The air blasted past Mirian’s force shield, white jets of cloud streaming past. The taut chains followed behind her. Below, Alkazaria rapidly shrank.
Unlike with the storm she’d conjured a few days ago, there was little nuance or complexity to her spells. It was simple: go up fast. Fast enough that she could feel the force of acceleration through her whole body, but not so fast that she’d pass out.
The Akanans had tested how far from a leyline a repulsor could be before the ...
2025-12-31 14:30:47 +0000 UTC
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Mirian sat on the cliffside overlooking Arriroba. Nearby, Zayd was explaining his recent adventure to his friends. “… and then we went wooosh and we were so high up! And there was a two-headed vole-tur and it said scraaaw! and then we flew past a big magic color going bwooosh! and then we were here!”
“No way,” said one of the other children.
As if that was going to stop him. “And then…!”
Grandpa Irabi sat next to Mirian. Dhelia and ...
2025-12-29 18:49:14 +0000 UTC
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2025-12-28 17:11:48 +0000 UTC
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Equinox materialized around Mirian.
“Oh,” Quintus said.
The last thing he saw was the shine of her gritted teeth, predatory, like a bog lion’s.
The fire poured out of her in waves.
The Lord Governor and his lackeys were melted; even their bones turned liquid. The tapestries burned like paper, the wood paneling, just as fast. The marble turned red and molten in places, and then Mirian burst the ceiling apart, emerging from the Governor’s Mansion as the room belo...
2025-12-28 16:36:25 +0000 UTC
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Ended up moving my travel to tomorrow, so you get an update. However, things have been busy, and now the holidays are upon us, which has not made anything less busy. No fun tangent this week. So far, I've been able to avoid missing a day posting during the holidays, but there's a fair chance I miss Wednesday. If I do, I'll make it up some other day! Hope everyone's holiday season is going well.
Edit: Yup, 0% chance of the next chapter going out today (Wednesday 12/24). Just too many th...
2025-12-22 00:24:06 +0000 UTC
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The archives were meticulously organized, and even more meticulously guarded. There was no protocol for maintaining an illusion while accessing them, and no way someone who was a mere “informant” would be allowed to see them. However, there was a flaw in the wards. The Deeps were frankly amateurs when it came to runic architecture, and their sequences that tried to detect unauthorized souls were easily modified, allowing Mirian to find an unoccupied meeting room in the third basement leve...
2025-12-21 20:50:06 +0000 UTC
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Divir fell early again. It was only the next loop that Mirian and the others realized just how inaccurate her forecast was. With Ceiba Yan’s roots just over the Labyrinth, the Uxalak Gate offered a way to siphon even more energy from the leylines than the Jiandzhi Gate. According to her calculations, six Gates attempting to stabilize the cascade should have delayed armageddon eight, maybe even nine months.
Instead, Divir fell on Nerevain 28. For two more cycles, Mirian attempted to ad...
2025-12-17 15:00:22 +0000 UTC
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2025-12-14 19:18:16 +0000 UTC
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The dark hall of the Mausoleum greeted them, both familiar and strange.
“It feels like something’s stinging me all over my body,” she heard a nagual say.
“I believe that’s the entropic field decaying,” Xecatl said, looking to Mirian for confirmation.
She nodded. “We will encounter the tertiary field soon. Prepare yourselves,” she said, stopping inside the entrance. There, eight of the nine bindings were inscribed and waiting. She glanced at Liuan. Yes, she’...
2025-12-14 18:11:09 +0000 UTC
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Mirian watched the auroras over Alkazaria. They’d intensified dramatically over the past four days, but they were still at lower levels than usual.
She stood atop one of the towers on the central hill wearing Equinox and summoned the leyline repulsors into place. A collective murmur went through the priests and arcanists watching her. She was used to the reaction. It was one thing to know, and another to see.
Mirian began to gather her auric mana, letting it gather. “Go ahead,...
2025-12-10 20:44:30 +0000 UTC
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2025-12-07 17:03:56 +0000 UTC
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Mirian watched as members of the Cult of Eintocarst went through their final test of the Holy Crucible. The divination spell engines around the room began to glow as illusionary projections danced in front of her. She only half paid attention to them, preferring to sense the magic currents herself as they moved through her aura.
She shook her head. There was too much leakage on the fourth soul refractor. “Check the rune sequences in the 7B channel. I’ll fix the refractor myself.” ...
2025-12-07 16:26:28 +0000 UTC
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Jiandzhi, West of the Gate - Duala 27
“It’s coming! Run! Run!” Qian said, and began sprinting east through the trail. Behind him, he could hear the thunderous steps of a lesser titan crashing through the jungle. Not for the first time, Qian wondered what egg-headed fool had decided to call these terrifying beasts ‘lesser.’ He also wondered who this woman was that she could convince the great Zhuan Li to do something as foolish as lure beasts to
2025-12-03 19:25:29 +0000 UTC
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2025-11-30 19:55:17 +0000 UTC
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Once the early business of the next loop was taken care of and everyone had their focuses, they met for the first Council of the 252nd loop. As usual, they met in the dreamscape, in the cavernous throne room of the Mausoleum, the Ominian sitting still in Their great chair, unmoving.
It started off about how Mirian expected.
“Mirian, what did you do?” Gabriel thought at her.
“How do you know it was me?” Mirian projected back.
Ibrahim sent the i...
