The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy-Chapter 256 - Inhuman Dreams

“You’ve been gone a wh—” Gaius froze mid-sentence. His jaw dropped, but he straightened himself and checked if Zhuan had noticed the changes to Mirian’s soul.

Zhuan was busy examining an object that looked like a poorly made mirror, and the back had erupted with some sort of chemical ichor.

“This is the Viaterrian ship,” Mirian proclaimed as she walked in the room. “I doubt it’s going anywhere.”

The other Prophet looked up. “This? Even intact, it would hardly be seaworthy.”

She hadn’t noticed.

“It didn’t sail the seas. It sailed the stars. Using non-magical technology. Even if the cycle could be stretched out a decade, I don’t think it would be possible to recreate such a marvel. And if Conductor said we can’t use the Gates for such a purpose, then there’s no escape. We save Enteria, or we save no one.”

Zhuan stood quietly, looking at Mirian. Then, with a force spell, she cracked open the thin object she was looking at. The device was in terrible shape, but parts of it still showed elaborate etchings and designs, more intricate than even the most complex modern spell engine.

“Hmm,” she said, tracing a finger across it. Pieces of the device flaked apart, leaving a dark smear of rust. “But then… why?”

Mirian still had questions herself. Why sail across the stars? Why delve into the cosmic unknown in a prison of steel, away from the beauty of the world they had left? Why did the Elder Gods intervene? Were there other people out there, still sailing the void? Or had the Cataclysm wiped them out?

“There will always be more questions,” Mirian said. “What matters now is the path forward. Our priority must be stopping moonfall.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Zhuan, tracing her finger around the Viaterrian artifact. “But if it is possible to stop the moon, then there are many paths to stopping it. What matters is how.”

Mirian contemplated that.

The Ominian thought to use the burning tree as a symbol. She tapped into the dream focus again, recalling the visual. Some branches look fine and sturdy, but end in fire and death. But even for all the paths that we can explore—how can we know the future after the loop ends? If I’m right about his assigned purpose, the Sixth Prophet must have thought he’d succeeded—but had only delayed the doom we face now.

Another thought drifted through her.

Even the Ominian is unsure. If there were a clear path, They would have shown us. But the branches are tangled, the paths veiled by leaves, the smoke obscuring what we can see.

Mirian had always wanted a good future, where people could live and be happy. For a long time, she’d just assumed that would automatically result from the war and apocalypse being stopped. Now, that seemed ignorant. Social forces, when strong enough, moved like ocean currents and storms. Even a well intentioned, mild-mannered immortal undead like her father was carried along by the tides of history; he had not been able to stop the Unification War. Despite all his power, he hadn’t even been able to win it.

Zhuan Li was right about one thing, that she was sure of. “As soon as I’m done with my prototype regulator, I’ll try it. I’ll try Gabriel’s approach. I’ll try yours. Our opportunity to apply science to history will not be squandered, that much I promise.”

“Good. That’s all I ask,” Zhuan said, nodding. She gestured around at the ship. “Take samples. Some of these materials may be useful in building your grand device. Take note of the form as well. Anything that survives a few thousand years is sturdy enough to warrant notice.”

As they separated to scour the ship, Gaius approached her and cast a zone of silence.

“She may not have noticed, but I did. Naluri, your fifth soul ascension?”

“It is.”

He smiled. “You’ve come a long way from that little girl I taught. You’ll reach a height I never did. That no one has.” He paused, looking grim. “Make a world that Leyun would love.”

The tears came suddenly to Mirian as she thought of her mother, body still lying in a shrine beneath the desert. She wiped them away. “I will,” she promised.

***

They returned with a pile of Viaterrian artifacts, choosing them either for the material they were made from, the intricate structures that made it up, or because it had some faint writing on it the scholars might be able to make sense of. Gaius had done some initial translation work, but some of the phrases found on the ancient objects baffled him.

“As best I can tell, it says, ‘do not eat,’” he said about one of the thin rectangles.

“But it’s not food. Why would you need to put that on something that was obviously not food?”

