The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian's excitement only grew as the month of Duala continued. By the 13th of Duala, she was elated: she'd found another way to extend the cycles. Whether by design or coincidence, she didn't know, but some aspect of the Elder Gates helped balance the energy in the leylines. Mirian poured over the leyline data she was getting from both sides of the Gates. The terrible surge that started in the east was moderated by the open portal. Around Cairnsmouth, there were fewer reports of arcane eruptions. From what she could tell, it wasn't just that the portals were using energy from the leyline—the only thing powerful enough to create such a bridge through the fourth dimension—but also moving huge amounts of arcane energy.

She attempted to interrogate the creature she had taken to calling 'Conductor' about this. It still refused to be identified with a name, but it was more so that she could talk about it with other people, rather than saying 'the weird Elder creature with the eyeball-covered tentacles' all the time.

Use door to calm leylines? she sent to it.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ASCENDED IS FORBIDDEN, Conductor sent back.

Save, Mirian sent, and then tried to picture all the places in Enteria and send that.

FORBIDDEN, Conductor repeated. THE PACT WAS MADE. CARKAVAKOM WATCHES.

When it sent Carkavakom, Mirian felt an overwhelming pressure on her. She felt an endless scream boiling in a vast creature. She saw a wall of flesh circling the sun, only it wasn't at all like the sun in the sky, but red and had violent arcs of fire bursting from it. She felt a thousand eyes staring at her. It was like she was in a great void, and in a sphere around her, thousands of eyes had all blinked open to watch her. In the space of a single heartbeat, she felt awe, she felt terror, and she tasted ash in her mouth.

She found herself pressed up against the opposite wall, having involuntarily moved seven feet backward and slammed into it.

The message was, at the very least, clear.

Liuan Var still hadn't managed to stop the Akanan invasion, but she was able to stop the airships. With the portal open, it was a simple matter to deploy a division of the Palendurio Army to Torrviol. Dug in with trenches, only slightly outnumbered, and with an unstoppable source of logistics, they could hold the line easily for far longer than the rest of the cycle would last.

Two more days passed. By the 15th, it was clear the miracle wouldn't hold. The leyline surges moving through the continent were simply too large. The eruptions by Cairnmouth were late, but they couldn't be stopped.

Mirian poured over the leyline data. Again, energy was pooling beneath Alkazaria. Why nothing in Akana? From the past data she'd taken, there were several leylines that looked like they should be forming a confluence near Ferrabridge, but the dynamic was completely different.

Architecture of the ascended. The Elder Gods, did it mean? Are even the exact paths of the leylines by Their design? she wondered.

There was enough energy moving through the system that confluences should also be forming down south in Persama.

She needed to investigate.

But first, she needed to figure out how to open the Elder Gate on the Torrviol end.

***

Song Jei had retrieved several maps of the Torrviol Underground from the secure library in Bainrose. Now, Mirian was looking over them again, looking for some sort of sealed room that was just like the one with Conductor. Occasionally, she would add a secret passage or write a note about an incorrect junction. The maps were all using a different scale. One of the older maps was actually measuring things in cubits. That particular measurement had been archaic a thousand years ago, but the map was only two hundred years old. Why the academic had decided to do that was as unfathomable as Carkavakom.

As she studied the maps, she kept having the feeling that she was missing something.

Eventually, she sat down and thought. Her mind drifted back to the early days of the loops. Almost immediately, she'd started going down into the Underground and finding strange things. She'd first seen that abandoned statue and the orichalcum disks, though she hadn't been able to levitate at the time. She'd found all sorts of secret passages and strange doors. Doors, she thought. She'd found a strange one that was locked. Just before that train ride with Nicolus where she'd first seen a leyline breach and moonfall. Then she'd gone back to it right after. She'd been exploring the Underground, using that embarrassingly bulky mapping device. There was a door, she remembered. Covered in glyphs. Pre-Cataclysm construction. And my divination spells returned something strange. Did I ever open it?

She returned to the maps. It had been close to the passage in Griffin Hall. She searched the maps. Nothing. But it hadn't been that hard to find. But the spies and professors all used the maps. Why would they go wandering off towards what's marked as a dead-end passage?

There'd been something strange about that door.

"I vaguely remembered something," she said to Jei, rolling up the maps. "This way."

They snaked through the passages.

"What are you thinking about?" Mirian asked.

Jei was silent. "Why?" she asked.

"Because I'd like to know. I appreciate you, more than you can know. I don't want to command you to answer. Or guilt you. Friendship… looks different for me," she said.

They continued on, the only sound the echo of their boots through the narrow passages. "Home," Jei said finally.

"You haven't talked much about home," Mirian said.

"I have often thought there is no point to yearning for what cannot be. Yet sometimes I fall victim to it, and wonder how my family fairs. Zhighua is not a good place to live right now, but it is beautiful. I wonder how my sister is. I wonder if I will ever see any of them again. Perhaps it is not fated to be. Right now, I have no life; I am not living. I am a tool being wielded in service for a god I do not have faith in, and it must be so."

