Skylar groaned with relief and began to shuck his coat; the air in Aqu's sanctum was surprisingly warm, although completely pitch-black without his strange dark-vision. As soon as he doffed it, however, a massive wave of exhaustion slammed into him; does it have anti-fatigue, anti-hunger, anti-dehydration, impact protection, and magic dark trapsight? What else is on this thing? A brief thought of testing out various potential other hidden functions drifted through his mind but was quickly blotted out by lassitude; numb, he closed his eyes and lost consciousness almost instantly.

  Skylar Kass dreamed.

  In his dream, he was in a field, watching himself watch himself watching himself -- a perfect circle of copies of himself, forming an ouroboros of self-observation. The sun overhead crackled with the chiaroscuro lightning from his vision of the past, but he didn't hear the cacophony of the Devari wailing; instead, he heard a repetitive, saucy EDM beat, as though the doomed sun had decided to throw one last rave. Helpless against the power of the rhythm, he began to dance, and all his other selves followed suit; he watched, auto-mesmerized, as each movement propagated through the loop behind him, making its way around backwards until it approached him again from the front like a predestination of procession. Idly, he wondered if he could stop dancing, or if the fact of his present movement would lock him and all his past and future selves into a never-ending boogie Bardo; as he did so, a similar frown crossed the face of each Skylar behind him, and so on and so on...

  The dream shifted.

  Now he was struggling underneath a heavy stone; dream-figures of Timurus and Aqu tried to bear it up with him, but they were insubstantial and effectless; vague figures of white danced around him, saying nothing, providing nothing. Any moment now he felt like the stone would crush him, trap him under the rushing water (he was in water now, apparently), and it pushed him under with relentless force but suddenly he could breathe underwater, but only as long as he held his breath --

  He awoke, gasping. Awesome. A regular, normal nightmare without any evil demigods trying to have sex with me in the oneiric realm. Merry sorbnek Christmas. He lay there for a while until his racing heart had slowed, then stretched, yawned, and arose reluctantly. I can't dawdle too long -- if what the note said is true, the logical extrapolation is that my primary time stream will keep marching onwards no matter how many trips I take, so I can only make temporary trips into my recent past. But taking some time to learn my new power -- and maybe get better at my old power -- can only help me in the future. He rubbed his hands and did a few calisthenics to warm up while he read what stream comments he had missed.

  This is untestable from my viewpoint, though? Even if this made sense -- which, lol -- it posits timestreams that only weakly interact, which might not be the case if any of this is even real. I probably have better things I should be doing.

  This idea, on the other hand, is awesome and I will totally try it. I suspect that tripping people will require a declension I don't know yet (and maybe also break the prohibition against harm), but doing hackery with frames of reference could be very interesting. The null hypothesis is that it won't do anything (or that the declension required to perform it will be impossible, unsupported, or impractical) but worth attempting once I know more.

  Not sure how I would duplicate objects in this circumstance; I don't even know for real if the Kalativa is real time travel or just some kind of haptic-feedback VR or something else even stupider. Seeing if I can bring an object back with me is good -- though the sandwich indicates that it's probable -- but actually duplicating things is only possible if I can move items from one timeline to another. The possibly-me who left this note seemed concerned about avoiding ontological paradoxes for some reason, so it's probably something I should be cautious about too. As far as distinguishing temporal copies of me from impostors, how the fratz would I do that -- I can't come up with a cipher only I can decode or a keyword only I know, because the Devari might be able to read my thoughts and presumably tell other people, to say nothing of other people who have access to Weir and can make me hallucinate the answer. Worse, if time travel is real, anybody trying to break the code would have all of space-time to do it in and then could hand themselves the solution in the past at any arbitrary point in time. No, the note made it sound like the solution is just 'relentless paranoia' and that will work against all possible attack vectors. Also, very on-brand.

