Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

This was Daimen and his personal team looking for rumors about the imperial staff. This time, Zach and Zorian had decided to tag along with them for a while. It had been four days since they had managed to obtain the imperial ring from the sulrothum, and they were still somewhat under the impression of what they had heard in the ziggurat. They didn’t know what to think about the whole incident. Clearly the angels were aware that the time loop was going to be activated and took at least some precautions in regards to that… did that mean they were behind the whole thing?

Zach certainly did not remember even talking to an angel, much less receiving any sort of instructions from them. Of course, it was possible that Red Robe was responsible for that, having erased Zach’s memory of that for some reason, but then one couldn’t help but ask why they didn’t plan for that possibility and leave a message for him through one of their other servants. The ring situation proved they were both capable and willing to make such contingencies when it suited them, so why not for other things as well?

There were no easy answers for that. Even Alanic admitted that this sort of thing did not make much sense to him, though he did not seem to be too disturbed. The angels work in mysterious ways, he said, since they labor under many limitations and restrictions placed on them by the gods. Many times they simply couldn’t do the logical thing, or even tell you why they are acting the way they do. One just had to have faith that they knew what they were doing and not rely on them too much.

Well, at least this way they had a trivially easy way of recovering the imperial ring…

"See, I told you Princess was the solution!" Zach said, spinning the said ring on his finger.

"This is not how you expected things to go and we both know it," Zorian told him firmly. He looked over to the side where Kirma was fiddling with the brand new divination compass Zorian had made for her. "So? What do you think?"

She didn’t answer for a moment, opting to instead cast a quick series of divinations through the device before turning it in her hands a few more times. Like her old one, it was a flower-shaped and made of metal, but with a much denser array of spell formula. Zorian was pretty sure his work was a massive improvement on what she had been working with up until now, but high level diviners were finicky and what worked for him might not necessarily work for her.

"Very impressive," she finally concluded. "A bit bigger and heavier than I’m used to, but I can work with this. It feels a little weird to accept something this valuable for free, though."

"Free?" Torun scoffed from their side. One of the floating eyeballs that followed him swiveled towards them while Torun simply kept scanning the jungle canopy for something. He had a bad habit of not looking people in the eye while talking to them, letting his floating eyeballs maintain eye contact instead. "He’s had all of us searching an entire continent worth of jungle for a straightened piece of wood without having to pay us a single thing. It was about time he started handing out gifts."

"That’s not very fair," Kirma protested. "We’re also doing this for ourselves, not just for him."

"And I’m paying plenty of money to make this happen," Zorian pointed out.

"Fake time loop money," Torun said dismissively. "Doesn’t count."

"Also, why don’t I get a gift?" Taiven suddenly asked, having snuck up to them from behind while they were taking. "Seriously, Zorian… you’re handing out expensive gifts to strange women, but you don’t have anything for your old pal Taiven? Shame on you!"

Zorian looked at her, amused. He’d thought she was still busy gawking at the jungle sights, since this was the first time she had ever stepped foot in one, but apparently she had calmed down a little and decided to seek him out.

Kirma gave Taiven a less friendly look, since she apparently didn’t like being labeled a strange woman out of the blue.

"My gift to you is taking you with me to Blantyrre, even though you have no useful skills for the mission and no wilderness survival experience," Zorian told her blandly.

"Eh, I guess that’s true," she laughed nervously. "I really do appreciate it, though. Traveling to exotic lands, searching for ancient artifacts… this sort of expedition is exactly what I hoped to one day experience. It’s great! It’s just too bad I can’t put this on my job profile or something."

She was entirely too giddy about the whole thing. On one hand it was kind of annoying to have her dance around the whole group like an excited little girl, on the other hand it kind of made him glad he had agreed to bring her along, since this clearly meant so much to her.

At least she wasn’t defenseless. The one time she had walked into a patch of carnivorous plants, she burned them all to ashes before anyone had even realized what had happened. Her inexperience aside, she was a decent combat mage.

Eventually, the group soon reached their destination – a small lizardmen village where they would supposedly find a reclusive sage that knew everything about the history of the region. While the everything was almost certainly an exaggeration, there was probably some sort of basis for his reputation, right?

Right.

The village was a humble one, with tiny houses made out of mud and straw. There was a river right next to it, and most of the adult villagers were currently busy tending to their boats, which they dragged onto the shore for easier handling. The children were either shuttling tools and materials between various work groups or chasing each other and play fighting while their parents shouted something vaguely threatening at them. Probably telling them to stop messing around or demanding they get out of the way if they wouldn’t help.

Their arrival caused a small commotion in the group, but they were mostly curious rather than wary. Most lizardmen never saw a human in their entire life, Zorian had learned, so they did not know what to expect of them. Since the group was accompanied by lizardmen guides hired in the nearby city-state and no one in the group carried an obvious weapon like a spear or a club, the villagers were not particularly frightened of them.

Annoyingly, this meant that some of the braver children tried to examine them closer or even touch them. One of them specifically picked Zorian as a target, probably because he was one of the shorter humans present, and kept asking him something while poking him.

Lizardmen language sounded nothing like normal lizard hissing. It was more like a high-pitched, warbling bird song. Zorian understood none of it, but by peering into the kids mind and listening to the snickering explanation of their lizardmen guides, he managed to puzzle out that the child was asking him if he was a fairy .

He hated this village already.

In any case, the group eventually set up a small camp just outside the village, with most of the group just idling around while the leaders of the village exchanged gifts with Daimen and went through various ceremonial gestures. The whole procedure was annoyingly lengthy, but apparently necessary. The reclusive sage they wanted to talk with was normally… well, reclusive . He wouldn’t deign to meet most people, but perhaps if they could convince the village elders to put in a good word for them, he might give them a chance.

Zorian was currently sitting on one of the cut down logs on the outskirts of the village, watching some of the lizardmen children fight the animated mud person he had created out of the ground to distract them from himself. Although the mud construct had the size and strength comparable to an adult human, the truth was that humans were notably smaller and weaker than lizardmen. Their vaguely crocodilian frames were wider and larger than human ones, and their skin was covered in tough leathery scales. Thus, even though the mud construct’s enemies were mere children, it was still being gradually overpowered. This was pretty much how Zorian had intended it to be, however. He didn’t really want to hurt the little brats, even if they were loud, grabby and generally annoying.