Chapter 239 - Ramifications

One by one, the souls in the underground winked out, until those that remained were running for the surface through the entrance north of town. There, they seemed to realize the rest of the Akanan army wasn’t there anymore, and joined the retreat.

By then, Mirian had organized Professor Cassius and a handful of professors and students to set up a perimeter around the town, and had handed the Luminate priests two of her soul repositories and directed them to use them for healing.

As Mirian was doing her last check around the perimeter of Torrviol, she saw the corpses of students where they’d been slaughtered in the initial attack from the west. As she passed by her old dorm, one of the corpses caught her eye. Her enchanted glasses had been shattered, and gunfire had torn her apart.

Lily.

Mirian stared at the corpse, emotions churning in her. Disgust. Anger. How many times has she died here, blinded, terrified, and alone? But another emotion stirred, one that she liked far less than the others.

Apathy.

She’ll be fine next cycle, at least. That had been something she’d told herself for so many people in so many cycles. It was a necessary line of thinking. She was glad she felt something for her old roommate’s death. She worried for the day that she wouldn’t.

Mirian moved on.

Then, she heard a remote voice spell from her father. “Naluri, come quickly. I’m by the train station.”

She stopped her patrol and flew southeast as fast as she could, a burst of wind trailing her as she sped over the town. Her father’s soul was easy enough to pick out. He was by one of the train cars, casting a spell she’d never seen before, eyes closed.

As she approached, she saw the corpses.

Gaius opened his eyes. “They all died recently. One of the Akanan remnants ambushed them before I could finish them off. Four of them have only been dead for a short time, and I’m stabilizing their remnant soul energy.”

“Resurrection of the dead,” Mirian whispered. “You mentioned trying. You really can do that?”

“Only the recent dead, and only if the soul can be reconstituted and the body healed. The damage done by the body’s death is… not always reversible. I’ll show you. Watch.”

Mirian looked at the corpses. She closed her eyes. Nicolus had been going back and forth between Torrviol and Cairnmouth. He’d returned by train at just the wrong time. Sire Nurea had thrown her body in front of him, and her corpse was on top of his. “Them,” she said.

“The woman’s too far gone. She died well before he did. I can do the boy.” He levitated Nurea’s corpse off her ward.

“Then do it.”

Mirian watched as her father began to manipulate dozens of runic bindings, each one grabbing and pushing the fragmenting pieces of Nicolus’s soul back into place. He explained his technique as he worked, only occasionally falling silent as he worked through an especially tricky piece of magic. The amount of control it required was staggering; when Mirian reached out with her own binding to help, it was like trying to push water into a sphere with her hands. She backed off, watching Gaius’s technique.

Once the soul was in place, he started going through healing spells. He pieced back together the shattered rib, fusing the shards back together. The punctured lung healed over. New blood began to flow in his veins. He did this all while keeping the soul in place.

“Then, the soul must be rebound in place. Once you adhere it to the body in several places, let the runic bindings decay naturally as the soul reattaches itself.”

The former corpse of Nicolus Sacristar stirred. He opened his eyes and gasped for breath. For a moment, he looked around uncomprehendingly. Then, he saw Mirian, Gaius, and Nurea’s corpse, and his eyes went wide. “It was… real. Gods… Gods… what? How?”

“You were unconscious. We healed you,” Mirian said, simply. There was no need to tell him the truth. She recognized the similarities between binding Nicolus’s soul back to his body and binding human soul remnants to one of Gaius’s undead soldiers. The process was similar enough that anyone with a prejudice towards necromancy would be disturbed.

He looked around again, then suddenly became angry. “You didn’t—you didn’t see this! How? Why? I thought you were a Prophet. You… we should have—she shouldn’t…” He scrambled over to Nurea and started weeping.

Mirian used a remote whisper spell to talk to her father so her former classmate wouldn’t hear. “How complete is the resurrection? This isn’t like him. I’ve seen him deal with Nurea’s death before with knowledge of the loop, and he isn’t so… emotionally volatile.”

Her father used the same spell to whisper back. “Hmm. I suspected as much. Incomplete, but by how much varies. Part of it is from the damage his brain took while his body was dead. The brain is the only thing I can’t fully heal. It can draw memories from the soul to repair some of itself, but when re-binding the soul, inevitably, fragments are missing. Those fragments are associated with memories, so it’s affected his mind. There is always some permanent damage. We’ll know in a few weeks how much.”

Mirian looked at Nicolus with pity. He doesn’t deserve this. None of them do. Yet what else can I do?

There was only so much she could do as one person. She could monitor Akana and prevent the invasion herself, but then she couldn’t head the research efforts in Torrviol, nor search the various Labyrinth sections. She could look around for Ibrahim, but she knew from Troytin chasing her that hunting down a time traveler who didn’t want to be found wouldn’t be easy. Her research here meant she couldn’t research in Tlaxhuaco, nor help Gabriel push into Zhighua. No matter what she did, she’d be failing to do a dozen other things.

