Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

And the third one was that showing up to class today was probably their last chance to do such a thing for the rest of the month. After today, it was unlikely they would have time to mess around with schoolwork and attending classes. They might as well take this opportunity to reunite with their classmates for a moment, finish recovering, and mentally prepare themselves for the trials ahead.

"You’re late."

Zorian looked at Akoja, dutifully standing in front of the door with a clipboard in her hands and taking note of incoming students. She stared at him coolly, tapping her foot impatiently against the ground.

He simply smiled at her in response, causing her to suddenly lose her cool and look away uncomfortably.

"Sorry," Zorian told her. "Things are a little hectic these days, at least for me."

"Well… just don’t let it happen in the future, okay?" she told him seriously, quickly recovering her confidence.

"Sadly, I don’t think that’s possible," Zorian shook his head. "I’m probably going to be absent from classes a lot in the near future."

"It’s not a good idea to miss the start of the school year like that," she told him with a small frown.

"I disagree. The start of the school year is the best time to miss," Zorian told her. "It’s all just repetition of things we’ve already learned in previous years and very easy study material. I’ll make up for it in a flash, you’ll see."

"Just get inside already," she told him with a long suffering sigh.

Zorian gave her a thumbs up and did as he was told, humming happily as he entered the classroom and picked a seat for himself. Zach was already inside, Akoja not having paid too much attention to him. Zorian greeted a few of the classmates he remembered being slightly more friendly with before the time loop, turning some heads due to how uncharacteristically happy he seemed, before going towards the front of the classroom.

He picked a familiar spot next to Briam and his fire drake, with Zach right behind him.

Just like he expected, the small fire drake in Briam’s lap immediately started hissing at him when he approached. Briam quickly enclosed the orange-red lizard with both hands and started whispering soothingly at his familiar. The drake calmed down a little but still kept both of his eyes on Zorian, alert and nervous.

Zorian ignored the spectacle, simply plopping down on his seat and calmly watching the scene. He still didn’t understand what exactly the fire drake found so upsetting about him in particular. He had once even peered into the fire drake’s mind to find the answer, but that didn’t help. The fire drake was not actually a sapient being. He was a creature of instinct, and something deep inside of him told him that Zorian was uniquely dangerous out of all people gathered in the classroom. The fire drake did not understand why, but it trusted its instincts.

Did the drake sense Zorian’s mental powers, despite not being psychic himself? Did Zorian have some ability he had no idea about? It was a mystery. From what Briam had told him, he wasn’t unique in this regard. Fire drakes could be very strange, temperamental creatures, and he wasn’t the first person that his familiar had picked out for some reason. Eventually, the influence of the mage they were bonded with tended to temper these kinds of aggressive urges, and mature fire drake familiars were apparently far more placid and reliable in dealing with strangers.

"Sorry about that," Briam said. "He’s still a little uneasy around strangers."

"Don’t worry about it," Zorian said, waving the apology away. "Congratulations on getting your own familiar, I guess. Must be a milestone for you."

"Yeah," Briam said happily, patting the drake like some kind of scaly cat. The drake reacted to that sort of like a cat, too. "It’s great."

He spent some time talking to Briam and waiting for the class to start. Though it was premature to worry about that now, he couldn’t help but wonder how to deal with school life in the future. His classmates were nice and all… some of them he’d be happy to befriend if possible… but he was so much more capable than them magic-wise that it wasn’t even funny. Plus, the classes themselves are bound to be mind-numbingly boring. Could he really pretend to be just a normal student for two years straight? Was it actually possible for someone like him – a guy with archmage-level skills and a decade of additional memories and experience under his belt – to befriend one of these people?

Perhaps time loop Taiven was right and his attempt to connect to his former friends and classmates was ultimately kind of hollow and patronizing…

Thankfully, his somewhat depressing thoughts were soon interrupted by Ilsa’s arrival to class. She did her practiced speech at the beginning of the class and then started the lesson. Zorian was already preparing himself for a boring but relaxing class the likes of which he had heard dozens of times inside the time loop when the classroom door suddenly burst open, and a teenage boy his own age swaggered inside.

He was tall, with messy blond hair and rumpled clothes that looked like they had seen better days. The door had been opened so forcefully that Zorian suspected the boy had kicked it open with his foot instead of using the handle. It rebounded against the wall with a loud bang and promptly closed itself behind him.

As he marched forward towards the front of the class, the boy swept the whole class with his gaze. For a moment, Zorian met his eyes and found himself staring at vividly orange eyes, their slitted pupils burning with barely contained anger and aggression.

Veyers Boranova had arrived to class.

Veyers was a frustrating part of the time loop mystery for Zorian. The fact that he had been deliberately erased from Zach’s mind and that he started each restart dead made him a strong suspect for the real identity for Red Robe. However, that raised the question of how Veyers had managed to become a permanent looper. It couldn’t have been through the method Zorian had used – everything he and Zach knew indicated that had been pure luck, and that deliberately replicating it would be both hard and dangerous. Zorian’s conversation with Panaxeth had fully convinced Zorian that Zach was the original Controller of the loop, so Red Robe must have come later. That meant he had probably become a looper through the temporary marker given by the imperial crown… which meant that he had only had six months to figure out a way to permanently join the time loop.

Did Veyers really possess the skills necessary to pull that off? He was just an inexperienced teenager. He had a crippling condition that made his magic and personality unstable. He was not considered a social genius or a magic prodigy, even before his botched ignition ritual. There was no way he could have developed his magic sufficiently to pull it off in mere six months, and organizing a group that could have done so in his stead would have taken considerable amount of social shrewdness.

Not to mention that Veyers would have had to do all this while keeping Zach in the dark about everything. Zach wasn’t very paranoid, and was probably even less so in the past, but that couldn’t have been easy regardless.

Still, Zorian could see how it could have worked. Perhaps Zach had really come to like Veyers for some reason and had done most of the work himself. Perhaps he had brought the other boy into the time loop again and again, figured out a way to stabilize his magic, and helped him advance his skills in the fastest and convenient manner possible. Perhaps there had even been a time when Zach had gone through the trouble of recruiting Quatach-Ichl and other soul magic experts in order to figure out a way to crack the secrets of the temporary marker… so that he could bring his best pal Veyers permanently into the time loop.