Chapter 261 - A Road Not Taken

Mirian began the arduous work of re-scribing the glyphs in her spellbook. She took the time to import specialized materials using Nurea’s connections with the Syndicate and used Torrian Tower’s specialized precision-scribing equipment. Along the way, she found ways to improve the efficiency of the glyphs she reconstructed. The runes took more time given that she needed specific high-energy souls. She started by hunting in the surrounding forest and using Syndicate-smuggled myrvites, then began gating down to the Jiandzhi to get the larger souls she needed. With how many times she’d revised the context in her soulbound book, Mirian had become highly adept at all the steps in the process, though she hadn’t needed to rebuild so much of it at once.

Then, near the end of Solem, she received a message from Jherica:

Mirian,

Liuan’s new plan failed catastrophically. She’s dead. Akana is on a warpath, and the airship are NOT sabotaged. Tried, but now I’m in hiding. Making my way to our mutual friend with the big tree (hopefully vague enough, I expect most of these to be intercepted).

-Sio Jherica

Copy 7 of 14

That was going to be a problem.

With Liuan’s hand pushing on the Akanan army, she could get Marshal Cearsia convinced that the ‘weapon’ the RID was propagandizing about wasn’t actually in Torrviol. Without any strategic objective there, the delayed Akanan invasion avoided anything north of Cairnmouth. Without her, though…

“Fuck,” Mirian said as soon as she was done reading the letter. The Akanan invasion would be in a few days and she hadn’t prepared the militia. “Get me Professor Cassius and Captain Moliner. Well, she’s not a captain of the militia yet, but she will be.”

“Who?” asked Song Jei, who happened to be in the room with her.

Mirian waved a dismissive hand. “Cassius will know her. If he’s not in his office, he’s at the practice range or with his eximontar.” Then she began muttering to herself. “Then we’ll need to accelerate the training, build the barricades, collapse the north tunnel network, set foss charges to detonate west of the dorms… should have gotten my… ugh. And where’s Luspire? I need him to hold the front lines while I take down the airships, again. Actually…”

She blinked out the window and headed north to begin walling off the underground passages.

***

Mirian landed on the deck of the Might of Liberty and calmly walked towards the bridge. As she walked, dozens of bullets and spells sank into her black shield. She used the absorbed energy to blast weapons and wands out of the hands of her attackers. The airships and army were still several hours out of Torrviol, and Mirian had come up with a plan that she hoped would save her a lot of time.

“Marshal Emera Cearsia, I wish to negotiate Torrviol’s safety,” she announced as she burst down the door. Cearsia, of course, opened up her spellbook, but Mirian tore it from her hands, stripped the officers of weapons, then blew up the communications console. “My understanding is that the Prophet Liuan Var failed to stop the war this cycle. I am the Prophet Mirian.”

Cearsia was staring at her open-mouthed before she realized she’d lost her composure. “I don’t negotiate with traitors, and I certainly don’t negotiate with mass-murderers who slaughter civilians. Your government—”

“Yes, yes, I know what you believe. You were told Baracuel has developed a secret weapon that is blowing up your cities and then they assassinated your head of state. You were lied to and manipulated because there’s a bunch of powerful people in Akana Praediar who want to turn Baracuel into a subservient country. The magical eruptions, however, are caused by spell engine overuse. All that waste mana is overloading the leylines. What your spies have told you is the ‘Divine Monument’ is actually a Gate created by the Elder Gods. If you blow it up, the apocalypse is in a few days. If you leave it intact, the apocalypse is in a few months, and I have more time to work on preventing it. You’re in a time loop, but only the Prophets can remember previous cycles.”

