by nobody103
Being an eagle, Zorian decided, was awesome. Weird, but awesome.
He flapped his wings a couple of times to change directions, wobbling dangerously for a moment. He still wasn't much of a flier, truth be told, and the less told about his landings the better. Thankfully, big birds like eagles spent most of their time in the air gliding and catching air currents, so he could get by. He fixed his eyes forward, in the direction of where 'Iasku Mansion' was supposed to be and set off into the wilderness.
Flying over trees got boring pretty fast, though, even with ridiculously enhanced eyesight – the leafy canopy of the forest obscured the surface from scrutiny pretty effectively, so there was nothing to see for the most part. He could see snow-capped mountains in the distance – the infamous Winter Mountains that dominated the landscape of central Altazia, which were said to be the source of all ice and snow by some – an icy, merciless heart of winter that woke up once a year to cover the land in frost until it is inevitably beaten back by the forces of summer, winter giving way to spring.
Zorian would like to call that superstition, but for all he knew there could actually be a kernel of truth in that, like an insanely-powerful ice elemental living there or something. There was very little known about the mountains, largely because of how dangerous they were – exploring them was about as safe as trying to map lower reaches of the Dungeon, and not nearly as rewarding.
Finally, Zorian approached his destination. He had been worried he would miss the spot, since he didn't have a map and everything sort of looked the same to him from his vantage point, but he needn't have worried. Iasku Mansion was very obvious and easy to spot. It wasn't, like he suspected, some inconspicuous clearing or standing stone that Vazen and Sudomir used as a drop-off point. It was, in fact, an actual mansion.
Zorian circled around the building a few times, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. The mansion gleamed white in a sea of green, somewhat worn down by the ravages of age and nature but clearly livable and cared for. Aside from the mansion, there was also a small warehouse attached. The warehouse appeared to be of much more recent construction, however – it had no moss on the roof, there were no cracks on the walls that his enhanced eyes could see, and it was far more blocky and utilitarian in construction.
Zorian had no idea why somebody would build this thing here. If it was a fort, or an observation tower he could understand… but who would want to build a luxury dwelling this isolated and exposed to the dangers of the north? Sadly, his contemplation was interrupted when the crows that dotted the trees around the mansion took exception to his presence and a hundred angry caws filled the air.
Zorian focused on them momentarily. Though the birds were small and distant, the eyes he currently possessed had no problem in discerning their features. They weren't crows. They were larger, and their pitch black feathers had small red decorations and an almost metallic sheen to them.
Iron beaks. The hell-birds of the north. Zorian didn't fancy his chances against one of those in this form, much less against the huge flock stationed around the mansion. Though now that he thought about it, he could probably cast magic missile in this form now, couldn't he? He might be able to bring down a couple of them before the rest tore him apart, then. That wouldn't get him anything, though, so he stopped circling around the mansion and put some distance between himself and the iron beaks until they finally stopped making noise and making threatening gestures.
He wondered what he had done to upset them so much. He supposed they just didn't like a large predator circling menacingly around them.
Well no matter. Landing right next to the mansion would have been a poor idea anyway. Very exposed, and probably warded too.
He searched the surrounding area for an open space he could land at without breaking his neck (transfer of injuries between real and shapeshifted forms was weird and inconsistent, but Lukav assured him that being killed in one form means you're definitely dead in the other as well) and finally found a clearing some distance to the west of the mansion. A little bit farther than he had hoped for, but beggars can't be choosers.
After a frankly embarrassing landing that saw him face-plant into the grass, Zorian transformed back into human form and spent several minutes memorizing the place so he could use it as an arrival point for future teleports.
That done, he set off towards the mansion, hoping to get a closer look. He already missed the eagle's awesome eyesight, but some things were better done from the ground and this way he would actually be able to teleport away from danger and make himself invisible. As far as he knew, iron beaks had no magical senses, so an optical cloak should be enough to evade their attention.
He was right – the iron beaks took no notice of him while he inched closer to the mansion, cloaked in an optical cloak and an aura of silence. Before actually scouting the place, however, a pack of winter wolves burst into the scene, led by a particularly huge specimen. Unlike the rest of the pack, the alpha didn't have a white pelt. His was silver and shiny, and his mind felt different from the rest. Stronger, deeper, more complex. Sapient.
Zorian stood frozen, watching the group with dread. Twenty-two winter wolves led by an unknown super-special sapient variant. Fuck, he just had to push his luck, didn't he? No way would they be fooled by his spells, considering how sensitive canine noses were…
Except… they kind of were fooled. At one point the Silver One suddenly stopped and started scanning the tree line, and Zorian's heart skipped when its eyes briefly passed over Zorian's location, but then the moment was gone and the pack moved on and disappeared somewhere on the other side of the mansion.
