Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Zorian had to admit, seeing an uprooted flower swing about from branch to branch, like some kind of weird monkey, was a unique experience.

Sadly for the soulseizer chrysanthemum, such desperate measures would not save it. It launched another stunning pulse at them in an attempt to lose them, and this did slow them down quite a bit, but in the end it was chased down and killed.

"We have been outsmarted and nearly killed by a flower," Zach said, still keeping a wary distance from the chrysanthemum’s remains. "We are never speaking about this again."

Zorian readily agreed to this request.

The Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon, known to most people as the Cult of the Dragon Below, was more than just a weird religion. It was an entire support organization that helped its members advance forward in life. They vouched for their fellow members when skills and trustworthiness were questioned, they helped them get the jobs and mentorships they needed to advance in their careers, offered their members loans under favorable conditions, granted free access to spell libraries that would be too restricted or expensive for members to otherwise get and they provided legal aid if members got into trouble with the mage guild. The higher ranking one had in the Cult, the more pronounced these advantages got.

This was the main reason why the Cult got so powerful and widespread. The sort of large-scale, highly treasonous plot that the Cult was currently participating in was not really something that they usually did. It was actually very, very atypical. For the vast majority of their existence, they had simply been a mystery cult crossed with a mutual aid society – kind of shady and disreputable, but nothing that the authorities would go too crazy over. Their biggest enemy was the Triumvirate Church and their faithful, which considered the Cult’s beliefs to be a direct affront to their dogma.

In any case, an expansive organization like that had more than just direct members of their secret club to draw upon. They also had a multitude of outside associates and other experts that sporadically worked with them. Some of these were true faithful that deliberately maintained distance from the main organization so that outsiders could not easily puzzle out the connections between them, others were just mercenaries that sporadically took missions from the Cult and some simply didn’t know who exactly they were working with. Zorian had largely ignored these people during his investigation into the Cult’s activities, since tracking them all down was an incredibly time-consuming and difficult task. He had better things to do with his time.

Then Alanic interrogated Sudomir a bunch of times and they discovered that the crazy mayor of Knyazov Dveri had detailed knowledge of these people. Sudomir appeared to have gone out of his way to gather as much information about the Cult as possible, worried that they might move against him at some point. The relations between him and Cult leadership hadn’t been the best since they realized he intended to publically advocate for the legalization of necromancy, something they regarded as lunacy.

Zorian still wasn’t terribly interested in spending time to investigate all these people. He didn’t think that would result in anything substantial. But Alanic was, and he didn’t have too many other things vying for his time. Thus, he wholeheartedly threw himself into the investigation, making full use of the time loop to comb through every lead and scrap of evidence Zorian could wrench from Sudomir’s mind.

And today, that effort seemed to have borne some kind of fruit. Alanic had notified Zach and Zorian that he had uncovered something important and told them to meet him next to an unassuming house in one Cyoria’s richer neighborhoods.

When they arrived, they found the place cordoned off by the mage guild personnel, but they had been notified that the two of them were coming and let them through on Alanic’s orders. Once again Zorian wondered just what position Alanic occupied that he could command people like this, but Alanic stubbornly refused to answer such questions and Zorian respected the man’s help too much to go prying into his thoughts.

"You called, we came," Zach said, waving his hand at Alanic to get his attention. "What do you have for us?"

"I don’t claim to understand every detail of the… situation you have found yourselves in," Alanic said, choosing his words carefully due to the presence of other people in the room, "but I believe you’ve indicated the name Veyers Boranova is important to you, yes?"

Zorian looked at him in shock.

"What? What does Veyers have to do with this? Is he here?" Zach asked.

"In a matter of speaking," Alanic said evenly. He motioned them to follow him and led them down the stairs and into the basement beneath the house. "This is the house of one of the lawyers deeply associated with the Cult of the Dragon Below. He is not a member, but he has helped on a number of occasions and is known to be sympathetic to their organization. I managed to get authorization to conduct a search of his house and… well, this is what I found when I opened the icebox in his basement."

Alanic stopped next to one of the three iceboxes lined up next to the basement wall and unceremoniously lifted the lid up. Inside was a frozen body of a teenage male, a peaceful expression on his frosted face.

It was unmistakably Veyers Boranova.

Zach and Zorian stared at the body for nearly half a minute, not saying anything.

"He’s… dead?" Zach asked lamely.

"Indeed," Alanic said. "I hear neither of you really got along with him well, so I will not offer you condolences."

"So the owner of this house…" Zorian began uncertainly.

"Jornak Dokochin," Alanic told him.

"Yes, this Jornak… did he kill Veyers?" Zorian asked. "When did this happen?"

"He is adamant that he did not kill the boy," Alanic said. "He claims the boy died of unknown causes while sleeping. One day he was fine, if a little surly, and the next day Jornak went into his room to check up on him and found him dead in his bed. I’d normally scoff at that explanation, but the timing…"

"He died on the first day of the restart, didn’t he?" Zach guessed.

"Yes," Alanic nodded. "The frost damage and the sheer passage of time make it difficult to tell for certain, but I’m pretty sure this is the same situation like those aranea beneath Cyoria and the mercenaries that were found mysteriously dead in their homes."

"Doesn’t that mean Veyers was soulkilled?" Zach frowned. "He isn’t Red Robe?"

"We can’t say that just from this," Zorian said, shaking his head. "We have no idea how exactly he entered the time loop, or what would happen if he left it. For all we know this could be the natural result of his leaving the time loop."

"Ugh," Zach grumbled. "So we found Veyers and yet learned nothing of value. I hate things like this."

"Well, anyway… I guess Veyers being frozen in the basement of a heavily warded house does explain why we never managed to find him when we searched for him in the previous restarts. What was he doing here, anyway?"

"Jornak has been disinclined to cooperate with us in this regard," Alanic told them. "He refuses to discuss details with me. He is a lawyer so he is harder to shake up and interrogate than most people I deal with. That’s why I told you to come here immediately. If you want to get anything out of him, we need to talk to him now. I’m afraid House Boranova has already heard of the news and is going to descend here sooner or later."

Alanic then led them to the second floor of the house, where Jornak was currently under house arrest with a couple of guards posted next to him. When they arrived they found Jornak pacing around his room like a caged tiger, angry and agitated. He deliberately ignored their entrance, not giving them so much as a glance.