Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

He was… probably right about that. If it were just Zorian and Xvim making decisions, maybe they would have decided to cold-heartedly ignore the threats and continue pressuring Jornak and his group. Maybe. However, there was no way either Alanic or Zach would be fine with that. Especially Alanic, since he clearly cared a lot about Eldemar – not just the people, but the country itself, as well.

For a while the scene was quiet, as Zorian and the rest of his group discussed the situation in front of them via telepathy. Jornak and his group were probably discussing something through magical means too, considering their body language and brief looks, though Zorian did not really know if they were using telepathy or something else.

Probably something else, as all three were under the mind blank spell.

It was a good thing they had decided not to bring Spear of Resolve with them, he mused. Her telepathic prowess would have been largely useless against the people in front of them and her skills at other forms of magic were relatively humble. She couldn’t teleport away, or even just fly off into the distance. If a fight were to break out, she would have been a rock around their neck – unable to contribute to the battle, incapable of quickly retreating, yet important enough that Jornak and Quatach-Ichl would definitely want to see her dead.

No, it was best she stayed safe in the depths of her web for now.

"If we agree to this, how can we be sure you won’t be here tomorrow to demand further concessions in exchange for not wrecking everything?" Zach finally asked.

"As we have already established, this truce is more in our favor than yours. Why would I risk things like that?" Jornak asked with a raised eyebrow. "In my opinion, I’m the one who should be worried. You have every incentive to agree to the truce and then dishonor it later. How can I be sure you won’t just take advantage of the truce of build up your forces and dishonor it a few days later? I can’t. All I can do is immediately make good of my threats in response."

Zorian clacked his tongue at the explanation. So this truce was basically toothless and could fall apart at any moment if one side pushed more than the other can tolerate. And there would definitely be plenty of pushing and testing of waters, that much was clear – if any side saw a chance to gain an advantage by dishonoring the deal, they would do so in a heartbeat.

"Threat, threat, and more threats. Just so you know, if you come later to demand more from us, I will immediately attack you, consequences be damned," Zach told him darkly.

"Does that mean we have an agreement?" Jornak said with a self-satisfied smirk.

"Ha ha! Of course they’re going to agree," Silverlake suddenly piped in, jumping up from her conjured chair and stretching in an exaggerated manner. She ignored Jornak’s annoyed look and stepped forward with a grin. "They’re all too touchy-feely to risk such devastation just to stop us a little earlier… but more importantly, they recently found out that Zach will have issues surviving this month. It sure would be nice if they could take a step back from all the fighting in order to figure out what to do about that…"

The atmosphere immediately got even more tense and gloomy. Zorian had always known that Silverlake wouldn’t have informed him about Zach’s contract purely on a whim, and now it seemed like one of the big reasons for it was to put pressure on them to agree to this truce. It was as Silverlake said – they needed time and resources to figure out what could be done about this, and it would be hard to focus on this if they were constantly fighting their enemies during this time, spending their time, money, and mana on getting an upper hand.

"How did you even find out about that?" Zach asked with a frown, directing his question at Jornak instead of Silverlake. Clearly he felt the lawyer was the source of the information. "I mean, even I didn’t know I made a deal with the angels, so how…?"

"You did know," Jornak said, shaking his head. "The angels didn’t tell you who they were, but you are not completely stupid." Zach scowled at him but said nothing. "There are only so many powers capable of doing what they did. You eventually figured out who it could be and raided church archives to see if they had records of similar deals being made. They did. In fact, they had examples of past angelic contracts – many, many examples. Even if none of them were directly applicable to your situation, they still held a lot of clues for those who knew how to read them. You brought them to me, and we worked together to piece together the general nature of your contract. I don’t dare claim I understand it completely, since I’ve never seen the actual contract and you can’t directly talk about it, but I know enough."

Zorian wasn’t surprised at this. Back when the angel they had summoned caused the contract to appear, he immediately noticed that the contract was written in very legal terms. More importantly, they were modern , familiar legal terms, the sort you would see in any sort of legal document in Eldemar. At first glance at least, the contract looked like something you might get if you visited a mundane lawyer in Cyoria and asked them to write up a contract for a business deal or something similar.

That meant the angels had lots of experience when it came to making these contracts. Zach shouldn’t be the only person working under this kind of contract. There should be others. Perhaps many others, and not all of them could have a contract backed by divine magic. No matter how secretive the angels were, examples of past contracts would exist somewhere out there.

And with examples of past contracts in hand, some creativity when answering questions, and an actual lawyer to consult with… it probably wasn’t impossible to figure out what is happening and how to covey it to others without tripping the angelic restrictions.

"You know," Silverlake began, "Panaxeth’s escape does not necessarily have to be for real."

Zorian gave her a strange look.

"The contract we’re under says we just have to let Panaxeth out of the seal and our job is done," she continued. "If the primordial is resealed immediately afterwards, even if we are the ones who do it, the contract will not punish us."

"That just shows how utterly confident Panaxeth is in being able to handle everything, including all of us combined, once it is out of the cage made by the gods," Zorian told her. "Don’t tell me actually think you can seal it back in?"

"I’m not sure you know this, but the gods placed numerous contingencies on Panaxeth’s prison, and on the prisons of all trapped primordials for that matter," Silverlake said. "The moment he gets out, Panaxeth will get seriously weakened. Even the primordial is not sure how badly the contingencies will hurt him. If Panaxeth was at the peak of his powers, I would obviously be a fool to try and fight him, but if he’s weakened badly enough it is entirely possible. Hell, those cultists trying to take control of Panaxeth? Maybe they’re not as dumb as we thought they are. They’ve overestimated their mind magic capabilities, yes, but if they had a master telepath and his hundreds of aranean friends–"

"No," Zorian told her.

"It was just a thought," Silverlake said easily, not arguing him over it. "An idle thought. I don’t really think us mere mortals could seriously control en entity on the level of Panaxeth, but perhaps we might be able to muddle his thoughts and hinder him long enough to push him back into the seal. Wouldn’t that be nice? Me and Red Robe… sorry, Jornak… I still can’t believe that little shit lied to me about something so petty… and that I fell for it…"

Zorian gave her an annoyed look as she started muttering to herself again and she cackled at him in response. Some habits were hard to break, it seemed, even if she had suddenly regained her youth.