“You’re a… you expect me to believe that sort of nonsense? Liuan was executed—”

“I’m sure she was, and I promise it won’t stick. She’ll learn from whatever mistakes she made, and you never will. Do you have an explanation for how a sixth-year academy student casually levitated up to your airship and disarmed both you and the majority of the crew? Look, I can show you the Torrviol Gate. It’s currently linked to Mahatan. We can go through it and you can see the city, then I’ll take you back and you can call off your army. Then you can go south and so whatever you want to Cairnmouth or Palendurio—you do like vengefully slaughtering civilians who had nothing to do with even your stated grievances—or head back across the Rift Sea. I don’t care, as long as you don’t attack Torrviol and don’t blow up the Gate.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I blow up your airships and slaughter enough of the army to get it to rout. And if it comes back, I do it again. I’ll tell you, it’s annoying, time-consuming, and doesn’t help anyone. It’s inefficient and a waste of my time.” Then, Mirian used aura projection to deliver her words into the minds of the officers. I’VE DONE IT BEFORE, and showed them images of the airships burning and falling out of the sky.

The officers had all turned white. Cearsia had stumbled back, but recovered. She was shaken. “Akana Praediar does not negotiate—”

Mirian summoned Eclipse, blinked forward, and cut off her head. She used an improvised force spell to prevent the blood from ruining her clothes. “Typical Emera. Would anyone else like to negotiate? I know we have a gaggle of captains and two commodores. Same offer.”

Behind her, she felt movement. One of the officers was pulling a gun. He didn’t know her aura was right on top of his. She levitated Eclipse backward, driving the sword into his brain up to the guard.

“I—I move to… h-halt the army and d-discuss…” one of the officers stammered out.

“Great! Go ahead and give the orders. Now. Oh, and show of hands, who’d like to visit Mahatan? It’s quite beautiful this time of year.”

***

In the end, the invasion was delayed for several days. Fort Aegrimere’s division began taking up positions in the town, but it seemed the Akanan attackers might withdraw without battle.

Then there was a mutiny in the middle of the officer corps, so even though Mirian had adequately demonstrated why the Akanan army shouldn’t attack for the officers on the bridge, the whole thing was veering into something Zhuan would write about, which annoyed her. As soon as the first artillery shell landed, Mirian went on the offensive. She sliced open the repulsor engines and dropped the two airships on the army, then used Gaius’s trick of exploding the auramancers to quickly and efficiently inflict maximum casualties. She covered up the evidence with fireballs since signs of obvious necromancy would be a problem for the professors she was relying on for research.

When she returned, it was to a throughly shaken Archmage Luspire who had watched her from Torrian Tower.

“They’re routing now, but they often make another pass at the town,” she told him. “Keep lookouts posted to assist with General Hanaran’s patrols. Remember, if the Akanans get in, they slaughter everyone.” And waste my time, she mentally added.

Then she got back to work on her artifice. She’d directed as many people in the town who weren’t involved in its defense to production. If she was going to study antimagic, she already had preliminary notes, and she already had a place where she could directly study an active field:

The Labyrinth.

***

Mirian stood before the entropic antimagic field of the Frostland’s Gate Labyrinth. She’d looked for closer ones, but the one she’d found in the Torrviol Labyrinth was too deep to be used. She couldn’t be watching her back from enervators or causters while also conducting experiments, and she certainly couldn’t bring a crew. With her variations on supreme levitation, she could cut her travel time to Frostland’s Gate down to a few hours, and with a glider, the trip back using the high altitude winds was even faster.

Beatrice and the others stood behind her looking nervous. That was the usual reaction to her presence, and Mirian had long since grown tired of assuaging people, so she just let them be nervous.

Mirian had spent weeks testing the effectiveness of different enchantment schemes at resisting antimagic. The most effective thing she’d found was the soul-imbued metals. Ironically, the very thing she was trying to retrieve in quantity from Divir. After her extensive testing, she’d forged an orichalcum gauntlet, then reinforced it with every enchantment that seemed useful.

Cediri held a timepiece, while Beatrice, Grimald, and the Ennecus group stood as lookouts.

“Start.” She plunged her hand into the entropic field.

