Throne of Time - Chapter 75: Unexpected Foundations (Patreon)

When the term resumed after the saintsday break, Suria threw herself into all her work with new energy. She poured her time into polishing her combat abilities, grasping mental defenses, and pushing Combat Perception to new questions no matter how much it annoyed the other students. Bit by bit, she was making progress that she could use to make a difference.

At the same time, she and Maut-mai returned to the tunnels on most days - they were no longer trying to clear the infestation, which would have been trivial, but instead to figure out why it had occurred in the first place. Learning the systems underneath the problems could be a far better force multiplier for Suria than any spell, and in this case, it seemed to have to do with warding foundations.

That day Suria was kneeling in one of the side passages alongside Maut-mai as they examined a large block of stone. Unlike the grand wards along a structure like the school wall, this stone was covered in workmanlike glyphs. Suria recognized a few of the augments, but the core inscriptions were all unfamiliar to her. Even some of the shapes were unfamiliar: one seemed to be some sort of modified trapezoid that she presumed allowed the ward to take mana from a neutral source.

"This one is fine too," Maut-mai eventually said with a sigh. "Everything intact."

"That's odd, given how many weevils there were." As she spoke, Suria glanced over at the frozen and crushed bodies in the corner.

"Actually, sometimes monsters are attracted to wardstones like this. Apparently they like the residual mana. That's another useful thing I learned from Talisman Artificing."

Before Suria could respond, they were interrupted by Bumbledun. He couldn't fit his shoulders through the door to their room, but he poked his head through and blinked slowly.

"Is everything fine here?" he asked.

"Completely intact." Maut-mai stood up and brushed off her hands in disgust. "We've been looking all this time and we've still only found one broken ward."

"It's possible that there might be only one. Darkmoon is usually good with maintenance."

"But there were so many of those repulsive things... no, it seems more likely that wards failed in multiple places throughout the tunnel system. They really should have gotten this fixed."

"You have just seen why fixing it is tedious," Bumbledun pointed out. "There is no way to locate failures except to search all of the warding foundations."

"Could someone build a spell to scan them all?" Suria asked. "It seems like surely it should be possible."

"If so, it is beyond my ken. But come now, I wanted to invite the two of you to some light refreshment. You have been working so hard, you should take a break."

"Very good!" Maut-mai hastened to exit, taking one of Bumbledun's furry claws as if escorting him. "Do you have any more of those little sandwiches?"

~

After so long working on her runic capacity, Suria next broke through at some point when she didn't even realize it. She was in Combat Perception, setting up the structure for another glyph, when the thirteenth rune seemed unusually easy to her. Instead of finishing where she'd planned, she pushed on to support another triangle.

She'd reached fifteen. That wasn't an arbitrary goal, because it meant she could create a runic pentagon with a full complement of five augments.

For the rest of class, Suria half-listened to the discussion from the other students while she tried to sketch out her new plans. In theory this unlocked all kinds of new options for her, but she needed to consider whether she worked on refining what she had or spent time learning new inscriptions in order to take advantage of her new capacity.

After class she hurried after Orinyan, intending to catch him in his office. He didn't move with his usual energy, and though he smiled when he looked back at her, she could tell something wasn't quite the same.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"Just tired," he answered with a shrug. "It's nothing you need to concern yourself about, just... work, plus new responsibilities in the department."

"I can imagine. Things must be in chaos, trying to rebuild without Professor Drazen."

"Believe me, sometimes we hate the man for leaving us in this state. But that's none of your concern, and it shouldn't keep me from my duties as a teacher. What did you need?"

Seeing Orinyan like this, weary and human after all, almost made Suria reconsider. But she really did need a new perception spell to prepare for the library and he'd volunteered, so it would be false kindness to turn him down. In some future cycle, she'd have to figure out the nature of his troubles and do what she could to make his job easier.

"I can make a runic pentagon with five augments," Suria said. "Is that a greater pentagon?"

"That's one name for it," Orinyan said, finding a smile for her. "Congratulations."

"Thank you. But I'm trying to figure out if that should change how I build the glyph."

"What is it for?"

"Uh, everything." Suria gestured vaguely. "I want a spell for general use, when I'm concerned there might be danger and I don't know what it might be."

