Gaius prepared breakfast for her, and then they set off, levitating to the old house. As they flew, they talked.

“I believe your theory is right,” her father said. “The Sixth Prophet spent a great deal of his time dealing with corruption in the Academies. There were also some high profile assassinations around that time. None of which were ever solved. But all of them arcanists.”

“But spell engines were invented anyways. Just a bit later.” Mirian remembered finding the correspondence of another Prophet deep in the Grand Sanctum. It had been a balm to her soul. She yearned for more of it. “What was he like?”

“Like Ibrahim, in a way. He had this outward confidence. But also a sorrow inside him. An exhaustion. It slipped through the mask. I only talked to him briefly, well before the Declaration Crisis. But it was clear, when we spoke, that it wasn’t the first time we had talked.”

“It must be so strange, from the other end. For someone to know you so well, and yet be a stranger to you.”

“It was. I found myself overthinking every path the conversation could take. Considering what I might have said to him previously. Afterward, it was a shock. The holy texts said the Prophets saw the future, not that they lived it. He never told me as much, but it was obvious from the way he talked.”

“How did you meet?”

“He came to me. Knew exactly where to find me, though I wasn’t an easy person to find. Back then, I was living in the shadows. Hmm. I suppose I did have another name back then. A pen name for when I wrote to the academies, and another identity I was using for my underground work as a necromancer.”

Gaius paused in thought. “Can’t remember those names anymore. Anyways, he needed me to construct an artifact for him. Mythril armor with advanced soul repositories, and defensive rune enchantments. I didn’t have quite the mastery of energy transfer at the time that I do now, but it still was a piece of formidable defense and utility. In exchange, he gave me a pile of gold, information on several historical texts, and some ruins in the central wastes. I was working in Mahatan at the time. It was only near the completion of the artifact that I began to understand what he was. Let’s land there. I want to recall it as best I can.”

They landed, and Mirian’s attention was completely on her father as he closed his eyes.

“It was so long ago… yet the strangeness of it helped me crystallize it. I took notes in a diary later. I remember saying, ‘It’s not a chthonic needle you have. I can’t understand the function.’ And he said, ‘You always do get curious.’ I still didn’t understand until later. There was… we talked about something else, but I can’t remember. But I do remember… I was working on several refinements I’d gotten wrong while he waited. And he got this distant look in his eyes, and he started rambling. He said, ‘The journey to the new world could be peaceful. It could be. But people have been wrapped about in great chains made of ideas. All of Enteria is shackled to cruel masters, instead of tied to each other. They demand the path to change must be one of destruction. If the old world is not first burned, the new one cannot emerge. It was not Carkavakom who saw that, but Eintocarst.’ He seemed so tired when he said it.”

Mirian felt dread building in her. “Another Prophet, come to the same conclusion as Ibrahim. And as you would, a century later.” Is war really so inevitable?

“Yes. He said something about needing to remove his needle eventually. Said, ‘Three have already returned.’ I became worried and told him he couldn’t have mine. Got ready to fight. But he didn’t want to fight. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We never could find the Mausoleum.’ In the moment, I was still confused.”

“Did he say where he looked? Why it was important?”

“No.”

“Did he believe the chthonic needles—does the Ominian need them? Or just the temporal ones?”

Gaius shook his head. “I don’t know. It was the last thing he said that stuck with me. I still dream of the conversation sometimes. He said, ‘There are a few who see the chains. Like Zomalator, they understand how to fight the hunger for the endless feast. Instead of consuming the stars, they will bind themselves in webs of companionship, as the Renewer did that gave the Ominian Their final hope. These, I will name companions. A pity you are not yet ready to join their ranks.’”

