Caladin’s Climb—Part 30 (Patreon)

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          Caladin thought that were he Hakan, he wouldn’t have told his opponent exactly what the parameters of his spell were. He had to either be supremely confident that there was nothing Caladin could do to escape, or lying. Caladin was more inclined to believe that Hakan was lying, or at least mistaken, than that it was truly impossible to escape. The only thing to do was to test everything.

          First, Caladin needed to confirm he was getting all his mana back after each reset. He checked his belt to make sure it was full, then dumped a full bar into a cantrip that wouldn’t change anything. He drew a picture of a smiley face on the ground next to him using lithomancy. It was an absurd spell to dump a bunch of mana into, and as expected, it didn’t explode or anything. Though it turned into an unrecognizable scorch mark. One bar of mana depleted, Caladin ran to the edge of the circle to reset the loop.

          As expected, he appeared back at his starting position. His belt was also back to a full charge. So, he had infinite mana to find a way out. That helped immensely.

          Next, Caladin wanted to test the limits of containment. It was possible that enough force could break the spell. He turned towards the edge of the circle and inscribed a simple modification to Pyroclastic Destruction. He had the spell draw on all the mana he had stored in both belts and closed his eyes.

          There was a blinding flash of light, then the loop reset. Caladin hadn’t even felt the explosion or the heat. His death, as well as Hakan’s, must have been instant.

          “What do?” Champion Hakan asked. “How iss resset?”

          “Don’t worry about it,” Caladin said. “I’m just testing the limits of your spell.”

          “No esscape,” Hakan hissed. “You will ssee.”

          Hakan rushed forward again. He was fast, incredibly fast. Caladin wasn’t too worried anymore. He always had the option to blow the both of them up. Nothing was stopping him from just doing that over and over again. Nothing except that it accomplished nothing and got him no closer to escaping the Time Loop.

          Since killing Hakan only reset the loop, Caladin tried disabling him instead. He came up with a modification to the Rend Flesh spell that would target just Hakan’s arms and legs, then he waited for him to get within range. It didn’t take long. Hakan rushed forward in a blur of speed. As soon as he entered range, Caladin triggered his spell. Hakan’s arms and legs exploded in a shower of gore. His torso fell to the ground and slid to Caladin’s feet. Caladin looked down at him.

          “Sorry,” Caladin said. “I know it’s unsportsmanlike, but killing you is a waste of time. I need to figure out how this spell of yours works.”

          Hakan’s eyes glazed over and didn’t focus on anything. He was probably in too much pain at the moment to hold a conversation. That was fine by Caladin. He didn’t need to talk. He went through his mental inventory of cerebromancy spells to see if there was something he could use to pull the knowledge out of Hakan’s head. If there was a way out of this spell that Hakan knew, Caladin meant to extract it from him. After considering a few options, Caladin landed on something that could work. A spell called Read Memory. He started inscribing the complex spell onto a scroll.

          Golden fire washed over the battlefield. Caladin was back to his starting position. He wasn’t sure what had triggered the reset that time. Hakan must have died from his injuries. It hadn’t taken as long as Caladin had expected.

          “Torture already?” Hakan called across the battlefield.

          “Oh? So you’ve been tortured before?”

          “Many timess,” Hakan said. “Iss no matter. Torture all you want. No help.”

          “Thanks,” Caladin said. “But I don’t need to torture you. I was just trying to disable you.” He inscribed a different spell this time, mixing Rend Flesh with healing magic so that Hakan wouldn’t die so quickly this time.

          Hakan split in two. Caladin cast his spell on the Hakan on the right. It disappeared the moment he targeted it, just fading away. Caladin tried to cast the spell again. The Hakan on the left had already split in two. When he targeted one of them with his spell, that one vanished and the remaining one split in two and spread out once more. He was closing on Caladin’s location fast. Caladin could see what Hakan was doing, but it wasn’t going to work. Caladin inscribed two copies of his modified Rend Flesh instead of one, targeting both of them at the same time. One vanished, the other fell to the ground. Rather than a bloody torso without limbs, Caladin’s spell destroyed his limbs and immediately healed the damage. He ended up as a torso.

          “Nice try,” Caladin said. “But this is happening. You’ll need a lot more than two clones to stop me.”

          “Ass you ssay,” Champion Hakan hissed.