“Perhaps like ‘ship’ developed multiple meanings over time, ‘eat’ also followed a term. For example, Persaman miners colloquially discuss spell engines saying they ‘eat foss.’ It might be something similar.”

Mirian shrugged. In another lifetime, the questions might be interesting to pursue. In this lifetime, she had enough.

Gabriel and Zhuan seemed not to notice Mirian’s change. Ibrahim did though. When Mirian told him about what she had discovered, he too fell into deep contemplation, finding a rock spire to sit on and meditate atop.

Mirian sent samples of most artifacts through the Gate, directing her professors to begin research efforts. After several beasts snuck through and killed a guard, the Zhighua Gate was lowered back into its pit so more myrvites wouldn’t harass Torrviol.

Zhuan began moving back south to Benansuo, with Gaius acting as an escort—and something of a spy. Gabriel, to Mirian’s surprise, joined her.

“I’m going to try every restaurant in the city,” he said when she asked. Then, more seriously, he said, “And because you can’t read between the lines, that also means visiting and chatting with officials, regular people, and soldiers. Most spy work isn’t the incompetent burglars in Torrviol, it’s just seemingly harmless conversations with the right people. So I’ll learn more about the situation and keep an eye on the Akanans.” Then he paused for dramatic effect and added, “Plus I get to try all sorts of new alcohols. And liver damage doesn’t follow us through the loops!”

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Mirian couldn’t even bring herself to roll her eyes.

Ibrahim, for his part, was still quiet. He hadn’t said much since her return. He’d been practicing with the violet focus and another one he’d picked up from somewhere, and she’d seen him going through his dervish forms and practicing different combat techniques, but he was clearly deep in thought about something.

He stayed in the Jiandzhi until the expedition left, then ended up in Torrviol, continuing his meditations.

Mirian knew him well enough to know he would talk when he was ready.

She’d set Professor Seneca in charge of the alchemical analysis of the Viaterrian substances, but all she did was confirm the ancient people really hadn’t used any magical materials in their great ships. Later artifacts from the cities had them, but not the earliest ones. Mirian reassigned Grandmaster Herrera, the woman in charge of the Academy’s crafting shop, to work on designing a process for replicating the alloys while Seneca used mundane chemistry to figure out more about some of the new elements they were discovering.

Song Jei, who’d stayed with Mirian despite her offer to let her go with her old friend, insisted on helping check the calculations necessary for the various projects. She stuck close to Mirian, offering assistance with whatever was needed.

Meanwhile, Mirian, when she wasn’t overseeing the other projects, began her redesign of the leyline regulator. She didn’t know what the toroidal device she’d found in the Viaterrian ship did, but there was a reason it had been used. She returned to the Torrviol labyrinth and brought back everything except the relicarium. After running a dozen experiments with Professor Endresen, she found the shape was better at suspending and balancing the leyline repulsor from the Vault. Then, it was a matter of extrapolating what dimensions the device would need to be.

For that, she no longer needed to depend on astronomers’ best guesses as to the size of the Divir moon.

She could simply measure it.

***

Mirian arrived in the dream again. Her dream sense had gotten better, but she and Zhuan had made no progress in manipulating time at all.

She spent some time observing the Ominian moving across the Endelice. Windblown snow drifted over the colossal figure, covering the dark stone flesh like a mountain peak.

This place… she thought.

It had taken her a long time to refine her arcane sense, but even an untrained person could feel a powerful enough arcane force. Like the taste of a connoisseur and the fine touch of a surgeon, human senses could be refined.

But they couldn’t be created out of nothing.

Are these memories of a place, or the place itself? If it’s a dreamscape, why was I able to manipulate the doors of the Mausoleum with magic? But it can’t purely be real, or there wouldn’t be the burning tree, the storm of anchors, or the nightmare of the fire from the void.

