Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

To keep his mind occupied, he silently named all the stars and constellations he could see. Due to his interest in the topic as a child and the Astronomy class they had in their first year at the Academy, he knew quite a bit. It was a full hour before he ran out of things to name and describe.

Monday was going to be awkward. Zorian had no doubt their little drama was overheard and would be the topic of conversation for several weeks to come. Considering that Akoja was a bit of a teacher’s pet in most of the subjects, the teachers could very well decide to make his life more difficult in the days to come as well.

Damn it all.

It was the sound of fireworks that broke him out of his thoughts. It was midnight apparently, and the festival had officially started. Zorian relaxed a little as he watched various fireworks blossom against the night sky, each exploding in its own unique way. It was beautiful. Most of them dissolved into quickly fading motes of light after the initial explosion, but a couple of them remained whole and consistently bright, more like flares than fireworks. They arced through the sky before dipping down and falling back to earth like falling stars. He frowned. Weird. Shouldn’t they be exploding by now?

The flare falling closest to him slammed into the nearby academy residence building and detonated. The explosion was so loud and so bright that Zorian was momentarily blinded and deafened, stumbling back and collapsing to his knees as the entire building shook beneath his feet.

Blinking spots out of his vision, his ears still ringing from the sound of the explosion, Zorian scrambled back to his feet. He stared at the spot where the stricken residence building once stood. Virtually the entire building had been leveled to the ground, everything flammable in the vicinity of the impact site was burning, and strange flaming shapes were emerging from the epicenter of the destruction.

Wait a minute… that’s his residence building!

He collapsed to his knees again as the implications of this hit him. If he had opted to stay in his room like he had originally planned, he’d have been dead right now. It was a sobering thought. But what the hell was happening here!? That was no firework, that’s for sure! It looked and sounded more like a high level artillery spell.

It was hard to tell if it was simply a consequence of his hearing being damaged, but he noticed the faint sounds of celebration had stopped. Looking over the city he noticed that what happened to the residence building wasn’t an isolated occurrence — wherever one of the flares hit, it left devastation in its wake. He only had a few seconds to ponder this before he noticed another batch of flares start ascending into the sky from the distance. This particular barrage was not masked by fireworks, so it was pretty obvious that they were artillery spells. They were under attack.

As the flares started dropping back to earth, Zorian began to panic. What the hell was he supposed to do!? Running away would be pointless since he didn’t know what the flares were targeting. He could very well be running straight into the area of effect if he ran blindly. Wait a minute, why does he have to do anything? There are a bunch of capable mages in the building, he should just notify them and have them handle it. He rushed down into the dance hall.

He had barely stepped on to the stairway when he ran into Ilsa and Kyron.

«Zorian! What are you doing here?» Ilsa demanded.

«Err, I just went out for some fresh air,» Zorian fumbled. «But that’s not important right now!»

«I agree,» Kyron said. «Kid, what was that blast? Don’t tell me this is something you did?»

«Hardly,» Zorian said. «Some kind of flares are falling all over the city, destroying everything they hit. Looks like some kind of powerful artillery spell.»

Ilsa and Kyron shared a look between each other before turning back to him.

«Go join Akoja and the others in the dance hall,» Ilsa told. «We’ll see what is happening and teleport everyone into the shelters if necessary.»

The both pushed past him and rushed to the roof, leaving Zorian to stumble into the dance hall in a daze. Akoja… Akoja wasn’t in the dance hall. She left. Because of him. She was out there, maybe even already dead…

He shook his head and banished such thoughts out of his mind. He took out his divination compass and quickly cast a divination spell to locate her. He wasn’t sure if it was going to work, since the spell he used could only find people you were ‘familiar with’ — in other words, friends and family. Thankfully, it seemed that being classmates with her was enough of a connection for the spell to work.

He took a deep breath to steel his nerves. He was liable to get himself killed, but… well, it was kind of his fault. He didn’t think he could live with himself if Akoja ended up dead because of him.