          Golden fire rushed over the battlefield. Everything was reset again. Hakan had triggered a reset himself somehow to stop Caladin. That was good. If he was in control of the Time Loop, Caladin could force him to end it.

          This time, Hakan immediately split apart into dozens of copies of himself and started spreading across the battlefield. Caladin didn’t wait for him to cover the entire field again. “Stop!” he shouted, imbuing his words with lithomancy.

          All the different Hakans stopped. Before they could move again, Caladin cast the oneiromancy spell Sleep. That took care of that. A dog pile of sleeping dragon-kin collapsed into a heap on the battlefield. Caladin approached the pile and cast Read Memory. Successfully this time. He pulled every recent memory Hakan had in his head out and looked them over.

          All of Hakan’s secrets were laid bare. Caladin learned how that spell he was using to copy himself worked; it was called Entangled Time Stream and allowed multiple versions of the caster to exist simultaneously. They all shared a single consciousness, mana pool, and injuries. It was essentially like being in more than one place at the same time. Hakan could cut versions of himself off at any point if he thought they might get injured and they would fade away. Good to know. Caladin also learned how Hakan was looping time early: he was killing himself. Specifically, he had a blade attached to his tongue with a piercing and was swallowing his tongue. Between causing him to choke and the blade causing him to bleed out, it was a fairly quick death. That explained why dismembering him didn’t work.

          As for the Time Loop. Caladin learned how it really worked. Hakan wasn’t in control of it at all. The spell wouldn’t be unstoppable if his opponent could just take over his mind and force him to end it early. No. The loop would only be broken if two very specific conditions were met at the same time. One; Hakan was alive and uninjured. Two; Caladin was dead. There was no other way to end the spell. Torturing Hakan was a waste of time. He couldn’t change the conditions even if he wanted. Caladin also learned that the spell controlling the loop existed outside the bubble of time he was trapped in. It was impossible to reach the spell to dismantle it, even by the most skilled chronomancer in the world. Even by a lunamancer. As soon as any magic pierced the bubble, a reset would be triggered. The spell would never run out of mana, since it only contained enough mana to reset itself a single time and regained all of it each time it did so.

          Time Loop was an impossibility. A contradiction. It should have been impossible!

          Caladin thought back to what the history books said about Champion Hakan. He had defeated over a hundred wizards to claim the Conflux. All at the same time, with nothing but his sword. Caladin wondered how many loops he had endured to accomplish that feat. Centuries perhaps. And the stories of so many of his opponents killing themselves? Not an exaggeration. They just ended their torment on their own terms. How long, he wondered, before he gave into that same despair. He’d had a lot of plans for his life, and they didn’t involve spending centuries in the same endless battle.

          Caladin wasn’t about to give up. Just because Hakan himself didn’t know a way to escape his own spell, didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. He just needed to get creative.

          Caladin left Hakan to sleep and walked over to examine the border of the spell. There was a stark line of golden light with patterns dancing along it at the edge, just beyond where Caladin could reach. He probed it delicately with fire, light, shadow magic and telekinesis. Nothing could slip past the barrier. On a whim, Caladin lifted one of the Hakans with a telekinesis and flung him over the line.

          There was a flash of golden fire and Caladin was returned to his starting position.

          Hakan said nothing, merely drawing his sword and charging forward with incredible speed. Caladin sighed. It really wasn’t going to end. He cast a lutumancy spell to turn the ground between them into mud. When Hakan charged into it, he fell in with as much enhanced speed as he was running with. Caladin turned the mud back into dirt, sealing him up to his neck.

          “Hold on,” Caladin said. “I know about that piercing of yours. I just want to talk. Can you talk?”

          “Then talk,” Hakan said. “It changess nothing. If you would like, I can passs on a messsage to a loved one for you.”

          “No thanks,” Caladin said. “I’m not planning to die in this time loop. I just want to know. How many loops have you been through?”

          “Too many to count,” Hakan said. “Eonss. I have been tortured many timess. Until beg for death. No matter. Cannot end sspell.”

          “Fine,” Caladin said. “Then how about this?” He walked forward and pulled Hakan’s sword from the dirt with a bit of kinomancy. Once he had it, Caladin cut himself and spilled a drop of blood onto the ground. He then inscribed the mother of all healing spells on the drop of blood, imbuing the spell with all the mana he had. The drop of blood grew into a hand, an arm, then an entire body. A second, naked, Caladin laid on the ground. It was breathing, but its eyes were vacant. It was just a shell.

