Chapter 235 - Whispers of Dead Gods and Old Spirits

The descent down the stairs started as a solemn one, the drama of it only slightly ruined by Jherica’s heavy breathing.

“Teaching and research never involved much exercise, I’m afraid,” they said apologetically. “My knees are killing me.”

Mirian cast a quick healing spell on them. “If you progress enough in soul magic, Rostal in Palendurio could teach you dervish forms that could help.”

Xecatl gave Mirian a quizzical look. “Mirian, what was the purpose of that spell?”

“Healing,” she said. “Why?”

“You are aware that healing injuries requires specific constructions—you would say rune sequences—to avoid negative side effects, right? That appeared to be raw soul energy.”

“Hmm? I think the cultists I learned from mentioned that, but it hasn’t been a problem.”

Xecatl raised an eyebrow, then looked back at one of the nagual who were following them. “Elder Ocelo, can you expound upon that subject for me?”

“Yes, Emperor,” the nagual in question said, stepping forward with a bow. “Uncontrolled soul energy, even when properly converted and aligned with the subject’s soul, can, over time, cause physical erosion of tissues. Each injection also increases the likelihood of the development of tumors. Some tumors can be excised, but other tumors are resilient, and still others can spread. The long term prognoses for subjects repeatedly exposed to raw soul energy is poor.” She finished, bowed again, then resumed her place in the line of nagual behind them.

“They manifest purely as physical problems, though, yes?”

“Yes.”

Mirian shrugged. “Then it’s not a problem. I’ve been doing that on myself for over a decade. The cycle resets it.”

Xecatl frowned. “It’s bad practice,” she grumbled in a very unemperor-like way.

Then the solemnity returned as they neared Xylatarvia’s body.

From the valley, it was impossible to tell that the spires and cliffs of jade resembled a humanoid shape. They loomed high, shining brilliantly in the light.

The first building they encountered was another shrine, also with a fountain. Xecatl recited another set of prayers, and a nagual used a control water spell to wash the Emperor’s hands and feet. There was more praying; Mirian caught the meaning of only a handful of words. Then, they proceeded past the shrine.

There was a workshop set up for masonry, as well as cuts of focus jade and half-finished pieces. Currently, it was abandoned. How much have they taken? And what happened to the other Gods?

There were at least three other types of god-stone used in focuses. There was the white stone with red veins used by the Cult of Zomalator. They painted Them dead. But what happened to the rest of the body? There was the silver-gray stone of the focus she wore now. Who did that come from? Last was the black focus stone that her father used. Most of that had been deliberately destroyed after the fall of the Triarchy. Does that mean three Gods died? Four? A chill went through her. Everyone knew about the Gods’ War. It was taught in sing-song tones in schools to children, then in more subdued tones to anyone who went to preparatory school. Priests spoke of it in their sermons. And yet, a part of her had never reckoned with the idea of it. She had known there had been a terrible war, that it had caused the Cataclysm and nearly wiped humanity from existence, but she had thought all the Elder Gods they worshiped had survived it. Priests spoke of the Ominian’s sacrifice, but then they also spoke of Their life. 

Here, as they approached a giant slab of jade, it sank in. How many of the Gods died for us?

Then, another thought.

She remembered—from those strange soul-fragments she’d seen at the bottom of the Mahatan Oasis—the world erupting into fire. The mage who’d sacrificed himself to shut the Gate down. Entire cities, pulverized. Entire countrysides, turned molten. The world upended.

How many people died for us?

Those people had lost everything.

They’d kept going. It was their sacrifice too that was the reason she was alive. That any of them were. It was a humbling thought; some person’s long-forgotten heroism meant she could draw breath. It demanded humility of her.

She felt another wave of sorrow pass through her.

Then she was looking up at Xylatarvia—or part of Her. Even this colossal corpse of stone was a fragment of what She was—and what She had been. She looked up at the jade cliff before her, then, tentatively, she reached out her hand and reverently placed it on the stone.

***

The whispers were fragments. Incomplete thoughts. Like a voice that was too faint to hear, no matter how she strained. A distant image, too far to make out.

At first, she struggled to force something understandable from what she could feel. Then, she relaxed, and waited.

For the longest time, there was nothing. The minutes dragged by into hours.

Then, she felt the faintest memory.

