Riloth 19th the 649th-656th

Trish and I stayed out under the stars in silence until Dagmar shouted that the reset was due. I went up to the pile of mattresses that had been my bed during my and Dagmar’s isolation and slept until a smell woke me.

The charred but not-unpleasant scent of Roland’s cooking greeted me as I rose from my bed. Not only that, I was free of sickness. I’d been free of it for months, but I still woke each morning grateful to be healthy. Even my sore limbs made me happy, for they were proof that I was growing in more than just my magic.

After a quick Cleaning, I left my cramped quarters. My room opened up to a common area furnished with undersized couches. Six similarly small rooms lined the walls of this semicircular room, and a door in the middle opened to the dining room, which itself was a semicircle. The kitchen sat around the dining hall, a mirror of the sleeping quarters.

“No, no, no!” Levar shouted as I entered.

He was sitting on a low stool at one of the similarly low tables, staring at the platter of food that Roland had just placed before him.

“What's wrong?” Roland asked, confused.

“You just fried everything in a pan!” Levar said, as if it was obvious.

“Yeah. I cooked it,” Roland said in a tone that showed he too thought it was obvious, but was confused why Levar would point it out.

“You gathered all those herbs, what did you do with them?” Levar asked.

In response, Roland pointed to the platter.

Grabbing his fork sullenly, Levar said, “Next time, leave the food you gather. I’ll cook.”

I grabbed a plate and squatted next to Levar to eat. The meal was fine. Not great, but edible, which was a step up from what we normally ate on the road. With Roland, there was never a lack of ingredients, only a lack of skill in combining them into anything of note. The look of irritation in Levar’s eyes gave me hope that was about to change.

The potion of forgone sleep had caught up to me, so ‘breakfast’ turned out to be dinner, and everyone was gathered and tired after a long day of sorting through the Dahn.

“So, what's the plan?” Trish asked the group once we’d eaten.

All eyes turned to me.

“I don’t have a plan,” I said, “I’ve been focused on getting to this point, I haven’t thought about what to do after.”

“Liar,” Dagmar said under her breath.

“Fine, I’ve thought about it, but it's not a plan,” I amended.

“So what's the ‘not-a-plan,” Trish asked again.

I sighed, pausing to gather my thoughts.

“To summarize, we know that the Primordial of Time is located nearby in a prison. Odds are pretty good that it is the cause of all of this,” I gestured vaguely around. “Something is wrong with its containment, and we need to find it and fix it. We need to do that without anyone dying because if we fix it, we won’t come back. We should probably also make sure we disrupt that demon summoning before stopping it—somehow. We need to do all of this while avoiding the ancient dragon that apparently kills me on sight now, and avoiding the demon who’s aware of the resets, all while you four stay close to the Dahn, because if you are caught outside, you’ll forget everything that happened.”

Levar raised his hand.

“You don’t need to raise your hand, you can just talk,” I told him.

“That’s more of a situation report than a plan,” he said.

Exasperated, I shouted, “I told you guys I didn’t have a plan!”

“Fine,” I continued. “Dagmar and I need to search for this prison. I don't know how we'll find it but it will involve a lot of searching. We have good reason to believe it's somewhere within the giant ward. Roland and the rest of you can search the immediate area around the Dahn, but Dagmar and I will have to be the ones to travel far out into the wilds to find signs of it. If you guys need to worry about making it back home, you won’t get very far.”

"What are we actually looking for?" Daulf asked.

I looked to Dagmar for an answer.

"Hmmm. Probably... a cave?" she said, tone devoid of any certainty.

"This is a terrible plan," Roland opined.

"We'll go over the notes here," I suggested. "They were searching for the same thing. Maybe they have a way of finding it."

“That’s a super boring plan,” Trish commented.

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure I’ll die horribly many times.”

“Is it weird that it does make me feel a little better?” Trish asked, to which Dagmar giggled.

Giggled.

I stared daggers at them both.

“And,” I said, pausing for effect, “Roland will need to teach Dagmar how to navigate the wilderness since she claims to have exhausted her search of the Kituh. Once she can travel without getting lost, we can take turns exploring. Until then, I kind of need a break.”