2025-11-30 19:22:55 +0000 UTC
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Mirian made her way to the conduit room near the Gate immediately.
I made it, she told Eyeball as she blinked into the room.
HAHA. HAHAHA, Eyeball thought at her, but they didn’t have the usual amusement flashing on their skin. HOLD ON. I’M DELAYING.
Pact stuff?
PACT STUFF. WELL, YOU’VE FIGURED OUT THE PACT PROBLEMS ARE FALLOUT FROM THE GODS’ WAR. LITTLE TIP FOR YOU, WHILE WE WAIT FOR OUR HUMOR CHALLENGED FRIEND. IF YOU...
2025-11-26 21:38:09 +0000 UTC
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2025-11-23 19:11:16 +0000 UTC
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Mirian stood over the corpse of Scebur. He’d bound a silver mask to his face, and when the RID had taken it off, some of the flesh had come with it. The mask was nonmagical, but mimicked the pattern of jewels embedded in the Skull of the Second Prophet. Why the obsession with the Second, though? Nothing she’d found in the histories of the Prophets had given her any clues. The historical Scebur remained as much a mystery as this present one.
There were some features she could see, at...
2025-11-23 18:38:46 +0000 UTC
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I think this is the final draft of the map of known Enteria. If you do notice errors, problems, or nonsensical parts, feel free to point them out.
Like a real map, plenty of information is left out for comprehensibility. For example, only major rivers are shown, most villages and towns aren't on the map, and not every place that is shown is named.
2025-11-19 20:31:48 +0000 UTC
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She and Zhuan spent three more days together in the mountains. On the third evening, Mirian felt something change as she was speaking to a scimitar lion. It was like when she’d been practicing Eskanar. For a time, she’d been able to muddle through conversations. Then something had clicked, and she was thinking in Eskanar. As her thoughts touched the scimitar lion’s aura, she felt a better understanding of what it wanted, how it saw her. It was nothing fundamentally new—she’d been sp...
2025-11-19 20:10:19 +0000 UTC
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Fun Tangent
As people have probably noticed, I like to use history to inform worldbuilding so that the world feels more realistic.
Fahrenheit cobbled together his temperature scale by making the coldest thing he could make (a brine solution, which he set as '0 F') and 90 F being the human body temperature (except that later had to be redefined. I've also heard a story where he set the temperature of the human body at 100 but when he measured himself he had a fever; w...
2025-11-16 21:28:30 +0000 UTC
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The next cycle, Liuan re-exerted her control over Akana Praediar, and Mirian was pleased to see that Akana Praediar’s aggression was restrained until late in the month of Nerevain, which meant the attacks on Cairnmouth and Palendurio were just starting when moonfall annihilated all life on Enteria.
Two cycles later, Xecatl had found a way to use spirit manipulation to control a kind of colorful myrvite bird found on Tlaxhuaco. A zephyr falcon was faster, but these birds could carry so...
2025-11-16 21:04:05 +0000 UTC
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Mirian’s robes were in tatters and her wounds still slowly closing as she asked Eyeball to lower the Gate back down into the underground. The Gate now had a family of mildly confused lesser titans guarding it, but they’d gorged themselves enough that they’d be sticking around. And, if there was one thing the Akanan army was completely unready to handle, it was a trio of greater myrvites from the Jiandzhi that could negate force spells and most shields.
The oniwyrms that had come t...
2025-11-12 19:06:10 +0000 UTC
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The artillery waited a dozen heartbeats while the Akanas passed through the pre-sighted areas. Then they opened fire, airburst shells spitting out lightning, fire, and magnetic pulses that thundered across the sky. Shields lit up all around. Two battleskiffs plummeted to the ground, trailing smoke and bursting with multicolored fire, but most of the attackers absorbed the opening barrage.
Mirian was already in the dervish form of the Dusk Waves to speed up her casting. She sent an i...
2025-11-09 18:14:23 +0000 UTC
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Akana Praediar’s attacks on Torrviol had been blunted initially, but as the 243rd loop proceeded, they redoubled their efforts, now coming from the south instead of the west. Presumably, that meant Cairnmouth had become occupied. Occasionally, Mirian would negotiate with a leadership figure and agree to halt attacks on Torrviol, only to have something happen and the attacks redouble.
It didn’t make sense. How much blood is worth the Gate? Who is behind undermining...
2025-11-05 18:56:13 +0000 UTC
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2025-11-02 18:44:55 +0000 UTC
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Mirian began the arduous work of re-scribing the glyphs in her spellbook. She took the time to import specialized materials using Nurea’s connections with the Syndicate and used Torrian Tower’s specialized precision-scribing equipment. Along the way, she found ways to improve the efficiency of the glyphs she reconstructed. The runes took more time given that she needed specific high-energy souls. She started by hunting in the surrounding forest and using Syndicate-smuggled myrvites, then ...
2025-11-02 18:22:26 +0000 UTC
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Over the next month, the Prophets discussed the finer details of the plans they needed to try, as well as the research that needed to be done. In addition to that, Zhuan and Mirian took turns instructing them on use of the violet focuses and soul-communication. They still hadn’t solved the non-linearity problem of the dream, but it seemed useful to be able to start communicating directly instead of needing to wait days or weeks for zephyr falcon messages to arrive. Privately, Mirian hoped t...
2025-10-29 16:28:58 +0000 UTC
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2025-10-26 18:44:47 +0000 UTC
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