by nobody103
Estin frowned, clearly taking that as a challenge, before putting one of his palms on the ground in front of him. For a second, nothing happened. And then, without any warning, the ground beneath Chelik opened up like a set of earthen jaws and pulled it into the resulting hole before snapping shut. The poor golem was left with most of his body trapped under the soil, with only its head sticking free.
Edwin stared at the buried golem for a second before glancing uncertainly towards Estin. The other boy inclined his head to the side, smiling faintly, clearly very pleased with himself.
"Okay. Claim disproven," Edwin chuckled awkwardly. "Could you please unbury him so we can move onto further testing?"
Eventually, they did try to bring down the little golem with a collective magic missile barrage and predictably failed. Even Zorian's missiles did not damage Chelik in any way, though hitting the limbs and head could imbalance it and knock it to the ground. Estin tried to hammer it into scrap with one of his earth spheres, but only succeeded in knocking it to the ground and rendering it immobile so long as the sphere was pressing down on it. Kopriva chucked a vial of alchemical acid at it, but this didn't work either. Finally, Briam went ahead and summoned his familiar and had the juvenile fire drake breathe fire at the golem for a while. That at least had some effect, in the sense that the golem ended up visibly heating up as a result. The fire wards weren't able to deal with sustained fire magic, it seemed. Edwin terminated the testing at this point, not wanting to see Chelik actually destroyed.
A satisfactory result, all things considered. The vulnerability to being buried and otherwise restrained was a large and obvious weakness, though, and Zorian was already considering what he could do to overcome it when making golems in the future.
The end of Edwin's golem test ultimately also signaled the end of the current practice session as well, and most people excused themselves and left afterwards. The day of the summer festival was only a few days away, so this was basically the last training session he would have with the practice group. That fact left him strangely sad – he had originally resented the loss of free time that came with the meetings, but the classmates he taught had ended up growing on him a little. It was nice to have someone actually respect his skills and achievements for a change, instead of constantly reminding him about how inadequate he was and how far he still had to go.
He turned towards Raynie, the last person to remain at the training round with him. She didn't look like she intended to excuse herself, so he assumed she wanted to talk to him.
"Yes?" He asked.
"Did you find out anything about your extra soul bits?" she asked.
She was stalling for time, but whatever. No reason not to answer the question.
"Sort of," he said. "I found a few ways to interact with it, but I only know what one of them actually does. Or at least I think I do. I'll try it out soon to make sure."
Yes, it was rather surprising, but apparently the marker actually was designed to be interacted with by its bearer. There were multiple… switches, for lack of a better word, that were clearly meant to do something once they were activated. A good number of them were utterly inert, and did not react at all to his probing, either because he did not know how to interact with them properly or because they were broken in the marker's transfer from Zach to Zorian. A lot of them were perfectly functional, however, and readily responded to his probes, eager to be set off like exuberant little puppies. He shied away from actually experimenting with them, since they gave absolutely no indication what their function was.
All except one. There was one command switch that immediately gave him a vague impression of what it was meant to do when he tried mucking around with it. He planned to test that one at the conclusion of his portal infiltration attempt.
"Make sure to have someone watching over you when you do that," Raynie cautioned. "At the very least they can call for help if you collapse or something."
"I will," Zorian lied. "Now why don't you tell me what's really bothering you."
"It's nothing you can really help me with," she sighed. "I just feel like complaining to someone, I guess. I have no one here to confide to, except for Kiana. My fault, really. I didn't try very hard to make any other friends. I don't want to bother Kiana about this again, so…"
"Well, feel free to complain," Zorian told her. "Is this about your family, perhaps?"
"Yes," she confirmed. "I sent them a letter last week. Asked them if I could come home for the summer festival. They said I wasn't welcome. Well, not really in those words, but I can read between the lines."
Harsh. What did she do to deserve that kind of response? Well, Raynie did say she wanted to complain, so he would probably find out soon. He opted to stay quiet and let her talk.
