Riloth the 19th the 73rd

Dagmar told me her tale. The events were much the same as how she wrote them down on your pages, but she told the story with a lot more mirth and deflections that first time. She didn't mention that she had tried to end her life. Her recounting filled in some of the questions I had been left with after interacting with Ludvik and Deshiv. From what I could tell, they were Hardune members tasked with manning the river flow, for some important but mysterious reason.

Then it was my turn, and I looked around the inn with a wary eye.

Could Tilavo be here? Could he be nearby? How far can his hearing extend? What if he has spells over the whole town? Divination spells listening for mention of his name?

I ran through increasingly unlikely scenarios when Dagmar interrupted my thoughts.

“Helloooo!” she bellowed as she waved her empty cup in front of my face.

"Sorry. I think maybe it would be best if I told my story a bit further from town.”

She rolled her eyes, but got up from the table and headed for the door.

“Don’t forget to leave a big tip!” she yelled on her way out.

I left a handful of silver coins on the table, far more than enough, and followed her out onto the street. We walked through the market once I caught up to her, and when we passed the stalls selling food my stomach began to rumble. I bought a quick meal for later and then began to lead Dagmar to the clearing from my first benchmark training all those resets ago.

How many days has it been? Without Spellbook, the days are starting to blur together.

As we walked through the woods, I activated Mage Armor and took no small amount of pleasure in the branches springing off of it and slapping Dagmar as we passed.

When we reached the clearing she said, "Alright, so are you going to explain why you led me out here into this bug infested roofless hellhole?"

This is something I learned from traveling with Dagmar—I don’t know if this is typical for dwarves or just her—she hates being outside. Everything about it: the bugs, the sky, weather, the countless "angles of ambush," the fact that people can spot you from afar, bears. I could list them all with your aid, but take my word that they were endless.

"I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be mysterious, but the proprietor of the Parlor killed me once. Somehow he read my memories of the resets and did not take well to the news that he was trapped in an endless time prison, doomed to relive the same day with no knowledge of his past."

"Hmm, sensible. Maybe I misjudged you. So, now it’s your turn. Tell me where you got that book. If I believe your story, I might tell you what I know about it." She left unsaid what would happen if she didn’t like my story, but I suspected it would involve me not waking up in future resets.

Where should I start? The fortress invasion? I don’t want to misrepresent myself as some adventurer who volunteers for quests. The attack on my parents? Sooner?

In the end, I started in much the same way I wrote in your pages that long ago night in camp. I explained how I grew up on the road, and how my mother trained me. I told her how we were heading to Edgewater for a meeting, and about the attack on the caravan, before continuing on through the events of Edgewater.

Much like Trish, Dagmar is a terrible audience. She had comments and questions on everything, as if this was a story and not my life. Though Dagmar’s comments were often more judgmental.

She thought my father was boring, but loved my mother. Dagmar didn't see what she saw in him. My mother's "training?" Hilarious. Dagmar kindly shut up for a bit when I told her about their deaths. When I mentioned that the sword belonged to my father, she began to listen with more attention.

"Slag breathed cur lizard," was her only response to the fall of Landing.

By the time I got to the dwarves' appearance, she had begun to pace in front of me as I spoke.

"So, there we were preparing to search for this enemy army, when we heard a scream from near the well. Two dwarves—Ludvik and Deshiv—were attempting to climb out of the Torack using the town’s well as a ladder."

Upon hearing the names, she halted her pacing to stare at me. "Tell me you speak the truth! Kenra Ludvik? High Priest Deshiv? They live? It can't be. Is this more demon trickery?"

"Uh, yeah, I mean no, not a trick. I think he said his title was Kenra, but we mostly called him General. Deshiv never gave a title, but I heard he was very impressive during the siege."

"There was a siege?"

"Yeah, I was about to get to that, but that was after we took back the fortress." I explained.

"I need to sit. Please continue. I will try not to interrupt further," she said, her face now softened and her posture less aggressive.

