Chapter 264 - Aftermath

Mirian’s robes were in tatters and her wounds still slowly closing as she asked Eyeball to lower the Gate back down into the underground. The Gate now had a family of mildly confused lesser titans guarding it, but they’d gorged themselves enough that they’d be sticking around. And, if there was one thing the Akanan army was completely unready to handle, it was a trio of greater myrvites from the Jiandzhi that could negate force spells and most shields.

The oniwyrms that had come through were nesting in the underground now, quite happy with the confined passages and the mages they’d devoured down there.

Torrviol had been rendered uninhabitable for humans, but at least for now, the Gate was secure.

Mirian spent several hours resting in Eyeball’s conduit room. She hadn’t been so exhausted in years. If the titans had emerged a minute later, she might have lost. Her last few spells had been curses drawn from her own soul since her mana had been all but gone.

When she had enough mana, she moved out again, using blink and her knowledge of the passages to avoid the new residents. Then she levitated around, using detect life to look for surviving Akanans. Lesser titans and oniwyrms didn’t exactly take prisoners. However fragile the human body was, though, people were surprisingly resilient. She’d been in enough battles to know that, even after the most terrible devastation, there were always survivors.

There was a soldier hiding in the ruins among several corpses. She plucked him up with lift person, healing the worst of his wounds with the scavenged soul energy of his dead companions. Another had managed to survive an airship crash—one of the Sorcerer Elite. She stripped her of her orichalcum, healed the head wound as best she could, then cast a weaken curse to suppress her ability to cast, then lifted her up to transport as well.

She found ten more survivors along the southern route, most of them hiding in military spell wagons that had run out of fuel. She dropped them off with the tattered remnants of the Baracueli army to the north.

“Start interrogating them,” she told Hanaran’s intelligence officer. “I want to know what they were told, what the operation intended to achieve, and who, specifically, is responsible for these suicidal attacks. Get me names.”

Then she slept.

The next day, she flew south, passing over the wreckage of spellcarts and artillery, over smoldering trenches and blackened craters. Much of the bloody work had been her own. She wasn’t at all surprised that the Akanan engines had run out of fossilized myrvite during their panicked retreat; she’d been targeting stores of it in her attacks. She still remembered what Nicolus Sacristar had told her about ‘following the energy’ so many years ago. Armies needed their logistics.

Smoke was trailing from several places to the southwest, so Mirian moved that way. There, she found two more crashed airships, with several more that had managed to land before running out of foss. There was a slow moving column of exhausted crews and arcanists slowly trudging across winter snowdrifts, hacking their way through banebriars and tangled underbrush. A few tried to shoot her or cast spells, but they were disorganized and scattered. She disarmed everyone in the area, breaking the rifles and incinerating the arcane catalysts. There were, however, several hundred Akanans scattered about; too many to carry them all. She picked high ranking targets to carry with her. There was a lot of shouting, trembling, running, hiding, and pleading. It was annoying.

She lifted one of the captains up to her. “Where are your generals?”

He just looked at her with wide eyes.

“What lies did they tell you about me? And who told them?” When he continued to be silent, she sighed. “Everyone always wants to do things the hard way,” she snapped. To the soldiers she was leaving behind, she announced, “You attacked me, and I could have killed you. But I have shown you mercy. Whatever lies your leaders have told me, know this: I fight for Enteria, to save the lives of you and your families. I have taken your weapons so you may do no more harm. I will not show you this mercy twice.”

She took twenty of them with her. Her aura was still too depleted for her to take more, and she wanted to keep a reserve in case she needed it. However, there were no attacks. She didn’t think the Akanans had actually given up, but she doubted they’d be able to rally for another assault any time soon.

***

Mirian sat in her room in Frostland’s Gate, contemplating the results of the interviews, sipping a cup of bad tea. Beatrice and her Labyrinth group were dead, of course; they’d always die without intervention. However, it was one of the few places near Torrviol that wasn’t either under Akanan occupation or already crowded with refugees trying to escape the war, so she’d moved the prisoners north over the pass. It also put them well outside the hunting range of the oniwyrms.

She’d ended up with an assortment of captains, colonels, and one field general. She’d gotten a few battlemages, one of the Sorcerer Elite, and two archmages. All of them had been held separately, interviewed several times, with the promise of better food and better lodgings for cooperation, and the loss of certain privileges for intransigence. General Hanaran called it ‘hard interrogation.’ Mirian was tired of all the evasions and lies; she just wanted results. Hanaran and her team had gotten them for her.