Mirian was silent. She felt a pang deep in her chest.

"There is some solace in the knowledge; if I am not alive yet, then I cannot die. I wonder: what will befall my home, when this is all done? Will Akana complete Baracuel's conquest? Will that bring peace, or just suffering? Will the old regime of Zhighua be reborn? Would that be better or worse? Nevertheless, all these thoughts will end soon. Is there a point to having them? Perhaps. But perhaps it is better to push them aside and be the orb that lights the path of fate."

So often, she had become numb to events, but there were times that they surged inside her. Mirian felt a single tear trickle down her face. "We've suffered a terrible fate," she said quietly.

"You cannot comfort the world before it dies, for then you will spend an eternity in mourning. You can only push forward and let it live. It took me a long time to learn that lesson with Bao. I mourned for who she was for so long that I forgot to celebrate who she had become. She is still my precious treasure."

"Some days, I feel unworthy. What did I do to deserve you?"

"Never feel that," Jei said. "I gave up in believing in 'justice' or 'deserve.' There is only what is, and what you do with it. I have probably said this before. I think the thought pattern emerges in my mind so often I must have said it, so I think if I say it I will repeat myself. But I will say it in case I haven't: you cannot save everyone. What you do must serve the greater good of all. When this is over, you must have changed the world so that these horrors cannot repeat."

She had said it before, but Mirian still hated it. Why must I be the one to choose? "It's a burden," she said.

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"Good," Jei said. "If it ever stops weighing on you, that's when you should worry. The tonnage of so many lives should not feel light."

"True," Mirian said. She thought of Viridian's discovery. What would Enteria look like without spell engines? She needed to start thinking of the shape of the future. "The world will change. I need to better understand the shape of it."

"I have always found knowledge and experience to help in whatever I am trying to do."

"There's so much to learn."

"Always."

They turned another corner. They were off the map now. They took another passage. This one brought them close to the Bainrose plaza.

At last they came to it. The door.

The seams of the stone wall had a faint blue glow to them, and the solid oak door had an orange glow inside the keyhole. She'd misremembered; the door had no glyphs on the outside, but by the arcane energy present, it was obvious there were glyphs somewhere in its construction.

Jei furrowed her brow. "When did you discover this?"

"Near the start of it all. I was wandering around the Underground randomly, trying to figure out where you were going and how the spies were getting into Bainrose. Or something like that."

Mirian cast date rock. Her divination was much better now, and she could easily target the mortar between the stones. "Five thousand two hundred years," she announced. That didn't just predate the Cataclysm, it pre-dated it by nearly four hundred years. There were legends of a people who lived before the Cataclysm. "What do you know of the Viaterria people?"

"Nothing," Jei said. "Most of what is said to be known is conjecture. Have I mentioned Zhuan Li?"

The name rang a vague bell. "A scholar of some sort. Historian?"

"More than that, but yes. She knows about them. Better, she is one of the few people in the world with a functioning brain. She can sieve out facts from fabrication."

"I'll have to seek her out. When the time is right."

Mirian started by trying to magnetically manipulate the lock. The magnetic energy was absorbed somehow. Her force drill encountered a similar problem. Is this human or Elder construction? It looks more like what people would make, but if so, how were they able to duplicate such complicated spellwork?

She used her divination on the keyhole. She had the strangest feeling of deja vu; it was strange, because while events and conversations repeated all the time now, she expected them to. She hadn't expected this feeling.

There was a small walkway that circled the room beyond the door. The vast majority of the room was a yawning pit that went down dozens of meters. Mirian checked the maps again.

"This must be it," she said. "We should be almost directly above the Elder Gate."

The ground shook. Earthshaker artillery from the Akanan siege, she guessed. She had half a mind to go out there and start throwing fireballs at them, but it would be a waste of time. Besides, when they were actually deployed, and not in column, they had shielding engines and trenches that would protect them.

She focused back in on the door. She didn't want to use blink because chances were she would overshoot and find herself plunging over the edge into the pit. But her next attempts with shape wood were countered by some sort of glyph architecture she was completely unfamiliar with. Creating a physical, brass key didn't work either. There wasn't just a magnetic repulsion, the lock had glyphs that would repel anything she stuck in there. Well, I suppose giant pits is what levitation is for, she decided. She cast levitation first, then blinked forward.

Mirian let out a gasp of breath as she unceremoniously slammed into a railing. The blink spell was thoroughly disorienting. At least it wasn't true teleportation, or the risk would involve having solid objects inside herself, rather than just hitting her.

She caught her breath and cast light.

Mirian gasped.

There was indeed a pit. The room here was a tall shaft, wide enough to hold the Divine Monument and much taller. Above her, the shaft continued until it ended in glyph-covered metal beams that supported a ceiling of stone. The same kind of stone as the plaza above. The shaft continued down for tens of meters, where it abruptly ended in the kind of stone found in the Elder Gate chamber. But what's the purpose of a vertical hall?

Perhaps some Elder creatures cared less about up and down. Mirian cast remote speech. "Jei, I'm inside. This one isn't like the Palendurio Gate, though. I need to find the, uh, creature in charge."

