Zorian stared at his tormentor in silence, as relaxed and impassive as one could be when faced with such a pitiless, unreasonable man. Xvim stared back at him, his face a picture of unshakable, effortless composure that made Zorian’s best efforts at stoicism appear laughable in comparison. Still, he wouldn’t break. He didn’t break. He had (eventually) met every ridiculous demand Xvim had given him and had never blown up at the man even once. Of course, that hadn’t impressed the man any, even when he’d demonstrated insanely good shaping skills for a third year student, but he’d expected as much.

They continued staring at each other in silence for several seconds.

“That,” Xvim finally decided, “was terrible. You are inflexible, slow, yet paradoxically impatient. I see in you a tendency to overreach, mister Kazinski, moving on to advanced fields of study without a healthy foundation to back it up. A common problem with many of your fellow mages, true, but ‘everyone else is doing it’ was never a valid excuse for anything. We will have to work on that before we tackle anything more substantial.”

“Of course, sir,” Zorian said calmly. “I’ll be sure to practice everything you’ve shown me back at home.”

“Good. I expect a better performance on our second session,” said Xvim, leaning back in his chair before making a shooing motion with his hand. “You are dismissed.”

Zorian made a solemn nod, slowly rose from his chair and then fled the office as fast as he could without making it obvious he was in a hurry to leave. Only when he shut the door and put some distance from the room did he let himself relax.

That could have ended up badly. Very, very badly. He knew he’d be taking a risk when he tried to read Xvim’s mind, but the man had aggravated him so much that he couldn’t help himself. Besides, what were the chances of Xvim deciding to shield his mind for a meeting with one of his students? Pretty good, apparently, because Zorian encountered a powerful mental shield when he tried to read his thoughts. He withdrew immediately, terrified that his telepathic probe had been noticed by the man, but whatever defenses Xvim had apparently gave the man too little feedback to notice Zorian’s relatively delicate attack. Well, that or he did notice but decided not to say anything, but that seemed very unlikely – if that were the case, he would have at least made a snide comment or two about how sloppy Zorian’s attempt was, even if he wasn’t at all bothered by the attempt itself.

It was very interesting that Xvim had bothered shielding his mind for their meeting, though. Was Xvim one of those mages who kept their mind shielded at all times, or did he somehow know about Zorian’s talents? There were a lot of possibilities. Zorian made a mental note to barge into the man’s office unannounced at some point in the next week, just to see if Xvim had his mind shielded even when not expecting Zorian to arrive..

His thoughts were still preoccupied with Xvim when he arrived back home, at which point the realization that he could sense the minds of Nochka and her mother in the house pushed the topic of his so-called mentor out of his mind. That was unexpected – there had been no plans for them to visit, as far as he knew. He entered the house and made a beeline towards the kitchen, where he could sense Imaya and Rea were currently situated, and found them seated around the kitchen table, gossiping over some cookies and.. plum brandy?

Well, whatever. After exchanging greetings, he tried to ask Rea about her reasons for coming unannounced without sounding rude and accusing. He didn’t quite succeed if the dirty look Imaya shot him was any indication, but Rea herself didn’t seem to mind.

“Nochka was being impatient about your next visit so I decided to take her to Kirielle instead,” she explained. “Besides, it is not fair to make you spend your time on bringing your sister over to my home. You are a student of magic, with many additional obligations aside, I’m told, and I am but a simple housewife with plenty of free time.”

‘Simple housewife’, right. If she really was what she claimed to be, he would.. well, he wouldn’t do anything crazy, but he’d be shocked. It was possible, but she was too confident and emotionally composed to be some ordinary housewife.

“For myself, I have no complaint about Nochka coming here from time to time,” Imaya piped in. “So you need not worry about any complaint from me.”

“I see,” Zorian said slowly. He looked at Rea, and found her unflinchingly meeting his gaze. Though his empathy detected no hostile intent and she didn’t do anything overtly threatening, he found her vaguely unsettling. It was her body language, he realized – though her posture was relaxed, she did not fidget or move at all.

