Chapter 268 - Presence

Mirian made her way to the conduit room near the Gate immediately.

I made it, she told Eyeball as she blinked into the room.

HAHA. HAHAHA, Eyeball thought at her, but they didn’t have the usual amusement flashing on their skin. HOLD ON. I’M DELAYING.

Pact stuff?

PACT STUFF. WELL, YOU’VE FIGURED OUT THE PACT PROBLEMS ARE FALLOUT FROM THE GODS’ WAR. LITTLE TIP FOR YOU, WHILE WE WAIT FOR OUR HUMOR CHALLENGED FRIEND. IF YOU’RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING A WAR AMONG THE ASCENDED GODS? JUST DON’T.

I’ll keep that in mind, Mirian thought.

Conductor appeared a moment later.

YOU GOT LOST AGAIN, Eyeball said.

I DID NOT.

YES YOU DID. I WILL BE WATCHING YOU FROM THE SECOTH CONTINUUM SPLIT, AND YOU’LL BE LOOKING AROUND CONFUSED FOR A WHOLE TWO-TENTHS OF A SECOND.

Conductor’s skin-teeth stiffened, which meant they were annoyed. LET’S GET TO THE POINT, the Elder creature said.

SHE MADE IT, Eyeball thought, and Mirian breathed out a sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure she actually had. THAT MEANS WE HAVE TO CONNECT THE GATE.

HE WON’T BE HAPPY, Conductor said. WE SHOULD REFUSE.

ONLY WITH MOST OF THE OUTCOMES.

If you’ve seen what I want, then you know…

THAT’S PRECISELY THE PROBLEM, Eyeball said. HUMANITY WAS GIFTED ENTERIA. BUT IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN THE GIFT, YOU HAVE TO… UGH I CAN’T SAY. LEARNING IN A LINEAR CHRONOLOGY IS SO ANNOYING. JUST… LET’S USE ONE OF YOUR HUMAN ‘METAPHORS.’  TIME IS A TREE.

And most of the branches are on fire.

YES, QUITE A LOT OF THEM, IN FACT. THERE’S A LOT MORE FIRE THAN TREE AT THIS POINT. JUST… UGH, HOW DO WE EXPLAIN THINGS WITHOUT VIOLATING THE PACT?

Conductor blinked forward slightly. THE PACT IS IN PLACE TO PREVENT THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT MIGHT LEAD TO ANOTHER GODS’ WAR. THE OMINIAN’S GIFT IS LIKE GIVING A CHILD A COMBUSTION SPELL. YES, THEY CAN USE IT TO CHANGE THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF THE CORPSES THEY EAT, BUT THEY ALSO MIGHT LIGHT MORE OF THE TREE ON FIRE.

Mirian had to take a moment. Cooking. The human word is ‘cooking.’ But yes, I see your point. Access to the Ominian’s body… changes things. The temporal anchors are there.

YES, Eyeball thought. AND YOU KNOW ALL ABOUT HOW INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS THAT ARE, IN ISOLATION, PERFECTLY FINE, LEAD UP TO SYSTEMIC CRISES.

Mirian thought of what she could do if she could seize the temporal anchors that had returned. Jei. She could bring Jei in. Viridian. With more anchors, Endresen and Torres. Then I won’t let the others use this Gate. I don’t even have to let them know I can go there. I can just say it was the whims of the Ominian.

IF YOU’RE RELYING ON SOMETHING STAYING A SECRET TO PREVENT A PROBLEM, YOU’RE JUST DELAYING THE PROBLEM.

Mirian raised an eyebrow. Isn’t that what you’re doing?

Eyeball’s skin fluoresced in amusement. QUITE THE CONUNDRUM, ISN’T IT? WHAT DOES ONE DO ABOUT AN INEVITABLE PROBLEM?

I’LL TELL HER, THEN, Conductor said. WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THE FUTURE WHERE ENTERIA LIVES. SCOURING THE FIELDS. LOOKING THROUGH ALL THE POSSIBLE DECISIONS, AND WHERE THEY LEAD. The Elder creature paused. WE HAVEN’T FOUND IT YET.