A minute later, when he was sure they were gone, Zorian slowly retreated into the surrounding forest and teleported away.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian decided to leave the Iasku Mansion alone for the moment. He was virtually certain they were connected to the Ibasan invaders now, and definitely intended to get to the bottom of that place at some point. However, he had a feeling that investigating the mansion as he was now would probably involve a lot of dying. Plus, he had a hunch that the mayor was a necromancer, and definitely had one under employ even if he wasn't, so losing a battle there might have more serious consequences than a premature restart. No, if he wanted to go there he had to finish Alanic's lessons first and greatly increase his combat skills, at minimum.
Instead, now that his time with Alanic was coming to an end, he had to step up his effort to improve his combat magic so he could go talk to the other aranea tribes and learn the secrets of their mind arts. There were a lot of reasons why that was important, but the one that drove him the most was the possibility of unlocking the matriarch's memory packet that still remained in his mind.
The memory packet wouldn't last forever, Zorian knew. It was stable for now, the matriarch having pulled all the stops to make it as resilient and durable as possible, but it would unravel and fail in time, and all the memories locked within would be gone. If Zorian wanted to fill in the blanks left in the matriarch's last message and understand what made her reach the decisions she did, he had to gain access to that knowledge.
He had no delusions it was going to be easy. For one thing the other aranean tribes were in no way guaranteed to be friendly, and even if they were, there was no reason for them to actually teach a random human their secrets. And even if he could secure their cooperation, the memories of something as alien as the aranea were bound to be a chore to interpret. And even if he could master that, he still only had one shot at unravelling the memory packet without ruining the content or triggering whatever defenses the matriarch installed to prevent him from doing just that.
But that was a matter for the future – right now he didn't feel very confident walking into a possibly unfriendly aranean hive. Since he didn't feel like testing his mind magic against the masters of the craft, his current plan of dealing with hostile or treacherous aranea basically boiled down to quick-casting 'mind shield' and burning everything in sight
via more conventional magic. Better combat skills were a must for that plan to work, though.
As it happened, he had something that should advance his combat skills, as well as make up for the money he lost to Lukav when he bought those two 'eagle transformation' potions – dungeon delving! He had basically ignored the dungeon entrance at Knyazov Dveri due to being sidetracked by the disappearance of local soul mages and Alanic's lessons, but there was no reason to continue to do so anymore. Most of the wildlife around Knyazov Dveri had ceased to be a challenge at this point, anyway.
Thus, two days after his hasty retreat from the Iasku Mansion, Zorian walked over to the official entrance to the dungeons beneath Knyazov Dveri and requested a permit to descend into its depths. It didn't cost any money, thankfully, and it was really nothing more than a formality to make sure you understood what you were getting into.
"Just remember, this part of the dungeon has never been pacified properly," the man behind the counter told him, handing him a permit card that he had to show to the guards to be let through. "It means there are greater riches to be found down there, but also that things are much more dangerous. People disappear down there all time. Nobody is going to look for you unless you join one of the local delver guild. Which I personally recommend to young mages such as you."
Zorian gave the man a non-committal hum and left, descending below on a long spiral staircase until he reached a small natural cavern that housed a small town. The inhabitants of the city above called it Delver Village, though officially it was just an extension of Knyazov Dveri. Not many people actually lived here – the buildings consisted mostly of guildhouses and businesses catering to dungeon delvers.
He had no intention of joining any of the guilds. Last time he checked they didn't let new members like him out in the field for at least several months after they joined, which made them pretty much useless to someone in his situation. He did understand the logic of it – you didn't want your new, inexperienced new members to get horribly murdered out in the tunnels, and very few mages were particularly capable at his age – but that didn't make them any less useless to him. He also didn't have any money to buy anything from the shops, so he didn't remain in the settlement for long. The people there were jerks anyway, asking for money just to answer basic questions or demanding that he joins their guild before they would divulge any 'secrets'. Thank the gods he could just read the answers out of their mind anyway.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian stared at the patch of glowing mushrooms at the corner of a largish cave he encountered in his wanderings through the cave system under Knyazov Dveri. It appeared to be a normal patch of giant glowing mushrooms, little different from the ones he encountered elsewhere around here, but he knew better. He wasn't fooled. His mind sense clearly told him there was an animal mind behind that mushroom… no wait, the mushroom itself had a mind? An illusion? Or some weird intelligent mushroom?
Deciding that it didn't matter, Zorian leveled the combat staff he'd made for himself and fired an incineration ray at the 'mushroom'. If he had learned anything in the two weeks he had spent down here, it was that absolutely everything wanted to kill and eat him – and not necessarily in that order. The rock mites, for instance, wanted to paralyze you and lay their eggs into your still living body so their larvae could eat you alive from the inside out. Anyway, the point was that striking first was common sense with these things, and he had no intention of getting closer to the mushroom impersonator.