Her father paused. “In all my long life, I never felt a cut to my self-identity like those words. When he said it, his eyes flashed, and I felt a judgment being rendered against me. I think… I don’t know what he intended. I wonder sometimes if he meant for the cycle to be the last one at all. Perhaps he knew what his words would do to me. Perhaps it was just his musing. The ramblings of a man who needed to talk. But they changed me. It took a few decades, but it changed the path I was on. Eventually, his words brought me to the Naasqual lands. I never intended to fall in love with the land. But when I trace it back… when I interrogate my own soul, I think it was his words that inspired me to fight for them. Did he see that, I wonder? Or did the Ominian?”

“A narrow path, through the burning branches,” Mirian muttered.

Gaius got a dazed look as he reminisced. “Yes. Yes, he said that too. I can’t remember when… the order gets mixed up sometimes. It was a long time ago. Then, he went north, and there was that bloody little heresy.” His gaze came back into focus. “I doubt the Sixth Prophet was responsible for the outcome of the Unification War, as Ibrahim seems to think. If he thought he had stopped the creation of spell engines, then how would he have predicted what happened nine years after that? He was human, after all.”

Mirian’s mind went back to the dervish. “Are you familiar with soul alignments?”

Her father looked confused. “You might be using a different term for a phenomenon I am familiar with.”

She explained what Jei had told her, and her experience in the frostlands and the First City, and how it had changed her soul. “Ibrahim must have discovered one as well. I saw him using two dervish forms at once. That’s not supposed to be possible, but then again, neither is directly absorbing ambient mana or being able to incorporate soul fragments.”

“Soul ascension,” Gaius said. “I’m not familiar with Sun Shuen, but I found a heretical text discussing the First Prophet in such terms, and at least some of the Triarchs seem to have done something similar. The dervishes were secretive about most of their techniques, but there are legends in the second millennium of such arts. I’d have to get out a reference book to remember the names. As best I can tell, the location itself doesn’t guarantee anything. You could send a hundred people to that place in the frostlands, and it may be that none of them gain anything. For me, I achieved the same ascension you did in the First City when I first stood in the center of Mayat Shadr.”

“Interesting. Are there… kinds of ascension that are known and documented?”

“Only as much as I’ve told you, unless they’re hiding in archives I haven’t yet visited. Another thing: the old Persaman texts seem to imply that ascended dervishes and ascended arcanists must follow different paths. I do believe you could learn what Ibrahim has learned, but by aligning your soul in that direction, you would lose the two ascensions you have now.” He paused. “Probably. Since the phenomenon is not easily replicable, it’s difficult to study. But what I know of soul-flow theory backs that up.”

Both of them became lost in thought. They resumed levitating shortly after that, the wind a welcome relief from the heat of the desert. Mirian watched the rocks and sands pass beneath them. Succulents nestled in the cracks and shadows where they grew out of thin soil. Here and there was a cactus. She briefly remembered after a rainstorm, the desert blooming. It felt so good to just be able to remember.

She at last broke the silence. “Did you only ascend the once?”

“No,” her father said. “Twice. The second one was recent.” He was silent. “Soul ascensions are never a sure thing. But I have reason to believe that you might find the path I did. After all, we share a connection.”

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Mirian knew where he had done it then.

A half-hour later, they arrived. She recognized her childhood home instantly. It was as she remembered, only, the fields and gardens were barren and the courtyard ponds that had once held jeweled lotuses were dry. They landed in the courtyard. She began to walk around, hand drifting over pieces of dusty furniture. Mirian—no—she was Naluri here—found it strange. The house seemed so small now. She found the hallway quickly enough. She knelt in that spot where she had, so many years ago.

“Necromantic revival isn’t the same as resurrection,” her father said, kneeling beside her. “As soon as the soul is broken and begins dissolution, the memories begin to dissolve with it. In a few hours, there are no memories left. The body without the soul retains some memories. If necromantically refined soul energy is carefully bound to the body, some semblance of memory and instinct remains. If the resonance of the new soul matches the resonance of what the creature is like in life, the simulacrum most closely approximates the behavior.”

“The mummy soldiers.” She smiled. “Meu. Yes, he never was quite the same. I still loved playing with him.”

