g her attention to him again.

There was no sane teacher in this school, it seemed. Zorian wondered whether it was the stress of teaching itself that was producing these kind of effects, or if you simply had to be crazy to accept a teaching position here.

“But I digress,” Nora said cheerfully. “I guess I should stop wasting our time and tell you what I want you to do. Here, let me demonstrate..”

* * *

The cube Nora wanted Zorian to recreate was quite complicated. At its core, it was a glorified lamp using a simple ‘torch’ spell as its base. It could be activated and deactivated verbally, by saying one of the several command words, and it had to be able to tell when someone was referring to it specifically, as opposed to using the command word in some other context. It had three different brightness settings. It conserved mana by not shedding light from any side that was covered by something – the side resting on the floor didn’t shine, for example, and wrapping it in a blanket would cause it to turn itself off. Each individual side could be turned on and off by tapping on it twice in quick succession. It could be keyed in to a specific person, taking orders from him or her alone.

Nora had told him not to worry if he couldn’t duplicate it exactly – she only wanted to see how far he’d get on his own by the next time they met. That was good, because this assignment was far more complex than anything spell formula related he had done up until now. Their next session was on Monday, so he had an entire weekend to work with, but he doubted he could fully rise to the challenge.

He had mixed feelings about Nora’s teaching methods. On one hand, she was taking him seriously, and that was good. On the other hand, she seemed to think that throwing a person overboard was a perfectly valid way of teaching people how to swim, metaphorically speaking.

“Come in.”

Zorian sighed before stepping into Xvim’s office. What a wonderful way to end a week. For all her faults, he infinitely preferred Nora’s way of teaching compared to that of Xvim.

“Zorian Kazinski? Sit down, please,” Xvim ordered, not even bothering to wait for an answer. Zorian caught the pen the man had thrown at him with practiced ease, and then promptly caused it to float off the palm of his hand, gently spinning in the air. Woops. He hadn’t meant to do that. Oh well, let’s see what the man will say about that.

“Make it glow,” Xvim barked out without skipping a beat, completely unfazed by Zorian’s skill.

Zorian wasn’t even surprised anymore. The pen promptly snapped back to his hand and erupted in soft ghostly glow. He cycled through various colors without prompting from Xvim, occasionally changing the intensity of the light just to prove he could.

Xvim arched his eyebrow at him. “I didn’t say you could stop levitating the pen.”

Zorian’s lips twitched in an aborted smile. If Xvim thought he would stump him with that, he was very much mistaken – combining two different shaping exercises was an obvious thing to do, and Zorian had already tried it. Moments later, the pen was spinning in the air in front of him, glowing.

Xvim tapped his finger on the desk thoughtfully. Was it possible? Had he really managed to give the man pause? The world was coming to an end! Zorian watched in anticipation, wondering what the crazy man would think up next.

“I suppose there is no point in testing your ability to burn things. That was always the easiest exercise of the three,” Xvim mused. As a point of fact, Zorian was a bit deficient in the burning exercise.. at least compared to the other two. Not that he was going to tell that to Xvim, of course. “Your essentials are.. adequate. Almost decent, though not quite. Your attitude could use some work, but I suppose you at least have more tact than most of the unfortunates that haunt these halls. Plus, miss Zileti has appealed to me on your behalf, asking me to be ‘not such a hardass’ towards you. As such, as much as I’d like to shake up your woefully shaky foundations, I’m going to reluctantly move on to something slightly more advanced.”

To Zorian’s great confusion, Xvim handed him a strip of cloth. What was he supposed to do what that?historical

“Err..”

“It’s a blindfold,” Xvim explained. “You put it over your eyes so you can’t see.”

“And.. why do I need a blindfold again?” Zorian asked.

“We’re going to train your ability to sense mana,” said Xvim. “You’re going to put the blindfold on, and then I’m going to throw these mana-charged marbles at you.”

Zorian stared at the man incredulously. Had he really heard him right?

“I’m either going to throw them over your left shoulder, over your right shoulder, or straight at your head. If you get hit by a marble, you lose a point. If you move when you don’t have to, you lose a point. Otherwise you receive a point. We’ll stop when you accrue 10 points or our time runs out.”

Yes, he really had heard him right. Thank you so much for your help Ilsa, thank you so much!

* * *

The next two weeks were busy, but routine. He directed most of his efforts towards mastering spell formulas, largely because Nora was very willing to indulge him – the harder he tried in their lessons, the more enthusiastic she became about teaching him. She even suggested they meet on Sundays for additional instruction, apparently not having any private obligations to distract her. He had learned much, but Nora set a grueling pace, and he was glad the restart was fast approaching. He doubted he could last much more than a month of Nora’s teaching.

Interestingly, he seemed to be attracting attention from the teachers and students alike in this particular restart. Maybe it was him impressing Ilsa as much as he did, maybe it was the way he quietly went with the insane workload Nora gave him, or maybe Xvim said something nice about him to the other teachers. Well, probably not that last part, since he had made little progress in mastering Xvim’s current ‘exercise’. In any case, he was getting a lot of attention for his efforts, which was rather curious. Most of the time, no matter how hard he tried in class, everyone was pretty flat about it. He thought about trying to leverage all that attention into something useful, but he was too exhausted by his studies to plot properly. Some other restart perhaps.

The attention had the unfortunate side-effect of wrecking any chance he had of befriending Kael. Associating with Zorian would surely bring great scrutiny on the morlock, something the boy was understandably concerned about, so Zorian wasn’t surprised the other boy never sought him out. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he could befriend the boy even in normal circumstances – the morlock had a daughter waiting for him at home, and thus probably wouldn’t want to spend his time after class socializing with friends.

Akoja was extremely pleased with him, though. Zorian couldn’t really understand why, but she was.

And then it happened. Suddenly, without any warning, there was a wrenching sensation and everything went black. He woke up, as usual, with Kirielle lying on top of him, looking smug.

There were two possibilities that Zorian could think of to explain this occurrence. The first one was that something or someone had killed him so fast he was dead before he realized it. He was skeptical of this, as he had done nothing to warrant an assassination, and he couldn’t think of any natural force that could kill so suddenly and thoroughly. He hadn’t even felt any pain before he died.

The second possibility was much more likely, and also much more worrying. While he was minding his business, learning spell formulas in Cyoria, Zach was off somewhere in the world, doing insanely dangerous things. Zach died. When he did, his soul was dragged into the past to start over.. and it dragged Zorian’s soul back with it.

Which would make Zorian soul-bonded to Zach.

Damn it.