To her credit, she really tried to keep her word. I could see her biting back remarks as I detailed our encounters with the forsaken forces. With every redcap we took out, she sat a little taller. When I mentioned the note that set off Daulf, she grew still.

"Please," she said quietly, "repeat that note as best you can remember."

"Okay,” I paused, trying to recall the exact words and wishing I could simply read it from your pages. “It was something like ‘Mistress, we have the dwarven children. Once we capture the town, we will send the human children as well. They were sent to the outpost.’"

She jumped to her feet and let out a loud, "Whooop! My boy!" after which, she ran at me and embraced me.

Yeah, it shocked me too—I thought she was trying to kill me again, and I Blinked out of her grasp on instinct.

We spent a moment awkwardly staring at each other before she said, "Sorry about that, but my boy might be alive out there."

I trudged back over to my sitting rock. "It’s alright, I’m glad. Is it alright if I continue? And maybe warn a person you recently murdered before you try to hug them."

The reminder of the killings brought her mood down slightly, and she too settled back down on her rock. I continued my tale, and at the mention of the undead dwarves and dragon her face grew grim, and she spat in the dirt, but didn’t interrupt and her mood lightened when I told her of Daulf administering last rights.

Finally, I got to our meeting. "And then, Daulf handed me a book from a table and said, ‘You might find some use in this.’ I took it, mostly because at the time I still feared he’d kill me if I looked at him funny."

I paused, giving Dagmar a chance to say something, but she didn’t volunteer anything.

"Satisfied? Or are you going to try to steal Spellbo—my spellbook from me?"

"Please, finish the tale,” she said, waving my concern away with her hand. “I want to know the status of the fortress," he said.

I tried to wrap it up quickly.

"Alright, well, we went back to the town and they had faced a battle, but the river had killed the bulk of the forsaken army. Deshiv and Ludvik—" she winced when I didn’t use their titles "—were okay, and they recruited some townspeople to head back and help secure the fortress. One of my companion’s ex-wives showed up, and Bearskin went missing, so we all ran off to find him. Oh, yeah! I forgot. When we got back to town, a massive gold dragon slew the white dragon from Landing and then flew off when he found out about the dead dragon in the fortress."

Dagmar stared at me, mouth agape in silence. She didn’t even blink. She tried to regain her voice, but only managed to gesture for me to carry on with a twirl of her finger.

"Sorry, in hindsight, I maybe should have led with the dragon. Deshiv—High Priest Deshiv—called him Wyr Teshiv-something. He told us to call him Teshiv. I suspect this was the ‘man’ my father had been traveling to meet, but I didn’t even suspect that at the time. It wasn’t until I recounted the events in Spe—my spellbook that it helped me remember a long forgotten conversation between my parents!"

Dagmar stood suddenly, and held the fake spellbook up in my face. "This book helped you? You Bonded it? Impossible."

"Flood," I cursed under my breath.

I wasn’t planning on letting that slip.

"Yes. I figured out it was an ensouled artifact by chance. I Bonded it a few days before all of this," I said, gesturing vaguely at the world. "I was beginning to think it was why I could remember the resets."

"Aye, I think you're right. If this book Bonded with you, I have no right to say it was wrong," she said, as she threw fake-Spellbook into my lap—where it turned into a cloud of black dust on impact.

Dagmar had been through a lot today. At the sight of fake-Spellbook's destruction, she broke out into a manic laughter.

After settling down, she said, "Who are you? You are, what, thirty years old?”

I thought about correcting her, but refrained from lowering her opinion of myself any further.

“Still a child, yet you have become so wrapped up in events so far beyond your comprehension that you don't even realize the magnitude of your insignificance. Don't take it as an insult. On the scale of this war, I am no more significant than you, but if you are a blind mole in a vast cavern, at least I am a bat able to gauge my insignificance."

A little offended, I snapped back, "Well please, oh great and knowledgeable bat, enlighten me."

She sighed, "I don’t even know where to begin. Have you heard of the Hardune?"

"I’ve heard the word, but know nothing about it."

She gave a deep nod and said, "It surprises me that you know even that. What about the Toan, the Chatoan, or the dragons’ pact with Bild?"

