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As it approached, her arcane sense felt like it was on fire. The beast radiated arcane energy like nothing else she\'d felt. "I\'m going to fly us out," she said. "Ready?"

Rostal nodded. She grabbed him with lift person, then activated her levitation wand.

As soon as they began to rise, one of the waving tentacles pointed right at them and shot out a dark beam.

Mirian felt the mana fueling both spells crumble from her grip. Instead of pushing through the glyphs, the flows grew chaotic, and her attempts to reassert control of the mana failed. With a yelp, she and Rostal plummeted from thirty feet up. They\'d already begun to leave the hill they were on top of, so instead of falling flat onto the ground, Mirian smacked into a bush. She heard branches snap and cloth tearing as she rolled off it down the steep slope, bouncing off a sapling, then crashing into at least three other things as she flailed about, grasping at the crumbling, sandy soil for purchase. Disoriented, she made out a flash of cliff approaching, and summoned Eclipse. With a shout, she plunged the blade into the cliffside.

Her arm wrenched and she screamed, but the blade lodged firmly in the ground. A tiny landslide of soil and small rocks tumbled off the slope down the cliff below. The little landslide continued as the DOOM, DOOM, DOOM! of the myrvite\'s footsteps sounded.

Mirian cast her levitation spell again, this time in a short burst, canceling it just as the beast shot out another disruptive beam. She\'d regained enough height that she could scramble along the steep slope. She started moving along it, switching from the Lone Pine form that had helped her weather the fall to The Spear That Cuts Water so that her feet could find better purchase on the treacherous ground.

When she looked back, scanning about for where Rostal had fallen, she saw the fool standing at the base of the cliff, blade drawn. Somehow, he\'d survived the fifty foot fall and was staring up at the beast, rapier drawn.

Mirian shot out a lift person spell to try and pull him back, but one of the tentacles shot out and blocked it while two others came at Rostal. He slashed the first, then vaulted off the second as it tried to grab him, diving under a third that came sweeping down like a scythe. Miran\'s spell dissolved on spell resistance so powerful that she felt a shock of feedback from it.

She saw Rostal get one more good slash, but there were too many tentacles, and only one of him. A spined tendril wrapped around his torso, impaling and crushing him. Mirian\'s eyes went wide as she saw what happened next: Rostal\'s soul energy didn\'t dissipate. It was instead sucked towards the gaping mouth of the beast, the myrvite\'s four pincers glowing with crimson light as it opened its maw wide. She could see rows and rows of thin spiny teeth.

Shit, was all she could think.

She sent out another burst of a levitation spell, then dropped it again as it sent out a beam, sending her forward along the slope to where the ground was flatter. She dodged through a patch of brush, aiming for where the ground had the cover of trees. The beast was at least a hundred feet tall and seemed to have no problem crushing and sucking the souls out of the vegetation too, but that would slow it down. Mirian had torn something important in one of her legs, and she was definitely bleeding from something. She sent healing energy from her repository into her leg, but ignored the other wounds. There was no time to figure out where she was hurt.

As she passed behind another bush, she sent out a greater illusion that looked like herself, sprinting at a right angle from her actual direction of travel. But when she glanced through the canopy to see if the behemoth had taken the bait, it hadn\'t.

Of course. It\'s not just looking at visible light or even heat. If it can eat souls, it can see them. Fuck. Fuck!

She dismissed the illusion. She\'d reached a patch of flat ground through the trees and took off through it at a dead sprint. The footsteps of the beast thundered after her, and she knew she was in trouble when she glanced back because it was looming larger through the trees. There was the CRACK! of trunks being splintered as the creature crashed through them. The thin pines of the boreal forest yielded like grass to an elephant. It was barely even slowing down.

Mirian changed her form to The Dance of Dusk Waves to gain extra speed, but she was running out of breath.

The beast let out another roar, and this time Mirian found herself stumbling, dazed.

Shit, she thought again, feeling the presence of the thing behind her growing. There was only one option left. She grabbed Eclipse by the blade and turned it towards her heart, ignoring how it cut into her hands, then plunged it into her chest.