A chill passed through Mirian. How many dead futures had they looked through? It was probably best that she didn’t know. Are you saying I shouldn’t go through the Gate to Divir?

OH, NO. ALL THOSE OTHER FIELDS OF TIME ARE ON FIRE TOO. ER, BRANCHES. WAIT, DO FIELDS HAVE TO BE HORIZONTAL? WELL, NEVER MIND. YOU’LL KNOW SOON ENOUGH, Eyeball said. JUST WARNING YOU, THOUGH, WE CAN’T USE THE CONDUIT ROOM ON DIVIR. THERE’S THE ISSUE.

The entropic antimagic field? But the field is a shell. The inside should be safe, right?

WE’VE SAID ENOUGH. TOO MUCH, Conductor said. ONE OF THE UNMOORED IS SNOOPING AROUND.

Before Mirian could ask what that meant, the other Elder creature vanished.

SO. I COULDN’T HELP MYSELF. I PEEKED, SO I ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO. BUT YOU HAVE TO SAY IT ANYWAYS.

Mirian nodded. Open the Torrviol Gate to Divir.

She felt the pulse of arcane energy ripple through the air as the Gate activated.

***

Mirian took a deep breath, then stepped through the Gate.

A moment later, she stepped back through, feeling a bit sheepish. There was no air on Divir. She’d known that, but gotten carried away.

We’ll leave that incident out of the official histories, she decided. She wondered what sort of ridiculous and stupid things the First Prophet had done that people had tactfully not recorded.

She wasn’t sure exactly how the Gate distinguished between fluids that weren’t allowed, like atmosphere or water from the Mahatan Oasis, and fluids that were, like the water in her blood and the air in her lungs. However, there was a way to move air through the Gate reliably, and that was to use a spell to condense it down into a pressurized sphere using a spell, then trap that air in some sort of container that she carried with her. The air burst apart as soon as the spell was cut by her travel through the Gate, but she quickly gathered it back in with a similar gather air spell, then let the sphere rest around her as she moved.

From the top of the Mausoleum, she took a moment to look out across Enteria. It was as beautiful here as it was in the Ominian’s dream. A glistening jewel of green, blue, and white. Sparkling oceans. Whorls of clouds. Vast forests. This place, she thought. Is there anything else like it in all the great void?

Immediately, she felt the cuts to her aura, like she was being hit by a thousand minuscule pinpricks. The entropic antimagic field was indeed a shell, or her aura would be stripped entirely, but something was happening with it. As she looked around, she could see the antimagic shell. Or rather, she couldn’t see the entropic field, but she could see constant sizzling light coming from it. All around, the sphere lit up with bursts of violet, green, and orange light, most small, but some larger. These were interactions she’d seen in the Labyrinth as she funneled pure arcane energy into an entropic field.

She had a pretty good idea what was going on here.

The Gates move arcane energy when open, drawing from the leylines. This would be the perfect mechanism to remove it from Enteria—except as it spreads out to fill the absence of ambient mana, it runs into the antimagic shell. Which means it’s starting the annihilation process now. It must be fragments of the field I’m feeling, or… hmm. More evidence for Endresen’s arcane particle theory. Unless… is a particle just what we call a small enough fragment of a field?

She’d have to bring some devices up here to measure what was happening.

But what will that do to the tertiary field that’s holding Divir aloft? That was a question she was far less sure of. The amount of research that was now open to her was difficult to fathom. And not just magical research. She wondered what Gaius would say when he saw artifacts of the Persaman Triarchy, untouched for thousands of years.

Mirian added a heat spell to the air around her, then levitated down to the giant doors. They opened easily to her magic, and she found herself moving down a familiar hall. It was surreal to be here, physically, after so many years. The way the walls shifted, the statues and reliefs of Elder creatures moving in and out of her sight as she walked forward—it was like returning home after a long journey. Even the silence was familiar, and she savored it. Savored this moment. The peace of moving through the Mausoleum. The accumulation of another victory.

Then, as she moved further down the hall, she began to feel the Ominian’s presence. It was more than just a pressure on her aura. It was a pressure on her very soul. The pinpricks of the entropic field vanished, replaced by a far greater pain. Mirian grit her teeth and moved forward.

The Ominian came into view.

