"Okay. So. I'm pretty sure nobody knows the answer to these questions, unless you've got a Paragon in your pocket.

The only case I've heard of where someone really messed up their soul was when they went into a True Liao vision, panicked, and completely broke the vision by screaming to be let out.

That does suggest that messing up causality might do something extremely bad. When you say that 'some hundred years ago suddenly existing in the same casuality with today', do you mean something that will change the past? Because that appears to be the really obvious sticking point where it goes spectacularly wrong."

"Not that I know of, but I suppose I could check.  I have too many things in my pockets."

"I don't know if the past will actually change, though it's my impression that it probably won't - annnnd I'm pretty sure that I am the person who should be investigating that anyway, so, uh.  Give me a minute to check some things, I'll be right back with you."

Right.  So will breaking the loop in the present, actually change the past, temporal analysis suite?  She's pretty sure that what's happening is that time is essentially being stretched from the point of the ritual on forwards, and what the present is observing is - echoes of that process, as the ritual itself is dragged through time to power the Vallornfonts - but the question is if it can meaningfully snap back, if she cuts the metaphorical rubber band.

There are multiple ways to cook a time loop!

She can just collapse it. The ritualists snap back to their own time and do whatever they were going to do. The people who went to all that effort to drag that patch of time here probably start dying, and are probably quite irritated about it.

She can dive in and interfere with it. This probably changes the past. That probably does Exciting Things to everyone metaphysically nearby.

She can use it to study the past without interfering in it. This is possibly what the people doing this giant working were getting at - the ritual form at the heart of this is actually pretty simple, the egregore ritual and the others on show today are much more precise and elegant - possibly they are just holding this wound open so that someone more advanced, hundreds of years later, can peer in and fix the problem better.

It also has the useful side effect that they're leeching energy from the original ritual and pouring it into the Trods, which in turn weakens the Vallorn that the original ritual created. Once it's collapsed it's going to stop doing that.

...Huh. If that's what's happening in there...

"...I had it backwards, the way around of how the time loop is being perpetuated - it's not the Vallorn doing it at all, it's - it's a rescue beacon for the future - for people like me - I can fix this!  It's so fucking simple!"  She looks positively giddy.  "And I think the way I'm thinking of doing it ought to solve the Vallorn death throes problem!  If they don't have independent energy reserves at least."

Because all she needs to do here, is build a wider metaphorical straw and suck the entire ritual's energy out of the looped-time power 'socket' like it's - like the outpouring of Spring is the 'tea' of boba tea and the actual structure of the ritual is a particularly large and annoying boba she wants to suck up --

Well there is the part where she needs to kick the foundation out from under the Vallornseed ritual first (carefully not observed in enough detail that a copy exists anywhere but in her black archives) - but that is child's play compared to doing something like prising a timeloop apart with gravitics!  She can just fucking do this!  No massive infrastructure projects required!

(She's not going to do anything that could cause a timequake without preclearance from the locals, and she's still puzzling together the proper spellforms to be sure that her intrusion will not bring the future to the past, with all this new data available - but!  She could do it, right fucking now, if she wanted to!  And she's pretty sure she could make the loop into a proper forward skip!  Without breaking fucking time, Abraxus!)

Most of the assembled are a little taken aback with the renewed enthusiasm.

"Did you... want to explain what you're planning?" asks the Unfettered Mind proxy grandmaster, tentatively.

"Oh, yes, right.  So what happened in there is that this is actually two rituals - the original Vallorn ritual, and a second ritual that's trying to hold the Vallorn ritual back, by capturing it in a timeloop and pulling from the font of Spring energy it's emitting to power the Trods.  This was...Honestly probably not the best idea, because in holding 'time' constant there they gave the Vallorn a steady food source - but it means that the loop is predisposed to resolve forwards and not backwards if I just latch on to the bubble with my own magic and pull.  Like a cork in a wine bottle, it'll shoot 'out' towards the present moment, and stop being a hairy ball of potential paradox.  At which point, knocking the Vallorn ritual's footing out from under it to stop it from firing further is just, incredibly simple for me to do, and given that the Vallorn themselves are entangled with the ritual, I can just...grab hold of the whole mass and pull, probably feeding that into the Trods since they're an easy sink that does something vaguely useful and doesn't require me to build any big widgets first.  Because the real problem is that the second ritual just didn't have a big enough pipe to suck all that Spring out of the little knot of space the Vallorn are relying upon for power, and if we can fix that, it will be pretty simple to unwrap their bubble after it no longer needs to be maintained."

