Mother of Learning: ARC 4

Zorian slowly woke in his bed in Cirin. His head was fuzzy, his body hurt all over, and he had trouble remembering what he had been doing in the previous restart. Confused and in pain, he remained lying in bed for a time, fading in and out of consciousness. Gradually, his mind began to clear up, and he started to grow concerned. Something was wrong. Yeah, he was feeling absolutely terrible, but it was more than that. Something was subtly off about this situation, and it was really starting to bother him. ‘Oh, right,’ it suddenly dawned on him. ‘Kirielle didn’t wake me up by jumping on me. I woke up on my own with no one else in sight. That shouldn’t be possible unless something has gone very, very wrong…’ The moment he realized this, it was as if something clicked inside his mind, and it all came back to him. The sudden visit of Quatach-Ichl, the theft of the dagger from the royal vaults with the lich’s help, the final battle against the ancient being, and the insidious soul attack he used just before the restart ended… The memories flooded into his mind suddenly and without end. The process was forceful and alien, as if something was shoving these thoughts directly into his brain with little regard to his well-being. The waves of pain and nausea radiating from his damaged soul suddenly intensified, and he barely managed to roll himself out of bed before vomiting his guts out all over the floor of his room. Dimly, he was aware that Kirielle rushed inside when he started making noise and then rushed back out screaming for Mother to come and help, but he was in no position to react to that. It took all of his strength just to remain conscious and weather the pain. His soul felt like it was going to split apart, and he instinctively knew that it would be a terrible mistake for him to black out at the moment. He and Zach had long theorized that their souls synchronized somehow with their bodies at the start of every restart, interfacing with their life force and rearranging their brains to account for the memories they gathered over the restarts, and it looked as if this was true… except that in its current state, Zorian’s soul was no longer capable of smoothly completing that process. Without Zorian’s conscious efforts to stabilize his soul, it would not only ravage his body and mind but possibly also injure itself further in its fumbling. If he lost consciousness now, who knew when he would wake up next? A small, panicked part of his mind feared he had already spent the majority of their remaining restarts in a soul-damage-induced coma, but he shoved that thought aside for now. This wasn’t the time to worry about that. For now, all he could do was grit his teeth and deal with the problem at hand. He didn’t know how much time he spent in that state, shivering on the floor of his room as he fought to stay awake, but eventually Mother and Kirielle rolled him over onto a blanket and carried him off to a guest room to recover in. Somehow, he managed to persist through it all until his soul finally calmed down. When he finally recovered enough to talk, he found out that it was still the first day of the restart. He had failed to react when Kirielle came to wake him up and stayed asleep for about two hours before waking up. Mother and Kirielle seemed shaken at the severity of his apparent illness and refused to let him get up and walk around on his own in the aftermath. They also called for a local healer to come and check up on him, which was very annoying yet perfectly reasonable in light of what happened, so he could hardly object to it. Predictably, the healer failed to find anything really wrong with him. He was not a mage, just a local who knew how to recognize common illnesses and hand out appropriate potions in response. He failed to find anything seriously wrong with Zorian, so he simply suggested that they watch Zorian closely for a few days to make sure it didn’t happen again. Mother was rather unhappy with his ‘uselessness’, but she did seem more at ease after receiving the diagnosis. When they finally left him alone for a while, he decided to chance things and reached into his marker, even though he knew the action would aggravate his soul damage somewhat. He had to know how many restarts they still had left. The marker told him he still had twenty-five iterations left, which caused Zorian to breathe a sigh of relief. He hadn’t lost any restarts, it seemed. Unfortunately, this was where the good news ended. The damage Quatach-Ichl’s last attack did to his soul meant that he was currently completely incapable of casting anything—attempting to perform even the simplest of shaping exercises caused his soul to radiate waves of pain and nausea throughout his whole body in protest. Though this would go away in time, he estimated it would take at least three months before he was back in his top form. Perhaps as much as four or five months if circumstances forced him to push things and he kept aggravating his injuries. Zorian suddenly realized that he relied on his magic for practically everything these days. He had already forgotten what it was like to be a weak, mundane teenager. Even coming up with a plan for going forward that didn’t involve the use of a teleport spell was hard… Dammit. He doubted Zach was any better off than he was, considering he had yet to visit Zorian this many hours into the restart, so this was pretty much a total disaster. Even though they hadn’t spent any of the restarts in a coma, the inability to use magic was going to sharply limit their options in the upcoming restarts. There was no way they could dare approach Silverlake or Quatach-Ichl with an obviously damaged soul, for instance. Additionally, the ancient lich may be able to recognize the soul damage as his own work in some fashion—Zorian had no idea how one would go about doing that, as he found no traces of foreign soul fragments in his soul, but he wasn’t a millennia-old lich like Quatach-Ichl.