Chapter 99 - Incursion

Mirian ran out the door after Grimald and Beatrice, with Cediri trailing behind her. The evening was darkened by clouds streaming across the sky, but already, Frostland’s Gate was dotted with magical lights floating in the air. Echoing from near the spellward across the drifts of snow, Mirian could already hear the sounds of combat. She had to check herself so she didn’t start shouting out orders.

As they moved to the north of the village, anyone who couldn’t fight was barring the doors and closing the heavy shutters on the windows. There was a bellowing sound from the yaks as the herd started pushing around, trying to build up steam for a stampede.

The glowing light orbs illuminating the battlefield also cast long shadows across town. The deep BRRRONG! of the alarm bells continued, echoing off the hills.

By the time they got to the battle line, the northern fields were already lost. A few dozen soldiers and townsfolk had established defensive barricades of the streets. At first, Mirian couldn’t understand what she was seeing, because the snow across the northern fields was trembling and moving about. Then she realized that she was looking at a swarm of frost scarabites that should have been impossible. Mixed in with them were frost drakes, ice wyrms, scimitar lions, and bastion elk. Half of them were supposed to eat the other half; they certainly weren’t supposed to move together.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Cediri said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Mirian had. Just before the apocalypse, myrvites in the scrublands swarmed northwest. “Look north. On the horizon.”

Between the Endelice Mountains and the low clouds, there was a stream of otherworldly light, pink and green and sometimes orange, moving into the sky.

“They’re not trying to attack,” Mirian said. “They’re trying to run. If we let them go around us, they will. We need to form a wedge.” Even as she said it, though, she could see that reorganizing the line would be next to impossible. Frostland’s Gate was in a narrow valley, and the mountains on either side were funneling the myrvites right into town. “Flanks,” she said. “Let’s move to the western flank! We need to put up force shields!”

It was too late. Grimald had already moved to the front, and was smashing any myrvite trying to push past the defenders, and Beatrice was busy raining down flame arrows on the swarm of frost scarabites trying to push into the streets. 

Mirian shook her head, then joined the fray. It was a stupid defense, but what was she going to do? Let them all perish in front of her? She flipped to burning electric force blades in her spellbook, more because she wanted to practice tri-energy spellcasting than any specific need for the spell. She tried to target a line of myrvites, creating a pile of corpses so that the stampede would find it easier to funnel westward, around the town.

The strategy sort of worked, mostly by accident. With myrvites piling up by the barricades, the vast majority of them were moving to the sides. There was the kriishh! of shattering glass as a bastion elk rammed a greenhouse with its magical antlers, its force shockwave sending the shards flying forward.

There was screaming, roaring, smashing, and trampling everywhere. It was absolute chaos. Mirian realized there was another strategy they could have used: simply hide in the houses and let the myrvites pass through the streets, with guards in front of the yak herds and greenhouses to keep those safe. None of these myrvites were going to try to take down a stone house. They just wanted out. If Professor Viridian was here, he’d be shaking his head, Mirian thought.

Still, she tried to save as many lives as she could, and soon enough, one of those lives was her own as another bastion elk leapt over a pile of scarabite corpses right into the front line, the shockwave sending Grimald and two other defenders sprawling. Mirian pressed herself up against the wall of a house, then raised a force shield. The great mass of the elk smashed into her shield as it squeezed past, pushing her against the wall, but not crushing her like it would have without the barrier.

She let the elk go, then turned her attention to the mass of scarabites following it, using careful incineration rays to pierce the ones that were trampling Grimald and the others, keeping them pinned. Then she put up a force wall, trying to give it an angle so that the beasts went around.

While she did that, Cediri and Beatrice helped Grimald to his feet.

“We should fall back,” Mirian said.

“Are you crazy?” Beatrice said. “We need to fight!”

Mirian understood. Right now, all everyone could see was the same myrvites they’d been fighting the whole time they’d lived here, and it felt like a fight for survival. They weren’t thinking about animal instincts, and the distant energy eruption to the north was just that—too far away to think about when there were a dozen myrvites trying to break into Frostland’s Gate now.

She kept fighting. For two hours, myrvites kept streaming by, sometimes in groups, sometimes stragglers. After that, there was a push forward to repair the spellward, and so Mirian found herself scribing and repairing glyphs while an exhausted Beatrice kept watch for attacks.

Then, there was still no rest, as the entirety of Frostland’s Gate braved the plummeting temperatures to search for survivors. Again, Mirian wished she had a focus, because detect human soul worked so much better than detect animal heat. Any injured people were tucked among the still-cooling myrvite corpses piled everywhere.