She felt the pain immediately as it started ripping at the outer layers of her aura. She steadied herself, clenching her teeth. She was doing this without the Lone Pine stance since she wanted the feedback pain provided, wanted to know what she could do to hold her aura together.

The enchantments were scoured into dust within seconds. The orichalcum began to spall and heat up, and as it did, she felt the razor edge of the entropic field on her aura intensify. She focused, trying to hold her aura together through force of will, trying to restructure the flows so they weren’t sliced apart. She shifted through the different dervish stances, but if there was any difference in their ability to repel the entropic field, she couldn’t tell. The pain faded when she finally swapped to Lone Pine, but the damage to her aura didn’t.

She pulled her aura back away from the hand, and then the pain became too much to bear as the antimagic field began to dig into her soul.

Mirian let out a hiss of breath and withdrew her hand.

“Three minutes, forty-five seconds,” Cediri announced.

Mirian frowned. “Would anyone like to be a comparison?” She glanced over at two more gauntlets she’d made.

Grimald said, “I’ll do it.”

Mirian used shape metal to resize the gauntlet, then handed it to him. The tall fighter adjusted the straps on the gauntlet while Mirian used a trick of necromancy to direct Grimald’s soul into contact with the orichalcum so it would align to his soul.

“Ready, Cediri?”

“Ready.”

Grimald plunged his hand into the field. He held it there, eyes watering with pain. Then he screamed and fell back, clutching his hand.

“Thirty-two seconds,” Cediri said.

Mirian pondered the next steps. “Alright, let’s get that measurement equipment down here next. I have some ideas for testing the field. Then we can start taking chunks out of the wall.”

Beatrice looked concerned. “You know what the Labyrinth does when you start removing pieces of it.”

“I am aware. Let’s move.”

***

Over the next two months, she flew back to Torrviol twice. The first time, she helped push back the reconstituted Akanan army’s siege, then hunted them down for several days to reinforce the message she was trying to send. The second time, it was just to check they were really gone. Each time, she picked up more supplies to move north over the mountains.

The problem with using any form of magic to try to assess an antimagic field was that the arcane force was dissolved on contact. With enough arcane force, the antimagic field could be pushed, but whatever was powering it was far beyond Mirian’s capability to overwhelm. She could use spells that sent unguided electricity, heat, magnetism, or force into the field, but that didn’t help her assess it. As the antimagic field destroyed the different magics she put into it, she could tell from her divination devices that there were subtle differences in how the glyphs were dissolved, but how she could use that to figure out the nature of the entropic field eluded her.

Her work on antimagic suppression fields seemed unrelated to entropic fields. From what she could tell, they operated on a different fundamental force. Suppression fields interfaced with the aura-soul boundary, and auramancers could duplicate the effect easily enough.

The Labyrinth sent waves of horrors at her when she drilled into it, but eventually, she got some chunks of the area around the entropic field. Problematically, the parts she needed most were inside the field. She spent two days plunging her arm in and using a hand-cranked diamond-tipped drill, but the material she got wasn’t revelatory in the slightest. There were no glyphs or runes to study, just the usual strange material of the Labyrinth. After exhausting every divination spell, every alchemical and chemical test she and Professor Seneca could think of, and even trying to use Tlaxhuacan spirit constructs to learn anything, she found her ideas on even how to proceed to study the phenomenon exhausted.

Plan 7 - Build an antimagic resistant skiff

Notes: Plans 3-5 scrapped/erased because an antimagic field interferes with all of them. Plan 6 still not ideal, but may be last resort. Antimagic proving difficult to make progress on. Plan 7 may be untenable because our technology and understanding of the world is simply not developed enough.