"You can't possibly search for everything, but you do have options." Orinyan shifted his shoulders and looked more like himself as he gestured her into his office. "So you have five augments, and only one needs to be dedicated to sending the information to you. It might seem obvious that you need to pick the other four, but you actually want to start with considering your main inscription, because depending on your choice, some of the augments might end up redundant..."

~

By this point Suria thought she had a strong grasp on the series of events within the cycle, but sometimes it could still take her off guard. The next surprise was something she should have expected: when the volcano erupted in Febek-Rai, it wasn't merely a minor headline, it was a crisis for Maut-mai.

The entire day after the news arrived, Suria was just putting out fires, such as preventing Maut-mai from jumping on a leyline ferry to abandon her education and return home. Logic worked a little, but only for a short time before Maut-mai would become distressed again. Emotional responses worked better, so Suria rubbed the other woman's shoulders and cast soothing spells to keep her calm.

"I just don't know if everyone's alright," Maut-mai said, for the dozenth time. "It wasn't so close to home, but so many of us travel around, it could have... I just don't..."

"They'll expect you to be here," Suria reminded her. "Someone will send a letter, and if you leave, you'll miss it. This is the first place you'll learn news about your family."

"Maybe so, but there's so much else. How could one of the big volcanoes have exploded? It wasn't supposed to - we knew their cycles and there were even experts from the Republic of Junn confirming our work. Could some sort of seismic spell have interfered? They're always doing research in the south. I never approved of it - too risky!"

"You know," Suria said, as the idea occurred to her. "We could probably buy a newsbook in town."

"I've already seen the headlines!"

"But Darmkael has connections all over the world. There are shops just for newsbooks, and they'd probably have connections to specialized news services in Febek-Rai. We could go down and get some more information... would you like that?"

"Maybe." Abruptly Maut-mai heaved a sigh and pulled away. "But I'm a frightful mess! Help me with my make-up, Suria. Do you have any sort of cleansing spell for my face?"

So Suria ended up looking for cosmetic magic to try to calm the other woman down. At the start of the cycle that might have annoyed her, but now it was just part of helping her friend - whatever else she could be, this Maut-mai was her friend. Suria would be there, whether for a spell or a shoulder to cry on.

Through it all, however, Suria reflected that it was even harder to grasp the full timeline than she had imagined. There were millions of people across the world, all dealing with their own problems. Even something as large as the eruption of a volcano had been nothing but a foreign news item to her before, and she had to wonder what other events were occurring that she had no idea about.

She wasn't sure which idea was worse: that she would never know everything happening within the loop or that, one day, she might.

~

"Some modern mages will say that it's ignorant not to distinguish mind and soul," the still-nameless professor said from her perch atop a desk. "Maybe sometimes. But they can actually be wrong, just in a different way. When people talk about those things, they're talking about whole categories, and sometimes those things overlap."

"Can they actually be both?" Suria asked. She was more confident in Mental Structure for Mages now, even if she was one of the younger students.

"You mean properties produced by the combination of the two? Possibly." The professor scratched at her head through her tangle of hair. "But it gets even more complicated when you consider the physical organ, the brain. How much of the self does it house? Some spells you may have to deal with will just target everything, which is why they may require direct contact with the skull..."

When the lecture concluded, Suria didn't really have any good spells for mental defenses, just an even longer list of things that could go wrong. Despite the grim nature of the class, she was enjoying learning more about mental defenses and she just wished she had more time to dedicate to the discipline. At the moment her goal was to develop a few good spells by the end of the cycle.

Suria lingered after class to ask some questions about mental inscriptions, in particular about whether there were any memory charms that could let her retain information permanently. The woman wasn't suspicious - she seemed to view this as one of the most common student requests, and unfortunately there were no good ways to simply extend or perfect memories.

Disappointing, but not unexpected, so Suria headed into the crystalline garden. The strange space in the center of Oculon Hall didn't bother her anymore, even when she was alone, so she strolled through. Except, a short way in, she realized that she wasn't alone.

"There you are." Adwyrma appeared from behind one of the trees and advanced on her. "Are we attempting the library?"

"Why are you asking now?" Suria asked back.

"Because I've found a new opportunity outside Darmkael. Smugglers moving over the mountains earlier than I've tracked them before. But it would take up time, so I wouldn't leave if you're planning to head into the library."