  I don't know what Pain Asymbolia is but it doesn't sound like something I'd want to do to my own brain, even if I could, which I probably can't. Weir can only impart sensations I imagine to a target I can make eye contact with -- it can't create real or quasi-real structures or have any independent existence, and only has subjective existence for the fraction of a second I'm imagining it, which also means I can't do much else while using it. I also have a suspicion that it's the target's imagination that really creates the details, and they'll believe whatever they tell themselves.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  In fact, the only two things on this list that make any sense at all is inducing a temporary biofeedback condition in myself that's safe for me but harmful to someone else, and maybe attempting to use Weir on myself with a mirror. He pulled the Kalativa out of his pocket and checked the polished rear, but it was still too dark for a reflection; Drotz. I'll get around to it eventually. He shoved the little dial back in his coat pocket and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Also, fratz you for asserting that I can't imagine stuff good. I can imagine stuff so good, you don't even know.

  Picking up the empty wineskin, he began to toss it upwards and let it fall back to the ground in various ways -- aimed at his face, aimed at his feet, off to the side, or at another object -- and began practicing and experimenting with Alzasch. He quickly discovered that "anhardt" would only arrest the motion of an object moving directly towards his general person -- extremities he stuck too far away were not protected, nor was any object other than himself, but any object he held or which occupied his space was sufficiently close to him (or, he suspected, his frame of reference) that it seemed to count just fine. Unlike Weir, however, knowledge of how to use it further did not seem to be automatically engrained within his mind; how the fratz am I supposed to learn the other declensions?

  He crossed his arms and started to pace, thinking. Assuming the time travel corfsmot is real, then some future version of me must have gotten good enough with this Art to save my brux -- which means there must be a way for me to learn the declensions. Or better yet, a grammar which gives me the necessary roots and transformation rules to construct my own declensions, which is obviously the better way to go. But what language are these things even in? Is it even a real language, or just a grammar unique to this single Art? "Hey, Aqu," he called out into the darkness, "How do I learn more words for Alzasch?" But only silence answered him; he frowned. He said I could summon him in his sanctum if I was alone... ah, skek.

  He turned around.

  The door to the sanctum was open -- how, he didn't know, because he hadn't heard a thing -- and a figure he didn't recognize at first was standing behind him, poised and full of menace. A shimmering golden robe rested atop smooth white garments below -- loose and flowing and suspiciously similar to what he'd arrived on this world in -- atop a slim, toned body that was clearly packed with muscle. In her right hand was a long white spear of eerily smooth metal, bearing no mark of design or craft -- merely a featureless cylinder, tapering to a sharp point. Long white hair cascaded down around a slender face that bore a worryingly fierce expression, out of which piercing black eyes blazed beneath a silver circlet. As soon as he saw her eyes, however, Skylar's breath left him in a whoosh of relief; Oh, it's just Amara. "Skek, you startled me." He blinked and cocked his head. "What's with the dye job and wardrobe change?"

  Apparently, however, this had been very much the wrong thing to say; Amara's expression darkened from fierce to murderous, and she leveled the spear at him in a way that was clearly not playful. "How dare you," she growled, and lunged for an impaling attack.

  "Drotz!" Skylar yelped, dodging and rolling frantically. That wasn't a joke -- she meant to kill me, and not in a nice way either. You don't disembowel someone just because you're annoyed with them; what's going on? "Is it something I said? Will say, in the future?" He thought hard, trying to make sense of it all; Is this her natural hair color, and she cut and dyed it before our meeting in the jail? Does that mean this is her before she met me? Or is it from way down the line, or a doppleganger, or something even weirder? "Help me out, here!"

  "I owe you nothing but a miserable death," the young woman grated, stabbing for his groin; this time, however, Skylar was ready, and stepped back out of range easily. She doesn't fight well -- almost like she's new to it, but all our meetings in the past she was deadly as skek. Is this before she got trained, or...

  The truth abruptly became apparent.

  As he dodged backwards, bony claws closed around Skylar's upper arms; without warning, he was hoisted into the air, wrenched painfully skyward by some powerful unseen assailant. He howled in pain as his shoulder joints and tendons were abruptly forced to bear the entire weight of his body in a terribly ungentle fashion. "What the... hey!" Skeleton minions? This might not be Amara after all.

