Cloak Games: Truth Chain

by Jonathan Moeller

  It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t understand how I had done that. I knew the limits of my magical strength. I could cast a lightning globe, but not one powerful enough to electrocute three or four wraithwolves at once. I could Cloak, but I certainly couldn’t move around while wrapped in the Cloaking spell.

  No. Wait. That wasn’t right.

  Those had been my limitations a hundred and two years ago when I had been imprisoned here.

  There had been time to practice since then.

  I was so staggered by the realization that I didn’t see the cytospawn overhead. Its tentacles wrapped around me and ripped my head off.

  ###

  When I woke up on Day 37,416, I didn’t go on the warpath. I didn’t set anything on fire or descend to the tunnels and start killing. Instead, I walked up the main street, went into the diner, and sat down. Yesterday’s realization had shocked me into something like…well, I wouldn’t call it sanity, but my brain felt a lot clearer than it had for a long time.

  I needed to think.

  I walked up the main street to the diner and started to summon magic to blast the door off the hinges. Instead, I stopped myself, opened the door, and sat down at one of the cheap tables, staring out the window at the street.

  I really wanted…

  Coffee. That was it. I wanted coffee. Of course, there wasn’t any coffee to be had here. I hadn’t drunk any coffee in over a hundred years. For that matter, I hadn’t eaten anything in just as long. The food here turned to mist whenever I tried to eat it.

  I never lived long enough to worry about starving to death or dying of thirst.

  I leaned back in the chair, put my shoes on the table, closed my eyes, and folded my hands against the back of my head. I had about six hours before the anthrophages got bored and came looking for me.

  That would give me time to think things through, and I hadn’t done that in a very long time.

  Decades, really.

  I had been so deranged with the pain and the fury, so filled with rage and hatred, that I hadn’t noticed the obvious. The town never changed. After every death, it reset and was just like new.

  But I wasn’t. I had gone nuts, for one thing.

  But after a hundred and two years of fighting creatures from the Shadowlands every day, after a hundred and two years of casting dozens or even hundreds of spells a day…I had become a stronger wizard.

  A much stronger wizard.

  How much stronger?

  I realized that I didn’t know. My memories were odd. I supposed I was a hundred and twenty-three years old now, though thanks to the twisted magic of this place, I hadn’t aged a day. I could remember everything that happened before July 19th, Conquest Year 315 well enough. I could remember my first year in this hell with reasonable clarity. After that…my memory was like one giant bloody wound, an endless montage of torment and blood and torn flesh and pain, pain, pain…

  I forced myself not to think about it. If I did, I was going to lose it again, and I needed to think clearly.

  The first step to thinking clearly was to figure out how much stronger I had become. I thought I had a good grasp of my magical skills, but that assessment was a century out of date. Back then, I had been able to Cloak, but I couldn’t move while holding the spell in place, and I had been able to cast some elemental spells, but not very many before my strength gave out.

  Well. No time like the present to find out how I had changed, right?

  “And it’s not like I’ve got anything but time,” I announced to the empty diner.

  No one answered. God, I really wanted some coffee.

  I pushed off the table, walked back to the main street, and set out to discover how much stronger I had become.

  I cast the Cloak spell and started walking. As I did, I counted off the seconds in my head. Having an accurate time sense is a vital skill for a thief, and I knew how to keep a precise count. I walked up one end of the street, back down to the gas station and the grain silos, and back up the main street again.

  All the while I held the Cloaking spell with an increasing sense of bewilderment.

  This should have been harder. It used to be harder. Casting the Cloak spell had been like holding a heavy barbell over my head. I could do it, but the effort took all my concentration, and I couldn’t hold it for long. Now it felt…well, it hadn’t gotten easier, but I had gotten stronger, and I found that I could walk and even run with ease while invisible.

  Too bad no guns worked here. I could have turned invisible and methodically shot every single creature in the town.

  At about five hundred and twenty-three seconds, the effort became too much, and I dropped the Cloak spell. I had been able to stay Cloaked for nearly nine minutes, and I had done it while moving around. If I had been able to do that a hundred years ago, most of my jobs for Lord Morvilind would have been a cakewalk.

  I wondered if Morvilind was still alive. No doubt he had found a way to survive Castomyr’s disaster. Did the High Queen still rule Earth? Nicholas Connor and the Rebels had prepared a plan to use Castomyr’s chaos to seize control of Earth, but I suppose Nicholas and all his friends had been dead for decades. Either the High Queen still ruled Earth, or the successor to whatever dystopian government Nicholas and his psycho friends had set up was still in charge.

  Whatever had happened had happened a century ago, and it was done and over. None of it mattered anymore. What mattered was breaking out of here and making Arvalaeon pay for what he had done.

  I cast the fire sphere spell. It whirled into existence above my hand, so hot I could melt steel with it. My arm darted out, and the sphere hurtled forward. At my command, it shot through one car window, and then another, and another, setting their interiors ablaze, and the globe burned through eight cars before the power drained away.

  I had never been able to do that before.