Her skin began to blister. She felt blood trickling down her face. Mirian opened up to the pages of runes in her spellbook. She healed the blisters and closed the wounds, but they reopened. There was some sort of soul-pressure she’d never felt before. She cast detect life—

And went blind. The Ominian blazed like a sun, and she fell to her knees, unable to even look at Them.

She stood and retreated, casting black shield. Immediately, the shield began to crack, fissures forming around the outside in a way she’d never seen.

She sorted through her pages of runes, moving soul energy about to best modify detect life. She settled on a way to reduce the intensity of the visions of light by several orders of magnitude, then cast. The black shield blocked her view, so she dismissed it and stepped forward again, bracing herself against the pain.

There, the Ominian sat, except, Their soul was in far more than just the humanoid form on the throne. It was in the walls, the floor—but it was mostly in that stone body. The living corpse. The dead life.

Mirian could see it now, even as her eyes bled. The Ominian’s soul shone with sickly light. She visualized it as a nacreous sheen, like streams of dark pollution that ran everywhere. In the center of the Ominian’s chest, there was a hole, but not like the one she and the other Prophets had. No, this was a gaping wound in the soul, a void ringed by things that looked like black stalactites and stalagmites, or perhaps a predator’s teeth. From this wound poured that pollution. It spread out like a web, then faded into—something. Not an aura—she could sense no aura from the Ominian.

The only place where the soul looked healthy was two points near the Ominian’s shoulder, where two luminous spikes had been driven into Their flesh.

The temporal anchors.

Mirian stumbled back, then collapsed to her knees again.

What did it mean? The Ominian had sent out the temporal anchors—but They seemed to be keeping the terrible wound at bay. Did They need them? Then why had then sent them out across time?

She tried to understand. What had happened? Was this from the Gods’ War and the resulting Cataclysm? In the time of the First Prophet, the Mausoleum would have still been on Enteria—right up until the end of the Triarchy. Surely, reports of the Ominian in such a state would have survived. Is it getting worse? Or is this like in the dreamscape, where Their state seems to be in flux?

One thing was clear. Plucking the temporal needles from the Ominian would not be the straightforward task she’d thought. Nor, if the Ominian’s soul continued to be in this state, could she even get close enough to do it.

And this was the Ominian half-dead. No wonder the Gods used the Elder creatures and intermediaries as their heralds.

The meager soul energy she’d collected before coming to Divir was depleted. Mirian backed away, then felt another presence behind her. She turned.

There was that man again, the one with shining tubes instead of a lower jaw. He looked at her, and for a moment, she couldn’t tell if he had eyes or not. They were yawning voids, black as the midnight ocean in a storm. Then she blinked, and they were there, boring into her soul.

What do you want? she asked.

Then he was gone.

That was starting to get annoying. It still unnerved her, but not as much as his presence had at first.

By then, Mirian’s air was running low; the spell she’d been using to hold her bubble together had been largely stripped away by whatever was going on with the Ominian’s soul. She would need to return through the Gate.

First, though…

She made her way over to the ritual site to the dead Triarchs. And there they were: the mythril armor and a scepter containing another titan catalyst, this one, even more potent. Mirian picked up the scepter. It was cold enough it burned her hand, but she savored the feeling of it. Then she picked up the armor with lift object and levitated back to the Gate.

***

Mirian hid the Triarchs’ objects deep beneath Torrviol, then switched the Gates around to their usual configuration while she worked on preparing Torrviol’s research efforts. As the work got underway, she dissected the Triarch’s spellrod. It used a fascinating configuration; the device was split between glyphs and runes. Several of the runes were ones she’d never seen. She mapped out the rune-sequences and began analyzing the remnant soul energy. The runes had survived in excellent condition, given their age.

That also means the entropic field isn’t decaying until the Gate is open. Otherwise, antimagic particles would have destroyed these sigils. Even adamantium and mythril couldn’t protect them that long.

Immediately, she could feel the difference between the titan catalyst obtained by the First Prophet and her own. Mana and soul energy slipped through it as easily as a perfectly formed conduit crystal. Her measurements on the output found a myr loss so negligible she wasn’t sure it wasn’t just a fluke of the equipment.