Making a snap decision, Zorian decided to take a risk for the second time in a day and dived into her surface thoughts. He didn’t want to get too comfortable with violating the mental sanctity of people around him, but if a person looked like a threat, he felt it was justified. And Rea definitely looked suspicious to him right now.

Rea’s mind was not shielded, and she gave no indication that she detected his intrusion. That said, he didn’t get anything worthwhile out of it. She was not feeling very introspective at the moment, nor thinking any incriminating thoughts. Mostly, she seemed to be studying him, even as he was doing the same to her. Much like Zorian could tell she was not a normal housewife, she too seemed aware that he was anything but a normal student.

He decided to get her talking about her background and current situation, hopefully guiding her thoughts down the path that would reveal what her deal was. Besides, Imaya seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable with their silent stare-down so if nothing else he should break the silence to calm her down a little.

“You know, I just realized I never did ask you why you and your family moved into Cyoria,” said Zorian. “I bet it’s a fascinating story..”

Over the next half an hour, Zorian spoke with Rea about her life and recent history, with Imaya occasionally jumping in with her opinion. Despite his efforts, Zorian failed to uncover any deep secret from Rea’s thoughts. Her mind was too focused on what she was saying, with little in the way of internal musings or stray thoughts. The only thing Zorian could tell with certainty was that she hadn’t lied even once while talking to him. Her story about her family moving from a small rural town to Cyoria out of simple desire for a better life in the big city was something she honestly believed in, rather than some clichéd cover story. Her husband wanted a better paying job he could not get in their old home, Rea wanted to get away from their rather unpleasant neighbors who were spreading nasty rumors about her whenever they could get away with it, and they were both unhappy with the poor state of the local school and wanted better for Nochka. So they moved. Simple as that. Currently they were still in the process of setting up in Cyoria, and were thus having some money problems, but Rea seemed unconcerned about that, claiming it to be a temporary issue.

His mind reading did pick up on two interesting things. First, Rea had ridiculously good hearing. Throughout the entire conversation, she was somehow picking up on the conversation Kirielle and Nochka were having in another part of the house, separated from the kitchen by a corridor and two closed doors. Zorian himself could not hear a thing from the two girls, no matter how hard he strained his ears. Secondly, while Rea did not know he was reading her mind, she was pretty good at figuring out people’s moods and motives the old fashioned way – she realized pretty quickly he was suspicious of her and trying to interrogate her.

And she found it amusing. Very, very amusing.

Eventually, Zorian was forced to admit defeat, withdrawing from Rea’s mind and excusing himself so he could leave. At the very least he was mollified that Rea did not seem to have any sinister plan for him and Kirielle, which was really all he cared about in regards to her. She could keep her secrets, so long as they didn’t come back to haunt him later.

“Oh yes, I nearly forgot,” Imaya said as he turned to leave. “Kael said he wanted to talk to you when you get back. He’s in the basement right now, tinkering with his alchemical equipment again.”

Thanking her for the information, Zorian descended into the basement to see what Kael wanted from him. It could be any number of things, really – he had dropped a multitude of bizarre problems on the morlock boy since they’d met in this restart, and he counted himself lucky that Kael was so reasonable and level-headed about what he had learned. He had to admit, with no small amount of embarrassment, that he himself probably wouldn’t have taken it half as well in his place.

Then again, he had the feeling that Kael’s willingness to accept his explanation about the time loop came from greed. He was sure that Kael saw the time loop less as a terrifying anomaly and more as a fantastic opportunity that could catapult his skills and knowledge immensely if he played his cards right, and that doubtlessly influenced how inclined he was to accept Zorian’s story as truthful. Case in point..

“Ah, you’re here,” Kael greeted him. “Did you get the ingredients I asked of you?”

“Yup,” said Zorian, reaching into his bag and withdrawing a wooden box full of alchemical ingredients.

“There were no problems?” Kael asked, accepting the box and promptly opening it to examine the contents. He pulled out one of the bottles from the box, the one full of inky black liquid, and brought it towards the light to check something.

