Riloth the 19th the 356th-399th

Creating spells is hard. Each morning the demon's fire woke us early, without a demon to be seen. I Teleported Bearskin to Levar's and went to retrieve the Tower wizard's spellbook and wand.

The marking of a year of resets came and went unnoticed, along with my sort-of-twentieth birthday.

Instead of detailing each struggle in order, I think it's best to chronicle my process creating the spell as a whole.

The first step was creating a copy of the templates for the gate, path, and Font from Floating Disk. That was easy and took less than a day. The next step was more difficult, though similar in process. I had to copy the spell components from the wand into my mental vault. I had a head start in knowing how definitely not to do it, which saved me from another blunder.

To copy the spell construct into a template, I sat with the wand in hand and accessed my mental vault. Once there I examined the wand's spell and meticulously copied it into the spell template I was building.

In total, it took five resets to do all of that and triple check my work. Once that was done I tried out the spell.

It didn't work.

I formed the spell in my mind, using the spell components from the wand and the Font related bits from Floating Disk, and sent it through my gate. The construct left my vault and went into the Arcane Realm, where it stayed.

I hadn't expected it to work, but I had hoped. Spells are made up of three main parts. The spell itself is the hardest to create. This is the component that make up the desired effect, and what I took from the wand. When a sorcerer casts a spell, this is what they are doing by instinct.

Next is the gate, which is a sort of landmark in the Arcane Realm. I understand these have something to do with the Primordials but not the details of the effect. Essentially the gates are areas where Primordials create tighter connections between the Material and Arcane Realms. Somehow these are related to their locations here, and finding Primordials can reveal new gates, but that isn't always the case and I didn't understand why at that time.

The path is the last component and is unique to every spell, which is why I didn't expect this spell to work. If a wizard could open their bridge directly to a Font, the path wouldn't even be required. The path is a route the spell is directed to take through the Arcane Realm so that it is not destroyed by the forces therein. The cost in Will for a spell is a result of the spell complexity and path complexity. Reducing either lowers the cost, and from this total the tier is determined. Because of this, a very complicated spell could have a low tier if the gate is close enough to the Font to allow for a simple path. Similarly, a simple but powerful spell might have a high tier due to the need for the path to take a circuitous path through the Arcane Realm to reach the Font intact.

It was with this in mind that I began the hard work of guiding a spell through the Arcane Realm. The first step was to open my bridge all the way. This had the unpleasant side effect of blinding me with Willsight on full blast, but in the Arcane Realm that would not matter.

The next was to cast the spell, send it through the bridge, and hold on—figuratively. You could cast a spell and slow its progression through the Arcane Realm with a slight effort of Will, allowing you to follow and observe it. This was the reason that my mother had insisted I make my bridge as large as she had. Well, she didn't know this was the reason at the time, but now I knew the source and purpose for the practice that was either lost to the Stormcallers or simply never taught to my mother.

So that was what I did. I cast the spell, and followed it through the Arcane Realm. When it became destroyed by the mysterious forces of that place, I altered its path and tried again. The spellbook had useful reference tables for the process, but after a while I'd memorized them and forwent getting the book to conserve Will for my work.

As I made progress moving the spell closer and closer to the Font of Force, the spell's cost grew with the path's complexity. Eventually, I reached a point where the spell was beyond my ability to cast and I had to restart. By then I'd had three copies of the spell in my mind, erasing Mage Armor and Shield to make room for branches of attempts. Occasionally I'd find areas where the path could be reduced, but I was making very little progress.

Around the time I was going to start a fourth branch, I stopped myself to attempt a different route. Instead of starting with the Floating Disk path, I started without one. Without a path, a spell will travel straight to a Font, regardless of what may stand in its way. For obvious reasons this doesn't work, but it does keep the cost of the spell very low. So, I spent a few days building up a path from scratch. The results were promising at first, but eventually slowed and this method too led to the spell becoming unwieldy.

While the Tower wizard's spellbook didn't explain this, I sensed from context that there were methods for this process that made it easier than my own blind strugglings, but I didn't have those available to me, and the Tower ensured that I couldn't find them in a local library—I'd checked.

So, I started on another avenue of approach. Using other gates. This also went poorly. The Light gate was easy, but the gates for Lightning, Barrier, Mind, and Identity required modified somatic components and adapting those was beyond me at the time.

