Chapter 270 - Assembly

Mirian watched as members of the Cult of Eintocarst went through their final test of the Holy Crucible. The divination spell engines around the room began to glow as illusionary projections danced in front of her. She only half paid attention to them, preferring to sense the magic currents herself as they moved through her aura.

She shook her head. There was too much leakage on the fourth soul refractor. “Check the rune sequences in the 7B channel. I’ll fix the refractor myself.” She retrieved one of the Elder artifacts she’d retrieved from the Labyrinth for the task and got to work. Sure enough, the refractor had hairline cracks, only visible with several lens spells.

As the priests dutifully checked over the sequences again, Mirian went over the areas where runes and glyphs were linked in tri-bonds together. No one on Enteria could do that for her. Then she checked the soul repositories. Then she waited for the other checks to finish.

She had spent weeks on end hunting the most powerful myrvites she could in the Jiandzhi. All of it together would create a single ingot of adamantium. It wasn’t a lot to work with, but it was still more of the sacred metal than had been made in the prior century.

When she was done, the next loop would see trace elements vanish from places all over Enteria. A dozen alchemist shops would have to contend with diluted inks. A hundred myrvites would be missing small bits of themselves. The Ennecus Guild would find chunks of its magichemical inventory missing. The Association of Metallurgists and Cult of Eintocarst would find several ingots of rare metals missing. The imperial weavers of Uxalak would see a bounty of royal silk go missing. A dozen artifacts from the Labyrinth Vaults would vanish.

And most noticeably, the Triarch’s mythril armor and scepter would be gone from Divir.

She’d learned from previous cycles that it would be a problem to have Gaius hiding out in Alkazaria, so she had him keeping a watch on the movement of anyone coming into the city. Checking the trains for Praetorians or agents carrying anything runic. Checking the cargo ships for too many passengers. She also had the Luminate Order’s full backing, granted in secret by Pontiff Oculo. With her command, they had been moving to root out traitors. Now, Carkavakom’s priests acted as watchers from Palendurio to Madinahr, ensuring the sacred laws were followed. The pilgrims of Altrukyst acted as scouts. The scholars of Yiaverunan, as accountants and logisticians.

Even the Cult of Zomalator was involved, though without the knowledge of the Pontiff. Through Lecne and his priests, she had set up deals with the criminal syndicates, giving her eyes on the movements of black market goods. Everywhere in Baracuel, a secret stirred beneath the surface of the world. Months of such movement were too large to be concealed, so the secret was hardly contained. It had become a whisper in every tavern, the very water that moved the rumor mill: a new Prophet had risen. Or perhaps several.

Mirian could no more stop these rumors than she could stop Divir from falling; no secret could survive when that many people knew about it. So she had prepared with that in mind. Mirian’s regulator armor wasn’t just a prototype. It represented a way to magnify her already considerable power.

In a word, it was bait to a trap.

If Scebur hadn’t actually been eliminated, now was the time he’d be forced to strike. If one of the other Prophets wanted to stop her, she would force their hand. If Xecatl was right, and her enemies were just biding their time, they could bide it no longer. With the Gates under her control, the only way they could force an end to this cycle was through a massive confrontation.

So as she worked, she kept watch.

Baracuel contained its usual turbulence. She’d had the Corrmier brothers and a few other big-name conspirators quietly abducted and assassinated, but their network of allies and supporters was too vast to actually exterminate. Fortunately, Marduke Sacristar had no ideology except for his own wealth and power, so through Nicolus, she’d been able to move him into a position to support the Palamas family, who was reasserting control while Parliament flailed about ineffectually by appointing committees.

But that was just the usual unrest. So far, she’d seen no Prophet-driven movement against her. It was quite possible no one would. After all, she had been keeping those most likely to attack her in the dark about relicarium. And, the time loop would continue. If someone stopped her now, she would remember them. A tactical victory here could also be a strategic defeat.

“Sacred One,” one of the priests said, bowing. “We can find no flaws in the sequences.”

“Good. We run the test again.”

This time, the fourth soul refractor had no leakage. When she checked the middle of the crucible, there was a puddle of molten orichalcum.

“Change out the holy repositories,” she said, gesturing at the soul repositories. It was necessary to change terminology around so no one realized they were doing necromancy. Holy necromancy, yes, but still necromancy. She wasn’t going to change the biases of accumulated lifetimes on a whim. “Clear the contents of the crucible. Rest up. We’ll begin forging the ingot in one hour.”

