WIE SCHWER KANN ES SEIN?

German, "how hard can it be?"

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die. -- Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

"I don't believe this."

Magicians witnessed and caused many strange and improbable things. They liked to boast nothing could shock them now. Diarnlan had discovered several times in the past that yes, she could still be shocked. But never before had she faced a situation like this.

She remembered fighting her loathsome former pupil. She remembered the pain of the sword plunging into her chest. She remembered the surge of fury when she saw she hadn't fatally injured him. She remembered dying -- well, in a way. At any rate she remembered a feeling like falling into a deep abyss. Yet here she was, on a frozen lake -- very similar to the one in Sólbjǫrgvegr -- under a tree covered in glowing red leaves -- very like the one her teacher had in her realm -- with Karandren's body lying a short distance away.

There were many things wrong with this situation. In the first place, Diarnlan was uninjured and no longer wearing her armour. In the second, Karandren had survived their fight. He had no business lying there pretending to be dead. In the third, Sólbjǫrgvegr would have collapsed as soon as she died. Karandren, that slippery bastard, would no doubt have run for his worthless life the minute he realised what was happening. In the fourth, why was he not wearing his armour either?

Diarnlan stared blankly at his fur-trimmed dark blue overcoat. It was ever so slightly too large for him. If he was standing he would have looked like he'd borrowed someone else's clothes. Lying down he looked as if some strange alien lifeform was enveloping him in its grasp.

Even after so many years Diarnlan recognised that overcoat. He'd worn it on his first day as her pupil. She distinctly remembered snapping at him that it looked utterly ridiculous.

"Most people know better than to make such a spectacle of themselves," she'd said icily. "Have you no coats that fit you properly or must you wear someone else's?"

The brat had the audacity to pretend to be hurt. He'd stared sadly up at her with his best imitation of a kicked puppy. "This is my coat. Dad sent me one that's too big so I can grow into it."

Strange. She hadn't thought of that incident for decades. In fact she'd tried not to think of her hated student at all. Yet the memory was as vivid as if it had only happened yesterday.

Diarnlan eyed the motionless boy dubiously. He certainly looked as if he was dead. Knowing him that might very well be an act. He might just be waiting for her to let her guard down so he could attack her. Instinctively she reached for her sword at her side.

It wasn't there. Instead her hand landed on the pleated knee-length skirt of her tunic. For the first time it dawned on her what she was wearing. A black tunic embroidered with gold leaves over black trousers. A matching cape, also black with gold embroidery, was no longer draped over her shoulders. It lay on the snow behind her. Apparently it hadn't been fastened and had fallen off when she sat up. Diarnlan stared at it. Then she looked down at her clothes again. She rubbed her eyes.

At least she hadn't woken up in a stranger's clothes. This outfit had certainly belonged to her once. Unless her memory was playing tricks on her, she'd worn it on the day Karandren first inflicted his presence upon her. There was just one problem. Shortly after Karandren's... abrupt departure, she'd accidentally spilt paint on the tunic. She'd never worn it after that. In fact she couldn't even remember what she'd done with it.

Thoroughly rattled by now, Diarnlan stood up and looked around for her sword. At last she saw it. To her disbelief it was sticking out of the frozen lake, as if someone had stabbed it into the ice with all their might. Karandren's sword was right next to it.

Only one of them could explain this. Diarnlan turned and glared at Karandren's body. She opened her mouth, ready to yell at him until he stopped playing dead. The words died on her tongue.

Karandren's eyes were open. He stared back at her with the same bewilderment she felt.

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If their swords had been within easy reach they would have resumed their battle on the spot. Luckily neither of them wanted to venture out onto possibly-cracked ice. Instead they fought with their bare hands until both of them were in too much pain to continue. Then they yelled at each other until they were both hoarse. Finally they both sat down on opposite sides of the tree to give their bloodied knuckles and sore throats a chance to recover.

Diarnlan watched the cuts and bruises on her hands disappear as if they'd never existed. She felt the pain in her throat fade away. She looked up at the bright yet sunless sky and waited for night to fall. It didn't. The faintly-visible stars never moved. It was almost as if time was frozen like the lake. Even though she was sitting on a tree-root covered with snow, she didn't feel cold at all. Her breath left no steam in the air. Out of curiosity she stood up and walked in a circle around the root. Her steps didn't leave a single mark in the snow.

