...For the aggro'd people: Selective mute, wall of force, they can enjoy being inexorably pushed away too.  Also confoam remains on standby.

For the bunch of people having coordination problems: "Alright, who considers themselves in charge, here?  Introduce yourselves one at a time going this way around."

For the ritualists...

The ritual catches mostly onto the secrets of Terunael.

But there is one secret of Myra's, that's relevant to this location: Where she's from, and what she read there.

Because that explains why she's so leery of the time loop.

And so, when any other signs they are to see have finally passed their eyes...

"Let me tell you a story," the vision says, in a soft but sharply intoned voice, space warping in a way that Myra would know was a wormhole as the focus of it passes through the Sentinel Gate and soars above a vastly different world.

"Let me tell you a story," the vision says, as it finds a small child that becomes a young adult, reading stories of her own upon a glowing tablet; many blur past, atop backgrounds of blocks and tiles and stars and others besides, but the symbol that burns into the screen as she vanishes in a twist of space is thus: Per tincure, atop a roundel-and-pall voided and inverted a roundel voided and transfixed by three arrows improper per pall inverted, Argent or Sable.

Or rather, as the screen's light goes out, the black-on-white of the symbol seen above pages of blurry and often redacted text inverts, such that it is now silver on black.

Beneath that, the text "RCT Δt | 'Pataphysics" fades in - and the screen cuts sharply to various different scenes.  Some that these people may recognize - the young woman popping into existence along with a dozen others and promptly shattering a monster into icy bits, that woman, a bit older, manning a ritual circle made of hundreds of runes and powered by whirring machinery as it draws shadows from a distant city into a plane of darkness, that same woman in a tavern talking to what must be lineaged individuals (by their reckoning) until they arm themselves and head off in a direction the camera can't see - interleaved with some that they may not have any idea where to begin to understand - a metal ring, spinning around its axis against a background of stars as they see the young woman operating an astronavigation system; the woman from the same time as the ritual circle, interrupted from work at a holographic display as she rushes to calm a lover's nightmare, staring out the window of a skyscraper's penthouse as the neon of the city below her is washed out by sunlight; the woman in the tavern, building weapons of war in a workshop full of tools they've never before seen, that work at the push of a button or three and work magic with lightning and lightning with magic, a dossier of some smoke-skinned arachnid-woman pinned to a target with knives - and often to the targets that this woman tests her weapons on.  The woman, putting away a robot army that's probably not hers, tearing a hole in the universe with a rainbow-gleaming knife, then shaking her head and exiting through a door that shows the absence of her reflection in the hallway beyond.

 

And here.  Now.  The ritualists casting.  The vision, recursing, in fractalline smears of warped space.

"Let me tell you a story," the voice continues, now recognizably hers, Myra's, despite no details having changed, "because," and here, it is clear, she is doing an impression of some other soul, a growling rasp, "you'd best believe you're in one!"

 

And then - the ritual shatters, the reverie broken in shards of glass as they're clawed back into the present, leaving behind only their memories, and indelible images of that symbol, a wormhole, and an open book.

The ritualists are mostly in rapt contemplation of their notebooks as they race to write down everything they can remember - a couple of them start verbally dictating only slightly garbled details to onlookers.

Rampant speculation about what realm of magic Myra might be associated with is fueled further as word of the vision spreads - there are a lot of proponents for Autumn based on all the robots, but some outliers for Night based on the tentacles and interesting forms of people described, and for Day based on the underpinning study and logic.

Increasingly there is also the theory that she is an Eternal who has worked out how to manifest in the material world directly, maybe that rainbow knife is an artefact that let her escape the Realms?

Meanwhile, it swiftly becomes apparent that at least one in three of the people here at the gates considers themselves to be in charge in some respect, which might explain how disorganised everything has been throughout. Most of the titles they claim are essentially 'leader of this small band of mercenaries/adventurers/explorers'.

Of those with more impressive titles, there's one Imperial Advisor on the Vallorn, one Champion of Vigilance, and one Knight-Protector of Spring.

