Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Hopefully the rumors of House Aope being bad luck were just superstitious nonsense and history wouldn’t really repeat itself like that, right? After all, House Aope couldn’t have reached its current status if it was really cursed…

Paranoia aside, he was taking quite a risk by interacting with Tinami like this. Not because he thought House Aope would mess up their invasion preparations or anything like that, but because of the attention it would bring to him personally. Officially, Zorian was just connecting Tinami and House Aope with the aranea, and anything else they talked about had nothing to do with him. In practice, there was no way the leaders of House Aope would be naïve enough to swallow that story. This was equivalent to putting a giant beacon on top of his head, telling the Aope leadership that he was worth paying attention to. Not exactly conductive for his plans to lay low after this whole thing is resolved.

Still, there was no helping it. The situation was precarious enough that he needed their help if he could get it.

"You know, you’re more interesting than I thought you were," Tinami remarked, giving him a shrewd look.

"Err, thanks," Zorian said awkwardly.

"Not that way," she hurriedly clarified. "What I meant was… you’re venturing into the tunnels beneath the city and taking lessons from giant sapient spiders living there. I never would have guessed you were that… driven."

"I’ll take that as a compliment," Zorian said after a short pause.

"It is," Tinami confirmed. "By the way, how come you’re missing so many classes? You know that looks pretty bad on your record, right? Even if you’re more capable than you look, you should still pay attention to your reputation."

"Don’t lecture me. You sound like my mother," Zorian told her. Tinami didn’t seem amused. "Anyway, I’m really busy with something right now and I can’t come to class. I already told my mentor about it and he said it was alright. I should be able to start attending classes again after the summer festival."

Assuming he was still alive and the city remained standing, that is.

"It’s your life, I guess," Tinami shrugged. "These meetings… we’ll continue with these, yes?"

"Sure," Zorian said. "As long as you wish."

"I get the feeling this is far more to my benefit than yours," Tinami noted.

"Kind of," Zorian agreed. "But I am learning thing here, so it’s okay. This isn’t a zero sum game."

He wasn’t even lying. Attending these practice sessions with Tinami would hopefully clue him in on what kind of skill level was considered normal among human mind mages. He had a feeling that would be crucial information in the near future.

Tinami gave him a weird look when he said that, though.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said quickly. "Nothing at all."

In the skies above Iasku Mansion, a lone iron beak was slowly circling the surrounding forest. The huge flock of iron beaks that guarded the place had long since noticed it, and were watching it carefully, but they did feel a certain level of kinship with a fellow iron beak, even if it was a foreign one, so they did not attack it.

The iron beak was actually Zorian, who had used a potion to shapeshift into the said bird. What he was doing was crazy, but if it could work…

He slowly approached the iron beak flock, probing it with his mind and soul, looking for flock leaders and weak links. Sudomir and the invaders had these iron beaks controlled through blackmail, having sized their nests and subverted their leadership, but the flock had never really submitted totally. It was intelligent enough to recognize blackmail and listen to simple orders, but also smart enough to hold a grudge and plot revenge.

For hours Zorian circled the flock, speaking to them mind-to-mind, subtly subverting the mind magic used by invaders to control iron beak leaders. If it were anyone else doing it, they would have likely made a mistake somewhere and alerted the monster handlers that something was happening and that the flock had gone out of control. But Zorian was good. Too good for the Ibasan monster controllers to detect anything.

As time went by, the iron beak flock paid more and more attention to the thoughts and images being fed into their heads. They were quiet and still, but their eyes shone with increasingly malicious glee.

Soon.

The day of the summer festival swiftly approached. Most of the preparations were complete, but there was always more that could be done and their actions got ever more frantic and desperate as the deadline approached. Perhaps it was just Zorian’s mind playing tricks on him, but it seemed to him that even uninvolved people, like Imaya and Kirielle, could sense the heavy atmosphere and became more serious as a result.

As the end approached, Zach and Zorian evacuated most of the people close to them out of the city. Having already seen how that sort of thing could go wrong with their original plan to get everyone to Koth, they did not group everyone together at the same place like they had before. Instead they picked five different sanctuaries and distributed people among them. In addition to Xvim, Daimen also got himself involved with the evacuation, drawing on his own connections and experience to make things go more smoothly.

His brother was still not happy with the amount of secrecy Zorian presented him with, but he seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation in the end, and agreed to cooperate with them until the situation was resolved.

After the summer festival was over, however, he was going to come to Zorian for that explanation he was promised. He was quite vocal about that .

Unfortunately, the evacuation wasn’t entirely successful. While most people agreed to go into hiding when told there would be fighting in the city during the summer festival, Taiven and Rea refused to go.

In Taiven’s case, the reason was exactly what Zorian had been afraid of – she thought of it more as an opportunity to prove herself than a dangerous situation to avoid. She was a fully-qualified battlemage, after all. All she needed now was some actual field experience. Zorian understood all that, but he also understood that she was a known friend of his to their enemies, which meant they would be directing far more forces at her than her skills and reputation warranted. Her combat skills, impressive as they were for her age, were not enough.

Was he selfish for not explaining that to her? Probably. If he told her the invaders would be gunning for her because of him, that would raise all sorts of questions about why that is so, and probably lead to her either finding out everything about him or feeling betrayed and hating him forever for it.

But maybe her hating him forever was worth it if it meant she would survive the month…

As for Rea, she was fine with having her daughter and husband out of danger, but she refused to go into hiding herself. Her explanation for this was that she was confident enough in her own combat skills and had to guard their house from looting. They were a very poor family, she said, and their move to Cyoria had exhausted all of their savings. If their house ended up looted or destroyed, they would be utterly ruined.

Zorian was wracking his head about how to talk her into abandoning the house – when Rea ended up inviting him to her house on her own initiative. Zorian was quite surprised at this, as this wasn’t something Rea typically did. Did she somehow catch wind of his own involvement in all this?

When he finally arrived at her place, however, he was greeted with another surprise: there were two more people already there.

One was Haslush, the detective that taught his divination and that he had already recruited into their anti-invasion efforts. He gave Zorian a curious look, but there was no trace of recognition in his eyes. He probably did not suspect Zorian.