Chapter 136 – Discovery

The colossal myrvite let out another roar as it thundered forward. Mirian covered her ears again.

It moved like a turtle, slowly but inexorably, but it was large enough that each stride covered a surprising distance. Mirian shifted to the Lone Pine form as it let out another roar. She still felt a wave of power stripping her aura, but the earth dervish method helped her weather it with less loss.

As it approached, her arcane sense felt like it was on fire. The beast radiated arcane energy like nothing else she’d felt. “I’m going to fly us out,” she said. “Ready?”

Rostal nodded. She grabbed him with lift person, then activated her levitation wand.

As soon as they began to rise, one of the waving tentacles pointed right at them and shot out a dark beam.

Mirian felt the mana fueling both spells crumble from her grip. Instead of pushing through the glyphs, the flows grew chaotic, and her attempts to reassert control of the mana failed. With a yelp, she and Rostal plummeted from thirty feet up. They’d already begun to leave the hill they were on top of, so instead of falling flat onto the ground, Mirian smacked into a bush. She heard branches snap and cloth tearing as she rolled off it down the steep slope, bouncing off a sapling, then crashing into at least three other things as she flailed about, grasping at the crumbling, sandy soil for purchase. Disoriented, she made out a flash of cliff approaching, and summoned Eclipse. With a shout, she plunged the blade into the cliffside.

Her arm wrenched and she screamed, but the blade lodged firmly in the ground. A tiny landslide of soil and small rocks tumbled off the slope down the cliff below. The little landslide continued as the DOOM, DOOM, DOOM! of the myrvite’s footsteps sounded.

Mirian cast her levitation spell again, this time in a short burst, canceling it just as the beast shot out another disruptive beam. She’d regained enough height that she could scramble along the steep slope. She started moving along it, switching from the Lone Pine form that had helped her weather the fall to The Spear That Cuts Water so that her feet could find better purchase on the treacherous ground.

When she looked back, scanning about for where Rostal had fallen, she saw the fool standing at the base of the cliff, blade drawn. Somehow, he’d survived the fifty foot fall and was staring up at the beast, rapier drawn.

Mirian shot out a lift person spell to try and pull him back, but one of the tentacles shot out and blocked it while two others came at Rostal. He slashed the first, then vaulted off the second as it tried to grab him, diving under a third that came sweeping down like a scythe. Miran’s spell dissolved on spell resistance so powerful that she felt a shock of feedback from it.

She saw Rostal get one more good slash, but there were too many tentacles, and only one of him. A spined tendril wrapped around his torso, impaling and crushing him. Mirian’s eyes went wide as she saw what happened next: Rostal’s soul energy didn’t dissipate. It was instead sucked towards the gaping mouth of the beast, the myrvite’s four pincers glowing with crimson light as it opened its maw wide. She could see rows and rows of thin spiny teeth.

Shit, was all she could think.

She sent out another burst of a levitation spell, then dropped it again as it sent out a beam, sending her forward along the slope to where the ground was flatter. She dodged through a patch of brush, aiming for where the ground had the cover of trees. The beast was at least a hundred feet tall and seemed to have no problem crushing and sucking the souls out of the vegetation too, but that would slow it down. Mirian had torn something important in one of her legs, and she was definitely bleeding from something. She sent healing energy from her repository into her leg, but ignored the other wounds. There was no time to figure out where she was hurt.

As she passed behind another bush, she sent out a greater illusion that looked like herself, sprinting at a right angle from her actual direction of travel. But when she glanced through the canopy to see if the behemoth had taken the bait, it hadn’t.

Of course. It’s not just looking at visible light or even heat. If it can eat souls, it can see them. Fuck. Fuck!

She dismissed the illusion. She’d reached a patch of flat ground through the trees and took off through it at a dead sprint. The footsteps of the beast thundered after her, and she knew she was in trouble when she glanced back because it was looming larger through the trees. There was the CRACK! of trunks being splintered as the creature crashed through them. The thin pines of the boreal forest yielded like grass to an elephant. It was barely even slowing down.

Mirian changed her form to The Dance of Dusk Waves to gain extra speed, but she was running out of breath.

The beast let out another roar, and this time Mirian found herself stumbling, dazed.

