Chapter 259 - Alternate Paths

Mirian was examining the effect different glyphs had on air currents and considering how that translated into mathematics when Zhuan reentered the chamber.

“You’re a fool. They’re all busy maneuvering. You must know that the most important conversations within a governing body aren’t the official meetings, but what’s done in the backrooms and pleasant conversations, right?”

Mirian snorted. “My first lesson in government was that none of it worked like it was supposed to. Why does anyone bother pretending to be a republic, then?”

“Because it smoothly distributes power among the elite, leading to a larger power base. That power base has the resources to keep the rest of the population in line. Ideology is their first line of defense, but they can hire enough guns and wands to get the job done if that fails.”

“It’s not even stable. There’s Corrmier’s coup in Palendurio. I assume you watched that? I stopped paying attention last cycle as it got messy. Liuan was having trouble restraining her Akanans.” Liuan had apparently disabled the two airship dreadnoughts, but that hadn’t stopped invasion forces from landing in Cairnmouth and Palendurio. However, since the fighting had all been away from the Labyrinth entrances, Mirian hadn’t bothered to get involved.

“The elite will often have contests within their ranks. There’s a social pressure for there to be fewer elites, because then each one of them has more power. However, if there’s too much consolidation, the elite power base weakens and the power has to be distributed again. You read the chapter about that? No?” Zhuan sighed. “Either way, that’s only one of the dynamics present in Corrmier’s coup. This war is about converting an imperial entity into a colony.”

“But why would Corrmier help with that? He’s part of Baracuel.”

“No he’s not. He’s Decian Corrmier. He is part of the Corrmier family first. He’s friends with industrialists and landowners second, who are Akanan, Baracueli, Persaman, and even Zhighuan. You must think of the elites as a group, not as part of a country. If Baracuel collapses, the rich people here have the wealth and resources to move, or to simply dominate under new leadership. Even Gabriel would agree that the Lord Saiyal only cares about how many palaces he has in Persama, not about Persama itself. He props up the myths and history of Persama because it serves him. Sylvester Aurum does the same in Akana. Corrmier uses his patriotism for Baracuel as a rhetorical cudgel. The elites will fight among each other, but they’ll also work together.”

Zhuan paused. “I’m surprised you don’t like this material. Zoom far enough out and social movements can be turned into equations and tables just like the tides and seasons. It would make them understandable.”

Mirian shook her head. “Is that all we are then? Forces of nature that believe themselves sentient, but are no more so than sand moving down a river? Is not a single grain of sand different? Can none of us resist the pull of our base instincts, our greed—the lust for power?”

“There will always be those who lust for power. The question is what the rest of us do about it.”

“Then a new power comes in. The Zhighuan Empire was replaced by the Triarchy. The Triarchy, by Baracuel. And if the world doesn’t end, Baracuel will be replaced by Akana. Has there ever been another way?”

Zhuan was silent. “Maybe. The pre-Cataclysm records are sparse. I must believe there is.”

“I appreciate the honesty, at least.” How many impossible things? she wondered.

With a sigh, she levitated out of her chair and cast detect life. Once she could see people moving through the walls, she could get a sense of what was going on. Ibrahim was meditating on a rock, while Jherica talked to him—or perhaps at him. They might make more progress talking to the rock. Gabriel was talking to Xecatl, who’s straight posture told Mirian that she wasn’t pleased with whatever was being said.

There was one person Mirian did need to talk to. It was just the conversation she was least looking forward to.

“Aright,” she said, and levitated over to Liuan Var.

“You!” the man she’d thrown out of the meeting earlier said as she approached. 

Mirian hadn’t learned his name and didn’t intend to. She cast zone of silence around him. “Prophet Liuan, I know we have you scheduled to report on your attempts to pursue this ‘Scebur,’ but I wanted to see if you need assistance with the matter.”

The man finally seemed to realize no one could hear him talk, and stopped, though his face had gone red.

Liuan glanced his way, then shook her head. “Always straight to the point with you. Fine, I’ll give you the summary now. They’re impossible to pin down. They keep acting through proxies, convincing powerful mages to do their bidding through that cult of theirs. I started scouring the continent for mysterious holes that appeared on the 1st of Solem, but they must have gotten wind of what I was doing, because all of a sudden my agents started seeing them everywhere. Obviously, if one appears in once cycle, but not another, it’s an obvious forgery, but… there’s too many things to keep track of. And then things change again.”