Roland and Dagmar both let out groans.

“I have no problem teaching anyone the ways of the woods, but she clearly doesn’t wish to learn. I won’t force her,” Roland said.

“Aye, I don’t want to,” Dagmar said and then paused. As if straining to get the words out, she continued, “But, the ferret is right. I am of no use, and am duty bound to learn this.”

Everyone went to bed after that, and I was left to my own devices, which I spent studying the magical texts on the top floor. The books on the third level were a little elementary, and I was well beyond them by now in Force and Lightning wizardry. I’d considered branching out, but when I began to review Findle’s notes, I saw that he, much like Leslie—gods I can’t believe that was his name—specialized in two Fonts. Leslie specialized in Lightning and Barrier magic, and Findle focused on Force and Sound magic. Force and Sound were the two Fonts his bridge opened nearest to, making his gate-less castings in those extremely effective. My bridge opened near the Font of Force as well, which made his notes an invaluable source of information.

It was with these notes that I’d managed to create the Catapult spell and the multi disk Force Disk. I’d also created a version of Magic Missile that acted more like a bludgeon. This new version was useful for training. It still hurt if it hit, and could probably be fatal, but Dagmar had gotten tired of being shocked in our training, so I’d developed this to appease her.

All of that is to say, I had decided to specialize in Lightning and Force for the time being. Barrier spells were difficult for me to wrap my head around when the spellforms were in front of me, and Sound looked similarly beyond my comprehension. Force came very easy, and I grasped Lightning well enough that I felt I could make strides on my own.

During my time in the Dahn with Dagmar, I’d gathered all the notes on Lightning from the top two floors. It was these that I went to study.

Tediously, I picked over the shelves finding the books I needed—again. Some sort of magical construct returned books to their "proper" place if they were left unattended for too long. This likely being the culprit that took you from me on our first visit.

The half formed Call Lightning spell construct from Leslie’s ring was still stored in you, and if I entered my mental vault I could continue to examine it. Now that I had the room to spare, I began to copy it over to my memory so that I could finally begin to work on rediscovering the spell.

For the next week, I spent most of my free time working on that. Due to the potion, my internal clock was out of sync with the group, but slowly, through staying up later and later each “night” I came around again to waking up at an almost reasonable hour.

In the brief hours my waking overlapped with everyone else, I would take a break from my studies to interact with them—usually participating in the training. Daulf, Bearskin, and Dagmar took turns leading different forms of instruction. Daulf and Dagmar focused on improving the martial talents of the group, while Bearskin worked on physical conditioning and unarmed combat. Dagmar also began to teach everyone the basics of activating runes.

Levar began to cook the food that Roland caught, and we had very pleasant meals of fresh game and wild greens. Dagmar refused the greens, but didn’t complain once about the food she did eat.

The next dinner, Roland came into the dinning room with two chairs hanging over his shoulders as he ducked through the undersized door.

“I made these,” he said, plopping them down. “I’m tired of squatting.”

The chairs were simple in their designs, but looked well-made. They’d been built from dismantled dwarven furniture from the Dahn that Roland had repurposed for humans and near-humans. Well, not all the humans, Bearskin still had to sit on the floor.

Roland left and came back with three more, bringing the total to five, enough for everyone but Dagmar—who was quite comfortable with the dwarven furniture—and Bearskin. Trish sat in her chair first. She squinted her eyes as if thinking, and shimmied side to side to test it out.

“Could you sew me a cushion?” she asked.

Roland ignored the request, but almost seemed amused by it.

During the meal, Levar gave me an update on his experiments with object permanence.

“I’ve been able to replicate the events of your story more or less. If I leave an object untouched, it lasts a whole reset and disappears quickly during the next. If I leave something on my person, it persists, and the new copy outside the Dahn disappears near the end of the day. Damaging any object causes it to disintegrate prematurely. I suspect the phenomenon is tied to the Fonts of Identity and Permanence.”

Flood, I forgot I said I’d help with that.

“Permanence?” I asked, recalling the name from the Dwarven text I’d found in the outpost. It had gone onto the long list of things I meant to look into further but hadn’t yet gotten around to.

