Chapter 239 – Ramifications

One by one, the souls in the underground winked out, until those that remained were running for the surface through the entrance north of town. There, they seemed to realize the rest of the Akanan army wasn’t there anymore, and joined the retreat.

By then, Mirian had organized Professor Cassius and a handful of professors and students to set up a perimeter around the town, and had handed the Luminate priests two of her soul repositories and directed them to use them for healing.

As Mirian was doing her last check around the perimeter of Torrviol, she saw the corpses of students where they’d been slaughtered in the initial attack from the west. As she passed by her old dorm, one of the corpses caught her eye. Her enchanted glasses had been shattered, and gunfire had torn her apart.

Lily.

Mirian stared at the corpse, emotions churning in her. Disgust. Anger. How many times has she died here, blinded, terrified, and alone? But another emotion stirred, one that she liked far less than the others.

Apathy.

She’ll be fine next cycle, at least. That had been something she’d told herself for so many people in so many cycles. It was a necessary line of thinking. She was glad she felt something for her old roommate’s death. She worried for the day that she wouldn’t.

Mirian moved on.

Then, she heard a remote voice spell from her father. “Naluri, come quickly. I’m by the train station.”

She stopped her patrol and flew southeast as fast as she could, a burst of wind trailing her as she sped over the town. Her father’s soul was easy enough to pick out. He was by one of the train cars, casting a spell she’d never seen before, eyes closed.

As she approached, she saw the corpses.

Gaius opened his eyes. “They all died recently. One of the Akanan remnants ambushed them before I could finish them off. Four of them have only been dead for a short time, and I’m stabilizing their remnant soul energy.”

“Resurrection of the dead,” Mirian whispered. “You mentioned trying. You really can do that?”

“Only the recent dead, and only if the soul can be reconstituted and the body healed. The damage done by the body’s death is… not always reversible. I’ll show you. Watch.”

Mirian looked at the corpses. She closed her eyes. Nicolus had been going back and forth between Torrviol and Cairnmouth. He’d returned by train at just the wrong time. Sire Nurea had thrown her body in front of him, and her corpse was on top of his. “Them,” she said.

“The woman’s too far gone. She died well before he did. I can do the boy.” He levitated Nurea’s corpse off her ward.

“Then do it.”

Mirian watched as her father began to manipulate dozens of runic bindings, each one grabbing and pushing the fragmenting pieces of Nicolus’s soul back into place. He explained his technique as he worked, only occasionally falling silent as he worked through an especially tricky piece of magic. The amount of control it required was staggering; when Mirian reached out with her own binding to help, it was like trying to push water into a sphere with her hands. She backed off, watching Gaius’s technique.

Once the soul was in place, he started going through healing spells. He pieced back together the shattered rib, fusing the shards back together. The punctured lung healed over. New blood began to flow in his veins. He did this all while keeping the soul in place.

“Then, the soul must be rebound in place. Once you adhere it to the body in several places, let the runic bindings decay naturally as the soul reattaches itself.”

The former corpse of Nicolus Sacristar stirred. He opened his eyes and gasped for breath. For a moment, he looked around uncomprehendingly. Then, he saw Mirian, Gaius, and Nurea’s corpse, and his eyes went wide. “It was… real. Gods… Gods… what? How?”

“You were unconscious. We healed you,” Mirian said, simply. There was no need to tell him the truth. She recognized the similarities between binding Nicolus’s soul back to his body and binding human soul remnants to one of Gaius’s undead soldiers. The process was similar enough that anyone with a prejudice towards necromancy would be disturbed.

He looked around again, then suddenly became angry. “You didn’t—you didn’t see this! How? Why? I thought you were a Prophet. You… we should have—she shouldn’t…” He scrambled over to Nurea and started weeping.

Mirian used a remote whisper spell to talk to her father so her former classmate wouldn’t hear. “How complete is the resurrection? This isn’t like him. I’ve seen him deal with Nurea’s death before with knowledge of the loop, and he isn’t so… emotionally volatile.”

Her father used the same spell to whisper back. “Hmm. I suspected as much. Incomplete, but by how much varies. Part of it is from the damage his brain took while his body was dead. The brain is the only thing I can’t fully heal. It can draw memories from the soul to repair some of itself, but when re-binding the soul, inevitably, fragments are missing. Those fragments are associated with memories, so it’s affected his mind. There is always some permanent damage. We’ll know in a few weeks how much.”

Mirian looked at Nicolus with pity. He doesn’t deserve this. None of them do. Yet what else can I do?

There was only so much she could do as one person. She could monitor Akana and prevent the invasion herself, but then she couldn’t head the research efforts in Torrviol, nor search the various Labyrinth sections. She could look around for Ibrahim, but she knew from Troytin chasing her that hunting down a time traveler who didn’t want to be found wouldn’t be easy. Her research here meant she couldn’t research in Tlaxhuaco, nor help Gabriel push into Zhighua. No matter what she did, she’d be failing to do a dozen other things.

She focused back in on the present. There were lessons to be learned here and now. Later would come later.

Gaius moved to the next recently dead corpse, and they repeated the lesson.

It’s worth the cost, she thought. For now, it was a relatively useless spell. But someday….

***

The next morning, Torrviol was still reeling from the attack. The way the people of the town looked at her had also changed. She often heard hushed discussion when she walked, or other times, conversations would cease completely as they saw her.

Some thanked her profusely for saving their lives and homes.

Some knelt and touched their hand to their heart.

Some walked away quickly, hoping not to interact at all.

And some went wide-eyed and trembled in fear.

The damage to her research was extensive. A fire had broken out in the Myrvite Studies building, and gunfire had shattered the greenhouses. Torrian Tower had taken less damage, but there were still a lot of broken glyphs, disrupted enchantments, and knocked over papers to deal with. Dozens of apprentices and professors who had been working for her had been killed.

She found herself in a grim mood. No one much liked the hundreds and hundreds of Akanan corpses piled around the town, and a disease outbreak would further impede her, so by midday, she found herself incinerating bodies with her father. “What a waste of time,” she said as she cast another remote flames spell.

“Part of life, I’m afraid,” Gaius told her. “Waiting for a carriage that’s late. Repeating chores. Needing to go back home because you forgot something important. You can’t let it bother you.” He paused, then said, “It does still bother me, though. I’ve always struggled with patience.”

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There was another group of dead Akanans north of them. Mirian began incinerating each, compacting the ash back into the soil.

“So how do you do it?” she asked.

“Hmm?”

“How do you cling to… kindness? Hope? The greater ideals that you do this all for? I find myself annoyed all the time. Surrounded by the ignorant, who I must teach again and again. Harassed by the malevolent, or those too stupid not to be tricked by them,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the still smoldering airship.

“Some days, I don’t. On the days I do though? Love.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “You’ve heard the more complicated answers, I’m sure. As the Unification War proceeded, I… became unpleasant. There’s a great deal of lies in the Baracueli histories, but there’s quite a bit of truth in there too. War makes monsters of us all, and I fought for many, many years. It became easy to kill. Satisfying, even. Plenty of them deserved to die. But that’s not why we live life. Life is about sharing a good conversation over a good meal with good friends and family. Everything else just revolves around that.”

Mirian raised an eyebrow. “Even if you can’t eat?”

“Even then. Oh, of course I was bitter about it for a few decades, but I don’t regret it. There’s too much left to learn for me to regret chasing immortality.”