          Caladin brought Hakan’s sword down and thrust it into his ’s chest, right through the heart. He waited a second. Nothing appeared to have happened.

          “Clever,” Hakan said. “But no work. You sstill live. Sspell not end.”

          Caladin grunted in frustration. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. And now he was out of mana. He used Hakan’s sword to decapitate him.

          Time looped again.

          “Iss give up yet?” Hakan called across the battlefield.

          “Never!” Caladin replied.

          “You will,” Hakan said. “You will.”

          Caladin tried to think while Hakan slowly walked towards him. Could he overwrite Hakan’s mind with his own, then kill himself? The conditions of the spell had said that Hakan needed to be uninjured. Having his mind erased might count as an injury. And then there would be the problem of the transferred memories slowly fading. No. It would never work.

          What Caladin really needed to do was dismantle Hakan’s spell from the other side. But he was trapped inside a bubble of looping time.

          Caladin remembered back when he had faced a remarkably similar problem. When Brorn had been sleeping inside a powerful ward and he wanted to steal his crown. He had bypassed the ward by going through the dream world with Sleep Walk.

          Could that work here? No magic Caladin had tried so far could escape the Time Loop spell. There was no reason not to try anything with a chance of success. Caladin dropped Hakan with a Sleep spell. He walked over to him. He took his sword, removed his tongue piercing, the rest of his tongue for good measure, then used visceramancy to fuse his skeleton in place and topped it off by encasing his whole body in a skin-tight prison of stone using geomancy. If Caladin was going to go to sleep himself, he didn’t want his opponent to be able to hurt him. Once that was done, Caladin woke Hakan up.

          Hakan looked at Caladin with a piercing glare that spoke of both betrayal and determination. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Caladin said. “Or I’ll cut out your eyes too. I’m trying something and I need you to be awake for it.” Hakan kept watching Caladin. His eyes were the only things he could move.

          Caladin backed off and laid on the ground. As long as Hakan was awake, it wouldn’t matter whose dreams Caladin ended up in. Absolutely anyone would be outside the bounds of the Time Loop. Caladin had serious doubts he could connect to another person’s dreams from outside the Time Loop, but he at least needed to try. It was the only conceivable thing he could think of that nobody Hakan had trapped in a Time Loop might have tried before. Oneiromancy was a fairly uncommon type of magic. Especially among combat wizards.

          Caladin prepared the Dream Walk and Sleep Walk spells he’d used on Brorn, then cast Sleep on himself.

          There were bodies on the ground. Dead. They were all dead. Caladin walked through the all-too-familiar campsite his family had lived in. There was nobody left alive. Everyone was dead. The bodies were piled up on the ground, so dense he couldn’t even see the ground beneath them. The corpses were many. They were one. Every face was someone he knew or used to know.

          “Why do we have to stay dead?” one body called out. It had Jenny’s face. She looked so sad. “Don’t you love us?”

          “Oh, please,” Caladin said. “This isn’t even logically consistent. If she’s dead, then she shouldn’t be able to talk. If she can talk, then she isn’t dead, is she? What is this supposed to be, a manifestation of my guilt? I don’t even know enough people for there to be this many bodies.”

          There was no response. Caladin’s assertion that a dead Jenny shouldn’t be able to talk seemed to have shut her up. He ignored the grisly details of his dream and stepped over bodies until he reached the nearest tent. The doorway of a tent had been enough to reach another dream last time. He stepped through the flap.

          A rainbow lit up the sky. A green-scaled dragon-kin child was riding a unicorn through a lush forest. The child squealed with joy. When he spoke, his voice came out distorted and stretched out. Caladin had read in Findalion’s Oddities and Strange Stories that unicorns were just the result of regular horses going through rather horrific disfiguration by unscrupulous wizards looking to con people out of their money. The horns were made of bone and caused the creature’s incredible pain until they inevitably died of infection. But then, this was a dream, so that didn’t have to be true.

          The unicorn shrieked and bucked the child off its back. Blood gushed from the creature’s horn. It reared back and impaled the child in the gut, then ran away.

          Caladin just watched the whole thing play out in horror. Had he somehow caused that? Was that possible when this wasn’t even his dream? The dragon-kin child clutched at their gut wound and cried in a distorted voice.

