Chapter 272 - Limits

The dark hall of the Mausoleum greeted them, both familiar and strange.

“It feels like something’s stinging me all over my body,” she heard a nagual say.

“I believe that’s the entropic field decaying,” Xecatl said, looking to Mirian for confirmation.

She nodded. “We will encounter the tertiary field soon. Prepare yourselves,” she said, stopping inside the entrance. There, eight of the nine bindings were inscribed and waiting. She glanced at Liuan. Yes, she’d noticed. She doesn’t seem surprised. She’s not scrambling to take notes.

It was Ibrahim who paused to look at them. “Hmm,” was all he said, though.

Jherica furrowed their eyebrows, then glanced at Liuan.

Celen didn’t seem to know what he was looking at. “Seems a bit blasphemous to write a note here,” he said, then was confused when no one responded.

They continued inside. By now, the entourages of the Prophets were thoroughly unnerved as the walls changed and shifted around them. Then, they began to feel the Ominian’s presence.

The seven priests muttered prayers. Jherica’s wizards began a frantic whispered conversation. Mirian didn’t hear them saying anything she hadn’t already considered. She wondered what the other Prophets expected. All she wanted was to make clear that the temporal anchors were not something any of them could simply snatch for themselves. That she wasn’t hiding anything.

Ibrahim led the way, eager to gaze upon the Ominian, no doubt to test himself. His skin was the first to start blistering. She saw his breathing change and his aura shift. He continued forward, gaze determined.

“I am shielding us now,” Mirian said. “But I won’t be able to hold it for long.”

If that wasn’t statement enough about the power they were about to encounter, she didn’t know what was. At least the tertiary field wouldn’t shred the sigils in her spellbook like the entropic field did.

She cast a modified version of black shield in front of them. They moved forward. Then one of the wizards collapsed, hyperventilating. One of Liuan’s priests fell next, muttering nonsense. The rest of them continued, but it was like stepping into a gale. The pressure near the God was overwhelming. Cracks of light formed in the shield.

Another priest fell to his knees. He looked like he was screaming, but he was silent. Blood leaked from his eyes and nose. He began to claw at his face.

“I… I can’t!” another of the wizards said. He was shouting it, but Mirian hardly heard him. He retreated, skin blistering. Another priest collapsed to the ground, hands over his ears. The archmage Jherica had brought had his own shield up, but he was struggling to maintain it, even behind Mirian’s black shield. 

There was a powerful silence in the hall devouring all thought and speech. Mirian had to shout to be heard, and even then her voice sounded distant to herself. “Those familiar with celestial magic can attempt to view the Ominian’s soul. However, be careful not to blind yourself.”

Xecatl’s two naguals were the next to collapse. One of them was crying, the tears mixing with blood. The other looked like they were seeing a distant horror. “How is it all flesh?” she heard him whisper.

Another priest fell, his mouth open in a silent scream. Then the archmage collapsed, his aura completely stripped. Mirian’s own aura was a whirlwind of rushing mana, but this close to the Ominian, the field was eating away at her spells almost as fast as she could replenish them. Her gather air spell failed and she recast it. As the Ominian’s throne came into view, her black shield cracked apart.

The rest of the non-Prophets fell to their knees in an instant, including Xecatl. Mirian recast the shield as quickly as she could.

To her surprise, it was Jherica who was the first of the full Prophets to stop. They were shaking their head, face blistered, left hand trembling, reaching towards the Ominian’s throne, but it was like there was an impenetrable wall before them.

Ibrahim was still in the lead, just behind Mirian’s shield. His eyes were full of fury, and he was leaning into the Ominian’s energy field, pushing into a hurricane with each step.

Mirian wiped a trickle of blood from her face. Gabriel was the next to stop. He retreated, shaking his head.

Liuan’s face held a look of determination and passion Mirian had never seen on her before. Her teeth were grit, and her eyes looked wild. But when she tried to take another step, she collapsed, hand splashing into a puddle of her own blood on the dark floor.

Zhuan stopped by her side, standing with as regal a posture as she could manage. Then the blisters and blood became too much and she stepped back.

Mirian had expected Ibrahim to throw himself into the barrier. What she didn’t expect was to see Celen, wandering forward almost like he was lost. His face began to contort with a hundred different emotions.

Mirian then heard Ibrahim’s words, as if shouted over rolling thunder. “Why did she have to die!?” he screamed.

The pressure in the room changed. The field shattered Mirian’s black shield, and when she tried to recast it, it failed. She saw the two temporal anchors in the Ominian’s shoulder blazing with light. She saw again that gaping pit in Them, darker than the void, shadows gushing from it as blood. There was a puddle of ichor on the ground by Them, she realized,  layered over like calcite in the caves of the Jiandzhi.

She felt pain.

She felt sorrow.

There was an emptiness that hit her, a dreadful sense of loss that scoured away all other feeling.

“Yes,” Celen said. “I understand.”

