32. Alternatives

Chapter 032
Alternatives

Despite Alanic’s proclamation that he was going to interrogate the prisoner, he did not immediately descend into the temple dungeon. Instead he started rummaging through a nearby cabinet full of potion bottles while Zorian slowly absorbed today’s newest revelations, opting to remain in the room for the moment. He was not in the mood for answering questions that Lukav would have for him once he got outside, and Alanic seemed like the sort of person who would warn him if he was being bothersome. Since Alanic said nothing about his continued presence, Zorian felt he had tacit permission to stay.

He had a piece of propagating, self-repairing magic lodged in his soul. Part of him marveled at the magical expertise of the person or thing that created the time loop system, but the greater part of him couldn’t help but wonder what exactly was crammed into said wonder of magical spell design. Alanic’s description, as well as Lukav’s inability to identify the spell despite his advanced-looking ritual, painted a picture of something far too complex and lifelike to be a mere identification tag.

This was important, he could feel it – he needed to know how the marker functioned as soon as possible. For one thing, if there was some kind of hostile contingency woven inside it, ready to screw him over once he tripped over some esoteric activation condition, he wanted to know about it. Not to mention that this particular piece of magic could very well be a key clue to understanding the time loop. What kind of secrets were locked inside of it? Kael had speculated that whatever spell had been placed on Zach to initiate the time loop had all sorts of safeguards and contingencies woven into it, and while the marker clearly wasn’t the source of the looping magic itself, it sounded like the perfect place to put those safeguards in. Maybe it had the time loop instructions manual encoded somewhere in its structure? Well, probably nothing so convenient, but still.

There was one thing that still bothered him greatly – if he had a marker in his soul that uniquely identified him as a time looper, why the hell hadn’t Red Robe tracked him down by now? His enemy was a proficient soul mage, after all. Zorian found it difficult to believe he was ignorant of the marker mechanism. With that in mind, he should have had little trouble locating every single time looper, Zorian included. But he didn’t. Why was that?

“Mister Zosk?” Zorian spoke up. “Could you spare a moment, please?”

“Call me Alanic,” the priest said, stopping his inspection of the cabinet with an annoyed huff. Zorian got the impression the annoyance was directed more at the cabinet than at Zorian, though. “What is it?”

“I know you said we’d speak tomorrow, but I’d just like to know how difficult it is to locate a marker like mine. How hard would it be for you to track me down with the best magic at your disposal?”

“By tracking your marker? Almost impossible,” Alanic immediately stated. “I’d need the original keystone from the maker of the spell to define the search criteria properly. That thing is far too complex for anything else.”

Zorian frowned. “Wouldn’t having my own copy of the marker sidestep that?” he asked.

“Well yes, but that would require you to be right beside me and serve as a willing focus of the spell. A tracking spell that requires you to be right next to the target is functionally useless, wouldn’t you think?” He suddenly gave Zorian a shrewd look. “But what you’re really wondering about is not you tracking down the person whose soul fragment gave you the marker, but them tracking you, aren’t you, Mister Kazinski?”

“Call me Zorian,” he said. If the man wanted Zorian to be casual with him, he should show the same courtesy. “And yes, that is basically what I’m worried about. How easy would it be for another holder of the marker to track me down?”

Alanic quickly walked over to a nearby bookshelf, plucked a plain brown book from its shelf and handed it to Zorian.

“The spell you want is on page 43,” Alanic told him.

Zorian quickly leafed through the book until he reached the indicated page. The spell in question was not an invocation, but rather a 10-minute ritual. It allowed the caster to locate a specified marker based on the copy of the marker in the caster’s possession, and it had a downright jaw-dropping range. If Zorian was reading this correctly, it could locate any and all copies of the marker over a circular area that extended well beyond Eldemar’s borders!

Yeah, it was not cheap in terms of mana use – it required enough mana that Zorian wouldn’t have been able to cast it at all before the time loop, and even now, after 3 years of restarts, it would take a sizeable chunk of his reserves. But still, for a nation-wide search spell it was shockingly accessible. He supposed its very narrow search focus allowed it to be hyper-efficient about mana use. Really, the only possible deal breaker was that the spell assumed the caster had a keystone imprinted with the copy of the marker, and would have to be slightly modified to switch the reference target of the spell from a stone held in the caster’s hand to a marker stamped on their soul.

Zorian sincerely doubted Red Robe was incapable of making such minor alterations to spells, though.

“I could be tracked from one end of the country to another,” Zorian mumbled disbelievingly to himself.

“Yes,” Alanic agreed. “Possibly even further. I don’t claim to have comprehensive knowledge of tracking spells so there may be a version with even greater range. Your insistence that the marker must stay on was quite surprising. I hope you have a good reason for leaving a giant target painted on your soul.”