She saw a field of stars. A strange tower, tilted on its side, the bottom of it spewing fire into the void. In the distance, she could see more of the towers like it, thin slivers of fire the only thing breaking up the endless stars. There was no sun in the void. No Enteria.

A pang of sympathy. A sense of pity.

They’re lost, she knew somehow. They’ll die.

Then it was over. Silence reigned again.

Mirian took her hand away and opened her eyes. She realized she was sweating. The sky was darkening into twilight. Xecatl and Jherica were gone. A nagual and two priests watched over her.

“How long?” she rasped, throat dry.

“Several hours.”

Mirian nodded, and headed back for the Veiled Temple, levitating up the mountainside. What she’d seen was as confusing as it was interesting, but it didn’t seem relevant. There was a mystery here, but not the one she needed to solve. Stay on the path, she decided.

***

They headed back to Uxalak the next morning. Xecatl would need to commune with the sacred tree there before the cycle ended. Mirian wanted to see what the Emperor’s researchers had discovered about possible Elder Gate sites. As they traveled, Mirian instructed Jherica on soul magic, and several nagual worked with Mirian on spirit constructs. 

One evening, when she was going through her arcane magic exercises, Jherica came to watch.

“Gods above, what are you even doing!” they asked. “It has to be raw magic because I don’t see your spellbook, but you’re cycling through four forces at once.”

“Five,” Mirian said. “You just can’t see magnetic fields very well. So you’re a polytheist now?”

“I think I have to be after seeing that. You know, the Ominian’s body—vessel—whatever it is—is smaller than Xylatarvia’s by an order of magnitude at least. You do this every night?”

“I told you my training regimen.”

“Yes, and I forgot half of it instantly. I still prefer astronomy. So did Xylatarvia, it seems.”

Mirian stopped casting and turned to face the older wizard. “You saw the stars?”

“A glimpse. Enough to know it was nowhere near Enteria. The constellations were all wrong.”

“Any idea what it means?”

“Not at all. Alright, what do you do next?”

“Intensity exercises. One force, as powerful as I can make it. I keep it confined to a small space so no one thinks a war is breaking out.” She projected simple heat energy, keeping it in a pin-point sphere.

“Bloody hells, I felt that. Right, fine, yes, I should go practice myself. Got to beat Tyrcast still. It would be fun to rub his nose in the dirt in a contest, especially if he didn’t break 100 myr during it.” Jherica stood off to the side and started going through their own exercises. She watched for a bit. Their control was sloppy, and their intensity low.

Everyone starts somewhere, she assured herself, then went back to her own session.

***

One morning, back in Uxalak, Mirian was carrying around a mug of spiced hot chocolate, enjoying the gardens, when she looked out towards the port. She admired the gulls soaring overhead and the bustle of the city. People were out, talking and eating. The mood was mixed. She could hear laughter, and see tears. Xecatl had ordained that the last days of the cycle would be a celebration of life. It was a kindness she could appreciate.

Something was missing, though.

Mirian squinted at one of the plazas near the port. Then she realized: the Akanan airships were missing.

She dropped her mug, shattering it, suddenly alert. In an instant, her spellbook was in her hand and she used accelerated levitation to rush over to the area where the Akanans had been.

“What happened? Where did they go?” she demanded of a Tlaxhuacan guard.

The guard stared at her, uncomprehending.

“Where?” she said in Tlaxa.

The guard shrugged.

That wasn’t right. He should be panicked if they had escaped. And, the Akanans shouldn’t have had enough fuel to return. Unless… but they would have had to put all the remaining fossilized myrvite on a single airship. So where are the others?

She cast a divination spell, targeting glyphs that she knew the airships used. The spell pointed her in the direction of a dockside warehouse. She flew towards it. The guard at the door wisely stood aside.

Inside, she saw the airships, the engines disassembled. All of them were accounted for.

Then what…?

A new suspicion arose. Mirian cast detect blood, ignoring the signals she was getting from the still-living people nearby. Sure enough, most of it had been cleaned up, but there were patches on the airships, and more in the rooms the Akanans had been staying in.

Mirian flew to Xecatl next. She was in the government palace, discussing something in Tlaxa with her advisors. The room turned to her as Mirian flew in.

“What did you do with the Akanans?” she demanded.

Xecatl’s guards had reached for their weapons, but she held up a hand. “I had them killed.”

Does death mean nothing to her anymore? Or is it just her enemies? She had to know. “Why?”

