Step one of the plan involved starting rumors. This was something Mirian had, funnily enough, almost no experience doing. Lily was a lot better at it. On Seventh day when they visited the dining hall again for lunch, Lily joined a table with several other sixth year students.

“Hey, do any of you have maintenance requests in?” Lily asked.

One of the girls at the table said, “No.”

“Okay, sorry for bothering you. It’s so weird though, it’s been days and nothing. And then I was talking to my friend who had one in, and he hasn’t gotten his filled in a week. And then someone told him that someone killed a maintenance team and the city guards are covering it up, and I was like, there’s no way that’s true, that sounds like something that bearded guy who keeps ranting about end times in the Market Forum would say, so I’m trying to… I dunno, make sure that isn’t true. Well, enjoy your meal.” And then she was off, before they could respond.

“Nice,” Mirian said as they walked away from the table. “You made that look easy.”

“Well, it is easy. You try the next one.”

They visited five tables, spread across the dining hall, trying to make the encounters seem casual. One of the tables, a fourth year boy piped up with, “Wait a second, yeah! There’s this broken door in the dorm and no one’s fixed it in a week. Is that what’s going on?”

They might have been rumors, but it wasn’t like they were untrue.

“So do you think it will work?” asked Lily as they walked back to the dorms. “What even gave you the idea to do that?”

“No clue. There was… well, this is embarrassing. There was a book I liked about a Deeps agent who had to stop a conspiracy, and if she wanted to get information out to the public, she would go to taverns in a disguise and start talking. I mean, that’s got to be based on something, right?”

“Maybe,” Lily said. “If everyone’s talking about it, someone who can do something about it has to pick up on it, right? There’s all these rich students, and some from the old nobility. If people in Torrviol are getting killed, they have the power to stir up a fuss.”

“Yeah. I feel like I’m missing something, though. Like, Archmage Luspire is in charge of the Academy, and he has to know about the break-ins. And certainly that his staff are going missing! When Platus died, they canceled classes, and there were all those announcements about safety and….” Mirian stopped. “Oh shit, that hasn’t happened yet.”

Lily had gone pale. “When does this happen?”

“It was a few days before the invasion.” She thought. “It was right before the weekend, so it must have been the 23rd of Solem. I still can’t… like, did he stumble on something? Why would they kill him?”

Lily shook her head. “I still can’t believe this all. It’s all so… it’s crazy!”

“Tell me about it,” Mirian said, and again she was glad she had her friend.

***

That evening, when Mirian listened to the sermon at the Luminate Temple, she was in a different place. When she’d heard it the first time, she hadn’t been paying attention. She’d been so focused on exams, and the flooding in her room, and had been so tired. Now, a different kind of exhaustion suffused her, but her ears were open. In the cavernous hall, amidst the tall pillars and the huge reliefs of the Gods looking down on them, she sat meditatively as the priest spoke.

“…and it was Ominian whose hand sheltered the people of Enteria from the Cataclysm. Not for coin. Not for worship. They demanded no price. They laid upon the people no debt. When the prophets asked why, Ominian said, with Their dying breath: ‘You are of life. The cycle of souls is sacred to Us, as it should be to you.’ We must remember this, and remember Their sacrifice. For it was Ominian’s body that shielded us. Though many died, some live, and here, we must remember another lesson. As They bore Their heart to Enteria, we must remember the tides of heavens are not a simple stream, but full of riddles and currents that we may never fully understand….”

As the priest spoke, he approached and put his hand on the statue of Ominian behind the altar. The God looked ominous in the flickering candlelight, looming above the congregation. No two statues of the God were quite the same, and the one here in Torrviol looked very different than the one in Mirian’s temple back in Arriroba. Some features were the same, though. Ominian was always depicted with a crown of burning laurels, sitting upon a throne, Their chest split open so the heart was visible. Unlike her home temple, the statue here had several knives sticking out of the God’s torso. The last knife pierced Their hand, which was raised, palm up, as if to ward away something. The stone of the statue was marble, and as Mirian looked on it, she got the strange sense of recognition. The black, white, and pink stone was full of swirls and whorls that reminded her of eyes.

The priest’s sermon continued. Sacrifice and the unknowable figured prominently, but the one that most resonated with her was the code of ethics: Doing what was right, because it was right, and no other reason. That was the code that her mother and father had instilled in her. It was what drove her now. The easy thing to do would be to flee, she knew. She still might have to resort to that.

Why did you choose me? she wondered, and looked around the chamber. From every wall, Gods looked down, part statue and part relief so that it looked like they were emerging from the solid stone. Which one had seen fit to give her a second chance? And why? What did they see in her?

She had never thought of herself as particularly worthy of anything. She worked hard, and tried to do what was right. The sermon ended, but she stayed seated, lost in thought, until the thin sunlight bleeding through the windows began to dim, and the shadows in the temple grew even deeper.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

***

The next morning, Mirian found to her surprise that the Myrvite Ecology exam had changed. This one was all about decomposition and scarce resources, though it had the same basic format as last time. Again, Professor Viridian had rings around his eyes, and Mirian could see his exhaustion. Midway through the exam, she looked up, and saw that Valen was looking at her from across the room.

Creepy, Mirian thought. She narrowed her eyes, and for once the girl actually had the decency to blush before she looked back to her exam and got to work.

Distracted, Mirian considered her plan. She decided that as aggravating as Valen was, she needed her. After all, she was the only person she knew of who had actually seen one of the cloaked figures running about.

After class, Mirian waited until the other students left, then went up to Viridian. “Professor? I know the quarter is over now, but could I meet with you during your office hours?”