"I don't believe this," she said again.

"Neither do I."

She started violently. At once she felt ashamed of herself. But how else was she supposed to react when her erstwhile pupil hadn't the decency to make any noise as he sneaked up on her?

All her life Diarnlan had one sure method of dealing with any unpleasant situation: blame it on someone else. She glared up at Karandren. He stood on one of the tree-roots that grew higher up. Whether by accident or design that meant he forced her to crane her neck to see him. Dimly she was aware she didn't feel as much physical discomfort as she logically should have.

"What have you done?" she asked through gritted teeth.

"I was about to ask what you've done."

Karandren jumped off the root and landed on the snow beside her. His ridiculously long coat got tangled around his feet. With a strangled yelp he fell flat on his face. Until now he had kept up a pretence of being an adult, complete with the insufferable arrogance of a dictator who expected his every word to be obeyed at once. The illusion shattered as soon as he fell. Diarnlan saw him for all he really was: a spoilt brat of a teenager playing at being grown-up.

"You're a child," she said with a snort. "Go and play with your toy soldiers and stop pretending you have any right to call yourself a magician."

Karandren sat up and gave her such a furious glare she half expected him to try once again to murder her. Pouting, he said with a child's petulance, "I know a lot more about magic than you do."

Diarnlan tried to hex him just to prove how wrong he was. She failed. Whatever had happened to her after dying and -- presumably -- being resurrected had sealed her magic out of her reach. She turned away and did her best to pretend he didn't exist.

"What is this place?" she asked herself.

Unfortunately she made the mistake of speaking aloud. Karandren just had to get in his tuppence-worth.

"It looks just like your realm."

Slowly Diarnlan turned and fixed him with her most icy glare. He didn't even flinch. If anything he returned it with an even colder glare. "This. Is. Not. My. Realm."

He snorted. "Are you sure? It's as bleak and miserable as you are."

The subject was promptly forgotten in the fist fight that ensued. At last the fight became half-hearted and gradually petered out. There wasn't much point in punching someone when any injuries you inflicted healed within minutes. The two of them sat down and pointedly ignored each other for as long as possible.

Leave it to Karandren to eventually break the silence once again.

"We're both dead."

Diarnlan snorted. She didn't bother looking round as she answered. "What are you talking about? I died. You didn't."

That little worm could wriggle off any hook. He'd survived exile. He'd survived years living in Miavain around gods-knew-what horrors. He'd survived the fight he started. She wouldn't be a bit surprised if he survived a crossbow bolt to the heart. The brat probably wouldn't even have a scar to show for it.

"I did die," he said casually, as if only talking about the weather. "I dare say it was very silly of me. But now I know what happens to people in collapsing magical realms."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

At least if nothing else she could derive some grim satisfaction from knowing she had killed him in a way. Well, her realm had killed him. That still counted as her killing him. Sort of. It wasn't really a satisfying thought. But then, neither was anything else in this situation.

"So we're in hell," Diarnlan said flatly. "Wonderful."

For want of anything better to do -- and to get away from her unwanted ex-pupil -- she got up and walked out onto the ice. It held. Judging by the reverberation of her footsteps it was at least a foot thick and wouldn't break for anything short of a war-hammer. Nor did she see anything under the ice, waiting to burst out and attack her.

This wasn't quite what she had expected from hell. Yet it certainly wasn't heaven. And of the religions commonly practiced in Avallot, only a cult who drank human blood in their rituals believed in anything in-between the two places. So where in the world was she?

She almost expected Saungrafn to disappear when she tried to touch it. It didn't. But it didn't respond to her presence in the way the real Saungrafn had. Its hilt remained cold in her hand. Normally a soul-weapon came to life when wielded by its owner. Part of their soul resided within it, after all. But she might as well have been holding an ordinary sword.

Diarnlan cast a wary glance at the ice around the blade. It looked solid enough. Still, she didn't fancy the ice cracking beneath her. She might already be dead, but for all she knew she could still be injured. Carefully she took a step back. That meant she had to lean over awkwardly to grasp Saungrafn's hilt.

Pulling the sword out of the ice was a much more awkward procedure than it would have been if she was right next to it. She yanked it out an inch at a time. It scraped against the ice with an ear-splitting shriek.

If anything's lurking around here it'll hear me, Diarnlan thought.