“I had my network track the Akanan crews to see if they were trying to recover reports from informants or spies I haven’t yet detected and pass them back north. Now, I know about three more informants and another drop point, and our academies have had a chance to apply what they learned of glyphs to the study of the airships.”

Mirian let out a breath and settled to the ground, spellbook vanishing. “Liuan’s work? Or Scebur?”

“They don’t know who they were working for. It’s even possible the RID planted its agents among the airship crews and they were just following orders established from before the cycle.”

“You should have told me.”

Xecatl glanced back at her meeting. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t remember to tell you everything going on in the country. Now if you please…?”

Mirian took the cue and left. Part of her wanted to go back and apologize. Part of her was angry that Xecatl had made plans behind her back, no matter how small. She tried to think back on why she’d gotten so angry so quickly.

The lack of control, she finally settled on. Her mind often leapt to the worst possibilities. The bond of trust she and Xecatl had formed had been rapid. Too rapid? she wondered.

There was a balance to be had between caution and trust. She spent the rest of the day watching Ceiba Yan, lost in contemplation.

***

The next cycle, Liuan arrived two days earlier than she had. It was still, in Mirian’s opinion, two weeks past how long it should have taken, but then again, she didn’t know how long it took to properly seize the RID now. She only knew that Liuan had been able to do it in a matter of days in prior cycles. How did Scebur stay hidden so long? Liuan had also gone to ground because of Troytin, but they must have been doing something in the intervening years. And what do they even want?

Liuan had no answers, and seemed even more frustrated than Mirian. She had begun work on finding whatever agents were on Tlaxhuaco, but had apparently spent far more time rooting around for Scebur than anything else.

Basic spirit constructs proved simple enough, but advanced ones kept Mirian’s head spinning. As the handful of nagual who could pull lessons from Ceiba Yan gradually progressed, Mirian began to critique their basic artifice. It brought back memories—made fonder by nostalgia—of sitting in Professor Torres’s class. In turn, they critiqued her analysis of spirit-constructs. She spent time deconstructing Tlaxhuacan staffs and other of their ‘natural enchantments.’ She communed. She trained.

Five more cycles passed.

Jherica alternated between working at the University and visiting Tlaxhuaco. Liuan suddenly started arriving with the airships on the 8th of Solem, which was about as soon as Mirian could get to First City anyways. Scebur, it seemed, had gone into hiding again.

Gabriel reported finding another Labyrinth entrance, this one, northeast of Urubandar. There wasn’t any sort of civilization anywhere near it, so exploration was going slowly.

No one, it seemed, could find Ibrahim. Mirian briefly wondered if he was, in fact, Scebur, but it didn’t line up with Liuan or Xecatl’s observations. They agreed to cancel the planned Council, as there wasn’t much to share that hadn’t been discussed by letter. Liuan didn’t want Scebur to seize an advantage in her absence, and it didn’t seem they would be getting Gabriel and Ibrahim to talk to each other any time soon.

Twice more, Mirian visited Xylatarvia. She even hauled up various devices she’d made to better understand the magic at work. She tried communing, but the jade corpse was silent. The data on mana was interesting, but it seemed less useful for solving the leyline crisis. She had to prioritize.

Emperor Xecatl scoured her country for a Gate in Tlaxhuaco. However, the going was slow. Simply searching for volcanic stone wouldn’t work; the island had once been a volcanic one. If there had been historical records, the grinding millennia of history had seen them vanish. Fragmented records in the Veiled Temple implied there had been a Gate of Fire on the island, but it was unclear where.

Of all the various spells the nagual could cast, few of them were divination related. Jherica and Mirian could bring allies from their respective academic institutions, but even with them, finding a deep-earth cavern was going to take a long, long time.

On the 229th cycle, Mirian felt her expertise had grown enough. The fruits she saw were no longer out of reach.

She visited Ceiba Yan, the sacred tree of Tlaxhauco.

***

When Mirian talked to her father, it was easy to see his age. There was a confidence that only came from so much practice, and a slowness that came from sorting through so many memories.

Ceiba Yan made him look like a newborn child. Its ponderous aura moved like a cloud dragging its way across the sky. When she looked at its soul, it was like looking up at a vast waterfall that had been slowed to a snail’s pace. The sacred tree had seen two thousand years of life. What was it like to watch a city grow around you? What lessons did the world teach you?