"I don't think it's so much 'gave it a steady food source' as 'ensured the Vallorn was mostly quiescent and didn't rapidly spread looking for new food sources'," a Vate objects.

Various people clamour about various things that might need to be prepared for, which seem to come in the following categories:

Vallornspawn / giant insect and animal dispersal into surrounding areas

Overpowered Trods bringing Spring magic everywhere like the Empire-wide Spring enchantment, which might eg screw up the other road network, cause more briars to be born, make wild animals more dangerous, make bandits more energetic and aggressive

Anything coming through from Teruneal / fate of Navarr and Thorn and the screaming people in the trees

Vallornspawn that are people with trapped souls rather than animals coming back to themselves and needing care and housing

Ecological collapse in Vallorn-adjacent areas, eg production of Therunin honey from giant bees, cultivation of Vallorn-sourced fruit cultivars, just a huge amount of rotting vegetation that can no longer be supported by the constant influx of Spring magic

"...I may not have been working with Spring long, but quiescent is quite evidently not something it does.

"...How the absolute fuck do you have giant bees, the atmosphere doesn't have enough oxygen --

"-- oh, right, yes, magically giant bees.  Bloody hell, why wasn't I considering the ecology, evolution doesn't care about sustainability, just whether it works --

"Anyway.  I have expert advice sitting around somewhere for that sort of problem, and we can use that advice in an attempt to let the ecosystem shift gently where shift it must.  Some adjustment will be necessary, but that's what all change is; we can additionally act to mitigate the worst of it.  Do we have any records on the immediate and longer-term aftereffects from the last time a Vallorn was disconnected?"

"...The whole point of what I'm planning to do is to drain the magic, using its entanglement with the ritual to ensure I get a good grip on everything affected, not send it surging.  If there's an overflow of Spring into the Trods, something has gone drastically wrong with the whole procedure.  Not that I won't prepare for such a thing, but the idea is that the outflow of Spring stops.  Although given what I just said, I can see why you would be concerned.  I'm not going to be earthing all the Springiness of the Spring magic into the Trods.  Just the magic part of the magic.  It's not worth the effort to hold on to it, but I'm definitely going to depolarize it before I go dumping it anywhere.

"I've already set up the necessary deployments for post-Vallorn rescue work; what remains, there, is staffing."

The Navarr present are keen to point out that they have, like, an entire nation for this purpose, most of which have essentially been doing game warden work with the local wildlife their whole lives and would be overjoyed to be doing the same thing with less rampant overgrowth and poisonous miasma.

The Urizeni are rather excited about the idea of unpolarised magic - magic always has a realm, the spells kind of don't but it's always been assumed they do really and it's just the effect has been compressed enough that anyone can do it (well, any magician anyway, which is basically anyone who really tries).

They're a bit worried it might in fact turn out not to be unpolarised but instead a mix of realms with highly unpredictable effects, that is what normally happens if you try something like this, especially on an Empire wide scale or even larger.

"...I'm going to double-check really quick, but as far as I know I have definitively been working my own techniques with unpolarized magic.  The existence of a basic thaumatic particle is itself implied by the polarization of magic being a phenomenon; if magic was made up of discrete fundamental forms, the same basic techniques wouldn't work for every sort.  You'd have two magics, with differing behaviors.  But as it is, especially with regios, which are a strange thing to have occur once let alone six times, I'm reasonably confident that there is a fundamental atom of magic beneath this, that presents in multiple different ways.  It might be to do with whatever makes ritual intermediary layers so necessary for native spellcasters, I'm not quite sure.  But it feels like you should be..."  A pause, a brief look at some documents.

