2012

The steps down into the cavern were treacherous, but he managed it; his legs were still unsteady, but getting better and more coordinated by the day. The icy air froze his now-white hair, but he didn't so much as shiver; it had been a long, long time since he'd been bothered by such things as cold.

The circle of bare ice in the center of cave glowed faintly, as though lit from below by some far-distant light. The man who had once been called Cameron paused for just a moment to admire it, then began his work, setting small carefully-carved rocks at various intervals about the perimeter and etching strange symbols and glyphs into the ice with a commando knife like the one the newer-model Agents had used. The work was slow and methodical, but he never wavered.

Finally, after nearly an hour, the preparations were complete. He straightened up, slowly and with great evident difficulty, then fumbled out a book and began stumbling over the words of his recitation as he read haltingly from the page. It was slow, and took him several tries; after he had to start over for the fourth time, he looked around guiltily for witnesses, then pulled out a pair of rather dapper reading glasses and put them on hurriedly before having a fifth (and much more accurate) go at the incantation.

As he coughed out the final word, the runes carved into the edges of the circle of ice began to glow faintly -- a low thrum, a bit like the bass beat of a dramatic scene in an action movie soundtrack (he had rather enjoyed Inception when it had come out two years ago) began to sound as the runes began to pulse, first slowly and then with increasing speed and brightness. He watched stoically, waiting with patience born of long, steady effort and great willpower, as the cadence of the oscillations continued to increase. The throbs of sound blurred together, forming a low tone that rose inexorably into a swell.

Finally, the tempo crescendoed; a great clap of thunder shook the cavern, the runes flared into incandescence, and the thermodynamics of temporal realignment converted nearly three thousand gallons of water directly from its solid state into its gaseous one. A section of the ice burst upwards with calamitous violence, filling the grotto with a hissing eruption of steam that obscured all vision for several seconds. When it cleared, the once-smooth surface of the ice had a rounded scoop nearly twenty feet on a side torn from its center, containing two curled bodies. Almost immediately, one of them began to stir.

Orton coughed, gasping for air, as the effects of nine years without oxygen (experienced as about four and a half real-time minutes, one agonizing second at a time) forcefully asserted themselves; weakly, he grasped at the slick surface of the ice for purchase as he tried to force his vision to function again. He strained his ears, his nerves, and his astral senses as he searched for threats.

"Boy," rumbled a creaky voice, "I done seen some fuck-ups in my time, but I do believe you have outdone yourself on this here specimen." Orton squirmed, trying to find the source of the statement, and flopped feebly onto his back as a figure appeared at the edge of the crater above him.

The man who had once been called Cameron remained short, but he appeared intimidatingly tall from this angle (especially since Orton had roughly one card-trick of magical power remaining at the moment). His face and what little skin his coat and suit exposed were covered with the healed scars of horrific burns, and his eyes were milky and opaque. Orton hacked and choked, trying to get out a rejoinder, but could only manage to raise his middle finger towards the figure.

Hesitantly and unsteadily, he struggled to his hands and knees, then looked over at Enna's recumbent form beside him. With a jolt of panic, he realized she wasn't breathing; he scrambled to her side, but before he could begin chest compressions, her throat bulged weirdly, and she vomited out a truly magnificent shower of icy water all over the both of them. A mocking chuckle cascaded down from the lip of the crater, adding insult to injury.

"Just breathe," Orton coaxed, as Enna gasped and gagged. "You've been through... well, some serious shit." Scraping and crunching sounds echoed from behind him as the other man began to descend into the crater. Orton resisted the urge to turn around, knowing he'd be looking down the barrel of an enormous revolver and feeling no need to visually confirm his suspicions. "So, are you going to threaten to shoot me again? After you went to all that trouble?"

"Might be therapeutic," mused the man who had once been called Cameron. "I reckon you'd survive it. Maybe I just wing you a little."

