DER WAFFENSTILLSTAND

German, "the ceasefire; the truce"

When you put a rat in a small space and make it starve, it acts desperately and bangs its head against the wall. Do you think people would be any different? -- The Devil Judge (2021)

The snowball fight degenerated into an undignified scuffle that ended when Karandren dropped a sculpture's head on top of Diarnlan. As she struggled to free herself she kicked him and sent him flying into another sculpture.

They both clambered out of the snow and took stock of the damage. Most of Karandren's snow-skrýszel were in pieces scattered over the ground. Karandren looked around in dismay.

"I spent ages working on those," he grumbled.

Diarnlan's instinctive reaction was to say, "They were awful." But the memory of her teacher's words stopped her. "...go and talk to Karandren. Try to reach a compromise even if you can't become friends. That will do for repayment."

Her first urge was to throw something at Karandren again, since Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair wasn't here and she couldn't throw something at her. She forced that urge back. If there was one thing she hated, it was feeling indebted to someone. She took a deep breath and considered her next words.

Slowly and through gritted teeth she began, "We need to come up with a plan of what to do in our next lifetime."

Karandren stopped moping over his ruined statues. He turned and gawked at her as if she'd become a skrýszel herself. "We?"

"We haven't been very successful so far--" What an understatement. "--so it seems that to survive we must..." Diarnlan paused. Having her skull bashed in by a rock again sounded vastly preferable to continuing this sentence. "...We must consider what we've already tried. See what worked longest and what got us killed at once."

Silence fell. Karandren stared at her with eyes almost as wide as dinner-plates and his mouth hanging open.

"Are you a fish?" she snapped. He shook his head mutely. "Then close your mouth."

He closed it. Then he took a step closer, staring at her suspiciously. "Who are you and what have you done with Diarnlan?"

Why that little-- She scooped up a handful of snow and hurled it at him. This time he side-stepped it easily.

"Alright, I suppose you really are Diarnlan. What happened? Did you hit your head?"

Even though there was no way he could know about how she died, that sounded like a nasty joke at her expense. Enraged, Diarnlan summoned Saungrafn and lunged at him. Karandren stepped back, tripped over the remains of a statue, and fell headlong into the snow. Diarnlan stabbed him in the chest. He looked at most mildly irritated.

"Well?" he asked, propping himself up on his elbows and ignoring how this drove Saungrafn deeper into his chest. "What were you saying about us trying to survive?"

Diarnlan pulled Saungrafn out and slid it back into its sheath. It did the telepathic equivalent of nudging her to speak when she would much rather stay silent. "I said... I thought that we should go over what happened in our past lifetimes. See what got us killed quickest. Then come up with a strategy to avoid those things."

Karandren hmmed under his breath. "That's easy. The times I've lived longest are when I go to Miavain and don't take you with me. But aren't you forgetting something? Every time we go back we have to face the skrýszel. And it's a different one in each lifetime. I think they're caught in the time-loop too and trying different ways to conquer the world."

Diarnlan stared at him. At the back of her mind she felt Saungrafn was equally startled. This didn't fit in with Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair's theory. She couldn't decide if that was a good or bad thing. "Do you seriously think the skrýszel have the intelligence to do something like that? They're animals!"

Karandren shrugged. "I don't know. The one that killed me last time was pretty smart. What about the one that killed you?"

"...It wasn't a skrýszel that killed me," she admitted reluctantly, and only because Saungrafn's telepathic nudging was getting on her nerves.

He raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Did you finally annoy someone else into murdering you? Did Erdreda grow a spine and cut your throat like I know she wanted to?"

Diarnlan unsheathed Saungrafn again. Karandren retreated several steps.

During her most recent lifetime she'd assumed Karandren had also been brought back and shoved into his four-year-old self's body. The discovery of the statues, which couldn't have been built quickly, and his ignorance of when she had ended up disabused her of this notion. He had obviously been left behind like she had during his most recent lifetime. Which meant she had to explain the sudden difference in time.

"I went back to being a teenager and had an unfortunate accident," she said shortly. Without giving him any time to reply to that she continued, "The accident will never be repeated. I know how to avoid it."

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"What a pity."

She raised Saungrafn warningly. Karandren sighed. "You do realise that thing isn't much of a threat? It doesn't even hurt me much." Damn it. "Anyway," he added in a cheerful tone, "what sort of accident was it? Painful? Gory?"

Diarnlan stabbed him in the stomach. Then she swung Saungrafn at his neck. Bizarrely it cut through the skin and muscle but bounced off the bone. While Karandren choked on his own blood she took advantage of his inability to speak.

"If the next lifetime is the same as mine was, we'll have ten years before the first skrýszel attack. Even better, you'll be a toddler and won't be able to get in my way."

"Not fair," Karandren complained. Blood streamed from his mouth. He wiped it away with his sleeve as he continued, "Why do I have to be a toddler? Why not you?"

"Because I'm older than you."

He shook his head. "No, I think we're the same age now. Put all our lifetimes together and we're both well over a hundred. Hey, do you think we could claim an old age pension?"

Diarnlan cut his throat again just to stop him talking. "If the skrýszels attack ahead of schedule, then we'll know if your theory is true. If not, it's just a coincidence that they keep changing things."