Shit, she thought again, feeling the presence of the thing behind her growing. There was only one option left. She grabbed Eclipse by the blade and turned it towards her heart, ignoring how it cut into her hands, then plunged it into her chest.

Pain lanced through her and she fell to her knees—but she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t sure if she’d missed her heart or if she simply wasn’t dying as fast as she’d wanted, but one of the tendrils grabbed her. She felt the spines digging painfully into her leg, lodging in like the teeth of a bog lion. Then, there was an immense pressure on her soul. She grabbed for her aura, but found it was being siphoned away. Eclipse fell from her grasp and—

***

—She was in the dream, in the Mausoleum of the Ominian. The Elder God stared down at her from Their throne, unmoving, but she knew They were watching. The places where They’d been pierced still oozed ichor, and there was a silence so deep it seemed more eternal than the stars, more unbreakable than the mountains and—

***

—Then she was awake in her bed, screaming.

“Wooo. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Shit!” Mirian said as she recovered. “Sorry Lily. Don’t worry, don’t worry it’s… don’t worry.”

“Gods, Mirian! It sounded like you were being murdered! Are you…?”

She closed her eyes. “All good. Allll good,” she lied.

She tried to reconstruct those last moments. As painful as they were, they were important. I was dying, but not yet dead. But my soul is intact. She cast around with her senses, feeling it. It was harder to see without the focus, but she could still see the shapes and currents of it. Eclipse is still there. So it came with me. She breathed a sigh of relief. Then a drop of water hit her on the head, and she looked up with a grimace. “The fucking hole,” she muttered, and grabbed her spellbook so she could telekinetically shut off the water heater above her.

“What?” Lily said, looking up at the ceiling.

Mirian closed her eyes again, thinking. The pieces of a puzzle were falling into place. This isn’t the first time. Specter’s curse wand shouldn’t have killed me, even if I did have a head injury. Whatever is embedded in my soul and is pulling it back—it must react to excessive soul damage. That’s important. If there is a way to remove the thing in the soul, I have to make sure I don’t trigger it. Then she thought of the dream. My soul must go somewhere else first. There’s that time in between sometimes when I die early. Strange. Where would it go? It’s not just floating around, or that beast would have grabbed it like he did Rostal’s.

“—kinda freaking me out a little Mirian, are you even listening? Why is there a hole in the ceiling?” Lily was saying.

She looked at her soul again. She certainly hadn’t escaped unscathed. There were disruptions in the flow, and dark patches of destabilization inside it. It doesn’t mean you’re invulnerable. Too much damage could still be a problem, just like with Soul Destabilization Syndrome.

“Mirian?”

Then there was the last thing. I have to figure out what the hell that beast was.

She shook her head. “Sorry, Lily. I’m okay. I’ll get the hole fixed. Some drunk students probably lost control of a spell or something.”

***

Mirian decided to take it easy for a cycle, and make sure her soul healed properly. As far as she could tell, most of the damage was superficial and could easily be repaired, but it would take time and meditation. The connection to her auric mana was harder to discern. As the first day progressed, it seemed to be at levels above what she’d been able to do with a fully healed soul, but there were places where the aura flow was disrupted. She was pretty sure she knew what that meant. The Blooming Iron technique can be used for strengthening arcane casting, not just strength and speed.

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Of course, just because she was resting for a cycle didn’t mean she would get sloppy. She killed Specter and Hache, burned both the imposter’s hideout and the spy’s headquarters, then made sure Magistrate Ada knew who to round up and where they’d try to hide.

Mirian also made sure to drop by Professor Viridian’s class near the end so she could ask him a few questions.

“Professor, I was doing some extracurricular reading, and one of the books made a claim that there’s land-bound myrvites the size of leviathans. It described a giant myrvite with eight legs, a black and white shell, tentacles, and a mouth with four pincers. Apparently it had some nasty natural spells, too. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

Viridian pondered that. “It’s hard to disentangle tall tales from truth, especially in older sources,” he said. “I’d be quite skeptical of the claims you read about. However, despite rumors to the contrary, I don’t actually know about every myrvite in existence.” He gave her a small smile.

“Is there anyone who has done research on, uh, the legends of big myrvites? It does seem implausible that something so big would exist. I mean, the territory it would need… then thinking of mating habits and… I mean, it does seem far-fetched. How would heritability even select for some of those traits?”