He nodded. “That’s all to say, I knew it was hopeless when I tried to bring her back. But I did try. Not as something I could control, but her true soul, as it was.” Gaius let his hand gently touch the place where Leyun’s corpse had once lain. There was silence in the house. Only the sound of Naluri’s breath, and the distant wind. “I’ve had many brushes with death. Only twice in my long life have I nearly destroyed myself spellcasting. The first time was when I killed Solvir and his band of archmages. And the second was right here, in this spot.”

“There was a third,” Naluri said. “When you realize the leyline crisis will cause Divir to fall, you try to stop it. Before I remembered, I watched that. In the ruins of Mayat Shadr, you tried to do the impossible.”

“Did I?” He smiled softly. “Well, that’s good to know.”

Together, they rose and walked into the storeroom. Gaius cast briefly, and a patch of flagstones in the center of it rumbled open. There was a dark staircase leading down. Simultaneously, they both cast light spells, and the warm glow of it illuminated the sandstone steps.

“I built this for the two of us, to remember her. For many years, I gave up hope that you’d ever see it.”

They descended.

The earth beneath the sands was cool. The stairs led out into a small but beautiful tomb. He’d carved it to look like a cross between a natural cave and a nice room, with nine sandstone pillars in a circle around the edges. Her sarcophagus was made of black marble, Leyun’s favorite. There was no lid. Instead, her body was preserved with runes. There was a carved hole in the ceiling, meant to resemble a natural cave’s fissure. From it, an enchantment spilled out light so it was like a sunbeam was hitting her face. Her mother had always loved to walk out onto the balcony and let the sun wash over her face. She’d close her eyes and take a deep breath and just bask in the moment.

Clasped in her crossed arms were a wand and a scroll. One of the scrolls she’d used to teach Naluri as a child. The same wand she’d used to try to defend their home.

Carved into the side of the sarcophagus was a stone relief. The tombs of famous emperors and kings showed their great deeds in battle and acts of political domination; this relief only showed their family together. Naluri saw herself, playing in the fields while Leyun and Gaius watched. In another carving, she was petting Meu. In another, sitting around a dinner table.

On the side, Gaius had carved words in old Adamic:

Here lies Leyun Nezzar

We hope there is another world beyond this one where our souls will meet again. We fear that there is not. No words can do justice to her resplendent soul. Until we cross the dark veil, we will remember her, and cherish the time we did have.

The old Adamic script itself was beautiful, carved in flowing loops so that the words themselves were art.

Around the sarcophagus was a ring of water. Jeweled lotuses of every variety bloomed there. There were other desert plants around the edges of the room. “The enchantment and environment is almost entirely self-sustaining. The jeweled lotuses absorb ambient mana as they grow, then when they die, the runes are set to bind them and use their energy to replenish the enchantments.”

“It’s beautiful,” Naluri said. She placed a hand on her father’s shoulder. “She would have loved it.”

“She would have loved to see how you’ve grown,” he said, choking on the words.

Naluri let the tears come freely as she walked to the sarcophagus. She let her fingers drift across the edge of the marble. She gazed at her mother’s face.

She hadn’t died with a smile on her lips, but her father had mended the burn wounds and cuts as best he could, and left her smiling as she faced the light.

It wasn’t so much memories that flooded Naluri, but emotions. The way her mother had made her feel. Safe. Happy. Loved. But not just those things. She’d thrown her share of tantrums. Begged and whined about silly little things that seemed so important. Always, though, it came back to that feeling of belonging, of knowing she had her mother’s arms to fall into.

No matter what.

Except not no matter what.

She steadied her breathing and closed her eyes.

She could sense the faint flows of soul energy in the lotuses around her. That had been her nickname: little lotus. Oh, how she had loved the garden. Here, her father had shown how deeply one could know a person; every detail in this tomb referred back to some small thing Leyun had loved. In a niche in the wall, shaved leaves of her favorite tea. In the air, there was an illusion producing the scent of lavender and tiger lily. Leyun had loved the smells so much she’d made a special enchanted garden to try to grow the plants so she didn’t have to import them. In another niche, there was a stone slate, poorly cleaned so the chalk dust still lingered, and her abacus. One of the beads was broken.

