Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"It’s fine," Zach sighed. "I’ve already come to term with things. I’ve already written my final will and everything."

"Right. In any case, you’re right. There is no point in waiting anymore. We’re just giving our enemies more time. We’ll attack two days from now, the day before the summer festival. I still have one final idea I want to try," Zorian said.

"The shifter thing?" Zach asked curiously. "You really think that will work?"

"If it does, it will be a huge success," Zorian pointed out.

"True," Zach agreed. "It’s worth a try."

Just outside of Cyoria, there was a spherical ritual room made by Zorian and his simulacrums. Everything here was carefully crafted for only one purpose: to power up and enhance one particular divination spell. All of the walls were densely packed with complicated series of lines and endless rows of cryptic sigils, all made from precious metals and rare alchemical materials. The ground was etched with no less than six blood red magical circles, and in the center stood a small golden cube with a seemingly mundane pottery bowl. Hundreds of tiny white stars hung in the air, illuminating the space. These were actually tiny dimensional gates that connected the room to various places in the country and beyond.

Every place that was likely to house the kidnapped shifter children, in Zorian’s opinion.

Currently the ritual room contained Raynie, Haslush, Rea, and three of Zorian’s simulacrums. Two simulacrums were disguised as adult mages, grim and silent, and were here for the sake of pretending this was a secret government operation, rather than something Zorian set up himself. Only one of them would be necessary for the ritual itself, but having two wouldn’t hurt and it would be more realistic for something of this scale to require multiple people to execute.

The last simulacrum looked just like Zorian and pretended to be the original – his job was mostly to stay next to Haslush and Rea and pretend to be normal. Though considering the looks on their faces as they studied the ritual grounds, he felt he mostly failed at that already.

"My, mister Kazinski… I knew you couldn’t be normal, but I have to say I didn’t expect you’re connected to people like this …" Rea said quietly. For the first time since he met her, she didn’t sound confident and in control, and he instead sensed a trace of fear in her voice.

"You have no idea," Haslush said, his voice quivering. His reaction was even more extreme than Rea’s; he seemed downright horrified by what he was seeing. "More money went into this room than my entire police department gets in a year. And it’s all meant to empower one specific spell that is only useful for this one thing! The whole thing will be useless after today! The extravagance is mind-boggling."

Simulacrum number one shifted in place, a little uncomfortable. Zorian’s perspective on money was a little skewed, yeah. This could be a real problem in the future, but at the moment he really didn’t care. He’d pay twice this much if he thought it would help.

"You don’t even understand what this room means, do you?" Haslush asked Zorian, giving him a strange look.

"No?" the simulacrum told him uncertainly.

And he really couldn’t. Sure, the room was the best thing he could make on a short notice, which probably made it amazing by regular mage’s standards, but he was sure a country as big and influential as Eldemar could pull this off.

It was kind of funny, really… the original went through so much trouble to make his abilities seem more humble than they were and to attribute his achievements to some nebulous government organization. He’d even succeeded. But in the end, the mere fact he was associated with people like that was enough to alarm and awe Haslush and Rea.

He’d normally get a headache out of this, but he was just a simulacrum and wouldn’t even exist in a couple of house, so imagining Zorian having to deal with this in the future just made him laugh.

"Ah, forget it," Haslush sighed. "You’re still too young and inexperienced. You’re tangling with some really dangerous stuff, is all I’m going to say."

"Don’t I know it," the simulacrum mumbled.

Raynie, on the other hand, was currently sitting in the middle of the ritual room, next to the golden cube and the bowl, taking deep breaths to calm herself. She was chanting some sort of song to herself in a language Zorian’s simulacrum couldn’t recognize. It was probably the language of her tribe. The two disguised simulacrums were also sitting around the cube, forming a triangular formation around it together with Raynie. They were naturally far more calm and collected, and patiently waited for Raynie to psych herself for the upcoming ritual.

The pressure on her was enormous. This ritual would succeed or fail purely based on how she performed. Simulacrum number one was certain his fellow simulacrums would perform their part of the ritual flawlessly, but the core part of the divination ritual was something only Raynie could do… because it was her brother they were trying to track down with the spell.

Divination spells were more effective the more they had to work with. In case of tracking spells, the caster needed something connected to the target. A personal item, a drop of blood, things like that. They were even more effective if the caster was personally connected to the target in some way: if they had personally spoken to the target at some point, if they were friends with them, or if they were married to one another.

As far as connections go, though, there were few things more potent than being literal family: parent and child, brother and sister.

And more potent still was to use literal blood magic to form a resonance between their common bloodline.

Finally, there was the primordial essence that existed in the blood of every shifter. Raynie was already a teenager, so most of that primordial essence was gone, integrated into her body and soul. However, traces of it should remain still. Zorian had spent quite some time with the leaders of the Cult of the Dragon Below, studying their method of releasing Panaxeth, and he knew how they used primordial essence to resonate with the one in the prison and act as a key. The same method could be used to fool any mortal defensive ward or anti-divination method.

Raynie and her brother were siblings. Even if they had never interacted much, the link between them was strong. Blood magic could make it even stronger. They also both had primordial essence in their blood, and that could be used to bypass any form of divination defense the invaders put up around her brother and the rest of the sacrifices.

If the ritual they were about to undertake successfully located Raynie’s brother, Zach and Zorian could liberate all the shifter children the invaders gathered during the past few weeks. Not only did that mean doing a good deed and saving a bunch of children from a gruesome death, it would also irreparably sabotage the Panaxeth release ritual. There was only one day before the summer festival. There was no way that the invaders could gather another batch of sacrifices in that short of a time.

There were a lot of ways the ritual could fail, even if they executed it flawlessly. For one thing, Zorian couldn’t blanket the entire planet with dimensional gates, no matter how small they were. Not even close. It was possible he had failed to pick the right place to search at, in which case all of this was for naught. It was also possible that the invaders were keeping all the kidnapped children separated until the final moment, in which case they will just end up saving Raynie’s brother and no one else. Their enemies also may have gathered enough spare children to form a second group, in which case they could still try to release Panaxeth as normal.