"Alright, everybody who's not in charge of more than five or so people, you guys might need to sort it out amongst yourselves if you want to have a particular proxy, but if there continues to be everyone and their brother claiming to be in charge of the whole operation because you run a party, we won't get anything done."

The Imperial Advisor on the Vallorn is definitely worth consulting.  She's not sure what half of these other titles are off the top of her head, but does her "scan all the libraries" directive result in having turned up useful explanations on a search?

...And what on earth is going on over there?  ...What, on Earth?  They saw it?

Huh.

Champion of Vigilance is a religious title, decided by a vote of all Vigilance congregation leaders who feel like showing up, which is mostly about who gets issued a fancy artefact shield, which apparently the Empire doesn't even have any more...

Knight-Protector of Spring is a Dawnish title decided by a yearly tournament, which comes with a fancy banner that they do actually have, and makes related Eternals respect them more, or something.

Multiple people inform her that nobody is in charge of the whole operation, it's an Adventure, Rhianos refused to sponsor it if anyone was in charge. (Also a large number of people protest that their unit is actually fifty, a hundred, three hundred people, it's just they left them to a sergeant and/or their own devices to come over here and participate.)

Face, meet palm.  "I get why he'd do that, it seems very in character, but also, that is the worst decision, tactically speaking, when you are in practice an army.  Alright.  I'd like all y'all who don't have particular experience with magic to go round up your groups and make sure they all understand that while everything's stable in the sense of not doing anything we don't know where and why it is right now, poking into the city before we've figured out what to do about the vallorn and their source is going to be direly hazardous to their health and might end up making the time-fuckery problem worse, so if they so desperately want to risk their lives on it anyway they should come speak to me about what to do and not do.  Not immediately, though, because I'm going to be working with the experts on plans to fuck over the Vallorn.  I don't expect this to involve getting into fights unless you count the probable Vallorn death frenzy, which I expect to be handling with direct intervention to defend everyone involved once I have enough force projection across the affected areas.  To that end I suggest that anyone who doesn't expect they'll be immediately necessary for ritual purposes or expert advice adjourn to the forward base by the weirwoods; I can and will provide transportation there."

There are, it is becoming clear to the careful scouting drones, some other interesting things in there amongst the interference that is making it quite hard to operate.

There are, for instance, around the time bubble, a ring of ridiculously enormous trees. Not just like the weirwood trees that are pretty big, not just like 'you can put a road through the middle' redwoods, seriously big 'instead of a city block you have a tree' trees.

In all of these trees, there are... What used to be people. They may, unfortunately, in many important senses still be people. They are all hideously impaled and... interwoven... with the hideous spiky vines that crawl all over the trees.

There is also an important sense in which the people in the time bubble are actually also two different people, from a few years later, who seem to be some kind of anchor and lynchpin to this whole arrangement. And those two people are constantly being torn apart by the vines and constantly healing...

Approximately half the people at the gate choose one of heading off, trying to gently manoeuvre the would be appliers of violence away from situation, and hanging around in earshot but clearly stepping back.

There are still at least fifty people who would like to actively engage and all believe themselves to be very important.

Fifty people is at least a manageable amount of Too Many People Augh.  Hopefully it will thin out a bit as people realize this is over their heads.

...Bloody hell, she despises temporal anomalies.  ...She finds herself wondering if these are the original Navarr and - Thorn, was it?  Yeah, Thorn, The Other Guy - first with plans, but then with regrets.  And who the hell thought making Evil Teledrassil was a good idea?!  Were they that desperate, or did things go that wrong?

"Alright.  Ladies, gentlemen, and those who find it rather impolite to ask others about their gender when there are people who're walking around London with the face of squids - excuse me, that's a reference none of you would know, but it is important to recognize those people whose genders are 'none', 'certainly not any of these', or 'sure, why not' - we are here to determine both what can be done about the ritual at the heart of Terunael, the time-locked font of Spring that empowers the Vallorn - and what should be done.  Which is to say that I expect this to rapidly become relevant to not just national but international politics, to some extent - and if you want nothing to do with that, I'll understand if you head out."

