Throne of Time - Chapter 65: The Term Wheel Turns (Patreon)

At the beginning of a loop, seventy days always seemed so long - certainly compared to the twenty-seven before the expansion, and even more so compared to the single hour from Suria's start. Yet somehow the cycle gave way, day after day filled by everything she wanted to do.

Currently she was attempting a combination of meditation and reading within a nook of the Taedric Building, which was a distracting location due to the foot traffic, but it allowed her to also check in on something else. So far she had come up dry, which meant a lot of time to focus on her soul meditation. It felt like gathering her mana in order to cast a spell, then instead of releasing it, just holding it formlessly in her mind, keeping her mental eye clear of any thoughts of glyphs.

It had been frustrating at the beginning, almost painful, and even now in the second cycle she was attempting it, she didn't particularly like it. But Suria had noticed that her soul talisman had increased her capacity a second time near the start of the cycle, and Professor Huen had told her that three was the goal, so she was close.

Actually using that talisman remained beyond her grasp. That was why, every time she lost focus or became distracted by passersby, she looked back down to the book in her lap. Internal Granite had been pleasantly straightforward on many subjects, but it suggested that reaching a soul talisman was a visceral act that was hard to explain. None of the metaphors and strange exercises had yet allowed her to actually use the newly structured portion of her soul.

Before she could begin another round, Suria abruptly heard one of the voices she had been waiting for: Maut-mai was leaving her room not far away.

"Come along now," Maut-mai insisted. "We'll be late for the gathering."

"Sorry... I just..." Kiznua emerged after her, carrying several different bags that seemed to be too large for her. She had entirely replaced her usual worn clothing with fancy dress robes and jewelry in the style of Febek-Rai.

"Don't slump!" Maut-mai scowled at her and the other woman flinched. "See, this is why you failed that exam. Shoulders up, back straight!"

Kiznua shifted as if she had been whipped into shape, then shuffled after Maut-mai. The two of them disappeared into the hallway, apparently headed to a gathering, and Suria watched them go in bemusement. It seemed that having the two of them room together had not been as effective as she'd hoped. Part of her wanted to have seen how that had happened and another part was glad to have missed it.

With her snooping accomplished, Suria poured herself back into her meditation. She struggled to empty her mind without losing her grip on her mana, which felt like slowly grinding a hole deep inside her soul. No matter how long she worked, that space felt ragged and rough, struggling against her efforts to focus on it...

Without warning, the roughness gave way. Suria felt her mind spinning around in a smooth space somewhere inside her, as if what had once been a rough pit had become a smooth hollow. Had she done it? Was her soul talisman finally in place?

Suria reached into her bag for a stone plate, which she always carried now, and began forming a random glyph to test herself. It was shocking just how easy the early runes were now, and she quickly sped through an entire formation before she began to slow down. Fourteen... fifteen... she barely managed to create the sixteenth rune before the stylus sprang from her trembling hands.

She spent a while just staring at her new glyph in weary satisfaction.

Remarkable how much alternate methods could do for her runic capacity. All her exercises since the beginning of the term had only increased it by two, but Gerial's potion had added one more, and now her soul talisman offered her a permanent boost of three. She would be starting new loops with a higher runic capacity than she had obtained at the end of some of them.

Yet the more she learned, the more she understood that runic capacity alone wasn't enough to make a real mage: understanding mattered most of all. As she settled into her chair and tried to crack the much harder problem of actually using her soul talisman, Suria kept looking after the women she had known in past lives... that was one problem that wouldn't be solved with spells.

~

When she walked out of Bub's Bobs, her satchel filled with new Alchemy reagents, Suria was startled to see a man covered in blood stumbling toward her. Even though she hadn't fought recently, she had a pair of talismans in her hands instantly, one ready with a force spell and the other with a mana shield.

None of it was necessary, because she recognized the man approaching her: Grynore, the Endelythan who had given her a runic potion in a previous cycle.

"Help..." he breathed, then slumped against her, his blood staining her robes.

"Lie still," Suria told him quietly, shifting to her healing training and easing him onto his back. "Take your hand away, let me see."

"Almost... got..."

Ignoring the people in the street around her, Suria checked the wound he had been clutching with his hand. An ugly cut, likely with a serrated knife, resulting in copious blood and some intestines showing. That would be a lethal wound under normal circumstances, but Suria immediately began casting the cleansing spells she had learned in the Medicine department, purging the wound of the grime and rot that had contaminated it.

