Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"We do a lot of crazy stuff," Zach said with careless shrug.

It turned out that neither Ulanna nor Orissa were very familiar with the details of how the gate spell works. This wasn’t very surprising, as the spell was extremely rare, but somehow Zorian kept forgetting little details like that.

After Zorian gave them a brief explanation of how the gate spell functioned, Orissa gave him a strange look.

"What?" Zorian asked, feeling somewhat self-conscious.

"This method you use to ignore distance limitations requires another person helping you on the other side, yes?" she asked. Zorian nodded wordlessly. "Then how can you open a gate back to Eldemar? Can the third Kazinski brother cast the gate spell, too?"

"What, Fortov? Please," Zorian scoffed. "He’ll be lucky not to flunk out of the academy."

"Zorian!" Daimen protested. He never liked it when Zorian badmouthed the rest of the family.

"No, we’ll be using the simulacrum I left back in Cyoria," Zorian said, completely ignoring Daimen’s outburst. "Since I can cast the gate spell, my simulacrum can obviously do the same."

"Oh, so you can create a simulacrum too?" Ulanna asked casually, not sounding particularly surprised. Zorian had to hand it to her, she was very good at projecting an aura of serene confidence. Orissa seemed to be trying to mimic that attitude, but she was nowhere near good enough to pull it off. One could see that these kind of reveals bothered her and put her somewhat off-balance.

"We do a lot of crazy stuff," Zorian said. He thought about mimicking Zach completely and giving her a thumbs-up and a cheeky smile, but quickly dropped the idea. That sort of thing was something only Zach could pull off without looking like a total idiot.

In the end, they managed to hammer out an agreement. Daimen would return to Cyoria with Zach and Zorian and would take the orb of the first emperor along with him. Zorian would leave a simulacrum in the Taramatula estate so that they could return via gate spell in exactly four days.

Zorian thought this would be the end of it, but his hopes were ruthlessly squashed when Daimen told him he still had to explain to his team that he would be away for a while.

For a moment, Zorian felt the urge to make an overdramatic gesture to the uncaring heavens. And here he’d thought this would just be a short visit to Koth, consisting of little more than replacing his lost simulacrum and asking Daimen if he had found out anything new about the orb.

Sometimes he just couldn’t win.

It was a massive relief to Zorian when the three of them finally stepped through the gate and returned to Cyoria. Both the Taramatula and Daimen’s team were on edge right now, and thus rather exasperating to deal with. He kind of felt bad for his simulacrum, who would be stuck with them for the next several days. Oh well, at least he had Kirma and Torun to talk to – those two were fairly interesting and he suspected he might be able to broker some kind of trade with at least one of them.

Regardless, he was back and could devote other matters. Xvim’s efforts to convince various experts to trade their secrets with him had been reasonably successful, Sudomir had to be properly interrogated, the efforts of the researchers to understand the Ibasan gate stabilization frame were starting to bear fruit and the Silent Doorway Adepts were hinting that they were willing to send a group over to Koth to acquire a gate key. Sadly, recent events concerning Daimen and the orb had probably made that last idea a dead end in this restart. His simulacrum couldn’t possible leave the Taramatula estate without a hundred pairs of eyes following his every move. Unfortunate. He could really use an alternate entrance to Koth that didn’t rely on Daimen right now. He would have to assign a high priority to this idea in future restarts.

Daimen had agreed to hand over the orb to him and Zach while he was in Cyoria. Partially because he figured they could find out far more about it than he could, due to possessing a marker that could actually operate it, and partially because he wasn’t entirely sure the orb would be safe in his possession. News traveled faster than people. By all rights, his little trip to Cyoria should have gone undetected by his pursuers, but he couldn’t be completely sure. Thus, he felt it was for the best if he didn’t have the orb on him unless absolutely necessary.

Zorian expected that he would be the only one that could tinker with the orb to discover its secrets, since Zach didn’t have the necessary personal soul awareness to control his marker. He was very much wrong. Apparently, Zach didn’t need to have conscious control over his marker to take command of the orb. After an hour or so of tinkering with the orb, Zach managed to connect to it instinctively.

And after that one success, he no longer needed an hour of tinkering to connect to again. Simply touching the orb would be enough to re-establish contact. Zach didn’t even have to concentrate on it to pull it off – a touch and a stray thought were enough.

Zorian was a little sour about that. The orb certainly never reacted that way to him, no matter how many hours he spent interacting with it. No, he had to spend months going thought that hellish soul awareness training and then more time painstakingly studying the way marker worked to get as far as he did. This sort of stuff really made it obvious that his marker was some kind of inferior version of the one on Zach.

It had been only a day since they were back in Cyoria when Daimen surprised him again. He wanted to talk to Kirielle and Fortov.

This was a bit of a problem. Both of their siblings knew for a fact that Daimen shouldn’t be in Cyoria. Mother and Father had gone to Koth to meet with him. How on earth did he intend to explain his presence here? But Daimen insisted that he needed to do this, and Zorian didn’t feel like arguing with him. There was probably no great harm in it, and he was pretty sure that Daimen would go and have those conversations behind his back if he was too stubborn.

Amusingly, Daimen wanted to talk to Kirielle and Fortov alone, without anyone else being present. Zorian was almost certain that meant he wanted to ask them specifically about Zorian. Hah! Fortov didn’t know anything about Zorian, and Kirielle was a little tattletale and would no doubt tell Zorian everything that she and Daimen talked about. But he told Daimen none of that and simply wished him luck before sending him on his way.

The next day, Daimen came back to talk to him, looking lost and confused.

"They didn’t even want to talk to me…" he complained, sounding quite dejected. It actually made Zorian feel bad for him somewhat.

"Come on, it’s not that bad," Zorian comforted him. "I don’t know about Fortov, but I’m pretty sure Kirielle wouldn’t have snubbed you like that. Imaya tells me you spent an entire hour with her."

"Yeah, but that’s all I did with her," Daimen complained. "She spent the entire hour fidgeting and looking uncomfortable. She barely spoke, and only when I specifically prodded her. I’m not entirely sure, but I think she was actually scared of me a little. That’s…"

Damien waved his hands in the air, as if trying to convey some kind of unpronounceable concept through silent gesticulation.

"Sad?" Zorian offered.

"Sure, let’s go with that," Daimen said. "Also worrying. And upsetting. And a whole host of other things. Especially when coupled with what happened with Fortov. Do you know what happened when I knocked on his door?"

"Not really, no," Zorian told him. He had actually known about Daimen’s talk with Kirielle, since she had told him all about it when he had come to Imaya’s place in the evening, but he honestly had no idea how Daimen’s talk with Fortov had gone. Not well, obviously, but it would be interesting to hear why . "What did he do?"