And once that winnowing is done - "Let me show you what I've found."

The impromptu theater/conference-room is mostly illusory, but there are very real walls around it; she doesn't want to show this to just anyone.

She doesn't get into the details of the people, but she will mention that there are two lynchpin figures at the center of it all - both at the t=0 start of it all, and some years later.

She'd like the vates' help in figuring out if they're anybody she ought to know, actually, she has some images.

Alas, everyone remaining is very happy to be involved in both national and international politics, and several of the people who had been standing aside are now looking more interested again.

A lot of the audience are still speaking over each other, until the Advisor on the Vallorn suggests we 'run this like Standing'. This appears to involve people who want to speak forming a line behind the Advisor on the Vallorn, and she calls them forwards one at a time to say their piece.

The first one in line says, "The first ones look like Terun mages, and the second ones... they've got to be Navarr and Thorn, right? We don't have very reliable physical descriptions, but... okay, what do you know about the origins of the Vallorn, I don't want to give you the whole saga if you've already heard it."

"I know that - the story goes, there was some sort of Terun megaproject, it Went Horribly Wrong, Navarr and Thorn did Something and created the trods about it Somehow.  Is there anything I'm missing, there?"

"It... rituals do not, 'go horribly wrong'. It was designed to do - pretty much this. The thing that went wrong is the targetting. They did not mean to destroy their own cities.

They did mean to destroy... everything else.

And we didn't know exactly what Navarr and Thorn had done - it appears what they had done is, well, this.

The Trods already existed in Terun times - they were conduits for magical energy between the cities. What Navarr and Thorn did is harness them, to drain power from the Vallorn - power that drains out of this hole. And the people are - the other people in the ritual, who died with them. Or so we thought."

There are a lot of nods, a bit of impatient shuffling, and an increasing amount of abject shock turning into hopeless weeping, going on amongst the assembled.

"...bloody hells, why?  Why would you do that?  What could possibly be worth the blood on your hands?  ...I've asked myself that question about enough analogous situations to know that I don't think I'll ever succeed in understanding it.

"But...that's not what we're here to discuss.

"...well.  The good news is that...they might be alive, and if we do this carefully enough, we might be able to save them.

"That's also the bad news, though; I'm sorry to break it to you like this.  If you need a minute, take a minute, everyone.  It's - painful for me to contemplate; I can't imagine what it would be like if my family were in there."

"My speciality is history, if you need more of a history lesson, but for now I'm going to hand over to someone else."

The next person steps up. "What do you know about liao ceremonies? I think that what we're seeing here, if this is an accurate representation, is something like the way we can do past life visions - except they have found one of these lives, probably amongst the..." he pauses for a moment to collect himself, having just had a terrible realisation amongst the academic analysis, "the children, they'd have to be very young to be... the one that's arguing for better targeting, they're probably the Virtuous one, that returned so swiftly..."

"...I can't say I'm an expert.  I know they exist, and certainly they work as advertised, but - you're saying that there's a soul that was present in this moment, also around now and acting independently?

"Because - as best I can tell, it's still those times in the bubble, such that incautious dismantling would snap us back.  Which is..."

"Bloody hell I do not want to deal with a McFly situation.

"Okay, brief digression into time travel mechanics and possible outcomes of acting, given this information:"

She'll throw up some diagrams, green, blue, red - after a moment's thought, she crosses them with a magenta starburst and branches to indicate her arrival as a potential complicating factor.

"There's three models of time travel that tend to be thrown around.

"The first is the constant-universe model, and it's usually the most accurate one - but I cannot say that it's 100% true here.

"Effectively, in the constant-universe model, you cannot meaningfully affect the past because if you were going to do so, you've already gone back in time and meddled."

The green diagram shows a closed loop, effectively.  Her magenta knocks the forwards march of time askew but doesn't break even the loops that occur after her.