As she came to stand beside him, Mirian understood now, too.

The memories came flooding back. She remembered when it had all begun—that first day of Solem, that first cycle, before she’d known she was in the time loop. She had woken to a feeling of overwhelming loss. She’d started crying. Now, she knew why.

It was DIVITRIUS’s pain.

It lingered here too.

How do we fix it? Can you be saved? she wondered. Then she blinked back the blood that was filling her eyes.

Celen collapsed next to her. She picked him up and dragged him back.

“Ibrahim!” she called.

He didn’t respond. He just kept moving forward. The field around the Ominian was scouring away his flesh. Blood sprayed out of him like wind blowing through the spout of a fountain, but he took another step. And another.

“Ibrahim!” she called again. He wasn’t listening.

Mirian dragged Celen backwards. He was unresponsive, body limp. Once she was far enough away from the throne, she reestablished the shield and began telekinetically dragging the all bodies back.

Ibrahim took one more step forward, then collapsed backwards into a pile of flesh. Mirian checked the Ominian. No third temporal anchor. He was just dead then. The fool would recover from that.

Her control over the air in the Mausoleum had failed for long enough that two of the retinue the back seemed to have suffocated. Mirian didn’t have the soul energy left over to do anything about it. Everyone else seemed to have lived, though no one was in good shape.

“Of course it became a bloody competition,” Gabriel said, wiping blood from his mouth. “Is Ibrahim…?”

“I’m sure he’ll be back next cycle,” Mirian said, catching her breath. What she wanted to say was, Now do you all believe me? She burst open two more air cylinders while she waited for enough people to recover. There was some resistance to returning so quickly, leading Mirian to explain that healing was much easier when people’s souls and auras weren’t being slowly degraded by entropic bombardment. The constant stinging pain from the field’s degradation seemed to convince them, and they returned.

***

The Prophets, minus Ibrahim, sat in council in one of the rooms in Charlem Palace. They had spent the rest of the day recovering. Mirian had reset the Gate to its usual configuration, but no doubt Divir was destabilizing early again.

“So what did we learn?” Gabriel asked the group in a chipper tone. The room was silent with contemplation, so no one replied immediately. “Oh—I know. How about, ‘let’s not do that again’? I think that’s a good takeaway lesson.”

Jherica began pacing around their spot in the chamber. “Anything I think of is speculative. There’s no complete theory.”

That had been Mirian’s conclusion ever since she visited Divir that first time.

“Liuan, you think the Triarchs were trying to control the Ominian. That feels to me like a historical retelling. Yes, I’m sure your priests believe every word of it. No, I don’t think even the Triarchs had that much hubris. Still, the entropic field hasn’t existed for the Mausoleum’s entire history. So they must have induced it. Perhaps they inflicted that necromantic wound? What does happen when you inject a massive amount of mortal soul energy into an immortal? But then… why send out the temporal needles? Clearly, they’re having some sort of healing effect. If the Ominian intended us to heal Them, why send the needles away? If that’s the cause of the problem in the first place…” They trailed off, but didn’t stop pacing.

Celen sat in the corner, having dragged his chair over to a less exposed alcove. He still had an unfocused gaze, like he was looking at something else.

Zhuan said, “They want us to fix the leyline crisis. That’s human-induced.”

“Moonfall only happens because—” Gabriel started, but was cut off.

“The leyline crisis would be devastating even without Divir’s fall. Liuan, you know what happened in Ferrabridge. Without intervention, Palendurio sees even worse. And that’s just what we’ve seen. Imagine there’s no relief from the crisis. It’s not just the surface being devastated, it’s the Labyrinth.”

Mirian thought this might be a good time to put forward one of her professor’s theories. “Selkus Viridian believes the Labyrinth is more than just a key part of the magical ecology of Enteria. He believes it is a part of regulating the climate. A breakdown of that system could compound the failure of the spellward barriers. Alongside mass myrvite migrations, there’d be droughts, floods, crop failure—a slower apocalypse, one that might take many lifetimes to conclude, but no less deadly. Repairing the Labyrinth is more difficult than even stopping Divir’s fall.”

“Again, it comes to the Labyrinth. There must be a way to control it,” Jherica said.

“I’ve given that more thought,” Mirian said. “If it was as simple as finding a control mechanism on Luamin, why didn’t the Ominian do it? Or couldn’t the Elder creatures do something right now?” She’d run through what Eyeball and Conductor had told her over and over. If there was a simple solution, it would at least be easy to see the branch of the burning tree they needed to follow.

Instead, the fire was closing in on every side.

Gabriel spoke up next. “Well, fuck, maybe they just can’t because of the Pact? If human politics are this bad, I don’t want to even think about how convoluted politics get among entities that experience time as non-linear.”

Liuan opened her mouth to say something, then shut it. She was being uncharacteristically quiet. The experience up there had shaken her.