Up to that point, Suria had been happily putting off the question. She told herself that she was still engaged with the general activities of preparing herself, learning more about the challenges within the Sequential Library, and convincing other loopers to join her. It didn't seem like such a threat when it was just a plan somewhere in the future, just as easily a few loops from now as this one.

Forced to make a choice, Suria realized that she needed to be ready. She didn't have infinite time to prepare because every time a new cycle began, the first hour presented unpredictable new threats. If she didn't find a way to overcome the current status quo, one of those could well leave her eliminated permanently.

"Yes," Suria said. "I want to enter this loop. Toward the end."

"Fine." Adwyrma stalked away and disappeared into the crystal forest.

That was technically good, since Suria needed strong allies on her side. It didn't feel like good news.

~

Suria hummed absentmindedly to herself as her stylus flashed over the foundation stone. The glyphs there were far more complicated than she could have created, but they weren't too rune-intensive and she had taken the time to learn another inscription to repair them.

Maut-mai was still distraught over the volcano eruption most days - despite having learned that all her family members and their interests were safe - and so Suria usually headed into the tunnels alone. She had methodically checked a large percentage of all the warding stones before she finally found this one: erosion had worn down one of the key glyphs that would keep out creatures like the weevils.

There was no guarantee that there were only two flaws in the system of wards, but those were likely the main culprits. If she fixed them in future cycles, she would solve the problem far into the future... even if that future wouldn't arrive, it felt better to find a meaningful solution.

With her work finished unexpectedly early, Suria had time to travel a little further and pursue one of her secondary goals. The xenarth tunnels extended beneath most of campus and Suria knew them fairly well now; they had seemed all the same at first, but now she could navigate easily between the xenarth homes and the basements of various buildings.

She was certain that the Sequential Library didn't have a basement, because she had used a perception spell to confirm that one of the big tunnels passed directly underneath it. That didn't mean that there wasn't another entrance, however, and it could easily be hidden in the maze-like tunnels. Once she was in the correct place, Suria touched the right-hand wall and began tracing out her path.

Before she got too far, she saw Bumbledun ambling toward her down the tunnel.

"Just searching for more warding foundations," Suria said, but the xenarth regarded her with large eyes.

"I think that is not quite true." Bumbledun settled onto his haunches beside her and shook his head very slowly. "You need not fear, small one. I am not an employee of campus security. But some of us have noticed you searching and wondered if, mayhap, you were looking for an entrance to the Sequential Library."

"You're right." Suria lowered her eyes, feeling bizarrely guilty for the technical lie. "It's nothing untoward, I promise you. They just restrict th-"

"You would not be the first student to complain about the restrictions of the library, nor the first to try to find another entrance. I regret to inform you that the bottom is made from the same impervious stone as all the other sides and there are no entrances from the tunnels."

"That's too bad. But if you say so, I'll let it go."

"There are, however, other options." Bumbledun daintily slipped a claw into his belt and emerged with a ring. "We must sometimes deliver heavy packages to the library, generally done after hours for the sake of not disrupting school business. For that reason, we have access."

"Wait." Suria's mood swung wildly as she realized there was a chance. "Do you mean...?"

"Do you promise that your chicanery is not of a malevolent variety?"

"I promise, we just want some books."

"Then as thanks for your assistance," Bumbledun told her somberly, "we would be willing to... look the other way if someone slips in during a delivery."

"Thank you." Suria moved forward to hug the xenarth and was glad when his paw came down to pat her back.

She hadn't been planning anything like that, but she'd just secured much easier entrance to the Sequential Library than their alternatives. That was good... though it also made the plan feel real. Now they had no excuses for not making the attempt.

-

We're getting close to the final sequence of the first book, everyone! I'll have more to say about that, and the question of dividing a serialized story, at a later time. For now, I just want to reassure everyone that I'm feeling pretty good about what I've written for the second book overall, so the story should be able to continue without interruption.

Meanwhile, we have somehow maintained a high position on RR, and public readers just got to the Xuhriha reveal and were overall positive about it. I can't talk about it just yet, but there is also substantial publisher interest in ToT. It feels surreal for things to be going this well and my fingers are just permanently crossed.