She had recreated her flesh healing glyph as usual, but as Suria looked through her satchel, she realized that she hadn't bothered to reinscribe several useful medical spells. For that matter, she had grabbed her talismans instead of her runebook - she was only accustomed to using it for class, not in the heat of the moment.

No matter. Suria propped the runebook on her knee and quickly inscribed the old glyph from memory. The core was an organ-restoring inscription, with augments for increasing its potency, resisting disease, and preventing unnatural growths.

Once she had that cast, beginning to restore Grynore's intestines, she could shift to healing the flesh over his stomach. The result was a mostly closed wound, though his torso would be prone to tearing open again until he had time to properly rest. Ordinarily she would have cast a spell of healing sleep to ease him on his way to recovery, but the Endelythan man's eyes fixed on her.

"What happened?" she asked in a low voice.

"Privacy..." he breathed.

Realizing how crowded the street had become, Suria gave everyone her best healer's smile as she considered her options. There was really only one good choice: straight back into Bub's Bobs. The old man was peering out, and when she made eye contact he quickly gestured for her to come in.

The Medicine department had an elaborate "force stretcher" spell that could carry patients without jostling, but Suria had been too focused on other inscriptions and had never mastered it. Instead she used her core force spell - she really needed to create a larger glyph for it - to pick Grynore up as gently as possible and carry him into the store.

"Here you go," Bub said, sweeping clean a table. "You need anything?"

"Just some privacy," Suria told him.

"Store is warded for it. I'll go warn off the looky-loos."

When he did so, that left Suria with the wounded Endelythan she barely knew. Clearly, his dealings with the Blank Hand had gotten him attacked by local criminals and she realized that by healing him she might have placed a target on her own back. Perhaps she shouldn't spend so much time in Darmkael anymore, at least for the remainder of this cycle.

"Will I make it?" Grynore asked faintly.

"You should unless the knife was poisoned," Suria told him. "I don't have good inscriptions for poison, especially alchemical poisons."

"Just in case... tell Wynchard..." He coughed painfully, then continued in a somewhat stronger voice. "We found the shipments. They aren't all for the Glyphbreakers."

"What does that mean?"

"They can't attack now. They're not ready." Grynore gave a bloody smile. "Wynchard was so convinced they'd be attacking any day now, but there's no way they can prepare themselves within the loop."

"How long, then?" Suria asked.

"Not sure... we need to check more..."

Since the Endelythan man was beginning to weaken again, Suria cast another round of pain relief and then healing sleep spells. He should make it, then he could communicate whatever he needed to Wynchard and his allies. Hopefully she wouldn't be caught in the middle of it.

~

Unlike many other courses, the exam of Basic Alchemical Principles was taken all at once, sitting at their normal tables. They had been assigned an alchemical reagent that served no direct purpose, but apparently served as a useful test of their skills. As Professor Slagterwese had put it, there was no way to cheat this potion, because they couldn't copy another table's work without understanding it.

"Wrong!" Professor Slagterwese shouted out the word at another table. "Failed!"

It was tense for most, but Suria hadn't been particularly worried. She and Murtiel had already attempted the reagent once on their own, and in class the whole process had only gone more smoothly. They passed with adequate marks, meaning that they could remain in the course.

Now, while other students struggled or failed, Suria was trying to put together some of her reagents to increase the concentration. She poured the liquid into one of her vials and set it up directly in the center of her alchemical glyph, one she still wasn't terribly confident in. When she pushed her mana into the glyph, the liquid began to boil too quickly.

"I think you want to decrease the intensity," Murtiel advised her. "Some students struggle to get enough efficiency, but you're going to boil it all away."

"Hmm." Suria looked at her glyph and considered that maybe she should replace one of the generic empowering augments if it was unnecessary. But since she didn't want to recreate the entire glyph, she instead attempted to slow the flow of her mana, resulting in a simmer.

"Good, that's a steady rate." Murtiel looked across the table at her curiously. "You're so focused on concentrating techniques. What is it for, healing potions?"

"Not just that," Suria said. She didn't know how to explain the silphium experiments that she had been running, or the vial in her satchel that she hoped would be instantly lethal. Murtiel probably knew plenty about contraceptive potions, but the details would raise unnecessary questions. "Just a few projects."

They sat in silence for a while as Suria continued to boil the liquid down to its most concentrated form. She was fairly confident in her ability with this sort of alchemy now, so she could reproduce a suicide vial in any future loop. Beyond that, she'd learned enough to make a simple healing potion. But overall, her Alchemy courses had showed her just how much there was yet to learn.

"You're a strange one," Murtiel said with a half-smile on her face. "Well, I wish you luck with everything, whatever you're trying to accomplish."

