DIE ZUKUNFT

German, "the future"

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all. -- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Diarnlan opened her eyes. She promptly wished she hadn't. Once again she saw the only-too-familiar tree. Its gold leaves glinted and flickered as if laughing at her. She glared up at it. For a while she couldn't be bothered to move. What was the point? She would just run into Karandren again no matter where she went. Even being sent back wouldn't guarantee she'd avoid him. It was like he was her shadow. Everywhere she went he would turn up too, and no matter how far she ran she could never escape him.

Nothing happened. Eventually she grew tired of lying in the snow. She sat up, looking around warily for any sign of her hated ex-pupil. At least he had the decency to be nowhere in sight.

Wait a minute. Where was Saungrafn?

Diarnlan leapt to her feet. She looked around in increasing alarm. Saungrafn had been right beside her when she last ended up here. Now it was nowhere to be seen.

She rounded the tree trunk and stopped in her tracks. Her mouth fell open.

There was an expanse of flat ground beyond the tree. Karandren was there, practicing sword-forms. The sword in his hand was only too familiar.

"Get your filthy hands off Saungrafn!"

He spun around. Absently Diarnlan noted his feet didn't sink into the snow, instead gliding on top of it like a skater on an ice rink. Karandren bowed mockingly, at the same time tossing Saungrafn into the air with one hand and catching it with the other. Diarnlan half-expected him to drop it or accidentally stab himself. Unfortunately he didn't. He twirled it around and around like a juggler at a carnival. It would be difficult enough to do that with an ordinary sword. There was a reason real jugglers used wooden swords, after all. But with a soul-weapon? That was only supposed to let itself be used by its creator?

Diarnlan glared at Saungrafn. "You traitor. What's wrong with you? You should at least have the decency to cut his hand off."

She got the distinct impression that if Saungrafn had a head, it would have shaken it disapprovingly.

"Oh, shut up," Karandren said with his usual politeness.

Diarnlan glared at him. Through gritted teeth she said, "I know it's expecting too much of you to behave like a human being, but don't you know it's rude to touch someone else's soul-weapon? How would you like it if I grabbed part of your soul?"

There was a brief silence. Karandren stopped spinning the sword around and looked at her expectantly.

"Well? Aren't you going to say it?"

Diarnlan blinked. "Say what?"

Karandren shrugged. "I expected you to say something about my not having a soul."

That hadn't even occurred to her until now. Strange. A few lifetimes ago she would have said it long ago and wouldn't have needed him to mention it.

"What's the point in stating the obvious?" she asked instead.

Karandren shrugged again. He raised Saungrafn and flung it at her face. Only the reflexes created by several lifetimes of being attacked prevented her from having her skull split open by her own sword. She glared at it as it sailed past her head and landed in the snow. Behind her there was a muffled sound like a yelp hastily cut off. She ignored it. Probably Karandren had just cut his own hand on the sword. Serve him right if he had.

"You traitor," she said to Saungrafn. "Why did you let him touch you at all?"

She got the impression Saungrafn would have shrugged sheepishly if a sword had been able to shrug.

You two need to learn to get along, the dratted thing had the audacity to say.

Diarnlan glared at it even more fiercely. It sank deeper into the snow as if hoping to disappear entirely.

"As soon as my next life begins I'm going to melt you down and sell you as scrap metal to the rag-and-bone man."

Saungrafn said nothing. Diarnlan had an uneasy feeling it was doing the soul-weapon equivalent of nodding along like an adult tolerating a child's foolishness. She firmly put that thought out of her mind.

When she turned round Karandren was gone. Diarnlan froze. She scanned her surroundings for any sign of where he was hiding. The ground was too flat around her for him to be nearby. He must be behind one of those mounds of snow that marked where the ground became uneven.

Or perhaps he had found a way to tunnel under the snow. Perhaps he was under her feet right now, ready to jump out at her.

Diarnlan held out her hand. Saungrafn sprang out of the snow and flew to her. She held it out in front of her as she turned slowly in a circle. When she was sure Karandren wasn't sneaking up on her over the ground she plunged Saungrafn into the snow. Again and again she stabbed it until she knew there was no chance Karandren was hiding under it.

He's gone, Saungrafn said.

"I can see that." Maybe he'd decided to go mountain-climbing like she had a few lifetimes ago. Diarnlan remembered the pain of falling and breaking her bones. With any luck he'd suffer the same fate and she wouldn't have to see him again until the gods (or fate, or the universe, or whoever was to blame for this mess) saw fit to shove them back into their old lives.

He's gone back, Saungrafn said insistently.

At first Diarnlan didn't know what it was talking about. Then she realised. Her eyes widened in outrage. "You mean he's been brought back to life while I haven't? This is outrageous!"

While Diarnlan and Karandren had been busy arguing over Saungrafn, their magic had been just as busy trying to figure out what to do now.

How about we send only one of them back?

Yes, let's try that.

