Mother of Learning

Introduction:

What do you get when a literal nobody with zero writing credentials sits down to write a free online fantasy story? Almost all of the time you get a mess. The story is either unreadable, uninteresting, or is abandoned part way through. When Nobody103 started writing Mother of Learning that is exactly what happened.^[1] He wrote the first eight chapters, decided they were not good enough, and started over. On the second try, he only wrote four chapters before discarding them and again starting over. On the third try he was satisfied enough with the first four chapters to post them online. Then he kept writing, averaging a chapter a month over the next nine years. And somewhere in that process the impossible happened.

Nobody103 expected some readership, but to his amazement the story exploded in popularity. By the time he finished in 2020, Mother of Learning had tens of thousands of regular readers. Six years after its completion, it is still Royal Road’s highest rated webfiction. On Goodread’s list of rational fiction it is number 25, only that low because their list is partially based on the number of reviews.^[2] Despite the free version staying online, Nobody103 eventually published Mother of Learning as an e-book, a physical book, and a professionally voice acted audiobook.

I was one of those tens of thousands of readers who looked forward to the increasingly slow chapter releases as the story reached its conclusion. There was just something about the main character’s journey that I could not quite explain. Some ineffable quality to the story that I did not understand beyond the fact that I really liked it. This review is my attempt to put those feelings to words.

Importance:

Before I read fantasy stories I watched fantasy cartoons. The one that I loved the most as a kid was X-Men. I wished so hard that I had been born a mutant so that I could have cool super powers. But alas, all I got for hitting puberty was acne and a scratchy voice. Fantasy stories are now my genre of choice, but it is hard to say that any have real world importance.^[3] Fantasy tends to be more about escapism and wonder than crystalizing an important lesson in its readers, which is probably why Mother of Learning had such an impact on me. It is the story that I wish I read as a teen and it is the story that I wish more teens (and adults) would read today.

The importance of Mother of Learning finally clicked for me when I watched the animated film Hansel and Gretel (2021) with my young kids. In this version of the fairy tale, the king is kidnapped and Gretel, a member of the Secret Magic Control Agency, is assigned to the case along with her estranged brother Hansel. The Secret Magic Control Agency is not a misnomer at all. It is literally a secret police force that spies on citizens of the kingdom to ensure that anyone with magical ability cannot act to the kingdom’s detriment.

I spent the entire movie expecting the twist where the prime minister would be found to be using the agency to get rid of the king. I waited for the inevitable moment where the main characters would expose the corruption that secret power causes. Instead the movie played it totally straight. The secret police really were the good guys. The government agents in charge really were looking out for the best interest of the country. The unsupervised magic users really were the villains. I was utterly flabbergasted … until I saw that the movie was made by a Russian production company. That was when I finally realized how much stories and their lessons matter.

It is a shame that most fantasy stories teach the wrong lessons. Most of the time, the hero of the story is born to greatness. Harry Potter had magically powerful parents and was prophesied to defeat Voldemort. The main characters in Wheel of Time are ta’veren. Ender was only allowed to be born because his siblings were geniuses. When the main characters are less distinctly special, then they rarely drive the plot. Katniss volunteers for her sister and shoots Alma Coin, but aside from that she is a pawn to the more agentic players. Frodo volunteers to carry the ring, but other characters are the ones protecting him and leading armies. The most common lesson in fantasy literature is that being a hero requires being born special or making a single heroic choice.

Mother of Learning is a story that is not about being born for greatness and not about making that one heroic choice. Instead, it is a story where an ordinary protagonist is forced to make the best decisions he can again and again and again in the face of an incomprehensible challenge and with no one to rely on but himself. It is a story that shows how much a person can accomplish if they have the willpower to keep improving themself day after day. It is a story that teaches the lessons that I wish everybody took to heart. That effort is what translates potential into success. That you do not know your upper limits until you try to reach them. That when you fail you simply start over and try again or try differently until you find something that works. That you do not have to be the best or the chosen one to make a difference.

These are also the lessons that I wish I had instilled in me when I was young. After reading the story, I can’t help but wonder what I could have accomplished if I learned to put in effort.^[4] What if instead of my childhood role model being someone that was gifted magical powers, it was someone that worked really hard? How much of my potential did I live up to? What am I doing now that I can do better? These are not easy questions, but they are ones that Mother of Learning makes readers ask themselves.