“Hmm,” Mirian said. She hadn’t actually answered the question.

“No,” Liuan said with a sigh. “Jherica and I have enough difficulties coordinating things so that I don’t confuse their changes as Scebur’s. I can get a firm enough control on the RID and, as you can see, the Senate is amenable. After all, they live on Enteria too.”

Mirian guessed that most of the people with her were politicians, then. She still had several priests and RID agents, but she was clearly expanding her control over Akana, step by step. Faster than Jherica. Should I be worried about the imbalance, or let them each specialize? Jherica was crucial in helping Xecatl’s research efforts. Take them away to contest Akana instead, and they’d be undermining the primary goal of getting spirit constructs to supplement the device. “I noticed attacks on the coast last cycle.”

Liuan clenched her jaw. “It’s never gone on that long before. How was I supposed to know some of my fixes wouldn’t hold?”

“Just a comment.”

Liuan cast her own zone of silence so that it encompassed the two of them. “I can try something more permanent to restrain Akana next cycle, but it’s high-risk, which is why I haven’t done it. I won’t bore you with the specifics,” she said, while glancing at her company.

Ah, best not rile up her temporary allies, Mirian thought. They do tend to get touchy when they realize how they’re being manipulated, or how there’s nothing they can do to stop one of us from changing our allegiance or reneging on bargains. “Why not experiment?” Liuan didn’t reply, so Mirian added, “Any insight on Scebur’s motivations?”

“No. Or perhaps… one of my priests has a theory. That it has to do with the Relics of the Prophets.”

Mirian kept her face blank. Emotions had become so much easier to suppress over the years. “Oh?”

“Each of the Prophets had a Relic of great power the Ominian gifted them. Which I still don’t understand—where are our relics? Or must we earn them by moving closer to the divine path? Either way, each one was powerful, suffused with divine magic that gave them powers that our own artifice can’t replicate.”

They’re just cobbled together from pieces in the Labyrinth, Mirian thought. Her father had used an Elder artifact to make his ring. Eclipse was just made of the soul-imbued metals doused in relicarium. Still, Liuan was the one she most wanted to keep in the dark about the relics. “Yet, we already know one core tenet of the Luminates and Church was wrong; the Prophets didn’t receive visions of the future, but lived them. What else is recorded but false?”

Liuan ignored the blanched faces several of her attending priests made. “I’ve been investigating, because I think Scebur may be after the relics. The problem is that there’s been several… forgeries.” She glanced back at one of the priests, who reddened. “It turns out there is quite an industry in creating fake relics and selling them to churches that don’t know better than to even talk to a single arcanist about dating the artifact, never mind consulting the holy records. But last cycle, I had a rare opportunity to visit the Grand Sanctum in Palendurio.”

“And?”

“Have you visited the Holy Vaults?”

Here, it wouldn’t do to lie too heavily. “Missing relics and more forgeries. I moved on quickly.” Except… now I recall the theory of where the real relics went was to Akana during the split with the Church of the Ominian. Does Scebur have one? Or does Liuan?

“Yes, the forgeries I expected. But why would relics be missing? The Luminates perform regular ceremonies blessing the vaults. That means two of the relics went missing within four months of the first loop starting: the Sword of the Fourth Prophet, and the Holy Pages.”

Mirian nodded. “Or, more worryingly, during the loop.”

“Precisely. Mirian—what if the relics are what we need to solve the crisis? Each prepared for us by the other Prophets, meant to be assembled by us.”

“I suppose certain relics could be combined. The Mask of the Fifth Prophet could be combined with the Skull of the Second Prophet. To what purpose, I’m not sure, but it would be simply done. But how would one combine, say, the Ring of the First Prophet with the Sword of the Fourth? Also, the attested powers of the relics have nothing that might stop a moon.”

Liuan shook her head. “You keep assuming it’s something to be stopped. Why put an impossible task in front of us? To get us to look elsewhere.”

Another voice chimed in. “So perhaps the solution is somewhere else. A mechanism in the Labyrinth?” Jherica was apparently done talking to Ibrahim and had returned.

“The Elder artifacts are useful, but nothing that can reconfigure the leylines.” I thought Jherica of all people understood what we were doing. Why are so many of them insistent on the problem being something other than what it clearly is?