Unfortunately, those results were a tangle of obfuscation. Whoever was ordering them around was calling themself the ‘true prophet.’ The field general and archmages each claimed this ‘true prophet’ had revealed their true name to them as a sign of favor, and—of course—all the names they’d reported were different. Mirian doubted any of them were real.

They’d all been lied to, of course. Told that Mirian intended to use the ‘Ancient Weapon’ or ‘Divine Weapon’ to scour the world of her enemies, and that the magical eruptions in Akana were proof of that. It wasn’t a new lie, just one that had been adapted to circumstance. Any officers who had actually seen the Gate were dismissed as mind-controlled, even though that sort of magic didn’t actually exist, and the RID especially should have damn well known it.

The military’s orders led to Grand Marshal Maximus Caldwell, which made sense. Among the highest ranking generals, he was the best connected. The Sorcerer Elite’s orders traced back to Allen Matteus, Director of the RID. Mirian had met them both at Sylvester Aurum’s party. The field general was the only one to have actually met Grand Marshall Caldwell, and had said the man had seemed, ‘off.’ Everyone else was low enough on the chain of command that they were just taking orders from their superiors as normal.

It all pointed to Scebur. A probing attack to see if their manipulations could change the tide of the cycle. A strike force specifically designed to test her capabilities. The latter part made sense, but the former didn’t. They’d targeted the Gate because it was key to keeping the cycle going, but how did it benefit Scebur to end the cycle prematurely? The other thing that bothered her was how effective they were at seizing control of the Akanan military apparatus. Was it so easy from that end? Given Jherica’s struggle to influence events, she doubted it. What that meant was that Scebur was hiding a lot closer to Liuan than the other Prophet probably knew.

If Liuan didn’t get Akana under control next cycle, Mirian could point Jherica at the problem—but it would likely take the old wizard more time than Mirian wanted to figure out how to push on the levers of power while dealing with Scebur. Assuming they could even do it. All the while, they’d be losing research time. Mirian still couldn’t believe the cycles didn’t have some sort of energy-based limit, even if they hadn’t discovered it yet.

No, what it showed was that Liuan was valuable. Without her, the Akanan invasion would inevitably aim to end the cycle before any sort of solution could be put in place. Mirian could hold them off, but only if she was pinned in place. And if Akana and Baracuel’s populations were both putting their productive power into war, cutting off Tlaxhuaco, then the leyline detector would have to be built by Zhighua and Persama, which was simply not possible. Even if Scebur was removed from the loop, Akana was already on a path to war that was overdetermined.

It was annoying that she even had to deal with any of it. This world is suicidal. Leaders and masses, marching to their doom blindfolded. And they resent anyone attempting to rip off the veil. She wished she could show them—really show them—how the world ended. Let them all see what all their machinations led to.

Mirian looked at her tea cup, then incinerated it, focusing and trapping the heat until it turned the cup and its contents into ash and vapor, then let the ash fall to the ground. It was terrible tea.

She telekinetically opened the door and levitated out of her seat and into the sky, then looked up at the two moons.

The void above called to her.

** *** **

Gabriel sat on the balcony of a penthouse apartment in the second cairn neighborhood of Cairnmouth. Behind him was the Temple of the Four, which had been ransacked. For some reason, when people ransacked buildings, they also liked to set them on fire. It seemed like a waste to him. The smell of smoke still lingered in the air.

In front of him, he could watch Akanan ships unloading soldiers and materiel. He’d gotten the numbers straight from the RID, and shipments across the Rift Sea were plummeting as Akana Praediar ran headfirst into a foss shortage. Right now, angry generals were shouting and gesticulating over fancy maps. The strike south across the Casnevar was already delayed.

Gabriel had looked at the tallies of dead, though, and was still convinced a revolution would have a higher body count. Maybe. The problem with riling up a population to go to war was… well, then they were riled up. It was bad business to kill so many civilians and destroy so many factories, but the angry Akanans couldn’t be stopped. They thought they were under attack by a Divine Weapon by a Heretic Prophet, after all.

As soon as Mirian had swapped the Gate, Gabriel had rerouted his own as she’d asked. Instead of staying in Mahatan, though, he’d gone to Palendurio, surveyed what was there and gotten more reports, then moved up to Cairnmouth. His instincts told him there was a reason the Akanans were pressing her so hard. He had a pretty good idea about what was going on, but he always liked to gather as much information as he could before acting.