“Ugh. I’m not happy about the situation, but I do. I really, really do. I’d also like to cast this tracking spell myself to see how many other people turn up in results, but we can deal with that tomorrow. I’ve already kept you from your interrogation long enough.”

“Unfortunately, I seem to have run out of truth potions,” the priest said unhappily, throwing a glare at his potion cabinet. “Annoying. You can’t buy those on the open market and it takes days for Lukav to make a batch. It seems I won’t be interrogating anyone today…”

Oh. He agreed with Alanic, that really was annoying – he wanted to know who the guy was working for just as much as the priest did. He thought about offering his services as a mind reader to the priest but quickly shelved that idea. Aside from the very likely possibility he would make Alanic too suspicious of Zorian to help him with his soul magic problems, there was the fact that he wasn’t sure how much help he would be anyway. His mind reading skills were still very unreliable at this point. He’d feel pretty stupid if he outed himself as a mind mage and then failed to achieve anything of note – better try that in some later restart, after he gave his telepathic abilities some polish.

“No matter. I will figure something out. I’m afraid I’ll have to postpone our meeting for a day or two because of this, though. I’ll send a message through Lukav once I have sorted my business in order. Agreeable?”

“Sure,” Zorian shrugged. “Just don’t die before we meet again. Whoever wants you and Lukav dead can clearly throw a lot of resources at the problem so they’re unlikely to stop now.”

“The same goes for you, young man,” Alanic scoffed. “You seem to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. Suspicious, that. If I were in the attacker’s place, I would definitely make sure to get rid of you before trying again. And no offense, but you look like a much softer target than me.”

Not having much to say to that, Zorian simply bid the man goodbye, had a brief conversation with Lukav outside the room to inform him of everything and then went back to his room at the inn. He would sleep on things before making any decisions.

– break –

With the next several days freed up for his own activities, Zorian decided to go visit Silverlake and see if the capricious old witch was in a better mood to help this time. The trouble was, he could no longer find her cottage. His memory was extremely good, and he remembered exactly where it was in relation to surrounding natural landmarks, but when he physically got to the location there was nothing there. No cottage, no witch, no nothing. As far as Zorian could tell, it wasn’t an illusion and there was no ward in place messing with his mind to stop him from noticing it – he detected no mental tampering, his area-wide dispels revealed no optical flickering, and he physically passed through the area that the cottage stood on in the previous restart and met no resistance whatsoever.

How the hell did she do that? Dimensional shenanigans, maybe? Like a pocket dimension that can intersect with reality under some circumstance or something?

Whatever the exact mechanics, he clearly wasn’t going to reach Silverlake’s place without her inviting him first. Considering that last time it took him several days of wandering around and almost dying to get her attention, he decided to not bother with that and find something else to do.

Namely, investigating the rest of the disappeared soul mages. While it was true that Alanic seemed to be his best clue at the moment, it wouldn’t hurt to check the other locations as well. Thus, while waiting for Alanic to contact him again, Zorian proceeded to break into the homes of each of his targets before combing through them with every divination spell in his arsenal. The knowledge he picked up from Gurey’s little escapade was quite useful here, as a number of those homes were warded against entry and divinations, and that would have given him quite a bit of trouble in the past.

What he found out wasn’t much, but it did put at least one question to rest – the attackers had indeed been active long before the time loop started. Two of the houses showed signs of a struggle, and forensic spells dated those signs about a month to a month and a half before the start of the time loop. In addition, the house of the old curse-breaking herbalist lady looked pristine on first glance, but Zorian easily detected evidence of repair magic used on furniture and sloppily erased blood splatter on the walls – both dated 3 days before the start of the loop.

Zorian silently thanked Haslush for his divination instructions – without them, he would have never been able to tell such things with any degree of certainty.

He also made sure to search the houses for anything personally interesting while he was at it, and here he had greater success. The herbalist lady had intact notes about her curse-breaking side-business – Zorian pocketed those, even if he wasn’t able to make use of them at the moment. She also had a pretty extensive journal that listed where to find rare plants in the nearby forest as well as detailed some of her rare recipes. Zorian left that alone for now, but made a mental note to show it to Kael at some point and see if it was worth something. The ransacked tower turned out to have been imperfectly ransacked, and Zorian managed to find two different secret compartments that the attackers missed. One held a trio of high-quality combat staffs and a stack of blasting rods. The other held a bunch of spellbooks containing combat spells – specifically, the sort of combat spells you couldn’t buy legally anywhere because they were far too effective and lethal for the Mage Guild’s tastes. Naturally, Zorian swiped all of it for his personal use. He found more interesting stuff in other houses, but nothing he felt like taking at the moment. The familiar-obsessed guy, for instance, had mountains and mountains of books and journals dedicated to soul bonds, magical creatures, and familiar-related magics. It was interesting, but not something he needed at the moment.

