There was a sense of peace, Mirian found, in traveling through the void. On Enteria, she had to consider every move she made, every word she said. There, she could change the course of history by accident. Here, there was just her—and awe-inspiring beauty. The magic she needed was simple enough she did it almost without thought: gather air, warmth, and then an intensified force push. Her armor took care of the rest, transmuting excess light from the sun and other strange forces that existed in the void into more kinetic energy. Compared to her usual arrays of precautionary divination and defensive spells, it was almost as good as vacation to Arriroba.
She looked back at Enteria. There was that green, white and blue patch amidst the strange colors of the rest of the world, slowly moving around into the black line of night. The known world. All that humanity had was there. Jherica saw this when they took their void-ship to Luamin. The others should have seen this too. Maybe that would have helped them understand, she thought.
Mirian turned her attention back to Luamin. The great moon loomed large before her, the grand temple she was heading for and some of the other larger structures already just visible. This close, she could see how the entire surface was engraved with kilometers upon kilometers of trenches, spread out in fractal patterns.
She came in towards the moon on a practiced trajectory, aiming to pass it by until she was close enough that the strange, automatic artillery that guarded Luamin would no longer target her.
As the cycles had grown long and Mirian had begun to get stuck in advancing her research, she’d taken several more trips to Luamin in the hopes that she’d be able to decipher some aspect of the arcane technology there. Given the practical limitations of studying the material there, she’d done some work figuring out what she could take with her back to Enteria. She’d succeeded, but little had come of it. Mirian had plenty of theories as to how to study both Luamin Elder technology and the Labyrinth in the future. She had all sorts of ideas of what advancements might be possible, but there simply wasn’t time to develop the tools they’d need to study such advanced spellwork within the short timeframe of the loop. What it had given her, though, was practice in moving to and from Luamin, practice opening the grand doors of the temporal temple, and the opportunity to try out several different experiments on how the grand machine down there worked.
In the later cycles, she’d conducted experiments to try and figure out what was actually causing the cycles to reset. Measuring armageddon was no easy task, but it seemed that the cycles reset as the shockwave from the Ominian’s soul detonating hit Luamin. It made sense; the device that was sending the souls back in time was buried on the moon. Some ancient ward scheme was detecting it and triggering the loop, she thought. Perhaps it was an ancient mechanism to prevent the destruction of Luamin, and would trigger in response to any threat large enough. Or perhaps, the Ominian had set the process up Themself, having seen its necessity.
The way to confirm the nature of the reset would be to perform experiments that were too risky to attempt. Mirian could have, for example, brought a large enough spellbomb onto Luamin and attempt to destroy the device and see if that triggered an early reset. But what if it succeeded, and didn’t trigger the loop? The other experiment would have been to fly past Luamin. Given just how fast and how far the soul detonation traveled, the most likely outcome would be that she would die to it regardless. However, if the death wave triggered the anchors to be sent back while Mirian’s anchor was still outside of the device, would she be stuck outside the time loop? It couldn’t be risked.
They’d all spent dozens of cycles scouring archives for more about the previous Prophets, trying to see if there was some information given to them by the Ominian that other historians and priests had missed. Trying to see if they understood more about the nature of the loops, or what goal they were trying to accomplish. Whether they had succeeded or failed.
After years of research, the questions still remained. Zhuan went back to performing social experiments. Jherica buried themself in research on the deep void. Gabriel returned to drinking. Liuan, she now knew, must have been doing something similar to Zhuan, only with the goal of leveraging Akana’s systems and hierarchies, not changing or destroying them.
With no consequences to live with, it had been easy to sink years into obsession.
Eventually, Mirian had mathematically shown, using measurements taken throughout the years as temporal anchors slowly returned to the Ominian, that the Elder God’s soul detonation was an inevitable result of the entropic field’s collapse. Huge amounts of excess energy were erupting from the Mausoleum as soon as the entropic field contracted into the center. Whether it was some energy type that was beyond their understanding of arcane physics, as the modeling room in Frostland’s Gate implied, or energy being pulled from different places in time and concentrated, as conversations with the gatelings hinted at, they didn’t know. However, one didn’t need to fully understand a system to mathematically describe it. And the math told a simple story: without all Their wounds healed by some sort of Elder anchor, the field would collapse, and the Ominian’s soul would be unleashed.
Only now, after all this time, would the Divitrius be made whole.