For a minute that thought struck fear into her heart. What sort of creatures might be lurking in this strange place? She had never been religious. Death and what came after it were subjects she had never studied. Now she wished she had at least read the ancient texts about the afterlife. They might be completely wrong, but even so they might have given her so idea of what to expect.

She shrugged helplessly. Not much use in worrying about that now. She'd retrieve her sword, get as far away from Karandren as possible, and try to find someone who could tell her what happened next. The two of them couldn't be the only people in the entire afterlife.

At last Saungrafn came free of the ice. It happened to suddenly that Diarnlan lost her balance. She staggered back and fell on the ice with a startled yelp. Luckily she dropped the sword as she fell. She didn't particularly want to find out what would happen if she accidentally stabbed herself here.

Diarnlan picked up her sword and scrambled to her feet. She pointedly refused to look back at the tree. If he was still there Karandren couldn't have missed seeing her fall. No need to add to her embarrassment by seeing him laugh at her.

She turned and looked towards the other side of the lake. If this had really been Sólbjǫrgvegr the other bank would be clearly visible. Behind it there would be a mountain range. Diarnlan had created that mountain range to look just like a picture she'd seen in a book. It had been the first thing she added to her realm. In fact everything in Sólbjǫrgvegr was based on things she'd seen in illustrations. She had been very proud of all her hard work once.

Now that this strange place had the audacity to look like her realm, she wasn't nearly as proud of it as she had been. Especially not when it was just similar enough to Sólbjǫrgvegr to make the differences all the more jarring. There was no other bank. Nor could she see any mountains. The frozen lake stretched on and on into the distance until it looked more like a frozen sea.

Deep in her chest her magic flickered back into existence. Saungrafn's hilt turned warm in her hand. Diarnlan almost dropped it in shock. She had no time to recover from that surprise when the world became blurred like a picture seen through a dirty window.

"What's happening?" Diarnlan yelped, too startled to care that there was only one person around to answer -- and he was the last person she wanted to answer.

In the distance she heard a high-pitched, childlike scream. Then the world cracked like a broken mirror. Blackness swept over her like a wave. All light and noises vanished. There was only the blackness and the silence and the feeling of being completely alone.

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Diarnlan awoke with a scream.

When she calmed down enough to take stock of the situation, she discovered that the darkness around her had a very simple explanation. She'd pulled her quilt over her head. She pushed it away and winced in the unexpectedly bright light. Unexpectedly colourful light, too. There had been light in the strange realm, yes, but it was a white and cold sort of light. Even the glowing tree hadn't given much colour to the place.

Diarnlan's thoughts ground to a halt. She stared around at her own bedroom. Not her bedroom in the palace, but her much smaller, more cluttered bedroom in her old house by the beach. She grabbed fistfuls of the old patchwork quilt her mother had given her. It felt as soft and warm and real as it had so many years ago. She scrambled out of bed and promptly tripped over her old slippers. At the same time she noticed she was wearing an old pair of pyjamas.

She screamed again. Loudly and for as long as she could. She only stopped when her breath ran out. That confirmed two things. One, she needed to breathe. Two, her throat hurt after all that screaming.

There was only one way to deal with this situation. She would have to think this through logically. But first she needed a cup of tea.

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No one who had ever attended Laoivere Academy would ever forget that infernal bell. It clanged to wake everyone up, it clanged to call them to meals, it clanged when lessons began, it clanged when there was an emergency -- real or imagined -- and sometimes it even clanged when a stray spell hit it. The noise it made could never be described. It was like a creature being tortured at the same time as a construction crew smashed rocks with sledge-hammers. Mentioning it to former students would prompt anguished groans. Current students spent much of their time planning to destroy the damned thing.

Karandren jumped violently at the first terrible crash. The world turned upside and rolled over several times. When it stopped spinning he found himself on a wooden floor, tangled up in a patchwork quilt, staring up at a white ceiling.

He blinked woozily. The floorboards remained solid and warm beneath him. The ceiling stubbornly refused to disappear. It was an all-too-familiar ceiling. He'd stared up at it every morning for the better part of a year. Ever since he'd been given his own, very small, bedroom at the academy, in fact.