“No. The shopkeeper looked at me strangely for buying so many expensive ingredients, but said nothing in the end. It would still probably be smart to buy the next batch from some other shop, though.”

“Probably,” agreed Kael, putting the bottle back and snapping the box shut.

There was no offer of reimbursing Zorian for his expenses. One of the first demands Kael had of Zorian once he decided the time loop thing had something to it was for Zorian to finance his experiments to the best of his ability. He understood Kael’s demand for what it was – not just a way for the boy to secure more funding, but also a challenge for Zorian to prove he believed what he was saying. After all, if he really believed in his own time loop story, he wouldn’t care at all about spending his money like that, would he?

Kael placed the box on the work table next to him, depositing it among the many other boxes, ceramic bowls, glass bottles and other alchemical instruments that cluttered Kael’s workspace. He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, his bright blue eyes rapidly scanning the rest of the basement, before he focused back to his conversation with Zorian.

“How often do you think you’ll be able to buy more?” he asked.

“Well.. I hesitate to say ‘as often as you need me to’, since I’m sure you can burn through any amount of money I have if you go wild, but I’m pretty loaded right now. Thanks to the time loop I found a very time-efficient way to extract a great deal of crystalized mana from Knyazov Dveri’s underworld, and selling that has given me a huge amount of money to spend,” Zorian explained. “So.. two or three boxes like that a day if I had to? Maybe more, but I really think that would be a bad idea, since I don’t think I’d be able to avoid unwelcome attention if I started buying so much expensive stuff.”

“I.. see..” Kael said slowly, clearly more than a little surprised at the information. “That’s a lot of money. Out of curiosity, why did you go to the trouble to get so much? Funds for your own experiments?”

“Partially,” said Zorian. “It certainly makes things a lot easier when you can throw around money like it’s nothing. Saves time. And yes, I know it’s strange for that to be a concern when you’re stuck in an ever-repeating time loop.”

“And the other part?”

“Greed, I guess,” Zorian admitted. “When I finally break out of the time loop I kind of want to have all my monetary concerns taken care of. Probably not the best use of my time but-”

“Don’t worry, I understand you completely,” said Kael, smiling slightly. “I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist doing so myself. In fact, I probably would have done it much sooner, even with the threat of other time travelers and the presence of more pressing problems you’re dealing with. So many problems in my life would have disappeared if I had a million pieces or so..”

“Well, you are an alchemist,” Zorian said. “Your profession has always been very expensive to practice, unless you were one of those alchemists who were willing to limit themselves to components they could grow and personally harvest in the wilderness. It makes perfect sense that you’d want to get rich if given a chance.”

“Perhaps. I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as efficient about it as you are, though. Well, not without resorting to theft. The thought of looking for crystalized mana would have never occurred to me. What’s so valuable about it that people are willing to pay so much?”

Zorian gave Kael a curious look. “It’s a bit strange to hear an alchemist ask that. I’m pretty sure that powdered crystalized mana is an important potion ingredient.”

“Not in the kind of potions I’m making,” Kael said, shaking his head.

“Ah. Well, crystalized mana is basically ambient mana in solid form. Harder to make use of than ambient mana, since it first has to be broken down into the more familiar, ethereal form before you can use it to power anything, but it is very convenient as a mana battery. Most mana batteries, such as the ones made with spell formulas, lose all stored mana in a couple of days to a week. Crystalized mana, on the other hand, is completely stable in normal circumstances. That’s very useful if you want to, say, support a powerful magical item or warding scheme independently of ambient mana levels,” explained Zorian.

“Ah, so these are the crystals the new trains use for fuel,” said Kael.

“Yes,” Zorian confirmed. “I heard that use of crystalized mana as train fuel is really driving the prices of it upwards lately, got a bunch of people worried. Very convenient for me, though.”

“Shame it’s only useful for powering items,” Kael said. “Having some kind of personal mana battery would have been a nice way of side stepping your limited mana reserves. Have you looked into making such a thing? Even if it only lasted a few weeks, that should be enough to be useful in your circumstances.”

