Totentanz

Book 2 Chapter IV: Der Waffenstillstand

Warning: contains violence and major character injury played for laughs. (Now there's a phrase I never thought I'd write!)

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."