Sure enough, the moment it was hit by the ray of fire, the 'mushroom' immediately unraveled into a large tentacled form of the tunnel octopus. Figures. The ability of those things to mimic both the color and texture of their surroundings was as impressive as it was annoying to deal with. This one was out of luck, though. Caught off guard by the devastating fire attack, it flailed its tentacles about briefly in panic before collapsing dead on the floor of the cave.
Zorian threw a rock at it to make sure it was not faking it, and then relaxed. He would have probably died to one of those by now if he didn't have his mind sense – it was, without a doubt, his main advantage compared to the other dungeon delvers. Thanks to it, he was able to evade the javelin worm ambush sites, tunnel octopuses and other hidden dangers to reach the richer, less exploited lower areas like this one. No wonder Taiven had been so excited about having someone with that ability in her team, back when she had first found out about it.
He instructed the floating spheres of light around him to scatter around the cavern and slowly inspected the walls for any sign of crystal and strange minerals. In general, crystalized mana seemed to be a much better moneymaker than hunting creatures for parts, at least if you could access virgin areas like this one. Crystallized mana also had the benefit of being, well, static. If he found some in a particular place on this restart, it stood to reason that it should also be there for every subsequent one as well. That meant that, if he could map out where they were over several restarts, he should be able to blitz through a bunch of known sites in just a few hours and get an enormous cash infusion at the beginning of every new restart. Especially if he learned how to filter through Dungeon interference and became able to teleport while inside it.
Sadly, his inspection found nothing in this cavern. Looking at the charred tunnel octopus corpse, Zorian considered the possibility of just harvesting its brain and beak (the most valuable parts of it by far) and returning to the surface. He had already found two large lumps of crystalized mana and several small ones, so this trip was already a smashing success, and continuing further would mean going deeper into dungeon, with all the danger that implied.
He continued on – not like he was ever really in danger thus far so even if the danger jumped up a notch he should… be…
Zorian rounded a corner and came face-to-face, so to speak, with some kind of floating pink ooze covered with eyes. It glowed, threads of light dancing throughout its smoky, translucent bulk, and its form writhed and shifted chaotically, ripples and pseudopods growing and retracting from moment to moment. For a moment it appeared to have not noticed him, its countless eyes – each its own color and shade – blinking and swiveling in their sockets with no rhyme or reason. But that moment passed quickly and its many eyes turned towards him, some of them extending on pseudopods so the creature could focus them on Zorian properly…
Zorian's eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
"Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"
Zorian looked at his grinning little sister incredulously. What? But he was just-
"Oh come on!" Zorian groaned, burying his face in his hands. "That's it!? It just looked at me and I died? What kind of absurd ability is that!?"
"Umm…" Kirielle said.
"Forget I said anything," Zorian said, giving Kirielle a brief hug before rising to his feet. Kirielle refused to let go, clinging to him like a barnacle, so he just carried her around as he walked to his bookshelf and retrieved his Compendium of Dungeon Denizens, volume four, and began leafing through it. "I was just having a dream, that's all."
"What kind of dream?" Kirielle asked curiously.
"I was going to be rich, and then I got killed by an… eyebeast?" Zorian said, as he looked at the description in the book. Even the name was stupid. Ugh.
"Oh," Kirielle said. "A nice dream that ends in a nightmare. I hate those."
"Me too, Kirielle. Me too," Zorian said, snapping the book shut and placing it back on the shelf. The description in the book told him nothing useful about the damn thing. 'Beware its deadly eyes' indeed.
He thought about casting the marker detection spell again, but what would be the point? It never detected more than two markers in existence. Or less for that matter. At this point it was obvious that this was all it was ever going to show.
Whatever way Red Robe used to get into the time loop obviously wasn't identical to the one used by Zach and Zorian.
As for Zach, his movements indicated that he always opened the time loop by hightailing out of Cyoria. The direction was not consistent, though, and he seemed to wander around randomly around Eldemar during each time loop. He wondered what that was about. Clearly the boy was avoiding Cyoria, just like Zorian was, but beyond that he could not figure out what Zach's goal was – Zorian had tried placing the locations Zach visited on a map and found no pattern he could see in it.
Whatever. Zach will be Zach. He had his own, more pressing problems to worry about at the moment.
"Right. Kiri, could you perhaps let go of me now?"
Chapter 35
Mistakes Have Been Made
'The beginning of the restart is always the most annoying part of the time loop,' Zorian mused quietly, standing on one of the arrival platforms in Cirin's train station. He pulled a watch out of his pocket and inspected it for a minute before putting it back with a sigh. The train was late. The train was always late, because this was less than a day into the restart and there hadn't really been time for anything important to diverge yet.