“Of course I’ve looked into it,” Zorian scoffed. “It’s impossible. Personal mana loses its affinity with its maker rapidly once expended, becoming indistinguishable from ambient mana in a matter of minutes.”

“Ah.”

“Indeed. What about alchemical solutions? Is there a potion that increases your mana regeneration, gives you a momentary mana boost or something like that?”

“I doubt it. I think we would have all heard about such a potion if it was at all available. But it’s possible, I suppose, especially if it has some serious drawbacks that curtails its use. You should probably ask Lukav about that – if anyone knows how to answer that question definitively, it’s him,” Kael said. He squirmed uncomfortably. “And since we’re on the topic of Lukav, I have a bit of a.. personal request.”

“I’m listening,” Zorian said curiously.

“Okay..” Kael began. “When I gave you that list of people to consult with in regards to soul magic, I did not exactly give you a list of strangers. We weren’t best friends, but I knew these people. We had history between us, we met sometimes to exchange news and the like.. to find out that someone had been going around, kidnapping and killing them, was very upsetting to me.”

Zorian winced. Now that it was pointed out to him, he had been really rather callous when he told Kael of the disappearances in Knyazov Dveri, hadn’t he? This wasn’t just another disquieting mystery to Kael, but an outright attack on him and his acquaintances.

“I’m not angry at you,” Kael hurriedly added. “I realize you already have a lot on your plate, and that staying alive and figuring out what is behind the time loop takes precedence over everything else. However, I would really appreciate it if you looked into these killers and figured out a way to stop them for good.”

“Of course,” Zorian immediately agreed. “I had fully intended to do so anyway. I simply delayed that investigation until I had taken care of more pressing problems and gotten somewhat better at magical combat.”

Besides, he had figured that investigating the invasion forces here in Cyoria would automatically bring him closer to solving that particular mystery. The two were clearly connected somehow, perhaps even two different fronts of the exact same operation.

“I see. That takes a load off my chest,” Kael said, exhaling heavily. “If there is anything I can do to help you with this, just let me know. I’m still in the process of asking around, but I think I can get my hands on a couple of truth potion recipes.”

“I already have my own interrogation magic, but I suppose having more options to choose from never hurts,” Zorian said. Truthfully, truth potions might actually be more effective than what he had in mind, at least at the current stage of the investigation, but he really needed to develop his ability to sift through people’s memories so he was reluctant to use them. “Keep in mind that Lukav already knows how to make a truth potion, so if your talks fall through I can just teleport you to his village so you can have a friendly chat with him. Perhaps he is willing to share.”

“He knows how to do that? Sneaky bastard was holding out on me,” Kael grumbled. “Still, that does remind me that Lukav is far from being a helpless victim and neither is his priest friend. It might be a good idea to involve them in the investigation – they might be perfectly capable of taking the killers down on their own if you provide him with sufficient information.”

Now there was an idea. It would be hard to secure Alanic’s cooperation without coming clean about absolutely everything, but the benefits could be immense. He would have to seriously consider it when he started to seriously tackle the problem of Iasku Manor and disappearances around Knyazov Dveri.

“Well,” said Kael after a few seconds of silence, unlocking one of the drawers attached to his work desk and withdrawing a cheap, featureless notebook out of it. “With that out of the way, I’d like to discuss another unpleasant topic with you: your soul marker.”

Zorian straightened his back a little, suddenly alert. Truthfully, when he had told Kael about the soul marker and allowed the morlock boy to perform a scan of his soul, he had not expected much. Kael may have been a necromancer, but he was very much an amateur one. Still, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to put some trust in the other boy – both Lukav and Alanic were rather narrowly specialized when it came to their soul magic expertise, and it was entirely possible that they had missed something that a full-blown necromancer, even a novice one, would find obvious. It seemed that was indeed the case.

“What is it?” he asked with barely hidden excitement.