“Ah, sorry. The Font of Creation is often referred to as the Font of Permanence. It's a difference with a more theological significance than magical, but in this context I felt it proper to use that name for it.”

“Fonts have different names?” Trish asked.

“Yes,” Levar answered. “The first Font was the very vast and nebulous idea of existence, and from it the others were formed, and from those even more were formed. Each new Font sussed out from its parent was a more narrow aspect of the one that came before it. The first Font is such a broad concept, that assigning any name to it is a bit hubristic. The last Fonts on the other hand—the elemental Fonts—are very clearly defined. There is no debate that the Font of Fire controls anything but that, while the Font of Heat from which it is descended could arguably refer to a whole host of things. For instance, the Font of Heat could cause objects to cool, belying the commonly accepted name. Ultimately, the names of Fonts are labels men have applied to concepts beyond our ability to fully comprehend.”

Trish, who had surprised me by her interest at the start, became a bit glassy eyed as Levar spoke on, and by the end of his description had gone back to eating.

“Oh,” she said. “Neat. Is there any more salad?”

There was not, and the meal broke up. Levar brought me to his lab. He’d claimed the alchemy lab on the top floor as his own, and had begun to clear it of ancient and worthless reagents. The ones he’d brought with him had long since disappeared. The cabinets and cubbies had been largely empty when we found the place, and the runes that covered them made Levar hesitant to place anything in them before he could understand what they did.

The top of the alchemy bench was now cleared, the glassware cleaned, and a grid of stones, sticks, and leaves lay out, each labeled with the details of its acquisition.

“Here it is!” Levar said, overly proud of his array of stones and plant parts. “If I am correct, this stone here should disappear in four minutes, Could you watch the process in your Willsight and describe what you see.”

I agreed, and activated the colorful vision. It was set to only show magical objects and the auras of people, but even then the walls of the Dahn were still blinding.

“I need to adjust it a bit, give me a moment,” I told him as I closed my eyes.

Slowly I increased the sensitivity of my sight until I could see the gray aura of the stone. If I blocked the walls of the Dahn from view, I could ignore the intensity of it long enough to perform the test. By the time the stone in question gained a gray cast, all the other objects on the table had long since stopped being visible.

“I think we were right in tying this to Will,” I said, and went on to explain how long it took to view the Will in the object.

At the end of the explanation, my head was pounding from the overwhelming aura of the Dahn. Luckily, the stone vanished shortly after. With my Willsight turned so high, it simply disappeared, and the black motes that rose from disintegrating duplicates were invisible to me.

I returned my vision to normal immediately after, and we sat to discuss the phenomenon as I rubbed my aching head.

“If you could not see the dust at all in your Willsight, does it even exist?” Levar asked. “I’ve tried capturing some in the past, but it was intangible. If it has no Will, it is not part of the Material Realm at all.”

“Do you think it is a glimpse to the space between Realms?” I asked.

“Possibly, but that might be a bit of a leap at this point.”

I imbued some objects with Will at Levar’s request, and he promised to report on his further findings later. He went to sleep, and I returned to my studies.

The next diner I missed entirely and woke up once everyone else had gone to sleep. I spent the night continuing my studies and came downstairs in time to overhear an argument between Levar and Roland in the kitchen.

“Don’t just dump everything on the counter!” Levar chastised the hunter. “You got blood everywhere!”

The amount of food Roland brought in each day was frankly astounding, but he was not the most organized fellow. If it didn’t disappear into black motes each day, the kitchen would be littered with piles of excess food.

“Put meat over in that storage room, and keep the vegetables and fruit over here so I can wash them!”

Roland came out of the back room with a put upon expression, sat down at one of the newly crafted chairs and began to carve embellishments into the plain wood while we waited for Levar to prepare our meal.

Dagmar too sat in a sour mood. She’d embarked on her first morning of “training” with Roland. He’d begun to teach her how to properly navigate the woods, and she had not enjoyed the experience, not speaking until the food came out. It was an odd breakfast of mixed greens with wild nuts and apples sprinkled atop it, served with some sort of forest rodent—hopefully squirrel and not rat.