  The robed-woman-who-might-or-might-not-be-Amara approached him menacingly, spear held high. "Fool. Your cowardice and selfishness will not doom us all; I will see you put down now." She pulled back her arm and launched the spear dead-center at Skylar's chest with terrific force; from this distance, she couldn't miss.

  "Anhardt!" Skylar yelped, halting the spear in midair; Amara's eyebrows shot up, then came down in a fury.

  "More tricks. But I have you now." She snapped her fingers, and two more skeletons walked unsteadily out of the darkness. Skylar gulped.

  He couldn't see the one holding him from behind, but he could see these all too clearly; rotted flesh and jerky-like sinews connected bleached bones at only the most critical junctures, leaving the rest of the horrifying forms exposed for maximum terror. In the empty blank eyesockets, two points of lights danced -- one silver, one gold -- rather than the luminous green or red sorcery he would have expected. Weird colors. What's going on? In the spirit of experimentation, he flung a crippling attack of Weir at one of them, but it had no effect he could discern; one skeleton grasped made a swipe at his stomach, while the other reached out grasping claws for his throat.

  Yeah, vark this. Skylar's hand, already in his pocket in anticipation of such unpleasantness, found the sharp part of the Kalativa's dial and pressed down on it urgently. He felt a sharp, pricking pain in his thumb, a split second of confused motion...

  Then, with a splat, Skylar landed face-down in a miresome mix of mud and filthy water. "Not again," he groaned, spitting it out. "I just got out of a korskak swamp!" A tiny sliver of moon hung overhead, giving him few clues to his new temporal location; either midday after the Obscurum, or late at night before it. No help.

  Staggering to his feet, he looked around for any landmarks or points of interest; the moonlight was just enough light to deactivate his eldritch dark-vision, but not enough to actually see anything with. Grumbling, he wobbled around in a circle, checking for any light out of the ordinary. At first, it seemed that he was back in the pitch-black isolation where his journey had started; but after a few rotations, he spied a small flicker of orange light that might be a distant and partially-obscured campfire. Jackpot. With any luck, this meet-cute won't get me enslaved by a vicious elf cop.

  Staying low, he picked his way towards it; the swamp was full of unseen trees he kept almost running into or tripping over, but his slower pace kept him mostly upright. However, the invisible thicket also kept getting in the way of his attempts to see more of the firelight; he shrugged and kept moving anyhow. Anything's better than just sitting here waiting to starve.

  Eventually, he got close enough to see a little more; a cheery little campfire emerged from behind a tree, with two soldiers sitting around it roasting chunks of meat on sticks and a third figure -- robed and cowled -- seated with its back to Skylar. He crouched, suspicious, behind a tree and thought furiously. Okay. I'm not gonna make the same mistake I made last time; assume unknowns are hostiles until I learn otherwise. Should I wait here until the moon sets? If a sunrise follows, I know I'm in pre-Obscurum times. The coat blocks my hunger, so I can --

  "You can come out," the robed figure said over its shoulder dismissively. "I can hear you breathing." Skylar cursed. Sorbnek it, what's the point of apparently being a thief if everybody spots you when you try to sneak? Freezing into stillness, he neither moved nor spoke; just because he thinks he heard me doesn't mean I have to confirm it.

  After a moment, the robed figure emitted a long-suffering sigh and rose to its feet; Skylar blinked as the mysterious form seemed to unfold forever, rising to what was easily seven feet or more. Drotz, this thing's at least as tall as Erdrym. Then it turned around, and Skylar's problems got quite a lot worse.

  The figure within the robe was dreadful -- long, bestial limbs covered with fur ended in massive, razor-sharp claws that seemed to thirst for blood, and where a man's head would normally have been present was instead the head of a misshapen wolf-like creature -- a large, slavering maw beneath a long snout and huge, white, dead-looking demonic eyes completed the horror. Worse, as Skylar looked into the eyes, an overwhelmingly powerful force took control of his mind; the thought like Weir, but more powerful formed and was instantly blotted out by ironclad tyrancy. "Come into the firelight," the creature commanded.

  COME INTO THE FIRELIGHT