Fifthday, Mirian decided to finally figure out what happened to Platus. She woke up early enough to annoy Lily, but just mentioned she needed to do some ‘extra studying.’ It was a good excuse, and Lily just went back to sleep. Then she headed for the Alchemistry building.

It was unlocked, though it shouldn’t have been. Mirian had finally completed her newest version of the spellrod the day before, so she drew it from her belt and prepared the force shield setting. She still wondered what it was Platus had uncovered that led to him getting killed. What secret had he stumbled on?

Mirian cautiously made her way up the stairs, careful not to step too loud. Every so often she paused to listen, but didn’t hear anything. By the time she made her way to the third floor, she finally did hear noise—the tinkle of glassware and the low hum of a spell engine. She looked back and forth down the hall. Dark and empty, as far as she could tell. She didn’t think any of the Akanan agents were on the level of using camouflage spells, not if they were relying on wands.

She tip-toed toward the open door of room 312. There were only a few minutes left until the explosion. Maybe someone was already in there with him? Mirian peeked around the corner.

Sure enough, there was Platus, all six hulking feet of him, bent over one of the alchemy counters. One of the supply cupboards was open, the lock on it hanging off, broken, the contents emptied. Platus had arrayed a large array of various chemicals and magichemicals in front of him. He’d scattered jars and measuring utensils across the counter, and was now focused on stirring something in one of the large glass beakers. A small spell engine for heating chemicals was on, and something was boiling in it. He was so focused on his project that he didn’t seem to notice Mirian peering in.

She double-checked. No one down the hall. No one else in the room. What was she missing? And what was Platus making anyways? She squinted at the jars on the counter, and her eyes widened. Oh five hells, she thought.

“Platus! What are you doing?”

He started, then shouted right back at her. “Burning hells, what are you doing? Go away before I hurt you.”

“You’re about to create a nitromyruenide, and you don’t have a containment field. Gods above, is that how it happens? You just blow yourself up? Are you suicidal?”

Platus went red in the face. He’d always had a short temper. “You’re all jealous of me! Trying to hold back my greatness. It won’t work! Now get out of here. This is my discovery.”

“Listen, I don’t really give a shit about you one way or another. Who told you to mix those? You’re about to create a room-sized fireball, and I guarantee you won’t survive it. Did you break into the Alchemistry building just to make an explosive?”

“I gave you a chance,” Platus said, and then he drew his wand.

Mirian didn’t know what the wand did, so she ducked around the corner and cast her force shield.

The explosion slammed into it within seconds, the fireball erupting from the door. Her force shield broke, and she went sprawling. She ran for the stairs, because the heat pouring out of the room was far too intense to stay close to.

Now she knew what kind of wand he was using, though. He’d used a flame spell—right next to an entire pile of extremely volatile chemicals. She couldn’t believe it. Was his death really unrelated to the conspiracy? There had to be more to it. Had someone convinced him to make whatever harebrained recipe he was brewing? Maybe the Akana spies had told him to do it as a distraction while they infiltrated some critical place. Or maybe Platus had really just been that stupid.

Mirian cast her disguise spell, then left through one of the side doors. She didn’t want to deal with a bunch of questions from anyone. When she got to class, she thought about the first time it had happened. She’d been so distraught. A student had died, in front of her, and it had haunted her for days. Now, it just seemed like a piece of trivia. She wasn’t sure she liked the change in perspective. But if the Gods had sentenced her to see so much death, again and again, it seemed an inevitable consequence of her fate.

***

That evening, she and Selesia took a walk down by the market again after classes. Platus’s death came up—how could it not?—but Mirian changed the topic after only a brief discussion. She didn’t want to dwell on it. They mostly talked about school, since that was what consumed most of their time. Since Selesia was training to be a mage generalist, Mirian could only offer her advice on half her classes.

Midway through the conversation, Mirian started to say, “In two years, you’ll look back at your classes and…” and then she paused. It was one thing to know there wouldn’t be ‘two years from now’ for Selesia, and another to internalize it. She swallowed hard. “—and realize they were easier than you remember. Sorry, had something in my throat.”

Selesia didn’t seem to notice. “Ugh, you can’t tell me the classes get even harder Mirian! How do you even remember it all?”

“You don’t have to memorize every glyph, but it helps. Understanding theory also goes a long way.”

“But the theory doesn’t make sense! It’s incomplete,” she said, and Mirian remembered she was part of the Takoa people, not just Akanan. More closely connected to Xipuatl’s people than to the colonists that had left Baracuel’s shores those centuries earlier. She wondered if they had similar views on soul magic. “What do the Takoa think of the… right, they don’t have the Luminates over in Akana. What is it… the Church of the Ominian?”

“Yeah. Uh, probably best not to talk about it in public,” Selesia said in a low voice. “It’s… well, there was really bad blood between the church and the Takoa. Several nasty wars before Akana’s constitution came into effect and gave the Takoa some protection from the zealots. There’s still a bunch of church leaders who think that part of the constitution should be repealed, so it’s something of a hot political issue. Not that there’s many people here who think that, but even though they like to brand each other heretics, the two churches are pretty similar in how they feel about everyone else.”

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“Gotcha, yeah.”

“You seem pretty open minded, though,” Selesia said hopefully.

“Thanks,” Mirian said with a smile. “Hey, one sec, gonna pick up a newspaper. I’m trying to be a little less ignorant about the world.” When she got to the printer’s stand, though, it was just the Torrviol Broadsheet for sale. “What happened to the other papers?” she asked.

The woman shrugged. “Morning train didn’t stop by. Trouble down the track is the rumor, but nothing too bad. Maybe we’ll have two papers tomorrow.”

