There were arcane devices and spell engines all around the Divine Monument. Some were clearly for taking mana flow measurements, and others measuring various types of energy. Still others, Mirian had no idea. They had glass bulbs with strange colored fluids, twisted brass pipes snaking all over, and metallic protrusions. The glyph sequences were unfamiliar, and the devices looked hideously complex.
High Wizard Ferrandus directed Mirian to a simple chair that had been set up next to another of the devices. This one had intimidating looking silver spikes, linked by rubber tubes that led to several glass vials full of an angry looking crimson liquid.
“What… does it do?” Mirian asked warily.
“We feed mana into the Monument, then look for reactions or resonance from your aura,” Professor Torres said. “You’ll feel strange. Shouldn’t hurt.”
There were more tests after that. At one point they used a drop of her blood in another machine. She kept feeling the prickling feeling of magic running over her aura. As the wizards turned on spell engines, glyphs on the Divine Monument would light up, then fade. She watched as they cast divination spells she’d never seen before. Mirian didn’t know what any of it meant.
As the tests progressed, Ferrandus was getting increasingly agitated. The wizards with him shared glancing with each other, perhaps anticipating what these results would mean for them later.
On the fifth device they used, Mirian began to wonder if her soul was being affected. It was difficult to focus in on it, since it felt like her aura was being scraped at, but it seemed the devices only interacted with her aura. She searched for that strange hole in her soul. It was still there, unmoving. If the Divine Monument was interacting with her, it was in some way that neither she nor the Academy’s best arcanists could detect.
As they wrapped up the last test, Ferrandus was grinding his teeth. He approached Jei and began talking to her in angry whispers, though not so quietly that Mirian couldn’t hear him. “Worthless, Song. We have introduced this liability—for nothing!”
Jei kept her composure. “We haven’t tried everything. Besides, secrecy does not matter anymore. Our enemies know, and therefore we should be more generous with our allies. Selkus Viridian—”
“—is not as smart as he thinks he is,” snapped Ferrandus. “And also a liability. Do you know what our potential donors were concerned about, last banquet? The Palamas were worried about him, specifically. The Bardas and Allards discussed ‘trends of worrisome research in radical ecology.’ We probably missed out on a pile of doubloons because Luspire doesn’t want to—hells, why am I bothering to rehash this? No, this isn’t a problem of needing more minds. We tried growing plants next to the Monument. Selkus would simply say we didn’t try growing enough! The brightest minds in the Academy are already here. It is not a problem to be solved by quantity. Get her out of here. I need time to think.”
Ferrandus took a position over on the other side of the room. Torres and the other arcanists stayed behind to work with the devices, though what they were doing was still beyond Mirian. Jei gestured for her to follow, and they left. She was apparently used to being dressed down by Ferrandus.
“You can see why I left my homeland,” Jei said as they walked. “After seeing it, I have spent a long time contemplating the nature of reality.”
“Yeah,” said Mirian, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. In another life, she would have been perfectly content dedicating herself to studying it. As it was, she doubted she had anything to contribute. Still, it was good to know what it was the Akanans were after. Now she just needed to figure out what they thought it did.
As they made their way up the spiral stair, she said, “Have they figured out how to open the stone doors? There’s a faster way down if they can.”
“No,” Jei said. “Ferrandus called it a distraction. Here,” she said, handing Mirian a scroll. “The mathematical formulas you need to break the spy’s cipher. Memorize them.”
Mirian took it and placed it in her bag as they continued back up. For a while, they walked in silence. Then Mirian said, “What’s the other way in? The one through the Griffin Hall passage?”
If Jei was surprised Mirian knew about that, she hid it well. “I will show you.”
They started up the ramps, while Mirian debated whether or not to tell Jei the other revelation she’d had. As they reached the storage room, she blurted out, “I’ve seen a place that looks the same as the Divine Monument. I dreamed it.”
“Interesting,” Jei said.
Mirian told her about it: about the shifting rooms that seemed to phase in and out of existence as she walked, about the strange materials it was made of—and of course, of the colossal thing on the throne, gaping wounds all over its body. “I still don’t know what it means,” she added. “It felt… real. Even when I woke.”
“It sounds like the descriptions the archivists found of the Mausoleum of Ominian.”
A shiver ran down Mirian’s spine. “But that was destroyed. I mean, that was part of that whole thing with the end of the Persamian Triarchy. There was that crazy priest who thought they needed to sacrifice a bunch of people, and then—look, I didn’t pay great attention in history class so I don’t remember the details, but even I remember that temple was destroyed. Along with most of the city, right? It’s one of the best documented divine interventions. My priest back home talked about it too.”
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Jei looked at Mirian. “Perhaps it was a vision of the past. Perhaps some part of the Mausoleum survived. There is much still buried in Persama that archaeologists still seek. I cannot say what it means.” She went over to one of the walls, past where the patch of dried blood Mirian had left was, behind several of the crates. “Here,” she said, and pulled one of the old torch sconces. A part of the stone wall swung open.