  I cast another spell, focusing my will into a shove of telekinetic force. I hit one of the burning cars hard enough to flip it onto its roof, glass shattering and spilling across the street. Curious, I walked to one of the undamaged cars, cast the spell for telekinetic gauntlets, squatted, and gripped the bottom of the car’s front door.

  Then I straightened up, heaving as I did.

  The strength of the telekinetic gauntlets flipped the car onto its roof.

  “Okay,” I said. “That could be useful.”

  What else could I do?

  I strode to the middle of the street and cast the spell for the ice wall. I had used it thousands of times in the tunnels, and I had gotten better with it. With a single spell, I raised a wall of ice twelve feet high, thirty feet wide, and one foot thick. I could even shape the ice as I created it, twisting it into a cylinder or a horseshoe. Unfortunately, I couldn’t freeze anyone solid, but I supposed I could imprison someone in the cylinder.

  If I wanted to kill someone with ice, I could use the ice spike spell for that. When I had learned it a century past, the ice spikes I had cast looked like knives. Now they looked like the sort of giant spears carried by horsemen in old movies about medieval times or whatever. If three anthrophages stood in a row, I could probably impale them all at once.

  My skill with the lightning globe spell had improved. I could summon three of them at once, and they spun around me in a circle, shooting wherever I directed. I released the globes I had summoned and sent them hurtling into a pickup truck, and watched as the truck sparked and flared and caught fire.

  I looked over the fires I had just set, a little astonished. I had used a lot of magical power. It should have left me an exhausted heap upon the ground. Instead, I felt…oh, just a little tired. Like I had carried two or three heavy boxes up the stairs. Or I had just finished the first mile of a nine-mile run. That kind of tired.

  I looked towards the dark towers of the cathedral, stark against the burning sky.

  Could I just…walk out of here? Was I powerful enough to do that?

  I shrugged and decided to try. The prospect of dying a
horrible agonizing death didn’t really daunt me. After you’ve done it thirty-seven thousand four hundred fifteen times, well…it doesn’t get any easier, but you sort of get used to it. Maybe that’s both the true strength and the true horror of the human condition.

  We can get used to nearly anything.

  I left the burning wreckage on the main street and turned the corner onto the residential street where the wraithwolves usually lurked. Four ribbons of mist flowed towards me, but before they solidified into wraithwolves, I cast the Cloak spell and kept walking. A dozen wraithwolves prowled the street, looking for me, but I walked past them.

  A short time later I strode up to the cathedral steps, pulled open the door, and stepped into the narthex. The anthrophages all turned to face the opened door, no doubt expecting me to arrive, but they couldn’t see me. I stepped to the side and pressed along the wall, making my way along the perimeter of the narthex. I had realized a long, long time ago that while I retained my memory, the anthrophages and the other creatures of this place lost theirs every time I was killed and a new day began.

  They didn’t realize what I was doing.

  I jogged down the vast stone nave as the anthrophages milled around the door. The rose window blazed before me like a malevolent eye. I hadn’t been in here for a couple of decades, since I had been more focused on my destructive rampages and slaughtering as many creatures as I could kill. Nothing had changed in the time I had been absent.

  I reached the base of the wall, dropped my Cloaking spell, and cast the levitation spell. I floated towards the window, and at once the anthrophages whirled and raced towards me, claws rasping against the stone floor.

  I could levitate faster than I had been able to do a century ago, but the anthrophages were still quicker. I suppose I could have used the telekinetic grip spell to grasp the ceiling and hurl myself up, but it was hard to do that in a vertical line. I would probably just drive myself into the rose window and freeze to death.

  I heaved myself onto the stone frame of the rose window, bracing my shoes against the curve. The anthrophages swarmed up the wall like a tide of ravenous ants, and I had only a few seconds to act.

  I cast the flame sphere spell and flung it into the ice of the window.

  Before, I had only been able to burn a few inches into the ice. This time, the sphere sank nearly two feet into the window, carving a steaming hole the size of my fist. I blinked in astonishment. I had never been able to do that before. Given enough time, I could blast my way through the rose window and back to Earth.

  Unfortunately, the anthrophages didn’t give me that time. They slammed into me, and I lost my balance and plummeted to the cathedral floor.

  At least this time, my death was quick.

  Chapter 9: Shattering

  When I woke up on Day 37,417, I didn’t have a screaming fit. I didn’t have a panic attack or another reaction.

  Instead, I only felt cold.

  And angrier beyond anything I had thought possible.

  People usually think of anger like it's a fire, like heat, but here’s something I learned. It’s possible to be so angry, so filled with hate, that it turns into something like ice. Or it’s like a glacier. Your whole heart and mind become a glacier, and you want nothing more than to grind away the object of your hatred.

  My whole mind and heart were focused on one thing.

  The utter destruction of Lord Inquisitor Arvalaeon.

  And I could do it. I knew I could do it now. After Day 30 had passed a century ago, the despair had been crushing. Russell and the Marneys and Riordan were all dead because I had failed them. I had spent the decades since then lashing out, destroying everything around me, raging like an animal caught in a trap.

  But that had been a long, long time ago.

  Everyone I had ever loved had been dead for decades, but I was still caught in the trap. But the way out of the trap wasn’t blind rage. The fury had made me strong, but fury alone wouldn’t solve anything.

