38. Return to Cyoria

Chapter 038
Return to Cyoria

Zorian’s previous experiences with riding the train to Cyoria alongside Kirielle hadn’t been very encouraging. She always started excited and curious, staring intently at the passing landscape and commenting on anything that caught her interest, but that didn’t last very long. There just wasn’t all that much to see on the route to Cyoria, so she quickly got bored of looking through the compartment window and turned to the only other source of entertainment left to her – him. And he was hard-pressed to entertain her throughout the entire ride.

That was back when he had been unwilling to use his rising shaping skills to do magic on the train, though. This time he decided he simply didn’t care about the risk of discovery. He could find no detection ward on the compartment they were in, and even if they did catch him in the act somehow, they would probably just slap him with a small fine and a lecture. It would be annoying, but better than listening to Kirielle whine about being bored for several hours. Plus, this way he got to practice his spellcasting while inhibited by a shaping disruption ward – something he had already been planning to try.

That was how Zorian found himself levitating a sphere of water in front of him, a ring of pens and erasers orbiting around it in a diffuse, slowly revolving ring. It was hard, despite the seeming triviality of it all. This wasn’t just him stacking a bunch of easy beginner spells to get a neat effect – he was performing an act of unstructured magic, treating the whole thing like a very complicated shaping exercise. Between the complexity of the floating construct and the disruption ward throwing off his shaping skills, he was really struggling to maintain control over the sphere and its satellites. He was pretty sure this was his absolute limit in terms of mana shaping skills so he should probably-

“Make a frog!” Kirielle challenged.

Zorian gave Kirielle an annoyed look. She grinned at him, confident that she had won their little game. That she had finally found his limit. He did not deliberately set out to make the complex thing floating in front of him, after all – it had started out as a much smaller sphere with a mere two pens circling around it, and Zorian had fully intended for it to stay that way until Kirielle started challenging him to make it more difficult. After he emptied the entire contents of his water bottle and used up all of the pens and erasers they both had in their possessions, he was certain she would have had to concede his victory…

He broke eye contact with her and focused on the floating construct in front of him. Trying to shape the floating water into anything other than the sphere it was now would be insanely hard. Telekinetically controlling water was far, far harder than doing the same with solid objects, and he would be hard pressed to sculpt it into complex shapes even if he was outside of a disruption ward and had no ring of small objects to serve as an additional distraction.

But he’d be damned if he was just going to roll over and admit defeat to his little sister just because of that. Over the next fifteen minutes, he slowly shaped the blob of water into a sculpture of a frog, as detailed and convincing as he could manage it… in other words, not very. He did have a burst of inspiration half-way through, though, and decided to depict the frog monster he saved the Yellow Cavern Guardians from in the previous restart instead of a normal one. Unfortunately, Kirielle didn’t think much of his efforts.

“That’s a pretty weird frog,” she declared.

“It’s a yellow cavern devil frog,” said Zorian, shamelessly making things up. He had no idea what that monster was called, or if it even had an official name to begin with. “Huge, vicious things with a penchant for eating little girls.”

“That’s stupid. You’re just making things up,” she accused. “Just admit you lost.”

“Bah, you asked for a frog and I made one. It’s not my fault you are not knowledgeable enough in the diverse and fascinating world of magical amphibians. Let me put this away and then I’ll tell you about Sumrak the mage and the story of how he saved a secret society of mages from one of the aforementioned devil frogs…”

Before Kirielle could complain too much, Zorian hurriedly set about dismantling the construct in front of him before his rapidly degrading control unraveled completely, letting the pens and erasers float down on the empty seat beside him and pouring the water back into its bottle. That done, he launched into a somewhat modified account of his battle against the frog monster.

Well okay, heavily modified. In Zorian’s story, the Yellow Cavern Guardians were a group of reclusive human mages that lived in the far north, practicing ‘spider magic’, and the adventurer Sumrak confronted the frog monster head on with his awesome magical might instead of resorting to traps and subterfuge. It made for a more impressive story that way. Kirielle seemed skeptical of the story at first, but when Zorian started using detailed illusions to demonstrate the events he was talking about, her suspiciousness melted away and she paid rapt attention to the story.

