Chapter 275 - Incandescence 

Equinox materialized around Mirian.

“Oh,” Quintus said.

The last thing he saw was the shine of her gritted teeth, predatory, like a bog lion’s.

The fire poured out of her in waves.

The Lord Governor and his lackeys were melted; even their bones turned liquid. The tapestries burned like paper, the wood paneling, just as fast. The marble turned red and molten in places, and then Mirian burst the ceiling apart, emerging from the Governor’s Mansion as the room below erupted like a volcano.

As the smoke and fire billowed up, it passed around Mirian. She appeared before Palendurio like a shadow, silhouetted by leaping flames and hellish smoke that glowed red in the evening light.

“What is wrong with you all?” she screamed to the city, amplifying her voice with a spell, her voice echoing off the walls of buildings and limestone pillars. “The world burns, and you fan the flames! Enteria screams for mercy, and you twist the knife deeper!”

The district was full of guild halls and wealthy merchants, the same ones who had been impeding her reforms at every turn. The marble pillars and gilded reliefs taunted her. “You think greed’s power has sows only benefits? Then reap the consequences!”

Magic moved through her like breath, the spells as automatic as a musician’s fingers across a harp’s strings. She cast her telekinetic spells and scooped up burning chunks of the mansion beneath her. For a moment, they hovered around her, then she hurled them down.

They flew like meteors, streaking through the air as they rained down on the guild halls and mansions. The district lit up with bursts of flame as the huge chunks of burning wood and molten stone crashed into the roofs, shattering the tops of the buildings, sending splintering wood and crushed tile raining down. All around the district, people scattered, the crowds stampeding away in unadulterated terror. The roar of the explosions drowned out the emerging screams.

The fires spread quickly throughout the buildings, the searing heat enough to utterly shatter the fire-proofing enchantments that protected the wood. She stoked the flames with her magic, and even the bricks began to melt. 

It still wasn’t as hot as her rage.

She’d had a temper, ever since her mother had been killed in front of her. Killed by the same kinds of people she’d been dealing with this cycle—politicians who preferred hostages to treaties, preferred domination to alliance, preferred gold to peace. They’d see the apocalypse before they’d relinquish their power.

I’ll show them power.

Mirian saw the lives winking out below her, some from the fires, some from the stampede away. She stretched out her bindings like the tendrils of a kraken and drew them in. Souls swelled up to greet her, some swirling around to be consumed, others to fill her soul repositories.

“This is just a taste of what’s coming,” she told the city. “If you won’t believe words, if power and violence is the only thing you’ll answer to, then you shall have it!”

Mere lighting spells couldn’t communicate her rage. Mire fire couldn’t burn hot enough. These people danced on the graves of children, made excuses for entire slaughtered cities, and had no remorse for any of it. If they wouldn’t feel regret, perhaps they could feel fear.

Mirian summoned her leyline repulsors to the slots in her battlerobes, then drew on them. They linked to leyline just below, keeping her aloft, and siphoning the barest fraction of their power.

That power, though, was enough to keep up the enchantments of an entire airship and supply most of the energy of its artillery batteries. The fools below her really had no idea how much she’d been holding back.

No more.

Mirian raised her right hand to the firmament and looked at the sky through her divination. The conditions were almost right; a beautiful sky, ready for a proper storm.

Above Palendurio, vapor condensed out of the air into droplets until it formed clouds, but she kept going. She drew from the Magrio River. Whirlpools formed in the river as she shunted the water up, sending up whirling funnel clouds. The spinning tornadoes sent barges and boats smashing into each other and the river bank, funneling more and more moisture into the sky.

More souls to fuel her spells. Gaius had taught her that trick. He’d understand her rage against these people, these parasitic leeches who only knew how to endlessly draw blood until the rest of the world was a husk.

The winds she was whipping up weren’t just fueling the clouds above; the raging gale was spreading the fire about the district. That was good. The guild halls, parliamentary offices, and mansions of this district needed to be cleansed, and no water could wash off the blood-stained hands of all the people here. Fire would do the trick.

But it wasn’t enough. King Palamas still rested peacefully in Charlem Palace. The Deeps still squirmed about in the Gallery. The Pure Blade mercenaries had their compound nearby. The Corrmier mansion in town was too far for such paltry flames to touch. The remaining Praetorians in the city needed to learn what happened when they murdered a child’s mother. The arcanists who couldn’t be bothered to build the machine that would save Enteria because their hands couldn’t be soaked in enough silver could see what awaited them when they made that choice. And all the merchants and traders who dawdled and argued—

She knew what Apophagorga must have felt when she and her army of gnats had descended upon it, cutting it to pieces with a thousand pinpricks.

The stormclouds above her darkened. She was innovating with her spells, pulling together force spells designed to move particles with divination to track electrical charge. Combining spells to move water with spells to move air. Mixing them all together until they were ready to be combined with the components of a lightning spell. 

Then using the massive amounts of arcane energy flowing through her to amplify every aspect. It was like a dozen greater lightning spells, but spread across the sky, merging spell with physical phenomena.