"Thank you," Suria said. "I think I'm almost done."

"Wrong!" Professor Slagterwese bellowed from across the room.

Suria did her best not to take it as an omen.

~

At the end of another exhausting day, Suria stumbled back to her room ready to simply rest. Her arms were covered in alchemical burns from an especially difficult potion, her mind hurt from uselessly struggling against the soul talisman, and her augments class had been particularly frustrating. Before she accomplished anything else, she needed sleep.

When she opened the door, she was glad to see that Xuhriha was there - her roommate was often absent on her own business, so that was a pleasant surprise. The other woman saw her, realized how tired she was, and immediately hopped up.

"Oh, poor dear." Xuhriha guided her into the room, careful not to touch the burns on her arms. "Let me set you up with some fluffy pink pillows."

"Do you have non-pink ones?" Suria asked blearily.

"Only pink, I'm afraid, but I can turn your pillows pink if you want."

Just when it seemed like Suria was going to finally get to rest, their door failed to close behind them. She realized something was wrong and closed her fingers around a talisman painfully, but Wynchard was already bursting into the room, his eyes wild.

"We need to talk," he said as he caught his breath. "Something happened in Darmkael and you need to know."

"Do you have to do this now?" Xuhriha protested. "Can't you see how tired she is?"

"This doesn't concern you," Wynchard said forcefully. "It's important."

Groaning, Suria patted Xuhriha's shoulder and reversed direction, stepping back out into the hall. That was probably less secure than inside their privacy-warded room, but Wynchard seemed very serious about this and didn't want to involve others. After he looked around the corridor carefully, he spoke in a flat voice.

"They're dead. Qyresh, Grynore, all of them."

"The Blank Hand killed them?" Suria asked. "I thought that had happened before, s-"

"No, this is different." Wynchard rubbed the bridge of his nose. "We were going to investigate a Glyphbreaker hideout in the city, one that should have been easy. According to the Blank Hand spies, they didn't have any real mages. Obviously the spies were wrong."

"But you just mean dead, right? Not eliminated?"

"Most likely. But I don't actually know, because I'm piecing this together after the fact and the bodies are gone. The trio went off themselves last night, just leaving me a message. When I followed, someone had already used a necromantic spell to purge their bodies."

"So..." Suria paused to consider. "You think the necromancer is working with the Blank Hand?"

"If not the Glyphbreakers themselves." Wynchard sighed and shook his head. "Anyway, I think you should stay on campus for the rest of this cycle. They might already know your face because you saved Grynore."

"Only for him to die."

"No, what you did was important. Without your help, we wouldn't have known so much about their operations, or that they were only partially working together. But for right now, we should stay cautious. We can get more information from the Endelythans next cycle."

"Alright, thank you for telling me." Suria didn't like having these plots intruding on her life and had to force herself to remain focused. "Is there anything else?"

"We're probably safe from the Glyphbreakers on campus," Wynchard put a hand on her shoulder, "but I don't know about the necromancer. Keep your eyes open."

They parted after that, Wynchard no doubt running off to warn someone else or throw himself against opponents. Suria had to wonder if the Glyphbreakers could really have been responsible for the deaths; it could also have been a group trying to use the name, or some even more complicated plot between the different gangs. She wanted to talk to Rije... but not that night. Right now she wanted sleep.

Suria shuffled back inside, made sure the door was closed and locked behind her, then stumbled to her bed. Xuhriha had prepared a cluster of pillows for her and eased her down into it before moving back to her own bed.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Wynchard is involved in conspiracies again." Suria sighed and sank back into the pillows. "Apparently the Endelythans died while trying to investigate things in the city. He's convinced it's the Glyphbreakers, even though it was the gangs that killed them in the past loops. I don't know what to think."

"That sounds bad. So he's advising not going out?"

"Yeah, more or less. And he's concerned about the necromancer again - I forget if I've mentioned that's his obsession. Have you ever heard about a necromancer hidden among the loopers?"

"Oh, umm, that's me." Xuhriha raised her hand with a sheepish smile. "I'm the necromancer."

x

Foreshadowing is a funny thing. In some past stories I've foreshadowed too subtly and it was missed, or worse, clues were actively misinterpreted as inconsistency. This time I decided to foreshadow more heavily... and I clearly went too far, because people have been guessing this for ages.

So yeah, now you know. There are a few places in this story where I'm using red herrings to trick readers in a way I hope will be satisfying, but... well, I hope you like how this goes. =P The ideal twist doesn't just create an unknown, it makes the next chapter more interesting. Hopefully you guys will enjoy. ^-^