21. Wheel of Fortune

Chapter 021
Wheel of Fortune

In the tunnels beneath Cyoria, Zorian sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, trying to sense the minds of nearby aranea with his own. That was the task he had been given by the matriarch as his first lesson, and it reminded him uncomfortably of Xvim’s mana sensing exercise.

It wasn’t going too well. That was another thing it shared with Xvim’s bullshit lessons.

[It has only been 3 days,] the disembodied voice of the matriarch admonished him. [You’ve barely even started. Don’t be impatient.]

“There’s got to be a better way of learning this,” Zorian complained. This kind of trial and error method was something he could have done without her help. As far as he could see, the only way the matriarch was really helping at the moment was by being an experienced practitioner ready to step in if something went wrong. Which, now that he thought about it, was quite valuable when messing around with something like mind magic. Or any magic, for that matter.

[That, and there is also the little fact that it’s easier to sense and contact Open minds than those of… non-psychics,] the matriarch remarked, fumbling a little towards the end. [I somehow doubt you would find many Open individuals to practice on back on the surface. Fewer still would be willing to let you connect to them. Anyway. I realize that these initial stages are tedious and boring, but they are necessary. And if I have not explained things satisfactorily, I apologize, but I do not know how to do it any better. This ability is not something I learnt, it is something I do. Aranea learn how to do this as very young children, much like human children learn how to walk and talk. Can you explain to someone who has been paralyzed all their life how to move their legs?]

Zorian frowned. So he wasn’t even able to master telepathic baby skills? Wonderful. Just wonderful. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he tried to consider the task in front of him and how to solve it. Yes, yes, the matriarch insisted he should just keep trying until he eventually succeeded by sheer weight of effort, but he was a mage damn it! Mages did things smarter, not harder.

Being psychic meant being a natural mind mage. For all that the matriarch kept bringing in her weird aranea spirituality into it, that’s what it all boiled down to. A psychic could read thoughts and emotions, trawl through people’s memories, hijack their senses and motor control, communicate with them telepathically and gods know what else, but all of it was mind related. Even the matriarch admitted that aranea used modified human magic for things like her speech spell and the rest of their non-mentalist magical arsenal.

Divinations were the key, he felt. If psychic powers were mind-based, why did they also enhance divinations?

[Not all divinations,] the matriarch remarked from the sidelines, apparently following his train of thought. [Only the ones that put information directly into your mind. The Gift helps you interpret the results of such spells more easily, and since most high-level divinations pour at least a part of the information straight into your mind… well, you can imagine how useful that can be.]

Suddenly, something clicked in Zorian’s mind. According to the books he read about the mind arts in the academy library, spells that were meant to read people’s thoughts were not terribly difficult in principle. The problem was that the result was totally incomprehensible to most users, unless they spent years training themselves how to interpret the results. Spells that aimed to establish telepathic communication also suffered this problem, though to a lesser extent – so long as the people in question spoke the same language, they could at least exchange verbal communication in such a fashion. In other words, human mind spells were remarkably like a divination that tried to simply dump its output into the mind of the caster… which wasn’t something most mages were equipped to handle.

Taking it all together, it seemed obvious to Zorian that one of the defining powers of a psychic was their ability to make sense of information entering the mind directly – whether it was other people’s thoughts or something more exotic, like divination results. The immediately interesting part was that it was a passive skill. Using it wasn’t something he had to specifically activate, it was a state of being, so if he wanted to sense the minds of nearby aranea perhaps he should stop trying to push his power out towards his surroundings and concentrate inward. He took a deep breath, visualized the results as motes of light around him and then just… opened his mind.

Blazing suns erupted all around him, including a couple in places where he hadn’t expected there would be any aranea to begin with. Apparently the matriarch brought more guards with her than she had openly displayed to him.

[Your first success,] the matriarch remarked, her telepathic probe breaking his concentration and causing the entire vision to burst like a dream. [Well done. Things should go a lot faster from now on. I’d congratulate you on your fast progress, but I have to be honest and admit I have no idea how fast humans usually progress in this.]

“Perhaps things would have gone faster if you had actually told me I was doing things wrong,” Zorian said with annoyance. “Why didn’t you tell me I was supposed to concentrate inward instead of outward?”