Jherica was still pacing. “Or perhaps the wound is from the Gods’ War, only, the ‘blood’ didn’t start gushing until the Triarch’s weakened the Ominian on accident. Or maybe… They don’t experience time the same way. Who’s to say They’re present in Their body in all parts of the timeline? But then still… why start the loop? The loops—the other Prophets to. That’s where the other needles clearly are. It all points to specifically wanting to change history on Enteria. Then it is something that needs to be done here.”

No one said anything. No doubt, they were still thinking of what they’d felt on Divir in front of the Elder God.

“Why is the Ominian full of despair?” Celen finally asked.

“The Gods’ War, of course,” Jherica replied.

Celen then looked at Liuan. “So… we are to solve this… by having another war?”

Liuan’s neck muscles tightened. “It’s not a matter of want, it’s a matter of… the road to peace is not always a peaceful journey.”

“‘Peace is a destination, not a path.’ Fourth Prophet. Left a bit of a mess, didn’t he? What with the Luminate Order splitting and all that. Never did reach his destination,” Gabriel said.

Zhuan looked at Mirian. The Zhighuan scholar and Liuan had already had plenty of discussions about the nature of Akana Praediar and the political and economic crisis. Zhuan’s position was that there was a fundamental contradiction between what the elites of Akana Praediar needed to stay in power and what needed to be done to resolve the leyline crisis. Her solution was a political revolution in Akana, though to be fair, that was her solution to the problems in any country. Liuan had the same position as Gabriel: that a political revolution would spill far more blood, and wasn’t at all necessary. It was just necessary to get the Akanan elites to see a bit further than their noses.

Now, Mirian could see that Liuan was finally wrestling with her ideas on what was to be done. She was certain that she still disagreed with Zhuan, but perhaps her attitude had been tempered. Sorrow was not the emotion of a God that had dictated a trial of strength or conquest. Despair was not the emotion of a God that thought that the path Enteria was on was mostly fine.

“Very well. I—we—will attempt to completely disarm the war movement in Akana. Not delay it. Not channel it into a more productive strategy.” She looked at Zhuan, who was raising an eyebrow at her. “Not through revolution! There is a peace faction within the Akanan leadership. If the Prime Minister lives, perhaps the war faction can be outmaneuvered. Mirian, I’ll need your help in subduing the conspirators in Palendurio. Ideally, before they set off a political firestorm. It won’t be easy. I’m dealing with over a decade of groundwork laid by Matteus, Rosen, and his ilk. And you know how many people want Prime Minister Kinsman dead.”

“I’ll assist you,” Mirian said. “I’ve had trouble mobilizing Baracuel’s industry in sufficient time. Once we’ve resolved the broad strokes of the political problem, I’d appreciate your help in resolving the technical and logistical issues. And Gabriel, I know you don’t want to overthrow the Princes—”

“What? No, I’d love to overthrow those gluttonous bastards—that’s me calling someone else a glutton, by the way—but I want to minimize human suffering.”

“Right. As I was saying, we could use you and Ibrahim’s help in securing both material, labor, and escorts through the desert to Mayat Shadr.”

“Hmm,” Jherica said. They’d finally stopped pacing. “I still want to see what’s on Luamin. But I suppose either way, I need to get the University on board with whatever we’re doing. Celen, I’ll sure appreciate your pen.”

Celen nodded from his corner.

“And we will continue our project to both stabilize the leylines and produce spirit-constructs that will assist the grand project,” Xecatl said. “We’re making great progress in our research, especially with the longer cycles.”

Most eyes turned to Zhuan. “The socio-political contradictions will resolve themselves, one way or another. Until then, there’s no question. I just need to work on routing supplies and people to Mayat Shadr.”

“And conquering Saising,” Gabriel said.

“And liberating Saising. Unless you think that Akanan puppet that wears the governor’s regalia is legitimate? Besides, if there’s a way to placate the leviathans—Xecatl is also working on that—then shipping out of Sasing will bypass the nastiest part of the Jiandzhi and allow us to avoid trying to drag several tons of material over some of the most treacherous mountains in the world.”

Jherica looked around, expecting the argument to continue, but Gabriel was leaning back in his chair, seemingly placated. “Wait… does that mean we’re actually in agreement for once? And not ‘we’ll agree to disagree on these fundamental aspects of the problem while sort of working together,’ but actually in agreement?”

“It appears so,” Liuan said.

They were right. When the meeting adjourned, there was a very different feeling to it. 

Mirian made her way to a private room in the palace that overlooked the city. In the distance, she could see the Magrio River bending about. It wasn’t a peaceful view; she could still see where fighting had taken place inside the city, see the buildings that had been hollowed-out by fire, or the torn-up cobblestones where mages had fought. She stood and looked out at the Baracuel Intelligence Gallery—the old museum that now hosted the Department of Public Security.

If she was going to truly abolish the conspiracy, she was going to have to stab it in the heart.

She’d been avoiding it, but she knew where she’d need to end up.