Toan was a word I’d long known, but Chatoan was new to me as of these resets. Toan meant “second being” or “second creations” and was the Torcish word for the Primordials. Chatoan meant corrupted Primordial, and until I’d read that dwarven book buried in the outpost, I’d never seen the term. In all the rush and excitement, I’d discovered a great secret of the age and never had the chance to register its significance until now. The fact that the Avatar was actually a Primordial corrupted by Faust had terrifying implications. Its origins have been endlessly theorized for the past seven hundred years, but it had all been baseless conjecture. Most thought that Faust had somehow built up strength and created the Avatar in secret from the Wardens, but if he had somehow corrupted and controlled a Primordial, who's to say he could not do so again? And if not him, another god.

"Yes, I know about those." I answered, after only a brief pause.

"Good, I guess I don't have to explain everything to you. I will want to know where you learned so much, but there will be time for that later. You aren’t supposed to know about the Hardune. They have existed since the gods left us. In their absence, the powerful forces they’d kept at check had free rein to lay waste to the world. The people of Torc took it upon ourselves to protect the gods’ creations. As Torc stands watch over Faust, we too stand watch over the threats that endanger the survival of the nurtured. Often these threats are caused by men or the servants of Faust, other times they are simply the power of the Arcane Realm running wild.”

“When a Font becomes realized in the world as a Primordial, sometimes it is localized and harmless, but other times it wreaks destruction on the world. Rarer and more dangerous still are the times when the threats originate from outside our Realms. Unimaginable horrors from wherever Oaan left to after creating the gods. In our history, we have battled threats of each kind, often too powerful to be destroyed, so instead we learned to contain.”

She paused to gather courage to speak the next part. "I'm not supposed to tell you this. Well, I wasn't supposed to say all that either, but you seem to know more than you ought to about subjects my people have long labored to keep secret."

She stopped again and began to pace, "Alright, so when the Chatoan broke free and began to destroy pretty much everything. Some dirt headed wizards from some stupid human empire summoned a massive water elemental to fight it. Trying to rival the power of a Font guided by the will of a god with an elemental was doomed from the start, and the Chatoan burst it like a ripe melon, turning it into an untethered spell that created water at an unimaginable pace. The world flooded with pure water. You knew all that, right?"

I nodded. The broad strokes of that were known history, if the intricacies of the Avatar’s nature were not. The source of the Flooding was known, though the means of its cessation was not.

"Well," she continued, "my people fixed all that—some of that. We had help. A group of adventurers working with the Hardune went on some mad quest to stop the water, while we prepared the Continent to serve as a prison for the Chatoan. Using our knowledge of runes, we prepared a trap in the center of the mountain bowl that would become the Continent and created the basin that would funnel all the water from the ocean to cool the wards to prevent them from overheating. We did that while preparing this land to withstand the flood, so that the Waatin would have a refuge. You're welcome by the way."

"Hold on a second," I interrupted. "You're saying that the Avatar, not only wasn't defeated by the Midlothian Empire, but that it's been trapped under the Great Lake?"

The Midlothian Coterie lost the bulk of its most powerful members in the battle against the Avatar. After their defeat, the water began to rise and the Avatar roamed the world unchecked. As the water rose higher, news of the Avatar's rampage became hard to come by. Eventually, everyone lived aboard a ship and the massive force of firey destruction that had once gripped the world in terror became an afterthought in the face of a world devoid of dry land.

She nodded in return. "I don't know what else you Waatin would think could cause a constant plume of steam to bubble from the center of a massive lake. Honestly, we expected you lot to figure it out by now. We went to great lengths to keep this secret, should Faust’s servants unite to free it. Somehow, the forsaken discovered the Chatoan was not destroyed, but instead contained. They must have been preparing for years to take us all by surprise. We’ve held them out of the Torack since the Flood. It makes no sense that they could get through to our outposts now. I’m heartened that the Kenra and the High Priest made it. There's hope that they marshaled the dwarven army to retake the outposts while I wallowed in my own pity."

