Chapter 255 - A Cosmic Soul

The expedition spent two full days in its new camp around the Gate while Mirian worked on getting new leyline data and organizing supplies. The Torrviol Gate could indeed be lifted up into the courtyard, which simplified moving supplies immensely—but also created a hazard that had to be guarded. Several Academy arcanists raised low stone walls around the courtyard so that students wouldn’t be able to sneak in.

Zhuan spent most of those days in silent contemplation. Mirian saw her often looking out from high balconies, staring at the horizon.

At night, Mirian and Zhuan continued to look for each other in the Ominian’s dream. Once more, they found each other, and were able to communicate. When they woke, they went through their experience, trying to figure out if it was technique or chance that had let them meet.

“The sense of where in the dream you are is different than when in the dream you are,” Zhuan insisted. Mirian had to admit she probably needed more practice. She’d only been using the dream focus stone for a short time. That some parts had come naturally to her didn’t mean everything had.

On the afternoon of the third day, Mirian had finished her initial readings of the leyline energy pouring into the Jiandzhi. Her heart started pounding as she went over the readouts.

“You have that look,” Ibrahim said. “Is that good or bad?”

“I… it’s preliminary data. But… if this continues, it’s better than I could have ever hoped for.” The leyline readings were still incredibly faint, the detectors showing more of a hazy cloud of energy than the lines she was used to picking up. When the Alkazaria Gate was smoothing out the imbalance of energy that flowed past Palendurio, it only took a week or so for the leylines there to reach capacity. “This could give us a month. Two months. Maybe even three or four.”

Ibrahim nodded. “Everything changes from this.”

Mirian whirled. “It gives us time.”

“Time to scheme. Time for rulers to consolidate power. Time for armies to muster. ”

“Time to build! Gods’ blood, Ibrahim, do you really think war will save us from anything?”

“It’s as inevitable as the eastern winds. Zhuan sees it too.”

Mirian shook her head. The man was still implacable. She went to talk to Zhuan.

“—two oniwyrm attacks and one petal demon. Are you sure? Not three?”

“Yes, Exalted,” one of the expedition captains was telling her.

“Fewer attacks than you expected?” Mirian asked as she approached.

“Yes. And it’s only been three days. If the Jiandzhi settles down, the southern corridors and Sanctuary Road may become viable for use.” She looked east. “Moving east will be a problem, though. None of my expeditions have made it that far.”

Mirian looked around at the assembled camp. “Uh… can we just fly? Atrah said it’s only twenty miles.”

Zhuan raised an eyebrow. “Twenty miles. Of sustaining both levitation and the combat spells you’ll need? Through attacks of mist jellies, canopy screamers, and winged tigers?”

“Yes. Either Atrah or I can carry you.”

The other Prophet gave her a stern look.

“With a lift person spell, to be clear.”

Her look softened. “You are sure you can accomplish this? I abhor waste and inefficiency.”

“I do as well. And yes.”

Just then, a commotion went up around the Gate. Apparently, a student had wandered through. Mirian vaguely recognized him. Is that the one who blew himself up in the Alchemistry building? Not great survival instincts. A guard had also stepped through, and was trying to drag the boy by the arm back with him.

“The danger of having a Gate in the middle of a school,” Mirian said. “Shall we set off?”

Zhuan frowned, staring off into her thoughts. Finally, she said, “Yes. We’ll see what’s there first. It is the most efficient path.”

Gaius joined them and they levitated high above, then flew east.

***

Acclerated levitation really was an amazing spell. When Mirian had first tried to trek across the Littenords to reach Frostland’s Gate, she’d managed far less than twenty miles a day. It had taken refinement and practice—plus the auric mana to sustain it—but now her spell could do it in just under an hour. She’d given Gaius a copy of the spell, and so they soared high above the canopy, only the tall peaks above them. Mirian still loved the feeling of the wind whipping past her face. 

