The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian's search of the surrounding area that cycle turned up little. Occasionally, she would look out at something and feel the faintest hint of deja vu, but it was hard to say if she was even remembering something or just going insane from looking at too many rocks.

With a few days left in the cycle, she returned through the Mahatan Gate to see if any developments had been made during the research.

As she strode through the Elder Gate, she startled High Wizard Ferrandus and two of the wizards working for him. "Prophet!" he exclaimed.

"Any breakthroughs on Gate research?"

"Our notes are over there," he said, gesturing to a haphazard pile.

Mirian swept them up with telekinesis, then levitated upward to the ceiling. She used blink to bring her to the strange shaft above the Gate. When she was at the top, she cast detect life to ensure she wouldn't collide with someone, then blinked again, bringing her to the plaza in front of Bainrose. That was significantly faster than any other route, but as usual, it caused something of a shock to anyone in the plaza. Mirian ignored the yelps of surprise and made her way into Torrian Tower.

"Hey! Students aren't—ah, apologies, Prophet," one of the Academy guards told her.

"As you were," she said, unconcerned. She levitated up the central room towards the advanced wizarding laboratories.

The notes Ferrandus had handed her turned out to be useless. It told her all sorts of things she'd seen before; only the arrangement of the sentences were different. She was still figuring out how to create initial conditions that would get him and his team to find new information about the Gates, one that didn't involve her spending an inordinate amount of time tutoring him first. Unfortunately, Jei getting pulled off the Gate project to work on crystallography with Seneca caused their productivity to crater.

Mirian smiled as Jei emerged from the alchemistry room. "How went the research this cycle?" she asked. It was her habit to speak Adamic now any time she addressed her.

"That remains to be seen," Jei said. "Have we integrated jeweled lotus extract into chrysoberyl crystals before?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You have not."

That brought a smile to her old professor's face. "Then it went well. Come and see."

They had grown minuscule crystals, since the amount of magichemical they were extracting was equally small, but Mirian marveled at their beauty. The ones in front of her were translucent golden minerals, but as Jei quickly demonstrated, using a different kind of light spell caused them to look brilliant orange.

"The inclusions of lotus extract, when properly suspended in the growth medium, significantly alters the properties of the crystal. It specifically took extract from an amber-jeweled lotus, though. It may be that different extracts match different crystals. We believe—"

Seneca burst into the room. She was so excited she was nearly vibrating. "She's back! Did you tell her!?"

Jei switched to Friian. "Sefora, I am being in the process of—" Love t.his s@t^or#y*?^ S!h$o+w yo.u$r^ supp#o&rt on M+9.VLE*M^P*YR.

"It's amazing!" the alchemistry professor interrupted. "It displays higher mana resonance than corundum! There's also the research implications—that there's dozens of new formulas that might do even better! If we can just resolve the problem of the flaws developing in the crystal structure—"

"There's a way to resolve that, it just involves going to the Labyrinth," Mirian said. "Let's go through the full report." She smiled at them. "You've both done well."

***

Between the cycles, she dreamed again. First, of the Mausoleum, gazing out at the endless stars in those towering windows she could never reach. She went again to the entrance where the colossal doors stood. Always, a faint glow lay beneath the stars in this direction, muting them. She pushed against the doors, but it was still like she was exerting no force on them.

The dream shifted, and there was the tree, but more than half of it was on fire this time. The branches didn't splay out in the kind of fractal patterns common of trees, though, they wove together, merging and unmerging, impossible to untangle just by looking. She climbed, putting one hand in front of the other, seeing if she could trace a path—

She was in that place of darkness again, the wall of fire coming closer, blotting out all the stars with its terrifying light. The Ominian floated in a void, watching it approach. It was closer now, closer than she'd ever seen it in a dream. At first, it had seemed a line of fire, then a rectangle, but as it came closer, it seemed to grow vertically. An expanding sphere, she realized. Mirian could feel the anticipation radiating off the God. The dread. She turned to see what They were guarding—

—and the dream vanished, just as the first drop of water hit her on the head.

She sighed.

***

For all the rapid progress she'd made in the search for Atrah Xidi in the 208th loop, the next two loops were incredibly frustrating. She scoured the area near the smuggler's drop the next loop, then roamed farther out the loop after. When increasing her search radius turned up nothing, she tried exploring what she could of the cave system.