"The second model is the many-worlds interpretation, where every instance of 'time travel' heads to an alternate universe, instead.  I don't think that's likely, however, because you wouldn't be able to sustain this in those conditions."

The blue diagram, many worlds where time travelers jump across lines.  Her arrival colors one magenta.

"The third model, though, and the one I'm worried we may inhabit, is the single rewritable timeline model.  That one gets...complicated.  Very quickly."

The timeline animates; people duel across it, painting it practically all the colors of the rainbow as they war over fixed points along it.

(It's basically a game of Continuum, that she's animating live.)

"I don't want to risk writing the universe out of existence while I'm - while anyone's - in it."

"I don't suppose any of you have a way to tell whether we're in case one or three, before I start thinking about whether breaking the first rule of time travel and time loops in general - which is, to put it succinctly, 'Don't' - is viable?"

Someone yells out "Abraxus!" A lot of people glare at them, look puzzled, or start waving at the Advisor on the Vallorn urgently. She points at one of them.

"Abraxus Whitespire was - the first person to claim to see future with True Liao, rather than only the past. He certainly did something, but it wrecked his soul - if you mess up with True Liao you get unmoored in time, normally that's just you can't remember which of you and your past lives you currently are, he was mostly incoherent but produced a lot of prophecy that has - arguably been accurate in places."

Several hands go down, but one has become even more determined, and is called on. 

"Can I have privacy for this? We swore not to make it common knowledge because of the possible consequences."

"Yes, absolutely."

She'll put up a privacy barrier.

"A couple of years ago, a sodality calling themselves the New Scions of Atun looked into the works of Abraxus. They recreated the Metempsychotic Anointing and used it on past life visions, which pulled them towards Abraxus' - I don't know what they called it, but I call it a 'soul vector', the path that a soul takes through time, which is not only forwards. 

They found someone with a past life that intersected Abraxus, and used Whispers Through The Black Gate to call his past life to the present while he was still with them.

His past life showed up, and gave them a box with a gryphon's heart - that was an ingredient they needed to make the potion of guiding light that can direct a true liao vision - directly transferring an item from the past to the future.

The whole thing fell apart after one of them - Yael - used the Potion to direct her vision, but lied about its contents to promote her theory of what lies beyond the Labyrinth by pretending to be the reincarnation of the First Empress - which was uncovered by ritual magic that Auric Horizon had been developing to gain more information on the location and timing of a vision.

After that they were discredited and scattered, and this is all second hand from a member I met in a Wayhouse, who wanted to tell someone but did not want to reopen the general investigation."

"...Well.  That's.  Certainly evidence of something, though it may be that local time is a big ball of wibbley-wobbly timey-wimey stuff instead of having a coherent aspect -- I was kind of already assuming that the Labyrinth was weird, honestly, given how Realms and afterlives just...are, but that's - good to have confirmation on - do you know if there's anything that suggests that this should have been impossible for Abraxus to give up, but happened anyway -- though I suppose 'atemporal realm allows timecloning' isn't strictly evidence either way, it's still suggestive in the worse direction if something is noticeably impossible now -"

"Nothing as clear cut as that. Getting gryphon hearts is difficult and stupid - they're the pets of the Eternal Hayaak, whose thing is over the top revenge - but not impossible.

It should have been impossible for anyone contacted by Whispers to interact with people who weren't the ritualists, never mind giving them an object, but we already know some entities can break the rules there, what the ritual actually does is basically just rip a hole and beckon."

"Ah.  So everything about this is absolute bullshit and thus not indicative of the 'normal' case, for all that - something is still rendered clearly possible in its evidence.  ...Though, considering, I do think I'll spend more effort than I already would have on avoiding the worst case scenarios."  Right, she's going to need some temporospatial isolators...

"Thank you for your willingness to trust me with this information; I don't make categorical promises in these situations, because bullshit will oft bullshit engender, but I will do my best to not betray it."

"Anything else before I bring down the privacy barrier?"