After a moment of quiet while she collected her thoughts, she started her story.
"The leadership of my tribe is hereditary," she said. "The firstborn son of the current chief inherits the mantle of leadership from his father. Simple enough, but the problem was that my father didn't have a son. My mother had a hard pregnancy when she bore me, and the tribe refused to bring outside healers to help. After I was born, she could conceive no further children. Or at least that's what we all thought for a time. Regardless, it was decided that in the absence of a male heir, even a daughter would do. Nobody wanted a succession crisis."
Hmm, so the tribe accepted a female leader but wasn't too happy with it. Considering the 'hypothetical scenario' she'd asked him about earlier in the restart, he had a feeling he knew where this was going…
"As I grew up, I was constantly told I had to be strong for the tribe," Raynie said. "That I have to work hard and embody the ideals we represented, so that there could be no question as to whether I deserved my position. I never resented that. I was proud of my tribesmen and my parents, for putting so much faith in me. I did my best, and I was good at it. Good enough that, in time, even my staunchest critics had fallen silent. But then mother got pregnant again."
Zorian winced internally. It was a son, wasn't it?
"Nine months later, mother gave birth to the baby boy that my father had always wanted," she said bitterly, confirming his suspicion. "I wasn't sidelined immediately, of course. They had to make sure my brother was not defective in some way before doing something so rash. I had hope for a time that I might succeed in keeping the mantle through superior skill and effort, but of course he ended up being a blasted prodigy. It was clear that he would eventually eclipse me. I… did not take it very well. I did not step down from my position quietly, and some of the tribe members even supported me. Mostly because they felt I had proven myself capable while my brother was still a relative unknown, and the designated heir had never been stripped of their position like that, so the whole thing was a bit questionable. But ultimately, my worst enemy was my own father – I had thought he was proud of me, of all I had accomplished, but in the end he was the one arguing most vehemently that I should move aside so my brother can take the mantle. How could I have possibly won that battle when my own father stood against me?"
"So they don't want you back because they think you're a threat to your brother's legitimacy and the tribe's leader?" Zorian spoke out.
"I am a threat to his legitimacy," Raynie said. "Was. I don't know. I'm not really sure about anything anymore. I feel like nothing I did mattered in the end. What do I even have to live for, now? All my life I was taught to live for the tribe, but I'm not sure I even want to go back there when they finally deign to let me return. What is there waiting for me? I don't think I'll ever be happy living back there."
Zorian studied her for a moment, wondering if he should try and comfort her. She seemed more angry than sad, though, and he had a feeling she wouldn't appreciate such a gesture. Best not to risk it.
"So you being here is your exile, then?" he asked.
"Pretty much," she answered. "Me being here allows them to cement my brother's position without my interference. Plus, me being educated by
outsiders and taught outsider magic destroys whatever shreds of legitimacy I had left."
"I can't understand why they won't let you home for the summer festival, then," Zorian said. "Not that I understand why you'd even want to go back to your father and brother you clearly can't stand, but that's beside the point. The point is that if you've been outmaneuvered that thoroughly, surely there is no harm in letting you go back home for a few days. That seems very petty of them."
"I was a bit of a bitch to my brother the last time I was home," she admitted. "I guess the little shit went crying to our parents, because they've been keeping him away from me ever since. They seem to think there is a risk of me killing him. So insulting."
They kept talking for a while – well, Raynie kept talking, he mostly just listened – but eventually she ran out of steam and just fell quiet for a time before announcing it was late and that she should go. Before she left, however, she told him that she enjoyed their meetings and asked if they could continue meeting like that, even if his original purpose for approaching her had long been fulfilled at this point.
He agreed. Of course he did. And despite her stoic demeanor, he could tell she was very happy to hear that. But the summer festival was just around the corner and she would soon forget any of this ever happened. The next time they met, they would be virtual strangers to each other.
