Riloth 19th the 171st-201st

I’d considered using the unforeseen time to experiment with sorcery in the Arcane Realm, but the more I delved into the complexity of wizardry, the more I grew to see the futility of the efforts. The odds of stumbling on a successful spell through trial and error were so small, to call them odds at all would be a gross exaggeration.

Instead, I started a fire and got comfortable, thinking about which spell I would learn next. The reset interrupted my contemplation as I tried to rationalize a reason to learn Clean next, but that was for the best. I knew that the right spell to learn next was another Barrier spell, I simply didn’t relish the fact. Despite my great satisfaction with Shield, I wanted to learn something more exciting next. Mage Armor might prove useful, but from its description—and my own experience seeing Dagmar shoot through it with a crossbow—I was not optimistic that it would prove useful against the golems.

Dagmar woke me the day after the first attempt with Shield with surprising excitement.

“Great job ferret!” she shouted, in place of her usual nudge.

“Please keep it down until I’ve had my potions,” I moaned, rubbing my temples. “And don’t call me that.”

“Don’t be a sinkhole. It's not an insult—well, it was, but now I mean it in a companionable fashion.”

I ignored her and started dressing.

Together, we headed down to get on with our day, and I explained my survival along the way.

Instead of the envy I expected from my claim, Dagmar stated happily, “That's great! We can bring the big crossbow and you can step in once more and shoot the big bastards another time.”

Riloth’s storming clouds, I should have kept my mouth shut. She’s right, but if I’d said nothing I could survive each day in comfort. Maybe she's also right that I talk too much.

We elected to test the capabilities of Shield even further. I allowed the wizard to shoot us with a Lightning Bolt—which I blocked—and had Dagmar fire back at the wizard through the barrier. The wizard was not prepared for a meager sorcerer and his stocky and stinky friend to survive his attack and didn’t react in time to block the bolt that struck him in the head. Dagmar’s aim over the past month had improved greatly. She said it was easy to compensate when you fired identical bolts each day. She’d gotten into the habit of marking a fletching and ensuring it sat in the weapon the same way each today.

Shield was less effective against Fanos’ blades, but Gust did the job well enough for Dagmar to finish him off once the Mage Armor faded.

Our rhythm continued, only this time with even more hope than before. With the addition of Shield, Dagmar could strike Timothy five to six more times a reset, and I too occasionally got a solid hit in with the war pick. Whenever I escaped—which was far from a surety—I’d wait a few hours and reenter with the crossbow to take one last shot at Tim.

Shortly after learning Shield, we’d begun to notice areas on Tim where the damage had begun to repair. Without the addition of that spell, I suspect we would have fallen into despair once more, but the improved proficiency gave us both hope.

The spell curriculum was settled when I got serious and reviewed the book. Clean would have to wait, but not that long. I planned to learn all the Barrier spells I could manage before reaching the limit of my skill. First, I needed to test Buckler, and then move on to Mage Armor. I would then skip the tier two Protection From Poison spell and attempt the tier three Counter Spell. I didn’t see the need for the former spell and suspected the latter to be beyond me.

After that, I would learn Clean. It wasn’t entirely an indulgence either. As a consequence of our tight schedule each morning, Dagmar had spent the preceding months in a state of constant filth, and as much as it was bugging me, I couldn’t imagine how she was handling it.

I tested Buckler briefly after the first attempt with Shield and found it formed a small barrier just before the hand that could block the blow of a sword, though stronger and heavier weapon attacks could overload it. In those instances, the attacks were at least slowed. Buckler, as it happened, was very easy to master. I already knew the trick to casting wizard cantrips—simply build the spell construct without the “spell” part of it. With the addition of the verbal and somatic components, I had to remove the spoken part and keep the hand gesture. It worked on the first try, and a crushing realization hit me.

I could have practiced the somatic component as a cantrip. That would have sped up the whole process!