Plot and Structure:

As mentioned in the intro, Nobody103 scrapped his writing multiple times before finally putting his work online for others to read. This is quite appropriate because the story itself is about restarting, growing, and doing better next time.

The initial plot of Mother of Learning goes as follows. Zorian wakes on the day he is to travel to magic school for his third year of lessons. One month later a foreign army invades the city. At 2am on the night of the invasion, or if Zorian dies prior to then, he wakes up again in his bed at the start of the month. No one else realizes this is happening and the first time Zorian tried to warn people he was stabbed to death by an assassin. Now Zorian is stuck looping in an endlessly repeating month with no idea what is going on. He is a beginner mage with below average mana reserves and a cranky disposition. The only things he has going for him are a downright insane work ethic and a sufficient level of paranoia to realize that someone else is looping and that they are helping the invaders.

What unravels from there is an epic quest of self improvement. Zorian needs to find mentors, tutors, and allies to help him learn the many esoteric branches of magic he needs to end the time loop. He needs to learn to fight the archmages and the 1,000 year old lich that are leading the invasion. He needs to solve logistical problems to travel across the globe and find artifacts of power that have been lost for centuries. And the more he learns about the time loop and its function, the more he realizes that he is not supposed to be experiencing it.

But there was a first loop. The first four chapters of the story are Zorian simply going about his days as the month passes. It is a slow burn, but it sets up an astonishing amount of material for the later chapters. Zorian is woken up when his sister Kirielle jumps on him. He goes downstairs to find that his parents are leaving for a six month trip to visit his older brother Daimen and Zorian’s mom asks him to take his sister to Cyoria to live with him until they return. Zorian declines and takes the train to school where the place is being fixed up for the Summer Festival, which this year occurs during an ultra-rare planetary alignment.

Zorian attends his classes and we are introduced to various teachers, classmates, and friends, almost all of which become important later. His former crush Taiven asks him to join a party of mages heading into the dungeon below the city and then is never seen again after he turns her down. We learn some general laws of how magic works from the review classes. We meet Zorian’s annoying mentor Xvim and watch as Zorian is told to do his basic three shaping spells again and again until they are good enough (they are never good enough for Xvim’s exacting standards).

Peripheral to all of this is Zorian’s classmate Zach. Zach had been a consistently mediocre student who almost failed out the previous year. This year, Zach is acing every assignment, impressing the battle magic teacher with his monstrous mana reserves, and dating two girls at once who both seem to be okay with it. It really annoys Zorian's straight-laced classmate Akoja, but Zorian is too introverted to care. Zorian is forced to go to the Summer Festival dance with Akoja and pisses her off so much that she storms out of the dance to cry. The city is then attacked and Zorian runs into the streets to try to find Akoja and get her back to safety.

Instead of Akoja, Zorian finds Zach fighting the invaders with an insane level of skill; casting spells like he was one of the premier battlemages on the continent. Zach helps Zorian find Akoja, but before they can all escape they are interrupted by Quatatch-Ichl, the lich leading the invasion. Quatach-Ichl defeats Zach, and when Quatach-Ichl dramatically gloats about it Zach makes a cryptic statement about not dying for good. The lich takes the admission seriously and instead of killing Zach, he casts an obscure soul magic spell on Zach and Zorian. Zorian dies and then is suddenly awakened by Kirielle jumping on him again. The month then repeats itself verbatim, but with Zorian remembering the previous iteration and Zach nowhere to be seen.

From here the story is told over the course of three (or four) major arcs. The webnovel treats it as three, but the longer third arc was split into two books when it was officially published. There are 117 chapters including the epilogue and they are broken down as such:

• Arc 1 (Chapters 1-26): Zorian comes to grip with the time loop and finds some unlikely allies to help unlock a hidden talent.
• Arc 2 (Chapters 27-54): Worried about being hunted, Zorian travels the county to learn as much as he can before finally coming back to Cyoria.
• Arc 3 (Chapters 55-91): Zorian finally teams up with Zach as they make increasingly risky gambles to escape the time loop.
• Arc 4 (Chapters 92-117): Now escaped from the time loop and at the start of the real month, Zorian must work harder than ever to stop the invasion and save the lives of everyone that he has come to care about.

