Matthew Jones
Stories
7
Chapters
2,283
Words
4.7 K
Comments
0
Reading
23 m
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The idea that someone might connect all the dots and realize his abilities were way too developed for his age was not a foreign idea for Zorian. He tried to make sure that the abilities he showed to any one person or group were firmly within the realm of possible, but he always knew that a sufficiently curious and dedicated individual could track down enough clues to realize something didn’t quite add up. There was no solution to this, as far as he could tell – not unless he wanted to spend most of his…
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Perhaps it was because she ‘knew’ that Zorian already had a date, much like everyone else seemed to believe, or perhaps it was simply a matter of Zorian being more circumspect with his intentions this time around, but Ilsa didn’t send any girl after him in the end. Not that Zorian had stayed at Imaya’s place long enough to see that in person, of course – that could have easily left him stuck with an unplanned date for the evening A part of him was annoyed he even cared about that. In the grand…
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Not far from the restaurant where he was supposed to meet Raynie, Zorian sat on a bench and waited. There was no sign of her yet, but that was in no way unusual – he had misjudged the amount of time it would take him to find the place, and was thus a little early. He didn’t let it bother him, choosing instead to pass the time by experimenting with his mind sense on the passing crowds, tapping into the eyes of pigeons flying overhead and practicing his shaping skills on the handful of pebbles he had…
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The start of the newest loop differed little from the previous one – he got on the train to Cyoria with Kirielle in tow, entertained her with feats of magic as well as disguised (and more than a little embellished) accounts of his own adventures to stave off boredom, and even talked with Ibery for a bit. Just for a bit, though – she wasn’t terribly interested in him this time, since he’d finished telling stories to Kirielle by the time they stopped at Korsa, and didn’t demonstrate any amazing…
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Zorian woke up very early in the morning, roused from his slumber by the faint, incoherent mumbling of Kirielle sleeping beside him. For a moment he wondered why Kirielle was sleeping in his bed instead of being in her own room, but then he snapped out of the confused half-dream state he was in and memories of the previous evening came rushing in to him. Rea and her husband were dead, their daughter missing. An event that had completely blindsided Zorian, who had never heard of anything like that…
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Zorian stared at his tormentor in silence, as relaxed and impassive as one could be when faced with such a pitiless, unreasonable man. Xvim stared back at him, his face a picture of unshakable, effortless composure that made Zorian’s best efforts at stoicism appear laughable in comparison. Still, he wouldn’t break. He They continued staring at each other in silence for several seconds. “That,” Xvim finally decided, “was terrible. You are inflexible, slow, yet paradoxically impatient. I see in…
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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…
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As the weeks went by, Zorian became increasingly bored with Mind Like Fire’s lessons. While they continued to pay results in terms of his increasing mental combat proficiency, they were also very repetitive and had increasingly marginal results. It didn’t help that his mental defenses were by now too good to be casually collapsed by his teacher, which meant that he no longer ended the lessons with a raging headache and an urge to lay down for a few hours. The lessons mostly just taxed his patience now,…
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Eventually, the month-long recuperation period came to an end. Zorian spent the last few hours of that restart with Kirielle, attending Cirin’s own celebration of the summer festival. Kirielle was very happy with him, because apparently she was never allowed to wander around or stay up so late during the previous festivals. He didn’t really reciprocate her excitement, to he honest – Cirin’s summer festival was the same as it was every year: incredibly dull. He found himself almost wishing for…
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‘The beginning of the restart is always the most annoying part of the time loop,’ Zorian mused quietly, standing on one of the arrival platforms in Cirin’s train station. He pulled a watch out of his pocket and inspected it for a minute before putting it back with a sigh. The train was late. The train was It was in times like these that he wondered why he even bothered going through this charade in every restart when he could just teleport out of his room at the start of every new loop and be done…
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