After reconstituting the runes and glyphs, she tested out its spells. She discovered the scepter had spells that could temporarily animate corpses—including myrvite corpses. Unlike her father’s undead soldiers, these required active focus on the spell, and the soul remnants weren’t anchored to the corpse. Another spell seemed to be related to aura communication. It could send out a pulse of emotion. Unlike her own ability, there was a stronger intensity to it, and it could cover a wider area.

Dangerous, she thought. More potent, perhaps, in the age of the Triarchs where armies marched closer together, rather than modern fighting where infantry and mages spread out to avoid the power of artillery, but still a powerful tool.

Several runic sequences seemed to be curses, some of which were familiar, some new. The interesting part was how the sequences allowed for broader control of the runic bindings; a curse could be settled on the souls of several organisms simultaneously, not simply one by one, and there was a sequence that affected humans specifically. No wonder they were both feared and hated. War is terrible in any form, but the desecration of the dead and the violation of the mind… people must have resented them. And yet, the Akanans are on the same path under Westerun. Only, their mass-manipulation spells are printed on newspapers and enacted with gruesome assassinations. Is the animation of the dead really something they’d never allow, or do they condemn it only because they don’t have the capability yet?

‘Magic cannot be separated from politics,’ she could hear Zhuan saying.

Mirian stopped her tests of the spellrod after a few days. She would have to work with her father on extrapolating the function of each of the new runes and seeing what else they could be made to do. It was possible that the research was a dead end, and wouldn’t actually help the leyline regulator or solve anything that had to do with the strange wound of the Ominian—but these decades of reliving the apocalypse had taught her that sometimes the answers to questions lay down paths that seemed unrelated.

She hid the spellrod again, then cut Torrviol’s link to Mahatan briefly so she could use her newly created arcane devices to measure what was going on on Divir.

***

When Mirian arrived, lugging steel cylinders of air and a bunch of artifice, she immediately noticed the difference. From the interactions of arcane energy now moving through the Gate, she could tell the entropic field had continued to destabilize in her absence. It was less a sphere now and more a tangled shell of yarn.

She set up her detectors as quickly as she could, spreading them out across Divir, then started looking at the initial readings. Her spell engine conjured an illusionary model of the small moon, showing exactly what she’d suspected: the arcane energy seeping through the Gate was destroying the entropic field, bit by bit.

Could that solve it? Mirian wondered. If the entropic field is removed, perhaps Divir crashing to Enteria simply becomes a mundane impact. Still catastrophic. Mahatan and Alatishad would be annihilated, and I doubt Rambalda or Urubandar would survive, but the mountains might block the worst of the collision. It wouldn’t stop the leyline eruptions, either, but people would survive. Is it enough?

It wasn’t the solution she wanted, but if it came to that, it was better than armageddon.

She checked the tri-bonded detectors aimed at trying to analyze the divine soul energy at work. The Ominian’s very presence had destroyed the detectors she’d placed too close, so she had to rely on indirect measurement. But as the data went through the automatic calculation engines and modified the illusionary model, she had an initial theory.

The third field at work is the Ominian. The entropic antimagic field is being generated from Them. Whether or not the entropic field is intentional or a byproduct of the wound, destroying the field is still like attacking Their aura.

The Gate being open here is just speeding up the destruction of the repulsion field. Attaching leyline repulsors here using the formulation of the Akanan Dreadnought engines wouldn’t work. The very arcane energy they’d need would require the Gate being open, which would cause the entropic field to bombard them into nonfunctionality.

Her heart fell. This was no solution.

She returned to the great hall of the Mausoleum, and walked until she was in the presence of that great and terrible soul. The power of it assaulted her immediately. She felt the blood running down her face, felt her skin begin to peel back.

DIVITRIUS, she thought, shouting so that her whisper of breath might be heard over the hurricane that was the Ominian. I won’t stop. I’m still looking. I’ll find a way to save Enteria!

Then she retreated, blood dripping on the dark stone, body shaking.

She returned once more to collect data from her devices, but even a few days on Divir had left them nonfunctional. The constant haze of the entropic particles had disenchanted the glyphs and runes.

Two weeks later, only midway through Duala, Divir fell from the sky, and the world ended again.