Totentanz

Book 2 Chapter VII: Der Schein Trügt

Warning: contains violence and major character death. Also sort of contains the death of a child, since Karandren is physically a six-year-old.

DER SCHEIN TRÜGT
German, "the appearance deceives"

I'm standing on an empty road all by myself. The sun is shining brightly. And the clock that's never wrong says it's twelve. Then I wonder, is it noon or midnight? -- Awaken (2020)

Weeks turned to months. Months turned to a year, then two years. In between dodging each other's assassination attempts, Diarnlan and Karandren continued the search for the hole in the veil. The underwater hunt proved futile. Now they'd moved to searching the air.

"I'm just saying, it would be much easier if--"

"No. We're not getting a hot air balloon."

Karandren pouted and went back to stirring his porridge. Diarnlan waited for him to eat it. He waited too. There was a brief silence.

"Did you poison the porridge?" Karandren asked, eyeing his bowl suspiciously.

"Not this time. Did you?"

He shook his head and shovelled a spoonful into his mouth. At once an expression of utter disgust crossed his face. He got up, stalked over to the sink, spat out the porridge, and rinsed his mouth out. Diarnlan watched with a smile. She pointedly ate a spoonful of her own porridge.

Karandren turned and glared at her. "You said you didn't poison it!"

"Pepper isn't poisonous."

He picked up the pepper pot and threw it at her bowl. She knocked it aside easily.

Karandren glared again and stormed out of the kitchen. Diarnlan waited for his inevitable retaliation. Minutes passed and nothing happened. She took another spoonful of porridge. Then she yelled and dropped it.

The spoon and her bowl were crawling with worms.

She picked it up gingerly, stalked down the hall to Karandren's room, and flung it through the door.

~~~~

There was only one good thing about being sent back to an earlier time. The skrýszel didn't attack. Diarnlan woke up every morning expecting to hear the only-too-familiar crash of their footsteps. Every morning she heard nothing but the sea and the birds flying overhead -- and sometimes Karandren doing gods-knew-what in his room. Judging by the metallic screeching and earth-shaking explosions that issued from it at random moments, he was doing his best to blow them sky-high.

"This disproves your theory," Diarnlan said during one relatively peaceful meal. (Relatively peaceful for them meant no poisoning attempts, nothing added to the food, and no efforts to murder each other with the cutlery.) "The skrýszel aren't aware of the time-loop."

Karandren pouted. "We don't know that yet! Maybe they're waiting to lull us into a sense of false security before they strike!"

He struck the table to emphasise his words and knocked his plate of mashed potatoes onto his lap. Diarnlan rolled her eyes.

~~~~

Diarnlan borrowed a boat -- or "borrowed" since she didn't bother to ask permission -- one evening and searched around where the skrýszel had always appeared. She cast spells to pick up any trace of unusual magic. All she got out of it was a nasty cold.

Surprisingly Karandren didn't try to kill her while she was bedridden and sniffling. Instead he sat beside her and talked about every stupid idea that came into his head. She would have preferred an assassination.