“Ah, thanks,” Mirian said, but was thinking I bet the smaller magical eruptions we saw have something to do with that.

“You okay?” Selesia asked her. “You got this distant look in your eyes.”

Mirian gave her a smile she hoped wasn’t said. “Ah, sorry. I… miss my little brother,” she said. That wasn’t the complete truth, but it was true. It had been nearly a year since she’d seen Zayd, and he was cute as ever. Her parents had told her he was reading books already, and was just as inquisitive as his big sister.

“Tell me about him,” Selesia said.

So she did. He’d been four when she’d visited last, and a right terror. He was far too cute to stay mad at, though she had to hide her stuff on the top shelf or he’d get into it. The reason she’d been out of baduka boar scriber’s ink was because he’d gotten into it, and dumped the whole bottle out. By the time they’d caught him, the ink had either stained the floor boards or his clothes, and the reassemble liquid spell was inadequate to reverse the damage. But when he’d seen how mad she was, he’d hung his head and given the cutest ‘sorry’ she’d ever heard, so she couldn’t stay angry at him. Mirian told her other stories too. She talked to Lily about him, too, but she found she didn’t mind repeating herself. Little Zayd. When will I see you again?

***

Mirian spent most of the weekend practicing her spellwork. Once again, she was annoyed that she would spend a great deal of time scribing spells, only to have all that progress wiped away in a few days. Still, it was necessary. There was no replacement for practice.

She stopped by the market and the train station each day for news. On Firstday, she checked with the staff on the train platform, whose job at the moment was to stand around and tell increasingly agitated people that, no, the train still wasn’t here.

“Still delayed,” one of the conductors, a man with a short goatee and a bit of gray in his dark hair told her. “There’s been no news of why, but that probably means a break in the track. Maybe they sent a sending spell or a messenger bird over, but I haven’t seen it.”

Mirian tapped her chin. “Maybe someone needed to commandeer the train for an emergency? Who do they tell if that happens?”

“I doubt it,” the conductor said. “The message would go straight to the city guard so they could prepare, and the city guard would alert us. The emergency law predates trains, it used to be used all the time when there were myrvite incursions.”

“Would the couriers get a message?”

“I suppose they would hear about it too. And we haven’t heard anything from either, so it’s probably just a break and the signal lights got screwed up by some bad weather.”

“Thanks,” she told him. There was another small piece of the puzzle assembled. By now, Akanan forces had probably landed on Baracuel’s shores, or there’d be no way for them to make it to Torrviol in time. So the army probably had already dispatched the division for protection, but they would never make it in time if it was a magical eruption causing damage to the track. The Baracuel army would always arrive at the last minute, unless it was sent before the crisis. But getting the Baracuel army sent before the crisis wasn’t going to happen because no one would believe the Akanas would attack until whatever happened in Palendurio happened—which no one in Torrviol would hear about except Nicolus. Not that it did him much good. Likely, the leyline eruption had already killed him.

To compound it, no one in Torrviol would be prepared for the Akanans or the Baracuel army’s deployment because the message the guards were supposed to distribute was getting suppressed. That did leave one last avenue—the Royal Couriers. They should be distributing a message, but they weren’t. Maybe the magical eruptions scared off the messenger birds. The guards have no jurisdiction over the couriers, so that must be it.

The next thing Mirian wanted to know was when the spellwards failed. The long magical barriers were connected by ward totems that ringed Torrviol and the surrounding farms, but the spell engines that powered the barrier were in three short stone towers. In the old times, scouts would be posted at each tower to act as lookouts for myrvites or bandits, but these days, most towns hired two or three magi on a temporary basis to walk a ring around the barrier every few days and make sure the wards were intact and the spell engines were properly fueled with fossilized myrvite. The train delays shouldn’t have caused the problem; all the towers were stocked with at least a month’s worth of the magical stone for just such a reason.

Mirian walked across the fields, which were bare except for a few weeds as they waited for winter to pass. Here and there, birds flitted about, searching the soil for bugs or seeds, she wasn’t sure. A few waited in the groves of cherry and elderberry trees, feathers all puffed up in the cold. Other than that, there wasn’t much movement. The clouds hung motionless, and as she walked further from town, the city seemed to still. Looking back, she could admire the time that was put into each building, and how even from afar the buildings had a liveliness to them. The skyline was completed by Torrian Tower, Bainrose castle, and the Kiroscent Dome, each solid anchors that rose above the other buildings. Thousands of years of history, the homes of generations, soon to be annihilated.

The stone watchtower was a stubby little thing, only two stories high, and these days the nearby trees were taller than it. Normally, there was a familiar prickle of mana flowing through the air when a spell engine was running, especially a large one. It had already failed, though. Had no one noticed? And why? Torrviol was lucky they hadn’t had a myrvite attack. Sure, the patrols up north kept the beasts of the frostlands from descending, but that didn’t mean no myrvites, just less myrvites, as the frost scarabites nesting south of here proved.

She made a mental note to check earlier in the cycle next time. At this point, it was impossible to say if it was sabotage, poor maintenance, or something else. There was no going in to see how or why, though. Each tower had a reinforced oak door with a thick steel portcullis, and the doors were kept locked when the tower wasn’t being serviced.

Either way, the damage had already been done. What made the most sense to her was that someone sabotaged the south spellward barrier so the town’s attention was there, and not northwest where the attack would come form. But as she hiked around the hills behind the dormitory, she found the second tower’s spell engine also dead. Maybe it’s connected to the magical eruptions? The spellwards in the south scrublands had also failed.

Mirian headed back to her dorm. Two more days of classes and some normality. Then in the evening, the world would end again.