Her aura was a hurricane, and dozens of lashing bindings only brought more souls in to empower it. She’d named her invented dervish stance Burning Tempest Sunders the Sky.

That was what she’d show them.

A dozen bolts struck down from her storm, lightning as thick as oak trees, and across the city, there was no scream that could outmatch her thunder. Another bolt stabbed down, and another, the lightning flash regular enough to illuminate the city like an electric sun. Now, it wasn’t the fire that silhouetted her, but the constant flash of lightning, and the wings of light streaming out of Equinox as the arcane power at her fingertips overflowed.

Several Praetorians were levitating at her from the northwest, but they were far too late; branches of the lightning cut them out of the air like flies, and they dropped away as soot. Mirian moved with her storm now, letting the lightning fall upon the vermin infesting the city. The Corrmiers’ mansion was smashed into kindling and dust; the kindling was set ablaze, and the dust, melted to glass. General Kallin was dead before the lightning finished flashing. The Pure Blade compound burned next, the soldiers scurrying about like ants, as if they could outrun her bolts. Decian died in the little plaza, his corpse blackened and silver breastplate smoldering with a cherry glow.

The storm passed north, crossing the Magrio, and Mirian with it. She could only wonder what the people who saw her thought. They probably couldn’t conceive of a person with this kind of power; perhaps they thought she was the wrath of Carkovakom Himself.

The Parliamentary Building would be empty at this hour, but she sheared off the dome and cracked apart the pillars anyways. But when she got to the Baracuel Intelligence Gallery, Mirian wasn’t content to simply rain lightning down. There were basement layers there, burrowed into the earth like roach warrens, and they needed to be purged. As her bolts burst apart the building, one after another, she used force blasts to crack apart the stone. Then, to make sure none of the murderous traitors infesting it survived, she commanded her stormcloud to rain, dumping it down in thick sheets so that any parts of the basement levels that survived were drowned. The electrified flood poured over the smoldering wreckage, Mirian’s thunder still a furious drumbeat that erased any other sound of the city.

As she moved towards Charlem Palace, her thunderbolts shattered the cobblestones of the paths below, setting the block ablaze. A few arcanists tried lobbing spells at her, but most couldn’t even hit her from outside the range of the storm. Most fled—or tried to flee. She continued to siphon souls up to her, consuming them as fast as they reached her to fuel her wrath. Any bank she saw, she directed lightning bolts too until golden slag dripped from the vaults. Along her route, she saw the fancy houses that were built atop the limestone pillars, the ones where rich merchants, old nobles, and board members set their mansions. She left them all burning, a hundred lighthouse flames.

People fled in every direction. She let them. Let them witness the fate of the twisted monsters who still think alchemy can turn blood into gold.

By the time she reached Charlem Palace itself, she saw a hasty gathering of royal protectors, Luminate Guards, sorcerers, and soldiers. They’d managed to get a single artillery piece into position. She deflected the first shot fired at her, then sent a line of magnetic detonation spells through the gathering. The steel breastplates and guns became razor shrapnel that tore through the group, and then the edge of the storm caught them, turning them to char.

Soldiers appeared at the windows of the palace, delusional enough to think spellpiercer bullets or standard wands would be enough to pierce her defenses. 

There was an imbalance of forces in her storm. The fires below were heating the air, while the cold winter air above was swirling about. She added to the forces, sapping heat from above and displacing it below. The imbalanced forces turned into a whirlwind, then a tornado, lined with lightning and leaping flames, the shrapnel of broken buildings and shattered steel spinning around it.

With a gesture, she flung the tornado at the palace. As the razor winds tore at the stone, she shattered the thickest walls impeding it with blasts of force so that marble debris was added to the gray walls of wind.

The palace was shredded. As the winds smashed pieces of the building into itself, lightning crawled along the tornado, and untamed fire blew through it all. Bolt after bolt smashed into Charlem Palace until the white marble was turned into blackened glass.

Wherever King Palamas had been in the palace, he was dust, as were his swarms of bureaucrats and functionaries.

Only then did her rage begin to cool.

Without her spells fueling it, the storm dissipated, leaving the cries and screams to echo through the city. Along the path she’d traveled were shattered buildings, their remains marked only by still-burning fires.

The cries echoing off the pillars, the sound of distant flames—they reminded her of something. It took her a moment to place what.

When the leyline breached northeast of the city. It’s like that, she remembered. Back then, she’d been full of sorrow for all the innocents that had died.

Now, she wondered how many of them were innocent. As Ibrahim had said, every ounce of fossilized myrvite powering the city had come from Persama. And she’d seen the conditions those people labored in. Now she’d also seen the files on how much blood had soaked the sand to make sure the foss still flowed north.

The blood running through the streets—wasn’t that just the typical state of humanity?

A wave of exhaustion ran through her, and not just because her aura had been harrowed, not just because she’d channeled more arcane energy than she ever had before.

She was tired of these people. Tired of these cycles.

Tired of seeing the worst of humanity and trying to wrest from them the fate of Enteria.