Plan 8 - Build a non-magical delivery system

Mirian knew, from her visions from Xylatarvia and study of the Viaterrians, that it was possible to move through the void without magic. She just had a hard time wrapping her head around how. The world ran on magic. Guns used glyphs and fossilized myrvite charges to accelerate projectiles. Trains used spell engines to generate force. Forges used glyphs to regulate heat and air flow. Yes, woodworkers like her adoptive mother might use non-magical tools, but that was for making furniture and artwork, not airships. Plenty of things had physical mechanisms, but for anything complex, everyone used glyph sequences.

She’d seen a column of fire coming from the Viaterrian ships in her vision. That was her clue.

She considered the heater. A modern home used a simple glyph heater, but plenty of homes had wood stoves too. It was easy enough to burn things. But to create the kind of force needed to propel something? And how would one regulate the force? How would one prevent the fuel from burning out of control? Then there was also the problem of containing air. Air was notoriously annoying to control with physical mechanisms because it was a gas. Spells made manipulating it easy. There was a reason fire response teams were made up of sorcerers and docks always had mages on hand to create air bubbles for underwater work.

Steel proved useful for making airtight containers, but it would need an airtight door. Also, adding a huge amount of weight to any airship would be a problem. The Viaterrian ship they’d found had thick, bulky doors, and now she could guess why. She could make an airtight airship. It was feasible. But then how to move something so heavy without force or gravity magic?

That brought her back to Professor Sefora Seneca’s department.

Alchemistry and its less-studied mundane counterpart often dealt with strange substances, many of which were volatile or burned. She and Seneca worked on measuring ways to burn such substances, using divination magic to measure the amount of heat and force such flames those substances could put out.

They started with cooking oil, mostly because it was simply obtained and would act as a proof-of-concept for their testing apparatus. The result was what she expected: a lot of heat, not a lot of force, and then there was the problem that the cooking oil had its own weight, which would only add to the amount of force necessary to move the hypothetical magic-less airship. 

Mirian looked at the first divination numbers with disappointment. Using fire to move an object was horrifically inefficient.

They tried a number of different explosive substances, both liquid and powdered, next. Immediately, they ran into a problem of getting anything they were using to burn in a controlled manner. Several times, their testing apparatus blew up. Then, there was the problem that most common explosives needed to react with air, and there wouldn’t be air up there. She would need air for breathing, and even more air for fuel.

A few fuel candidates seemed promising (at least, if they could find a way to solve all the other problems), and then came the next problem: how would they manufacture these substances at scale? Most mundane chemicals useful in alchemistry were made in small amounts by experts using specialized spell engines or specific spells. Torrviol, as a major research center, often got them in enchanted casks. Usually, they were shipped in tiny glass vials. The most useful ones weren’t shipped at all because of the danger, and instead, only small amounts of precursor chemical were moved, again, in tiny packages. Those precursors, in turn, came from rare minerals that weren’t mined at any appreciable scale because the market demand was too low for anyone to bother.

The longer she worked on the project, the more she realized that there were entire fields of study that would need to be invented to make a mundane airship, and the more she looked into what would be needed, the more work she began to realize would need to be done. The leyline detector would be made up of parts and materials that were already manufactured at scale. The magic-less airship would need parts, pieces, fuel, and technology that no one on Enteria made.

Notes:

Our reliance on magic has undermined our ability to solve problems without it. I can’t even begin to estimate how many years or decades it might take to solve the technical issues that I know about, and I find myself having trouble imagining what a magic-less airship would even look like. Presumably, long ago, Viaterrians had solved these problems, but consulting with Zhuan in the dream, whatever records survive do not detail their mundane technology in anything approaching a useful capacity. Our technological development has gone in a completely different direction than theirs must have. Inventions we possess seem obvious in retrospect, but were built on what came before. Trying to break new ground where the fields have not been prepared by others is a different task entirely. I can imagine new arcane devices with ease. My imagination fails me with these mundane projects. I am trying to build Torrian Tower with a foundation of straw.

Plan 8 overly time consuming and unlikely to succeed. Also making me too philosophical. Scrap.