[I did; it’s not my fault if you dismissed it as pointless aranean superstition,] the matriarch said airily. [And I actually didn’t know that the problem lay there in particular. I suppose my tendency to respond to your thoughts makes you think I can understand them in totality, yes? The truth is less impressive, I’m afraid. Telepaths like you and me labor under many of the same limitations that plague human mind magic, it’s just that we advance much faster in the field and don’t need a structured spell to use our abilities. Unless you structure your thoughts into actual speech, the most I get from you from my surface scans is a very fuzzy image of your current emotional state and your general intentions. This is doubly true because you’re human and I’m an aranea, two radically different species that don’t even share the same general body plan, much less mentality.]

“Huh, so language and species do matter to a psychic,” Zorian remarked. “I was wondering about that.”

[It’s usually not a big problem, since most creatures tend to think in words when they engage in conscious thought,] the matriarch said. [So long as two creatures speak the same language, they can freely engage in telepathic conversation, no matter how different their underlying thoughts. If they don’t share a language… well, admittedly, not all is lost. Psychics can potentially communicate with completely alien minds. It involves structuring your thoughts into general concepts that are hopefully broad enough to be understood by the recipient but not so broad as to be meaningless. Unfortunately, this method is very crude and tends to be both painful and disorienting to the target. I believe you experienced it already when you met one of the less human-savvy araneas in one of the previous restarts.]

“So it’s not just because you’re more powerful that you speak with me so easily?” asked Zorian.

[No. I took the time to learn human language, mentality and culture. As did a number of other aranea that occasionally interact with humans. However, our web is extensive enough that most aranea can remain largely ignorant of human ways while they go on about their business, which is why most of my guards are silent around you. Trust me, they aren’t usually this withdrawn, but if they tried to talk to you they’d just give you a headache.]

“Does that mean that mental attacks are easier than communication?” Zorian asked curiously. “I mean, if botched telepathic communication is practically a mental assault to begin with, it shouldn’t take much to simply fry a creature’s brain and be done with it.”

[It’s called a ‘mind blast’, and it’s the simplest telepathic attack there is,] the matriarch said. [It’s also the simplest one to defend against. You should really stop worrying about me attacking you. Aren’t the explosives you constantly carry in your pocket enough to reassure you?]

“They help,” Zorian said. “But in this particular case I wasn’t alluding to the possibility of hostilities between us. I was just curious.”

[Well, good. Anyway, we should get back to developing your mind sense before we get too off-track,] the matriarch said. [You made your first successful stab at it, but it is far too shaky to be useable at the moment. You need to be able to sense minds around you instantly, without having to sit still with your eyes closed and preferably while doing something else entirely.]

Zorian sighed. He was definitely getting flashbacks to Xvim on this.

– break –

The rest of the month was fairly unremarkable and mostly spent on honing the mind sense and trying to sense the intensity of magic sources through a mana cloud. Though the matriarch refused to teach him anything until he got his mind sense (relatively) mastered, he already noticed her lessons gave him some rudimentary control over his empathy – enough that he could keep it shut with enough concentration, but not enough to focus it on specific people or otherwise refine it. That alone made the lessons useful, since it should make social events infinitely more bearable for him.

And speaking of social events, Zach had been increasingly pushy about bringing him to his summer festival party. After the boy kept bugging him a few times, Zorian relented. Yes, it would bring him uncomfortably close to the other time traveler for the evening, but he was curious about how his empathy suppression would fare in a live situation and also how Zach’s mansion looked from the inside. Besides, he was trying to get to know his classmates better, and this was a good opportunity to chat up some of them without looking completely out of character.

“Is it really okay for me to come with you?” Taiven asked as she walked beside him.

“For the last time Taiven, yes. Zach made it clear that the more people we invite along with us the better,” Zorian said. Not surprising if you knew what Zach was trying to achieve. “Look, if you don’t want to come-“

“Oh no, I totally do. It’s not every day you get a chance to attend a party at the Noveda mansion. It’s just that I find it a bit strange, that’s all. I’m kind of surprised you agreed to come, though – isn’t this sort of thing an anathema to you?”