(Officially he'd been given that room as punishment for fighting with the other boys in his old dorm. Unofficially he'd been hastily shoved out of the dorm after a boy tried to sneak up on him and temporarily lost his eyes for his troubles. Not his eyesight, his eyes. Karandren was still rather proud of that curse. It took a lot of effort to invent and to make sure it would wear off. He hated all the other students, but he didn't want to be expelled for permanently harming them.)

Why does hell look like my old room? he wondered, still dazed from his rude awakening.

First it looked like Diarnlan's realm. Now it looked like a room in the academy. Maybe this wasn't hell at all. All of Avallot's religions must have got it wrong. There wasn't actually any punishment for him after death.

Outside the bell clanged again. Karandren changed his mind. This really must be hell, and that infernal racket was part of his torment.

The floorboards shook. Ever so slightly at first, then with more force. Karandren jumped to his feet with a yelp. He promptly got tangled up in his quilt and fell down again. This time he had the luck to land on the bed. It took him a moment to realise that no, the world wasn't about to disintegrate around him and hurl him somewhere else again. That was just the reverberation of fifty pairs of feet traipsing down to the dining room.

Karandren got up and reached for the door. The room was so small that his arms were long enough to reach the doorknob from where he was seated on the bed -- or rather, they had been long enough when he died. His arms had somehow shrunk since he arrived here. In fact his entire body had suddenly become much smaller than it should be. He tried to step forward, found his balance was completely off, stumbled on his bizarrely short legs, and fell against the door with a startled squawk. It quickly turned to a pained groan as his chin collided with the wood.

When the teachers chose Karandren's new room for him they hadn't been worried about giving him much space. They'd converted a disused storage room into a makeshift bedroom. It had enough room for a small bed, a smaller chest of drawers that was only just large enough for his clothes, and a tiny window above the bed. It certainly didn't have a mirror. Karandren had never needed one before. If he wanted to check his reflection, there were plenty of mirrors in the halls, classrooms, and bathrooms. For the first time in his life he regretted not putting a mirror in his room. Even a small one would do. He had an uneasy suspicion of what was happening. He just needed a mirror to check.

Conjuring a mirror should have been easy for someone with his magical powers. Karandren pictured a mirror. His mind settled on, of all things, the long and narrow mirror that had hung in Diarnlan's living room. He remembered every detail about it, right down to the small scrapes on the frame and the spots on the glass. Then he tried to conjure a replica of it. His magic created the faintest outline of the mirror. Then it disappeared.

Karandren tried and tried. Not only could he not conjure up a mirror, he found he didn't have nearly as much magic as he should have. The dark magic he had studied for so many years had disappeared. He hadn't had so little magic since...

Since he was fourteen. Since he first became Diarnlan's pupil. Since he left the academy. His suspicion became more and more certain.

He scrambled onto the bed and tried to reach the window. It wasn't as good as a mirror, but he might be able to catch a glimpse of his reflection. He failed. Not only could he not see his reflection, he couldn't even reach the window. When he stood on tiptoe he was still too short.

Karandren had experienced his most dramatic growth spurt when he was fifteen. During his time at the academy he was one of the shortest boys in his class -- something the other students never failed to remind him of. After he was exiled, almost overnight he shot up like a beanstalk. His clumsy attempts to get used to his new height were still etched in his memory. If there was anything that could possibly be broken, tripped over, or collided with, then he broke it, tripped over it, or collided with it. Sometimes he did all three at once. So when he found himself unable to reach a window that should have been level with his shoulders, Karandren knew there was something wrong. Combine that with all the other things wrong with this situation, and it painted a very disturbing picture.

The bell finally stopped its horrific racket. From the dining hall came the sounds of the students having their breakfast. He would be missed soon. Someone would come to see why he wasn't at breakfast. What could he tell them? "Sorry I'm late. I'm actually over ninety years old. I died yesterday and woke up in my fourteen-year-old body. You can see why I didn't feel like breakfast after that."

If he said that, he'd be shipped off to the mind healer before he could say "time travel".

Karandren took a deep breath. He climbed down from the bed and walked slowly over to the door. Each step took much more consideration than normal. He felt like he was fifteen again and one false move away from falling over his own feet.

Carefully he opened the door. He sidled around it gingerly. Only when he made it into the hallway without tripping did he finally relax.

The whole way down to the dining room he told himself, All I have to do is get through breakfast. I can hide somewhere and find a way to reverse this afterwards. How hard can it be?