Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

His vision began to darken. He wanted to do something, wanted to send a signal to his various contingencies in one final act of spite, but his mind was fading, fading, fading… He forgot Zorian’s words, forgot what led him to this place, forgot any of this ever happened. He found himself back in Cyoria, surrounded by corpses of Zach and Zorian, knowing only one thing:

He was Jornak Dokochin, a humble lawyer from Cyoria, the true heir of House Denen, and the last surviving time looper…

…and he had won.

Again, and again, and again.

He was Zorian Kazinski, the third son of a minor merchant family from Cirin, accidental time traveler, and quite possibly the most powerful human mind mage in all of Altazia…

…and he had won.

It was not an easy task to arrange all of this. Sure, he could have beaten Jornak and Silverlake, stopped the ritual, and left it at that… but that would be a very bittersweet outcome. Zach would have died at the end of the month and Zorian would have spent the rest of his future running away from Eldemarian assassins and whatnot.

Zorian did not spend all those years in the time loop just to settle for a… suboptimal outcome.

The first task, of course, was figuring out how to get past the mind blank spell. Even before he had known about Zach’s angelic contract, he’d known the boy was hiding something of critical importance that he would have to wrench out of his head. Thus, he worked with Xvim, aranea, and many others to find the solution. A way to beat the ultimate mental defense – a spell that had been providing total protection against mind magic, no exceptions, for literal centuries now.

A lot of people Zorian had worked with thought it was a fool’s task to begin with. What did Zorian have that so many other mind mages that tried to invent a workaround hadn’t? But Zorian didn’t embark upon this idea blindly. He already had an idea before he threw himself into the project.

The soulseizer chrysanthemum was a very rare and obscure magical creature. It was so dangerous and frightening to people that they had long since eradicated it in more civilized areas, not even bothering to study it properly before doing so. Who was brave enough to research a flower that would eat your soul if you made a mistake in restraining it? Not many people. It didn’t help that the plant was a very valuable component for many potions, meaning it was worth more dead than alive to begin with.

In modern times, of course, some mage or organization would have probably become interested in the soulseizer and organized a hunt so its abilities could be studied… except that the plant only lived in monster infested wilderness these days, was surprisingly good at hiding, and smart enough to pick its fights carefully. Plus, its abilities were not well known, and old descriptions found in ancient tomes did not do the creature justice. They made the chrysanthemum look like a simple plant-shaped soul eater. It just wasn’t that impressive sounding.

Zorian had experienced the flower’s attack first-hand, however. Zach hadn’t thought much about their experience, seeing it only as an embarrassing instance where they had nearly been beaten by a flower, and soon forgot about it. But Zorian had never forgotten. The way the plant’s initial stunning attack had simply bypassed all of their defenses left a deep impression on him.

If the chrysanthemum could bypass their defenses by targeting their body, mind, and soul simultaneously… could the same method be used to target someone’s mind even when it was protected by the mind blank?

Mind blank protected the mind by separating it from what the aranea called the Great Web . The mind closed in on itself, rejecting all contact. But it was still connected to the brain, and to the soul. It should be possible to target the mind by going through those two, somehow. This wasn’t a new idea, by any means, but most people who tried to make such a method work before hadn’t had the soulseizer chrysanthemum on hand to provide a working example of how such a thing would work in practice.

Zorian did. And he had a whole host of experts in both soul magic and mind magic to help him figure it out.

The process of studying the chrysanthemum’s abilities had some unintended benefits. He probably would not have found a way to negate the wraith bombs in a reasonable amount of time if he hadn’t spent so much time studying the flower and its abilities, and he wouldn’t have been able to make the weapon that Mrva had used to disable Quatach-Ichl for a few moments. These were all just side benefits, however, paling in importance to the real end goal of the research: the manifold resonance spell.

The spell was not ideal by any means. First of all, the magic Zorian and his team designed could only be used through touch. Skin-to-skin contact was required to successfully cast the spell. It was also incredibly complicated and hard to control. Three whole minds were needed to execute the spell. Not an impossible requirement for someone who could make simulacrums like Zorian could, but still an issue. Finally, targets eventually acquired a resistance to it. Experiments showed that targeting the same person repeatedly with the spell made them instinctively resist it after only a handful of attempts. In case of people with highly trained defenses like Xvim and Alanic, that meant they became resistant after only two or three attempts.

But it worked. It was complicated and inconvenient, but it did the impossible and that was all that mattered. With the spell to bypass mind blank in his arsenal, victory – actual victory – was finally possible.

In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his fellow time travelers – Zach and Jornak.

When Zorian teleported next to the two combatants and lunged at them, hands glowing, he knew neither would take it lying down. Zach looked shocked at his sudden betrayal, but he was an experienced fighter and reacted immediately, firing a pair of blindingly bright white rays that nearly took Zorian’s head off. Only his defense cube saved him, by warping space around him slightly to make the beams miss. As for Jornak, he drew the imperial dagger out of his belt with a smooth, practiced motion and thrust it straight at Zorian’s face.

Zorian didn’t know much about the imperial dagger. Its main ability out of the time loop was supposed to be its ability to hurt spirits, but… why take that chance? He doubted Jornak would try to use it on him if it wasn’t uniquely useful in this situation. He jumped back a little, evading the stab at the cost of losing some momentum and giving up some of his advantage of surprise.

"Zorian, what-" Zach started saying, outrage evident in his voice.

He never got to finish it. A marble Zorian accidentally dropped out of his pocket before he jumped back suddenly activated and instantly sucked in all the air around them, creating a sizeable area of total vacuum between them.

The surrounding air quickly rushed in to fill the void, forcefully dragging all three of them into the center of the area. Jornak and Zach were unharmed, but caught off guard. But Zorian was ready.

The moment they collided with each other he clamped down on Zach and Jornak’s hands and cast the spell.

A faint blue wave quickly rippled through them, expanding from the point of contact to envelop their whole body. They still had their mind blank spell on, but it didn’t matter. Their bodies went limp, insensate to the world around them.

Moment later, they were plunged in a constructed dream world over which Zorian had total control.

It was an incredible achievement creating this thing, and this wasn’t just Zorian praising himself. The aranea were also in awe of the scale of what he created. That said, he wasn’t doing this alone. Aside from him and his simulacrums, many, many aranea were helping him control the illusionary world. On top of that, he wasn’t really conjuring people’s surroundings out of nothing. He was accessing eyes of people around the city and his iron beaks in the sky to give Zach and Jornak as convincing of an experience as he possibly could.