Riloth the 19th the 96th

“Flooding pack rats,” Dagmar grumbled as she walked into my room, waking me when she slammed the door.

I bolted upright to see her dropping my potions on the desk. She paced across my room fuming as I got ready.

“So, are you just not going to bathe anymore?” I asked as the odor drifted over towards me.

“Mind your own. I’ll bathe when I feel like it, and I don’t feel like it today.”

I held my hands up in a placating gesture.

“Alright, fair enough.”

Rat jokes ran through my mind, but I bit them back. Their assault had affected her in a way her deaths by the golems had not. She may joke that I can’t hold back a comment, but I didn’t need to prove her correct.

This will cheer her up.

“If it’s any consolation, I think our furry friends may be the key to our predicament.”

She halted her pacing and gave me her rapt attention. “You think the rats are causing this?”

“No, no, no,” I said, waving away her question. “But they did give me enough pieces to build a theory.”

Dagmar only continued his stare, inviting me to elaborate.

“You mentioned that the Hardune use a Primordial’s own Font to power their prisons. I suspect that this resetting phenomenon is the safety mechanism for the Primordial of Time. Something—maybe an accident, or maybe malicious intent—has caused the prison to fail, and the safeguards put in place by the Hardune are bringing us back to ‘now’ to give us a chance to stop it.”

She looked out the window as she thought it over. “Hmmm, maybe. How did you get to this from the rats?”

“I figured that if the rats are unaffected, it stands to reason they have some connection to the source of the resets—like us. It seemed unlikely the rats would have sworn oaths to the Hardune—right?—so that left them being connected to the same Font. From there, the Font of Time was a likely guess, and I have a theory as to how their abilities work, which—if correct—would confirm it.”

She was quiet for much longer now before responding. “You might be right. If we had a runemaster, we could probably even confirm your theory by building a suppression array.”

“A suppression array?” I perked up at the new term, “What’s that? Could you do it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed. It sounded interesting. “You can make runes.”

“So? I have a basic understanding of runes, but a rune array of this complexity would take a runemaster with a century of experience.”

“Could you figure it out? We have time.”

“Could you figure out a new spell?”

I took her question seriously and contemplated. “A wizard spell? Probably… It would take me a couple of decades of tinkering—and I’d probably die a few hundred times—but I think I could figure it out eventually.”

“Well, good for you, but I can’t,” Dagmar shouted in frustration and slammed her fist on my desk—causing the potions to clatter to the floor. “I’m not a runemaster, or a wizard. I’m a warrior that trained her whole life for a battle and failed when it finally came.”

“I’m sorry. I thought this would be good news.” I gave her some space and waited for her to talk.

Those rats must have really gotten to her.

She didn’t speak for a few minutes, which was a few minutes of silence more than I was comfortable with.

“Are you alright? Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, but I don’t think you are going to give me a choice.” She paused to choose her next words carefully. “I felt helpless against those vermin. It reminded me of my fight through the outpost on the night of my failure. It reminded me that I had failed my son.”

I didn’t know what to say, shocked by the sudden vulnerability.

Do I say sorry? That feels so empty.

“It’s okay,” I tried instead. “We are going to figure this out. Together. We will find your son.”

She looked up with uncertain hope in her eyes.

“You will help me find him?” she asked warily. “I mean, after we escape this. You will help?”

My first instinct was to laugh and ridicule her for her doubt. But I stopped myself, replaying the last few weeks in my head.

We have never spoken about what would come after. We don’t exactly get along—which I think is mostly on her—and she knows I’m looking for Bearskin.

In writing in Spellbook and talking to Dagmar about Edgewater, I have learned a lot about myself. Daulf was right about me. I can’t pass by those in need of my aid. Does she not see that I will help her? That I have already determined to help her? How does she see me?

What did she say after I explained where I found Spellbook? “Who are you?” Like I was not some kid in over my head, but that I was a somebody—someone important. Ensouled artifacts, mysterious parents murdered by a cult, Chosen, Demons, Forsaken, Dragons, Kenras and High Priests, and now this whole situation. From her perspective, these resets are not some fluke for me, but one stop in an ongoing adventure. All things I fell into ass-backward while she spent her whole life waiting for them to arrive. A life that was three or four times the length of my own.

Finally I spoke—though it was not a long pause, all that flashing through my head in a moment. “Of course I will help find your son. Even if I didn’t want to—which I do—his kidnapping has to be connected to all this.”—At my words, she let slip a quick smile before marshaling her expression back to its natural scowling state—“We will escape this prison, find Bearskin and your son, and see about connecting with whatever Hardune remain. It’s what adventurers do. We help people.”

We sat in silence. I tried to remain in the moment, but my mind didn't allow it.

The Hardune! If I am right, any who remain are trapped in these resets too! Unless it is spatially limited, which would mean we are close. But if it's not, then we could have no hope of finding the source.

Dagmar interrupted my thoughts with a simple, “Thank you.”

Riloth the 19th the 97th-110th

After the brief rat-induced detour to our plan, we resumed our routine. The atmosphere lightened significantly after our talk. We had been laboring with a cloud of inevitable doom over our heads, working towards the Dahn because it was there, not because it was an answer. It was only after real hope came into the picture that we saw the old situation for what it was—desperation.

Our working relationship thawed to something almost resembling friendship. Dagmar still threatened my life, and I still pestered her with questions, but I could tell she didn't really mean the threats—probably. She opened up more and started filling in the gaps in my magical education wherever she could, which mostly pertained to runes.

