Time skipped backward.
The vasuthant jerked Bareris into the center of its shifting darkness. Pain burned through him. The creature was trying to poison him with the energy of undeath. Since he was undead too, the effect wasn't as devastating as it would have been to a living man, but it might well prove lethal over time.
It was difficult even to see the arm gripping him now that the vasuthant had merged it with the central cloud. Bareris cut at the place where he judged it ought to be, but even if he was right this time, the stroke had no apparent effect. Another burst of agony jolted him, and the relentless constriction around his waist threatened to pinch him in two.
Just barely visible through the murk, Mirror called to his god and slashed his sword through a portion of the vasuthant's body. Its shadowy core seethed, and the ring of pressure around Bareris's torso loosened.
Bareris bellowed a war cry and swung his sword. The tentacle frayed from existence, dropping him to the cavern floor. Still inside the animate darkness, he cut at it repeatedly until it flowed away and uncovered him.
Without taking his eyes off the thing, Bareris asked, 'Are we winning?'
'I don't…'
'… know,' Mirror replied. 'I only ever fought one vasuthant, and this one's bigger and more powerful.'
So they really had precious little idea what they were facing. But Bareris surmised he needed some mystical defense in place to counter the creature's manifest ability to revisit a moment that hadn't worked out as it would have preferred. He sang, and eight more Barerises sprang into existence around him, each with a stance and facial expression identical to his own.
Just in time too, for an instant later the vasuthant surged forward like a towering black wave.
A tentacle flailed, and one of the illusory doubles burst like a soap bubble at its touch. Bareris stepped in and cut the vasuthant.
He grinned a wolfish grin. Perhaps he'd hit on a winning tactic.
Then one of his duplicates vanished without the vasuthant snagging it with one of its limbs or making any other form of visible attack. It was a pointed reminder that the entity still possessed capabilities he didn't understand.
Still, he liked his and Mirror's chances better than he had before, partly because when the vasuthant obliterated all his illusory doubles, he could always sing up another batch.
He and his companion battled on, often with sword strokes, sometimes with their mystical abilities. Bareris chanted to leech the strength out of the vasuthant much as it had tried to do to him. Mirror hammered it with flares of celestial power. Meanwhile, time lurched and stuttered.
The latter effect was disorienting and obliged them to defend themselves from many of the vasuthant's most cunning attacks not once but twice. Still, they kept the living darkness from doing grievous harm to them, while their attacks withered bits of it.
Bareris could only hope they were cutting and burning away enough to matter. Since the thing was merely churning blackness floating in blackness, he still couldn't tell.
But it seemed a good sign when the creature abruptly flowed back beyond the reach of its opponents' swords. Bareris wondered if it had finally had enough, if it might ooze into some hole and let him and Mirror pass. Then he felt a frigid prickling on his skin. Power was accumulating in the air, as if an adept like Lallara or Lauzoril were working a particularly potent spell.
Mirror apparently felt it too, for he charged. Flanked by a pair of duplicates, the remnants of the third group he'd conjured, Bareris drew breath to shout.
Neither he nor the ghost managed to act in time to balk the vasuthant. Something exploded from it, a force neither visible, audible, nor tangible, but delivering a psychic shock so overwhelming that it froze both its adversaries in place.
Or perhaps it was simply the realization of what the vasuthant had wrought that paralyzed them. For Bareris once again had a beating heart in his chest and a glow of warmth in his flesh. He was once again the Mulan youth growing up in the slums of Bezantur.
Which meant Tammith was waiting for him there. He had yet to make the disastrous choice that led to her destruction.
He told himself it was nonsense. Though he sensed his transformation was more than mere deception, reason said it couldn't last or change the past even if it did. Still, he was slow to move, his two minds, his two realities, pulling him in opposite directions.
Beside him, Mirror, now a figure of solid flesh, looked just as stupefied. He had no guilt or anguish over an abused and murdered lover to transfix him, or if he did, he'd never told Bareris about her. But no doubt the sudden restoration of his maimed mind and memory and deliverance from the endless hollow ache of undeath were equally overpowering. That, or the excruciating comprehension that his resurrection was only temporary.
Churning and coiling, the vasuthant rushed forward. Retreating, Bareris sang to raise a curtain of fire, or at least a semblance of it, between his foe and himself.
He stumbled over the phrasing, perhaps because it was a powerful, difficult spell, and the boy whose form he now wore and whose intrusive thoughts were addling his own had yet to master it.
The vasuthant reached for him, and he felt a sick near-certainty that its power had diminished his martial skills as well, that he could no longer wield his sword well enough to fend it off. He was about to perish with Szass Tam unpunished and Tammith unavenged.
Then the vasuthant's arms whirled past him to reach for Mirror instead, and when Bareris followed the motion, he understood why. Mirror had already turned back into a ghost, which meant that at the moment, he posed a greater threat to their adversary.
Mirror rattled off an invocation, and his murky blade shined so brightly that Bareris had to squint to look at it. The phantom charged the vasuthant with the weapon extended like a lance.
Power groaned through the air. With a snapping sound, several jagged cracks opened in the section of cavern floor between Mirror and the vasuthant. Then shadow swirled around the ghost, almost obscuring his running form, dimming the light of his sword, and enclosing him in a sphere of gloom. Mirror froze midstride, immobile as a statue.
The vasuthant swung its tentacles back toward Bareris. He retreated, and the creature snatched and destroyed one of the remaining duplicates.
Then Bareris's heart stopped pounding, and for an instant, he felt horribly cold. He was undead once more and suffered an irrational pang of loss, even though he needed all his abilities to have any hope of survival. Without Mirror fighting beside him, that hope was slim enough as it was.
The last of his doubles vanished.
Bareris just had time to fling up his arms to protect his head before he crashed into the cavern ceiling. The collision hurt but didn't cripple or stun him, and he sang the word that would slow his fall and spare him a second impact.
But unfortunately, the charm didn't allow him to control where he landed. The vasuthant flowed underneath him, and he dropped into its black, fuming core. At once pain stabbed him, and as the nearly invisible arms snaked at him from every side, wrapping around him, the torment intensified, even as it did him serious harm.
He spun, dodged, and struck. Each successful evasion or cut bought him another moment of existence but nothing more, because the vasuthant formed new arms as fast as he destroyed them. Meanwhile, the passing instants shuffled and repeated themselves until he thought the confusion of that alone might break his mind.
Standing in the center of the living darkness, he was also standing at the heart of the wound in time, and the more the creature exerted its powers, the more grievous that injury became. When he realized that, something-