She considered. Somehow, their dreams were connected to the Ominian. Dreams were thoughts. Thoughts came from the mind, which was governed by the brain and soul. Brain and soul mirrored each other. But I know from the loop, the soul can pass memories to the brain. Many arcanists had lived and died trying to understand the nature of thought and the mind. The brain was physically necessary; less ethically inclined wizards had removed portions of people’s brains and noted the resulting dysfunction. Luminate healers had also documented what brain damage did. Usually, the soul, which should have had the memories, wasn’t able to fix it.

The temporal anchors have something to do with it. She thought of Troytin’s temporal anchor shooting through the sky. Back to Divir, she now knew. The temporal anchors… are they a part of the Ominian? Or a tool?

Then, does it matter?

In some way, they were sharing a portion of the Ominian’s mind. There was, logically, a physical process and a soul process at work.

The best analogy is a spirit construct, she realized. We can manipulate part of the system, but myrvites form spirit links because they gain a benefit; something the other myrvite can do that they can’t. And the whole becomes greater than the parts.

Humans had no time sense—or at least, not in the way Elder creatures did. Perhaps there was a way to gain it, but she couldn’t rely on that. So what would a myrvite in a spirit construct do?

The communication was moderated by glyphs and runes, though not scribed out by any pen. When a Tlaxhuacan nagual wielded a staff, the glyphic connections were in the crystallized sap of the branch, in the fractal patterns of the wood, in the thread-like tendrils of a fungus that had burrowed into it. Theoretically, the structure of the glyphs was the same as one written by a pen, just repeated like the lattice of crystal on a scale too far for even her magnifyinglens spells to see.

Communication that way is natural for myrvites. Eyeball and Conductor know it. Presumably, they could talk to Ceiba Yan or a chimera as easily as they talk to me. Carkavakom sent a message to his priest to explain that the Elder creatures are needed as interpreters. The Elder Gods are too far removed from human experience to talk to directly.

And yet…

Yet, the Ominian had talked to them. Through glyphs and runes, they’d created this dreamscape that she now sat in. She needed to communicate with the Ominian. Let Them know that there was another way through branches of that burning tree—if only Mirian could deliver a warning.

A second possibility. If we could send a message to, say, the Second Prophet, or the First—they could still change things. If the Ominian’s temporal anchors are spread across time, only two have returned.

She thought back to the metaphor of ants. They built complex networks of tunnels, communicated with each other, and had their own social structures. If there was a crisis in the hive, she wouldn’t know how to solve it, only see the corpses of them scattered afterward. But if an ant could tell me why, and how… perhaps. If she could learn to communicate with the Elder creatures, she could learn the language of the Elder Gods properly. She was already on that path; her thoughts often formed in the same ways glyphs and runes did. Sometimes, when she was doing math in her head, the calculation would appear as glyphs.

What would that do to the branch of time we live in now, though? Can it even be changed?

And another thought:

What if some other Prophet already did what I plan? What if this is the best path of time? What if the others exist on the fields that Eyeball and Conductor watch over, and this is the only one?

It might not work. Even the leyline regulator might not work. She had communicated rudimentarily with the Omnian before. However, no matter the path, it seemed like it must be a boon to be able to talk to Them.

Strengthen the spirit that united them.

Mirian thought she felt a presence behind her. She looked back—or rather, turned her perception to what was behind her. Nothing. No Zhuan. That was fine; she intended to cast spells to measure Divir, since she couldn’t exactly pace off distance since souls didn’t have real ‘feet.’ Revealing that capability might raise questions she didn’t want to answer yet.

Mirian stood, or rather, was suddenly standing, with no transition between sitting. The four-dimensional Mausoleum would prove an issue to measure, but she could figure out the circumference of Divir, infer a radius, estimate total mass, then compare that with Jherica’s measurements of Divir from their telescope on the surface. Mirian had used her technique of scribing massive glyphs on a spellbook page to make a simple four-glyph spell, one that had a mathematically defined origin point, a defined end point, and simply drew a line of light with a defined radius between those points.

She began to move across the desolate moon, stepping over bones and deadened runes, moving across the rocks through the derelict structures that dotted the piece of Mayat Shadr that had been torn from Enteria.

As she worked, she tried to think not in human language, but in glyphs.

One spell at a time, she began to measure the second moon.