It hadn’t even occurred to me to try such a thing. In traditional pre-spellform wizardry, you learned the spell holistically, constructing the gate, path, and spell all at the same time. Each took years to master, and working on multiple aspects at once helped speed the process up. As such, you couldn't cast the cantrip version of the spell until you’d mastered the spell itself. With a spellform though, you could learn the cantrip and practice the somatic component, which is the same for all spells of the same Font. Since the Will cost of cantrips is negligible, it would allow for much faster mastery of the hand gestures required.

And so, we continued in our efforts. Each day, Dagmar would explore the Kituh, seeking access to the mysterious area of collapsed tunnels, while I studied. I’d offered to search overland for the surface entrance to that area of the Kituh, but she assured me she could figure it out. Besides, she rightly guessed it was the location occupied by the sorcerers the Tower members were seeking, and we did not relish the thought in adding another heated battle to our daily rotation.

Mage Armor only took me a week to master after I’d learned Shield, and as we expected the results were far from useful against the golems. The first time Dagmar took a hit, the blow penetrated the armor and sent Dagmar sailing into a wall. The blow which would have been lethal had only been crippling, and she experienced a particularly slow and gruesome death that day as I fled out of the Dahn. We stopped using it after that fight. It might help against the occasional glancing blow, but that was not worth making every other death a living nightmare.

In my mind, the most useful effect of the spell was that it nicely distributed the weight of a heavy pack across your shoulders and protected you from snagging branches. It didn’t stop Dagmar’s complaints while hiking, but it did change them to focus more on bugs and the sun than the foliage.

As I expected, the third tier spells were beyond my ability to master. I’d spent two weeks trying to reconstruct Counter Spell in my vault, but even with my ever-improving mental deftness in crafting spells, this one was too complex for me to hold together. It felt like I was trying to build a ship in a bottle that was too small to contain it. But there was hope, as I felt that I was almost there. The spellbook had no notes specifically citing the barriers to unlocking subsequent tiers, but after reading through the whole thing, I got the sense that the complexity of spells a wizard could learn was tied to Will capacity in some undefined way.

I spent one study session benchmarking my own version of Lightning Bolt which I’d mentally renamed “Lightning” to conform with the naming conventions of the new spellbook. I found that the spell cost five point eleven Will. Based on that cost, I had just over twenty-five Will at the time of my first benchmark all those years back, and forty one at the start of all these resets.

My growth in these few months was astounding, and even Dagmar admitted it. The dwarves knew much about Will capacity, having studied it for ages. She herself had a capacity of sixty, and she had fifty years on me. Dwarves grow in Will at a slower pace than humans, though most have about ten when they reach adolescence, just like us.

As I mentioned earlier, the days fell into a rhythm. The two hundredth reset passed without mark, and the rhythm skipped a few beats when Dagmar found an access way to the seemingly intentionally caved in section of the Kituh. It was just after I’d begun to learn the spellbook’s cantrip of the Font of Lightning, though before I’d made much progress. Clean had been bumped back on the schedule once more.

She reported her finding when we met up for the assault on the Dahn. The next day we made our way there directly after our battle with the human duo. She took us... somewhere, the entire place is identical to me. Eventually, she judged we were in the right spot and we dismounted, heading into the darkness.

"You can use a Light spell, there wasn't anyone here before," she informed me as I dismounted.

I cast Light on myself, and a brilliant white orb appeared above my head illuminating the small crack in the stone we were to traverse. The opening was barely a foot wide, and the thought of squeezing through it sent chills down my spine.

"You want me to crawl through that? I'll get stuck."

Images of Bearskin climbing on his side to gain access to the fortress outside Edgewater came to mind.

"Don't be a baby. It widens up thirty feet in," she admonished me as she crawled through herself.

I cast a second Light spell on her and watched as she shimmied and wormed her way around the uneven surfaces of the fissure.

After only a few minutes, I heard her yell, “Your turn!"

I could just barely make out her face through the winding path.

Good enough.

I reached to the Arcane Realm, focusing on my companion.

With a quiet whoosh of displaced air, I appeared directly before Dagmar's face.

"Bah!" she screamed, jumping back.