"Hell of a coincidence," Karandren muttered.

Diarnlan raised Saungrafn. He jumped back before she could cut his throat for the third time.

"As soon as we go back I'm going to make a soul-weapon of my own," he said. "Then I can cut you up for once." Diarnlan advanced on him menacingly. He leapt out of her way again. "We need to decide where to meet!"

"Meet? What are you talking about?"

"If we go back ten years we'll have to meet early. I can't travel to your house as a four-year-old."

Diarnlan stared at him blankly. "Why do you think I want to meet you?"

"So we can work together to stop the skrýszels, of course! And--" Karandren grinned. "--so I'll be there to see it if you die in another accident." He hurried on before she could reply. "I grew up in Hjaroarvatn, on the farm on the hill above the town. You can't miss it because it's painted bright blue. If I wake up as a four-year-old I'll wait at the end of the lane for you to collect me."

Diarnlan threw Saungrafn at him. He dodged, which didn't improve her mood. "You idiot! Do you think I want to get arrested for kidnapping?"

"That would be funny." Karandren grinned again, then saw the look on Diarnlan's face and quickly sobered up. "Don't worry. I'll leave a note telling my parents I've run away."

Why did every conversation with this imbecile leave Diarnlan feeling like she was hitting her head against a brick wall? "A four-year-old. Leaving a note. Saying he's run away. Don't you think your parents will be just a little worried about you?"

Then again, maybe he was such a nightmare that they'd be glad to get rid of him.

Karandren shrugged. "Well, it's likely this next lifetime will end with us both dying horribly and then everything starts all over again, so nothing we do really matters, does it? No one will remember it in our next lives. And besides, I refuse to spend ten years pretending to be a child. It's hard enough pretending to be a teenager."

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Time was a very strange thing in the in-between realm. It dragged by very slowly while they were arguing then flew by after they stopped. Diarnlan sat down under the tree and waited for something to happen. It seemed like only seconds had passed when she looked up and saw Karandren had already rebuilt two of his statues. She almost asked, "Why are you doing that?" But then she considered how much of Karandren's stupidity she had already dealt with today, and decided the last thing she wanted was to talk more to him.

A few more seconds passed. Now Karandren was almost finished the third statue. That was when the world disintegrated again. Diarnlan was so used to this by now that she only sighed and waited to see where -- or when -- she ended up this time. When she opened her eyes she found herself staring up at an all-too-familiar white ceiling.

So. She was fourteen again, which meant Karandren was now four and would be waiting for her in Hjaroarvatn.

I could just leave him there. What can he do? Hunt me down?

After all, it wasn't as if she'd promised to go and look for him. Why, no matter how she looked at it there was no way this would end in anything but disaster.

She climbed out of bed and put on her warmest clothes. This time she went to the headmistress's office before leaving. The school safe was kept under a floorboard beneath the headmistress's chair. Since she wasn't going to Teivain-ríkhorn-hrair this time she needed to get money from somewhere, and it wasn't as if she was going to face any consequences when she would die sooner or later.

The office door was locked with a spell that couldn't be undone by the students. But Diarnlan still had her memories of being an adult and the magic she had learnt then. She opened the door easily. A few minutes later she had her pockets full of coins. On the way out she paused to look at a map of Avallot pinned to the wall.

Hjaroarvatn was in northern Avallot, about fifty miles away from the academy. Too far for her to walk. That settled it then. Karandren could wait as long as he liked. She wasn't going to go for him.

What about the teleportation platforms? that pesky little voice whispered.

Diarnlan froze half-way out the door. She weighed up her options. Either she left Karandren and tried to figure things out by herself, or she collected him and tried not to kill him before they figured out how to stop the skrýszels. It should be an easy choice. And yet...

As she headed towards the teleportation platforms one thought kept repeating over and over. I must be out of my mind!

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The farm on the hill was indeed very easy to spot. When Karandren said it was bright blue he had been telling the truth -- in the same way someone would be telling the truth if they said an inferno was warm. The house was such a vivid shade of blue that it could be seen from miles away. Looking at it made Diarnlan's eyes water.

The teleportation platform had sent her to just outside the town walls. To her right a road led off towards the farm. She walked along it until she came to the foot of a hill. Above her was the farm with a narrow lane leading up to it. Beside her was the farm's letter-box. But where was Karandren?

If he's made me come all this way for nothing I'll skin him alive!

"Ahem," a high voice said somewhere near Diarnlan's feet.

She looked down. Then she looked around. There was no one in sight. "What--"

A small shape detached itself from the side of the letter-box. In the dim light it took Diarnlan's eyes a minute to understand what she was seeing. Then the shape resolved itself into a child whose head barely reached her knee, so wrapped up in a thick woolly coat, scarf and hat that they looked like a walking snowball. They craned their neck back to look up at her.

It turned out that when he was a toddler, Karandren had a very round face and eyes that seemed too large. If Diarnlan's classmates at the academy could have seen him they would have immediately cooed over him and declared him the cutest thing they'd ever seen.

Diarnlan, being a very different sort of person, burst out laughing.