That also proved to be a dead end. Even if the necromancer was using a blink spell, the tunnels were too narrow and twisting to be much use. She began to only explore tunnels large enough to easily fit a person, but after weeks of exploration, it seemed there was nothing near the place Thaseem had shown her.

She returned to Falijmali again to replenish her supplies and get clean of the sand that found ways to get into everything. On a whim, Mirian took a different route on her return, flying eastward first before swinging around in an arc south.

That was when she saw it.

A streak moving through the air. It was moving faster than a two-headed vulture, and was too large to be a sand-kite. Mirian snapped off two lens spells, layered on top of each other. Sure enough, it was a dark-robed figure, flying against the wind. He was flying southeast, his back to her. He apparently hadn't seen her. There was only one person it could be.

Atroxcidi. Or rather, Atrah Xidi. But where is he going? Ibrahim's armies are marching in the opposite direction.

She cast total camouflage, thinking, Gods' blood, I almost ran into him. All this searching, sure that he would be somewhere north near Rambalda, and it was coincidence that they nearly crossed paths while levitating. Why didn't I anticipate that?

Then, you can't anticipate everything. She didn't like that.

Her camouflage spell didn't seem to be necessary. The necromancer's back stayed to her, and he was flying farther away with every passing moment. But that did mean she had an opportunity, however dangerous. Quickly, she considered her options. There were only a few days left in the cycle. He was flying southeast and appeared to be traveling in a straight line, which meant he had come from the northwest. Rambalda was in that direction, but she wasn't sure that was where he'd come from. Did he come from his hideout? Has he actually just been there the whole time?

Mirian looked down, mentally marking the place where his shadow passed over a rock formation. When he passed over another distinct formation, she noted that too. She moved the lens spells back up. The necromancer was nearly out of sight. She flew towards the first rock formation she'd noted, then used a compass spell to align herself. In the Holy Pages, she'd copied a scale map of Enteria. She glanced back. The necromancer's speed and angle hadn't changed.

She flew up several thousand feet where the air had a chill to it, layering more lens spells. In the distance, she could just make out Rambalda. Wrong angle. Then he came from closer by.

Mirian used a special ink she'd developed to mark a red line across her map. Later, a remove ink spell, enhanced to target the specific type, could clear the notes. If Atrah Xidi had come directly from the same place he'd started the loop in, this little encounter had just drastically reduced the area Mirian needed to search. In fact, it should only take a single cycle more to find it. Ibrahim is coming from Rambalda, and based on his army movements, I can guess when he leaves to find the necromancer. I don't know how he's managed to move as fast as he does, but I can find a location to watch from, and it's as simple as posting up where the two lines intersect.

That had, essentially, just solved the problem of finding the necromancer. There was no need to continue the search this cycle. Now it was just a matter of time.

She glanced back at the direction he'd gone.

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What is he doing? The curiosity was burning her.

The smart thing to do would be to be grateful about the narrow miss. But this doesn't seem like something Ibrahim would have told him to do. He would want him attacking Baracuel, right? Understanding this might untangle the motivations of the man, which would help her in negotiations. If she went after him, she'd likely not have time to return to Torrviol. She'd lose the research progress the Academy had made this cycle.

Mirian hesitated only a moment more, then flew after him.

***

The necromancer turned out to be easy to follow. She couldn't maintain his speed without using accelerated levitation, and she couldn't use the mana-hungry spell for long because the necromancer wasn't leaving her much fuel.

The corpses were everywhere.

Whatever he was using to kill, Mirian wasn't sure. The desert drake corpses she encountered were simply that: dead. But unlike her slaughter, he hadn't spared the smaller creatures either. No flies gathered to the corpses. No scavenger beetles sought to carry away their remains. When she cast detect life, it didn't pick up burrowing mammals or tiny insects like it always did. He had scoured the desert.

That worried her. The only thing she'd seen like that was the hollowing out of Akana Praediar as the myrvite hunters there culled everything they could find and piled them up on carts to be dissected. But even they'd left scavengers and decomposers.

