Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

Zorian wasn’t the only one who was busy. Kirielle persisted in trying to learn magic, more stubbornly and diligently than Zorian had ever seen her. She was doing very well for a complete beginner, but the sad fact was that she was closer to him in talent than, say, Daimen or some other child prodigy. Novelty had become something of an unofficial liaison between the aranea and House Aope, and was as a consequence subjected to a crash course in diplomacy and proper conduct by the matriarch — something she constantly complained about to Zorian whenever they met. Tinami, for her part, was much more interested in her lessons with Zorian once she found out some details about what being psychic means, and appeared to be working on some kind of personal project that consumed most of her free time. Zorian suspected, from the snippets of thoughts that briefly bubbled into her consciousness during their lessons, that she was trying to somehow artificially make herself psychic. Which struck him as crazy dangerous, since it meant messing with your own mind and all, but that was House Aope for you. Kael was also pursuing some kind of personal project that he refused to elaborate to Zorian — though it apparently had something to do with spell formula because he kept borrowing Zorian’s books on the topic. Zorian left him to his work — Kael had been incredibly helpful throughout the month, taking it upon himself to help Zorian as much as he could for some reason. Zorian didn’t think it was just generosity and hadn’t forgotten just how fascinated with the time loop the other boy was last time, so he wondered when the other boy would approach him about what he really wanted from Zorian.

Apparently, the answer was ‘just before the summer festival’.

«Hello Zorian,» Kael said. «Are you doing something?»

«Not really. I’m just waiting for Akoja to show up so that I can go to the dance,» Zorian said. «There is no point in starting anything since she’s bound to show up absurdly early. What is it?»

Ah, Akoja. He still wasn’t sure why he had asked her to be his date for the evening. Probably because she gave every indication she wanted him to and he didn’t want to make her sad for no reason. Not that she had actually come out and said it, though — hell, she even chickened out on the meeting she had arranged with him and made it look like she wanted some school advice instead of… well, whatever it was she had really wanted to talk about. Hopefully she would be a little less pushy this time around and the evening wouldn’t end in as big of a catastrophe as it had the last time they went out for the evening.

«I have… a gift and a request,» Kael said. Zorian mentally translated it as ‘a bribe and a demand’. «First, I have been thinking about your stories of previous restarts and couldn’t help but notice the presence of a powerful lich on the side of the invaders. Those are… very hard to deal with, especially with classical magics.»

«But not with soul magic?» surmised Zorian.

«Well, sort of. It’s not easy, even with soul magic, but there are some tricks you could pull on a lich if you knew how to mess with souls. The thing you need to remember is that a lich’s soul is automatically pulled back into their phylactery when their physical form is destroyed. This is because destroying their body severs the link between their soul and their body… obviously, since there is no body to speak of anymore. Still, if you could sever the link between the soul and the body — something that is a lot easier to do with creatures whose soul is artificially connected to the body through magic — then their souls would immediately be wrenched back to their phylactery, even if their body is technically intact.»

«They’d be effectively banished,» Zorian concluded. «It wouldn’t kill them, but…»

«The process of possessing a new body is not that fast for a lich — they need a whole day at the minimum, and that’s assuming they already have a new body ready to go. Banishing the lich back to its phylactery is as good as killing it, at least for your needs.»

«You’re telling me you can teach me a spell to do that?» asked Zorian excitedly.

«Well no,» said Kael, promptly popping Zorian’s bubble. «And it would be of dubious value even if I could. The spell requires you to touch the target.»

Zorian winced. «Yeah, I don’t see myself getting within touching range of the lich.»

«So I got you this, instead,» Kael said, handing him a small silver disc, reminiscent of a particularly large silver coin. Closer scrutiny, however, quickly made it clear it was some kind of a spell tool, being covered in spell formula instead of typical imagery common to currency.

«I don’t have to touch the lich!» Zorian realized after thinking about the ‘coin’ for a few moments. «I just have to make sure the coin touches him!»