The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Ravatha looked at Nurea. Nurea looked at Ravatha. Mirian, lounging in a chair, observed them both as they both had what could only be described as a stern-look contest. After a bit, the competition seemed to resolve in Nurea's favor, because Ravatha looked away. "This is absurd," she said.

Nicolus, who had been amusing himself by reading a book from the small shelf in Ravatha's office, said, "Yeah, but it's also true."

"I said I would handle negotiations," Sire Nurea said.

There's probably a faster way to do this, Mirian thought.

"She's a Prophet? She looks as old as my daughter."

"Her eyes are literally glowing. I can promise you they didn't do that a few days ago," Nicolus said.

"Nicolus," Nurea said quietly, and her ward rolled his eyes. She turned back to Ravatha and said, "I was equally skeptical, if not more so. But you just watched her do magic that is completely unknown to any academy. She fixed the Torrviol train, knowing exactly what parts would be needed. One of her professors said she opened some sort of ancient Gate. And she knows secrets. She knew about you. She knows about…" Nurea was still hesitant to speak about it, so she lowered her voice, "…knows about what my Lord Marduke is… planning."

Mirian had demonstrated the blink spell to them and summoned her spellbook as well. For the time being, she was keeping Eclipse hidden, since Liuan and Gabriel still didn't know about the soulbound relic.

Ravatha looked at Mirian skeptically. "And you want me to… analyze the books of a port in… where did you say it was?"

Mirian piped up. "Falijmali. The southernmost port on the East Sound."

"I don't speak Adamic."

Mirian shrugged. "You don't need to. It's mostly tables of numbers."

"What's in it for me?"

She felt her mood shift from amused to furious. It happened so suddenly, as her outbursts of anger often did. She stood. "Sire Nurea just explained that the world itself ends without intervention. The price you gain is your life. Is that not enough for you?"

Ravatha's eyes widened. Then she shivered.

"You see me now," Mirian said, voice a whisper. Before, she'd seen Mirian, the young student. Now, she saw the age behind her.

The Syndicate woman looked at Nurea one more time, this time, looking much less sure of herself. Finally, she said, "Very well. It will help if we take one of my associates. He usually works in wards and forgery, but he's also quite adept at bookkeeping—"

"Numo. Yes, I remember him. I've worked with him." He'd helped her analyze the wards at the Temple of the Four to save Arenthia. Mirian thought of the old priestess. She had worked for the Deeps, and most of her acolytes were former criminals. She would be executed the next day at noon. "Hmm. I know someone else who will be a good asset. I'll meet you at the train going to Torrviol. Get Numo and meet me there."

"Why are we going to Torrviol first?" Ravatha asked.

Nurea looked at Nicolus, who shrugged. "I'm just enjoying the fireworks, you know? She seems to know what she's doing."

Before, Mirian had needed to arrange a special heist where she stopped the bullets from killing Arenthia at the moment of her execution, then hired smugglers to take her away while a fake corpse was 'burned' by a corrupt worker at the morgue. Now, she would have no trouble breaking into the prison.

The anti-divination ward scheme was simple enough to crack. Once she'd done that, she could locate the wards that existed to detect illusion spells and burnt out the key glyphs involved on the route she planned on taking. She used telekinesis to pick-pocket a guard's glyphkey, then disguised herself as a guard and moved into the cells. Once inside, she cast zone of silence in the area. Then she could kill the two guards on duty on the cell block. That was, unfortunately, the best solution; while she could immobilize them with force binding, maintaining the bindings and zone would grow exponentially in mana cost at great distance, and the disturbance could lead to a pursuit she wanted to avoid. Rostal had shown her a way to choke someone so that they went unconscious, but that only lasted a few seconds. It was much easier to kill them.

She used the glyphkey to enter the door, where Arenthia was sitting by the window. The old priestess started when the door opened.

Mirian dismissed her illusion and stepped inside, telekinetically dragging the corpses of the guards into the room and propping them up by the wall. "Hello Arenthia. I'm Mirian, seventh Prophet of the Ominian—though the more I learn, the more it seems that number is a bit low. I've worked with you and Lecne is past time loops, and need your expertise. You can send a letter letting your cult know you're fine, and I still intend to keep my promise saving you in whatever the final cycle is."

Arenthia looked at Mirian, then looked at the dead guards. Mirian hated seeing her like this. She was so scared before she died. Arenthia didn't deserve to languish in that fear, not when she was so wonderful and full of life without it.

"I'll explain more on the train ride to Torrviol. All I need right now is for you to walk with your head high. That, I know you can do."

She cast disguise illusions on both of them, then marched them out the complex. An hour later, they were on the train going north.

***

Mirian first brought the lotuses through the portal to the professors. Getting the results meant flying back to Mahatan to return through the portal before the end of the world, but the inefficiency of the route was outweighed by the efficiency of spreading the research out through multiple loops. Since she could use total camouflage, moving around alone was simple.