"I think that's it. Basically every time someone investigates this, someone's soul explodes, so, uh, try not to do that I guess?" 

"I will definitely be avoiding any soul exploding I can see coming."

The privacy barrier goes down.

"Well.  I think that the information I have been given in confidence makes it definitively unsafe to assume we aren't in case three.  Which means that the naïve way of attempting to break the loop is definitely too dangerous."

The next person in the queue steps forwards.

"Before I get started on the current known Vallorn affecting rituals," he says, "what are your current thoughts on solutions, naive or otherwise?"

"So.  Space and time are kind of the same measurement along a different axis, and gravity is the distortion of space and time.  The naive solution to the time bubble is to - effectively, pop it, or peel it open, with gravitic shenanigans.  And the complex solution is that but with more 'wrapping the small bubble in a bigger bubble so that nothing can go spilling all over the continent if it goes wrong'.  I've got the technology for it, at least - and given how few times I can count seeing time magic go right, I'm inclined to take the route that depends more on numbers than wibble-wobble.  Not that magic isn't extraordinarily useful, but it's also adding this whole other interpretive layer between you and reality that's just bad when you need to care about - "

"...Speaking of Vallorn rituals.  Do we know where all their hearts are.  Because I'm going to need to wrap those in causal isolation or just tear the entanglement apart myself if there's going to be any hope of not getting timefucked.  Ah, pardon my language."

"I'm sure someone's going to get a nice big fabric map out of their bag in a minute, but yes, we think we've tagged them all, though there might still be one underwater we've missed.

I have no idea what you're talking about with time and gravity but I can see some of the Urizeni practically vibrating about it, so I'm guessing that constellations are going to be the paradigm you're after - blood and pattern magic are excellent for things you can specify in a nice, straightforward, heartfelt way but you want a Stargazer for getting really technical.

I'm not sure how well specific rituals are going to help you, so I'll just give you the general overview. Essentially, the Vallorn responds very well to the Winter resonances - especially high powered curses that drain fertility from the land, which obviously has undesirable side effects, but has been useful for keeping a lid on them. And naturally you can rile it up with Spring - although the Trods and Dance of Navarr and Thorn - the ritual that creates more Trods - are Spring magic too, but designed to siphon the intense Spring magic off of the Vallorn and use it elsewhere, rather than stick around within the Vallorn.

The other thing you should know about, if you don't already, are singing stones. The Teruneal people used these as focuses for blood magic - it was their way of letting covens work together, like the covenstones we make today - and they also acted a bit like Marcher dolmens, binding magic into the land. If you're trying to do something to the vallorn hearts, they probably do have intact Singing Stones in there - the larger ones, that are bound to the land - which might help with connecting to the boundaries?"

Someone does, indeed, get out a nice big fabric map. There are six hearts marked: Hercynia west of centre near the 'destroyed heart' marked at Seren, then Liathaven to the west behind Jotun lines, Emrys to the north in the icy wasteland of Thule lands, Broceliande east of centre, Therunin a little south-east of that, Béantal Dol over in the Druj lands of the Sarangrave on the other side of a big lake, and finally Cavan much further to the south-east in the Axou lands. It also has marked in little footprints the several journeys of Navarr and Thorn as they established the Trods; they did not reach Cavan or Emrys and there is only a dotted line up to the Sarangrave.

"That's missing Feion Essa, which we think might be off the shore of Sarvos, off to the south underwater in the Bay. But we're not actually certain that one ever existed."

"I'm sure I won't miss a giant honking Spring source like this even if I'm looking from orbit, so.  We will find out soon enough if it did!"

That shouldn't take too long to confirm, it just needs an overflight and a submersible run double-checking to be sure.  She doesn't have to do anything special.

Singing Stones, huh.  "Those do seem like they could well be useful foci.  What do we know about them?  And I must admit that I'm not very well-grounded in properly cooperative casting to begin with, where there's more than one person involved in throwing the power about, if the covenstone analogy is more than surface-level."