Orton laughed, somewhat bitterly. "Fuck you too, buddy." He turned back to Enna, helping her to sit up more straightly. "Take your time. Don't try to talk too fast."

"Ugh... blegh... what the fuck, Orton?!" she choked out.

Orton nodded. "Much better. If you can recite your catchphrase, things are back to pretty much normal." He leaned back and sighed, then twisted around to glance at the other man in the crater. "Do I even want to ask what you want, or how you did this?"

"Probably not," the man who had once been called Cameron replied. "How about we just say I'm feelin' like a new man and let it go at that."

Orton blinked, then squinted. "What the... Jiann?"

The revenant cackled. "In the flesh, although I cain't exactly claim whose." He scratched his now-mustachioed nose with his middle finger. "Turns out our mutual Texan annoyance weren't nearly as protected from animaphagy as you, white boy."

Orton rolled his eyes. "You realize you're white now, too, so it's super cringe to say that."

Jiann cackled louder. "Ain't nobody ever told you?" he riposted gleefully. "You can take the brother outta the streets, but you cain't never take the streets outta the brother."

Despite himself, Orton grinned back, then shook his head. "I guess that explains how you found me and got us loose. Thanks for that, at least."

Jiann sniffed. "Don't mean nothin'. I jest still ain't keen on gettin no moon up my ass, is all." He rubbed his neck, obviously discomfited. "Damn, but this cracker's body's powerful uncomfortable. Not nearly as smooth a transition, lemme tell you."

Enna, finally recovering enough to express her bewilderment in terms other than profanity, glanced back and forth between the two of them with obvious confusion. "Orton, who even is this guy? What's going on? What happened to Gentry?!"

Orton winced. "Um. Uh, we didn't win."

Enna gave him a glare. "No shit, Sherlock. But if we didn't win, why aren't we dead? And what the hell was that... that..." she groped for words, trying to articulate what she'd been through and failing rather spectacularly.

Orton sighed. "We got rolled hard right from the beginning. The first spell he cast was an illusion spell that forced us into a mindscape, and I didn't catch it until almost too late. There's no telling how much, if any, of the fight after that was real."

"What?" Enna recoiled. "So we were, what, stumbling around in here attacking nothing?"

Orton nodded. "Possibly. Or the whole fight might have gone exactly as we perceived it, with just him taking control at the end. Mindscapes can show you anything, even reality."

Jiann whistled. "Even I ain't got no tricks to get out of a mindscape, Orton. How'n the hell'd you pull that off?"

"A little creative cheating and a lot of luck, as usual." Orton shifted uncomfortably. "Once he had us in the mindscape, he couldn't just kill us -- a direct attack would bring us back into congruence, just like a temporal differential. But there wasn't anything stopping him from melting the ice and keeping us from noticing we were drowning." He shuddered. "By the time I realized what was happening, we'd been underwater for a couple of minutes, and I was almost completely tapped out of power -- not nearly enough to break us out of the mindscape, and definitely not enough to break us out of the ice even if we had been free. So I did the one thing I could, and cast the Clepsydral Cavortation."

Jiann nodded. "Skippin' yourself forward in time in leaps, hopin' to stall long enough for somebody -- me, I reckon -- to come an' rescue you."

"Pretty altruistic of you to rescue us," Enna joined in suspiciously, "when the last time I saw you you were pointing a gun at my head and threatening to shoot both of us."

Orton winced. "Um. Enna, this is actually Jiann, the, uh..." he cast about for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain everything, and promptly gave up. "He's a friend. He took over that guy Cameron's body, presumably killing him in the process."

Jiann chuckled. "Yeah, he ain't alive no more. Sumbitch tried to burn down my house, and me along with it." He twirled one of Cameron's heavy revolvers and reholstered it in a lightning-fast motion. "He got my body, but I got his, and that ain't too bad of a trade from where I'm sittin." He tried to pose heroically, tripped, staggered, and sat down heavily. "Still workin' out a few kinks, though."