“Yes, but maybe we haven’t gone deep enough. There’s a way to control the leylines, right? Hence the leyline repulsors those big floating boats use—”

One of the military men with Liuan burst out. “That’s top secret military information! Professor Jherica, you can’t simply—”

Mirian hurled him into the bay with a telekinetic spell. Some three hundred feet away, he came up splashing and sputtering. “Prophet Liuan, why do so many of these idiots think they can keep secrets from a Prophet?”

“They don’t fully understand the situation. Which is fine,” she said, hiding her annoyance. All of her advisors had taken a step back.

“Anyways,” Jherica continued, “I think there’s controls down there. If the Labyrinth is like a self-regulating mechanism—which it certainly seems to be, given what you told me about how it even affects the climate—it must have emergency controls. Even a Tyrcast engine has an override.”

“The Labyrinth is a death trap,” Liuan said flatly. “We’ll get what we need from it, but the minimum—no more.”

“But think about it! Our cycles are shorter than the others. Perfect for delving such a dangerous thing. Maybe that’s the sign.”

Liuan shrugged. “Why bury the mechanism, though? That would put it right next to the leylines, the same leylines that might burst apart the control mechanism. Where does a Tyrcast engine put the override?”

Jherica put a finger to their chin. “On the outside, of course. Where it’s easily accessible by… oh.”

“And if you were an Elder God, where is the easiest place to access something? ‘They shall endlessly course through the deep void, as a fish swims through the ocean; nothing is beyond Their bounds,’” Liuan finished, quoting one of the sacred texts.

“Luamin,” Mirian said. “Jherica already showed us that entire moon is covered in Elder architecture. Divir is reachable, though.” Almost. Just give me a few more cycles. “But Luamin… Luamin is significantly further away than Divir.” And yet, we know that people made ships that can make even further journeys. Zhuan has already explored a lot of the Viaterrian ruins. But maybe something did survive. 

For the first time in a long time, Mirian felt doubt about her plan. If the answer was up there, that would be easier than building a city-sized device.

“You two intend to continue investigating the relics and moon, then? Jherica, you’ll want to talk to Zhuan about her discoveries on Viaterrian artifacts. I believe they had the means to build vessels to reach Luamin, which might inform anything you want to build. Hmm. The leyline repulsors could probably only bring an airship so high, but that could be the basis for an upper altitude launch platform for a smaller skiff. And you already have factories that can produce Tyrcast engines.”

From the looks the Akanan advisors were giving each other, there was a lot of skepticism in Liuan’s crowd, but a far less hostile reaction than to the revelation of the leyline regulator. If there’s an easier path, why not take it?

Liuan went back to talking with her advisors, with Jherica joining in. Mirian had worried Liuan might try to exclude Jherica from important discussions with the Akanan elites they were relying on, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

One less thing to worry about.

After a bit more conversation, she took her leave to talk with Xecatl.

“We may be in a connected spirit with the Ominian,” she told the Emperor of Tlaxhuaco as she explained her use of the violet focuses found in Zhighua.

The nagual listened to her theory and her evidence, then poked holes in her theory about how such a spirit construct might function through the temporal anchors.

“The temporal anchors return to the Ominian when removed. But where do they go when we merely die? For obvious reasons, I’ve been unable to test anything involving this matter.”

That was an interesting line of thinking. Mirian and the others knew from their subjective experience of the in-between time after dying that the temporal anchor went somewhere before the end of the loop. They knew from Celen’s fate that it left no trace of the soul.

“If it moves physically, it will be easy to detect, even in the fourth dimension. Prior to being embedded in a soul, we know that’s the case, hence the holes in our roofs. But while embedded, the motion is different. Whenever I killed Troytin, the anchor didn’t make a hole in the ceiling as it left. And if it were merely moving in the arcane dimension, Apophagorga presumably would have been able to capture mine when it killed me. If it’s moving like matter does through the Gates, I don’t know that we’ll even be able to track it.”

Xecatl contemplated that. “Perhaps another instance where spirits can be of assistance. Myrvites often have ways of detecting things we don’t even know to look for, like soil conditions, the saliva of insects, or subtle changes in ambient mana. If we can develop a specialized spirit…”

Zhuan had been right, it seemed. The more personal conversations were quite helpful.