Pain lanced through her and she fell to her knees—but she wasn\'t dead. She wasn\'t sure if she\'d missed her heart or if she simply wasn\'t dying as fast as she\'d wanted, but one of the tendrils grabbed her. She felt the spines digging painfully into her leg, lodging in like the teeth of a bog lion. Then, there was an immense pressure on her soul. She grabbed for her aura, but found it was being siphoned away. Eclipse fell from her grasp and—

***

—She was in the dream, in the Mausoleum of the Ominian. The Elder God stared down at her from Their throne, unmoving, but she knew They were watching. The places where They\'d been pierced still oozed ichor, and there was a silence so deep it seemed more eternal than the stars, more unbreakable than the mountains and—

***

—Then she was awake in her bed, screaming.

"Wooo. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Shit!" Mirian said as she recovered. "Sorry Lily. Don\'t worry, don\'t worry it\'s… don\'t worry."

"Gods, Mirian! It sounded like you were being murdered! Are you…?"

She closed her eyes. "All good. Allll good," she lied.

She tried to reconstruct those last moments. As painful as they were, they were important. I was dying, but not yet dead. But my soul is intact. She cast around with her senses, feeling it. It was harder to see without the focus, but she could still see the shapes and currents of it. Eclipse is still there. So it came with me. She breathed a sigh of relief. Then a drop of water hit her on the head, and she looked up with a grimace. "The fucking hole," she muttered, and grabbed her spellbook so she could telekinetically shut off the water heater above her.

"What?" Lily said, looking up at the ceiling.

Mirian closed her eyes again, thinking. The pieces of a puzzle were falling into place. This isn\'t the first time. Specter\'s curse wand shouldn\'t have killed me, even if I did have a head injury. Whatever is embedded in my soul and is pulling it back—it must react to excessive soul damage. That\'s important. If there is a way to remove the thing in the soul, I have to make sure I don\'t trigger it. Then she thought of the dream. My soul must go somewhere else first. There\'s that time in between sometimes when I die early. Strange. Where would it go? It\'s not just floating around, or that beast would have grabbed it like he did Rostal\'s.

"—kinda freaking me out a little Mirian, are you even listening? Why is there a hole in the ceiling?" Lily was saying.

She looked at her soul again. She certainly hadn\'t escaped unscathed. There were disruptions in the flow, and dark patches of destabilization inside it. It doesn\'t mean you\'re invulnerable. Too much damage could still be a problem, just like with Soul Destabilization Syndrome.

"Mirian?"

Then there was the last thing. I have to figure out what the hell that beast was.

She shook her head. "Sorry, Lily. I\'m okay. I\'ll get the hole fixed. Some drunk students probably lost control of a spell or something."

***

Mirian decided to take it easy for a cycle, and make sure her soul healed properly. As far as she could tell, most of the damage was superficial and could easily be repaired, but it would take time and meditation. The connection to her auric mana was harder to discern. As the first day progressed, it seemed to be at levels above what she\'d been able to do with a fully healed soul, but there were places where the aura flow was disrupted. She was pretty sure she knew what that meant. The Blooming Iron technique can be used for strengthening arcane casting, not just strength and speed.

Of course, just because she was resting for a cycle didn\'t mean she would get sloppy. She killed Specter and Hache, burned both the imposter\'s hideout and the spy\'s headquarters, then made sure Magistrate Ada knew who to round up and where they\'d try to hide.

Mirian also made sure to drop by Professor Viridian\'s class near the end so she could ask him a few questions.

"Professor, I was doing some extracurricular reading, and one of the books made a claim that there\'s land-bound myrvites the size of leviathans. It described a giant myrvite with eight legs, a black and white shell, tentacles, and a mouth with four pincers. Apparently it had some nasty natural spells, too. Have you ever heard of anything like that?"

Viridian pondered that. "It\'s hard to disentangle tall tales from truth, especially in older sources," he said. "I\'d be quite skeptical of the claims you read about. However, despite rumors to the contrary, I don\'t actually know about every myrvite in existence." He gave her a small smile.

"Is there anyone who has done research on, uh, the legends of big myrvites? It does seem implausible that something so big would exist. I mean, the territory it would need… then thinking of mating habits and… I mean, it does seem far-fetched. How would heritability even select for some of those traits?"

"Yes," he said. "I don\'t usually recommend students meet each other, but Calisto Ennecus\'s family has done a great deal of research into rare myrvites. I used to work with her father. I\'m afraid much of what they know is proprietary, and not information they would sell cheaply, either. But they might be willing to part with some esoteric trivia, as long as it didn\'t impact their myrvite hunting income." He gave a heavy sigh. "Everything is business these days, and it takes precedence over the larger ecological problems that—"

They were interrupted by a scream from the courtyard. She\'d left one of the wyvern cage doors slightly ajar, and so that was the sound of one of the spies getting a limb bitten. Usually, it was the left leg.