The arcs themselves are all well paced with the details of the time loop slowly being revealed. In order to avoid spoilers I won’t be sharing information about the overarching mystery of how the time loop works. Thankfully, the book is full of secondary mysteries that Zorian only learns about through his repeated interactions with people. For example, it takes dozens of loops before Zorian realizes that Kirelle desperately wants to go to Cyoria with him and only wakes Zorian up so aggressively because she couldn’t wait to find out if he would agree to take her. Much later, Zorian finally asks why his parents are travelling to another continent to see Daimen and learns that Daimen is engaged to foreign royalty and his parents want to break up the marriage. The groundwork for those two reveals are laid in the first scene, but the entire book is like that.

‘Repetition is the Mother of Learning’ is the phrase that Mother of Learning takes its namesake from. That learning is not just Zorian’s growth as a mage but his understanding of the mysteries all around him. Despite Zorian’s incredible progress over the course of the story and many impressive fight scenes, the story is not enjoyable because it is a power fantasy. Lots of stories have their main character become exceptionally powerful over time. The enjoyment is in seeing the world that Nobody103 created from so many different angles that it finally starts making sense. There is a constant mystery that the heroes are working to understand and overcome and it is their hard work and creativity to solve these problems that makes the story stand out.

Characters and Relationships:

Zorian Kazinski is the primary protagonist of the story and the lens through which we experience the world. He is a fifteen year old boy from a slightly dysfunctional family who got into the prestigious Cyoria Magical Academy by virtue of having an older brother who was a prodigy. Technically he also tested in by barely making the top fifty in the country on a standardized test, but everyone believes it was nepotism.

Zorian has two major problems. The first one he overcomes relatively early in the story and the second is never resolved. To start, Zorian hates crowds. They hurt his head and the more people there are the more it hurts to the point where he gets incapacitated from migraines. Due to this, Zorian starts out as a cranky loner who avoids people and social gatherings as much as he can. Eventually Zorian learns that this is because he is an extremely powerful empath and can sense the emotions of others, but the lack of training makes it so that he feels the emotions of crowds as an oppressive force. Once he learns to tune things out he slowly becomes a much more social person. The change is gradual and well done; so much so that in rereading the story it is shocking to see what a jerk Zorian starts as.

The second issue for Zorian is that he is face blind. This is never explicitly stated, but my head canon is that because Zorian can often identify people based on their emotional signature, he does not pay much attention to how they look. The reason I think this is because Nobody103 almost never describes what characters look like. Unless someone has a very distinctive look, they only ever get a single line or two about their appearance the first time they show up and then never again for the rest of the story. After that their characterization is only in terms of what actions they do and what words they say.

As Zorian progresses on his journey, he comes across a variety of characters, most of which are there to teach him how to be a better mage, try to kill him, or both. Also, half the characters are giant sentient telepathic jumping spiders known as Aranea. Only a few of the Aranea become recurring characters, but arachnophobes should be forewarned that much time is spent on Aranean world building and Zorian spends quite a while going from spider colony to spider colony. Those that can tolerate spiders will find that Enthusiastic Seeker of Novelty is the best character in the story and her interactions with Zorian are adorable.

The deuteragonist of the story is Zach Noveda. Zach is the hero trope from every fantasy ever written. He is an attractive and charming person with a good natured personality. He is also the last scion of a noble lineage, set to inherit a fortune, and has the mana reserves that most mages would kill for. Zorian quickly deduces that there is so much in Zach’s favor that the time loop had to be made for him. The problem is that Zach has royally screwed it up. Because somehow, someway, a third time traveler has entered the loop and compromised Zach. Zach no longer knows how he got into the time loop, does not know how to leave, and does not realize that the third time traveller is countering him to make the invasion impossible to stop. All he is left with is a vague feeling that ending the time loop has something to do with defeating the invasion and that he needs to do it all by himself. Zach and Zorian eventually team up to form a crazy powerful duo, but the fact that Zach’s mind has been messed with drives Zorian’s desire to avoid Zach for a while and challenges their relationship even after they join forces.

