Chapter 266 – Dreamscape

She and Zhuan spent three more days together in the mountains. On the third evening, Mirian felt something change as she was speaking to a scimitar lion. It was like when she’d been practicing Eskanar. For a time, she’d been able to muddle through conversations. Then something had clicked, and she was thinking in Eskanar. As her thoughts touched the scimitar lion’s aura, she felt a better understanding of what it wanted, how it saw her. It was nothing fundamentally new—she’d been speaking to myrvites for years now—but it felt different. She couldn’t explain it.

When she slept, she moved around the dreamscape.

She found the Ominian, slowly striding across a vast forest. From the mountains, she knew that it was Akana Praediar, long before humans had ever touched the land.

These are Their memories, she knew. Traced and retraced. A way to remember this place. A way to hold on to what was lost. What will be lost. She flew across the dream. The Mausoleum was rooted in reality, but the other places weren’t. She wasn’t sure how that worked, but she didn’t need to understand the theory, just the rules. They were bound together in a spirit, and each soul within the construction was in contact with the Ominian.

She had a request, and she put it together without words or emotions, only what she knew of the arcane sigils. Communication required establishing common context; the scimitar lion understood raising young, understood hunting, understood hiding from predators. The Elder Gods understood none of that; she showed the Ominian concrete physical events: moonfall. The measurements of the temporal anchors. The kind of stone found in the Endelice. Once she had that, she showed the Ominian the movement of time she needed in glyphs, showed Them the spirit construct in runic approximations.

At first, there was no movement. Then, the giant God stirred. Their body appeared humanoid, but sometimes as it moved, she could see the pieces of it hidden by a trick of the dimensions, vast pieces of twisted stone and unblinking eye-like whorls, twisted wings of dark crystal, and limbs that twisted at odd angles.

The Ominian raised a hand, and for a moment, Mirian could see parts of Them in a layer she couldn’t normally perceive. It was maddening, that glimpse. It was like she was almost touching a new understanding of how the world was assembled, only for the pictures to dissolve into fog as she reached out. It was like realizing the ground she stood on wasn’t solid, but contained more of the void than anything real.

In an instant, the world around them transformed. Now she looked at Akana Praediar as it was now. The western mountain peaks worn down, the forests replaced by endless farmland. There were no people, was no movement—it was a memory, not a reflection of reality—but it was a fixed moment in time.

Mirian gaped at the Elder God.

It had worked. She’d made herself understood—without the translation of Eyeball or Conductor.

She tried to push her thanks through runes, but the God was motionless.

Mirian stepped through the dream into the Mausoleum.

Two shadows, the souls looking like the folds of cloth, the faces blank, were already waiting for her at the foot of the colossal figure of the Ominian.

“What happened?” thought one of the souls. Xecatl, she knew.

“I think… I think I got the Ominian to make the dream linear,” Mirian thought back to both her and the second soul, Jherica.

Another shadow appeared in the room, then another, then another. Liuan, Ibrahim, and then Gabriel. Last, Zhuan appeared.

“The dreamscape shifted. And you’re all here,” Ibrahim thought, surprised. “What happened?”

“Time is linear in the Mausoleum, now,” Mirian thought. “We can now meet any night we please.” That would give them a powerful tool for coordination. Instant communication each night.

“Amazing!” Jherica thought. “Does this mean… is there a way to communicate with the previous Prophets? Can you tell Them to move us back to the First? But then what if we changed what the First Prophet did? Could we even do it? If we could, what would that do to our branch of time…?”

“I don’t know,” Mirian replied. Could she? Would the Ominian listen? How did that play into the Pact? And what would happen to their portion of the fields of time if something a thousand years ago changed? Would they be erased, or would they be like a branch cut from a tree, unmoored from history?

“It can help us do something else, in the meantime,” Xecatl thought. “Scebur doesn’t have a violet focus, but they must be somewhere in the dream when we sleep. We can hunt them down and take a measure of their soul.”

If she’d had a body, Mirian would have straightened in shock. “Spread out in the dream. Check in here every so often. If I can get a look at their soul, I can create a divination spell that targets a unique current or feature.” That would involve a tri-bound sequence that mixed runes and glyphs.

The souls of the Prophets began to vanish as they spread out.

Mirian flitted through the dream. The memories of places had all changed to represent the present; the Ominian hadn’t quite understood that she just needed the Mausoleum in linear time. Or perhaps they couldn’t have one without the other. It seemed the Ominian walked all of known Enteria, though, which meant there was a lot of ground to cover. Even flying through the dream faster than what supreme levitation could manage in reality, there were so many places to check. But they wouldn’t get a better opportunity for an ambush.

She shifted back and forth between the Mausoleum and the dreams. Xecatl returned as she did. “Nothing in that place of creeping dread, and I did a quick pass over the archipelago. I’ll try to cover Tlaxhuaco,” she said. “Perhaps they’ve been using the dream to scout it out.”

Mirian left to look across Baracuel. Using that logic, Scebur also might be scouting out Torrviol. Except, it wasn’t quite Torrviol that she returned to, but a place where the Labyrinth had blistered up and myrvites stalked through old mismatched ruins. Not quite the present, then. She returned twice more, checking in with Ibrahim first, then Jherica, who was looking along the Akanan coast.

Mirian rushed through the more symbolic places of the dream next; the sea where it rained anchors, wove around through the grove where mushrooms grew into storms and volcanoes into trees, out into the void where the wall of fire veiled the stars, always growing but never arriving. She returned to the Mausoleum, finding Ibrahim again, then Xecatl twice more, then Zhuan.

“Has Gabriel or Liuan checked in?” Zhuan asked.

“No. I was about to ask the same. Maybe Jherica has seen one of them. I can wait for them.”

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Zhuan gave her affirmation. She had the most practice with the violet focuses, and found it easy enough to rapidly move around the dream.

As Mirian waited, she quickly grew impatient. She hated standing around feeling useless. It felt like hours passed, though it was probably only a few dozen minutes.

Finally, Gabriel appeared. “Liuan says she found Scebur. She woke herself up to go after her.”

“What!?”

A soul couldn’t exactly shrug, but Gabriel sent his best impression of one.

“Where are they?”

“The dream isn’t exactly going to tell us that. She said something about a soul-pattern she recognized.”

“She shouldn’t go after them alone.”

“She’s not. The archmages and Sorcerer Elite are on her side this cycle, remember?”

“I can fly there. In two days—no, I think I could do it in one if I pushed myself.”

“Right, drain all your mana and then burst into a delicate political situation, helping locate someone you don’t know and wouldn’t recognize. Brilliant.”

Mirian sent the feeling of a scowl at him.

“We all have the things we’re good at, remember? Liuan can handle herself. Maybe she can even get them to talk.”

If Scebur wasn’t a fool, they could remove themself from the loop in an instant. A wand of fireball could also do the trick, as Celen had proven. Then, they’d have time to recover and plan. They’d set about causing more chaos that made them difficult to detect. Mirian didn’t care if they talked. Their actions—refusal to talk, attacking Tlaxhuaco, encouraging the war to escalate—they had already spoken loud enough. What she wanted was to remove them from the loop entirely.

And yet, that would reveal a capability she was still keeping hidden.

Liuan had access to the RID. Scebur could be cursed into incapacitation. And if that didn’t take, that was valuable information to know.

“If she lets Scebur escape, I’m going to overturn every rock in Akana until I find them. This has gone on long enough.”