Next, she brought Numo, Arenthia and Ravatha through. Nicolus wanted to go, but then Nurea would insist on joining too and Mirian didn't want to carry that many people.

Ravatha, when behind her Syndicate desk and surrounded by her allies, was unshakable. It turned out she wasn't always that way. Bringing her through the Gate caused her to go pale faced and get a pronounced tremor in her right hand. Mirian flew them over to the prince's eximontar stables and had them steal six of the beasts. As they galloped northwest, she used shields to protect them and force blasts to knock the prince's pursuing riders off their mounts repeatedly until they gave up.

Ravatha, who hadn't flinched at all when the prince's riders had started slinging spells and firing rifles at them, said, "Coming through and just… the water closing in all around us—I didn't know water could be so dark. That was terrible."

Arenthia laughed, now well recovered from her ordeal in the Cairnmouth prison. "Gets the blood stirring, doesn't it! I haven't been chased like that since those street thugs tried to grab me when I was twelve!"

Numo said, thoughtfully, "I thought it was a fascinating experience. I think everyone should try it."

"Hah!" said Arenthia, while Ravatha muttered to herself.

The ride north was, in Mirian's opinion, quite uneventful, though Ravatha got jumpy about all the desert drake and the manticore attacks. From the amount of pacing Numo was doing when they camped, she could tell he was concerned, but he kept it to himself.

When they got to town, Mirian got them all different rooms to stay in. Arenthia went straight to the bathhouse, complaining of sand getting in her unmentionable places. Ravatha didn't complain, but quietly went to join her. Numo started unloading his pack onto the table in his room, ordering the objects from smallest to largest as was his habit.

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Mirian got to work on her ward scheme. She'd developed some tricks to making sure the rooms didn't look like they were vandalized. She could use shape wood to carve out little sections of the floor, scribe the glyphs in the furrow, then use shape wood again to replace it and erase any trace of the scheme.

Numo apparently noticed her doing this—using divination, since Mirian kept her door closed—and commented on it at dinner.

"It took me some time to pick up on it. But why use the taraj and muno glyphs?" he asked.

"There's dozens of flux glyphs that can be paired to get the same result, but are uncommonly used and therefore not searched for with standard divination spells. How did you know to look for them?"

"It was the sarang glyph."

"Used in glyph lamps though. It should read as a false positive."

"Yes, but glyph lamps aren't on the floor."

Mirian nodded. That was true enough. But it gave her an idea. Next cycle, I can use shape iron to put my own ward sequences inside the glyph lamp, in parallel, but not interacting with the light itself. Or, perhaps I could integrate it into the lamp… people might suspect poor scribing rather than a ward hidden inside the primary sequence. I want more time to study those ancient spellrods. Always easier to iterate off of the ideas of others.

That night, Mirian broke them into the first of the artificer shops. While Numo looked over the books and the inventory, Arenthia and Ravatha started looking around.

"Where would you put it?" Arenthia asked.

"Here," Ravatha said, pointing at some of the floorboards.

Mirian was puzzled. She wasn't a complete fool; she'd cast several divination spells last cycle checking for hidden basements or the like.

Nevertheless, Ravatha quickly found a spot on the floor she could press down on, leading to a click! and the floorboards sliding away. Below were three brass cases lined up neatly. "Standard smuggling practices," Ravatha said. "Brass, so that the materials inside are harder to detect with magic. A shallow hiding spot the same height and width as the containers, so that detect compartment or other similar spells that look for hollow space don't find anything. A nonmagical mechanism so that there's no glyphs to be found."

You've learned this lesson before, Mirian mentally chided herself. An over-reliance on magic can blind you.

"That confirms the operation," Mirian said. "Now I need to know where they're going."

***

That part proved to be more difficult. Ravatha managed to find a hidden rest area south of the town about a day's travel away, but anything that was beyond that remained hidden.

"I think I know what it is. Can't understand the words, but I understand faces. They've got the suspicion," Arenthia explained over one of their dinners.

"I gathered that," Mirian said.

"It's not like you think. It's not that they're suspicious some of the time. It's that it's in them. In their bones. They lost something. Their parents lost something. Their grandparents lost something. They've kept the memory of it alive, but not the thing. The loss, they shared. They've bonded over it. If you haven't felt it, how can you be trusted. You know?"

Mirian leaned back in her chair. "Like the cult."

"Nah, that's different. Zolomator is the redeemer. We're the ones who took things. Stole. Hurt. Killed. We may have been hurt, but we also were the perpetrators. It's hard to face the shock of that. To embrace a truth that you have done evil."

Ravatha, who had been silent up until this point, snapped, "Are you trying to say something?"