Its intelligence was a strange thing. She had talked to Xecatl and Viridian about it. It didn’t know words or language, but it knew the soil like Torres knew glyphs. It couldn’t see, yet it knew light like a friend. It didn’t know what it meant to play or hunt, but it knew so many animals by the way they touched its bark and leaves. Its understanding of movement was fundamentally different than a person. It couldn’t smell, but it understood what thousands of chemicals and magichemicals meant.

Over hundreds of years, it had learned to sift through nagual memories and see the world in a more human way, but to see the world as a human was still fundamentally strange to it.

It was this Mirian thought about as she touched its bark, and opened her soul to it.

It was an easy thing, to let Ceiba Yan touch her. The only politics it knew were the bartering of nutrients in the soil. There would be no parliamentary intrigue, no agencies with dark secrets, no hidden motives. Ceiba Yan could be trusted in a way no human could.

When it felt her soul and tried to mirror it, Mirian reciprocated. She let herself be lost in its memories.

Ceiba Yan had stood here for the endless seasons, letting the sun bake its bark, letting the chill ocean wind play over its leaves. There was a pattern to things. A predictability. She felt what it was like for roots to dig deep into the soil. What it was like to feel the rain from ten thousand seeking tendrils under the earth. What it was like for so many generations to pass like a dream. Great philosophers had argued in his shade and changed nothing about how it grew. Great generals had conquered, then perished, and Ceiba Yan had watched them come and go, just like the ants that sometimes wandered over his bark. Rich merchants had visited like the birds, but even the birds left more of an impression, as they at least left bits of fertilizer for him.

A sea eagle brought its catch to Ceiba Yan’s branches to eat. The fish bones eventually found their way into his roots.

Ash blew in from a distant volcano, and Ceiba Yan drank the dust.

A seed blew in from a distant land. Under his canopy, it never sprouted. A beetle ate it, then excreted it, and again, Ceiba Yan found sustenance.

A great carduk turtle died. Fungal tendrils broke it to pieces, and Ceiba Yan feasted again.

Beneath it, the leylines stirred, and Ceiba Yan picked up trickles of mana.

It was strange to think of how much death fueled the old tree’s life. All the world turned, but eventually, it found its way back to the soil.

Atop the Endelice Mountains, Mirian had understood the nonliving world, the foundation of all things. Here, she saw that world’s culmination. It was a different world.

And yet, we are part of it. How many trees did Gaius eat in the shade of? What was Leyun without her garden? Dhelia without her woodshop? Jeron without his schoolhouse, built of lumber? Zayd, without parks to run around in?

Her family was more than just her blood, more than just those connected to her. Humanity’s memory and history were not separate from these memories, from this history. Those who thought they were separate from it were fools, too lost in a narrow perspective.

Ceiba Yan was the soul of life, and Mirian saw how connected death was to it. Cycles of seasons, cycles of growth. Even the Gods aren’t immune, she realized. Xylatarvia still nurtured Tlaxhuaco. By Her bones, the people here constructed their spirits, grew their fields, and healed their sick. A gift, given at an incredible price, but a gift nonetheless.

And through it all, we’ve lived.

Resolution flooded Mirian. In Ceiba Yan, there was a story, not just of patience and wisdom, but of resilience. Every storm he’d survived, every war where his trunk had failed to burn, every drought he’d weathered—was a heroic tale of surviving against the odds.

We will survive this apocalypse, Mirian thought. We will.

Ceiba Yan saw her. Saw Mirian’s memory of the apocalypse. Saw through her the bursting leylines and the burning moon. Gradually, she felt its roots dig a little deeper. Reach for a little more mana.

Together, Mirian told the sacred tree.

Her soul had changed again, she knew. Not in predictable flows or resonate patterns, but in a chaotic, thoughtless way, the way only instinct could manage. In Takoa’s First City—the real one—she’d begun to take in tiny fragments of floating souls. In the Endelice, she’d begun to pick up little bits of ambient mana to fuel her aura. Now, she felt more mana available to her. The more vigorous, more caustic mana from the life around her was only dangerous if she didn’t understand it. If she  tried to make it hers, seize it and shape it, it would burn her aura like a hand in fire. If she made her aura like what it was, it would slip in like a smooth stone at the bed of a river.

When she looked around Tlaxhuaco’s gardens, the souls of the plants seemed brighter, the spirits, easier to understand.

Mirian closed her eyes, and reveled in the life that was here.