Can he really use the soul energy efficiently from even these small forms of life? It worried her, and it excited her. Already he'd demonstrated knowledge of magic beyond anything the Academy or the priests had taught her.

She continued her pursuit. By now, she knew where he was going. There could only be one destination this far southeast: Mayat Shadr.

The dead city.

***

The closer she got to Mayat Shadr, the more cautious Mirian grew. It wasn't even that she was scared of Atrah Xidi. No, her divination was focused on the leylines beneath them.

Mirian had seen the eruption by the train tracks to Alkazaria. She'd seen the breach along Casnevar Range when the Monument blew, and watched how it destroyed Palendurio.

Those had been small.

With three days left until the end, she saw two leyline breaches, one to the north of her, another to the west. Even some ten miles away, she'd had to put up shields, and then keep a filter air spell going so that the resulting gyres of sand didn't choke her. In the gaping wounds in the earth the breaches left, she saw pieces of the Labyrinth and the red glow of lava. Periodically, magical energy would erupt from them, transmuting into lighting, flames, and bursts of force.

With two days left, there was a massive breach five miles south of her. Mirian snapped up a prismatic shield as soon as it started. The entire southern horizon turned white, and she had to put up a block light spell so she wasn't blinded.

In that moment before the spell went up, she thought she saw a black sphere near the breach.

Or maybe it was a trick of the afterimages burned into her retinas.

She cast constant divination spells, trying to anticipate any other breaches or eruptions. Her leyline data was useless here. She'd never gotten this close to the center of the final collapse. Looking up, the Divir moon was almost directly above them. It really does fall directly on top of the old city, she realized.

That night, the auroras were so bright she might as well have been walking in an overcast day, only the ground was lit by oranges, violets, and greens. The world she walked became surreal, like she was in one of the Ominian's dreams.

That was how she first saw Mayat Shadr. It was in the distance, awash with the colors of the auroras above so that it didn't look real. The size of it—she blinked several times to make sure it wasn't a hallucination. Torrian Tower in Torrviol had always stood out as this massive thing, so much taller than anything around it that it had a presence to it. The towers of Mayat Shadr had fallen into themselves so that they were jagged shadows of their former selves, but even in that state, she could tell they had once stood nearly as tall. There hadn't just been one, though, there'd been hundreds of them, overlooking a city that once must have been magnificent to behold.

Thousands of years of sandstorms had blown over the city, shrouding the buildings in a sea of dunes. Somehow, that made the ruins feel more momentous. What secrets are buried here? she wondered. Here was the former capital of the Persaman Triarchy. Once, it had been full of grand palaces that even Sylvester Aurum would have been envious of. Once, it had been the heart of civilization, and from it pumped the blood of empire that spread its influence around Enteria. Once, there had been the Conclave of Archmages, sitting in their marble towers. The histories spoke of grand gardens and bountiful aqueducts, of bustling markets full of wares from around the world, of great innovations, and greater armies.

Now, it was this vast ruin, one that only whispered of the greatness that it was.

Of Atrah Xidi, there was no sign, and her divination picked up nothing. To stay hidden, Mirian burrowed into the ground with gather sand and shape stone to make a shelter. That would also protect her from the worst of an arcane eruption putting out a shockwave.

When she woke the next morning, she started moving cautiously by foot towards the archeologist's camp. Over the past few decades, researchers had aimed to learn of long-lost technologies of Persama, with some controversy. Not all the discoveries were old spell rods or useful architectural techniques; the Triarchy had been infamous for its use of necromancy. Most of the stories she'd heard about it were cautionary tales, teaching the dangers of hubris.

Is there some powerful necromancy still hidden here? Is that why Atrah Xidi has come here?

From what she'd read, the camp itself was the size of a large village. A few hundred archaeologists worked here. Half-again as many servants in turn supported them. It was all funded by Persaman elites like Lord Saiyal as part of a project to reforge a Persaman identity. All the major cities were allowed to send expeditions, and so the camp was divided into sections that competed for discoveries. Ibrahim had apparently spent time here as a young man.

