Runesight

22 - Skipping Goat

From the beginning of time, before people had handy things like calendars or writing, Gium was the soul of the world, the one who gave creatures the abilities to bend the impossible. As such, there were some abilities he had to remove from the Imprint after certain mortals abused their powers. I don't know his stance on the dragon wishes, but considering how thoroughly he'd shut down the ability of anyone to use it infinitely, I assumed he didn't like it much.

Parts of the Imprint were unbalanced as a result. No one had a complete record of what it would look like if it hadn't been amended over the years, but generally, there were eight types of spell. Each of these interfered with each other, but some more than others.

This was pointless to me entirely at the moment if it wasn't for the fact that dimensionalists can't cast time spells. Nowadays I wonder if Gium did that deliberately to keep us from doing some particularly world shaking magics, the overlap between the two disciplines wasn't something I ignored.

Mostly, this was a problem at the moment because half the exercises toward the cloning spell involved time magic. Which meant no teleportation, gates, or even bending space until I could cast the spell reliably.

The actual spell was very very light on the time magic part, but chronomancers in general were a relatively confusing lot, and folks were hard pressed to find any of their skills anywhere. So essentially the cloning spell sidestepped that by starting the user on the very basics of time magic.

But in short, I was struggling.

I tried to be someone who could do it anyway.

I told Aymiae that if anyone asked, Foralen was doing 'intense personal meditation!' for the next week and was not to be interrupted. I went and visited Jeref again but the zombie's state seemed mostly the same as last time. I felt like I should be worried about the increased restlessness the thing was displaying, but there were too many things on my plate as it was.

I wasn't getting enough sleep again since the nightmares decided to come back, most waking hours were dedicated toward decidedly not using any dimensional magic and trying to get my soul to accept the little scraps of time magic as genuine. It wasn't nearly as hard as my past attempts as Fari to learn the healing arts, perhaps because I could literally go in and stabilize my own soul by force, but in all I felt I was making passable progress on that front.

Most nights I made my way to Nightwind where things slowly trickled back to normal, and it wasn't even a coin toss anymore that I would walk into any given room and hear a conversation about Foralen.

Hivren though, would never stop the speculation game. "I think I've got it this time guys! She said she plans on dying here, does that mean she's dying? Do you think that's why she came back?"

I gave him a baffled look and I wasn't the only one, Givei did too, Jiuhen probably would have joined us in that if he was paying attention. He'd long since tuned Hivren out though. "What the sparks kind of logic is that." Givei pointed out, furrowing her brow. "She's perfectly healthy, she jumped off a roof for goodness sake."

Hivren shrugged, "do you have a better idea for why she disappeared for twenty-two years?"

Givei shrugged and jabbed Jiuhen in the side, who was staring out the window thoughtfully. She was almost unfairly mean to the guy, but he seemed to need someone who kept him on course. I wasn't hedging my bets on the length of their relationship though.

I remained silent, picking at my food and trying to figure out how to contribute to the conversation. Hivren sighed, "Did any of the rest of you get to ask her a question? Eliax? I remember seeing you there later on with your bard friend."