She focused back in on the present. There were lessons to be learned here and now. Later would come later.

Gaius moved to the next recently dead corpse, and they repeated the lesson.

It’s worth the cost, she thought. For now, it was a relatively useless spell. But someday….

***

The next morning, Torrviol was still reeling from the attack. The way the people of the town looked at her had also changed. She often heard hushed discussion when she walked, or other times, conversations would cease completely as they saw her.

Some thanked her profusely for saving their lives and homes.

Some knelt and touched their hand to their heart.

Some walked away quickly, hoping not to interact at all.

And some went wide-eyed and trembled in fear.

The damage to her research was extensive. A fire had broken out in the Myrvite Studies building, and gunfire had shattered the greenhouses. Torrian Tower had taken less damage, but there were still a lot of broken glyphs, disrupted enchantments, and knocked over papers to deal with. Dozens of apprentices and professors who had been working for her had been killed.

She found herself in a grim mood. No one much liked the hundreds and hundreds of Akanan corpses piled around the town, and a disease outbreak would further impede her, so by midday, she found herself incinerating bodies with her father. “What a waste of time,” she said as she cast another remote flames spell.

“Part of life, I’m afraid,” Gaius told her. “Waiting for a carriage that’s late. Repeating chores. Needing to go back home because you forgot something important. You can’t let it bother you.” He paused, then said, “It does still bother me, though. I’ve always struggled with patience.”

There was another group of dead Akanans north of them. Mirian began incinerating each, compacting the ash back into the soil.

“So how do you do it?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“How do you cling to… kindness? Hope? The greater ideals that you do this all for? I find myself annoyed all the time. Surrounded by the ignorant, who I must teach again and again. Harassed by the malevolent, or those too stupid not to be tricked by them,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the still smoldering airship.

“Some days, I don’t. On the days I do though? Love.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “You’ve heard the more complicated answers, I’m sure. As the Unification War proceeded, I… became unpleasant. There’s a great deal of lies in the Baracueli histories, but there’s quite a bit of truth in there too. War makes monsters of us all, and I fought for many, many years. It became easy to kill. Satisfying, even. Plenty of them deserved to die. But that’s not why we live life. Life is about sharing a good conversation over a good meal with good friends and family. Everything else just revolves around that.”

Mirian raised an eyebrow. “Even if you can’t eat?”

“Even then. Oh, of course I was bitter about it for a few decades, but I don’t regret it. There’s too much left to learn for me to regret chasing immortality.”

“Then isn’t life about learning and growing?”

Gaius torched another group of scattered corpses. “Sure. But it becomes empty if you can’t share it with people. I enjoy learning history, but the satisfaction of new knowledge is best shared, not hoarded. An artist wants her art to be seen. A musician, his notes to be heard. To be human is to crave connection, and love is our primal, desperate connection to each other. We connect ourselves in other ways. Friendship. Trade. Reliance. And less admirable ways. Hate. Fear. Envy. Not recommended, but they are bonds, aren’t they? If you let yourself be disconnected entirely, then you lose your humanity.”

“Then you didn’t succeed. You’ve been holed up in a secret lair for near two decades making soldiers.”

“I didn’t. Life is a process. It’s never done. I would have done what I must to get you back.” They continued burning corpses. “I don’t know what’s to be done about the warmongers. The people who take and take, and never have enough. The Baracueli couldn’t leave us alone. If we’re to have a good life full of good meals with good friends, the ravenous leeches wearing human faces must be dealt with. Sometimes, we must give up a part of our humanity. Just keep those threads of connection alive.”

Mirian shook her head. “One by one, I feel those threads of connection snapping. Dhelia, Jeron, and Zayd… I’ve stayed away from them to protect them, but then the connection, the love… fades.” Mirian stopped walking, her gaze following the smoke trailing up into the air. “Lily died again. I barely felt anything.”

“A fighter must harden her heart,” Gaius said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Yet, any shell that can be made can be broken. What are you fighting for?” he asked.

She thought about that. A cold wind blew across the bloody fields, but neither of them felt it.

Gaius continued. “When it was me, I came back to the reason I’d joined the war in the first place. I’d fought for the Naasqual, so I returned to the Naasqual. It took me a long time to return. But then I met Leyun, and I knew the fighting, the pain—it had been worth it.”

“I need to think,” she said.

“Then go think. I’ll finish cleaning up this mess.”

***

Mirian spent a few more hours wandering the battlefield. Then, impatience seized her. She felt like she was wasting time. Why did she need a rationale? Her philosophy didn’t need to be particularly deep. Existence was preferable to nonexistence. She returned to her work. 

The damage to most of the spirit constructs they’d been working on proved too extensive to recover. Mirian reestablished the arcane physics experiments, but when the attack had hit, she hadn’t just lost information, she’d lost people too. Some, because they’d died. Some, because she’d lost their trust. 

Nicolus was one of them. She monitored him because, like it or not, she wanted to see the effects of resurrection on the psyche. He was the best one to examine, because she knew him best.

