Chapter 137 – Recuperation

Calisto, when she wasn’t arguing with or attempting to manipulate Nicolus, was a surprisingly pleasant person to be around. She also found Bainrose an intolerable place to study.

“That musty old castle is fifty percent dust and twenty percent spiders by weight. No thank you! This is much nicer,” she said when they sat down at the place she’d chosen. There was a little cafe north of the old theater, but south of the restaurant Torres liked to eat at. Mirian had probably walked by it a hundred times without paying it much attention, but it was a cozy little place. The cafe was set in a little courtyard with a cherry tree and a tiny but well-kept garden. Three little warmth spell engines kept it comfortably heated despite the arrival of winter.

They’d agreed to meet on Fourthday so that they had more than one lecture to review, but also so that Calisto’s end-of-the-week plans with her friends wouldn’t be interfered with.

“Do the cherry blossoms ever get in your teacup in the spring?” Mirian asked. She missed spring and summer. They were the only two tolerable seasons in Torrviol.

“That would just be romantic,” Calisto said. “I’d be more worried about a bug dropping down from the tree. Let me see that notebook of yours.”

It was a new notebook, since it wouldn’t do to be carrying around her old notes. Mirian handed it over.

“You have really neat handwriting for a boy,” she said, flipping through it. “No offense.”

Mirian chuckled. “I know how we can be.”

“I like your little diagrams. And your glyphs are practically perfect. Better than Viridian’s on the chalkboard.” She smiled haughtily. “I have a good eye for these sort of things.”

The self-importance must have driven Nicolus insane, Mirian thought. “You do,” she said. She didn’t even need Nicolus’s advice to understand that Calisto liked flattery. “How do you know so much about myrvite ecology? Almost any time Viridian asked a question, you had an answer ready.”

“Well, I couldn’t answer all the questions. Gotta give some of the other students a chance. But I guess you could say it runs in the family. We’ve run one of the myrvite hunter guilds for generations, so I was learning myrvite names before I could walk. You’ve heard of the Ennecus Guild? That’s us.”

“I’m afraid not,” she lied. It sounded familiar, but she was still having trouble placing it. But Micael would have no reason to know anything about it.

She waved a dismissive hand. “Well, of course you wouldn’t have. I’m sure in Akana Praediar everyone’s fawning over those big companies and their fancy spell engines. But what do they run on? Not just the fossilized myrvite. Virdian’s new machine needs thousands of glyphs, and those don’t grow on trees! Not all of them, at least.”

Mirian frowned thoughtfully. “Does the Ennecus Group have any business dealings with the companies across the Rift Sea?”

Calisto rolled her eyes and gave a dramatic flourish. “No, of course not. They’re so hard to deal with. You really have to know somebody…”

Mirian nodded along as Calisto continued, taking mental notes. I just need to learn a bit more about Akana Praediar’s joint stock companies and I can drop references like I know them. She won’t know enough about things to challenge Micael’s knowledge. That can get me access not just to her myrivte knowledge, but to another Labyrinth entrance. Though she might know something about it already…

Then, the realization struck her. Ennecus Group! Oh Gods, that’s why I recognize the name. They run one of the expeditions in Frostland’s Gate, too! She tried to keep her face passive, and tuned back into what Calisto was saying.

“…and that’s why Sylvester Aurum’s companies are going to hit a growth limit. Akana is already wiping out their native myrvite populations at completely unsustainable rates. It’s just stupid, short-term thinking. I don’t know why everyone thinks he’s so smart,” Calisto finished.

“Hey, I’m doing archival studies, and Endresen gave me this paper… well, long story short, it didn’t have anything to do with glyphs. But it did describe this absolutely colossal beast that was sighted at the border of the scrublands…”

Mirian described the creature as best she could, including its life-sucking capabilities.

Calisto’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Where did you get that paper? Can I see it?”

Mirian gave her what she hoped looked like a sheepish smile. “Uh, it’s in some secure archives in Torrian Tower. Removing it would trip an alarm ward and… uh, I mean I can ask her, but probably not.”