And again, she didn’t even have a focus to heal any of them. When she saw the local priest, he didn’t have a censer, the usual device that contained a soul repository, meaning he would be using injured victims’ own soul energy to heal them. Wounded townsfolk, already weakened by hours of enduring the frigid cold while they waited for aid, would surely perish.

Mirian helped where she could, wrapping wounds and searching for survivors, until midnight winds screaming through the village forced everyone indoors; there were too few arcanists who could even cast a warmth spell.

It would be like this everywhere, she was beginning to understand. Eruptions, all across the land. Myrvite stampedes and broken spellwards. An irresistible pressure, bending civilization towards collapse.

First, slowly.

Then, all at once.

In the battle in the Labyrinth (right up until the greater horror appeared) and this battle, Mirian had found herself feeling distant from it all. For everyone else, there was the immediate need for survival. For her, she could step back and see the shape of things. Of course, she had information they could simply never know, and it wasn’t their fault, but it was deeply alienating. More and more, she felt apart from the world.

She missed lying in bed with Nicolus. She missed holding hands with Selesia, so many years ago. She missed being able to have a conversation with Lily—a real one, where she didn’t already know what the outcome would be. She even missed Valen, strange and prickly as she was. She missed her family, especially her little brother. But now, more than ever, she couldn’t look for them, since that might lead the other time traveler to her new identity.

Instead, she was doomed to be a stranger wherever she went. She would stand for them. But who will stand for me?

Mirian had to remind herself it’ll be worth it in the end. That was what she had, and she clung to it.

***

While Frostland’s Gate collectively tried to regain its feet, Mirian tried to take measurements of the anomaly north of them. Over the next day, the light to the north faded. Unfortunately, it was too far away for her to get any sort of real reading on the arcane forces involved. The Endelice Mountains were some seventy miles away, and the eruption maybe a dozen miles beyond that.

Instead, she turned to calculation, deriving the amount of arcane power involved given how much light was emitted. It involved a lot of estimation since the reference books she really needed were in Torrviol, but she came up with a reasonable number. That number, in turn, was so large as to be meaningless. An archmage like Medius Luspire could reach spellpower of just over 100 myr. The eruption, pouring that much energy out of the ground for days, reached something like 10,000 myr. The number was even more absurd because ‘myr’ as a magical unit didn’t scale linearly.

Still, what else was she to do but try and stop it? I’ll find something, she reassured herself. Or else why would the Ominian have even bothered?

She stopped by Elsadorra’s shop to see what she’d found about the greater labyrinthine horror.

“Similar composition to the lesser horrors I’ve seen,” she said when Mirian asked. “I still have similar questions. Normal myrvite biopsies reveal elevated arcane energy levels just after death as it dissipates into the ambient. Labyrinthine horrors have lower than background level arcane energy levels. I still see no signs of any organs of a digestive system. At least, not one I can recognize. A baffling problem. I would very much like a live specimen.”

No digestive system? “People have noticed that before, I assume. But how do they… move? And why would they try to eat us then?”

“Research speculates they eat arcane energy and convert it directly to kinetic energy to move. Perhaps they only consume the auric mana of their victims. Or perhaps their soul. They would still need some sort of organ system for this, presumably. ”

Mirian had no idea what to make of that. “Do they have anything resembling an arcane catalyst, like other myrvites? Or a material that distills down to a known magichemical?”

“That would be too easy,” Elsadorra said. “They are primarily muscular tissue, psuedobone, and carapace. One research suggested these thin strands are nerve tissue.” She used a gloved hand to hold up a thin, wet looking string. “I am skeptical. I have had fresh samples, and it does not respond to common stimuli. Are you satisfied?”

“Not at all,” Mirian responded.

“Good,” Elsadorra said. And then, “Goodbye.” That seemed to be how she liked to end all conversations.

***

They were finally planning—again—a return to the Labyrinth, when Aelius came into the End of Civilization and walked up to their table. “It’s shifted,” he said, without introduction.

“What?” Beatrice said. “It just shifted near the start of the month. It just shifted. It shouldn’t be shifting again for a few months!”

Aelius shrugged. “Didn’t expect it either. But we went down, and the first level has nasties running about again. We did some remapping, found the entrance to the second level, then withdrew. Here’s your copy of the first floor,” he said, setting a rolled up scroll down on the table.

Beatrice made a disgusted face at the map they’d just finished planning routes and sample sites at, then crumpled it up and used raw fire magic to burn it. Then she sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and sighed loudly. “Gods’ dammit.”

“That wasn’t strictly necessary. Could have used the back of that paper,” Cediri said.