          “Sorry, kid,” Caladin said. “But I need to hijack this dream. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.” He grabbed the child by the forehead and inscribed Sleep Walk onto a scroll. He didn’t stop to wonder if a spell could be cast that way in a dream. It had already worked for him once before.

          Caladin opened his eyes. He looked down at himself. He was in the body of a small, green dragon-kin child, laying in a bed. The spell had actually worked. He’d escaped Hakan’s trap! When he moved his hands, they moved in slow motion. He stood up, and it was like trying to move through mud. The magic was working, but it was trying really hard not to work. Caladin pushed through it and got out of the bed. There was a dragon-kin woman in the next room. It looked like she was baking something over a wood fire stove. She looked at Caladin when he entered the room and smiled at him. Then she said something in a deep, horribly distorted voice. He couldn’t even begin to make sense of it.

          Caladin ignored the woman. He didn’t know how much time he would have, he couldn’t afford to waste any of it. He went straight for the front door of the house and stepped outside. All he saw was desert in every direction. The house he stepped out of was buried at least halfway underground, only a bit of the dome-like roof showing. Caladin turned in a circle until he saw a landmark. There was a cluster of buildings on the horizon.

          By Caladin’s best guess, he was outside the city limits of the Kreetish capital. There was no way he could get this child far enough in the time he had. Not walking anyway. Could he cast a spell? He would be operating several layers deep. A human, trapped in a time loop, inside the dream of a child, using magic to make the child sleep walk, and then casting a spell. Maybe it was possible, but the child would need a mana source.

          Back in the camp, Caladin’s father had been able to cast the flame spell he knew just fine. It just took him most of a day to get enough mana. Mana wells were an abundant source of mana, but they weren’t a requirement to cast magic. A small amount of mana inundated all things. It should be possible to cast a single spell with the passive amount of mana this dragon-kin child possessed. It would just have to be a small one, and he’d need to use it to reach the circle. If he failed, there would always be another dream to jump to. There were likely an extremely limited number of dreaming hosts in the middle of the day that were close by, but he had sudden hope. Surely one of them could find his escape.

          Caladin slogged back inside the house in slow motion. The dragon-kin woman was still trying to talk to him. He still couldn’t understand her. She held up a serving spoon with some food Caladin didn’t recognize on it. Caladin couldn’t tell what she was trying to say, but he could tell she was trying to offer him a bite. He reached out and grabbed the whole spoon from her hands. He dumped the food, which looked like some kind of sauteing vegetables, back into the pan and went back outside with the spoon.

          As far as writing utensils went, a spoon was pretty terrible. Caladin had never tried to cast a spell by drawing in the dirt before. There was no reason it shouldn’t be possible, though. The medium didn’t matter, only the runes. He leaned down and scratched runes into the dirt with his spoon as fast as he could, making sure to get the correct stroke order. He didn’t know how long he would have before the little girl’s mother would try to stop him, and he certainly wouldn’t have the strength to fight her off.

          It didn’t take long for the dragon-kin mother to follow Caladin outside. She was waving her arms and screeching something he couldn’t understand. He ignored her. As long as she didn’t interrupt his work, she was irrelevant. When she saw what he was doing, she stood back and watched. He thought he’d be curious too, if a small child woke from a nap and started drawing complex runes in the dirt. That gave Caladin all the time he needed to finish. He prayed there would be enough ambient mana in the area to power the spell he was inscribing. It was a simple vocomancy spell and the child body he was wearing was small enough that the cost shouldn’t be too great. The moment of truth came when Caladin drew the last line.

          Shooooopppppp!

          There was a stretched out popping sound from the displaced air of Caladin’s spell. Caladin appeared just outside the bounds of the Time Loop spell. From the outside, the spell looked like a giant black dome with golden glowing edges. Caladin hadn’t been expecting that, but it made sense since nothing he did from inside escaped, even light magic. Taking in the large black dome was intimidating. Caladin was wearing the body of a small child with no mana at his disposal. He wasn’t sure what he could do to dismantle Champion Hakan’s spell now that he’d actually reached the other side of it.

          While Caladin was considering what to do, the decision was made for him. He suddenly snapped back to his starting position inside the Time Loop. He had no idea what had happened.

          Hakan was standing across from him like always. “Hey!” Caladin called out. “What did you do? I was in the middle of something!”