He decided not to befriend Raynie again in the future. Not while the time loop was still in effect, anyway. If he ever managed to get out, though, he told himself that he would try to befriend the red-headed shifter for real. She reminded him of his pre-time loop self too much to just ignore it. Her problem was, as she said, something he couldn't really help her with… but maybe just having an extra friend would be enough.
He remained at the training ground for quite some time afterwards, lost in thought, before making his way back to Imaya's place.
✦ ✧ ✦
It was the day before the summer festival and everything was ready. He had stopped Nochka's kidnapping again, crafted all of the equipment he would be using in his gate-crashing attempt, and evacuated the Filigree Sages back to their home. Now all that was left was to gather the findings Kael and Taiven had made with their personal research and store them inside his mind for future restarts.
Fortunately, he was currently meeting them both in Imaya's basement for exactly that purpose.
"Here," Taiven said, handing him a small notebook. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm kind of glad the month is coming to a close. You have no idea how annoying it is to practice shaping exercises all day, every day."
"Taiven, I've had Xvim as my mentor for the past four years," Zorian pointed out.
"Yeah, yeah…" she waved dismissively.
"Show me what you've learned," he told her.
"What? But it's all written down there," she protested, pointing at the notebook in his hands.
"Doesn't matter, I want to see it personally," he insisted. "Some things really cannot be written down."
She had progressed nicely, he decided fifteen minutes later. Some things he considered trivial didn't really work out, which meant he either wasn't teaching them properly or Taiven was spectacularly unsuited for them, but there were also some exercises that came almost naturally to her. It was a good start, if nothing else.
"That was way too slow," he said. "And you fumbled a bit towards the end. Start o-"
"If you say 'start over' one more time, Zorian…" Taiven warned him.
"Fine, fine, I'll stop channeling my inner Xvim," he chuckled. "We'll stop here. I got what I needed, I think. Kael, how about you? Are my eyes deceiving me or has the amount of notebooks you got for me actually shrunk from what it was initially?"
"You said you memorize how the whole book is made with that spell of yours, not just text, so I figured I would write as dense as possible and save space that way. A single book takes the same amount of space in your memory regardless of how much is written in it, if I understood you correctly," Kael said.
"That's true, but the alteration pattern I store is never flawless, so some imperfections are bound to creep up in the reproduction. I hope you didn't make the letters too small…"
Some quick testing proved that Kael's condensed writing survived the memorization-reproduction process just fine, so Zorian went ahead and memorized the whole stack.
"Well, that's it I guess," Taiven said awkwardly. "I guess we'll see each other in the next restart. Not that I'll remember any of it…"
"Actually, I'm going to skip going to Cyoria for a couple of restarts," Zorian admitted. "I need to find a way to halt, or at least delay the degradation of the Matriarch's memory package. And also to advance my memory reading skills so I can get something out of it if I fail. I can't waste time on classes before I solve this."
"Fair enough," Kael said. "I'll note that I have pretty much exhausted all the low-lying fruits when it comes to my research. I'll need to reach out to other experts and maybe acquire some restricted materials through less than legal channels the next time we do this. I know you're justifiably leery of making too many waves, so you'll have to discuss this with my other self."
Just as well that he was putting his routine in Cyoria on temporary hold, then. He didn't need a distraction like that right now.
The group separated after a while, with Zorian leaving to find Kirielle. There was one last thing he wanted to do before the end.
"Kiri, do you think you could show me your drawings?" he asked.
She didn't need much convincing. She ran out of the room and soon returned with a thick stack of papers that represented her artistic endeavor over the course of the past month. She drew anything that caught her fancy, it seemed – the sparrows that liked to gather on the street in front of Imaya's house, the house they lived in and its inhabitants, the trees in the nearby park where she played with Nochka, and so on. He was especially impressed with the handful of images that depicted the Cyoria's main train station – not only did she remember what all the various storefronts they'd visited looked like, she even memorized many of the individual items that had been on sale. Zorian had forgotten most of that stuff roughly five minutes after they had left the train station, but Kirielle had remembered it well enough to draw a realistic picture of it an entire day afterwards.