***

Beneath the Temple of Eintocarst, Mirian worked. For nearly two months she worked day in and day out. No one on Enteria had the skill she did in glyph or runework. It could only be her.

She’d recorded the rune sequences of the Triarch’s scepter for posterity, but as impressive as its design was, her own work had eclipsed theirs, and she needed it for parts. The Triarch’s mythril armor she could keep mostly intact, but it required heavy modification. For several days, she sent pieces of the armor into the crucible, channeling colossal amounts of heat into the metal so it could be shaped and the integrity of the sacred metal reinforced.

The regulator armor had a breastplate of solid mythril. From the chest radiated out sweeping lines so that the chest of the armor resembled a rib cage. This mostly followed the Triarch’s design, but she’d applied more modern methods to it, hollowing out the ‘ribs’ of the armor and putting in perfectly formed conduit crystals grown using Elder artifacts.

These conduit crystals wouldn’t work on the final leyline regulator design; they would only work when resonating with her soul. This allowed her to adjust the resistance of the conduits with a thought, allowing her to either absorb excess arcane energy or let it move in perfect flow. This formulation built on her early research, and was the pinnacle of the studies that she, Jei, Seneca, and her father had worked through. First, they’d discovered amber jeweled lotus extract could be incorporated into chrysoberyl for a higher mana capacity than corundum. Then, she tested out adding powdered orichalcum and then powdered mythril to crystals, which had led her to the soul-linked conduits.

The final formulation used powdered adamantium and extract of the ebonbloom lotuses from her father’s garden. It was incorporated into a silicon-carbide crystal. The resulting crystal was pearly white from one angle and looked like the night sky from another. Tiny flecks of black and gold floated in it, giving the crystals a wondrous, celestial look. Even if they’d had no useful properties, they would have been the prize of emperors. As it was, they were simply the most efficient way to move arcane energy that she had found in her years of research, very nearly achieving perfect mana flow.

On the inside of each mythril ‘rib’ were enchantments. As excess arcane energy flowed out of the crystals, the enchantment repaired any cracks or flaws in them, making the system self-regulating. She’d based the design conceptually on Viridian’s work with ecosystems and their feedback cycles.

On the back of the armor was a flexible jointed column that linked the sweeping ‘ribs’ together, completing the cage around the breastplate and resembling a spinal column. It felt right to Mirian that, after all the research she’d done, nature had provided a schematic. Gaius had warned her the design was too reminiscent of Triarchic style and looked a bit ‘necromantic,’ but Mirian was pretty sure he was the only person outside of museum curators and historians who even remembered what Triarchic style looked like. Either way, she wouldn’t deviate from the design; each sweeping mythril ‘rib’ was needed to contain an Elder artifact from the Labyrinth.

By combining artifacts from multiple Vaults, she’d collected one of every known energy type. One had the artifact that could absorb massive amounts of heat energy. The next, massive amounts of electric energy. Then magnetic energy, and kinetic energy, and so on.

The ‘spine’ of the armor had two slots where she could place the leyline repulsors she’d already bound, allowing the armor to either be tuned to powerful spellwork or directly trying to push at distant leylines.

From the metallic spine, next to those slots, she worked in eight conduit vents. Dealing with leylines meant dealing with extreme forces, and even with all the Elder artifacts, sacred metals, and adamantium-doped conduits, she would no doubt find herself in the grip of energies beyond even her capability to move. The conduit vents would shoot excess arcane energy out, with glyphs tuning the output so that the arcane energy would decay specifically into light. When she’d tested out the design, the result had been that excess energy spillover resembled luminous wings. Such a reference to the Ominian’s sacrifice would only add to her perceived legitimacy as a Prophet.

The inside of the armor was stuffed with more glyphs and runes. Mythril, as a soul-infused metal, could take runes, unlike most metals. This allowed Mirian to use a formulation much like her father’s undead constructs to contain a robust energy-transformation system. Weaker spells would simply by transformed into different forms of energy, which in turn could be converted to arcane energy for her use, much like black shield, or simply absorbed using the Elder artifacts that absorbed an energy type. After that, she took inspiration from her father’s robe, embedding the most common glyphs and runes she used in clustered formulations that would allow her to use spells without even drawing her spellbook. That would also allow her to clear a few dozen pages in her spellbook for notes, something she badly needed.

The rest of the armor was covered in hundreds more glyphs and runes. She’d studied the systems of Torrian Tower to learn more about material reinforcement and strengthening. Every enchantment she could think of that would increase the resilience of the materials, she added. Then, she added a final system that would allow her to divine if different glyphs or runes became nonfunctional. It was glyphic architecture that combined the practices of the old Persaman masters with the work of modern pioneers like Torres. It was only possible to fit so many magic sigils in because of the work of researchers like Endresen pushing the limits of glyph miniaturization and machine-assisted artifice.