Zorian didn’t know whether to be amused or outraged that she was so entranced by the illusions. They were… well, not quite easy, but nothing special either. The floating ball of water and school supplies he had made earlier on her prompting had taken much more skill and effort to create. He was tempted to chalk it up to her ignorance of what a true display of magical expertise looked like, but he suspected that even if she knew how to judge the difficulty properly, she still likely wouldn’t have cared. He had noticed during previous restarts that she loved illusionism the most out of the magical disciplines he had shown her. Maybe it appealed to her inner artist?

The train announcer declared that they were arriving to Korsa, forcing Zorian to cut the story short just before Sumrak succeeded in fighting his way through the devil frog’s innumerable spawn and confronted the monster in the cavernous home to which it had cravenly fled when it lost its last bout with the adventuring mage…

…and of course Kirielle was having none of that. She was fine with waiting while people were streaming into the train and looking into compartments to find a seat, but with everyone now settled down and the train moving again, she demanded he continue with the story. The problem was that Ibery had decided to join them in the compartment in the meantime, and Zorian felt just a tiny bit apprehensive about showcasing his abilities in front of her. An apprehension that Kirielle didn’t empathize with in the slightest.

“You can’t stop now, not when the story is so near the ending,” she complained.

“Well, so long as I refrain from using my, err, visual aids…” tried Zorian.

“Nooo!” Kirielle pleaded. “That was the best part of the story!”

Zorian threw a significant glance towards Ibery, hoping that Kirielle would take the message. She did, sort of, though she didn’t react to the information the way he hoped she would.

“Oh come on, the nice lady won’t snitch on you for doing magic in the train,” Kirielle declared out loud. She then turned towards the startled Ibery and gave her the most soulful puppy-eyes look she could muster. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Umm…” Ibery mumbled, fidgeting uncomfortably in her seat. “What? I though the train had countermeasures to stop spellcasting?”

“It does?” asked Kirielle, surprised.

“It does,” Zorian confirmed. No point in playing dumb now. “They just disrupt spellcasting though, not make it impossible. You can work around it if you’re good enough.”

“And… you’re that good?” Ibery asked uncertainly.

Zorian shrugged, offering no other response. To Kirielle’s delight, he then proceeded to finish the story he had been telling, pretty illusions included. He noticed that Ibery had set aside her book to listen as well.

She also tried to discreetly cast a few simple spells when she thought he wasn’t looking, and then frowned when she failed to overcome the disruption ward. She was probably just curious about the level of skill needed to overcome the ward. He thought about scanning her surface thoughts to find out what she was thinking, but decided not to after giving it some thought. The risk of getting caught in the act was minimal, since Mind Like Fire had taught him how to stealthily test for presence of mental defenses, but getting into the habit of casually invading the minds of everyone around him struck him as a bad idea. He left Ibery to her experiment and focused back to Kirielle and the story he was telling.

Once he was done with the story, Ibery promptly struck up a conversation with the two of them. She admitted that she didn’t care much about the story itself, especially since she only caught the tail end of it, but she was very impressed by his ability to overcome the train’s wards. Especially once she learned he was only starting his third year at the academy.

Eventually they arrived in Cyoria, however, and went their separate ways. Before they said their goodbyes, however, Ibery nervously told him to drop by the library sometime in the next week in order to discuss… something. Well, whatever – he had intended to raid the library for more spells in this restart anyway, he might as well see what she wanted from him while he was at it.

“I think she likes you,” Kirielle said when they were alone.

“Nah, she’s head over heels for Fortov,” said Zorian.

“What?” Kirielle asked, baffled. “Her and Fortov? No way!”

“Well I didn’t say they’re together,” Zorian clarified. “Just that she has a crush on him.”

“How do you know that?” Kirielle asked suspiciously.

“Ancient magical secrets?” tried Zorian. Kirielle gave him a deadpan look. “Fine, fine… I’ll tell you later, when we arrive at our new lodgings. It’s not something we should discuss out in the open.”