Kael sighed and pressed the notebook into Zorian’s hand. Leafing through it, however, Zorian realized he didn’t understand anything in it. It was full of unfamiliar diagrams and alien jargon, interspersed with brief paragraphs that meant nothing to one who lacked sufficient context to understand them. He shot Kael an annoyed look.

“I’ll be blunt,” said Kael, ignoring his glare. “Your marker shouldn’t work.” Seeing Zorian’s confused expression, he moved to explain. “I was immediately suspicious when you described how tightly the marker’s entwined with your soul – why would someone make such a deeply embedded marker and then make it a simple unchanging identification stamp like you assumed it was? The desire to make the marker resilient to damage and harder to remove could explain some of it, but it was still excessive – there are less invasive means that would have only failed if the soul was so mangled that the person was effectively dead. Those methods do have a noticeable flaw, though – they are a lot easier to copy than what you have rooted in your soul. That, I felt, was key. The marker was designed to foil attempts at copying it to other people. And in order to do that-“

“It needed to check up on the host’s soul to see whether it has been transplanted to another person,” Zorian interrupted.

“Yes,” Kael said. He took the notebook out of Zorian’s hands, flipped it to one of the later pages and handed it back to him.

Looking at it again, Zorian could tell that the diagram was supposed to be a crude outline of a human’s body, several circles, tringles and straight lines drawn over it. Below it was a short paragraph talking about ‘essence channels’, ‘feedback nodes’ and ‘transition barriers’. It still didn’t mean much to Zorian, but he could tell this time that it was supposed to represent Zorian’s soul, the marker attached to it and their interaction to one another.

“I do not claim to completely understand the marker,” Kael said. “Or even most of it – it’s an awe-inspiring thing, clearly made by a master soul mage. I especially like how it makes itself inconspicuous to casual soul scans – I’m not surprised I never detected it before being informed it was there. Still, there are some things about its functions that are obvious to me, and one of them is that the marker is designed to consult the soul of its host – the core, unchanging part of it, anyway – and alter its identification tag according to what it detects. Transplanting the marker to another person should result in a totally different identification value.”

“But that’s clearly not how it works,” Zorian protested. “Zach and I have the same damn marker! The tracking spell wouldn’t have worked otherwise!”

“It’s broken,” Kael said calmly. “Your marker, that is. There are parts of it that are totally inert, either because they do not acknowledge you as its rightful host or because they are missing some critical piece that got lost in the transfer. I’m guessing that at least one of those is supposed to send a signal to the looping mechanism when you die, terminating the loop prematurely – that would neatly explain why you get sent back when Zach dies but he doesn’t experience the same when you end up dead. He has the intact version of the marker, whereas you don’t.”

“But the main part of the thing works?”

“In a sense. It does everything it is supposed to, consulting the core of your soul, but for some reason it is still stuck on the same value it had while it was still inside Zach. It’s broken, but it’s broken in your favor.”

“Huh,” said Zorian lamely. What was he supposed to say to that? “Honestly? This isn’t such a huge surprise. I always suspected that the marker was in some way defective. After all, I highly doubt that its makers intended for someone like me to enter the time loop the way I did. Does this really change anything?”

“Depends how you look at it,” Kael said. “You are in no danger of being suddenly dropped out of the loop, so I suppose from a personal perspective this doesn’t change much. But look at it from a wider perspective. If I’m right, then whatever convergence of circumstances aligned to pull you into the time loop along with Zach was a fluke. A fortunate fluke, but a fluke all the same. It is not consistently reproducible.”

Zorian frowned. What was he..

Then it hit him.

“Wait. How did Red Robe end up time looping, then?”

“Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?” Kael said, his fingers drumming on his work table impatiently. “I’m afraid I don’t know how to answer that question. But he clearly didn’t use the same method you did.”historical

“Yeah,” Zorian agreed. “I had strongly suspected that, but I couldn’t be sure. Him having some other method of joining the time loop would explain why he never used his own marker to track me down the way I did Zach. He doesn’t have the same marker as me and Zach, if he indeed has one at all, so he would have to capture Zach and use him as a key to locate me that way.”

