Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"I see," Zorian said, nodding. "I suppose you’d be quite a hypocrite if, after subjecting your students to such an infuriating initial treatment, you ended up losing your patience after only a handful of repeating months."

Xvim hummed in response, not giving a verbal response. He glanced at the divine artifacts Zorian was inspecting.

"You realize, I’m sure, that no one has ever managed to figure out how divine artifacts actually work?" Xvim asked.

"Of course," Zorian said. "But very few people had the opportunity to take one apart over and over again as a method of study."

"Still, I’m surprised you’re wasting time on this," Xvim remarked. "Wouldn’t it be wiser to spend more time on time loop related things?"

"I would actually classify this as very much a time loop related thing," Zorian answered. "The time loop clearly works at least partially with the help of divine energies. Who’s to say they aren’t involved with our markers?"

"Oh?" Xvim asked, suddenly more interested.

"It’s just baseless speculation," Zorian said. "But I’ve been thinking about what Red Robe could possibly have that other past Controllers didn’t that would allow him to break the limitations placed on temporary markers, and the most likely answer I’ve come up with is… Quatach-Ichl. I suspect divine energies are involved with the marker somehow, and that the reason Red Robe had been able to jailbreak it is because he had Quatach-Ichl’s help. His method of perceiving and possibly modifying divine energies may have allowed him to tamper with the marker in ways that are impossible to us… in which case our efforts to understand and modify the marker are doomed to fail right from the very start."

"I hope you are not right about that," Xvim said after a short pause. "Quatach-Ichl has been alive for centuries. Who knows how long it took him to develop such capabilities?"

Zorian had nothing to say to that.

With the palace orb handed to the time magic researchers for study and experimentation, Princess had temporarily lost her home. They weren’t going to leave her in there while the researchers tinkered with the pocket dimension. That would probably end in tragedy, and they still needed her to intimidate the sulrothum tribes into allying with them, anyway.

Although Princess herself was not particularly heartbroken about being away from the orb, the situation did make moving her around a bit of a chore. She couldn’t live in the desert. While she could tolerate dry areas, she needed plenty of water to rest in. Thus, Zach and Zorian mostly kept her deep in the Kothic wilderness, where she was happily terrorizing the jungle wildlife, and used dimensional portals to move her where they needed her. Thankfully, while Princess was huge, she was also serpentine in build and very flexible. She could squeeze herself through surprisingly small openings. However, this still meant Zach and Zorian had to expand their dimensional gates to far greater sizes than they typically used, greatly increasing casting time and mana costs involved.

Princess did have her own, divinely-granted teleportation abilities. They had experimented with them somewhat, trying to see if the hydra had underutilized her gifts somehow, but they were disappointed in the end. Her teleportation powers were exactly what they appeared to be: a short-ranged teleport ability that Princess could use for entering and leaving the palace orb, as well as tactical positioning during battles. It was incapable of transporting her across large distances.

The logistics of hydra transport aside, their alliance building was moving along extremely well. The sulrothum tribes they were visiting were both less secure and less prosperous than the ziggurat tribe. Their settlements had no defensive wards, they had no guardian beast on the level of the divinely-touched sandworm and their equipment was far shoddier than what Zach and Zorian were used to. Thus, when a pair of powerful human mages came to them, riding on a gigantic eight-headed hydra and handing out gifts, none of them dared to simply snub them. Not all of them were eager to work with them, but all of them at least agreed to hear them out.

It helped that this time they had brought an actual sulrothum language specialist to translate for them. The bearded, middle-aged man had only agreed to work with them after Zach and Zorian used Neolu and her family connections to guarantee their trustworthiness, but he had been worth the trouble. Not only was he proficient in the hand language that sulrothum normally used for their communication with humans, he even understood some of their native clicking and buzzing that they used to talk to each other… though he couldn’t actually speak it, of course.

Curiously, the man was completely non-magical. Ibak, as he was called, claimed that spells were of little help to him in his job. They only put the sulrothum on edge, as many of them were wary of talking to mages. The devil wasps had great difficulty distinguishing spell chants from mundane conversations, so any time a known spellcaster started speaking they would be viewed with great suspicion.

At the moment, Zach, Zorian, Ibak and Princess were approaching another of the sulrothum tribes for recruitment. This one was particularly underwhelming, however, and Zorian privately wondered if they should even bother. The settlement was just a series of circular holes dug into a cliff, and Zorian had seen enough of such places by now to estimate the number of sulrothum living there. The tribe probably had less than a hundred members total. Since the group had done nothing to mask their approach and Princess was very eye-catching, the sulrothum scouts had long since spotted them and the entire tribe was a nervous hive of activity. This allowed Zorian to take a look at the decorations and weapons the group was sporting, and he was not impressed with what he was seeing.

"Why are all these tribes so much worse than the ziggurat one?" Zach asked out loud.

He probably did not expect an answer, but surprisingly Ibak had an answer.

"Because of the dungeon access," Ibak said.

Zach and Zorian shot him curious looks, not really understanding.

"While humans like to build their cities on top of accessible dungeon layers, most other species do not, as their less sophisticated magical expertise makes them less capable of dealing with creatures crawling out of the Dungeon on the regular basis," Ibak clarified. "The sulrothum living in the Ziggurat of the Sun are an exception, probably because of the giant sandworm you mentioned. The creature probably allowed them to reshape their local underground the same way human communities do, letting them exploit the place in relative safety. The other tribes do not have that, and thus appear underwhelming in comparison."

"Huh," Zach said thoughtfully. "I guess that sandworm is even more important than we thought. The wasps really lucked out with that thing."

Before anyone could continue the discussion, Princess released a warbling cry and pointed one of her heads towards a spot on the horizon where a group of sulrothum was flying towards them.

Zorian frowned at the sight. He wasn’t surprised that Princess had noticed them before anyone else – she had eight pairs of eyes and was intensely vigilant by nature – but the direction they were coming from and their numbers were unexpected. They were coming from their left, rather than the sulrothum settlement in front of them, and there were twelve sulrothum in the approaching group.

"An emissary from a different tribe?" Zorian guessed. He doubted the tiny settlement in front of them would send out a hunting party as large as this… and if they did, the group would first enter their home to consult with their elders before confronting them.