Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"Don’t worry about it," Zorian repeated, hoping this time it would stick. He couldn’t exactly tell the boy that his savings account would spontaneously refill when the loop restarted, so it was hard to explain why money wasn’t too important for him.

Overall, his interaction with Kael was a lot friendlier this time around. Grudgingly, he had to admit Kirielle had a lot to do with it – she hit it off with Kana pretty quickly, despite the other girl being practically a baby, which seemed to put Kael at ease with both of them. After that, the two of them discovered they got along pretty well and Zorian decided to help the morlock with his alchemy and learn something at the same time. Which led to their current situation.

"This whole situation is terribly strange," Kael said after a minute of silence. "Not in a bad way, though. Kana is the happiest I have seen her in a while. I really am grateful to your sister for everything she has done for her, by the way."

"To be honest, I’m not sure how long it’s going to last," Zorian admitted. "For now she finds Kana cute, and probably finds it pleasing to have someone pay attention to her with such rapt attention. She tends to get bored really quickly, though. And in any case, she’s only in Cyoria temporarily while my family is off visiting my brother in Koth."

"Well that’s too bad," Kael sighed. Then he smirked at Zorian. "Though I supposed you’ll be relieved when she finally leaves."

"Well, who knows," Zorian said. "We’ll see how things go. She’s not so bad right now, so maybe she won’t be a total pest like she usually is. I’m hoping some of your daughter’s attitude will rub off on her in time."

"Oh, that would be such a pity," Kael said. "It would be a shame for such a lively girl to lose her spark of life. I myself wish Kana had some of that boundless enthusiasm."

"Shall we trade, then?" offered Zorian.

"No," Kael snorted. "Fetch me the water celery and be quiet for a while. I need to concentrate on this part."

And so Zorian stood in silence and watched Kael work, and thought about what the rest of the month would bring.

Zorian felt the mana-charged marble approaching him, but didn’t move. He couldn’t tell whether it was aimed to the left or to the right, but he knew it wasn’t aimed at his forehead. He could always tell when it was. Always. He wasn’t sure how he could tell that with absolute certainty when he could not actually pinpoint where the marble was going, but he was grateful for it. He just wished he could replicate that success to the exercise in general.

The marble whizzed past him and he struggled to identify on which side it passed him by.

"Left," he tried.

"Wrong," Xvim said in a disinterested tone. "Again."

Another marble was thrown towards him. This one wasn’t aimed at his forehead either. Not that surprising, really – Xvim stopped doing that when he realized Zorian could identify those with perfect accuracy. It wouldn’t do to give Zorian free points, after all.

"Right," he said.

"Wrong," Xvim immediately responded. "Again."

Zorian frowned behind the blindfold. Did it just seem that way or was he actually getting worse at this as time went by? Something was very wrong here. At the beginning of the session he was getting more than half of them correctly, but now he was constantly getting it wrong. He’d have thought he’d guess correctly every once in a while, through statistical inevitability if nothing else. There were only two possibilities!

That’s why, when Xvim threw the next marble, Zorian quickly wrenched the blindfold off to see what the deal was.

The marble flew straight over his head.

That son of a bitch!

"I didn’t say you could take the blindfold off," Xvim calmly said, as if Zorian didn’t just catch him red-handed.

"That’s cheating!" Zorian protested, completely ignoring Xvim’s remark. "Of course I couldn’t guess correctly if you’re not even going to abide by your own rules!"

"You’re not supposed to guess, mister Kazinski," Xvim said unapologetically. "You’re supposed to sense ."

"I was sensing," Zorian ground out.

"If you were, you would have realized what was happening far sooner, and you would not have needed to take off the blindfold to identify the problem," Xvim said. "Now stop wasting your time and put the blindfold back on so we can continue."

Zorian cursed Xvim mentally but did as he was told. As much as he hated to admit it, Zorian had to admit there was a lot of truth in Xvim’s words. He had been mostly guessing over which shoulder the marbles were going, relying on gut instinct instead of a clear perception of its location. But it was hardly his fault he couldn’t reliably track a fast-moving object through its faint mana emissions – according to books, that was a highly advanced skill that took years to master! Honestly, asking a student to master this sort of thing in their third year was completely unreasonable. But completely in character for Xvim, he supposed. At least he no longer had to worry about being hit in the head anymore.

The rest of the session was typical, which is to say repetitive and boring. Then again, what part of school wasn’t boring at this point? He had been stuck in the time loop for little over a year now, and feigning attention during classes was starting to get hard. He was tempted to take a page out of Zach’s book and go wander somewhere else for a few restarts, but he couldn’t. For one thing, it would be irresponsible to waste time like that when he could be working on skills he needed to get to the bottom of this. For another, he didn’t want to attract attention to himself. The memory of their interaction was probably still fresh in Zach’s mind, and there was a possible third party to consider. Completely blowing off classes would be completely out of character for him, and would raise a lot of eyebrows. He was already playing it close by taking Kirielle with him and skipping almost a quarter of his classes to do his own thing, but those changes were at least easily explainable. If his current course of action didn’t produce results, he’d have to drop the masquerade to preserve his sanity, but that wasn’t an immediate concern. He had more pressing problems to worry about, so he put off that issue for later, when and if it became relevant.

His session with Xvim done, he went to the library to report to Kirithishli. Normally he didn’t go to work on Fridays, since dealing with Xvim tended to kill his mood very fast, but he was feeling just fine today. He was getting used to the irritating man’s antics, it seemed.

"Zorian!" Kirithishli greeted. "Good timing! We just got a new shipment today and Ibery had to go home early."

"Uh, okay," Zorian said slowly. He was about to ask what kind of shipment arrived, but then he decided it was a stupid question. It was a shipment of books, of course. "What do you want me to do?"

"Just unpack the books out of their boxes and separate them into rough categories," answered Kirithishli, pointing in the direction of a small mountain of boxes. "I’ll inspect them in more detail later to see what to do with them."

"You don’t know what to do with them?" asked Zorian, baffled. "Why did you order them, then?"

"I didn’t," Kirithishli said, shaking her head. "Someone donated their personal library to the academy. It happens from time to time. Sometimes people leave their books to us in their wills, or people who inherit them don’t have a use for them and can’t sell them. A lot of old books are only useful as historical curiosities and sometimes not even that. Most of the books in these boxes will be disposed of, to be honest."

"Oh?" asked Zorian, opening one of the boxes and pulling out one of the books stacked inside of it. It was a manual about cultivation of plums. The cover said it was published 20 years ago. "I’m surprised by that. I distinctly remember you saying that librarians should preserve everything they can rather than pick and choose what they think is good or useful ."