Mirian landed near the grand temple and put her hand to the door. She took a deep breath, stilling her usual thoughts. Here, she was not Mirian, but a construct of a thousand timelines, a soul unbound by the flesh. In a thousand futures, she was dead. In a thousand pasts, she was alive. Her perception was a prison; in all those timelines, on all those paths, she was Mirian, was Naluri, was the different bodies she’d warped with bindings and inhabited, was the different roles she had played to carve out this path. But all the paths had been needed for her to be here: all the horrors of war and all the beauty of peace existed within her. The past had not stopped existing. She was still in Torrviol, watching in horror as she bled out in the Kiroscent Dome. She was still cursing Troytin as she woke up from dying again. She was still marching across the passes of the Littenord, frozen wind scouring her. She was still lost beneath the Labyrinth, trying to understand the trials there. She was in her moment of triumph over Apophagorga, and in her moment of regret as she soothed the great titan. She was a hand justice smiting the worst of men, and she herself was the burning tempest bringing ruin to Palendurio in her incandescent rage. Here, in this moment, she gathered herself as the culmination of those moments, for she was all of them, and her soul trickled out from its vessel to inhabit the door.
With that great rumble, they opened, and she walked the halls beneath Luamin again. This place, she thought. The more she’d learned, the more she understood, the more she marveled at the works of the Elder Gods. And yet, such marvels, such heights, didn’t prevent their own wars. Didn’t stop them from unleashing the Cataclysm and nearly destroying all of Enteria.
She thought of the great wall of fire that approached Enteria in the dream, with only the Ominian between it and Enteria. Out in the void, even They looked minuscule. The dream never showed how They stopped it. Perhaps They hadn’t.
Mana swam through the halls as Mirian continued her descent, her canisters of air and water levitating behind her.
There was something about the depths of Luamin that felt surreal, more like a dreamscape that a reality. It was more than just the lower gravity, more than the strange light that trickled through the halls, and more than the thrum of sound she could feel through the floor. There was a deep heartbeat of arcane energy. She had begun to wonder if, perhaps, Luamin was alive in the same way that the Mausoleum was part of the Ominian.
Still so much to learn, she thought, letting her fingers gently pass near the walls.
At last, she found herself before the machine that held the temporal anchors until they were sent back. Her eyes settled on the crystalline window where she looked beyond it to the arcane sun.
Strange, she thought. The sphere of violet and orange light had shrunk more than she’d expected based on the rate of decay she’d measured in the loops. Some aspect of chronomancy. Perhaps energy expended in timelines I was never part of?
There would always be more mysteries. For now, she had a purpose. Mirian approached the machine. The anchors of the past Prophets had been veiled by the causality of time magic—another thing beyond her understanding. The two anchors in it now had no such protection. She extended a hand and touched the first anchor, then wove tendrils of magical force to grasp it. There was a flash—
***
—And she found herself in the dream.
Celen, she thought. She peered down at his soul like one looked at a fish in an aquarium. The way she was interfacing with the dream—with his soul—wasn’t the usual method. It had to be some magic of the machine, because it was nothing she’d done.
Celen wasn’t in his usual spot. He was hiking through the Casnevar and had stopped to admire a waterfall. Gradually, he seemed to realize he was being watched.
“Mirian?” he asked.
“It is.”
“You feel strange. Like you’re everywhere around me. But it could only be you.”
She sent the feeling of affirmation. “It’s time to join Divitrius,” she thought to him.
“I suppose it is. You know, I should have traveled more. I was so enamored with Akana’s beauty that I hardly saw the rest of it. These mountains… I don’t think I could ever run out of poems to write about them.”
“I’m sorry, Celen.”
He sent the feeling of a shrug. “Don’t be. Wasn’t your fault. You did what you could. At least now my mind will be free. I’m not sorry that I still have regrets. If you don’t have regrets at the end of your life, it means you never changed and grew. I said my goodbyes to Jherica. I’m not ready, but I never would have been.”
Mirian felt a pang of sorrow. “Enteria will remember you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s not the kind of death other people experience is it? A perfect copy of my soul joins Divitrius. I’ll be part of Them. Can their be a happier death than that?”
Mirian sent a smile at him. “Perhaps not. Goodbye, Celen.”
And with that, she pulled on the anchor. It was much the same as removing one from a soul—she folded in its four-dimensional blades, one by one, then gently extracted it.
***
The temporal needle was visible only for a moment as a flash of light. Mirian said a brief prayer for Celen. There would be time to mourn him properly later. She had another anchor to remove.