Enna shook her head. "So all of that was what, an illusion? It felt real as hell."

"Not exactly." Orton wasn't looking forward to explaining this part. "It was a mindscape -- a created reality. It wasn't physically real, but it was definitely psychally real -- in other words, you really experienced it, with all the anguish and other emotions that come with... well, with what you experienced."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Shit, I don't even know what I experienced." Enna rubbed her temples. "It was like... I had my old life back, but everything was fucked up... my mind was so foggy, and..."

Jiann nodded. "Mindscapes affect th' mind directly, young lady. Means they can turn parts o' your brain on and off, or feed you all kindsa lies. Fake memories, amnesia, pain..." he sniffed. "If'n you can imagine it, a mindscape can make it real."

Enna looked disgusted. "So what, Gentry was playing with my mind that whole time? If he knew we were alive, why didn't he finish us off?"

Orton shook his head again. "Not Gentry. The mindscape was made from your own fears, and you were actually tormenting yourself." He sighed. "I did what I could to help you, but there wasn't much I could do without power -- just a few encouraging hints and messages here and there." He glanced away. "And, um, some other stuff."

"Orton," warned Enna.

He threw up his hands. "Okay, fine, I may have put you into a cascading dream loop so that anytime you tried to kill yourself, you would 'wake up' from a nightmare. What do you want from me? It wasn't like I enjoyed watching you commit suicide ninety-three times. Give me a fucking break, okay?"

Enna blinked. "Shit, I... fuck, really?"

Orton nodded. "Mindscapes are bad, bad news. I focused on keeping us alive, and trust me, that was very close to all I could do."

She scowled. "Well, thanks, I guess. Figures you'd avoid it somehow, anyway."

Orton laughed. "I wish. No, I got to experience a subjective eternity of being torn apart by my own six billion personal demons too -- but I, at least, can multi-task." He stretched, brushing the frost off his clothes. "We should get out of here. I'm pretty sure Gentry didn't leave any watchers or wards, but just being temporally contiguous again might catch his attention sooner or later." He looked around, resigned himself sadly to the fact that his backpack was probably gone forever, and started searching for handholds in the ice.

Enna wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. "So where do we go? I mean, how much of a head start does he have now?"

Jiann tilted his head to one side and grinned nastily. "Depends, girly. How much prep could you get done in nine years?"

"Jesus Christ." Enna was beginning to regret waking up.

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The black-tallow candles, rendered from the fat of goats fed with the blood of their own young, had been expensive to procure; the accursed gold thread which marked the pentagram, spun from a statue stolen from an ancient temple teeming with crazed cultists, had been technically free but significantly more obnoxious at both the acquisition and the refinement stages. In fact, the easiest part of this entire affair had been the corpse; Gentry had just shot a random passerby and carted the body away without so much as a kerfuffle or even a comment of consternation. It was a shame, he reflected, that society placed so much value on possessions, and so little on human life. To him, life was much more important than worldly goods -- after all, you could hardly do proper black magic without a good, solid sacrifice!

Chanting the words of the desecration, he moved his hands portentously through the air, shaping and binding meta-structures as the smoke from the candles curled up in twisted streams from the red-flaring wicks. His brow remained smooth, unfurrowed by concentration despite the exacting nature of the ritual -- a mistake at this stage would be quite inconvenient indeed, but Gentry was in no danger of that, or indeed at any time. Howling hordes of demons, bound in a panoply of stricturous schemata, served in lockstep within his mind -- having one concentrate on a spell for him was such a mere trifle it barely merited consideration, let alone mention. Smoothly and effortlessly, his body and spirit navigated the complex and demanding ritual while his conscious mind daydreamed, thinking about pie recipes. He'd quite gotten into baking recently, and was hoping to assay a tart or a flan soon.