Over the month of our struggle against the “Ims”—Dagmar hated that and it didn’t catch on—she found many leads in the Kituh. We marked these for further study—mentally, of course, because I had lost you, and we couldn’t write anything down. We tried making a map and dropping it in the Dahn for later, but it was gone the next attempt, swept up by whatever force stole you. Most of these leads were collapsed tunnels where she suspected an outpost might lay, but she saw no signs of a Primordial’s prison.

“I've been wondering why the Kituh was so dense out here, in an area so old,” Dagmar mentioned one day while telling me of another cave-in. “The presence of a captured Primordial would justify that, but where did everyone go? Who collapsed all the tunnels? Why was it left unguarded so long? Bah, look at me, I’m turning into you.”

My training with Ren progressed slowly and uneventfully, as did our war against the golems. Through trial and error, I found that I could only cast sorcery cantrips while concentrating on spells from the Font of Air. I still couldn't manage any wizard cantrips, or use sorcery cantrips while concentrating on Mage Armor. Whenever the spell went through the bridge, my concentration dropped on the active spell.

In my trials with Conjure, I discovered something new. I could summon my sword despite its size, even if it was a dozen feet away, but if my belt knife was more than a foot from my body, I couldn’t summon it. Nor could I Conjure other swords, no matter how much Will I imbued into them. Through these tests, I figured out the mechanism behind Conjure's need for me to concentrate on an object. When concentrating on something, you are unconsciously imbuing it with small amounts of Will. Now that I knew the trick of it, I could intentionally imbue an object with Will and be able to Conjure it without the need to clutch it in hand for hours.

No matter how much Will I imparted in them, I could not Conjure any object larger than an apple. But, after a few days of study, I learned the secret. The aura of the sword had changed slightly. Where before it was a pure icey blue, now a faint sliver of a darker blue threaded through it, almost unnoticeable. When I examined my own aura, I saw a similarly thin ice blue thread running through the roiling mass of darker blues. I had begun to Bond my father’s sword, though it had exhibited no abilities thus far beyond my increased capability to Conjure it.

After discovering that I could Conjure Bonded ensouled artifacts at greater range, I attempted to Conjure you when next in the Dahn, but the attempt failed. Now that I had confirmation that the two tone nature of my aura was evidence of our Bond, I took solace in the knowledge that my aura was still completely suffused with yours, to the point that I still didn't know which shade of blue was mine and which was yours.

Each night Dagmar and I met in the forest and marched to our deaths in the Dahn. My training with Ren and experience in the resets had been honing my instincts and reflexes, but my body was acting as an anchor, as it reset each day, keeping my progress in check. Thankfully, Wind Jump allowed me to leverage my growing combat prowess despite my body's limitations.

The battles grew in length. In the beginning, I could survive a mere ten seconds from the end of the countdown to my death. Adding Wind Jump allowed me to last half a minute, but it wasn't until we began to work together in earnest that we were able to last any real length of time.

Our coordination grew with each battle as we became accustomed to each other’s rhythms and reactions and started to anticipate them. I began to use my spells to assist in Dagmar’s movements, casting Gust to save her from killing blows she couldn't dodge herself. The golems always saw her as the greater threat and if I succeeded in surviving Timothy’s first attack, he would resume his assault on Dagmar. The longer Dagmar lived, the longer the battle stretched, and the more damage we could inflict in a single reset.

I noticed the return of the mending effect on the golems after a month of attempts. Through our battles, the golems’ surfaces had become pock-marked, chips and gouges covered their once pristine stone surfaces. At first, we had tried to focus our attacks on the same area each time, but the golems made efforts to protect their vulnerable points. We were forced to make any attack that presented itself. Timothy received the brunt of our efforts, and he was the worse for wear of the two.

The hundredth reset passed without notice, for we had long since lost count, and on the one hundred fourth day of the resets, I saw it. The first attack I had made with the nerestet runed war pick was gone.

Each time Timothy had redirected my Blink, I would appear with my face inches from his chest, and each day I got an up-close and personal view of the damage. I saw early on the rough edges were smoothing out and repairing, but the progress seemed slow. Eventually, the rough crag became a perfect hemisphere inset on the surface of the golem. The next reset, it was gone.

“Flood!” I shouted in frustration when I saw it. That moment of hesitation resulted in my death.

Riloth the 19th the 111th

“What happened?” Dagmar’s voice woke me.

She had not bathed, but not out of malice. If there was news to share, she often forwent bathing to get to my room as quickly as possible.

From my perspective, the realization had been but a moment before, and the frustration was still fresh. I threw my covers off violently—only for them to float gently to the floor, mocking my anger—and stomped over to the potions.

“Tim recovered,” I said solemnly. Our relationship had thawed to a point, but Dagmar still thought my nicknames for the pair of golems were ridiculous. “The first attack I had made on him finally closed. I thought the smoothing would continue until the hole was filled in, but once it was free of sharp edges it filled in overnight.”

Overnight? No, that's not right. Overreset? Stop, focus.

Dagmar let out a quiet curse and sat in the chair, “Fauell.”

We sat in silence for a while before she spoke. “Well, there’s nothing to be done. We need to shift gears.”

“Shift gears?” I asked, not familiar with the expression.

“It’s a gnome phrase. It means to change what you are doing. The little weasels are always trying to introduce new terms. It's not important” She waved her hand in the air, as was her habit when I sidetracked her. “We need to find you more spells.”