Even as he conversed with his little sister, Zorian paid attention to what his mind sense was telling him while they moved through the crowds. Even if he was being targeted by someone shielded from mental detection, the absence of a mind in someone would be a huge red flag on its own. He detected no hostile intentions directed at either of them, though, and none of the suspicious people he encountered were invisible to his mind sense. After ten minutes, he breathed a sigh of relief – his fears of walking into a trap with his little sister in tow appeared to have been unfounded.

Hmm, he knew it would rain later on, but he could ward against the rain easily enough… perhaps a little sightseeing around the city to quench Kirielle’s curiosity a little?

“Hey,” Zorian said, attracting Kirielle’s attention. “Do you want to visit the main plaza of the city? They have a pretty nice fountain there that I like to watch sometimes…”

She said yes, of course. He needn’t have even asked.

– break –

It had been more than four years since Zorian had started looping, and a lot of things had happened in that period. Keeping track of it all was a major challenge, despite his mage training and his own excellent memory. Being absent from Cyoria for nearly a year and a half in order to escape Red Robe’s scrutiny certainly didn’t help in this regard, and many of the minor details and specifics of how a ‘normal’ restart was supposed to go had faded from his mind during his long absence.

It should not be very surprising, then, that he’d totally forgotten what happened the last time he tried to reach the fountain at the beginning of a restart – after all, he hadn’t tried it since that very first, fateful restart that got him included into the time loop.

Thus, when the two of them finally stumbled upon the swarm of cephalic rats blocking their path, Zorian was caught just as off-guard by it as he was the previous time. He wasn’t as defenseless as he was back then, though, and he nearly burned them all to a crisp before he stopped himself. He was pretty sure that him killing the swarm would put him on the invaders’ radar, and therefore on Red Robe’s radar as well, so the smartest move would be to simply retreat like he did back in his first restart.

He felt the swarm testing his mental defenses and responded by strengthening his defenses and striking back. The attacks stopped, but his counterattack did very little to the collective mind of the swarm – the group mind was thoroughly unshielded, probably because any mental shell would interfere with its internal telepathic network, but his counterattack merely knocked out a couple of individual rats instead of doing any significant damage. He wondered-

He felt a spike of terror from Kirielle as she finally realized what she was looking at, and realized he really shouldn’t be playing around with these things – he was probably immune to anything they may dish out but she wasn’t. He fired off a weak flamethrower at the closest part of the swarm to make them back off a little and then immediately turned around, grabbed Kirielle and fled. The rats didn’t follow, much like how they didn’t follow him the first time he encountered them. They probably didn’t want to attract attention any more than he did, though that did raise the question of what the hell they were doing blocking off one of Cyoria’s major roads in broad daylight. Something to look into eventually…

While they ran, he idly marveled about how fortunate it was that he’d never replicated that first meeting with the cephalic rats before he had met the aranea – they would have undoubtedly read his mind, and there was a good chance they would have found out about the time loop from his thoughts. Even if they dismissed the time travel stuff as delusion, they would have definitely been interested in him knowing about the invasion…

“Um, can we still go see the fountain?” Kirielle asked once they had retreated sufficiently and she’d had a chance to catch her breath and calm down.

“Yeah, I know an alternative route,” said Zorian, pointing towards a nearby park.

Wait, hadn’t he tried that in the first restart and encountered some kind of problem? He was pretty sure he had. What kind of- oh! The bicycle girl. He had totally forgotten about her. Oh well, that wasn’t really a problem – he would just get her bicycle out of the water really quickly and they would be on their way.

Kirielle got unusually quiet when they encountered the little crying girl and hung back while he talked to her. He got the girl’s bike out of the creek with trivial ease, simply placing his hand over the bridge and wiling the bike to rise into his grasp – it took more time to calm the girl down a little and get her to tell him what she was upset about than it did to actually retrieve it. He used a couple of spells to dry the bike off and clean all the grime that had accumulated on it, simply because he could and saw no reason not to. He suspected the bike was cleaner now than it was before it had fallen into the creek.