Finally, after nearly three hours of grueling (for his servitors) spellcasting, his body completed the final act of the rite; a burst of chaotic black energy cascaded above and around the corpse, then flowed with a sinuous, slithering motion into the eyes, ears, and nostrils of the dead man's face. A long, pregnant moment passed, while Gentry's body panted (lamenting the new aches and pains of recently turning thirty) and his mind wondered exactly how the specific chemistry of crust mouthfeel worked. Then, quite abruptly, the corpse sat up.

The dead man's skull cracked and creaked as its structure and form crunched and shifted, reshaped and macerated by the spirit now animating it, and then it turned to look upon him. Its face was hideous -- an eyeless black mask of undeath with no features other than an enormous, many-fanged maw which took up a good three-quarters of its volume -- but Gentry minded not at all. If a mother could love any face, he reasoned, surely so could a necroneiric creator. "Welcome to corporeal existence," he greeted the wiedergänger, and it screeched horribly in response. He patted its head paternally. "That's right. We have got quite a lot to do, haven't we?"

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Jiann poked at the fire half-heartedly, trying to get it to flare up a little, but his efforts seemed to make little difference -- the wood here was simply too wet to burn very well on its own. With a sigh, he expended a little magical power to dry out the wood and enclose the campsite in a bubble of warm air; he didn't feel the cold at all, but he supposed it'd be nice for his still-living companions -- not that he cared particularly about niceness, but there was only so much he could do about inheriting Orton's prim and puritanical morality. Satisfied that the fire was now producing adequate heat and light, he settled in and began cleaning and polishing his revolvers.

"I gotta say, I never figured you for the gunslinger type," Orton commented, entering the circle of firelight and sitting down with a groan as his stiff muscles protested. "Doesn't it get frustrating when you mysteriously miss all the time?"

Jiann chuckled, a sandpaper-like sound in his dead throat. "Not so much as you'd expect. Most things ain't warded like magi, so guns do jest fine against 'em -- and for other mages, well, I got my own ways of dealin'." He scratched his chin contemplatively. "Ain't like I tangle with other magi much these days, anyhow. Mostly fightin' off robots."

Orton blinked. "What? You mean those Agent guys?"

"Ayep." Jiann nodded, rotating a cylinder experimentally. "Seems like takin' over Texas Boy's body got me all spiritually mixed up in whatever he was doin', so now I get G-Men crawlin' all over me whenever it's least convenient." He tapped his temple with the barrel of one of the revolvers. "I only got bits an' pieces of his memories -- I suspect he weren't all there, so to speak. But elementally, our mutual shit-kickin' friend was involved in some kinda conspiracy, or so he believed." Jiann shrugged. "They ain't too much trouble for me. They dodge bullets, but ain't got no protection against divinations; so one augured shot, an' pop goes the weasel." He worked the action on the hammer, testing it for stickiness. "Lil' Miss Drowns-a-lot sleepin'?"

Orton nodded. "Yeah. She's pretty exhausted -- from her perspective, it had been about three days with no sleep or food. I figure she could use the rest." He shuffled slightly, seeming a little embarrassed. "So, uh... what have you been up to?"

Jiann laughed, not kindly. "Orton, what'n the hell are you tryin' ta make small talk with me fer?"

To his surprise, Orton looked up at him with concern. "It's clear you went through some rough stuff. I'd have to be some kind of psychopath not to care, especially since you just rescued us."

Jiann shifted uncomfortably. "Like I tol' you, ain't nothin'. Mutual alignment o' goals, remember? Don't go gettin' all sappy on me now." Satisfied with the state of his revolvers, he put them away and fixed Orton with what he hoped was an intimidating glare. "Don't forget I know where that trenchcoat you got came from."

To his surprise and increased embarrassment, Orton stood up and walked closer, then sat down so close to him they were almost touching. He continued to meet Jiann's gaze, and in confusion, Jiann searched Orton's eyes, expecting to find pity or subterfuge; but all he could detect were endless depths of warm brown humanity. He shivered. "Aw, cut that out, already."

