Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

He activated his newly-acquired soul perception and took a look.

It was not easy for Zorian to use his soul perception. Training it had been slow and frustrating thus far, though he had been told by Alanic that he was doing just fine by normal standards. He’d had the ability for less than a month, so it was to be expected that his control over it was crude and that he had trouble interpreting what it was telling him. Zorian imagined this was how non-psychics felt when they tried to train their non-structured mind magic into something usable.

Still, identifying whether something in front of him had a soul or not was well within his modest capabilities. With that in mind, he focused his soul perception on Silverlake and immediately realized that she indeed had a soul. She wasn’t an illusion, a remote-controlled puppet or a simulacrum, then. So they had actually been talking to the real Silverlake up till now; that was nice to know. Just to be thorough, he shifted his soul perception to the approaching book-carrying Silverlake and…

She had a soul too. What?

Zorian shifted his attention between one Silverlake and the other repeatedly, trying to work out what was happening here. It was no use, though – his soul perception simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to unravel this mystery and he didn’t want to start casting analytical divinations at the old witch and her weird clone. Blatantly scanning someone without their explicit permission was widely considered to be rather rude and insulting behavior.

The other Silverlake soon reached the one Zach and Zorian had been talking to and gave her the book she was carrying. The first Silverlake glanced at the book, nodded slightly and then snapped her fingers.

The other Silverlake seemingly imploded, badly startling both Zach and Zorian, her form collapsing into a smoky black ball. The ball existed for only a moment before reforming itself into a large black bird, which promptly hopped onto Silverlake’s shoulder. It was a raven, Zorian realized.

Of course! Zorian thought, slapping himself in the forehead. Silverlake had a raven familiar! The link between a mage and their familiar allowed both of them to assume the form of one another really easily, provided that the mage knew the proper spells.

And Silverlake no doubt knew the proper spells, because familiar magic was one of the things that witches were known to be really fond of. Hell, she’d even found the way to shield the raven’s mind from scrutiny, preventing Zorian from easily identifying it as a shapeshifted animal.

Zorian opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted when Silverlake tried to blow away the layer of dust on the cover of the book and ended up sending herself into a coughing fit due to all the dust suddenly flying into her face.

The raven cawed indignantly at this, flapping his wings a couple of times for emphasis.

"Shut up," Silverlake said to the raven in between her coughing and wheezing. She glanced towards Zach and Zorian. "And why are you two just standing around like that!? Come closer and take this blasted thing away already! Who do you think I brought it for? Do you think I wanted to refresh my memory or something?"

Zorian stepped closer and Silverlake immediately pushed the large leather-bound tome into his hands. He grunted softly and took a step back, caught off-guard by her sudden movement and the book’s considerable weight. Damn, this thing was heavy…

"Read this and everything will become clear," Silverlake said, finally getting her breathing under control.

Zorian eyed the heavy leather book in his hands suspiciously. The cover was brown and non-descript, with a title that proclaimed, in plain white letters, that this was a collection of cookie recipes. Flipping the random pages of the book seemed to reinforce this claim.

He glanced at Silverlake and saw that both she and the raven perched on her shoulder were eying him closely, waiting for his reaction.

With a small sigh, Zorian swiped his hand across the book and cast an appropriate dispel, shredding the illusion covering the book into pieces. Following that, he was confronted with a lot less innocuous title: Unspeakable Cults, Volume Four .

"You just can’t resist pulling these kinds of tricks all the time, can you?" Zorian asked rhetorically.

"You made a lot of tall claims today," Silverlake shrugged. "It’s only natural for me to test them every now and then in small ways. If you two are really a bunch of old time travelers like you claim to be, a simple illusion wouldn’t have posed a problem for you. Besides, I can’t exactly leave a book like this out in the open without disguising it somehow…"

"What do you mean?" Zach frowned.

" Unspeakable Cults is one of the most widely banned series of books circulating around Altazia and Xlotic," Zorian explained, idly leafing through the book. All sorts of ghastly drawings and descriptions immediately assaulted his eyes. "It was written by an anonymous author that had a penchant for infiltrating secretive cults and mage organizations so he could observe their ceremonies and activities. No one is quite sure how he did it, but considering the furor the books created, it’s clear he didn’t make it all up. Anyway, after infiltrating all these cults and watching them for gods know how long, he wrote a series of eight books that go into great detail about what he had seen. Every debauchery he had seen, every messed up sacrifice or morally-bankrupt experiment is described in great detail, and he even illustrated some scenes with drawings and diagrams. Although the books contain no actual spells or ritual setups, they have been banned almost everywhere as blasphemous, degenerate filth."

He closed the book, eying it in great distaste. He really didn’t want to read this stuff…

"I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what page I should be looking at?" Zorian asked Silverlake, staring at her pleadingly.

Silverlake just grinned at him nastily. Damn witch…

Zorian glanced towards Zach speculatively, but the boy immediately shook his head at him before he could even open his mouth.

"No, no, no," Zach said quickly, extending his arms in front of him in a warding gesture. "Sorry Zorian, but this definitely sounds like a job for you. You have a lot higher tolerance for this kind of stuff than I do."

Ugh. As much as Zorian hated to admit this, his fellow time traveler kind of had a point. Reading the minds of high-ranking cultists, Sudomir, Ibasan invaders and others had shown him enough of the dark side of humanity that he had been numbed to the horror of it all to a large extent.

He still didn’t want to wade into a book like this one, though, so he decided to get a little creative. He started casting divination after divination spell at the book, trying to divine the section of the book that Silverlake wanted him to read. This was harder than it sounded, because the book was heavily warded against divinations and did not ever mention primordials by name, but Zorian was very good at divinations by now. Especially these kinds of divinations. He’d had his simulacrums in charge of researching mountains of documentation for obscure clues for quite a while now, so a task like this was pure routine by this point.

After five minutes or so he found the section that seemed right and flipped the book open. Both Silverlake and Zach peered over his shoulder to look at the page he had picked.

"You’re no fun, boy," Silverlake said, scowling at him.

Zorian took that as an admission that he had indeed found the right page to start at and began to read.

The chapter in question described a small cult of mages, somewhere in Xlotic , which worshipped an entity imprisoned behind some kind of dimensional veil . They did this by capturing unwary travelers, implanting some sort of magical worms into their brain and then forcibly establishing contact between their mind and the mind of the imprisoned entity. Normally, mental contact with the entity resulted in quick insanity as one’s mind was overwhelmed by the flood of incomprehensible thoughts and images, but the chemicals released by the worms as they fed on the victim’s brain tissue somehow allowed them to last longer under this assault. Drugged out of their minds to keep them talking and half-insane, the victims would then spend the next couple of hours screaming, pleading, cursing and babbling gibberish while the cultists diligently wrote down their feverish ravings for later study.