Automatically, Mirian pulled out her spellrod and tried casting a light spell. As she started to draw mana, a wave of dizziness swept over her. The mana slipped from her grasp, and she doubled over, retching.
“You need to rest,” Jei said. “Those devices changed your auric flow. It is temporary, but it will take time to recover.
That bothered Mirian. She hadn’t realized how screwed up her aura had become. What if it is permanent? she worried. Once again, she wondered what things came with her when the loop reset. Her memories clearly traveled with her, as did hunger pangs. But wounds didn’t. What about the state of her aura?
She kept these thoughts to herself as Jei took her through the route in the underground that ended at Griffin Hall. Mirian had mapped most of it, but missed one of the shortcuts. Jei had also subtly warded the last door from detection, making it so Mirian’s reveal iron spell would have never found the lever.
They emerged from Griffin Hall, and Jei locked the door behind them. “Go, what is the phrase? Take it easy.”
“Thanks,” Mirian said, and departed, mind still whirling with the implications of what she had seen.
***
Fourthday, confirmation came that afternoon that the tracks south of Torrviol had been damaged. Fifthday, another zephyr falcon arrived from the south, bearing news of the escalating conflict. Without Mirian’s forewarning, people might have simply fretted over the worrisome news. But with Mirian’s loud proclamations that it was a prelude to war, it sent waves of panic through the town. She began to hear a word whispered when she passed: Prophet.
Mirian found herself at the mayor’s office again, advising him.
“The spellwards around town and south of us all have gone down, but we can’t waste time repairing them,” Mirian told him. “Everything has to go into the evacuation of those who can’t fight, and preparations for those who can.”
Mayor Ethwarn had taken on a sickly pallor, and there was a tremor in his right hand. “How are we to evacuate if the trains are going to be commandeered by the military? The myrvite infestation on the road is bad—there’s no way we can move everyone.”
“Perhaps the commanders will let people ride the train back south once it unloads the soldiers. They’ll have added cars, though it still won’t fit everyone. With the repairs on the tracks being quicker, it may be we can fit an extra train. I don’t know when Fort Aegrimere sends their division, but there may still be time.”
The mayor wanted her to have more answers than she had. She could tell he wanted to flee, but after campaigning on the idea that ‘flee’ was the one thing he wouldn’t do, he was having trouble reconciling his desire to protect his reputation with his desire not to be in the middle of a war zone.
After their meeting, Mirian roamed about town, taking in the changes. She watched the recently formed militias practicing in the fields, drilling with both wands and what firearms people had scrounged up. From what she’d heard, Professor Cassius had given his classes a rousing speech about patriotism and country before dismissing them. Many of his students now were arrayed on the fields south of Torrviol, sending spells into piles of stones that had been set up as targets. Cassius himself was directing drills that had arcanists and townsfolk practicing taking cover from artillery, then popping up to fire back. It was nice to see Platus among them, rather than blowing himself up like he usually did.
Professor Viridian and a dozen other professors, including Professor Eld, were scribing spells by assembly line, simply taking whatever spellbooks people passed them and copying the glyphs down as fast as they could. She noted the ground lightning spell, which would be useful against the chain-lightning artillery shells, and force shield, which wouldn’t do much to bullets, but might do much better against shrapnel and debris.
Professor Torres was leading an effort with Ingrid to build a piece of artillery atop one of the fire-fighting wagons in the student crafting center. Getting even a single weapon of that size built in five days would be an impressive accomplishment. Right now, it didn’t look like much—just a bunch of steel and scrap laid out in piles, with Torres pouring over blueprints.
Not everyone was preparing for battle, though. Plenty of people were gathering up their belongings, and there was a constant stream of people heading toward the train station, where a permanent crowd of desperate people were pressing the beleaguered workers there for any information. She’d seen others crowding around the docks, trying to purchase fishing boats, as if they would be able to navigate the narrow rapids of the river.
Mirian visited the ruined building that had been the spy’s headquarters. Someone had erected a warning sign near the spike pit, and the building was mostly a mess of collapsed rubble and charred wood. The guard had already gone through looking for anything of value, but Mirian wanted to know the layout of the building. She drew a map of the rooms so she would better remember it, and used divination to find any remaining glyphs or mechanisms she might have missed. Reveal iron mostly showed a mess of nails and rebar, but she also found the remains of two safes, though each was open and the materials inside scorched beyond recognition.
She wondered what the best use of her time was now. So many things were now in motion that it was hard to keep track of everything. For now, it seemed best to stay mostly passive and observe the outcome.
As she made her way back towards the dining hall, though, she realized that passivity may not be possible. Priest Krier was leading a delegation of some dozen acolytes and townsfolk. The acolytes carried the symbolic lightbringer torches, the white fire also trailing thick white smoke. The townsfolk had with them a variety of tools. When they spotted her, they started walking right toward her. This was clearly no chance encounter. The way the townsfolk carried their tools, it was clear they had not brought them for farming or because they thought Mirian might need help repairing something.
“Mirian Castrella,” Priest Krier boomed out, clearly wanting this to be a public spectacle. It worked. Already, people were turning to see what was happening. “You stand accused of heresy. Come with us.”