Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

As they descended into the Hole’s depths, Zach and Zorian questioned Silverlake about her interest in primordials. Silverlake claimed it was not something she had ever been overly concerned with, it was just that she had been alive for a long time and even casual study could build up to something substantial when you keep chipping at the problem over several decades. She also claimed that, like them, she did not know of any primordial prisons other than the one in Cyoria.

Zorian wasn’t sure he believed her, to be honest. She knew Panaxeth’s prison well enough to give her confidence that she could detect changes in its dimensional boundary, but she’d only studied it casually? Zach and Zorian could only faintly detect the presence of the prison and little else, and it wasn’t like their attainments in the field of dimensionalism and divination were low. Furthermore, while their search for other sites of primordial imprisonment had yet to bear fruit, they did have no less than three promising leads already… and that was with them casually directing some efforts at the problem, rather than dropping everything to pursue the issue. He was supposed to believe that Silverlake couldn’t manage to find even one additional prison after spending gods know how many decades of interest in the topic? He had a feeling Silverlake was seriously underselling both her level of interest in this and her attainments in it. He even suspected that her incredible level of skill in the field of pocket dimension creation might come from pursuing this line of research.

He did not voice his suspicions, though. He could tell that, although Silverlake was putting forth a confident façade in front of them, the things they had said had deeply disturbed her and made her uneasy. If he was too pushy she might feel backed into a corner and lash out. Frankly, she had never struck him as the most stable of individuals to begin with.

They didn’t have to descend far into the Hole to get access to Panaxeth’s prison. Unlike the palace orb and other pocket dimensions that Zorian was familiar with, primordial prisons seemed to have larger and more complex anchors to the main reality that extended over quite a large area. In fact, considering that Zorian had once witnessed Panaxeth breaking out of his prison in the sky above Cyoria, he suspected that the anchor extended well outside the Hole itself… it was just that those parts of the anchor were too subtle for Zach and Zorian to detect them. In any case, once they had reached sufficient depth, Silverlake asked them to shut up and let her examine the prison in peace. So they did just that, sitting down on a couple of nearby rocks in silence while Silverlake did her thing.

Zorian paid close attention to the spells Silverlake was casting. Though one couldn’t learn a spell just from watching someone cast it, they could get a pretty good idea of what the spell was supposed to do if they were experienced or familiar with the relevant theory. Zorian was both, so there was a lot he could tell by watching Silverlake analyze Panaxeth’s prison. She used dozens of individual spells in her investigation, each one of them a lengthy and complex thing that seemed narrowly specialized for one specific function. Such unoptimized, hyperspecialized spells were probably something she had made herself, specifically to tackle the problem of analyzing a primordial’s prison. Furthermore, she cast these rather unwieldy spells with practiced ease, making no mistakes whatsoever, strongly suggesting she had done them often enough for it to become rote.

Casual interest , sure…

As time went by, Silverlake’s face started to frown more often and her casting became more feverish, but she remained completely silent and focused on her task. She didn’t even mutter to herself, as she was often prone to do. Finally, after more than two hours of casting, pondering and intense staring at the empty patch of air in front of her (what was that even supposed to do?), Silverlake let her arms drop to her sides, sighed and then turned towards them.

"Alright," she said. "You win. I provisionally believe your crazy story."

"Provisionally?" Zach asked curiously.

"We’re clearly in a different world than we were up until a few months ago," said Silverlake. "It does not necessarily mean your specific version of events is what is happening, but I have no better explanation at the moment. So for now, I’m accepting your story as valid."

"Just to confirm, you actually detected a noticeable difference between Panaxeth’s prison as it was a few months back and as it is now?" Zorian asked.

"I suppose you could say that," Silverlake said, a note of discomfort creeping into her voice.

"Why the glum face?" Zach asked, picking up on her mood. "Didn’t you expect to find just that?"

"I expected to either find that the prison is some kind of poor man’s knockoff of a real primordial’s prison or that it was thoroughly unchanged from how it was before and that you were trying to feed me a pack of lies," Silverlake said.

"But?" Zorian prodded.

"But it’s the same prison as it has always been… just seen from a different perspective," Silverlake said, lost in thought for a second. She scowled when she refocused back on them and saw them looking blankly at her. She clacked her tongue. "Bah! I can’t believe I have to explain myself to a bunch of amateurs like you… Well, let’s try it like this: you know how a dimensional gate looks like it’s composed out of two discrete portals but is actually just one dimensional construct with two ends? The prison in front of us is like that. I can sense the changes in it, but a closer look reveals they are clearly superficial. It’s the exact same object, just seen through a different lens. Panaxeth’s prison exists simultaneously in both the real world and… whatever the hell this place really ends up being. This Sovereign Gate of yours couldn’t duplicate primordial prison grounds, but it could make them attach themselves to this world in addition to their original one… and it’s giving me a headache. I don’t know how this could possibly work and I don’t know why someone would bother with this. Why didn’t this divine toy just neglect the primordial prisons entirely instead of going to all this trouble to ensure access to them even in a recreation of a real world? Argh…!"

She pulled at her hair for a second (not very hard, mind you, she seemed to do this just for dramatic emphasis) and then turned back towards the gaping abyss in front of them, staring at it in deep thought.

After a few moments of silence Zach asked the obvious question that Zorian was pondering as well.

"If the primordial prisons are objects that exist both in the real world and the time loop reality, doesn’t that make them a sort of a… bridge, for the lack of a better term?" Zach asked Zorian quietly. "If so, it might be possible to use them as a sort of conduit for opening a passage between this world and the real one. Hell, releasing one of them from their prisons might not even be necessary!"

"I wouldn’t place my hopes too high on such an idea," Silverlake suddenly said. Apparently she wasn’t so deep in her thought that she couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation. "Primordial prisons are hard to perceive, nevermind interact with. It would take vastly more skill to use them as a spell conduit than–"

She suddenly stopped and turned around to face them, an incredulous look on her face.

"Wait, what was that about releasing one of them?"

After convincing Silverlake that something funny was going on with the world at large and that their time loop explanation was at least a little bit plausible (and smoothing out some unfortunate misunderstandings), Silverlake reluctantly agreed to continue teaching them pocket dimension creation. In addition, Zorian had managed to talk her into selling them the analysis spells she used to study Panaxeth’s prison in exchange for both of the ingredients for her potion of youth. As much as she complained that such a trade was profoundly unfair due to the mechanics of the time loop, she just couldn’t resist getting her hands on both of the ingredients she needed to complete her potion of youth.