Mirian reached for it—
***
—and saw the coast of Persama laid out before her. Gabriel was by the cliffs north of Urubandar, pacing back and forth. His soul was wild with emotion, the currents on the surface writhing about like a pit of snakes. It took him a moment to notice Mirian. He froze, looking around.
“Fuck!” he said. “I knew you’d have some thing you could do. I should have told her you didn’t. Then maybe… Gods dammit. Never did stop keeping secrets, did you?”
“Apparently, I should have kept more.”
Gabriel went back to pacing. “I tried to tell you. But I already knew it wouldn’t work. People don’t change.”
“Is that your excuse?” Mirian thought at him. “What I think you mean is that you don’t change. You’re just trying to justify the unjustifiable.”
“See, this is why I never bothered. You and Zhuan have always been far too righteous to see things for how they really are. Sure, your plan might work for a little while. But when you’re gone? It’ll all fall apart. Always does. You eventually started actually reading history books. You read all that and you really think human nature can be overcome? Maybe it’ll take another century, another millennia, another epoch, but eventually it’ll all fall apart and we’ll go right back to killing each other over who gets to be on the top of the pile. The only thing to do is take a seat at the top of the pyramid and enjoy yourself. The Ominian gave us immortality. And you’d all give that up?”
Mirian felt disgust welling up in herself, then pity. “Are you really so base a creature? A century of lavish hedonism in palaces wasn’t enough for you?”
She felt Gabriel’s spirit boiling over with frustration. His usual mask of easy humor and controlled emotion had shattered. And it had been a mask, she supposed. “‘Enough’ is not a thing humans can comprehend. We always want to grow. Expand. Greed is built into our bones. I’m just a realist. Just admitting to myself what others run themselves in philosophical circles trying to justify. There’s an inevitable conclusion they always come to, that actually, they do deserve all the power they have. The hierarchical systems of Enteria don’t exist because no one’s thought of a better one. They’re the logical evolution of our myrvite-eat-myrvite world where the strong conquer and the weak are wyvern food. Did killing all those assholes in Akana actually change the course of the country? Nope! A bunch more assholes were waiting in the wings to step in. For all that Zhuan wants to destroy hierarchy, who’s at the top of Zhighua?”
“You’re projecting your own inadequacies. Your own sins. Even the most ruthless man can be tempered by social systems that change the equilibrium we fall into. A system is not required to encourage our worst tendencies. We can build something better. We have, before. I’ve seen it—fragments of old memories. A better world. But it must be built. And it will be—by people who are less cruel and avaricious. By people who simply want a better world for themselves and their children. They are down there. Already building.”
Gabriel stopped pacing. His soul-form turned towards the Obcassium Ocean and the light-stained waves. “Doesn’t matter anymore. Fuck! I was this close to getting Liuan’s anchor out. Would have had you both.”
“Doubtful. Any last words before you join the Ominian?”
“You’ll realize I’m right, eventually. I’m just sorry I won’t live to see it.”
Mirian sent the feeling of a shaking head to him. “You think the strong should dominate, but look at you. So weak you can’t even overcome your own impulses. I pray that God gives you some perspective.”
And with that, she ripped the anchor free.
***
Mirian spent a few more hours gazing at the otherworldly light of the arcane sun within Luamin. As she did, she incorporated the majority of the remaining distilled mana elixir she’d brought with her into her aura. Professor Senca’s team had done good work removing impurities, but there was so much of it that she needed to take her time with the process so as not to destabilize her aura or soul.
When the work was done, she returned to the surface. As she gazed around, she had a thought.
You know, with the cycles done, we might have time to properly study some of the wonders here. Research made all the more important as we try to phase out our current spell engines. I don’t suppose the Elder Gods will miss a few pieces, will they?
She’d taken back pieces of Luamin before during the loops, so she already knew what would trigger the automated defenses and what wouldn’t. Mirian wrenched free four chunks of the moon, each boulder-sized piece full of marvelous alloys and microscopic glyphwork. She cut free two of her canisters of air and her first canister of water, as they were empty now.
She set her eyes on Enteria. Right now, the known world was facing away from her, so all she saw were the strange colors of whatever world lay beyond the stormwall. By the time she made it back, though, she had calculated she would be coming back down directly on top of Persama, passing by Divir just before its controlled descent. Already, the entropic field would be changing as the Ominian’s soul was healed by the full set of temporal anchors.
Mirian’s aura swirled, and she took off, streaking towards Enteria, her pieces of Luamin following with her.