“Damn,” Calisto said. “If you could find a way to get me it… I would be very grateful.” She leaned forward and waggled her eyebrows. Is she trying to be seductive?

“I’ll see what I can do. But what do you know about it?”

“Ah, not much. It was my grandfather’s research project. Sire Ennecus, before he pissed off the Bardas patriarch. Frankly, I think our family should still have the knight title. It has a nice ring to it. But the myrvite… it’s got to be a Cataclysm Beast. Apophagorga, from the sounds of it.”

“Cataclysm Beast?”

“Yeah. You know, like the one the First Prophet sacrificed his life to kill so that the people of Viaterria would be free to reestablish the old cities again? ‘Blah blah blah, now with my blood I consecrate this land and free us from a thousand years of terror, etc. etc.’ The Elder Titan.”

Mirian thought about that. “I’d sort of assumed some of the… fancier stuff in the oldest writings were… exaggerated?”

“I mean, it’s a reasonable assumption. The farther back you go, the less stuff survives. And it’s not like they ever found the bones of the Elder Titan or anything. Unless the Luminates have something stashed in a vault or something?”

They don’t, Mirian knew.

“If we found one… ugh. I can’t believe the Triarchs lost it.”

“Lost what?”

“The arcane catalyst the First Prophet got off the Cataclysm Beast. It was handed down for generations, and then there’s the collapse. With all the fighting and destruction, all the records of where the catalyst might have gone were destroyed. It could be languishing in the desert somewhere.” She sighed. “My grandfather was obsessed with finding it, or another Cataclysm Beast. Because, you see, there’s sightings of titanic myrvites after the First Prophet, cross-referenced from different sources and everything, and some historical fragments about the different ones. He spent decades, first on research, then on expeditions. But he never found one. He would tell me stories about them when I was little. Those were always my favorite.”

“I’d love to hear about them. The records don’t really talk about how the First Prophet defeated the Elder Titan. Or much about it. And the, uh, my church priest always made it sound like it was a metaphorical beast.”

Calisto took a sip of tea. “It’s not in the official records. You have to search the apocrypha and weird archives. A bunch of the archives are in Persama. I always wanted to go adventuring there when I was a kid. Pity what’s happened to the place. I hope the Baracuel Army teaches those bloodthirsty rebels a thing or two. We should get back to studying, though.”

Mirian acquiesced, though she was only half considering the material. Her mouth was watering, and it wasn’t for the cafe’s food. That’s the arcane catalyst I need to use for my soulbound spellbook. It has to be. That myrvite titan was using both soul magic and arcane magic. If there’s anything that can make a breakthrough in Xipuatl’s unified theory… that has to be it. Then, I’ll just need to locate the relicarium.

Eventually, she brought her thoughts back down to the present. After all, as exciting as it was, she would need to find a way to kill the massive thing.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

As she skimmed through the texts Viridian had assigned, one of the textbooks they’d checked out from the library gave her pause. “Are these heritability traits here based on the latest research? This isn’t like one of those philosophers who thought women had an extra tooth but never bothered to check, is it?”

Calisto peered over her shoulder. “The eyes example is a bit simplistic, but it’s basically true. Characteristics like height are highly variable, but eye color is pretty straightforward.”

“Are you sure?” Mirian asked. It was weird to think of her body as containing thousands of glyph-like structures, so tiny as to be invisible even with several layered lensing spells, all which carried traits with mundane chemical signals. We’re not myrvites, but we do have magic. And the chemical explanation is so complicated!

“Yeah,” Calisto said. “My aunt breeds eximontar. Eye color and carapace shading are two of the simple heritable traits. Red eyes is recessive, orange eyes is dominant.”

Mirian stared at the textbook. “I met someone who had gray eyes, but she said neither her parents nor grandparents had gray eyes.”

Calisto shrugged. “Oh, that’s easy then. She’s adopted.”

Mirian’s heart caught in her throat, and she felt a strange tingling sensation. That can’t be right.