A swarm of mist jellies tried to attack them, but she and her father cleaved through them easily. She caught sight of a winged tiger lazily soaring above them in the distance, but it seemed to think better of attacking.

As they moved closer to the mountain, Zhuan called over the wind, “How old are you?”

“Forty-two.”

Gaius made a strange noise. Had she not told him this loop? There was so much to remember.

“I was older than you when this all began. I thought it was impressive when I broke into the category of archmage a few years back. How in Enteria do you have this kind of mana and spellpower?”

Zhuan had gone through soul ascension once, so she already knew about that. “Practice,” Mirian answered. She’d also told—and shown—Zhuan her training regimen. She couldn’t have kept it a secret if she wanted to; Gabriel, Ibrahim, and Luan all knew it, and she demonstrated parts of it every day.

And have your father start your soul magic training when you’re a toddler, she thought. She’d been looking at enough souls and arcanists now to notice a pattern in the strength of a soul and the maximum output of a caster. Just like a child picked up a language more quickly than an adult, she seemed to have picked up tricks to strengthen her soul more easily—tricks that only revealed themselves much later in her life. She couldn’t exactly tell Zhuan that part, though.

“There,” Gaius said, peering through a lens spell. They started descending towards a valley that was high up in the mountains. “Strange. I can see what looks like the remnants of a tower underneath the foliage, but it was constructed… sideways. A nonsensical design. No wonder parts of it have collapsed. Perhaps an experimental structure? I’m not seeing any ships or drydocks of any sort, though. Let’s get a closer look.”

As they flew in, Mirian caught the general shape of the structure her father was talking about. It was vaguely cylindrical, with thick leg-like protrusions keeping it above the ground. Or rather, they had once kept it above the ground; only two of the ‘legs’ had survived. As the others had cracked, the sideways tower had fallen, shattering pieces of it. 

Like the other Viaterrian structures they had seen, the building was immense. Twice as tall as Torrian Tower, if they were to put it upright, she thought. But why put it sideways?

She had a flash of recollection. The building reminded her of something… but what?

They landed near the structure. Several small lizard-like creatures scattered as they landed, making clicking noises of alarm. The jungle was sparser here, but the building still dripped with vines and was covered in tangles of plants.

Her father frowned. “There’s little else here. Some squat structures, collapsed by erosion.” He cast a divination spell, then said, “There’s a metal plaza beneath the soil here. An absurd waste of steel, but the Viaterrians aren’t attested to being fools like the late Triarchs were. They must have had a reason.”

Mirian looked around. The rooms inside the tower were visible from where large parts of it had sheared off when the metal legs propping up the thing had collapsed. The rooms, though, were arranged in circles around the center. Gaius was right; from a structural engineering standpoint, it was a terrible design. Unless…

She looked closer at the rooms. If someone had, say, put the tower upright, people would have been able to stand on the floor—or ceiling, for that matter. But lying on its side as it was, the floor plan only made sense if the people could walk on the outer walls. Advanced gravity magic? she wondered. The rooms were rusted to the five hells and back, but she could visualize what it might have looked like.

Something about the curved sections of room reminded her of a spellrod. The design would be what I would use if I needed parts of the tower to rotate.

They began to explore the tower, levitating up to land on the inside.

“Are we sure this is Jhulu?” Zhuan asked.

“Not at all,” Gaius said. “Vessels. Boats. Hmm. The Cataclysm was incredibly destructive, but it didn’t raise entire mountains. There’s no way they built and maintained seafaring vessels here. Perhaps Jhulu is further east.”

Mirian began to drift through the rooms, light spell illuminating the rooms. The place was absolutely infested with nests. There were hollow spaces in the wall; perhaps they’d held something once, but now, she could hear rodents running about. She found a chip of strange material. It was transparent, but not glass; hard, but light. Frowning, she put it in her pocket. Perhaps she could do an alchemical analysis on it.