“And if he’s indeed a master soul mage like you seem to think, he probably ‘knows’ you could not possibly have an identical marker as Zach, so there is no reason for him to try that in the first place,” Kael said.

They bounced theories and ideas off one another for the next half an hour, but it was all just hollow speculation at the moment. They had no way to confirm or discard any of the possibilities. Kael thought that Red Robe was in some way piggy backing on Zach, either by leaving portions of his mind in Zach the way the Cyorian matriarch did with Zorian, or by having some kind of soul link with Zach. Zorian discarded the possibility of a mind package immediately. The logistics of that kind of setup didn’t add up – Red Robe was active within hours of the start of the loop, if his quick arrival to the ruins of the aranea colony in that one restart were any indication, and processing a large amount of memories took more than a day. Not to mention that Zach didn’t start every restart by going to the same location, so it was questionable how Red Robe would have even gotten a memory package in every restart. No, Red Robe definitely wasn’t using memory packages. And really, Zorian didn’t think he was linked to Zach’s soul either – if he was, he would have checked Zach’s soul for additional connections when he’d read his mind and found out there were additional time travelers running around. Instead, he immediately ran off to confront the aranea. The thought of someone being connected to Zach’s soul didn’t seem to occur to him.

Personally, Zorian thought Red Robe did have a marker of some sort. It was entirely possible, he felt, that there was a way for people who knew what they were doing to enter the time loop ‘properly’ – to get their own marker and all. Though that did raise a question about why he didn’t just off Zach and go on with his life free of interference.

What was so special about Zach?

“Right. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with this,” Zorian said. “Anything else I should keep in mind?”

“Nothing that Lukav and his priest friend didn’t already warn you about – avoid any magic that could alter your soul substantially. We don’t know what caused the marker to get stuck on its current identification value, and there is no telling what will push it off the edge so take care,” said Kael.

“I was afraid to do that even before now, and for that exact reason too,” Zorian said, leaning back on making a deliberately dramatic sigh. “Pity, though. I guess my dream of turning that stupid grey hunter Silverlake sent me to deal with into my very own familiar or becoming a grey hunter shifter is doomed to remain just a dream..”

“Didn’t you know? There is a reason why most shifters are made from normal animals,” Kael warned him. “Being a shifter means you get instincts from the other part of the soul, and magical creatures always have very strong souls.. the more magical the creature, the stronger. And they tend to be extremely violent and territorial. With regards to grey hunters, I’m fairly certain they don’t tolerate even their own kind, much less anything else. Such an attitude would bleed over to you if you became a grey hunter shifter. And there is also the matter of inheritance to consider - even if you are able to master a grey hunter’s soul and not let its urges rule you, there is no guarantee that your children will be similarly strong-willed, especially since they’ll have those urges from the day they are born. I’d strongly recommend against that course of action. As for making it your familiar, keep in mind that it takes a long time for the soul link to mature and that you need to be close to it the whole time. There is no guarantee that the creature won’t kill you during the process. And if you do manage to slave it to your will, it could still be dangerous to everyone around you who is not protected by the soul bond.”

“There was no need for a lecture. I was just joking,” said Zorian flatly.

“Good.”

“Even if its abilities would have been so very useful..” Zorian said wistfully. “Extreme toughness, speed and magical resistance? Yes, please!”

“Just kill it, chop it up for parts and make an enhancement potion out of them,” suggested Kael. “You can ask Lukav to help you do it, I’m sure he’d jump at the chance. Not many people are crazy enough to go after one of those monsters, after all, so I’m pretty sure he never had a chance to work with grey hunter parts.”

“You know, that actually sounds like an interesting idea..”

“Glad I could help,” Kael said, peering into a slowly bubbling metal pot on the table in front of him and scowling. “Well, my current experiment is not going too well. And I thought I had it this time, too. Time to try batch number four.” He gave Zorian a speculative look. “Say, do you think you can help me out here? Some of the steps are pretty simple, and observing my work will ensure you don’t forget what I talk-->>

next page