After a long moment, Orton nodded and backed up, then looked away. "Sorry. I guess I don't have any right to ask you that sort of thing."

Frustrated, Jiann threw up his hands. "Hell's bells, Orton, what do you wanna hear? A powerful an' movin' description o' my spiritual journey whereupon I explored my innermos' emergent self?" He kicked at a clod of dirt, somewhat clumsily. "Go piss up a rope, boy. We ain't in mutual psychic therapy no more, remember?"

Orton shrugged. "Maybe not. But better or worse, we're stuck with each other." He looked up at the twinkling stars, visible much more clearly here than in the more populated areas he'd spent much of his life. "You don't have to open up to me, but I'm here if you want to."

The silence between them stretched for many minutes, but it was Jiann who broke first. He scowled down as his scarred, blackened hands. "I was livin' on a farm. Bound nature to m'self, had... I don't even know how to describe it. Harmony. Maybe halfway to peace." He sighed, then leaned back and stared up at the sky as well. "Cap'n Cowpunch here ruined all that. Shot me a few times, we had us a tussle. Ended up torchin' my farm and house, and both of us along with it."

Orton winced. "Damn. But at least he couldn't affect your soul, right? As a revenant, weren't you pretty much immune to anything he could do?"

"I wished. He weren't no slouch, Orton." Jiann clenched his fists, remembering. "I was... hell, all spiritually intertwined with my farm. I was on my way to somethin..." He shook his head. "When he burned my farm, it killed me. Killed me deader'n any talisman or magic sword through the ka coulda done. Killed me mystically, you understand." Orton looked down, but didn't respond. "So all I could do was try to take 'im over, like I'd tried with you. It worked, but..." Jiann stretched out a leg, showing how it shook and trembled. "His body and my spirit don't exactly get along all that well."

Orton nodded. "Your nervous system is used to being taller than you are now, and there's probably some kind of residual repressed dislike for him that's preventing you from fully integrating." He grinned. "I'd give you some kind of self-help-y advice on learning to love your enemy, but you'd probably just think I was hitting on you."

The two of them shared a chuckle, a rare sound in the quiet night of Hammastunturin erämaa-alue. After a while, Jiann looked over at Orton. "Well boy, I sure hope you got a plan. Because as I see it, we're more than a lil' bit behind the ol eight-ball at this here juncture."

Orton scratched his head. "The beginnings of one, maybe. I don't know how good our chances are, but..."

Jiann shrugged. "Surprised you're stickin' around here, actually. Figured you'd have gone back for attempt number six by this point, yeah?"

"Huh." Orton pondered for a moment. "I don't actually know that you'd notice if I did... I mean, what would that look like from your perspective? Would you see me just disappear? I've never regressed unless I was dying in any of the previous loops." He grinned again. "Heck, for all I know, it's a requirement to make the ritual work."

Jiann twirled a revolver, smirking. "You askin' me to shoot ya?"

"Not today, anyway," Orton laughed. "But... no, I still think we have a chance. Maybe a better chance than in any of the previous times." He looked up at the stars again, contemplatively. "Gentry did me a favor he doesn't know about. I broke through, inside the mindscape."

Jiann sat up, intrigued. "Seriously? Fourth tier?"

Orton nodded. "Turns out all that soul-searching I spent the last half-century indulging in is good for something. I could... I don't know, accept the torments, learn from them, be refined by them." He stretched. "It's all very enlightened and transcendental and shit. Maybe I'll write a book about it after I save the world."

"Countin' chickens again," sniffed Jiann. "As I recall, bein' fourth tier didn't make much of a difference last time."

"Nope. But maybe I'll make fifth tier this loop. If we have enough time before he squishes us with the Mare Tranquillitas, I mean." Orton shrugged. "No sense worrying about it. We got other shit to do, anyway."

Jiann nodded. "Got a first step in mind?"

"Yeah," replied Orton, laying back and looking up at the moonless light. "It's called taking a nap."