Arenthia got a big grin on her face. "Wasn't judging you, sweetheart, but it sounds like you've judged yourself."

The Syndicate woman's chair screeched as she stood and left the table. Numo didn't even watch her go. He was busy separating the food on his plate, something it seemed he did every meal.

The priestess snorted. "Some people think the whole world is about them. Anyways, where was I?"

"It's hard to face that you've done evil."

"Hah! Sure is. People want to justify themselves. Much easier to deny what's real than you accept there's something rotten in yourself. Even if Zolomator joins the pantheon of accepted Gods—They'll still be rare to worship. Takes something special to change like that. Wish it wasn't so special, mind you, but I say it like I see it."

Mirian stacked her second plate on top of the first, then signaled the waiter for a third helping. The spice here was just right. The flavors, almost nostalgic. She could imagine she was eating in Arriroba.

"You really pack it in," Arenthia said.

"Mana has to come from somewhere." There was a longer theoretical discussion to be had about that. She'd been taught that people didn't absorb ambient mana, but she thought now that had to be wrong. The amount of food an archmage would have to ingest to get the kind of output their spells were capable of would be absurd. Mirian was convinced it had to do with where soul energy originated from. Her leading theory was that the soul absorbed ambient mana, and the body, its mirror in dual aspects that created the single self, required its own proportional amount of energy to compensate. Then, there was whatever her soul-alignment had done in the Endelice. It seemed ambient mana was directly integrating into her aura. Was that a quantitative change, though, or a qualitative one? That wasn't something she wanted to talk about with Arenthia, though. As much as the woman knew about the soul, it would be beyond her expertise.

Instead, she said, "So what does that mean about the people here? How do I get them to trust me?" It would be so much easier if they did. Someone clearly knows what's going on.

"Not sure. They have a hope in them too. Don't know what it is. Doesn't seem like things are on the mend."

Mirian ate her third plate of food, then sat back again in contemplation. Eventually, Ravatha returned to the table, glaring at Arenthia but content with the silence.

Mirian didn't pay much attention to it. She thought of the Ominian. They lost something too, didn't they? Do They wander in search of it? Or in tribute to its memory? And she had lost—

So many things. Things she didn't remember. Her childhood memories. Her birth parents. Her pet cat.

Things she did remember. Innocence. What it meant to live a life free of pain. Friends.

Things that would never be. She thought of Najwa's shop. I could have had something like that. I would have been happy.

Then she thought, No. That was just a dream. There was never going to be a normal world waiting for me. "What did the Prophet of Zolomator do? What did he see?"

"Mmm. Quite a bit. Most of the holy texts were destroyed, though. Because they were heretical, of course. Such a pity. Anyways, it was about Pocli 4615 when there was the Declaration Crisis. If he was trying to stop it, he failed. Strange though. He was executed, and that was the end of it. But when you die… you just go back to the start, don't you?"

"Yes," Mirian said, which got her further lost in thought. Was he a real Prophet after all? Zolomator is real—They are one of the statues in the Labyrinth Vaults. Impossible evidence to fabricate. But what was the Sixth Prophet trying to do? How did he exit the time loop? Was it the Gods' choice, or did he remove the temporal anchor himself?

Mentally, she thought about history facts. The Declaration Crisis hadn't been talked about much in her schooling, and it hadn't come up much in the reading she'd done. Most of her studies had revolved around the Unification War. And its precursors, of course. There was the Spell Engine Revolution just before…

…just before. Gods, that's it. Pocli 4651 is the first recorded use of a spell engine. Maybe he thought he had succeeded—maybe that was his task. And maybe he stopped the invention—only for it to show up a few decades after his death.

Someone had said something about that. Maybe it was Gabriel, or maybe it had been Jei or Nicolus. Something about how some events in history were overdetermined. That it wasn't one small factor or bit of chance that led to them. Like Ethwarn getting elected Mayor of Torrviol when Wolden gets exposed as corrupt. Happened every cycle. Or Kinsman getting assassinated in Akana. Hmm. Gabriel must have mentioned the term, because he thinks the invasion of Baracuel by Akana is inevitable. As it is, Liuan is only delaying it, convincing the generals to wait a few weeks until Ibrahim has further weakened the country.

That kept her thinking. So how does one change an overdetermined event? Only a time traveler could possibly do it. But the levers to change history must exist, or why would the Ominian bother? They know…

But did They know? The Ominian had told her They couldn't see all the possible paths. Was it just a God's misguided hope? How doomed are we?

Giving into such thoughts wouldn't do. She needed to focus. Take one step at a time. Maybe that meant getting the people of Falijmali to trust her. Maybe it just meant scouring the desert until she found the necromancer's hideout. Either way, she would succeed.

"Silver for your thoughts?" Arenthia asked.

Mirian smiled. "Not this time." She stood. "But you've given me an idea. I'll try it tomorrow."