Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"Oh come on. Me and my brother almost never interact with one another," Zorian told him. "You seem to have investigated me, surely you know that much? How would I know anything about what he has been doing?"

"But you do know he’s here in Cyoria right now?" Haslush pressed.

"Of course. He dropped by to let me know he’s in the city. It’s just common courtesy. We are family, after all," Zorian said with a shrug. He saw no point in telling an obvious lie and pretending he never saw Daimen recently.

"Do you two seriously believe Zorian is some kind of secret agent?" Raynie asked incredulously from the side, her eyes shifting between three of them in rapid succession.

"He definitely knows more than he lets on," Rea shrugged. "Considering the situation, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to wring some information out of him. It’s your brother’s life on the line here."

"It, it doesn’t have to be," Raynie tried anxiously. "Maybe it’s just a ransom thing and they just haven’t gotten to state their demands. It’s–"

"You’re lying to yourself and you know it," Rea said, giving her a knowing look. "When a shifter child gets kidnapped, nine times out of ten it’s became the kidnappers want their blood essence. With so much time having passed, it’s a question whether your brother is still alive at this point."

Raynie paled at the reminder.

"Let’s not be all doom and gloom here. I’m sure her brother is still very much alive," Haslush hurriedly assured Raynie. "The ritual they are kidnapping all these children for is only due to happen on the night of the summer festival. They need to keep her brother alive for a while yet."

"Hm. If you say so," Rea said. "Still, that date is just around the corner. If that’s our deadline, we don’t really have much to work with."

"Look, what do you even expect of me?" Zorian asked Rea, frowning at her slightly. "I don’t know where any kidnapped children are being kept. Do you think I would just sit on that information if I knew?"

It wasn’t like Zach and Zorian didn’t try to sabotage the primordial release ritual by denying the invaders the needed sacrifices. The problem was that they couldn’t possibly round up every shifter child on the continent and hide them away – no matter how thorough they were, their enemies could always throw a wider net and go after some shifter community that Zach and Zorian didn’t even know about. Jornak had spent decades preparing for this. Zorian suspected the power-mad lawyer would have found the needed sacrifices no matter what they did.

Of course, if Zach and Zorian could locate the place where the shifter children were being kept, he was all for launching a rescue operation. Without the needed sacrifices, Panaxeth couldn’t get free, which would be an automatic win in a sense. It would be worth it to trigger the final battle before the summer festival if they could inflict such a critical blow on their opposition. The problem was that Zorian genuinely had no idea where Raynie’s brother could be helped. It could very well be that those children were being kept on Ulquaan Ibasa, Koth or some other distant place.

They could be anywhere on the planet, so finding them was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

"I don’t know," Rea admitted. "I know you’re involved with this somehow, but I don’t know in what way. Maybe you really can’t do anything for poor Raynie here, but I’m hoping you can. I know she thinks I’m just a scheming, skulking cat, but I really do want to help her."

"What!?" Raynie protested. "I don’t–"

"It’s fine," Rea said with a chuckle, gesturing with her hand towards Raynie to quiet her down. "I get it. There’s too much bad blood between our peoples to let go on a whim. And I get why Zorian here is feeling defensive and denying everything. I suppose it must feel like I led him here into some sort of ambush."

"Didn’t you?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow at her.

"No… well, yes, I guess I kind of did," Rea admitted. "But considering you’ve been less than honest with me these past few weeks, I think you should be able to stomach a little underhandedness."

Zorian opened his mouth to defend himself but she raised her palm to stop him.

"I understand," Rea said. "I’m not angry with you. You wanted to get your sister’s friend and her family out of danger, but you didn’t want to reveal your secrets. I would have probably made the same choice in your place. I’m just curious… was our first meeting really an accident?"

"Yes," Zorian said easily. From a certain perspective it was true. "I’m not terribly social. If my little sister wasn’t such a giant busybody and insisted I accompany Nochka to her home, the idea would have never occurred to me. Getting Nochka’s bike out of the river so she could stop crying would be enough for me."

"Oh, is that what really happened?" Rea laughed. "You know, Nochka later told me a bunch of mean boys were trying to take her bike away from her and you chased them off and then escorted her home in case they came back."

Oops. He should have synchronized stories with Nochka, apparently. He didn’t think it was a big secret!

"Err, of course Nochka’s version is the correct one," Zorian assured her. "Don’t mind my earlier ramblings, I just got confused for a moment."

"Sure, sure," Rea said indulgently. "It was very heroic of you to defend my precious daughter from random ruffians like that…"

For a while, Haslush and Raynie watched them curiously as they talked, not interrupting their interaction. However, while Haslush was a grown man and an experienced detective, Raynie was just a teenager and under a lot of stress at the moment. As such, she soon became impatient.

"You… Zorian can you help me with this or not?" she loudly asked, impatience and frustration in her voice.

Zorian stared at her for a second before opening his mouth to apologize and tell her he was just an academy student and that there was nothing he could do to help her brother…

…but then he shut his mouth and started thinking about something.

It suddenly dawned on him that their enemies may have made a huge mistake when they kidnapped Raynie’s brother.

After a few seconds, he focused back on the redheaded girl staring at him expectantly and stared back straight into her eyes.

"You know what?" he told her. "I actually think there is something I can do. But I’m going to need your help."

Haslush silently leaned forward, his lazy-looking posture shifting into one of alertness.

"Me?" she asked, taken aback. She shifted in her seat uncomfortably. "But I’m just an academy student."

"So am I," Zorian told her. "Here’s what we need to do…"

In the port city of Luja, there was a small abandoned warehouse. It was a dark, uninviting place – the walls were moldy and crumbling, the floors were full of rat droppings and glass shards from broken bottles, and the windows and doors were crudely barricaded with wooden boards. There were a number of such places in Luja, as it was a large port town where trading companies were starting up and going bankrupt on a regular basis. Most abandoned warehouses would eventually find a new buyer and be fixed up into useable condition, but it wasn’t unusual for places like this to stay unoccupied for months or even years as old owners tried to hold on to it in hopes of getting a better price later.

As it happened though, this particular place held a dark secret. In the back of the warehouse, shielded from view by a mountain of rotting crates and boards, there was a black egg-like object attached to the floor with a mass of root-like tendrils. Spiral lines were etched into the black oval, beginning at the bottom and reaching all the way to the tip. Perceptive individuals would note that the oval almost looked like a giant black flower bulb on the verge of unfolding into a proper flower.