After a few days, he was better, but he still wasn’t quite the same. It took longer for him to think. His words sometimes became jumbled. His emotions were all over the place. When he saw her, he became afraid.

She stopped bothering him.

Several regiments of Akanans tried to attack again, but this time, the incoming force was spotted by militia patrols and Mirian and Gaius could crush it before it was even near the town. Five militia members died. Another hundred Akanan soldiers burned. Neither Jherica or Liuan had responded to Mirian’s zephyr falcons, but that didn’t surprise her. With the war declared, those messages were likely being intercepted at the delivery point. She’d figure it out next cycle.

One evening, Archmage Luspire approached her as she was looking through notes. He watched her from the door. She smelled alcohol on his breath. He was drunk again, then.

“Who is… Professor Xidi?” he asked.

“I told you when he arrived. A Persaman arcanist. An archmage, obviously.”

“Are you aware he’s using, um, an illusionary disguise?”

“Yes.”

“And… necromancy?”

Mirian looked at him. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Luspire looked scared. She’d rarely seen him scared. His hand was twitching by his spellbook. “There are… lines. That shouldn’t be crossed.”

“Would you rather the Akanans slaughtered the entire town? Because that was the other option.” She hesitated. If she summoned her spellbook, she was pretty sure Luspire would attack. She sighed. “Why are you here?”

“To stop you, if we need to.”

We? Mirian realized he hadn’t come alone. She wanted to cast her detect life spell to see how many he’d brought, but that would involve her spellbook. “Should I remind you what our research is for?”

“Luspire, move,” she heard a familiar voice say. Professor Torres. “It’s a convenient excuse. You could justify anything with it, couldn’t you?” she said. Several other professors now moved into position behind her. Cassius. Runer. Even Eld and Holvatti. If they were all working together, that wasn’t a good sign.

Mirian closed her eyes. “That argument again.” She opened them again and flung the notes aside. Luspire flinched, hand touching his spellbook. “You can’t stop me. None of you can. That’s the thing about time loops. You will forget all of this. I won’t. You’re all powerless.” She snarled the last word.

“What did he do to Nicolus?” Torres asked.

“Saved his life.” Mirian shook her head. “None of you understand. None of you can understand. How do I convey all the things I’ve learned, everything I’ve seen… the misconceptions I found, the truths I uncovered. Lessons about soul magic. Hidden truths in the Grand Sanctum. Secrets beneath the Labyrinth. Sacred mysteries in distant lands. How do I convey that all with mere words?”

“I found the undead soldier in the underground,” Cassius said. “Mirian, you’re playing with powers you don’t understand.”

Mirian was silent. She understood it just fine. Gaius had been teaching her. It was Cassius who didn’t.

“Do you really have nothing to say for yourself?” Torres asked.

Mirian summoned her spellbook and cast black shield.

In an instant, the room was filled with spells. Luspire’s fire spells burned through the room. However, the more spells that were directed at the black shield, the more arcane force she had to play with. She spun most of it into the light-suppression part of the shield that was the secondary defense of the spell, meanwhile, she began to cast mana siphon spells, locking one onto each aura. Professor Atger fled. Professor Eld tried to break line of sight, but that didn’t stop the siphon. Luspire put up his prismatic shield, and Mirian ignored it. All of their spells were being suppressed by her spell-resistant metals. The dozens of spells they threw at her, she hardly noticed; only Luspire’s were strong enough to need her attention. The archmage’s fire spells splashed back, burning Torres badly. Mirian healed the burns with a thread of soul energy, continuing to stand there.

After a few minutes of the bombardment, their auras were mostly depleted.

Mirian dismissed her black shield. “Well, this loop was a waste,” she said. Luspire was looking at her dumbfounded. Torres still had her wand out, but Mirian could see the fear in her eyes. She shook her head again sadly, then broke the window behind her and flew out.

***

Gaius found her floating in the air, high above town, looking out beyond the Littenord mountains, looking towards the Endelice. He came and floated next to her without a word. Mirian liked the snow-covered peaks. There was a majesty to them. The north forest was dusted by its own snow, the pines and firs implacable as always, the mushroom trees looking dour but colorful with their shrunken caps.

“When I look at people now, I look at them like puppets I want to pull the strings on. The connections to them I have—they won’t last.”

Her father was silent. He floated there as a comforting presence.

“When I need to center myself, I come back to this. The beauty… whether here, or down in Persama, or in Tlaxhuaco. There’s… so much of it. The snow on the mountains never loses its majesty.”

She felt Gaius’s gaze on her, and his smile. The cold wind continued blowing past them, making their robes whip about. The cold didn’t touch either of them, though.

“That is a thread I can hold onto. Whatever parts of my humanity I lose, whatever walls I have to put up around my heart… there will be this one connection. No matter how many times I see the wonders of this world, their beauty doesn’t fade. If nothing else, I’ll fight for this.”

“Good,” her father said.

Mirian smiled back at him. It was a soft, sad smile. “I love this place,” she said.