what was behind it, then. I suppose I could leave a note for my eventual successor saying not to tell theirs. Going against what the universe expects to happen would be more risk than it's worth."

"You could leave a note saying it shouldn't be opened until a certain date, I'm guessing this carries more weight in a family of chronomancers."

"We do try to keep things linear, but it wouldn't be unheard of."

"Linear?"