Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"We don’t want to fight," Zorian said. "But if you really insist on it, I guarantee you it won’t end in your favor."

Rather than answer him, Silverlake stomped her foot on the ground, causing a set of heavy, potent wards to radiate out of the entrance to her pocket dimensions. The warding scheme quickly enclosed the entire area, shutting down their teleportation, filling the area with fog, inhibiting their shaping skills, disturbing their souls…

Even as Silverlake was making her move, though, Zorian was doing the same. He quickly reached into his backpack again and retrieved from it a truncated pyramid made out of glittering blue stone. He threw it in front of him, and it promptly righted itself in the air and began to hover there, golden lines and glyphs suddenly appearing on its surface. In a blink of an eye, it had enclosed Zach, Zorian and their war golems under a dome of yellow light.

Silverlake’s wards crashed into the dome… and were immediately halted in their tracks. The old witch was way better than Zorian in a number of fields, but her skill at setting up wards wasn’t one of them. Not to mention that wards were always more effective as a means of defense than they were as an offensive tool.

There was a tense silence as the two sides stared at each other from behind their respective barriers. After about a minute of this, Silverlake suddenly sighed and commanded the earth elementals to merge back into the earth and the wards to retreat back into her pocket dimension. After a second of hesitation, Zach and Zorian similarly put away their own defenses.

"Well…" Silverlake said, sounding surprisingly chirpy and relaxed. She chuckled at their wary postures and serious faces. "I really suffered a loss this time, didn’t I? I guess this is what I get for trying to escalate things into combat. I was never that much of a fighter, truth be told. I don’t suppose we could all forget this ever happened, hmm?"

"Sure, let’s," Zach said, giving her a friendly grin. "It’s probably for the best if this never happens again, though. I only ever give people two chances."

"Oh?" Silverlake said, cocking her head sideways like a curious bird. "Oh, I see. Everything I’ve been met with thus far is your friend’s work, but he isn’t actually the combat specialist. You are. And you never even made a move thus far…" She shook her head, speaking to herself self-depreciatingly. "Silly old girl, making such blunders at your age… it’s just as they say: you learn all your life and still die a fool. Though there should hopefully be no dying for me just yet…"

"In any case," said Zorian, coughing into his fist to attract her attention, "I believe I have an answer for the concerns you expressed just before this… unpleasantness. You were wondering how this was all possible, yes?"

"Yes," she bluntly confirmed. "I’m very curious as to how this could happen."

"It’s like this," said Zorian, creating another illusory scene, this one depicting the planet they lived on, spinning placidly in the air. "There is an artifact from the Age of Gods that can take our entire world, take a snapshot of every single thing in existence and create a flawless copy of it in a giant pocket dimension…"

Surprisingly, after Zorian had gotten about halfway into the story, Silverlake suddenly started to ask a series of rapid-fire questions about the Sovereign Gate, the Guardian of the Threshold, the exact mechanics of the time loop itself, and so on.

"Alright, you can stop now," she eventually said, tapping her leg with her bony fingers. "I think I know what’s going on now. Well, somewhat. And if I’m right, then there is a very easy way to check if you’re telling the truth or not."

Zach and Zorian perked up at her words.

"Oh?" Zach asked excitedly.

Silverlake grinned, obviously enjoying the fact that she knew something they didn’t. Or at least thought she did – Zorian wasn’t going to get excited before he heard what she actually had to say. For all he knew, she was just trying to patch up her wounded pride.

"Tell me," she said, "have you two ever heard about the primordials?"

Primordials were strange, enigmatic creatures. They were supposedly first-born children of the primordial dragon from which the world was fashioned, ancient and powerful. In life, their abilities had rivaled those of the gods themselves. In death, they had spawned a multitude of lesser primordials to continue their struggle. One would think that such fearsome beings and everything related to them would be vividly remembered by history, but this was not the case. In his search for primordial prisons outside Cyoria, Zorian had consulted many church documents, historical records and elementals, largely in vain. Primordials may have been powerful and frightening in their heyday, but they had been sealed away thousands of years ago. That was a lot of time for information to be forgotten, especially since the gods had actively tried to limit knowledge of them and their prisons while they had still been active in the world. Thus, finding any substantial information on them was quite hard.

Moreover, even when such information was found, it was hard to gauge how much of it was reliable and how much of it was pure fabrication. A lot of the stories that bothered going into the details of the nature of primordials were mutually contradictory, and there was no way to test any of them to see which one was closer to the truth than the others.

"In other words, you know virtually nothing about primordials except that they exist and that one of them is imprisoned in Cyoria," Silverlake concluded after hearing their explanation.

"Yeah, pretty much," Zach confirmed. Although they were searching for the locations of other primordial prisons in their free time, that hadn’t produced much in the way of actual results. "What does this have to do about confirming the truth of our story, though?"

"Patience, boy, patience," Silverlake urged smugly. "A house must be built from the foundation up. In order to answer that question, I must first show you the truth about primordials and the way they were imprisoned…"

Oh? She could actually answer those questions? Zorian was torn between excitement and a healthy dose of caution. On one hand, this was a powerful witch that has lived through more than a century – surely she wouldn’t be making claims like that without a good reason to be confident? On the other hand… well, it was Silverlake.

After some thought, he decided to voice his concerns to the old witch in front of him.

"Ignorant brat," she complained. "Do you think I’d be joking about something this serious!?"

Zach and Zorian shared a knowing look between each other.

"Well… yeah ," Zach said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Now that you mention it, that does sound like something I would derive dark amusement from," Silverlake mused, rubbing her chin with her hand as she stared at the tree branches above her.

"Not exactly something you should be proud of," Zorian pointed out unhappily.

"Anyway, do you want to hear what I have to say or not?" Silverlake asked loudly, abandoning her musing pose in favor of folding her hands over her chest and looking at them both defiantly.

"Sure we do," Zorian said. As annoying as the old witch was, she had some very unique skills and insights that were almost impossible to find elsewhere. "Let’s hear it."

Silverlake stayed silent for a few seconds. Before either Zach or Zorian could say anything about that, the entrance to her secret hideout flared into life again and another Silverlake stepped out of it, carrying a large brown book in her hands.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at this. Silverlake having some kind of duplicate was not that surprising. There were lots of spells that duplicated the appearance of a caster in some way, after all. Even if it was an actual simulacrum, Zorian still wouldn’t find it unusual, since Silverlake was clearly proficient in soul magic. The really interesting question was which Silverlake was the real thing: the one they’ve been talking to all this time or the one that had just walked out of her dimensional hideout?