The third time looper is the enigmatic figure helping the invasion, eventually known as Red Robe. For almost all of the story he is a complete unknown who hides in the shadows, delivers information to the invaders, and pulls strings to make the invasion far more effective. The one time he does reveal himself he proves to be a devastatingly powerful necromancer. While Red Robe does not appear again for many more chapters, the fact that he exists and the mystery of who he is drives Zorian away from Cyoria and into hiding for nearly the entire second arc. When he is finally revealed towards the end of the story, his motivations make sense and you can follow how he became such a monster.

Beyond the three time travellers, almost everyone else of importance is someone that teaches Zorian and Zach magic. These people range in skill and as Zorian grows as a mage he has to learn from better and better teachers. At first he can learn from his combat mage friend Taiven, but in time he surpasses her skill so thoroughly that she has an emotional breakdown. He and Zach eventually learn the most complex branches of magic from Alanic Zosk, Xvim Chao, Silverlake, and Quatach-Ichl.

Alanic and Xvim are actual allies. Alanic is a scarred battlepriest with a stern demeanor who is an expert in soul magic. Xvim, yes the same Xvim that was super annoying for the first fifty chapters, turns out to be a secret archmage specializing in defensive magic and unstructured spells. Once these two can be convinced about the time loop they drop everything to help Zach and Zorian. Over time Alanic and Xvim go from mentors to peers to subordinates of the increasingly powerful boys.

Knowledge of the time loop is shared with Silverlake out of necessity. She is an eccentric ageless hermit witch of dubious moral character that sends Zorian on a suicide quest the first time he asks for her help. However, she has centuries of knowledge of potions, necromancy, dimensionalism, and interdimensional prisons; which makes tolerating her a necessity. She also comes up with many clever, crazy and morally grey methods of taking advantage of the time loop.

The final instructor of note is the millenia old warmongering lich Quatach-Ichl. The boys’ actions eventually make enough waves that they catch the lich’s attention, so the undead monster behind the foreign invasion surprises them by … joining them for dinner. The lich turns out to be incredibly honorable in his dealings and, aside from the whole ruthless invasion thing, is one of the most likable characters in the story. When Zach and Zorian trade artifacts that they have collected for tutelage, Quatach-Ichl reveals himself to be the best teacher that the two have ever had. Until he figures out about the time loop, at which point it goes poorly.

Zorian’s relationship with his family is also explored. He starts out disliking everyone in his family, except for his younger sister Kirielle whom he merely tolerates. Zorian eventually bonds with Kirielle and her influence softens his prickly demeanor. Zorian’s prodigious brother Daimen is not present on the continent at the start of the month and so he serves most of the story as a driver of Zorian’s insecurities and frustrations. When Zorian is forced to seek out Daimen’s help, he finds Daimen to be an awesome ally who did not realize what his reputation had done to his younger brother.

The only semi-romantic relationship is between Zorian and Raynie. Raynie is a standoffish classmate that Zorian meets with to learn some niche information about soul magic. While their relationship is described by Zorian as being friendly and professional, they actually have a lot in common and she begins confiding in him stuff that she doesn’t talk about with her friends. Meanwhile he enjoys their conversations as a nice distraction from his heavier time loop related problems. After the main purpose for their meetings has ended, Raynie asks to keep getting together to talk. Zorian agrees, but is pained by the fact that she won't remember him and so he mentally commits to only getting to know her more once the time loop ends. The situation feels like the beginning of a typical teenage love story, but because the time loop cuts off one party’s memories it can never progress beyond the initial getting to know each other phase.

Rational Fiction:

Mother of Learning was not written to be a work of rational fiction, but it is hard to argue that it is anything else. The most striking aspect of the book is that by the end everything makes sense. Nobody103 created a world where the magic system, religion, history, and politics all support the plot to the point that it feels like events in the world are flowing to their logical conclusion. When the hows and whys of the time loop eventually become known, it leads to a series of ‘oh shit’ and ‘a-ha’ moments for both the characters and the reader. The answers usually come with more questions, but eventually all of those questions resolve into a coherent whole.

The characters within the world of Mother of Learning act intelligently. Zorian’s goal is to get out of the time loop, but there is no straightforward or easily exploitable manner to do so. Instead he has to set goals, make plans, learn from his mistakes, and repeat. Secondary characters have their own goals and their actions vary greatly in response to how Zach and Zorian’s actions change the month. This includes the villains. When Quatach-Ichl finds out about the time loop, he gives up on the invasion and tries to destroy Zach and Zorian so thoroughly that even a time loop would not save them. When Red Robe realizes that someone other than Zach is looping with him, he immediately pulls out his trump card to eliminate them as a threat. Every character is playing to win and making the best decisions they can with the information they have at the time.