Finally, she used the adamantium ingot to gild the armor. Even the great bounty of adamantium she’d made wouldn’t be enough to cover the entire outside of the armor, so she used the swirling fractal patterns of the Ominian’s flesh as her final inspiration so that in the end, the armor shone with both black and white metals. Anyone who looked at it would instantly see the celestial, the sacred—the void itself, entrapped in metal.

With the breastplate itself done, she then had help from several Tlaxhuacan tailors in using the royal silk she’d requested from Xecatl. First, they applied layers of it as padding that lined the inside of the armor. Then, the rest of the pieces were sewn in a connected robe, evoking the traditional garb of the Baracueli archmage, with a subtle nod to the style of the Naasqual people of Falijmali. Her birth mother’s people. It was only right that she would include it.

The titan catalyst, harvested by the First Prophet himself, she worked into the inside center of the breastplate, just in front of both her heart and the temporal anchor. Next, she integrated a focus from each of the Gods in a circle around the catalyst. The silver-gray focus, she already had, though she still didn’t know the name of the Elder God it had come from. Then there was a violet focus from Yiaverunan. A jade focus from Xylatarvia, sent as a gift from Xecatl. A white and red focus from Zomalator. And last, a black focus that she could only guess came from the Ominian Themself.

As far as she knew, that encompassed every type of known focus stone. Altrukyst, Eintocarst, Shiamagoth, and Carkavakom were not said to have died in the Gods’ War.

Throughout the entire process, Mirian worked to make sure the relicarium was evenly integrated throughout the armor. As a four-dimensional substance, the luminous liquid could be applied even to surfaces that seemed to be inaccessible. Mirian had come up with a checklist of equations that would ensure she could make sure every part of the armored robe had been integrated. Once it was bound, there was no way to undo it that didn’t involve her own soul-death, so there was no room for mistakes.

She had delayed her trip to Divir as long as possible, but even the few minutes she’d needed to retrieve the Triarch’s items had caused the destabilization of the second moon. Even with the Tlaxhuacan Gate open, her forecast put moonfall on Plenith 28: a cycle of exactly six months.

Still, she had planned to be done well before Plenith 12, where moonfall was with her usual configuration. Unlike her spellbook, there was plenty of time to double-check her work.

On Plenith 5, there was a riot in Alkazaria, but it seemed to trace back to legitimate popular sentiment. Her priests and hired syndicate spies had noted she was being watched, but that was to be expected. Pontiff Oculo had his own people checking on her, and all the noble families had an idea of who she was and what she represented. Even Parliament had likely figured out she should be watched. Almost certainly, some of those watchers traced back to the other Prophets. She knew that Xecatl had agents watching her in place, for example, though at least one of those was probably one of the tailors who’d helped her put together the robes.

None of them stopped her. No Gates were attacked. No archmage was manipulated into confronting her. She had been prepared for such a maneuver, but her preparations had been overkill. There was not even a cursory attempt.

On Plenith 7, Gaius Nezzar entered the city in disguise to stand guard over her while she bound the leyline regulator armor. Beneath the vaulted ceiling of Great Temple of Eintocarst, Mirian readied the final bindings, alone with her father. The priests stood watch around the temple. Gaius had placed his own wards around the premises.

“Have you decided on a name for it?” he asked.

“I have,” Mirian said, running her hands across the armor. “It is half the celestial Divir and half the terrestrial Enteria. A thing to bridge the world of the Elder Gods with our own. It serves to balance the leylines. And here I am, binding it on the very day. A spring day I thought I might never see again.”

Her father smiled.

“Equinox,” she said, and began to settle the bindings over it, one by one.

When it was done, she let out a breath of relief. Another step on the path, she thought. She looked through the stone ceiling to where she knew Divir was. She didn’t say anything. The feeling was enough. The Ominian was watching her.

With a flash of light, she let the armor into her soul. There was a strain to it—without her ascensions, the bulky object might not have fit. But once it was there, she could feel it, right there, next to the others, circling like lines of liquid light.

She summoned it to herself, then levitated midway up the central chamber. It was heavier than what she was used to, but not at all a burden to fly around in. The fit was perfect, and the weight, evenly distributed. She spread her arms wide, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply.

Whatever came next, she was ready for it. It was time to move into the final stages of her plans.