"...Yeah, the existence of your circles of transubstantiation are pretty good reason to be confident that your magic works off of the same underlying substrate.  ...Although, I haven't done a proper assaying, maybe they're all as chemical as liao is...Oh, hm, but the weirwood trees.  Anyway.  You don't get that sort of equivalent exchange elsewise, because if magic A is magic A and magic B is magic B, and they're two different strata, you can't guarantee the uniformity of them to be interchanged whatsoever."

Anyway, if the magic is suddenly being made out of several unique fundaments on her, you gotta tell her about it, otherwise that's entrapment or something.

(n.b. that's not entrapment, even in the original case - but it would be quite a surprise, given that nothing seems to have flagged that so far.)

So, it turns out, right, that the magic doesn't like being looked at quite so closely. If you just assume it will cheerfully act like some kind of unified magical force, like it does to power spells, then it works just fine. If you examine it very carefully to see whether it's actually made up of distinct parts - surprise, it's made up of distinct parts!

If you get the mix right it's just like making white light, though, you can balance out the resonances and dissonances and get the thing you wanted in the first place.

There is kind of a fundamental thaumic particle, it's the 'personal mana' that sufficiently trained people generate themselves, but it's generally not heavy duty enough to do much by itself - especially, it has serious transmission losses and can't do much at range. All the rest of the local thaumic particles fundamentally came from a Realm to start with and are aligned likewise, but - for instance - mana crystals have enough variety within them to make this not a significant problem in practice.

...well, there's also whatever is powering the magical materials and herbs, but those are even more stubbornly aligned, just in different and much vaguer directions than the Realms.

"Mana crystals and personal mana seem unaligned, but we haven't succeeded in stabilising any unaligned rituals," explain the Urizeni.

...But is mana still, always, mana, and not, like, different sources generating separate springions and autumnions and personions.  Because she knows how to spin mana into being aspected the way she wants, and habitually does so - but to find that her techniques don't explode when trying to deal with multiple fundamental particles she doesn't know about would be...

Surprising.

"That's because they aren't; they're just undifferentiable to your senses.  Personal mana is aspected to the person.  You all have unique signatures."

"...Anyway.  I know the right direction to point mana so as to make it have no meaningful side-effects, and how I, at least, can shift it there."  Because really, she should have expected that the right analogy was photons to begin with.  They had native runes.  Those are like the magical equivalent of the double-slit experiment nine times out of ten, in her experience.

"...we would be extremely interested if this could be applied to ritual theory, one of the major problems associated with Empire-wide enchantments has been the unpredictable resonance and dissonance effects caused by magic on that scale."

A variety of Navarr, for some reason mostly those with a branded design burnt into their upper left cheek, are wanting to talk timelines and details about the ecological support projects; apparently a Brand is a recognised role that leads a group of people and does that thing to their face to show how serious they are about it, or something.

"Well, I haven't broken anything yet and I've been working on relatively wide scales, albeit not in a regio-respecting frame - a lot of my work 'cheats' spacetime, honestly, by directly entangling -" she cuts herself off before she can get into explaining quantum mechanics terminology, wrongly because of the ways in which she violates its assumptions - "we don't have time to get into that - but I'm not sure I can teach everyone the specific techniques I use.  I've never actually needed to do that before, and I'm pretty sure I have much more direct contact with magic than baseline humanity here does.  The thought does occur, however, that you could at least approximate what I do with careful management of pure source mana; I'll run the numbers when I get a chance."

By which she means, 'is presently actively throwing some compute at speculative interferometry, but leaving the results to the side for the moment because there's no time to implement anything useful from that'.

"Unless you think it's likely to be practically relevant in the next few days, in which case I can reprioritize."

As for the Brands: "Please, help yourselves to the ecological simulations.  I'd just be reading the numbers off of their results and probably giving bad input to boot; you can likely actually use the dang things with some degree of field expertise - expertise that I'm not going to have time to develop anytime soon.  I know that ecological concerns are going to exist because of course they will, but I'm just taking wild shots at which ones based off of random things I've heard about for other reasons."