Gaius and Zhuan continued to talk, speculating on the purpose of the building. Her father hadn’t had his maps of the region for a hundred years. “…misremembered, maybe…” she heard as his voice echoed through the strange cavernous rooms and halls. In another place, mildew was growing beneath a weak shaft of light that shone through a hole in the ceiling. A rounded ceiling makes sense. But why a rounded floor and walls? The doors had also been made out of thick steel, which seemed excessive. Some were closed, though she could bypass them by flying around to the next hole in the structure. There were places where the steel had been rent, or a door torn off. Based on the carapace fragments, she guessed lesser titans had been scavenging things from the tower. Though what did they want?

She kicked at a pile of rubbish. There were more pieces of that translucent material, mixed in with dirt, a few animal bones, and—was that colored string? She picked it up. A divination spell quickly told her there was copper beneath the colorful wrapping. Clever. A minimalist way to keep the material insulated.

She wasn’t finding the thing she was most interested in, though. Where are the glyph and rune remnants? They’d run out of residual mana, of course, but the physical structure should still remain. Why use copper wires if there’s no mana being conducted? And copper is the cheaper choice. Surely, the great Viaterrians knew that silver or gold was better for conducting mana, right?

Another thing was missing: crystals. There should be fragments of conduit crystals, even if they were broken. Mirian went through several divination spells, but they turned up with nothing. Had myrvites consumed it all? But there’d still be something left over.

Near one end of the sideways tower, the legs had collapsed, but the structure itself was more or less intact. Another steel door barred her way, but this time, there was no crack in the wall to bypass it.

Mirian used a magnetic pull spell to rip the door off its hinges. It was surprisingly sturdy; even after all this time, it was about as hard to pull apart as one of the doors on the Akanan Dreadnoughts. 

Dreadnoughts. Hmm…

An idea occurred to her as she stepped into the next room. The Viaterrians had an advanced civilization. Of course they had airships. Perhaps… but why wouldn’t it have a deck? Why the orientation? Why the allowance for rotation?

The next room she entered was cavernous, and by far the strangest she’d seen yet. Water had seeped in, leaving stains of rust and stagnant pools, but with her light spell, she could see the glint of metal everywhere. In the center of the room was a huge torus. Her divination revealed the presence of copper, but it was alloyed with other metals that she didn’t have glyphs for detecting. 

Still, there were no glyphs. No runes. Nothing that indicated magic at all. If this had been an airship, there would have needed to be a leyline repulsor. Then Mirian froze. She’d seen this place before.

No. Not me. Xylatarvia.

Her mind went back to the fragment she’d seen while communing with the Elder God’s colossal corpse. A tower, I’d thought. But floating in the void. Cylindrical. A few thousand years of erosion, neglect, and myrvites tearing at it, and most of those features would have vanished.

Another thought: there was no magic. The Elder Gods can perform magic in the great void, but could a human? There’s no ambient mana. No Labyrinth. No myrvite ecology—no myrvites. Gods above…

She sat down cross-legged. Words of a sermon she must have heard a hundred times ran through her head. Xylatarvia descended from the stars on a ship made of vines. She delivered her message of peace—and her knowledge of the arcane glyphs.

The old stories had always struck her as silly, but what if there was an ancient truth? Realization struck her like a whirlwind. Xylatarvia found humanity, but not on Enteria.

She closed her eyes, mind racing, trying to pinpoint another memory. I was in the Grand Sanctum. Looking for secrets there… it was a room… behind a statue of Altrukyst! There was a story I hadn’t heard—She sailed Her ship of vines through a hole in Altrukyst’s chest, and it emerged from the Luamin Moon. Now, she knew there were mechanisms of the Elder Gods on the Luamin moon. Construction on the same scale as the Labyrinth. Zhuan talked about using the Gate to escape Enteria. Why would the Gates be limited to Enteria? Why would the Gates be limited in size?

Zhuan was looking for ships that sailed the seas, but they would find no such thing. So many myths speak of Xylatarvia’s ship of vines, not here on Enteria, but among the stars. 