I spent a few days trying to cast the spells from each gate with poor results, until one day I made a wonderful mistake.

In my hopeless attempt to modify the somatic component to the Font of Barrier, the most promising of the four, I failed and my bridge opened to the same random section of the Arcane Realm as it normally did, but my spell went out anyway. And to my surprise, I could sense it got closer to the Font of Force than any of my previous attempts.

I dissolved the template, leaving only the spell component and the Font, and tried again. This time I followed the spell. It was immediately destroyed, but that destruction was the closest I'd yet gotten to the intended destination. I turned back to my bridge and saw that beside it loomed a massive Font.

I'd never seen this Font with my wizardly senses before, but somehow I knew what it was. It was the Font of Air.

Why did my bridge open here? Did it always? I've never paid much attention to my bridge's location without it being set to a gate. Is it normal for it to be this close to a Font? And is it simply chance that the Font of Force is so close? The geography of the Arcane Realm is not exactly three dimensional space. What made these Fonts close?

All good questions that Levar and Dagmar had no answers for. With burning curiosity, I continued my quest. Little by little my spell got closer to the Font of Force, until one day three force darts shot across the room and shattered Levar's window.

"I did it!" I screamed in triumph.

"We can tell," Dagmar said, but she had a smile on her face that didn't match her grumpy tone.

That night we celebrated with a little bit of magically aided burglary. I stole the best bottles of dwarven ale and elven wine from the Dragon's Den, which had a very multicultural collection despite its human centric views.

The spell, which Levar recognized as Magic Missle, took a shockingly small 2.5 Will to cast. Furthermore it took less then a second to cast and did about as much damage as the big crossbow if all the bolts of energy struck the same target. The three bolts it fired came out in quick succession and flew a little slower than an arrow, but they turned unerringly towards their target. Each bolt could be sent to different targets, and I expected this would be my go to spell for dealing with pack rats, kobolds, and goblins. It was probably good for harpies and humans as well.

The celebration was twofold, for Levar had finally found a method of safely waking Bearskin, but we'd delayed doing so to keep me on task. We decided it best to wait a bit longer before waking him. The day after learning Magic Missile, I returned to the Tower members to relearn my missing spells. Mage Armor, Shield, and Lightning.

Who knew what madness Bearskin's return would bring.

Riloth the 19th the 400th

"Unicorn, nirnroot, daisy. This day is endlessly repeating itself. This is Bearskin who I once mentioned. He is drugged with the witch's brew tarrowfang and I need you to wake him up." I told a sleepy and pajama'd Levar.

"Oh, this is exciting!" he said as he went to take a potion of forgone sleep only to notice two were missing.

"We took those. Sorry. I owe you a bit of a tab." I explained, not for the first time.

"To be a part of an adventure is payment enough!"

He responded the same each day, but I felt it important to always be honest with this man who so blindly trusted his own secret code gifted to me from his lost future—parallel? past?—self.

It took Levar half an hour to prepare a draft to wake Bearskin, and I spent the time trying to remember my last interaction with the giant. It was a training session I thought.

Bearskin coughed and choked up the liquid Levar poured down his throat, sitting up as he did. When his coughing subsided he looked around.

"Theral? Where am I?"

To his credit, he didn't look confused, only curious

"I found you drugged in a cage, captured by slavers," I explained.

"Oh yes. I ran for two, maybe three, days. I stopped to rest and woke up in a cage." He spoke slowly, carefully choosing each word just as before.

"What do you mean your 'ran for three days?'"

"I left Edgewater and ran for three days and then stopped to rest," he repeated in the same manner.

"How?"

"I drew on the Bond some, but it is possible. Dangerous, but my sword helps me recover."

"Where is your 'sword?'" I asked, not comfortable calling that obsidian edged club such.

He looked thoughtful for a moment and then pointed and said, "That direction."

I went to look outside, and he was pointing in the general direction of the Clipped Ear.

“Do you want to go get it?” I asked.

“It can wait,” he said. “Tell me how you found me.”

“It’s rather a long story.”

“How long can it be?” he asked. “I have time.”