“It’s either this or attending the official dance organized by the academy,” Zorian said. “My only real choice is to pick my poison.”

“Ah, I see,” Taiven nodded. “I guess that in that case this does appear to be a better option.”

Zorian glanced at Taiven from the corner of his eye, feeling slightly guilty. The truth was that his main reason for inviting her along was to personally see how she would fare against the invaders. He knew she was a lot better than him at combat magic, but probably not all that much better, and he wanted a comparison point that wasn’t as ridiculous as Zach or an experienced battlemage like Kyron.

Then again, this was Taiven – she probably ended up fighting the invaders in every restart anyway, just not where he could see her. At least this time she would have the advantage of fighting alongside a combatant of Zach’s caliber.

They barely knocked on the door before Zach came along and ushered them inside. He probably knew they were coming the moment they stepped through the outer gate, now that Zorian thought about it – it would make sense to have some kind of detection field woven into the ward scheme that protected this place.

“I’m glad you decided to come,” Zach told him as he led them towards the dining hall, where the party was apparently supposed to take place. “Considering how you behaved towards me lately, I half-expected you to ignore your promise to come and stay in your room.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Zorian said curtly. For one thing, Zach hadn’t even bothered him all that much in this particular restart. Was the other time traveler trying to bait him into unmasking himself or had he simply spent so much time in this time loop that he was having trouble sorting events according to which time loop they happened in?

“Uh, what’s going on here?” Taiven asked, looking between them uncertainly. “Is there something I should know or…”

Zach glanced towards her before turning towards Zorian and giving him a thumbs up. “New girl, huh? Man, you have a new one every time I see you. I wouldn’t have pegged you as that kind of guy.”

“What?” asked Zorian and Taiven simultaneously.

Zorian was honestly baffled for a moment, but then realized what Zach was mixing up his restarts again. Akoja, Ibery and Taiven: Zach had seen him with all three of them in various restarts. But that… that was totally different! None of them were even interested in him!

“Zorian is a man-whore?” Taiven asked in a worryingly calm voice.

“I am not!” Zorian denied hotly before focusing his anger at an amused-looking Zach. “And you! Stop spreading stupid rumors about me! I know for a fact you’ve never seen me with a girl until this evening! And you wonder why I’ve been avoiding you this whole month…”

Zach winced. “Sorry, sorry, I was just messing with you. Don’t worry, I’m sure your girlfriend won’t leave you over a couple of stupid remarks by yours truly. Or if she does, she was never worth bothering with in the first place.”

“Oh really?” Taiven said. “You don’t think he’d be devastated to lose a girlfriend as powerful, smart and sexy as-“

“Taiven, don’t you start too,” sighed Zorian. “Zach, she’s not my girlfriend. She’s just a friend.”

“Who happens to be female,” Zach said, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Zorian said, gnashing his teeth in irritation.

“Ah well, at least you already have a girl to dance with for the evening,” said Zach lightly.

Zorian kind of doubted that. Taiven was a very attractive girl, with a nice athletic figure and the face of an angel, and she liked men who were similarly gifted in the appearance department. Chances were high that Taiven would find someone else to dance with once they hit the crowd. Zach maybe, if the way she was checking out his backside was any indication.

“You know, this place is pretty empty,” Taiven whispered to Zorian as they walked. “I know he’s the last of his House and all, but I can’t even see any servants milling around the place.”

“Most of the servants were dismissed from service by my guardian while I was still a small child,” Zach said. It did not surprise Zorian that he’d heard her – Taiven was very poor at whispering. “Since my parents died while I was still a baby, he had free reign to do what he felt was necessary to keep House Noveda standing until I was old enough to take over. As part of that, most of the maintenance staff and other contractors were found to be unnecessary and fired.”

“And you don’t agree with his actions?” Zorian guessed. He could definitely detect an undercurrent of hostility when Zach talked about his guardian, which fit in with the fact that he regularly brutalized the man at the beginning of a lot of restarts.

Zach gave him a curious look before sighing.

“Let’s just say he and I have our disagreements and leave it at that,” Zach said.

“You know, I never did find out what happened to your family,” Taiven said. “How come you ended up being the last of your House?”

