Chapter 277 – Journey

The air blasted past Mirian’s force shield, white jets of cloud streaming past. The taut chains followed behind her. Below, Alkazaria rapidly shrank.

Unlike with the storm she’d conjured a few days ago, there was little nuance or complexity to her spells. It was simple: go up fast. Fast enough that she could feel the force of acceleration through her whole body, but not so fast that she’d pass out.

The Akanans had tested how far from a leyline a repulsor could be before the connection lost power. Mirian used the repulsor for the first few miles of travel, then felt the connection fade. For a brief moment, the acceleration stopped, and she was drifting by inertia, the clouds laid out below her, the world looking so peaceful and small.

Then she cast supreme levitation, focusing the majority of her mana through the anti-gravity glyphs. Accelerating away from a center of gravity was what it did best, and that would last for several hundred miles.

This time, though, there was no Divir entropic field to disrupt her spell or slow her down.

She soared faster.

The air thinned. She compressed a last bit of air into her shielded bubble.

Off to the side, she saw Luamin, surface glinting bright in the sun. Together, she and the greater moon both rose to meet each other. Around her, the stars usually hidden by the glow of the atmosphere appeared. Across the void, there was a beautiful cloud of them, stretching like a band of some other great horizon.

A memory flitted by. That cloud had been thicker, once. Not in her memory, but in the Ominian’s dream. There had been more stars—but then there’d been that wall of fire.

A chill passed through her. The Gods’ War was truly unimaginable.

She looked down below. There was beautiful Enteria, in all its majesty. Off to the side, she could see Divir, small and dark even as the sun illuminated it. It was a pebble set against the ravishing blues, greens, browns and whites of the planet.

After a time, she felt the forces on her settle, and she shifted her mana away from the anti-gravity glyphs and to the force glyphs. She sped up again, her speed now far beyond even an artillery shell. And yet, her travel felt peaceful. There was no air rushing by her anymore, just the void. No drag.

She tapered off the mana she was using to generate acceleration, instead using energy transmutation to turn the stored energy in Equinox’s repositories. The relics she’d found in Vaults could store a great deal of energy, allowing her to slowly use those. Each energy relic was like a piece of fossilized myrvite, except they had less weight, better efficiency, and no toxic mana release.

As the air grew stale, she opened up the first of her containers, keeping the gas as contained as she could.

She looked down again. Enteria was so big. From up high, the two known continents looked impossibly small. Beyond the storm walls, she caught glimpses not just of other continents, but strange colors. Vast flora with colors like twilight—shades of purple, violets, oranges and pinks. Strange clouds, too iridescent to be water. Her brow furrowed as she considered the implications.

If the Labyrinth controls the climate as Viridian thinks, perhaps the climate isn’t uniform. Zhuan wanted to break through the stormwall, but—could we even survive in such a strange land? She suddenly thought of Eyeball and Conductor with their biology that was fundamentally different from hers, and even most myrvites. She thought of the holy texts. Xyltarvia granted us a piece of Enteria. Was that literal? Was that part of the Pact?

Then she laughed. After all this time, she still was finding more questions about the world. Perhaps even the Elder Gods had questions.

Below, Enteria slowly shrank.

She kept her shield up out of caution, and it was good she did. Suddenly, there was a flash of light and a massive crack formed in her force shield. Mirian immediately recast the spell, then looked around trying to figure out what had hit it. Her divination revealed no creatures, no spellcasters—no terrible void creatures. There were, however, minuscule pieces of rock.

That made sense. She was moving fast enough that even a tiny pebble floating in the void was moving faster than a bullet.

She began to drink some of her mana elixirs, one every dozen minutes, stabilizing her aura after each. The temperature of the air bubble plummeted, but she reversed the flow of the heat repository in Equinox, directing the stored energy to release. With that, she didn’t even need to cast a simple heat spell. The sun began to burn her exposed skin, but that was fixed by a light-dimming spell. That same sunlight was also recharging the light repository. She directed that energy to transmute into force energy.

An hour later when she looked back, Enteria had shrunk. She could see the whole circle of the planet, and the glimmer of stars around it. It looked… fragile. A jewel suspended in a vast void. She could see now that down in the southern hemisphere, there were even more colors, swirling red clouds above a continent of teals and deep grays, while off to the east beyond the stormwall, she could still see those strange violets and oranges.

It only reinforced how vulnerable the world was. The Elder Gods had shaped Enteria for life, but it was like a great spell engine of unimaginable complexity: shatter the wrong piece, and it might all come apart.

Even without Divir’s fall and the entropic soul-scouring explosion, the leyline crisis would eventually doom them. Did the Ominian know? Was it better to have Divir rise and fall as a warning so that we didn’t just delay the apocalypse crisis to a later time? How much of this was Their plan, and how much coincidence?

She looked for the smaller moon, but couldn’t make it out.

Up here, there was no sign of humanity. They were small beyond belief. And yet, the Ominian sought to protect us in the Gods’ War. What did They see in us?

She turned towards Luamin. Another bit of rock smashed into her shield, deflecting off in a burst of flame. Mirian reconstituted it, swapping to a stronger prismatic shield, then layered a force shield over it. That little pebble had drained more mana than stopping an artillery shell.

I wonder what our ancestors did? she wondered, thinking of Xylatarvia’s memory of the Viaterrian Chiminan Behemoths floating through the void. Colossal, and yet, impossibly small.

Mirian finally cut her mana to the force spells accelerating her and simply floated through the void. She was going faster than anyone ever had—except for those distant ancestors, she supposed—and yet, she felt like she wasn’t moving at all.

Luamin was growing larger in her vision. Soon, she’d have to accelerate away from it so she didn’t smash into the surface like a meteor. For now, though, she drifted through the great void.

Looking back at Enteria again, she thought, I should bring those fools I’ve been dealing with up here. Let them see what all their machinations and politicking looks like from the void. So high above, it all seemed immediately obvious to her that the rivers of blood that had been spilled to draw lines across maps had been an exercise in futility. Known Enteria was small compared to the planet, and the planet was nothing compared to the grand void around it.

Such a tiny thing, she thought. But worth saving. It’s all we have. And we could be so much more.

She thought again of a society of Grandpa Irabis. She thought of the grand towers the Viaterrians had once built, of the archmages laying down their lives to bury the Mahatan Gate.

Mirian looked out across the stars. Where did we come from? And what happened to that place?

It was another question, one impossible to answer now. Maybe there were other places out there for people, and if they failed here, it was a tragedy, but not an end.

Maybe this wasn’t the first apocalypse humanity had faced, and the void-ships Xylatarvia had rescued were all there was.

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She turned her attention to Luamin. She knew from Jherica’s calculations that it was moving impossibly fast in the void, but like her, it hardly seemed to be moving. She checked her pocket watch. Half an hour, she thought. Then she’d begin the deceleration.

For now, she wanted to see the surface better. She pulled up her lens spells and began to examine the moon.