“Fool humans, living up here in this nightmare,” she grumbled as she ate a plate full of mushrooms she’d found during the day. Roland said they were poisonous, but Dagmar had assured him that there wasn’t a mushroom that a dwarven constitution couldn’t stomach.

Roland had even found some alchemical herbs at Levar’s request. They would not last long enough to prove of use, cut plants disappeared far faster than anything else, but he was noting their locations in case we discovered a better means of preventing that than flooding them with Will.

On that topic, he let me know that the objects I’d imbued with Will had survived past their expected expiration, confirming our theory once and for all.

“We must subconsciously flood our surroundings with Will, including things that are on our person,” he mused.

“That fits, I can only Conjure an item that has been on my person for a notable amount of time, but if I push Will into it, I can do so immediately. I suspected as much,” I said.

“Go easy on yourself,” Daulf said, “You had a lot going on, far too much to be theorizing about every strange phenomenon that occurred.”

“That didn’t stop him from trying,” Dagmar noted, as she took a bite of a dangerously red striped mushroom.

The days continued like this for the remainder of the week. Each day I woke up a little later until I eventually corrected my sleep schedule. I vowed to not give in to my indulgent sleeping habits of old. Sleeping in while not physically ill was a luxury I missed, but I’d been alone for too long, and didn’t relish the idea of isolating myself through an unhealthy sleep schedule.

During that time, Levar really showed his worth. Aside from confirming that duplicate objects slowly lost Will until they faded, he also found a simple method of preserving duplicates through restarts. When Dagmar and I had first entered the Dahn, some cabinets had still contained magically preserved food. The runes in the pantry and cupboards preserved food though some yet-unknown mechanism, but in the process imbued the preserved objects with enough Will to prevent it from disappearing.

Levar was quite cross with me for not mentioning the function of these runes sooner, and once he knew of them, he sought out the patterns elsewhere in the Dahn. The same runes were found on the drawers and cubbies around the alchemy station, and he wasted no time stocking them with anything he could convince Roland to recover for him from the woods. This led to another discovery and insight into the duplication process. If an item had more than one duplicate, the rate at which they decayed increased, such that the preservation runes could not keep up with the decay, and the older copy would vanish. We confirmed all this with my Willsight by measuring how rapidly each object lost its gray cast.

That was not a fun experiment. I’d say it was like watching paint dry, but staring at a wall didn’t induce headaches.

Levar also recruited Dagmar in his task to decipher the runes of the Dahn, and the pair went about cataloging each symbol and where they were repeated so that their purposes could be discovered. Dagmar’s knowledge of runes mostly pertained to combat applications and those required to maintain the Kituh. There was some overlap between those and the ones used in the Dahn, but the books found on the fourth floor were a much better source of runic knowledge. The pair pored over them to unravel some of the mysteries of our new home.

Dagmar also began to teach Levar how to power runes. Partially so Levar can start to experiment, but I think it was mostly so that Dagmar didn’t have to help in the kitchen every time Lever needed something turned on. Without a background in wizardry, it took Levar a few days to pick up on the trick of imbuing Will, and even when he did, he could only power runes with advanced control gems. Luckily, all of the ones in the Dahn had these, and they were tied to the soulstone of the Dahn itself. Running a rune connected to the Dahn only required the barest touch of Will to activate, and the Dahn supplied the rest. This was in contrast to the Kituh which drew upon the Will of the driver or soulstone attached to the car.

My vacation from deaths ended when Roland returned to the Dahn without Dagmar.

“Where did she go?” I asked, surprising myself with the depths of my concern.

“Rot if I know,” he said as he dropped his heavy sack of food. “I gave her a test, telling her to navigate back here. When I tracked her to check on her progress, her trail led in a windy circle until it disappeared. I don’t know how I lost her.”

Dagmar finally returned to the Dahn a few hours before the reset. In her wanderings during Roland’s test, she’d stumbled upon an entrance to the Kituh and given up. It took her a long time to get her bearings and make her way back to the entrance we’d always used to reach the Dahn from the Kituh. Even after having traveled that path a hundred times, she still got lost and spent the afternoon wandering.

“I think you better start exploring without her,” Roland whispered to me as the very disheveled Dagmar tromped in. “This is going to take a lot longer than I thought.”