Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

«I’m either going to throw them over your left shoulder, over your right shoulder, or straight at your head. If you get hit by a marble, you lose a point. If you move when you don’t have to, you lose a point. Otherwise you receive a point. We’ll stop when you accrue 10 points or our time runs out.»

Yes, he really had heard him right. Thank you so much for your help Ilsa, thank you so much!

The next two weeks were busy, but routine. He directed most of his efforts towards mastering spell formulas, largely because Nora was very willing to indulge him — the harder he tried in their lessons, the more enthusiastic she became about teaching him. She even suggested they meet on Sundays for additional instruction, apparently not having any private obligations to distract her. He had learned much, but Nora set a grueling pace, and he was glad the restart was fast approaching. He doubted he could last much more than a month of Nora’s teaching.

Interestingly, he seemed to be attracting attention from the teachers and students alike in this particular restart. Maybe it was him impressing Ilsa as much as he did, maybe it was the way he quietly went with the insane workload Nora gave him, or maybe Xvim said something nice about him to the other teachers. Well, probably not that last part, since he had made little progress in mastering Xvim’s current ‘exercise’. In any case, he was getting a lot of attention for his efforts, which was rather curious. Most of the time, no matter how hard he tried in class, everyone was pretty flat about it. He thought about trying to leverage all that attention into something useful, but he was too exhausted by his studies to plot properly. Some other restart perhaps.

The attention had the unfortunate side-effect of wrecking any chance he had of befriending Kael. Associating with Zorian would surely bring great scrutiny on the morlock, something the boy was understandably concerned about, so Zorian wasn’t surprised the other boy never sought him out. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he could befriend the boy even in normal circumstances — the morlock had a daughter waiting for him at home, and thus probably wouldn’t want to spend his time after class socializing with friends.

Akoja was extremely pleased with him, though. Zorian couldn’t really understand why, but she was.

And then it happened. Suddenly, without any warning, there was a wrenching sensation and everything went black. He woke up, as usual, with Kirielle lying on top of him, looking smug.

There were two possibilities that Zorian could think of to explain this occurrence. The first one was that something or someone had killed him so fast he was dead before he realized it. He was skeptical of this, as he had done nothing to warrant an assassination, and he couldn’t think of any natural force that could kill so suddenly and thoroughly. He hadn’t even felt any pain before he died.

The second possibility was much more likely, and also much more worrying. While he was minding his business, learning spell formulas in Cyoria, Zach was off somewhere in the world, doing insanely dangerous things. Zach died. When he did, his soul was dragged into the past to start over… and it dragged Zorian’s soul back with it.

Which would make Zorian soul-bonded to Zach.

Damn it.

Chapter 012 Soul Web

Zorian stomped into his room, closing the door behind him with way more force than necessary. He should have known he wouldn’t find out anything about soul bonds that he hadn’t already known, but it was still annoying to come back empty-handed after spending an entire day in the library.

The books all repeated the same warnings he received back in his first year: soul bonds were a dangerous and poorly understood branch of magic, capable of causing some pretty horrifying side-effects if used recklessly. Every once in a while, some ill-informed couple decide that soul-bonding themselves together would be the most romantic thing ever, only for everything to end up in tears and lawsuits a few months later when complications surface. The main issue was that one of the participants usually started to mentally and spiritually dominate the other, making them more like themselves in mind and soul, not to mention disturbingly obedient and deferential. This was a good thing when binding animals as familiars, since it was almost always the animal that got dominated by the human, and animals actually tended to benefit from such domination by developing higher intelligence and better control over their magical abilities (if they had any). Sentient beings usually had issues with someone magically subverting their entire personality and worldview, however. At least until the soul bond finished, turning them into a servile clone, that is.