She composed herself quickly and said, "I suppose that works. It would have taken you ages to fumble your way through that tunnel."

"If that's a tunnel then I’m an Arch Mage."

“The tunnel,” she said, emphasizing the word. “continues this way. I didn’t go any further yesterday. I didn’t have time.”

I cast Mage Armor on both of us and we moved on at a cautious pace. The “tunnel” was a natural fissure that arose sometime after the construction of the Kituh, and after the collapses Dagmar had been investigating. The walls were rough, and each depression in the stone had a mirrored protrusion on the opposite side. It continued to widen as we walked, and eventually, Dagmar and I were able to walk side by side. The floor was rough and made up of fallen rubble from above that filled in the bottom to make it passably traversable.

The rough floor ended abruptly, the fissure intercepting another system of tunnels near its ceiling. My light was sufficient to illuminate the floor and walls, revealing another dwarven outpost of similar design as the one guarded by the harpy. We both jumped down about thirty feet with the aid of Slow Fall.

Rubble that had once been the ceiling littered the floor, but buried beneath it my light revealed the dull and smooth surfaces of armor I’d grown quite familiar with.

“I think we found where all the dwarves ended up from the first outpost.” I commented.

Dagmar responded with a somber “Aye.”

We walked through the tunnel and found ourselves at the Kituh entry bay to the fortress, identical—save the rubble—to the one Dagmar had first shown me all those months ago. One wall was dominated by the large gate that lead into the fortress proper, while the other end—which ought to have lead to the Kituh—was sealed completely by fallen rock

“Just as I thought,” Dagmar said looking at the rubble—though I could not see it at the time, my light not having reached that far, “There must have been an attack, and they collapsed the tunnels as part of the defense.”

We explored the area and found the emergency transport plates we’d been using missing from this outpost. The runes that controlled the doors were still intact though, and Dagmar was able to open the gate and grant us entry. The large door opened to a hallway identical in layout to the one I’d first explored alone. A quick inspection revealed it all to be much the same, though fallen dwarves lay where they’d been slain in every room.

The attack had come from the surface entrance, and all the dwarves had died bravely with their faces to their foes. Whatever had slain these soldiers had done so without damaging their armor or disfiguring their bodies. Each set of armor lay positioned in the shape of the dwarf that had once worn it, bones still intact inside.

Stranger still, was the stone of the walls and the floor. The mottled pattern of the granite was streaked with wide bands of pure white. These strips of bleached stone ranged from two to ten feet in width and were present wherever bodies lay. Dagmar spent some time picking into one of these patches to discover the color returned to the stone a few inches below the surface.

“I’ve never heard of anything that would do this. Have you?” she asked, a quaver detectable in her voice.

I shook my head no in response. I could tell that this scene was dredging up painful memories for her, and elected to remain as quiet as possible out of respect.

We surveyed the whole outpost and found the situation much the same as the first we’d discovered—save the signs of battle. All valuables were missing, along with any books. Weapons, armor and clothing remained untouched. The body count showed that more dwarves had fallen here than the beds could hold, and confirming my initial hunch that this is where the occupants of the other outpost had mobilized to.

After a few hours of counting the dead, we went to the barracks room to sit and rest before embarking back into the tunnels. The entrance to the surface was just as collapsed and impassible as that to the Kituh, so we would be retracing our steps. We sat in the barracks at a table—that was very much not sized for humans—and I listened to Dagmar voice some theories about what could have caused this.

“From the age of the dead, it couldn’t have been forsaken, but there's the —” she stopped mid-sentence, eyes fixed on a section of wall.

Slowly she stood from her chair and walked to a bare wall between two sets of bunk beds. The walls of the barracks were covered in bunk beds stacked two high and cut into the stone. Throughout the whole room they were spaced evenly, with four inches of stone between each pair and the next, but here stood a gap three feet wide.

Gingerly she placed her hand on the stone, and shortly after the section of wall disappeared, sliding down into the floor with a now quite familiar rumble of dwarven stone mechanism.