This is the Viaterrian Chimean Behemoth, she realized.

Then, another thought:

Professor Viridian had spoken endlessly about strange gaps in evolution. Humans were here, along with several other species of mammal, but there were few common ancestors bridging the gap. In fact, evolution itself was something of an article of faith in the Luminate Order, passed down as ancient knowledge. And how many other truths were just that? Originating from the Viaterrians, discovered not here but…

Most myrvites had no such gaps in their evolutionary record. There were hundreds of species of drake, dozens of types of wyverns. Fossilized myrvite itself attested to myrvites existing on Enteria for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps longer. Yet no such archaeological finds of human civilization older than five thousand years old. Some wizards assumed the bones were eaten, others, that they were destroyed in the Cataclysm… but no.

Her mind reeled at the implication.

We are not from Enteria.

She opened her eyes, staring at the ancient mechanism before her. No precursor technologies from the Viaterrians have been discovered because they came here with them. Marvels of technology, but invented somewhere distant.

But where?

Mirian closed her eyes again, feeling the violet focus beneath her hand. She passed soul energy through it, bringing her memories back to the Ominian’s Mausoleum. She brought her mind to the vision of the stars above it—that great void, and so many of them. She thought again of those towers—those ships—drifting through the void.

How far did we travel? Why did people leave? What happened—to our home?

She thought of Gaius’s tales of what the world was like before the spell engine. Vast stretches of dangerous wilderness.  Untamed wilds. And yet, we could not be contained. After the Cataclysm, humanity had become fragmented, cut off, isolated—but it hadn’t stayed that way. Explorers had braved the seas without any way to stop leviathans or sea serpents. They had found ways to travel through even the deadliest jungles. The threat of death couldn’t contain their urges; even now, people looked at the unconquered frontiers and yearned to illuminate their mysteries.

Sometimes the exploration wasn’t one of journeys, but of knowledge. Ancient alchemists had risked life and limb to discover the secrets of magichemicals. Wizards like Professor Endresen pushed at the boundaries of arcanism and physics, looking for the answers to questions, and then pushed again when their answers led to more questions.

When empires fell, young arcanists like Gaius explored their ruins. No matter how dangerous the place, humanity would be pushing at the boundaries. Beatrice and her companions, delving into the Labyrinth. Mirian herself, pushing into the deadly Endelice Mountains, looking to answer questions.

There, amidst the endless cold, she had understood the nonliving foundation all life depended on. In Tlaxhuaco, she’d seen the nature of living things, with nothing not connected.

In Takoa’s First City, she’d seen the souls of the lost and forgotten, the long line of humanity that had led them to this present. At her mother’s tomb, she’d seen into her inner soul and its closest connections. Now, she saw a glimpse into the nature of humanity’s soul. There was an urge to explore, to move, to wander; a curiosity that could not be bound. The laws of the universe conspire to try to keep life pinned to a world. But we yearn for more, for greater things. To be connected not just to each other, not just to our ancestors, not just to the world, but to the great void above. A cosmic soul.

Perhaps not all the Viaterrian ships had come here. Perhaps some still wandered, or had found another world. Altrukyst the Traveler saw us, and saw His equal. 

There was something profound that resonated in her revelations. It spoke to a greater purpose, a noble calling. Humanity could be cruel. It could be shortsighted.

But it could also be something greater.

Enteria will not be our end. This is just another beginning, she resolved. We will not stop growing and learning. We will not stop exploring.

Resolution coursed through her, and she felt her soul shifting again. She could feel the currents of her soul moving a little faster, the threads of it, now more robust. The boundary between her soul and aura was not a line, but a gradient. No more a limit than the boundary of sky that lay between humanity and the stars.

She flexed her aura, letting mana course around her open palms. She could feel the power there, waiting for her command.

When we overcame our worst impulses, the void itself could not bind us. We did it before. We’ll do it again.

The last apocalypse didn’t stop us. This will not be our end either.