"Apologies. That came from the myrvite pens," Viridian muttered. "I better go see what that is."

Mirian excused herself to go continue her preparations. As she walked, it felt like there was an itch in her brain. Ennecus. I\'ve heard that name before, but where? Even running through her memory exercises, she couldn\'t quite place it.

***

Two days later, Mirian assumed her Micael identity, just in case Troytin arrived early without his Akanan allies. She took on an apprenticeship with Professor Endresen, but avoided Marva. She made sure to change up several small but wide-reaching variables in the town, mostly thorugh spreading rumors. It was still important to change up the variables in a cycle. She would offer the fool no refuge of predictability.

The Akanan time traveler finally did arrive, coming in by the air yacht as he usually did with the usual crew. They\'d brought with them some new devices, though from what she could tell, the divination machines weren\'t dedicated to search, but to research. Several assistants helped levitate them over to Torrian Tower, while the Torrviol professors looked on eagerly.

Mirian stayed in the shadows and watched.

Troytin\'s efforts, from what she could pick up, seemed to be split. Archmage Tyrcast was endlessly annoyed at him, saying at one point, "Oh, just make the airship go faster? Why, I wish I\'d thought of that myself!"

It was an amusing enough quote that it circulated around the apprentices. One of Professor Cassius\'s disciples had told her over lunch. Meanwhile, work continued on the Divine Monument, but she knew from Jei and Torres that they were making no progress at all.

His latest efforts at reestablishing control over Specter\'s networks was moving at a lethargic pace, especially because Mirian was releasing most of the zephyr falcons in the region before he arrived in Torrviol. Troytin had started bringing his own zephyr falcons to send, but the falcons were trained to move between set points they were familiar with. The ones he brought could only return to the places they knew, which apparently was Arborholm and Vadriach. Those places, in turn, could send a zephyr falcon to somewhere like Cairnmouth or Palendurio, but it slowed down his efforts significantly. That, and by the time he arrived in Torrviol, he now had the Deeps turning a very worried eye down south. Ibrahim\'s invasion was not a part of their big conspiracy, and while the Akanans weren\'t worried, the Baracueli conspirators and their elements in the state certainly were.

On the 12th, Torrviol was abound with rumors that General Hanaran had been sent south to help lift the siege of Alkazaria. Mirian found it passably interesting, but was more interested about what Professor Viridian would say in his opening lecture for Myrvite Ecology 370. She\'d also sat next to Calisto, who had glanced at her, but was now ignoring her.

Viridian paced back and forth in front of the chalkboard as the bells tolled, distantly echoing through an open window somewhere. "By now, you\'re no doubt familiar with both my lecture style and examination process, since you\'ve had to take at least four of my courses to get to this one," he said, glancing at Mirian—Micael to his eyes—as he did. "Or perhaps you haven\'t, given the incident with the registrar\'s office. Regardless, you are here for ecology, so let us begin there.

"There is a severely understudied aspect of myrvite ecology. The discipline began with several of the guilds—" Mirian noted Calisto smiled at that, "—as a way to ensure they could continue to harvest the myrvite spell organs so critical to civilization. Biologists have long discussed the evolution of flora and fauna since our earliest records. It seems humanity has taken for granted the concept; it has been obvious and unquestioned. Yet, perhaps it shouldn\'t be. In more mundane organisms, it seems to be the correct explanation. But what of myrvites?"

Here, Viridian drew a quick representation of a spell organ. "Take, for example, the slithering swarm. This myrvite is only found in the labyrinth. By what selective pressure did it come across such a habitat? By what selective pressure did it gain the use of its shadow-arms? These \'arms\' can be replicated with a nine-glyph spell. There are some indications the slithering swarm has magichemical sacs that replicate the function of these glyphs. Alone, all of these glyphs would be useless. Unlike the brain or other fantastically complex organs, there\'s no apparent iterative process that would seem to result in a myrvite gaining such a complex spell."

