Chapter 272 – Limits

The dark hall of the Mausoleum greeted them, both familiar and strange.

“It feels like something’s stinging me all over my body,” she heard a nagual say.

“I believe that’s the entropic field decaying,” Xecatl said, looking to Mirian for confirmation.

She nodded. “We will encounter the tertiary field soon. Prepare yourselves,” she said, stopping inside the entrance. There, eight of the nine bindings were inscribed and waiting. She glanced at Liuan. Yes, she’d noticed. She doesn’t seem surprised. She’s not scrambling to take notes.

It was Ibrahim who paused to look at them. “Hmm,” was all he said, though.

Jherica furrowed their eyebrows, then glanced at Liuan.

Celen didn’t seem to know what he was looking at. “Seems a bit blasphemous to write a note here,” he said, then was confused when no one responded.

They continued inside. By now, the entourages of the Prophets were thoroughly unnerved as the walls changed and shifted around them. Then, they began to feel the Ominian’s presence.

The seven priests muttered prayers. Jherica’s wizards began a frantic whispered conversation. Mirian didn’t hear them saying anything she hadn’t already considered. She wondered what the other Prophets expected. All she wanted was to make clear that the temporal anchors were not something any of them could simply snatch for themselves. That she wasn’t hiding anything.

Ibrahim led the way, eager to gaze upon the Ominian, no doubt to test himself. His skin was the first to start blistering. She saw his breathing change and his aura shift. He continued forward, gaze determined.

“I am shielding us now,” Mirian said. “But I won’t be able to hold it for long.”

If that wasn’t statement enough about the power they were about to encounter, she didn’t know what was. At least the tertiary field wouldn’t shred the sigils in her spellbook like the entropic field did.

She cast a modified version of black shield in front of them. They moved forward. Then one of the wizards collapsed, hyperventilating. One of Liuan’s priests fell next, muttering nonsense. The rest of them continued, but it was like stepping into a gale. The pressure near the God was overwhelming. Cracks of light formed in the shield.

Another priest fell to his knees. He looked like he was screaming, but he was silent. Blood leaked from his eyes and nose. He began to claw at his face.

“I… I can’t!” another of the wizards said. He was shouting it, but Mirian hardly heard him. He retreated, skin blistering. Another priest collapsed to the ground, hands over his ears. The archmage Jherica had brought had his own shield up, but he was struggling to maintain it, even behind Mirian’s black shield.

There was a powerful silence in the hall devouring all thought and speech. Mirian had to shout to be heard, and even then her voice sounded distant to herself. “Those familiar with celestial magic can attempt to view the Ominian’s soul. However, be careful not to blind yourself.”

Xecatl’s two naguals were the next to collapse. One of them was crying, the tears mixing with blood. The other looked like they were seeing a distant horror. “How is it all flesh?” she heard him whisper.

Another priest fell, his mouth open in a silent scream. Then the archmage collapsed, his aura completely stripped. Mirian’s own aura was a whirlwind of rushing mana, but this close to the Ominian, the field was eating away at her spells almost as fast as she could replenish them. Her gather air spell failed and she recast it. As the Ominian’s throne came into view, her black shield cracked apart.

The rest of the non-Prophets fell to their knees in an instant, including Xecatl. Mirian recast the shield as quickly as she could.

To her surprise, it was Jherica who was the first of the full Prophets to stop. They were shaking their head, face blistered, left hand trembling, reaching towards the Ominian’s throne, but it was like there was an impenetrable wall before them.

Ibrahim was still in the lead, just behind Mirian’s shield. His eyes were full of fury, and he was leaning into the Ominian’s energy field, pushing into a hurricane with each step.

Mirian wiped a trickle of blood from her face. Gabriel was the next to stop. He retreated, shaking his head.

Liuan’s face held a look of determination and passion Mirian had never seen on her before. Her teeth were grit, and her eyes looked wild. But when she tried to take another step, she collapsed, hand splashing into a puddle of her own blood on the dark floor.

Zhuan stopped by her side, standing with as regal a posture as she could manage. Then the blisters and blood became too much and she stepped back.

Mirian had expected Ibrahim to throw himself into the barrier. What she didn’t expect was to see Celen, wandering forward almost like he was lost. His face began to contort with a hundred different emotions.

Mirian then heard Ibrahim’s words, as if shouted over rolling thunder. “Why did she have to die!?” he screamed.

The pressure in the room changed. The field shattered Mirian’s black shield, and when she tried to recast it, it failed. She saw the two temporal anchors in the Ominian’s shoulder blazing with light. She saw again that gaping pit in Them, darker than the void, shadows gushing from it as blood. There was a puddle of ichor on the ground by Them, she realized, layered over like calcite in the caves of the Jiandzhi.

She felt pain.

She felt sorrow.

There was an emptiness that hit her, a dreadful sense of loss that scoured away all other feeling.

“Yes,” Celen said. “I understand.”

As she came to stand beside him, Mirian understood now, too.

The memories came flooding back. She remembered when it had all begun—that first day of Solem, that first cycle, before she’d known she was in the time loop. She had woken to a feeling of overwhelming loss. She’d started crying. Now, she knew why.

It was DIVITRIUS’s pain.

It lingered here too.

How do we fix it? Can you be saved? she wondered. Then she blinked back the blood that was filling her eyes.

Celen collapsed next to her. She picked him up and dragged him back.

“Ibrahim!” she called.

He didn’t respond. He just kept moving forward. The field around the Ominian was scouring away his flesh. Blood sprayed out of him like wind blowing through the spout of a fountain, but he took another step. And another.

“Ibrahim!” she called again. He wasn’t listening.

Mirian dragged Celen backwards. He was unresponsive, body limp. Once she was far enough away from the throne, she reestablished the shield and began telekinetically dragging the all bodies back.

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Ibrahim took one more step forward, then collapsed backwards into a pile of flesh. Mirian checked the Ominian. No third temporal anchor. He was just dead then. The fool would recover from that.

Her control over the air in the Mausoleum had failed for long enough that two of the retinue the back seemed to have suffocated. Mirian didn’t have the soul energy left over to do anything about it. Everyone else seemed to have lived, though no one was in good shape.

“Of course it became a bloody competition,” Gabriel said, wiping blood from his mouth. “Is Ibrahim…?”