Gabriel wanted her to try his way, but even the destruction she’d just wrought was nothing compared to what war did to a city, to a country, to a people. Even a series of bloodless coups would still see armies occupying cities and the violent resistance that followed. And she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand to give the monsters she’d just killed even a thimble of power.

The thought of giving them more was intolerable. So then what?

It seemed that destruction was unavoidable.

Letting these people witness it felt right. Let them see the barest fragment of what I’ve seen.

And yet, she felt regret too. She was a child throwing a tantrum again. Letting emotions rule her, when she needed to be cold.

Bloodless.

Inhuman.

That was what she thought as she floated through the air, surveying the damage. She had become numb to most of it. She ordered Nicolus about like a puppet, not like an old friend. She ignored Lily, having written her off as useless long ago. She pushed and pulled at her old professors like they were pieces of a spell engine.

And when people wept in the streets because of some fight, she just thought, you’re dead anyways. None of this is real.

That it was real to each and every one of them—that each of them thought and felt every single cycle—it was as intolerable as the horrors the Deeps had wrought on those children. All this power she had—and it could only rain more destruction on this doomed world.

A set of figures caught her eye. It was a woman and a man. She… recognized them. The glyph lamps along the street were dead, having been shattered, perhaps by stray lightning or debris, but in the roaring fires still consuming the nearby mansions and palace, she could make out their features.

It took her several moments. She almost didn’t recognize them, because it had been so long.

It was Dhelia and Jeron. Her adoptive parents. How long had it been? She didn’t even know. She’d been avoiding them because she didn’t want her fellow time travelers to investigate them too closely. She still wanted to keep her connection to Gaius secret, and the more they pulled on the threads of her family, the more of that tangle they’d uncover.

But they’re supposed to be in Florin City, she thought. But of course they hadn’t stayed there. Their intended destination had always been Torrviol, stopping by Palendurio and Cairnmouth on the way—just like they had for her trip. Because they wanted to show—

Her heart froze.

They were crouched over a third figure. She’d nearly missed him in the dim light because his little body was so tiny.

Zayd.

“Stay back!” Dhelia cried at her, clutching the child’s corpse to her.

Jeron didn’t say anything. Just looked at her, and there was no recognition in his eyes. Just despair, and the trails of tears streaking his ash-covered face.

They didn’t recognize her.

“Zayd,” she whispered, and thought, What have I become? “I can heal him,” she said.

“He’s dead! You’ve done enough, you monster!” her mother cried out.

The numbness shattered. Mirian felt her own tears flowing as she descended to them. She dismissed Equinox and summoned her spellbook to her hand.

“Mirian?” her father whispered. “But… how?”

“I can save him,” she said again. “Give me space.”

Zayd’s soul was still mostly in his body, and had only just begun to fray. Mirian’s spellbook glowed with light as she flipped through the pages, summoning the complex bindings she needed.

Soul energy swept through her, spinning around Zayd like a gyre. Before, her focus had been on destruction; she’d been the director to an orchestral storm. Now, her focus was on restoration. With her bindings, she was a conductor of a requiem for this one life.

 Carefully, she extracted the steel shrapnel that had pierced Zayd, then reconstructed the bone at the back of his skull where his head had hit the pavement. She purged the ash in his lungs, and mended the cuts, burns and bruises. Little by little, she forced his soul to stay, to heal, to live. 

Her parents looked on in awe and horror.

Then, Zayd gave a little gasp.

It took him a moment to regain consciousness. Mirian checked her work and made sure she hadn’t missed anything.

Zayd looked up at her, but instead of smiling, his eyes grew wide and he scooched backward, shaking slightly.

Apophagorga ripping apart her soul hadn’t hurt nearly as bad as that did.

“Zayd,” she whispered, through tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Mirian, what is going on?” her mother asked, the fear heavy in her voice. “You were… you…” She looked up at the place in the sky where she’d been. Looked at the flames all around them.

Mirian shook her head. They can’t understand, she thought. But then she realized, If they can’t understand, who can?

She knelt down. “Zayd,” she said. “It’s me. It’s your Mi-Ri.” But even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. She was approaching the third decade of being in the loop. Over two hundred and fifty loops separated her from the young woman she had been when Zayd had known her. How many battles had she fought? How many people had she slaughtered? She’d traveled across known Enteria. Traveled to Divir and seen the Ominian Themself.

“Come here,” Mirian said. “Let’s get away from this. Let’s go home,” she said.

And that was a lie too. What was home to her? Arriroba, where she’d grown up? Her true parents’ home, in the Persaman desert? Torrviol, where she’d now lived most of her life? Or were those all insufficient?

But Zayd cautiously stood and tottered forward. “Your eyes are weird,” he said.

“I know. Hey—have you ever wanted to fly?” she offered. Zayd’s eyes widened, and this time, not from fear. “I’ll explain on our way,” she said to her parents. “Or at least, I’ll try.”

Soon enough, they were soaring northeast towards Arriroba. She could have taken the Gate, but she wanted the time to clear her head.

Behind them, Palendurio still burned.