If he ever found some time to kill, he should ask Kirielle to teach him how to draw. He doubted he would be any good at it, but the mental image of his little sister trying to teach him something was amusing.
"…and this one is Nochka's kitty fo- err," Kirielle fumbled, barely catching herself in time. She threw him a panicked look and then tried to shove the drawing of the young black cat beneath some of the already inspected drawings.
Heh.
"Her kitty form, perhaps?" Zorian asked innocently.
"You knew!" Kirielle gasped.
"I knew," he confirmed. "So could you tell she's a shifter on your own or is she simply as bad at keeping secrets as you are?"
"I'm not bad at keeping secrets!" she protested. "And, um, she kind of slipped that she can do magic and I bugged her until she showed me what she can do."
Ah yes, the eternal tendency of people to brag about their skills. Well, that and Kirielle's incredible ability to keep bringing the subject up until the victim decides it's easier to just give in and humor her. He didn't blame Nochka for giving in, considering how often he ended up doing the same.
Nochka's indiscretion aside, there were no further surprises waiting for him among Kirielle's drawings. He then tried to cast the memorization spell to commit the entire stack to his memory, but found that Kirielle was intensely protective of her work and strangely suspicious of his actions. It took a while for Zorian to convince Kirielle that the spell he wanted to cast was totally non-destructive and that he wouldn't even dream of burning her artwork or anything similar. Really, where did she even get the idea?
"Fortov once burned a bunch of my drawings when I asked him to show me some magic," she admit
ted. "Said it was a joke."
Zorian rolled his eyes. Yes, that sounded about right for Fortov. Knowing Kirielle, she was probably being extremely annoying and disruptive… but that was still a very shitty thing to do.
"I'm kind of insulted you'd compare me to Fortov, but whatever," Zorian said. He quickly memorized the stack and handed it back to her. "There. All done."
Kirielle quickly leafed through the papers to make sure he really hadn't done any damage and then left to put the drawings back to her room.
She was back soon enough, though, looking worried.
"Zorian, why did you want to memorize my drawings?" she asked. "You could just ask me to show them to you whenever you wanted to take a look. Are you going somewhere?"
Zorian gave her a sideways glance, wondering what to tell her. He would be leaving her behind during the next few restarts, and he kind of felt guilty about it, but there was no helping it. It was why he was 'wasting' some of his mental space on her drawings instead of filling it out with something more practical.
She was pretty observant to have come to that conclusion, though. She probably noticed some of his other preparations.
"Yes," he admitted. "I am. After the summer festival."
"Oh," she said. "But don't you have to attend classes?"
"Well yes. But this is more important," he said. "Don't worry, I won't be gone long. You won't even notice I'm gone."
Surprisingly, she accepted this explanation without complaints. Good. The last thing he needed was for her to freak out this close to the end.
"But," she decided, "you have to bring me a gift when you come back. Or I'm telling mom you left me alone with a bunch of strangers."
"Sure," said Zorian, rolling his eyes. He wondered if gifting her with the drawings she'd drawn herself in previous restarts counted as cheating.
Probably. But he was going to do it anyway, just to see how she reacted.
✦ ✧ ✦
The dimensional gate beneath Cyoria was a difficult target to approach. One had to avoid numerous Ibasan patrol groups to even get near it, and then the prospective attacker had to deal with an entire defensive base built around the gate if they wanted to actually pass through. Storming such a place was a task for a battlegroup, not a single mage, and would give the defenders plenty of time to shut down the gate if they felt the base was about to fall. Not to mention that Quatach-Ichl could and probably would come to their aid if such a major assault was launched on the place. No, the only viable way of accessing the gate was to sneak in somehow. A rather unlikely endeavor, considering the place was teeming with mages and war trolls, and likely had plenty of detection wards layered on top of it too. But Zorian had a plan. A rather reckless plan that he'd never even think about trying outside of the time loop, but it was a plan regardless.