          Hakan said nothing. He raised his sword up high and charged forward, splitting into many copies of himself right away. Caladin inscribed a massive Pyroclastic Destruction spell, killing them both. When things reset, Caladin took advantage of Hakan’s momentary disorientation to cast a Sleep spell and drop him. He stomped over and used another Read Memory to pull the answer to what had happened out of Hakan’s head. It turned out Hakan had created a few copies of himself with his Entangled Time Stream spell. The copies were as restricted as the original, but one of them managed to reach the katana of another—that’s what he called his sword—and killed itself with a clever use of lip muscles.

          “I should have covered your face,” Caladin said to the unconscious body. “I won’t make that mistake again.” Caladin crafted another batch of restraint spells for Hakan. This time, not only did he fuse his bones together, but he severed every muscle and tendon he could try to use to do anything, especially his lip muscles. Then, for good measure, he severed the nerve in his eyes and ears, giving him no possible means to break the spell again.

          Once that was taken care of, Caladin woke up Hakan, then used Dream Walk again. It would be a waste of time if he slipped into his opponent’s dreams.

          Caladin returned to the camp of dead bodies. The dream was different this time. There was another version of himself. The other self stepped over bodies until it reached a tent flap, then disappeared inside. Caladin followed him.

          When Caladin arrived in the other dream, the unicorn was already bleeding and baying in pain. He stopped his other self, grabbing him by the shoulder. His other self turned to face him. He was immediately struck by the most intense headache he’d ever experienced. Blinding pain shot through him. The world went black.

          Caladin opened his eyes, feeling dizzy. The headache from his dream had followed him into the waking world. Trying to interact with another version of himself had been an idiotic idea. Thinking back, Caladin could now remember getting tapped on the shoulder from behind by another version of himself the first time he dream walked. But he could also remember not remembering that, and the more he thought about how little that made sense, the worse his headache grew. He took a deep breath and cleared his mind.

          Hakan was still disabled, so the loop hadn’t reset. Caladin looked at Hakan. It seemed the champion hadn’t attempted to move. Or if he had, the movement he’d managed had been negligible. Caladin made note of how easy it had been to completely dominate the man just by putting him to sleep. If he didn’t find protections against that sort of magic himself, he could end up being defeated just as easily.

          While Caladin was looking around, he spotted movement at the edge of the arena’s bounds. A small dragon-kin child was standing at the edge of the arena. It was the child from his dream; he was sure of it. But Caladin hadn’t done anything to make the girl teleport here. Not this loop. He’d done that last loop.

          Unless…

          Changes to the timeline outside the Time Loop were permanent! And concurrent! This was now something that happened every loop. His other dream self invaded that child’s dream and forced it to teleport over to the arena. As Caladin watched, the child started looking around in confusion, then started crying. A red-scaled dragon-kin appeared next to it, said something, then they both disappeared.

          Caladin almost laughed to himself. That had probably been one of the official observers. They would be baffled how a child had gotten to a dangerous battlefield. Well, they were in for a treat, because he wasn’t stopping until Hakan’s loop was undone.

          A quick spell put Hakan out of his misery and reset the loop. Both opponents returned to their starting positions. Before Hakan could do anything, Caladin dropped him again with Sleep. “I know,” Caladin said aloud. “Annoying, right?” He stripped away all the other man’s working muscles and senses and left him in a heap. Only once he was disabled did Caladin go back to the dreaming.

          Caladin returned to the nightmare of dead bodies. He looked around quickly to confirm that he had arrived first, then darted for the nearest tent flap. When he arrived in the child’s dream, the girl was still riding the unicorn and laughing with glee. He ignored the child and looked for a doorway to Dream Walk through. He didn’t want to run into his other self again. There were, of course, no doors in the middle of the jungle the child had dreamed up. Caladin spotted a dense patch of foliage. If a tent flap could work, why not leaves? He pushed through the brush and found himself in an empty desert. There was a dragon-kin man with pale green scales wearing scraps of armor, trying to pull himself along a desert landscape. He looked emaciated. A nightmare then. The man called out in a pathetic voice that was distorted beyond recognition. He looked directly at Caladin, which wasn’t an entirely surprising development, considering there were no other landmarks in sight.

          “Sorry,” Caladin said. “I’m not here to save you.” He crouched over the man and inscribed Sleep Walk. His senses faded.

          Caladin had hit the jackpot. He woke up in a military barracks of some kind. There were rows of beds with several other dragon-kin soldiers snoozing away. He smiled. A barracks full of trained soldiers he could possess? He had his work cut out for him.

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