Mother of Learning: ARC 4

2

He sighed. He had really underestimated the ancient lich. He probably should have been raging internally at the amount of grief Quatach-Ichl caused them, but in all honesty, Zorian found himself impressed by the decisiveness and ruthlessness Quatach-Ichl had displayed. It took mere moments for Quatach-Ichl to decide, after seeing Xvim’s memories, that the time loop was real and that he should sacrifice everything to hit them where it hurt the most. Most people would be doubtful of the information or too shocked to think clearly, but Quatach-Ichl didn’t hesitate at all to sacrifice his own soul in an attempt to take them down.

Zorian could see the logic. Without Zach and Zorian mucking things up, Quatach-Ichl was pretty much guaranteed to get what he wanted out of the invasion of Cyoria, and potentially cooperating with them had little appeal to him. Possibility of betrayal aside, he was a thousand-year-old lich—what use did he have for a measly decade or two? Still, knowing all of this intellectually and being able to disregard self-preservation in order to pull off a suicide move… those were two entirely different things. Zorian had no idea that a person could detonate the outer layer of their soul in order to launch a massive suicide attack on the souls of everyone in the vicinity, but even if he did, he would not have expected Quatach-Ichl to use such a maneuver after less than a minute of consideration. Zorian knew that he would be unable to act so boldly if he had found himself in Quatach-Ichl’s shoes, and it boggled his mind that a lich—by nature obsessed with personal survival at all costs—was able to steel himself into pulling off a suicide move so easily.

Well. Putting that aside, he suddenly realized he had a tricky problem on his hands. Namely, he had to find a way to convince Mother to let him go to Cyoria so he could check up on Zach. From what he remembered, the last time he failed to wake up in time was due to the Sword Diver attack in one of the restarts, and he had to remain in Cirin for the rest of the month to make Mother calm down and let him out of her sight. This time the situation looked much worse, and he needed to convince her to trust him far more than she had been willing to the last time around.

He could already feel his headache getting worse.

It took two whole days of constant nagging and arguments before Zorian was able to convince Mother to let him go. He thought about just boarding a train when she wasn’t looking, but the look in her eyes made him suspect she would drop everything and follow after him if he tried that. She could be remarkably stubborn that way. Strangely, it was Father who ended up helping him by arguing in his favor. He actually seemed impressed that Zorian was willing to push through his sickness and keep attending classes, and he ended up helping Zorian convince Mother to let him go to Cyoria. It was a very surreal experience to Zorian, since he couldn’t remember the last time his father took his side or approved of his choices. He didn’t know how to feel about that.

In any case, Mother eventually relented on the whole issue, though she did insist he take Kirielle with him. So she could ‘keep an eye on him’, supposedly. It was amusing to see her pause in surprise when he immediately agreed to her request.

The journey was a bit of an unpleasant shock to him. Robbed of his magic and still plagued with phantom pains and tremors, he struggled to carry their luggage, and they both ended up getting caught in the rain for a while before they sought shelter in a nearby inn. He ended up renting a tiny, overpriced room for a single night, since the rain wouldn’t be stopping any time soon.

Kirielle wouldn’t stop complaining about getting wet for nearly an hour and screamed like a baby when she saw a particularly large cockroach crawling along the wall of their room.

Being unable to access his vast magic abilities was an unusual and very unpleasant experience.

The next day, he brought Kirielle to Imaya’s place. Thankfully, she did not make too much of an issue out of their arrival, even though Zorian had not arranged for anything with Ilsa in this particular restart.

Then he went searching for Zach.

He quickly realized this wouldn’t be as easy as he imagined. Zach was, he soon found out, officially missing. Tesen Zveri, Zach’s legal guardian, was organizing a search for him and called for anyone who had any information about his whereabouts to make contact immediately.

That was… very familiar. Almost nostalgic, really. It was pretty much the same situation that he had faced during the first few restarts after he got pulled into the time loop.

He wondered what that meant. Was this some kind of additional time loop safeguard that kept the Controller gone until they recovered, or was this just Zach’s guardian freaking out about finding a comatose Zach and faking a disappearance? Personally, Zorian would bet on the latter. Quite a few people apparently knew how inappropriate Tesen’s handling of the Noveda affairs was, so if Zach were to fall mysteriously unconscious all of a sudden, he would be one of the prime suspects. Zorian could totally see Tesen fearing that the coma would be blamed on him and faking a disappearance until he could decide what to do, much like Jornak did with Veyers.

In any case, it was relatively easy to prove which one of the options was correct. Zach and Zorian both had a marker with an identical key, and Zorian knew a tracking ritual that would let him locate his fellow time traveler with ease.