Zorian punched Taiven in the shoulder for asking such a question of their host, and punctuated it with a firm glare when she shot him a scandalized look. He wasn’t sure what she was scandalized about, though – did she really not realize how inappropriate her question was, or was she just surprised it was him hitting her for once instead of the usual Taiven-on-Zorian violence?

“Oh leave her alone, she’s just being upfront about her curiosity,” said Zach. Somehow he knew what had transpired, even though he had his back turned to them when it happened. “I kind of like her attitude, to be honest.”

“Figures,” Zorian grunted. Now that he thought about it, Taiven and Zach both had the same devil-may-care attitude about things, so maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to have them meet each other…

And with that, Zach launched into a protracted explanation of the Noveda House’s downfall… most of which Zorian completely ignored in favor of studying various paintings and portraits along the way. Truth be told, Zorian had already tracked down all information about Zach and House Noveda that he could get his hands on, so very little of what Zach was saying was new to him.

While tragic, Zach’s story was by no means unique, and could be boiled down to two main causes: Splinter Wars and the Weeping.

The Old Alliance was a complicated construct, a patchwork empire made out of a multitude of bickering, semi-independent states that only sometimes listened to orders coming from Eldemar, but for all its faults it was quite successful at suppressing outright warfare between its member states. Armed conflict was rare and highly limited in scale, especially since the Alliance had no major outside enemies to defend against. Thus, when the Old Alliance shattered and its component states started mobilizing their forces for war, it was the first time in nearly a century that actual war would be waged in the region. And it would be a bucket of cold water straight into the face of every battlemage in Altazia, for it would be the first time ever that firearms were used in warfare on a mass scale.

Firearms were known to Altazia for centuries at this point, but they were not held in very high regard by the generals and decision makers of Eldemar and other powerful countries. Initial attempts to make use of them had shown them to be unwieldy and almost as dangerous to the user as they were to the target. Artillery mages were a lot more mobile and effective than any cannon, and the less said about hand-held firearms the better. Still, enough people remained interested in them that the technology never died and gradually improved as time went by. However, even after naval powers started arming their ships with cannons, even when a couple of mercenary groups began using rifles successfully, handheld firearms were still ultimately seen as a dead end. There was nothing that riflemen could do that a properly trained archer couldn’t do better, and bows and arrows were a lot easier to enhance with magic than rifles and their ammunition. The one advantage rifles had over alternatives was that they required almost no training before they could be used effectively, and countries of the Old Alliance had no use for barely trained conscripts.

Until the Splinter Wars, that is. With the dissolution of the Old Alliance, every state suddenly scrambled to arm itself for the coming conflict, and having a passable army immediately was more important than having a proper one a decade from now. Smaller countries, inherently unable to compete with the likes of Eldemar when it came to magical might, invested particularly heavily into firearms as an alternative to combat magic. Eldemar, being one of the few countries with a fully functional traditional army, felt no need to play around with these ‘commoners’ toys’.

No one really expected firearms to be as devastatingly effective as they ended up being. Even the countries that made heavy use of them expected them to do little except stall the advance of classical armies and perhaps motivate them to look elsewhere for easier prey. Instead, massed rifleman armies absolutely savaged traditional ones, catching established powers completely off-guard. Instead of larger powers gobbling up every minor power and city-state around them and then duking it out among themselves (the outcome everyone had been expecting), the larger powers ended up weakening themselves instead, often splintering into their component parts as their internal enemies smelled weakness. Although nations eventually adapted their forces and battle doctrines to firearms technology, the damage had been done, and every subsequent Splinter War only made Altazia’s political fragmentation worse.

This was especially true because the Splinter Wars caused immense casualties to the mage Houses that were the intellectual and political elite of Altazia’s nations. The reason was simple – being a battlemage was a highly prestigious occupation and many Houses used their military involvement as a way to gather influence and reputation, which they then used as leverage in furthering their political and mercantile interests. With the advent of the Splinter Wars, the demand for battlemages only increased, causing many more mages to enlist in the various armies in search for glory and wealth. This backfired spectacularly as casualties began to mount. Unfamiliar with the strengths and limitations of firearms, and often outright dismissive of them, many mages fell prey to snipers, artillery strikes and massed rifle fire. Many noble houses were thoroughly crippled by the losses they sustained, House Noveda being one of them.