Even the stupid looking decisions by characters have good reasons. Why is the city’s response to the invasion so incompetent? Why is Zach trying to take on an entire army by himself? Why isn’t Red Robe doing anything about Zach? Why does Silverlake send Zorian after the Grey Hunter? Why is Xvim so hard to impress? Why doesn’t Taiven visit Zorian again? The last answer is not a major spoiler, so as a freebie: Taiven dies without Zorian’s intervention.

The legal, political, and societal implications of magic are touched on and logical. Knowledge of blood magic, soul magic, and mind magic have exceedingly good reasons for being either highly restricted or outright banned. Mages refuse to reveal their personal magical discoveries to anyone except an official apprentice. Governments run secret magical experiments that are subject to conspiracy theories. Powerful magical families keep their power by hoarding knowledge or by having special abilities that are passed through their bloodline. Ancient forgotten magics were forgotten because they were replaced by easier and more efficient versions of the same spells. There is even a reference to how orgy magic is a lost art because all of its benefits can now be done solo.^[5]

Magic System:

The hard magic system in Mother of Learning is amazingly detailed and has many unique tweaks that I had never considered. Casting a spell consists of channeling mana while using a series of hand gestures and words to shape that mana into a spell boundary. Different words and gestures cause the boundary to form in various multidimensional shapes and the difference in those shapes causes the mana to generate different magical effects.

Efficiently creating a highly stable spell boundary is what separates spellcasters that know the same spell. The more stable you can create the spell boundary the more mana it can hold before collapsing and thus the more powerful you can make the spell. A more stable spell boundary also has less magical leakage; allowing a skilled mage to use less mana to cast the same spell as another mage. The spell boundary can also be modified into a slightly different configuration to give a spell additional effects.

The case study that Mother of Learning uses for explaining magic is the Magic Missile spell.^[6] A Magic Missile is normally a glowing orb of force that travels in a straight line and deals damage. However, a skillful mage can subtly adjust the spell boundary to sharpen the missile so that it pierces through things, homes in on its target, or is a swarm of missiles. Even more skill with the spell allows for even better homing abilities or a swarm of missiles that home in from different angles. With a perfect spell boundary, the spell no longer glows and is instead invisible. However, casting the spell perfectly with the speed needed for combat would require implausibly good shaping skills.

Mana reserves, shaping skill, and spell repertoire are the big three things for a mage to have, but they trade off against each other. Mages with massive mana reserves struggle with the fine details of shaping, preventing them from casting spells that require highly detailed boundaries. Mages with crazy good shaping skills have pitiful mana reserves, preventing them from casting high mana spells or many spells in a row. Different fields of magic also require expertise in different types of shaping. There are thousands of shaping exercises that mages can master to improve their shaping skills, so mages focus on the ones that are relevant to their specific field. This results in specialists having a detailed spell repertoire and lots of power in one branch of magic but much less magical ability in others.

While hand gestures and words are extremely helpful for shaping mana into the correct spell boundary, as someone becomes more familiar with a spell they can slowly start omitting elements of its casting. With enough practice a mage could eventually cast a spell without any gestures or words. The extreme version of this is unstructured spellcasting, wherein a mage uses pure mana shaping to produce the magical effect of their choice, even if there is no original spell for what they are trying to do.

The breadth of topics covered within the magic system is immense. Illusion, divination, alteration, necromancy (soul magic), dimensionalism, divine magic, blood magic, mind magic, and battle magic are all noticeably distinct and given due time and explanation. Zorian even learns cartography and library magic. Beyond traditional spellcasting, the magic system includes golem making, spell formula (magic item creation and warding), mana sensing, potion making and alchemy.^[7] Each of these specialties is covered in detail and the world feels like it has a rich magical tradition.

Themes:

Mother of Learning belongs to the sub-genre of fantasy called Progression Fantasy. Stories of that type showcase the fantasy of a character that increases in power over time. However, while self improvement is a prominent theme of the book, it is not the most important one.