Only she and Gaius could look at this room and know what every thing here meant, and why it had been included. If, in a thousand years, both of them had passed, a hundred scholars could analyze every mote of dust and still not understand that Gaius had deliberately made the tomb walls look unfinished because Leyun had loved the natural caves of the desert, especially those where a bit of sunlight spilled in and there was some secret garden. They couldn’t know the purple and orange cloth draped around her was her favorite scarf. They wouldn’t understand that her feet were bare because she’d loved the feeling of the warm sand between her toes as she did her morning walks.

In ten thousand years, if this tomb still existed, she might be thought of as an example of the burial rituals of Persama. At most, the entire knowledge of the Naasqual culture would be a few degraded scant references in weathered fragments of stone. Even the names of the old Triarchs might be forgotten. Perhaps there’d be a legend of ‘Atroxcidi,’ warped beyond any semblance of reality.

Piece by piece, every part of her memory would be lost. But here, now, she was known. In her own soul, there was a piece of her. There was a piece of her father too. And of the people she knew best. It would pain her birth father, she knew, but Dhelia and Jeron were also her parents. She knew them too, knew all the little things they loved, and all the little things they hated. Jeron would have never let a dirty writing slate be propped up in his tomb. Dhelia would have hated the smell of the flowers, but loved the smoothness of the petals beneath her fingers. Each day, a person changed, but small parts of them crystallized. Gems that weren’t permanent, but only to be beheld in a single life.

She thought of little Zayd. So little about him was solid; he was a liquid being, almost completely in flux. One day, he might love eating fish, and the next day, spit it out on the ground, much to Jeron’s dismay and Dhelia’s wry amusement. Now, he was a little bundle of raw feelings that loved sprinting across the fields and chasing butterflies. What would he be in a few years?

And then there was Grandpa Irabi, not related to her by blood either, but simply by the bonds he chose to tie to the people around him. There was Lily, who Mirian knew so well it was annoying. Nicolus, who she’d grown to understand. And Jei. And so many others—each had changed who she was and helped her on this journey.

None of this could be described as anything but ephemeral; each day, she changed. And yet, there was a realness to who she was.

In this room, she saw the impermanence of life, but also the shape of a beauty that could only be perceived in this short span they’d been allotted. As Eyeball might say, it was a beautiful flower, growing in only this spot in the great fields of time as she passed it by.

She would remember it and savor it as long as she could.

She was Naluri, but she was also Mirian. Both sides of her cried for what was lost here, but her heart swelled with joy for what love she’d been given. Her tears fell down from her cheeks to her mother’s.

The lesson for her soul was not in the ambient mana or the old bones of Enteria’s mountains, not in some deep tale of humanity’s long history, but inside herself. She felt her soul’s flows intensifying, not at the edges where it touched the world, but deep inside herself. A core of light and memories, irreplaceable and unique.

It will be for you, Mom. When I’m done, no one will have to go through what you did. No sudden moments of fear and violence. When I’m done, we’ll stop burying people, and start burying the wands and rifles of war. There will be a garden for you, and a library. Zayd will run through it and trample some of the flowers and knock a book off the shelf. And I will remember you, as long as I can.

She brushed her hand across Leyun’s cheek. She was cold, but her skin was still soft. She remembered her mother’s gentle touch, the way her hand would brush through her hair. Inside her, knots of soul energy broke open like so many flowers unfurling, no longer a tangle, but like fibers being woven, being thickened and strengthened. Inside her was a garden of memory. Not complete; it would never be complete until she took her last breath.

Naluri took in a deep breath, and when she opened her eyes again, she could see the glint of her silver eyes reflected off the tears that had fallen.

“Thank you,” she whispered.