It's been a while! Why is that, you ask? Because I'm terrible at getting things done, obviously. Is anyone even going to read this at this point?

...Anyway, rather than go through the rest of the story sequentially I'm just going to focus on answering the main questions it raised, so here we go:

[What happened in the original timeline?]

-> Lirelle fails to secure evidence of the corruption in the military and her sister refuses to abandon her post. When word of Ellis' death reaches town, Lirelle leaves without a word to anyone. Between the war and the ever-worsening effects of the mana vein collapse, quality of life in Silent Falls rapidly declines. Kerr becomes increasingly irritable, eventually to the point of excess drinking and occasional violence.

-> Lirelle finally reappears, only to find Silt covered in bruises. Upon learning that the injuries are Kerr's handiwork she goes to confront him, but he's drunk out of his mind and all that accomplishes is further pissing him off. In the brief altercation that follows, Silt receives a deep cut along his index finger from a poisoned knife Kerr grabs unintentionally.

-> Due to the urgency of the situation, Lirelle travels alone with Silt to a clinic in a small nearby settlement, promising to return for Nassia, Rosch, Anise, and Aster. Silt just barely makes it through the worst of it with the care of Lirelle and the medic, but needs to remain at the clinic for a considerable length of time in order to fully recover.

-> Once Silt's life is no longer in immediate danger, Lirelle leaves to go back for the others. Around this time, the continuing war lands Silent Falls firmly in enemy possession, greatly complicating the task of getting their family members out safely. Meanwhile, Silt gradually recovers and begins helping out at the clinic, forming a friendship (perhaps a romance?) with the medic who runs it.

-> By the time Silt is back at full strength, conditions have worsened significantly. Worried for Lirelle and his siblings, he decides to travel back to Silent Falls, but it turns out it's far too late—the town is in ruins; his siblings are dead; Kerr, Lirelle, Nassia, and Rosch are nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, the clinic is burned to the ground during his absence, the medic most likely dead.

-> Barely hanging onto his will to live, Silt makes his way to the capital, which is now protected by the first mana-regulating barrier developed by mages. Without any connections or particularly valuable skills to make use of, he has a hellish time scraping by in the overcrowded slums, eventually losing his place in the city entirely and taking up the role of messenger to survive.

-> The prologue happens.

[What happened with Kerr? Why does Silt end up lying about it?]

-> When Silt first returned to the past, the mana poisoning he was afflicted with vanished, but his mind was still in an incredibly delirious state and what he was seeing seemed like nothing but a fever dream in which the source of his trauma was defenseless right in front of him. Once he recovered and discovered that this was, in fact, reality, he was horrified to realize he had already stabbed and killed Kerr in his sleep.

-> At first he planned to be honest about what had happened, believing that Lirelle would at least hear him out properly, but what he'd failed to consider was that the Lirelle he'd known in the future had already turned her back on Kerr after personally witnessing him nearly kill Silt. This Lirelle, on the other hand, still viewed Kerr as distant family and a friend of sorts, while Silt was basically a stranger—going by her attitude towards him during their first meeting, he realized that telling the truth right away would probably be a terrible idea and decided against it on the spot.

[What's the deal with Silt's fevers and memory lapses? Why is he the only one who retained his memories of the future?]

-> While the group continues doing prophet things, gaining more and more influence, and helping prevent major societal damage due to the collapse, Silt gradually realizes that his frequent bouts of unexplained sickness and the gaps in his memory that follow are due to proximity to mana/enchanted items (like Kerr's cloak). Apparently, while going back in time did remove the excess mana from his system, his innate resistance to mana poisoning is for some reason now abysmally low.

-> Eventually they succeed in securing a meeting with the archmage, and Silt recounts his story properly to her rather than maintaining the premise that it was a 'prophetic dream'. The archmage is forced to accept his words as truth, as she is able to detect traces of her own magic within Silt, though she also has absolutely no idea why he, of all people, would have been the target of the spell. Studying it, she's able to get a brief glimpse of her own perspective at the moment of casting. She describes a heavy blizzard under a night sky of ominous blue mana clouds, and Silt realizes that something's off—winter had not yet arrived during his last memory before returning to the past.

-> The truth is, the intended target of the archmage's spell had been the famed 'hero', the captain of the royal knights, who she'd believed had the best chance of averting the total collapse of civilization. Unbeknownst to her, that very 'hero' had been caught in a major mana storm while protecting a town from beasts and developed serious mana poisoning. Knowing that he posed a huge risk to the surrounding villages if he ended up losing control and going on a crazed rampage, he figured out a way to regulate his mana by channeling some of it into another living creature. 

-> He wasn't able to actually recover, but he did manage to keep the effects from getting any worse. Unfortunately, the existing mana poisoning in his body still slowly degraded his mind until the only thing he knew anymore was surviving, capturing a wild beast, keeping it tied up and forcing mana into it until it died, throwing it on the pile outside his cave, and doing it all over again. By the time Silt happened to take shelter in that very cave to escape a sudden mana storm (in other words, the prologue), the hero was no longer able to even differentiate between a person and an animal.

-> Silt was held captive for several weeks before the time reversal spell's activation, the hero still having enough basic intelligence to keep him fed and alive in order to continue channeling mana into him, but a combination of physical illness and near-deadly mana poisoning very quickly left him essentially incapable of thought, and the effects of the poisoning completely wiped the entire experience from his conscious memory. 

-> This period of time is the reason why:

a) Silt's resistance to mana poisoning is basically nonexistent

b) he unconsciously finds the hero incredibly unpleasant

c) he keeps seeing that horrific bloody figure in his nightmares

-> As for why Silt alone kept his memories, that's because the archmage didn't know the hero's precise location and set the spell to find and target his mana—which just so happened to be getting channeled into Silt at the time.

[Okay, so how does the story actually end? How do Silt and his companions end up saving the world?]

-> Well, uhh... I'm not entirely sure. One of the problems I had with the story, in retrospect, was that my focus was entirely on unveiling the mysteries behind Silt's situation and I failed to really connect that to the actual events of the plot in any meaningful way. 

-> I was leaning towards delving into how the archmage was able to recover a piece of her memory through Silt—perhaps the group's efforts in warning people about the danger end up failing to convince entire populations to carry out some drastic solution, and so they somehow find a way to give everyone back their memory, allowing first-hand experience to drive the people to take action rather than the words of a so-called 'prophet'.

-> I had general plans for some character arcs as well, but none of them are really all that significant so I'll be leaving it at that. 

If anyone happens to have any burning questions left about the story I'll be happy to answer, but otherwise that's about it. 

Thanks for reading (if anyone is, in fact, still reading) and take care!

- Ion