She paused for me to take it all in.

Wow, this is a lot. The Avatar remains a threat and was not defeated. Not only that, but it is residing next to the largest city in Basin. The dwarves have secretly been safeguarding the world for thousands of years, and they haven’t been lording it over our heads?

Was this the secret my father was looking for? Is this how he connects to all of this? It can’t be, he hardly spoke of the Avatar or focused his research on it. And my father! He was almost certainly going to meet a flooding dragon! What would a dragon want to talk to my father about? Could he have been involved in all of this? It seems outlandish, but it seems even less likely for it to all be a coincidence.

"Ehem," Dagmar coughed, deeming I’d had enough time to ponder it all. "I have some more questions. First, why did that book just crumble? Why did your father have a meeting with Wyr Teshivanido?"

"I don’t know why my father planned a meeting with the dragon, but to answer the first question I think I should tell you what I’d been up to these last few months, and the specifics of why I didn’t want to talk in the Parlor."

I told her an abridged version of my time in the resets. Starting from when I began writing in you, and ending with our meeting. I chose to not mention some—alright, all—of the more embarrassing aspects of my experience.

When I told her about my experience with Tilavo in the library, she interrupted me. "Oh Wardens, that does not bode well. I suspected as much when he recognized the significance of your spellbook, but this confirms it. Tilavo must be a dragon. But how? If he is pacted with Bild, he would not have been able to kill you so easily—unless he believed it to be for the good of the world."

She stopped to consider, "Hmmm. That seems like a stretch—you're not that annoying. But, if he isn't pacted with Bild, what is he doing out here? He ought to be working towards the rescue of the Chatoan and destruction of the prison that keeps his god captive, not running a gambling parlor and clearing out bandits.”

“Wait,” I said, coming to grips with the revelation. “A dragon? For real?”

“Of course,” Dagmar answered, as if it was obvious. “I suppose any powerful wizard or Blessed could have repeated his feats in the library, but who else but a dragon could identify an ensouled artifact at a glance? And not only did he recognize it as an ensouled artifact, he recognized the significance of that particular artifact.”

“I—but, umm,” I struggled to voice the barrage of questions assaulting my mind. “I’m going to need a moment.”

I sat and tried to parse all she’d said.

Dragons can detect ensouled artifacts, that is significant, but apparently only dragons can do so. Dragons and now me?

And what is significant about Spellbook? Tilavo didn’t know about the resets before he read my mind. What did he see in it?

Was I blind? Should I have seen that Tilavo was a dragon? I suppose that the Parlor’s name is a bit on the nose, but crystal dragons are not real, they are just fantastical creatures out of fairy tales, not legends lost to the past... right?

No, I couldn’t have known. I learned that dragons can masquerade as men, but it would be the height of paranoia to thereafter expect to see them around every corner when it's far more likely to encounter a powerful mage, adventurer or Blessed. But, in hindsight, yeah, maybe I should have picked up on it.

“You done?” Dagmar’s voice broke through my thoughts once more.

How long was I sitting here? I've been alone too long.

“Sorry, yes. I have some questions.” I said.

“Of course you do,” she replied with a heavy sigh. “Please, finish your tale first, and I’ll entertain them, but keep it brief, I want to get away from all this—” she looked around in disdain"—nature."

“Fair enough. After I woke the next day, I came out here, to this very spot. From here, I wandered aimlessly for hours until I stumbled on—of all things—a door sitting in a clearing in the woods with these interlocking ring symbols, just like on the cover of Spellbook. It opened for me and,” I paused, trying to think of a more flattering way to describe it but coming up short, “I was killed by a pair of golems. When I woke up the next day, my spellbook was a copy, and the real one was trapped in the door. I’ve been trying and failing to get it back for weeks? Months? I can’t even remember."

I had been looking down while I spoke, and noticed that Dagmar had stopped her angry-stompy-pacing. When I looked up, she was staring at me, face showing more shock and awe than from any other time in our strange conversation.

"Torc’s mercy, who are you boy? You found the Dahn? Take me there at once!"