Without looking at her, Viridian said, “Unfortunately, I’ve just become quite busy recently,” and nodded at the pile of exams on his desk. “And, after all, what’s done is done.” It was not his typical warm response.

Mirian chewed on her lip, then worked up the courage to say what she had planned to say. “Well, if I may… I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. If I’m right, it’s related to why you’re so tired.”

To his credit, Professor Viridian displayed no surprise at this strange comment, though he did turn his gaze to Mirian. He didn’t say anything for some time, but just as Mirian was about to give in to the urge to apologize and run out of the room, he said, “Four o’clock, I’ll be in my office.”

“Thank you, sir,” Mirian said, and hastily walked out of the room.

She damn near smacked right into Valen.

“Gods! What are you doing?” Mirian snapped. She’d wanted to talk to Valen, but she hadn’t expected to find her just outside the door waiting in ambush.

The shorter girl looked up at her with those intense blue eyes of hers and tucked a lose strand of her dirty blond hair behind her ear. Instead of apologizing, like a normal person, she asked “What were you talking to him about?”

“Why is it any of your business?” Mirian replied. “I need to get to my next exam.”

Valen followed her down the stairs. “You have a half-hour. You’ll get there on time.”

“You already know what it’s about.” Instead of going to the first floor, she opened the door to the second. She stepped into one of the empty classrooms, and looked out the window. Here, the windows all looked to the inner part of the former arena where the myrvite gardens bloomed in one half, and the cages of the myrvite beasts they studied here were in the more distant half. Mirian opened one of the latched windows. She had a hunch. As soon as the window was open, she knew she was right. “Do you hear that?”

Normally, one could hear the little cockatrice calling out like chickens, or the wyvern’s shrill call.

“No.” Valen paused. “Alright, I see your point. So you think that guy…?” Well, one could accuse Valen of a lot of things, but Mirian couldn’t accuse her of being stupid.

“You saw him too. And you saw what Viridian looks like right now. I need you to back me up, because this is all bigger than you think it is.”

Valen raised an eyebrow. “Bigger than a massive break-in to the Academy that no one seems to be talking about?”

“Why do you think no one’s talking about it?”

“So what else did you find out?”

Mirian hesitated. Well, she knew Valen and Viridian both could be trusted. After all, they’d all died together in that rotunda beneath the dome. At least, both could be trusted not to be in league with the Akanans. “The guy who was going to repair the leak in my dorm told me they found a scroll written in Eskanar with information about the break-ins. They figured out where the next one was going to be, so some maintenance guys tried to stop the break-in and went missing. So if you’re thinking I’ve lost it, stop by maintenance, and try to figure out why the entire building is closed.”

“So that’s how you knew,” Valen said.

“That, and I’d seen one creeping about on the roofs between classes. And the guards didn’t care at all.” Mirian tried to think of an example of what a normal response to a crisis at the Academy was that wasn’t in the future. “Remember… it would have been our second year, and some students went missing in the Mage’s Grove? It was in the Torrviol Broadsheet, everyone was talking about it, and they printed fliers of their faces.” Torrviol only had the one local newspaper.

Valen chuckled. “Turns out, they’d just been smuggling alcohol and partying out there. Archmage Luspire was so furious at them.”

“Yeah. That was way smaller than this. And yet….”

“I get it,” Valen said. “Funnily enough, you’re not the first person I’ve heard this from.”

“Really?” Mirian said, but in her head she was thinking well of course Valen has her finger on the crank of the rumor mill.

“Oh shut up, you heard the rumor too, that’s why you finally decided to talk to Viridian. Why else would you wait?”

Mirian inwardly cursed herself. How the hells was Valen so good at picking up when she was lying? It was a good thing she’d never tried to play cards against her. But, fortune had favored her. Enough of it had been convincing, and her story lined up. “So you’ll come?”

Valen hesitated. “Okay. Yeah. When is it?”

“Four o’clock today.” Mirian closed the window, while Valen walked back out the classroom door. She turned and stopped when Mirian said, “Oh, and Valen? Thank you.”

Her psuedo-nemesis seemed as surprised as Mirian did by the gratitude. But it felt right to offer it. “Yeah. Of course.” Then she left. Maybe after this Valen would stop being a jerk to her.

The math exam was considerably easier without sleep deprivation. It was also earlier in the day, so she was that much more alert. As before, it did make several students cry, but Mirian felt good about the whole thing as she turned it in. She still had no idea what the last few questions were about. She’d have to look through her notebook, because she was pretty sure Professor Jei had never covered them. Still, she thought she did better; she’d never actually gotten the results back on this exam before the attack had come.

Mirian had time for lunch at one of the nearby cafes. As she ate, she kept looking out the windows, looking for any suspicious figures traversing the rooftops, or people skulking about. Of course, it was another dreary, cold day, so all the dark cloaks would have made them blend right in to the crowds.

She stopped by the library and worked on her spellrod design for a few hours, paging through various arcane design books, writing notes on various glyph-combinations. The work required near encyclopedic knowledge of the various glyphs. As she read, she became more and more impressed by the unnamed Persaman who’d made the spellrod Professor Torres would be displaying to the class in a few days. Static glyphs only ever did the same thing, no matter where they were placed in a spell. There were actually only a few static glyphs, they were just used in spells all the time because they were so useful. Then there were flux glyphs, of which there were thousands. Each one of those glyphs changed function depending on what the glyphs previous to it in the spell were. Some of the glyphs even changed function depending on what glyphs came after it, which didn’t make any sense to Mirian.

She was glad there was already a huge list of combinations and several theoretical frameworks to work from. She hadn’t the slightest idea how ancient people had managed to figure out how all this stuff worked.

Several hours later, she made her way to Professor Viridian’s office.