Riloth 19th the 661st-693rd

The next day, I set out as soon as the reset occurred. Bearskin, Levar, and Dagmar had worked together to create a portable device that always pointed to Bearskin’s home, which was approximately north by northwest. Roland had marked a perimeter around the Dahn entrance, which he was confident he could explore himself without risking a reset once we had the Will detection devices working. So, I was tasked with running beyond this range before beginning my search. That region coincided with where the forest opened up into plains far north of Crossroads.

This was the region from which most of the farmers found in Crossroads hailed. I didn’t see any farms that first day, or the next, or any of the many after that. The work was very, very, very, slow.

After a grueling six-hour trek through the forest behind Roland, I started my search at the edge of the wood. I followed the pointer, took one hundred paces, activated my Willsight, looked around, and repeated. Over and over. With the aid of potions of endurance and forgone sleep, I walked from sunrise straight through to the reset, only stopping to get a good look at my surroundings so that I could identify a landmark. I planned to delve into your pages in my mental vault each subsequent night to verify I'd kept the proper bearing.

The reset came as I lay in a strange numb discomfort. My mind knew my body ought to have been exhausted, but the potions prevented it from getting the message.

And then, I was in the Parlor, and the exhaustion came. A trip to Levar's and the Master's Den saw me on my way back to the Dahn hale and with a spellbook to study. Levar's runes were not sufficient to keep the spellforms intact when left unattended.

Back at the Dahn I was treated with a warm welcome that quickly died out when I reported no news, and I went to my room to sleep. Levar had directed me to an alternative to the potions of forgone sleep, and now I could simply take a nap and not lose a whole day. Calantis root could be chewed to keep someone alert and clear of mind without any immediate side effects. I say immediate because it causes horrible liver failure a week after it is consumed raw. Refined by an alchemist, it's safe—mostly—but its most famous use was by the defenders at the Siege of Calantis, who used the root to keep their small contingent of soldiers active at all times until their army could come and break the siege. Somewhere beneath the seas lies a statue in their honor surrounded by a meadow of the flower from which the root is taken—though I suppose the meadow is now gone.

For me, I would be erased from reality before that need concern me.

For the next few weeks, I repeated that pattern. I quickly learned all of Barion's spells and copied each into your pages. Spider Climb was a fun spell and allowed me to walk on any surface, my hands and feet sticking like—well a spider. I definitely saw uses for it and was anxious to race Trish over rooftops once more. The only drawback was that climbing a sheer face is still physically exhausting, even if you can't fall.

Pyrokinesis was the other spell I saw potential use for. It allowed me to control an existing fire, causing it to create a thick smoke haze, or explode in a blinding flash, putting it out in the process.

Darkness was the last useful spell, which summoned a globe of impenetrable darkness. It looked like a hole in the Realm into a void of nothingness.

As I determined before, aside from Floating Disk and Shadow Blade the remainder were of no use.

Once all those spells were recorded in your pages, I transitioned my study time to recreating Call Lightning and experimenting with new Force spells. Sorcery practice came while searching for the prison, and it almost made the tedium bearable.

So far, I’d succeeded in attempting to cast the incomplete version of Call Lighting that Leslie had been working on.

I still can’t believe that’s his name

Anyway, the spell didn’t work, but from my recent studies enhanced by access to actual study material, I now knew what each part of the spell was supposed to do. It was my evaluation that the construct was approaching the desired effect from the wrong angle. Call Lightning was supposed to allow the caster to call bolts of lightning from the sky, with only a single upfront expenditure of Will. Leslie tried to accomplish this by creating a sustainable version of Lightning Bolt that maintained its connection to the Font.

My intuition was that that wouldn’t work. Instead, I took a page out of Leslie’s notebook—literally, I took Levar’s magical copying device, and copied the whole spellbook into your pages, ripping each page out one by one.

Though I had little wider knowledge of modern wizardry, it seemed apparent that Leslie was particularly adept at reducing the costs of spells through the use of somatic and verbal components. These lessened the Will expenditure required by stabilizing the area around the caster and using that area as the conduit to the Arcane Realm instead of the wizard’s body, filled as it were with the connections to a myriad of Fonts unrelated to the intended effect.

My plan was to replicate this stabilization effect, incorporating it into the spell itself. The brunt of the spell would go towards creating an environment from which the Font of Lightning could be freely called. I needed to create a storm.

My idea was sound, I think, but progress was slow. Luckily, the search gave me a lot of time to reflect on my methods.

That was sarcasm. The search was mind-numbingly dull.

One day, while studying on the top floor, heavy footsteps broke me from my research. I looked up to see Bearskin entering.

“What are you doing all the way up here?” I asked. He was a rare sight beyond the second floor.

“The doors grew.” he answered with a smile.