In the end it was five days before Alanic finally contacted Zorian again. If Lukav didn’t insist that his friend was alive and well, just unusually occupied with something, Zorian would have feared the attackers got him.

Regardless, Zorian soon found himself seated in front of Alanic, ready to finally discuss things.

“I apologize for the wait,” Alanic said. “I’m afraid that the confessions I managed to force out of the prisoner had far more far-reaching consequences than I had initially suspected.”

“Oh? I don’t suppose you could tell me what those are?” asked Zorian.

“I’m afraid not. It’s not something you should concern yourself with,” Alanic said, leveling him a mild glare.

“Fine, fine, I get it,” Zorian said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. Truthfully, it did not matter much because he already knew what Alanic had found out. While the priest seemed to have some sort of natural mental defense, his friend Lukav didn’t. Zorian had simply pestered the transformation expert about the prisoner and read the man’s thoughts wherever he refused to answer.

Basically, the mage Zorian incapacitated was hired by none other than Vazen – the man who Gurey wanted him to rob (well, spy on) in the previous restart. Worse, the man appeared to be just an underling himself, with the real ringleader being someone more highly placed in the local hierarchy. Someone capable of interfering with the police and guild investigations.

It was certainly an interesting piece of information, and Zorian had some suspicions of his own about Vazen now. The man had concluded some kind of deal with a company in Cyoria, so it was entirely possible he was connected to the invaders somehow. He had intended to have another go at those documents anyway, but now they acquired a whole new importance.

“Good,” Alanic nodded. “What did you want to start with?”

“Well, first of all I’d like to know if you could help me defend myself against soul magic in the future,” said Zorian.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to help you with that?” asked Alanic curiously, cocking his head to the side slightly.

“I was told that spellcasters without some measure of soul perception can only cast the most rudimentary of soul magic,” said Zorian. And from his attempts to duplicate Kael’s spells, he knew that to be largely true – the only spell he managed to learn from Kael was the one that cloaked him from the soul perception of other necromancers, and Kael claimed that was baby stuff.

“Ah. You’ve been talking to a necromancer, I see,” Alanic said.

Zorian winced. “It… seemed like a logical course of action. I had a soul magic problem, and he was a soul mage.”

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“Hmph. Necromancers,” began Alanic, taking pains to stress the word, “have a habit of targeting others with their spells, so of course they consider soul perception to be absolutely essential for their craft. If you just want to cloak your soul in some protective effect, it is hardly necessary to go to such lengths.”

Oh, is that why he could cast Kael’s soul sight invisibility spell but not the rest of his arsenal?

“Even for other things, it is possible to use lengthy rituals to get around that requirement. I believe you’ve already experienced an example of such a ritual when Lukav tried to determine what is wrong with you. Don’t be fooled by his lack of skill – Lukav is but a dabbler in this branch of magic, and if you dedicate yourself to the discipline you could end up much more impressive than he is.”

“But I’m never going to progress beyond unwieldy ritual setups without soul sight, am I?” guessed Zorian.

Alanic sighed. “Yes. But soul sight is too much of a temptation. It makes soul magic too easy. For the sake of your immortal soul, I implore you to turn away from that path. It is not necessary to go that far just to protect yourself.”

“I see,” said Zorian. “Out of curiosity, do you have soul perception?”

For the first time since Zorian met him, Alanic looked uncomfortable. “Yes. But that’s… different.”

‘Of course it is,’ Zorian thought. ‘Do as I say, not as I do, just like it always was.’

But he didn’t say that. Instead he asked Alanic what exactly he was willing to teach him.

“There are two ways I can see this going,” said Alanic, quickly regaining his composure. “Option one is that I teach you how to perform a plethora of protective rituals to foil hostile soul magic. They are, as you say, cumbersome – casting times can be up to 2 hours long in some cases, and setting up a ritual isn’t easy. They last a long time, though. Weeks if you perform them correctly. The advantage of this path is that you get a way to defend yourself right away – I’m fairly certain you could do the beginning rituals as you are now. Also, some of the rituals will allow you to affect souls other than yours, though none of the rituals I’m willing to teach you can be used on an unwilling target.”

“And the disadvantage is that if I’m ever caught unaware by the enemy, I’m screwed because there’s no way to shield myself on a moment’s notice,” finished Zorian.

“Exactly. That’s where option number two comes in. With the help of some meditation exercises and special potions, I can teach you how to ‘feel’ your own soul. If you hone the skill to a required level, this skill will allow you to cast any soul magic that has you as its target. You’ll be able to shield and analyze your soul with invocation spells, and it might even allow you to passively notice when someone is messing with your soul in some fashion.”