He paused and looked around the class. "Or, consider the intact ecology sites found within the Labyrinth. There are records of a leviathan being found intact inside a colossal Labyrinth chamber—a chamber two hundred miles from the coast. What accounts for this? Perhaps the Labyrinth itself is modifying the evolution and traits of myrvites. After all, the Elder Gods did not build the Labyrinth for no purpose. If we cannot deduce the function of the Labyrinth through study of its structure, perhaps we can deduce its purpose through its effects."

There were a few murmurs throughout the class. Professor Viridian\'s lectures were never scripted, but here, he was departing from the textbooks significantly.

"We will study this question throughout the winter quarter. In order to even begin to discuss it, we will need to understand the complex factors that influence ecology."

Viridian wrote several words on the chalkboard: organisms, climate, resources, and interactions. "My recommendation is that you categorize your notes in these four conceptual frameworks. In organisms, we will study heritability, traits, and spell organs. Resources and interactions you should understand from previous classes, and this will be an exercise in application. But with climate, I would like to say a few more blasphemous words."

He smiled. "I\'ve been having some conversations with our visiting guests from Akana, and Professor Denton shared with me the most fascinating development. Akana Praediar is developing wondrous spell engines that can perform calculations automatically, using the mathematical relationship of several glyphs to move energy about. In the end, it produces an illusion. When Archmage Luspire asked what I would like from a collaboration, I asked for a very specific one they\'ve been developing. And they have delivered it."

With a dramatic flourish, Viridian telekinetically opened a closet in the room and pulled out a machine.

Mirian started. That\'s new, she thought.

"Here, I have input the properties of the oceans and continents—simplified of course—and their ability to incoming solar light. I have added the mountains and Enteria\'s spin. I have input initial conditions, such as ocean temperature. The machine then attempts to simulate the climate patterns of Enteria. Observe," he said.

Mirian was on the edge of her seat, and she wasn\'t the only one. She could tell Viridian was feeling especially pleased with himself, and that meant he\'d discovered something. Even if it was built for this purpose, adjusting the parameters of the spell engine must have taken him the whole break, she knew. I wonder if he slept!

She watched the machine whirred to life. An illusionary square lit up the room, bathing everyone in blues, greens, and browns. It was a map of the known world. It made sense Viridian had only used the known portions in his model—no one knew what was across the larger oceans, and even Akanan airships would struggle to brave the deadly storms. She watched as colored puffs of atmosphere settled, and then the machine lit up with blobs of color across the continents.

Several students gasped. Some—probably those who needed to brush up on their geography—looked around confused.

"The white areas represent the frostlands and tundra. The yellow areas are arid, the dark green where we would expect temperate forests, and the light green where we would expect tropical environments. You see the problem," he said. "Who would like to comment?"

Calisto\'s hand shot up immediately, as did several others.

"Yes. Calisto."

"It\'s wrong," she blurted out.

"Yes. Elaborate."

"The whole climate map is off! The device put the beginning of the frostlands some three hundred miles north of where they actually start. There\'s an entire temperate region that doesn\'t exist. And in east Baracuel, it has forests instead of the arid scrublands that are really there. And Persama isn\'t a desert!"

"Wonderful, yes. How absolutely fascinating," he said. "So then what might account for the massive differences?"

Another student said, "The model\'s garbage," which got a few guffaws.

"Certainly. It doesn\'t reproduce Enteria\'s climate, except in a few places further south. But simply dismissing it isn\'t very interesting. What\'s far more interesting is to ask: why? For by answering that question, we may discover something."

"There\'s a missing factor," offered one of the sixth years sitting behind Mirian.

"Precisely. But I have input the largest factors. So what could it be?"

Mirian saw what he was getting at. She was trying to lay low, but she couldn\'t help herself. Her hand shot up, and Viridian nodded at her. "The Labyrinth and the leylines," she said.

Viridian was absolutely beaming, his eyes twinkling as he said, "What an intriguing hypothesis. We shall have to explore it as the class continues."

Much to Mirian\'s disappointment, after his introduction into the big mysteries, Viridian moved back to going over the foundational concepts of heredity and its influence on animal traits. She studiously took notes, and found Calisto glancing over at her notebook.

As soon as class ended, she put on her overly charming smile, the one she\'d tried so many times to use on Nicolus to get what she wanted, and said, "Hey, you seem to know your stuff. Want to be study partners? I\'m Calisto." She extended a hand.

Mirian had been planning on asking her the same thing, but the girl had beat her to it. "Micael. And sure," she said, shaking her hand. "You know any good places?"