And, as Gabriel watched a Rosen Industries Type Seven specially modified skiff airship come into view, he thought his instincts had hit the mark. He cast several layers of lens spells like Jherica had taught him in the last Council, tracking the airship as it arrived from the northwest. Sure enough, he knew the man aboard. Magnus Tyrcast, you scoundrel. War didn’t do much for your composure, did it?

Gabriel took a sip of wine as he watched the spell engine on the skiff sputter, then die. As the airship plummeted to the ground, Tyrcast first panicked, then seemed to remember he had a levitation wand. Gabriel watched, amused, as the archmage managed to right himself, abandoning the crew.

He snorted as the airship went up in smoke somewhere northeast of Fort Aegrimere. Two airborne units were dispatched from the fort to meet the archmage. Gabriel munched on an eclair while he watched, then reached for a second one.

Then unmeasurable tragedy struck, and when he reached for a third eclair, his hand brushed an empty plate. He had to content himself to eating hard crackers with a paltry two-cheese topping and only three types of cured meats. What a barbaric place, he thought, taking another sip of wine. At least the vintage 3210 red Causaevur could act as a balm.

He flipped through his copy of the ships currently in port. The Wake of Liberty was docked at the fort. That would be the ship they’d put Tyrcast on. That would be the ship he’d need to track on its way back to Akana.

He wiped his hands on the tablecloth, stood, cast his illusion spell, checked his soul-bindings, then headed for the door. He’d make his way to the fort, then follow Tyrcast and his strings. If that didn’t work, he’d look for the strings puppeting Grand Marshal Caldwell or maybe snoop around the penthouses and mansions the top RID officials liked to visit. The upper echelons of the elite were a small world. It made them easy to manipulate, but it also made it easier to track who was manipulating them.

He was pretty sure he already knew, but it would be invaluable to get confirmation. They each had their skill-sets. He’d continue playing to his strengths.

** *** **

Plan 9 - Use inertia at mid-altitude to breach the antimagic barrier

Mirian was glad to be done with the 243rd loop, but she still wasn’t ready to waste any time she’d been given. She’d rearranged the Gates again, then spent some time in Mahatan making a high-acceleration spell and a physical shield she hoped would do the trick. Gabriel had wandered off somewhere—probably off to another palace to make sure all the wine was properly accounted for—but he’d conveniently prepared things so that getting the assistance of artificers and access to the royal forges was trivial.

With the right timing, launch, and arc, she might be able to make it past the antimagic shell. This time, she’d keep her soulbound spellbook sequestered. Death would send her back in time before the book was damaged. Instead, she’d made a set of specially designed wands, sheathed in mythril to protect them from the entropic destruction. If they were shattered, it wouldn’t cost her any time at the beginning of the next cycle.

The moon came down in early Nerevain, the inefficient use of Gates having cost them a month of research time. Hopefully, Jherica and Ibrahim had made productive use of the time she’d won for them.

She’d made her own airship that only served to get her to the correct altitude. There, hopefully the worst bursts of antimagic energy would be done and the barrier would have thinned.

Mirian poured mana into her wands, teeth grit, accelerating until her vision began to narrow.

Before her, Divir burned, and the sky danced with auroras.

Notes:

The antimagic barrier is confirmed to deteriorate the closer it gets to Enteria. It’s the imbalance and dispersal of the leylines that causes Divir to fall, but there’s still excessive leyline energy in the region, presumably overpowering the entropic field. I was able to calculate the energy release of arcane and entropic fields intersecting in the Labyrinth, but the interaction between Divir and Enteria isn’t the same. I still can’t model the event with my equations; neither the fall of Divir, nor the intensity of the entropic detonation. There’s more to the balance of forces than Divir’s mass, the antimagic field, and the arcane field generated by the leylines.

Regardless, even sheathed in mythril and warded, the damage to the wands was excessive. Inertia was insufficient to overcome the wall of flame engulfing the moon, and its airspeed at that altitude was too high. I was unable to reestablish levitation or heat shielding after passing through the entropic field. The wands would have survived in a Labyrinth-generated entropic field for a minute easily, but somehow, the field around the moon is more intense.

Considering returning to plan 6. It will just take… timing.

Plan 9 Result: Failure