Now, the actual camp had been abandoned and the people had moved into the ruins, which they'd fortified. No doubt, the wizards and historians there were terrified of what was happening around them, but it looked like few had been able to leave. The nearest occupied village was over a hundred miles away. The caravans had likely stopped coming weeks ago. She could see defensive glyphs enchanting stone ruins where the camp was taking shelter, and places where spellward engines had been repurposed into force barrier spells. Far more fuel intensive, but it had likely saved them from the worst of the eruptions and the resulting sandstorms.

She was maybe a mile from the camp when Atrah Xidi appeared. He had been somewhere in the ruins, doing what, Mirian didn't know. He floated just above the ruins and held a single hand up.

Mirian used detect life, just in time to see streams of souls rising up into the necromancer's hand. Whatever spells he'd just used, he'd killed the entire camp—just like that. Mirian's breath came out in a hiss. Gods' blood.

Part of her screamed that she should start flying. But that was animal instinct. She was above that. If she really needed to, she could knock her temporal anchor against her soul and be pulled from the loop. She kept watching, keeping low against the dune. The apocalypse was growing near. She'd come this far. She wanted to understand this man.

For a moment, he stayed floating in the air, soul energy coalescing around him. It was disappearing somewhere. A repository. But what soul repository could be large enough to store that much soul energy?

Atrah Xidi turned and flew towards the center of the city.

Mirian followed, using total camouflage, and then on further consideration, began maintaining three other anti-divination spells. She levitated forward, keeping herself low. The world felt strange, here, beneath the Divir moon. The howling wind had become so normal it didn't seem like noise, just a part of the eerie silence of the city. Mayat Shadr had been a massive city, with a network of streets and blocks that surrounded its center in a circle. The minutes ticked by. By her reckoning, the apocalypse itself was only a few more minutes away.

Abruptly, the city ended. Only, it didn't, she realized. There was an abrupt stop to the structures and a slight depression, full of sand. The city formed a ring around that circle of sand. There was a lone figure, no longer flying, but walking, black robe billowing in the wind. He was slowly making his way to the center of that ring.

Mirian stared at him. Is there some ritual he's prepared here? Is he part of the cause of this all? From what she could tell, there were no glyphs. The ambient magic was intense enough she felt it as a thick pressure, but that was the leylines getting ready for their final burst. There must be some magic artifact. Some device. Did the Triarchy leave something behind? Does he trigger it? What does he hope to accomplish?

Her mind raced with possibilities.

A flickering white light washed over the city, bleaching it. Somewhere in the distance, another leyline had breached. The eruptions would be coming faster now.

The dark figure reached the center of the circle in the middle of the ruins. Then, he knelt down in the sand and put his face in his hands.

Mirian stared, uncomprehending. Is he… weeping?

Then he stood and gazed at the moon.

If the old necromancer said anything, she was too distant to hear it. But when he began to cast, she could feel it. The ambient mana in the area shifted, responding to the absolutely massive amount of auric mana pouring into Atrah Xidi's spell. Belatedly, she cast prismatic shield, because the final eruptions were beginning. A dark shield surrounded the necromancer a moment later, but his spell continued to build.

The city turned bright with bursting leylines. All around them, sand spiraled into the air. Old stone buildings shattered like children's sandcastles.

Above them, the moon began to descend.

Mirian's mouth fell open in disbelief. He wasn't using the souls to increase his levitation speed. He's been gathering them all. The necromancer had so much mana swirling around his aura that the edges of it were decomposing into random forces. The very air around him was distorted, and the sand was swirling around him like a gyre as bits of electric and heat energy crackled around him. The Divir moon was falling faster now. The leyline bursts had ceased, and now, the sky was bright with the fires of the falling moon. It was coming straight down at them.

The necromancer released his spell.

A beam of force erupted from his hand, pointed directly upward. The air around it smoldered with heat and light energy as the edges of the beam decayed.

Gods above, Mirian realized, a chill running through her despite the heat. He's trying to stop it.

It was an awe inspiring display of power. Far above 150 myr, she knew. Perhaps as high as 200, and not just in a burst—sustained. A thousand souls and a hundred years of practice. A mastery of magic, perhaps unrivaled in all of human history. And yet, it wasn't enough. The force beam didn't even slow the moon as it descended.

But when Mirian woke from the death at the beginning of a new cycle, she knew. He understands. Too late, of course, but everyone had understood too late. Whatever evil his ancient heart held, he was for Enteria, and for life.