“What?”

“The. Doors. Grew.” he repeated, slow and over-articulated.

Bearskin spoke with a strange accent and used simpler words, but we’d all learned not to mistake these for signs of a dull mind. His people, it seemed, valued bluntness and getting right to the point.

I got up and followed him to the door that topped the stairs, and sure enough, it was human-sized. Not Bearskin-sized, but large enough that he could duck through it with only a little concern.

“That's great!” I said, rubbing my forehead. I still occasionally hit my head on a doorway when walking with a book in hand. “Did you come up here just to tell me that?”

“No,” he answered. “I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” I asked.

“I am now more in your debt. I left to keep my problems from you. But I only made more for you.”

“This isn’t your fault. We would have been trapped no matter where we were. If it weren't for you, I might have been trapped back in Edgewater with only Ludvik and Deshiv for company. Don’t tell Dagmar, but I suspect I’d enjoy their company even less than hers.”

Bearskin laughed, “You should not joke. You owe each other much.”

“I know. We are on good terms, she just doesn’t want to admit it, and I let her pretend.”

“I still owe—”

“No, none of this ‘debted’ or ‘Contest’ talk,” I cut him off. “We are friends, and we shouldn’t keep track of such things. If you want to repay me—not that I expect you to—tell me why you left.”

He loomed silently for a moment—it's impossible to not loom when you are closer to eight feet than seven.

“I discovered I was not the only person to leave my home,” he said heavily, as if laying down a burden. “That orc woman—”

“Tamra,” I interrupted, supplying the name of Roland's estranged and possibly ex-wife.

“Tamra attacked me, thinking me her foe. I won, and she explained her mistake. Others of my clan have been to her city. They have gained great acclaim for their master, fighting in their arena. They fight for fame and coin, which is wrong. But worse, they fight for the Lady who has destroyed my people. I went to stop them.”

“That was dumb,” I said bluntly. “You definitely should have asked for help. I probably wouldn’t have been much use back then, but I could have gotten Trish to assist, and Daulf would probably have followed. Roland was going either way.”

"Yes," he said. "It was dumb. I should have asked for help. I can not defeat five from my tribe alone."

"Tell me more about this Lady who ruined your island?"

Bearskin had given a brief summary of events when we first met, but he didn't want to burden his mission on someone he felt debted to.

"She appeared on the beach one day. A pale, black haired woman with pointy ears and a 'dress' of shiny red fabric." He said 'dress' as someone would repeat a word in a foreign tongue they'd only learned phonetically. "She walked right into the village and stared at the Totem. When she moved to touch it, the chieftain called for her to stop. She challenged him to battle. The whole island gathered to watch them fight on the beach. The chieftain charged with his black glass sword and the woman caught it in her hand and punched him in the chest. He died to a single blow."

He stopped speaking, staring off to the side as if watching the events unfold just out of my sight.

Oh no.

"Bearskin, have you considered that this 'Lady' may have been a dragon?" I asked.

"No," he answered, breaking from his revery. "I didn't know what a dragon was until we saw one. Maybe."

"We should have a meeting."

We gathered around the new dining table Roland had built from the wood from the bar. He'd scoffed at the idea of just making the old table taller and insisted on making a new one. I marveled at the intricacy of the engraving he'd done in such a short time as Bearskin recounted his tale in fuller detail. I will have him write it in your pages later as I did with Dagmar. He's been practicing his writing and he's gotten proficient enough. He could already read, he just had to work on his lettering.

"Aye, definitely a dragon," agreed Dagmar.

"Almost certainly," echoed Levar. "This is so exciting."

Trish was silent and uncharacteristically still through Bearskin's recounting. I vowed to ask her about it later in private. She wouldn't appreciate being called out in the group.

"Could this be the dragon behind the cult we fought? 'The Mistress', 'The Lady,' they are simple names for someone with such power," Daulf said. "But what are the chances Bearskin's enemy is related to this."

I spoke up, "If my father were here, he'd almost certainly say, 'one dragon disguised as a man or woman is strange, two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern.'"

"That's a little too specific to be an effective aphorism," Levar observed.

"Okay, so what if it is her?" Roland asked. "How is this relevant?"

"Because you daft squirrel man," Dagmar shouted. "If a dragon sent Bearskin's kin to Orinqth, we'll probably see one there. And if she is this 'Mistress', she is the reason my son was taken, and responsible for the fall of the Hardune."

She looked up at Bearskin—really, really far up, and said, "When we escape this, you will have me at your side when you save your kin."

Roland wisely chose not to defend himself when he saw the look in Dagmar's eyes.

Ruining the mood, Levar chimed in, "You know, if you count the one at Landing and the undead one, that's five dragons. Do you think those two ever disguised themselves?"