Dagmar and I broke out into laughter. When we’d settled down, I gave Bearskin a abridged rundown of the subjective year I’d experienced since last seeing him. I left out a lot of details, and only covered the broad strokes. He sat patiently listening, while Levar listened, hanging on every word.

I’d not ever given Levar a full accounting of the situation, and I resolved to allow him to read part of my accounting should I ever recover you.

I should probably let everyone read it at some point. Maybe I will create an abridged version that doesn’t scream “I’m a dragon blooded sorcerer, come kill me.”

It took an hour to explain, and by the time I was done, it wasn’t even our pre-fire wake up time.

“What will you do?” Bearskin asked.

“Well,” I said, pausing to put my thoughts together. “I hope to defeat the golems, reclaim Spellbook, and bring all of you into the Dahn so you can maintain your memories of these events.”

I spoke hesitantly and with a little uncertainty. I’d thought a lot about bringing the others into the Dahn once we captured it, but I hadn’t voiced the thoughts aloud. To do so made it feel more real. As if not putting the words out there would make it so the idea could not be taken from me. But now I’d done it and there was no taking it back.

“You’d bring me with?” Levar asked. “Really?”

“I kind of owe you. I have taken a lot of potions from you and I stopped paying a long time ago. Plus.” I added with the uncertainty of a child making a new friend. “I enjoy your company and look forward to not having to repeat the same interaction indefinitely.”

Bearskin spoke up again, “I will help fight these golems.”

“No!” I nearly shouted. “I don’t want that. I know you would, because you think you owe me for saving you, but for the last time, you owe me nothing.”

“This is not a debt one can forgive. Now I owe you double”

“I will not wake you each morning to just watch you die in the evening. I’ve seen too many terrible things happen of late, and I fear I will never be able to sleep should these resets ever end and the opportunity presents itself.”

“Okay,” Bearskin said, as if ending the issue. “Try again. If you fail this next time, ask me for help.”

That seems... reasonable. If we can’t do it now, we are unlikely to find another boon that would help us. But, I can always look around more before asking him for help.

“Alright,” I said, “But what should I do with you in the meantime?”

“If you do not mind, wake me and let me help out there,” he said pointing to the fire.

Levar spoke up as well, “If you are taking requests, I think I would actually prefer to not know the whole details of these resets until there is a chance I will remember them. This is exciting and all, but the existential dread of knowing you will be erased from existence, or at least reverted, saps a lot of the fun.”

“I’m sorry,” I told Levar, “I hadn’t considered what that must be like. I was so focused on how losing interactions with friends affects me that I hadn’t considered what knowledge of the resets would do to others.”

“This is all very touching,” Dagmar chimed in from the side of the room, “but I think we need to talk to get back to planning.”

And so we did. Levar sorted out a potion regime for our upcoming trials. He advised Dagmar to stop taking potions of clarity, as they interact poorly with other enhancement potions she could be drinking. Instead, he recommended she take an anti-toxin potion intended to cure poison along with a potion of giant’s strength. The giant strength with the clarity would have, you guessed it, ended with horrible bodily harm. Something to do with your muscles growing until they ripped out of your skin.

We ended the day by retrieving Bearskin's "sword." The four of us walked out of Levar's, through the market square—collecting stew and strange looks along the way—and into the Clipped ear. A man tried to stop our entry when he saw Dagmar and the possibly-not-fully-human Bearskin, but I blew him aside with a quick blast of wind.

Bearskin kicked the door down, breaking it from the hinges without spilling his stew. We strode through the crowded inn in his wake, collecting more openly hostile looks than outside. He went behind the kitchen, past the bar and into the small room in the back that served as an office. Bearskin's weapon stood in the corner propped up against a wall.

"That is mine," he said to the terrified man behind the desk.

He was a rather round man with thinning hair and he wore nice clothes that the quality of his inn could justify him affording.

Bearskin retrieved his weapon and walked out.

"You don't want to, I don't know, rough the guy up a little? Maybe burn down his inn?" I asked, a little surprised.

"That would be no Contest," he replied, adding weight to the last word.

Oh yeah. I forgot about that Contest thing.

Bearskin continued, "When this is over, we will turn him into the headmen here. Trials are a form of Contest, but revenge is not."

We spent the rest of the night repeating our celebration from before. A sort of final meal for this iteration of Bearskin and Levar who knew themselves to be fleeting.