Visions flitted through Mirian’s mind faster and faster. Back in Mayat Shadr, she could feel pain crashing over her body, though whether it was from Ominian’s mind brushing hers or the arcane power coursing across the surface of her soul, she couldn’t say. She was still casting her spell, even as she watched a thousand futures spill out in front of her. The experience of existing simultaneously was stretching her mind to the breaking point. She knew with absolute certainty if she had done more than merely brush the surface of the Ominian’s soul, she would be dead.
But here, now—whenever that was—she was beginning to understand. Her pleas to the Ominian had never gone unheard. But how could an entity so powerful, with an experience of reality so fundamentally different, explain? The pressure released from Apophagorga hissing in a whisper was enough to kill an ant. The barest touch of their flesh would scour an insect’s soul. And such a comparison was inadequate to explain the Ominian.
Mirian let the visions sweep through her.
She only saw the barest glimpse of moments, but just enough to find meaning. There were endless combinations of prophets—all ending in ruin. There was a flaw in humanity, one it must have overcome once before, but was not guaranteed to do so again; it was a shortsightedness, a greed that pulled at the heart. Liuan had seen it, and in opposing it, succumbed to it. It was what Mirian sought to defy:
Timelines where the Zhighuan Empire never broke apart, and they fought the rising Persaman kings in a hundred wars until spell engines turned those wars into devastation. Timelines where the Triarchy never collapsed, and its empire grew and devoured until the land was as bare and ruined as the eastern barrens. Timelines where Akana Praediar’s conquests broke the other nations into weak, war-torn polities that were easily exploited. Timelines even where Baracuel retained its dominance after unifying wars and its colonies never broke away. They all ended the same way.
All the while, people came from every corner to pray at the Mausoleum for a god that was not yet dead, and watched them as they fell to their knees, heads touching the floor in some cultures, prostrate in others, hooded and hands clasped in still others. They prayed, they supplicated themselves, and yet, even when they heard no answer, they made their own. Far too many of them followed the paths they’d wished to all along. Pontiff Oculo would have been in good company among them. They failed to hear the whispers of Divitrius still echoing in the halls. They failed to see the lessons engraved in their corpse.
They had been saved from the fire above, but whether it was in conquest or industry, the fires below burned them all the same. The despair built. The Ominian began to wonder if they should simply let the flames engulf Enteria. Above Mayat Shadr, Mirian felt the urge to do the same. Even Ceiba Yan was tempted by the idea of a long rest, of no longer fighting the seasons.
Then, the Ominian saw an unlikely path.
A mad Triarch received visions of the Ominian and misunderstood them. They sought resurrection; their power and understanding was insufficient, but the ritual shattered their grand city, and placed a dangling sword over the heart of Enteria. Divir ascended, and the capital of the Triarchs was destroyed in a day. Now, the death of Enteria could not be a slow thing. The Ominian’s very body and soul was now poised to shatter against the planet if the Labyrinth was sufficiently disrupted—and somehow, this disaster opened up new paths.
The prophets the Ominian might choose changed and changed. They sought desperately to find a way to that path, that glimmering hope shining on a distant horizon. The Ominian had sought to pick their prophets carefully, iterating on the strange chance that the mausoleum’s ascension opened, but Mirian felt frustration. No combinations seemed to work.
Mirian struggled to follow it. Pieces of dead futures came too quickly, and she could no longer see a pattern. Her mind retreated, trying to find something she could connect to, some memory or place that she could recognize. She spiraled through moments of cinder and ash, of endless battlefields strewn with dead, of burning towns and villages, of long marches and blistered feet.
Her mind caught glimpses of familiar forms. Not the prophets she knew, but a shape similar to them.
She saw a triumphant Persaman general standing over the ruins of Palendurio, then Vadriach. His armies ascendant, Baracuel and Akana were left in ruin. But a resurgent Persama failed to bring change. Within a few generations, the mines that had once fueled the industry of their oppressors fueled their own war machine.
She saw a well-dressed politician standing in front of an unfamiliar Senate. His canny speeches swayed the chamber. Behind closed doors, he knew how to make money flow where it was needed, knew how to throw a gala that brought the right people together, and knew when to send a magical telegram to put in place a more shadowy operation. But all he did was delay the crisis; the contradiction of Akana’s need for industry and its need to stop were not resolved. Shortly after his death, Divir came plummeting down.
She saw a powerful archmage traversing Baracuel, leading armies in conquest, powerful artifacts giving her soldiers an edge. This time, Mercanton stood in ruins, and Ferrabridge was plundered. Akana Praediar broke into a dozen warring states. Baracuel’s power went unchallenged for another hundred years—and then, war came again, and this time, with no prophet to guide them, spell engines resurfaced, too useful a weapon to be discarded.
There was a Tlaxhuaco that fought valiantly against its invaders, and a Zhighua that overthrew the Akanan puppet government, but alone, they could not change the fated path.
Conquerors, warriors, spies, mages, scholars—she saw the Ominian sorting through them like she might have sorted through a hive of insects, looking for a single ant that might change the colony’s fate. One by one, they discarded them.
Alone, every Prophet failed.
Alone, the Ominian would die in vain.
Mirian felt the despair returning. Chunks of the Ominian’s flesh the size of the island of Tlaxhuaco were cast back through the still-burning void. Their magic flickered.
A deep sorrow flooded through them both. Mirian’s own memories couldn’t help but be mixed in with the Ominian’s. As their anguish swept through her, it couldn’t help but conjure up associations with the feeling. She saw Cairnmouth burning. If she had stopped to, she would have been able to count the fading human souls left behind by the evacuation. She saw the spellbombs falling on Palendurio. She saw the coast of Tlaxuhaco in ruins, battleship shells leaving behind craters where homes had once been. She saw the battlefields along the Setarab River, the corpses scattered for miles. Each dead soul a future cut short. Each life taken a tragedy.
