Chapter 94 – Taking a Hike

Going north instead of south would mean that Mirian wouldn’t have a chance to deploy her seeds of chaos design, since it required the train system for dispersal, and there were no trains that got anywhere near Frostland’s Gate.

Still, she didn’t want to give Sulvorath an easy time, so after two days of scribing spells (she was getting quite sick of that part of the cycle by now) and preparing provisions, she decided to change what kind of letters she was sending via the Royal Couriers. For her first letter, she wrote to Mayor Wolden and told him to be wary of an Akanan named Sulvorath. Then she wrote another letter to the Crown Bureau telling them of a conspiracy in Torrviol involving Adria Gavell and Sulvorath, then another letter to the Arcane Praetorians telling them the real Adria Gavell was dead. Then she wrote to Ravantha and told her that this Sulvorath person was trying to take over the lucrative smuggling operations she had going by taking over the criminal markets in Torrviol. All in all, she composed fifteen letters.

It was a good start, but it wasn’t enough. She’d learned that the souls of different species had difficult to quantify differences to them, and creating rune sequences that distinguished one kind of soul from another were complex to make. Size was much easier to distinguish, and of course, whether or not the soul had a specific mark was easy to detect. Mirian suspected Specter had made her celestial fire-trap detect soul size and mark presence so that a rat running over the flagstones wouldn’t trigger anything, but that meant any animal with the same ‘soul size’ of a human could trigger her trap.

She tested this theory by stealing a pig from one of the farmers and sending it ass-first through the window of the spy’s headquarters. The boarded up window cracked apart from the force of the squealing hog, and shortly thereafter, her hypothesis was confirmed as she saw flames erupt.

Mirian didn’t stick around to watch. Her traveler’s pack was already on her back, and she left before anyone could find her skulking about on the scene. She knew what kind of patrol routes the guards had, so avoiding them was easy. She hoped the other time traveler appreciated her handiwork, and was deeply regretting his decision to attack her.

The journey to Frostland’s Gate would be a long one. The village was about as far away as Cairnmouth, but the road there was one of the few in Baracuel that didn’t have a spellward protecting it, and it wound through forests, hills, and a treacherous mountain pass. Merchants still needed to move their cargo around on the backs of donkeys, since even a wagon with modern suspension systems broke down on the rocky road.

Most merchants started by taking a boat up Torrviol Lake’s north shore and starting on the road there, but lacking a boat, Mirian opted to circle around through the overgrown trail in the woods. No one would be stupid enough to be traveling on the road at night, so no one would see her departure north and be able to report it. Given that winter was setting in, few merchants would be on the road. Mirian would have to rely on the traveler’s obelisks when she rested, but she’d read that they were still maintained on this road since unlike in other places, there was no spellward.

Once she did leave the spellward around Torrviol, she cast nightvision, a neat spell that shifted infrared light near her eyes into the visible spectrum, making it much easier to see.

Near the lake, there was a derelict lumber mill, though by now the forest that had been cut down around it had regrown. Unlike the old growth forest, though, it was rife with underbrush and snags, and even with her enhanced vision, Mirian stumbled several times making her way through it. She was relieved to make it into the older forest, where the towering conifers and mycanoid trees blocked out enough light that the forest floor was empty. In the dim moonlight, with the huge trunks evenly spaced out, the forest looked like a shadowy hall of mirrors.

Mirian had pulled all-nighters before, and the long walk through the night and into the next morning wasn’t so different. When she finally reached the first traveler’s obelisk, though, she was tired enough that she took the opportunity to rest. She charged the obelisk so that the protective spells would last a few hours, then spent a few minutes scribing a series of glyphs on a sheaf of spellpaper. The divination portion would detect the collapse of the protective spells, which would subsequently trigger the other glyphs, creating a loud noise that would wake her.

It was a rather complicated solution to not having an alarm candle, but she couldn’t think of a better way. There was no way to maintain mana flow while she slept, so none of the active spells would do it.

Two hours later, the noise of her elaborate alarm roused her with a start. She groaned, rubbed her eyes, spent a few minutes groggily staring at nothing, then kept going.

Another hour into her travel and she saw her first dangerous myrvite. A chimera—this one looking like a giant boar with porcupine spines—watched her from a hundred feet away. They stood and stared at each other before the creature trotted off, perhaps deciding mushrooms were easier prey. Mirian cast an enhanced hearing spell just to be sure. Annoyingly, that made the crunch of her own footsteps that much louder, but she didn’t want to waste a cycle getting eaten by a myrvite. The spies had drawn most of the predators near Torrviol over to the derelict tower, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more lurking in the woods.

Soon after that, she was in the foothills of the Littenords and the path grew steep. At the crest of one hill, she finally got a view of the path ahead and got the feeling that she was woefully unprepared. Through a gap in the trees, she could clearly see the Littenord Range. From her vantage, the slopes seemed impossibly steep, rising up high above, and from the peaks to the passes, they were drenched in snow. They were utterly gorgeous, and also more than a little intimidating. She found herself thinking, I have to walk over those mountains?

And that was the small range separating Torrviol from Frostland’s Gate. If these were the Littenord, no wonder only fools tried to see what was beyond the Endelice Mountains.

The guides she’d read had mentioned the journey took about six or seven days to make it to Frostland’s Gate, and since she was young and fit, she’d thought maybe she could manage five. But with the heavy pack already a burden on her shoulders, she got the creeping feeling her journey was going to be on the long end of that number. At least up here in the north she didn’t have to weigh herself down with water since it was so abundant around her.

That night, she slept under a traveler’s obelisk again, and she dreamed of the Ominian again. It was a familiar dream. Together, they walked across Enteria. Sometimes, it was the scrublands near Alkazaria, sometimes the foothills of grand mountains, sometimes strange forests she’d never seen before. Always, the places were devoid of all signs of human habitation, but other life grew about in abundance. Always, she found herself thinking, this place. This place. This place, over and over again. The feeling she got was the same feeling she felt walking around Torrviol, or Arriroba. It settled over her like a warm blanket.

When she woke, she was sad to be alone, and sad to not have bought a thicker bedroll at the market. Her back was sore, and the morning frost had seeped into her bones. She quickly wrapped herself in a warmth spell and ate another breakfast of jerky, hardtack, and dried fruit. Again, she looked up at the mountain pass ahead, and still couldn’t believe she had to go up that thing. Torrviol still wouldn’t get snow until the 12th, but up here in the mountains, the soft flakes were drifting down already, and the mountain peaks scraped against the bellies of dark clouds that promised more.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Mirian steeled herself, adjusted the straps of her pack, and began her ascent of the pass.

The trail devolved into constant switchbacks to account for the steepness of the slopes. At first, the trail was bare and the snow mostly kept off the ground by the thick canopy of pines and caps of the mushroom trees, but as she rose, the trees thinned out and the path became drenched in snow. Fortunately, decades of travelers had left the marks on the road, and there were helpful sigils, cairns, and fallen trees laid parallel to the ground to help guide travelers as the road became subsumed by white drifts. Though she’d seen no one yet, there was at least one traveler and some donkeys ahead of her, and she was thankful their prints on the churned snow also helped mark the trail.

By the end of the third day, Mirian knew she’d underestimated the time she needed. The next obelisk was halfway up the pass, below the overhang of a sheer granite cliff that offered some respite from the winds that were now blowing. She was by no means in bad shape; she’d run regularly and dueled regularly before the start of the time loops, and that fitness had stuck with her even after she’d mostly stopped exercising. However, as she lay down on her bedroll, her legs were sore as anything, and the snow had started falling much heavier.