So Karandren found himself abruptly yanked out of the strange in-between afterlife and back into the body of his fourteen-year-old self. He stared woozily up at the ceiling while his mind processed what had just happened.

Claaaaaaaang! went the academy bell.

Karandren almost jumped out of his skin. That more than anything brought him back to reality. He glared in the general direction of the bell and gathered his magic for a spell. Absently he noticed that he still didn't have all the magic he used to. Then he cast the spell.

For the second time in as many lifetimes the bell exploded into smithereens.

This time Karandren didn't run away after destroying the bell. He trooped into the school basement with all the other students while the teachers ran around in a panic. While the other students chattered amongst themselves he stood off to the side in silence. No one spoke to him. Barely anyone even noticed he was there.

His thoughts chased each other round in circles. What should he do now? Stay at the academy and refuse to have anything to do with Diarnlan? Run off to Miavain again but make sure not to bring her with him this time? Or -- and this idea kept coming back to him after all the others had disappeared -- why not try something completely different this time? All his previous attempts had ended in skrýszel-related disaster, so why not deal with the skrýszel before they could become a problem?

He did some quick calculations. Assuming this was the day when the first skrýszel attacked, then he had roughly ten minutes before it came through the veil. Everyone was distracted by the exploding bell. This was the ideal time to slip away.

No one paid any attention to Karandren as he slipped out of the basement. As soon as he reached the top of the stairs he bolted in the direction of the teleportation platforms, pausing along the way to steal a sword from a suit of armour in the hallway.

The teleportation platforms were behind the school and just inside the walls. There were three of them, each circular and built on top of four pillars. Stone steps led up to them. All of them were large enough to hold ten people at a time. The magicians who built them many years ago had designed them to respond only to the presence of the academy's residents. When a new student or teacher arrived they had to cast a spell to make it recognise them.

Karandren ran up the closest flight of steps and skidded to a halt in the centre of the platform. Nothing happened. For the first time it occurred to him that his magic might have changed enough to stop the platform recognising him. Experimentally he conjured up a flower made of ice, taking care to use the lightest magic he knew.

The runes around the platform's edges began to glow. A map of Avallot appeared in mid-air right in front of him. Karandren tossed the flower aside and examined the map. Diarnlan's house wasn't marked on it, but he could make an educated guess at where it was. He tapped his finger against that part of the coast. The map changed from one of the entire country to one of the north-east coastline. He noticed where the village was marked and used it as a reference to find Diarnlan's house. He pointed at the chosen location for ten seconds. That triggered the runes to lock onto that destination.

The platform activated. A flash of light, a dizzying feeling of being dragged forwards, and Karandren was standing on the beach.

He looked around. At once he saw this wasn't quite the right place. The roof of Diarnlan's house was just visible over a small hill. He walked along the beach until the house came fully into view. There was no sign of Diarnlan herself. Probably she'd run away again as soon as she came back. Nor was there any sign of the skrýszel.

Karandren scanned the beach. No footprints, no claw-marks, nothing at all except a lot of sand and a tree growing a short distance from the water. He sat down on the grass at the edge of the beach and waited.

The thin part of the veil was somewhere out at sea. He dimly remembered hearing that no one had been able to find it. Perhaps it was underwater. If so he would be better able to find it than anyone else. He filed that thought away for future reference, just in case he failed to kill the skrýszel this time.

A faint tremor ran through the ground. Karandren tightened his grip on the sword's hilt. He scanned the sea. Nothing. Not even a seagull.

The tremor came again. His eyes landed on the sea. There were ripples on the surface, yes, but they weren't coming towards the beach. They were heading away from it, as if caused by something on the land rather than in the sea.

Karandren looked around suspiciously. Still nothing in sight but the tree-- Wait a minute. Trees didn't grow on beaches.

He jumped up and raised his sword. The monster gave up all pretence and charged right for him.

At first the in-between realm was peaceful. Diarnlan had a leisurely walk around the lake, pausing to take note of all the differences between this place and her realm. But this very quickly became boring. Now she found the drawbacks in being stuck here without Karandren.

For want of anything better to do she began to build a snowman. She was in the middle of rolling a snowball into place when Karandren reappeared. He popped into existence right in front of her, tripped over his own feet, and fell on top of the snowball.

Both of them were frozen in place for a minute. Diarnlan recovered first and scooped up another handful of snow. When Karandren finally clambered out of the ruined snowman he immediately got hit in the face by another snowball.

"Well?" Diarnlan asked. "How did you die this time?"

Karandren gave her the sort of look that suggested he had just seen things man was not meant to know. He didn't even seem bothered by the snow; at any rate he hadn't brushed it away yet. "Trees should not have teeth!"

Diarnlan blinked and tried to make sense of that. "Huh?"

He didn't elaborate. He just turned and stormed off, still muttering about trees and teeth. Diarnlan watched him go. Then she turned and gave Saungrafn a baffled look. She got the impression it was shrugging in equal confusion.

Under her breath she said, "What happened, and why did it have to happen when I wasn't there to see it?"