Staring up at a falling Divir, Mirian felt tears prickling in her eyes. The moon was still accelerating.
Another feeling swelled up. An implacable relentlessness. Mirian saw feelings, flashes—roots, cracking open rock, no matter the thickness. Branches, straining for sunlight in an oppressive shade. An unforgiving sun, beating down on leaves until they withered, until the soil was cracked and dry. Ash falling from the sky, blotting out that same sun until the chill of winter threatened to freeze sap. And yet, clinging to life, no matter the difficulties, no matter the season. Always growing.
There were friends in the soil, little pieces of fungus that offered up fragmented nutrients. Tiny clusters of things that grew on roots that bolstered them. A mother tree’s roots, gifting what was needed. A scent on the wind, warning of danger. Even isolated at the zenith of Uxalak, Ceiba Yan had known a truth.
Alone, they would perish. But the message of the sacred tree was clear:
NOTHING
IS
ALONE.
Mirian clung to that thought.
Together, she and Emperor Xecatl had tended to the gardens and research facilities of Tlaxhuaco until they’d found spirit-constructs that would function not just in the Persaman desert, but in the freezing north of Frostland’s Gate and the arid plains of Akana Praediar. Together, she and Zhuan Li had spent years iterating on political frameworks, adjusting them to the needs and inclinations of the cultures, creating governmental bodies that might be held accountable to the people they served, where greed and corruption could not so easily hide. Together, she and Sio Jherica had come up with new magichemical processes and industrial methods that weren’t so destructive. Together, she and Celen Lineas had come up with the stories that would form the bedrock of new cultural values, celebrating the heroics of everyday people.
And Divitrius did not stand alone, either.
A body made of jade, twisted with endless vines and leaves of malachite appeared by the Ominan’s side. Xylatarvia, Mirian thought, and as she manifested, Mirian thought of the Jiandzhi, of the Tlaxhuacan forests, of the ancient woods near Torrviol, of the feeling of being lost in an endless sea of green. Blinding soul magic wove through webs of astral vines. The cosmic fire overwhelming them burned them to ash, but more grew just as fast.
The others came too. Yiaverunan, recognizable not because she was anything like human, but because the way her form was divided into four parts, the way her flesh had no eyes, and by the orb in her hand that burned like a miniature sun. Mirian had first died before her statue, thinking that might be her savior god.
Then was Shiamagoth, burning eyes crowning his head. Before him, a great shield manifested, bringing Xylatarvia and Yiaverunan relief. Then Altrukyst arrived next, a hollow chest containing a massive Elder Gate within it, leading to some place where a black sphere was surrounded by a disk and halo of orange fire. A hole opened up in Shiamagoth’s shield, and a gyre of flame was sucked into the Gate.
A body of white marble veined with red came last, pierced by thousands of black metal needles. The other ascended’s forms turned, but Zomalator did not hesitate; they thrust themself in front of the fire. Together, they wove magic powerful enough it tore at the very fabric of reality.
From beyond the flames, Mirian caught sight of writhing flesh, of forms too twisted to describe. Some part of the Gods’ War had come here, but her senses had trouble even grasping the nature of the swarming abyssal legions that crawled through the void. Pieces of the elder gods moved in and out of sight. Mirian only had the sense of a desperate fight—and just one of thousands that were taking place across the sea of stars. Her mind shuttered, and was overwhelmed. She had to pull into herself and turn away.
Behind them, the void filled with crystallized flesh, pushed back towards Enteria. None of the Ominian could be spared to stop it. Few stories had survived of the Cataclysm, but now Mirian understood where the rain of fire had come from. Below, they would see the meteors coming down endlessly, even as fire burst from the hearts of their cities: pieces of godflesh. Soon enough, they would be priests’ reliquaries.
One by one, the elder gods were thrown back. Then, somehow, it was over. Mirian sensed the battle was won—but at a terrible cost. Half of Yiaverunan was sundered. Chunks the size of mountain ranges had been carved out of Shiamagoth and Altrukyst.
But it was Divitrius that Mirian was part of, and Divitrius who fell, along with Xylatarvia and Zomalator. She had the sense that pieces of the others existed in other places in time, but the Ominian had put all of themself before Enteria. Their body was broken, their soul was shattered—all that was keeping them alive were the temporal needles. The other gods vanished, and Mirian felt, through the Ominian, that they knew why: the war still raged. Better that they protect another world than grieve for what was already lost.
The Ominian crumpled to the planet. They shaped a chrysalis of burnt flesh around them, a grand structure filled with their favorite creatures. A place where the pathetic little beasts they sought to protect might walk amidst their memories and better understand, even though they knew already the lessons would be misinterpreted. But it was all that they could preserve. The Mausoleum, Mirian thought. Not meant to be a tomb, but a museum. A monument. The coincidence seemed too much—she’d filled those same halls with her own memories. The lessons with Song Jei were there. That hall helped her remember her first expeditions with Beatrice, Grimald, and Cediri. Her time with Lecne and the other priests of Zomalator were by those statues.
She looked at the Mausoleum with new light. There was something she needed to grasp—it was still beyond her, but growing tantalizingly close.
She looked up at the Ominian, enthroned. Dying. The temporal anchors were all that were keeping the Ominian alive, but it was those same temporal anchors they would send out to save Enteria—if it could be saved.
But how to choose? Why were we chosen?
The tree in her visions was still burning. The futures all still ended in fire. Was there ever a path out of the fire, or was it just a valiant but foolish hope?
In the present, Divir drew every closer.