“No you couldn’t, because I set it on fire,” Beatrice said.

It was Cediri’s turn to sigh.

***

They finally made it down to the Labyrinth two days later. By now, it was the 23rd of Solem, and Mirian was annoyed at just how little time they’d actually spent exploring the Labyrinth. Rationally, she knew it made sense—no one but her was getting any second chances here—but she had so much to accomplish, and was getting impatient. She’d spent the previous day on myrvite patrol just to do something, though predictably, they didn’t find any.

It was interesting to see the place after the shift. The entrance was the same; everything else was different. The hieroglyphs that had looked so ancient and immutable were rearranged. The passages that had looked so sturdy and unchanging were different sizes, and had different halls leading to and from them. Even the design of the rooms was different, with pipes in new places and the stone strange new colors. Geology class was a long time ago at this point, but she was fairly certain the stone floor was made of none of the common minerals they’d covered in class.

Mirian had rebuilt a simplified divination device and brought along a diamond-tipped drill. When they got to the second level, she used the drill to extract samples wherever she found high magical energy readings or clusters of tiny glyphs. Soon enough, her pack was full of stone-chunks, and heavy enough she wasn’t going to add to it.

Cediri continued to meticulously map every passage, though Beatrice had him beat for ‘high strung.’ Every strange sound they heard had her whipping around to investigate. Here and there, labyrinthine horrors attempted an ambush from behind darklamps, but nothing like that first time.

They also found an ice wyrm, though it wasn’t doing very well. It seemed to be dying, as it would sporadically writhe about on the ground, its crystalline scales making a horrible screeching sound when it did.

Two rooms later, Cediri let out a “whoop!” and sent out a quick force grab spell, followed by electric hand. “Ghostling,” he said, holding up the now dead translucent myrvite to the group. It was like the labyrinthine horrors in shape, but it clearly had some sort of strange organ system, visible right through its body. It was like nothing Mirian had ever seen. “Only found down here. Rare as hell. That cluster of rainbow-y looking matter below the thorax—it distills into a magichemical we still don’t understand yet. No clue what glyphs require it. Some wizards at the academy are going to be very happy with us,” he said, grinning.

Then, when the rest of the group was turned, he gave Mirian a meaningful glance that said, don’t mess this up for me.

She couldn’t help but smile. He’s going to sell it, she thought, and winked at him. That was interesting, though. Magichemicals that had no glyph? She wondered if it was connected to the runes instead, even though scribing runes usually required soul energy.

“Next room looks clear,” Grimald said, peering into it.

They stepped forward, then suddenly Mirian felt her mana being sapped. It was like a scouring wind was blowing it away—she could feel some force tearing at her aura.

Beatrice blanched. “Back. Back! Entropic room.” The three arcanists all piled back into the hallway, scrambling backwards.

Grimald joined them, standing at the threshold. “Well?”

“If it was just a suppression room, I’d say we go. But that’s not a normal antimagic room, that shit was stripping our auras,” Beatrice said. “It was stripping yours too, Grimald, you just didn’t know it. And when it’s done stripping your aura, it starts tearing at your soul.”

“Oh,” said Grimald, eyes getting wide. 

Mirian peered into the room, curious. “What’s causing it?”

Cediri let out a barking laugh. “Who knows! Good luck finding out, too. It’ll strip any form of mana that goes in there, so divination is equally useless. We’re just lucky a door didn’t close behind us, which is what we’re pretty sure will happen if you go far enough in the vault we’re investigating. That’s probably what killed all the archmagi that one time. That, and probably an automaton. Sometimes they’re hiding in the walls.”

“The Elder automatons can function in an entropic field? So it doesn’t strip glyphs?”

“No, just all mana. They become as dead as black ink while they’re in there. People just become dead. Only takes a few minutes. I don’t know that anyone’s figured out how you’re supposed to get by one of those things if there’s a locked door on the other end. By all rights the automatons shouldn’t work either, but they do.”

Mirian closed her eyes, focusing on her aura. “I lost half my mana from that.”

“Yeah, at least,” Cediri said. “Beatrice?”

“A little more than half. I say we go back.”

“Seconded. Damn. Well, we got the ghostling and Niluri’s samples.”

Beatrice shook her head as they trudged back for the stairwell back to the first level. “The Academy is absolutely going to cut our funding,” she said.

When they reached the surface, Mirian bought the ghostling off Cediri so she could experiment with it later. Then she spent a good chunk more money, this time getting precision measurement equipment and the best magnifying lenses she could find. She got to work analyzing the glyph sequences she’d brought back, eager to learn what kinds of secrets they held.