The walkway spiraled around the cylindrical shaft. She levitated down until the walkway came to another door. Again, Mirian blinked through.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! she heard in her mind. Startled, she jumped back, slamming into the door.

A tentacled creature that looked very much like Conductor sat on the table. She noticed immediately that this table did have its crystal conduits intact.

Mirian winced, and stepped forward slowly offering her hand out. The creature's eyes looked around wildly as it squirmed, fading in and out of her sight. Briefly, it vanished altogether.

Hello, she sent.

SORRY. YOU STARTLED ME. IT WAS VERY QUIET FOR A VERY LONG TIME OVER HERE. The eyes squinted at her, and one of the tendrils gently started prodding her. Parts of the arm faded, and then she felt it poking her in the back. It was unnerving to have pieces of its limb invisible. OH, YOU ARE VERY REAL. WELL, WE GUESS THAT MEANS WE NEED TO 'WORK' AGAIN. HOW NOVEL!

Please, Mirian sent. Open small doors? She pictured the oak doors.

IS THE CRISIS OVER? I WAS TO KEEP THEM CLOSED UNTIL IT WAS OVER.

Mirian sent confusion through her soul.

I GUESS IT IS, FROM THIS PERSPECTIVE. WE FORGET, YOU CAN'T SEE THE WAR ANYMORE. IT'S IN THE 'PAST.' HAHA. WE LOVE THE IDEA OF AN EVENT THAT CAN NO LONGER BE REVISITED. IMAGINE THE LIMITATIONS. IT MUST BE INTERESTING.

Behind her, the oak door opened. Presumably, the other one Jei was standing by had also opened.

This Elder creature was very different than the last one. She wasn't sure what to make of it. Had thousands of years of isolation made it crazy? Except, had it really been isolated? The last one hadn't answered her questions, so she stayed focused on her task. Crystals intact? she asked to confirm it had what it needed.

OBVIOUSLY, the second creature said, poking at the conduits arrayed on the table.

Name?

The creature poked her again. THAT'S RIGHT, YOU HUMANS LIKE NAMES. LIMITATIONS. HOW CURIOUS. WE ARE TICKLED BY THE IDEA OF HAVING A SINGLE NAME. IT IS HILARIOUS YOU GAVE THE ASCENDED NAMES. The creature pulsed several times in what Mirian could only assume was laughter. Flickers of color passed over its carapace. WE WISH TO HAVE THE NAME 'EYEBALL.'

Mirian's brow furrowed. Eyeball?

The creature pulsed again with apparent mirth. YES! HAHAHA. IMAGINE BEING IDENTIFIED BY ONLY A SINGLE, IRRELEVANT ASPECT OF YOURSELF! WE ARE DELIGHTED.

Open other gates? she asked, trying to picture Alkazaria.

NO, YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW THE TEMPORAL RULES. EVEN IF YOU DO HAVE A—and Mirian saw a vision of the thing she'd called a temporal anchor in her soul. EVERYONE HAS TO FOLLOW THE RULES ON ENTERIA. THAT'S THE PACT. AND NO CHANGING THE PACT, EVEN IF IT SOUNDS FUN.

Mirian was quickly getting a headache. Did these creatures have to shout?

Voice whisper? she sent.

WE ARE WHISPERING. IT'S NOT OUR FAULT YOU ARE SO FRAIL.

Okay. What rules for opening big gates?

WELL YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SHOW THE DESTINATION. IN MIND-WORDS. THIS PROVES THAT YOU HAVE VISITED IT IN AN EARLIER CONTINUITY OR HAVE BEEN GIVEN PERMISSION BY YOUR RULE-MAKERS.

Okay. Thank you Eyeball.

HAHA YES. WE HAVE ENJOYED YOU IN THE OTHER CONTINUITIES. There was a pause. UH, FORGET WE SAID THAT. WHAT WE MEANT IS THAT WE HOPE YOU WILL VISIT AND TELL MORE JOKES IN THE FUTURE. A THING THAT ABSOLUTELY HAS NOT HAPPENED YET. AND MIGHT NOT! WHO CAN TELL? NOT US, HAHA!

Eyeball started pulsing again.

See you later, Eyeball.

LATER! WE LOVE THIS CONCEPT.

Mirian turned to see Jei watching her. "Apparently, they have different personalities," she said.

As they walked back up the spiraling walkway, Jei said, "This shaft is strange. It must serve a purpose."

"Yes. Apparently the creatures have rules they need to follow, so there's limits on what it can tell me. Though it seems some of them are worse at following the rules than others. I also need to get better at communicating with them. I don't even know how they're conveying certain language concepts. How does one communicate 'the' through soul vibrations? Yet the words in my mind are clear."

"That such Elder creatures exist is… fascinating. And they are familiar with humans?"

"Apparently."

"Imagine how much there still is to learn and discover," she said.

Finally, on the evening of Duala 16th, the moon came crashing down. It had stayed aloft for four extra days.