“There,” said Zorian proudly. “Your bike is clean, intact and out of the creek. You can stop crying now, okay?”

“Okay,” she sniffed, rubbing her eyes. “Um. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Zorian said. “Well, we should get going now, so take care. I think it’s going to rain soon, so you should probably head home as well.”

“Come on brother, don’t be mean. We can’t just leave her here,” protested Kirielle suddenly. “We should get her home ourselves, just to be sure.”

“He’s not mean,” the other little girl protested, suddenly snapping out of her daze. “And I can find my way home just fine. I’m not stupid.”

Oh, he liked this kid. It wasn’t often that someone defended him in preference to Kirielle.

“Well. I’m glad that someone is not automatically assuming the worst of me,” said Zorian, giving a sideways glance towards Kirielle. She rolled her eyes at him. “I am sure that Kirielle didn’t mean anything like that, though – she was just worried for you, since you still looked pretty upset.”

“I was just… I only got the bike yesterday and mother told me to be careful with it because they couldn’t afford a new one and I…”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” said Zorian quickly, interrupting her story. She looked like she was going to cry again. “You got it back. All’s well that ends well. But maybe we really should accompany you home, at least until you calm down a little.”

“Yeah!” Kirielle piped in. “We can talk on the way and get to know each other. I just moved in here and it would be nice to have a friend my age. What’s your name anyway? I’m Kirielle and this guy here that got your bike out of the river is my brother Zorian.”

“Nochka,” she said. “But, um, I don’t want to make you late.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“We were just going to see the fountain, nothing really important,” Kirielle waved her off. “We can do that any time. Come on, show us where you live.”

The walk to Nochka’s house was a short one – she lived pretty close to the park, which was the reason her parents had let her go there all alone. Still pretty strange for parents to be so hands off about their child’s whereabouts, but Zorian’s parents were the same with him so he didn’t pry. He didn’t say much of anything really, but that was okay because Kirielle talked plenty enough for both of them. Nochka herself was shy and nervous, constantly watching her surroundings and jumping at every unusual sound, but she did warm up to Kirielle by the time they had reached her house. She was eight, a year younger than Kirielle, and was also fairly new to Cyoria. Her family had arrived into the city a couple of months ago, and she didn’t have any friends her age either. Great. He was pretty sure he knew where this was going…

Zorian once again tried to disengage from the whole situation once they got Nochka to her destination, but failed – Nochka’s mother saw them arriving and insisted they come inside, and he didn’t want to be impolite. He figured the woman had every right to be curious about a couple of strangers walking around with her daughter in tow, so they should at least allay her fears a little before leaving. Nochka hurriedly gave her an account of the situation the moment they were inside; though in her story the bike didn’t end up in the creek, but was instead stuck in a rope trap that happened to be in the park for… some reason. Nochka kind of glossed over that part and moved onto Zorian helping her get it down from the tree.

Yeah, Nochka was a terrible liar. Based on the way her mother was looking at her when she finished her story, Zorian was betting that she would be getting the real story out of Nochka the moment Zorian and Kirielle left the house.

Nochka’s mother, who Zorian learned was named Rea, was honestly a little scary to Zorian. She didn’t look frightening – she had the same jet black hair and dark brown eyes that Nochka did, and the stature and dress of an average housewife – but it took only five minutes for Zorian to decide there was more to her. Her movements were all fluid and precise, she never stuttered or wavered when she spoke, her gaze was frighteningly intense, and she gave off an air of absolute confidence and composure. Frankly, if he had been alone he would have left the place in a hurry, but Kirielle didn’t seem nearly as intimidated by the woman and insisted on telling her new friend stories. Such as the one of how they stumbled upon her in the first place.

“Ah yes, the strange brain rats,” Rea said when Kirielle told them about their encounter with the cephalic rats. “I’ve seen a few hanging around the house, but never in such numbers. Disgusting things.”

Zorian frowned. Why were the cephalic rats hanging around their house?

“You should be careful,” he told her. “They’re called cephalic rats and they can read your mind, possibly even memories if left unmolested long enough.”

“Hmm… good thing I kill them when I find them, then,” Rea said.