  Disciplined, orderly, controlled fury, that was the way out.

  My fire spell had burned two feet into the window, and I thought it was about six or seven feet thick. If I hit it a few dozen times, I would blast through it and return to Earth. So, I had two options. I could either find a way to kill all the anthrophages in the cathedral and obtain the time to burn through the window, or I could become strong enough to destroy the window with a single spell.

  I thought either way might be possible. I had mowed down all those anthrophages in the street, and the sheer shock of it had snapped me back to something that sort of resembled lucidity. Could I do the same thing in the cathedral? If I could fight my way through all those anthrophages and win, I could melt through the window without interruption.

  And if that didn’t work, I would just have to keep practicing.

  Because I finally understood the truth of this hellish place. I had all the time I needed to practice and become stronger. Already I was far stronger than I had been when Arvalaeon had dumped me in here and forgotten about me, and that strength and skill had come from spending decades lashing out in pain and rage. How much stronger could I become if I went about it systematically?

  Sure, it was going to get me killed, but I had already died nearly forty thousand times. At this point, another few thousand deaths wouldn’t make much difference. Perhaps if I kept at this long enough, I would become powerful enough to kill every single damned creature in this place, and rip it apart with my bare hands.

  I set to work, testing the limits of my abilities.

  I took the semi from behind the grain silo again, pushed the engine to maximum, and rammed it into the cathedral, blasting through the narthex and into the nave. That killed a lot of anthrophages, and I blasted through a lot more of them, killing them with fire and lightning and ice and telekinetic bursts. I levitated up to the rose window and started hurling fire at it, but the anthrophages swarmed up and killed me before I could burn all the way through it.

  I did that over and over for a couple of months, trying variations on the same tactics, but the end results were always the same. I killed a lot of anthrophages, but I couldn’t kill them all, and they always took me down before I could get through the window. The problem was that I couldn’t Cloak myself and cast another spell at the same time. If I had been able to do that, I could have gotten through the window easily.

  Instead, I needed a new plan, and as I experimented and died over and over, and I realized the plan had to have two parts.

  First, I had to become even stronger and more skilled, especially with the fire sphere spell. Burning a hole two feet deep and a few inches wide into the ice wasn’t good enough. I needed to do a lot more damage to the rose window with a single spell.

  Second, I needed to kill way more of the anthrophages. Left uninterrupted, I would have been able to chisel through the window in a few minutes. If I couldn’t find a way to kill all the anthrophages, I needed to find a way to lure them off.

  I sat in the diner and thought it over, wishing I had some coffee. I wondered if there was still coffee on Earth. I could vaguely remember what coffee had tasted like, but it had been a long time.

  Eventually, I sat there long enough that the anthrophages and the wraithwolves came for me, and I killed and killed until they overwhelmed me and I died.

  When I woke up under the clock, I had a new plan.

  It would take some time to implement, but I thought it would work.

  The plan would just take some time to practice.

  Specifically, decades.

  I fell into a routine. Every time I died and woke up under the clock, I spent six hours practicing my spells. I cast every spell I knew, again and again, pushing my skills to the limit. I would burn down half the town, or descend into the tunnels and create a maze of my own to torment the anthrophages. Sometimes I used blasts of telekinetic force to rip down buildings or attack wraithwolves. That actually was kind of fun, in a demented sort of way. I angled the blasts of
telekinetic force to throw the wraithwolves into the air in a high arc, and my record was a blast that picked up a single wraithwolf and sent it tumbling over four houses before it landed.

  That made a mess.

  I would also use the telekinetic grip spell to take running leaps that lifted me from the street and to the rooftops of the houses. I used that to play leapfrog, jumping from house to house and raining death upon the wraithwolves and the anthrophages. One time I miscalculated and dropped onto the street from fifty feet in the air.

  Sadly, that also made a mess.

  Every three weeks, I tried for the cathedral again.

  I used variations on my tactics. Sometimes I Cloaked and ambushed the anthrophages, killing them and Cloaking again until my strength failed and they had me. Other times I used ice walls to seal them in the narthex or cut them off from the rose window. Unfortunately, the anthrophages could climb the walls of ice as easily as they climbed walls of stone, so that didn’t work to keep them away from me. Sometimes I drove the semi into the cathedral, and sometimes I did not.

  And with every day and every death I refined my tactics, I practiced my spells, and I grew stronger.

  This went on for a long time.

  A very long time.

  A lifetime, really.

  ###

  On Day 57,819, I woke up beneath the clock with a strange feeling.

  I straightened up, brushing off my jeans and grimacing at my headache. Odd that the headache still bothered me. I had known pain that made the headache seem like pleasure by comparison. Maybe it was because I had been waking up with the same damn headache every day for the last one hundred and fifty-eight years.

  But the headache wasn’t at the forefront of my attention as I gazed at the main street and the hills outlined against the burning sky.

  Today felt…right. As if I knew exactly what to do. That wasn’t surprising, since I had been here for a century and a half and knew everything about the town. I could navigate the streets and the tunnel system and the forests with my eyes closed.