House Noveda had been fundamentally a military house, even if they were active in a lot of other fields as well. According to Zach, House leadership considered military service to build character, and every male member was expected to serve at least a few years in their youth. Quite a lot of female members enlisted as well. Very closely connected to the Eldemar royal family and very traditionalist in attitude, the Noveda supported Eldemar’s military ambitions whole-heartedly, conscripting every available battle-ready member into the war effort. All this meant that when Eldemar began the Splinter Wars by launching a massive, multi-pronged assault on its smaller neighbors, House Noveda members were right there at the forefront of the offensive.

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

And they paid dearly for it.

Still, while House Noveda was heavily diminished in the immediate aftermath of the Splinter War, they were not yet done for. Given a few more decades, the House could have recovered somewhat and reclaimed its former glory and political influence. Sadly, that’s when the Weeping came and ruined everything.

Nobody knew where the Weeping came from. It simply started to spread among the soldiers one day, a deadly, incurable disease that struck down everyone who contracted it, heedless of age, health or even magic. Once a person contracted it, their death was all but certain – they would first collapse into fever and delirium, then become blind, and then start to leak blood out of their eyes before finally expiring. Regular healers were useless, no magic could cure it, and even the church and its lost mysteries of the gods failed to halt its spread. In the end, nobody could do anything except wait for the disease to burn itself out, which it eventually did. As mysteriously as it appeared, the Weeping disappeared after blazing across the entire continent.

The exact number of deaths from the Weeping was still debated, but most writers agreed that somewhere between 8 and 10 percent of Altazia’s population perished in the epidemic. Some groups suffered more, while others were completely unscathed, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Zorian’s family was completely untouched, for instance – both of his parents and all of his siblings survived the epidemic completely unscathed, which made them all very, very lucky. Conversely, Zach lost absolutely everyone to the Weeping. The few Noveda that survived the Splinter Wars all contracted the sickness and died, leaving a hollowed-out shell of a House whose only surviving member was a small child, too young to even care for himself.

“…which is how the whole sad story ends,” finished Zach. “If nothing else, the Weeping finally put an end to the Splinter Wars. But that’s enough of such depressing topics. We’re here!”

Indeed they were, and boy was Zorian happy for his rudimentary control over his empathy – Zach’s chosen meeting hall was a lot smaller than the academy dancing hall and the mood was a lot more informal and unrestrained, making crowds denser and rowdier. This would have been pure hell in his normal state.

Just as he was contemplating the best way to go mingle with the other students (hopefully giving him an opportunity to dig for personal information while they chatted), the choice was taken from him. Taiven also wanted to mingle, though her reasons were almost certainly more benign than his own, and she decided that the best way to do that was to have Zorian introduce her. Convenient.

After talking to a couple of people he was reasonably familiar with and knew he could talk to, mostly Kael and Benisek, Zorian moved onto people that seemed like they wouldn’t mind getting interrupted. Of course, in a group of this size, it was silly to expect it would only be them approaching others.

“Alright, who else do you know here?” Taiven asked.

“Well, that tall, green-haired girl having a heated argument with those two guys is Kopriva Reid.”

“Wait, she’s that Reid?” Taiven asked. “One of those gangsters goes to the same class as you do?”

“Why, Taiven, are you suggesting that House Reid has something to do with organized crime?” Zorian asked with a small smile. “That’s quite a serious accusation, you know. Nothing was ever proven, after all.”

“Whatever. The bottom point is that I’m not going anywhere near the gangster princess. Anyone else?”

Zorian scanned the crowd again. To be honest, he always found Kopriva to be a pleasant enough person to talk to, at least in the small number of times they actually interacted. She was a bit blunt and had a habit of swearing like a sailor when things didn’t go her way, but she never did anything… well, gangster-y. A small group of girls glancing his way suddenly caught his eye.

“See that group of five girls over there?” he said to Taiven. “That would be Jade, Neolu, Maya, Kiana and Elsie.”

“They look… giggly,” said Taiven with a sour expression. “Pass.”