The primary theme of Mother of Learning is that you, the reader, can accomplish monumental tasks. You can do the same thing Zorian just did. You do not have to be special. You do not have to be born a prince, an alien, or a reincarnated hero. You do not need to be chosen by the gods or the subject of a prophecy. You do not even need to be the best person for the job. If you want to make a difference, what it actually takes is to continuously work towards a goal and use every tool at your disposal. Even then you might not succeed, but it is the only way to give yourself the best shot possible. So plan the best way forward, set yourself to the task, and don’t give up.

The other major theme is untapped potential. Zorian starts the story as a relatively average mage. He made it into the best magic school, but only barely. It is later revealed that he was thoroughly evaluated and determined to be an unremarkable talent. What the evaluators failed to understand was that there is massive potential in everyone. Zorian readily admits that others could accomplish the same things that he did, provided they did not buckle under the pressure. He was simply pushed to the limit of his potential by the situation he was in. Most mages in Zorian’s world are not trying. They are only putting in the level of effort needed to get by. The questions are left to the reader as to what level of skill could you reach and what barriers could you break if you spent your time improving yourself.

A final theme is the complexity of people. Zach and Zorian are the only two characters that develop over the story in the classical sense. Every other character is shown repeating the same timeframe, so in place of development they gain complexity by reacting differently to different scenarios based on how the loop is changed by Zach and Zorian’s actions. Given different circumstances, characters with tough exteriors have emotional breakdowns, shy characters become outspoken and talkative, and hated characters sacrifice themselves for noble causes. By the end of the story almost every character is shown from a dozen different angles and very few of the characters are as simple and straightforward as a single interaction with them would indicate.

Criticism:

No story is perfect and neither is Mother of Learning. For not having an editor, Nobody103 did a fantastic job with his writing. However, there are still two notable flaws with his style and one directional choice that impacts the overall story.

As mentioned earlier, Nobody103 rarely describes the appearance of his characters unless they have a very distinctive feature. Raynie is a red-head, Alanic has a scar, Taiven is pretty, Kael has white hair, Quatach-Ichl is a skeleton that wears a crown, and that is about all physical characteristics that I can confidently state without referencing character introductions. I distinctly remember rereading the story and being impressed when Quatach-Ichl is first described as a skeleton of metallic black bone surrounded by a sickly green flame and wearing a crown covered in purple gemstones. Unfortunately, every description afterwards is that he is a skeleton and he wears a crown so by the end of the book that was all I remembered.

The second flaw with Mother of Learning is the info dumps. Nobody103 did all of the worldbuilding before writing the story and he is excited to share it. As the topics become relevant, the reader will learn the history of the world, Aranean culture, political climate, flora and fauna, even more Aranean culture, magical theory, etc. I was never bothered by this while reading since all the information became relevant and the exposition was rarely overly long. Still, readers should be warned that there is a lot of lore and it is constantly being shared throughout the first three fourths of the story.

My biggest criticism is when those information dumps stop. The last quarter of the story takes place after Zorian leaves the time loop. At this point he is fighting against the invasion in one final version of the month. He has to counter Red Robe and Quatach-Ichl, prevent a bunch of child sacrifices, and make sure everyone he cares about lives. It is a seemingly unsolvable problem, yet this is when the reader stops getting full information about what Zorian knows. Instead the narration hints about extra actions that Zorian is taking off-screen. Zorian’s plan was probably intended to be a new mystery for the reader to solve, but it unintentionally takes the suspense out of the final act. The reader can trust that Zorian will succeed, because unstated plans almost always succeed. So while the final act has epic battles and high stakes, the reader does not feel much suspense because they have been narratively assured that everything will be fine.

Conclusion:

Mother of Learning is my favorite story. When I first read it I did not know why I liked it so much. After putting my thoughts to the page I can say it is from a variety of factors. The story unfolds as one massive engrossing mystery. The characters are unique, interesting, and intelligently solve the problems they are facing. The magic system is thorough and comprehendible to the point that it feels like it could actually exist.

But what separates Mother of Learning from other entertaining stories is that it is the one that teaches the lesson that I would impart onto others: No matter who you are, you will never know what your limits are until you try to reach them. So buckle down, put in the effort, and don’t give up when things get hard. You aren’t guaranteed success, but if you try you might achieve the impossible. Just like Zorian. Just like Nobody103.