The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian woke, sealed the hole above her bed with shape wood and shape metal, quickly threw on her clothes, then sprinted out her dorm and to the plaza in front of Bainrose Castle. She blinked beneath the flagstones, plummeting a dozen feet before casting levitation to stop her fall. Then, it was to the conduit room, where Eyeball sat spread across the table full of glyphs and crystals, its eye squinting at her mischievously.

You already know if I succeed, she thought grumpily.

HAHA. NO, OF COOOURSE NOT! HOW COULD I KNOW? THAT HAPPENS IN THE 'FUTURE.' HAHA. HAHAHA.

That Eyeball was able to convey sarcasm through soul-information was just an indication of how much she had to learn in the field. Still, nearly two months of practice had helped refine her technique significantly. Open Mahatan Gate, please, she thought.

HAVE FUN! Eyeball thought, and Mirian felt the strange pulse of magic that accompanied the Gate opening. Then blinked and levitated her way to the Gate room. Mirian used shape stone to create a post between the Gate and the door, and then wrote in large block letters on a spare sheet of paper:

Do NOT go through. Gate leads to a location deep underwater. Please continue studying it, though. —Mirian, Prophet (and former student)

It took a minute, but she could spare that. Next came her least favorite part. Though she'd tried, she simply couldn't maintain spells when she was teleported. This meant she had to rapidly form an air bubble to breathe and a force shield to alleviate the crushing pressure. Inevitably, she still had aches in her joints from the brief moment when she was unshielded, and she knew of no healing magic that fixed those aches. She took a deep breath, and holding it, stepped through.

A moment later, she was in the crushing depths of the oasis casting her spells. Then she surfaced, speeding off north away from the city. She didn't bother with stealth. By the time anyone alerted the Sentinels, she'd be long gone.

As she passed over the desert, she once again debated tactics. Should she burn as much mana as she could just to get there faster, or save some just in case? Fighting the necromancer wasn't realistic, but hated the idea of not having mana for whatever might arise. Perhaps he'd make the two Prophets fight and see who came out on top.

Get a hold of yourself, Mirian thought. She mentally rehearsed what she was going to say again. My name is Mirian. I'm one of the new Prophets. You're likely aware of the ongoing leyline breakdown. The Ominian has established a time loop to prevent it, because it soon leads to the Divir moon falling… hmm. Is that leading too much with the problem? I could say I'm the only Prophet, but I'll likely only have a few hours at most before Ibrahim arrives. What if I led with me being one of the abducted children from Falijmali? Of course, if he goes to talk with them, none of them will have heard about me this loop. But he must be smarter than that—that would just confirm the loop. But he must understand his help is a valuable commodity to bargain. Especially if Ibrahim shows up…

She kept thinking as she flew. She butchered a drake and absorbed its soul, using that to cast accelerated levitation for a few miles. Several loops using this route had given her a pretty good idea of where to look for drakes, and they had the largest souls to mana drain. It was also easy to strip their legs of scales and use heat spells to cook them so that she could eat while she flew. She could also use spells to harvest water from the cacti along her route.

At night, she only slept a little, using a carefully decaying ward system to set herself an alarm. The Lone Pine dervish form would supplement her lack of sleep. Every hour counted.

***

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The plateau, at least, was easy to spot. As she moved over to it, she first levitated high up and layered several lens spells on top of each other to look towards Rambalda.

Finding the dust cloud was too easy. It was closer than it should have been. Dammit! Ibrahim's several hours closer than he was last cycle. He was an hour away, give or take. She ground her teeth. Far less time than she'd wanted to have alone with the necromancer, but it seems Atrah Xidi had detected her last cycle, and possibly alerted the Prophet. Perhaps accidentally. Perhaps not. Or, Ibrahim had made a breakthrough in the early cycle. Either way, she had no time to lose.

Mirian flew down to the cave she'd detected as the entrance to the necromancer's hideaway. She landed just outside. She could see the souls of the five drakes inside. One of them was massive—likely a matriarch. She cast her first divination spell, targeting the rael glyph, which was used in basic alarm wards. There it was, present on some sort of ward deep at the back of the cavern. That was to be expected. Quickly, she cast other detection spells, looking for what exactly the purpose of the ward was. It detects any kind of mana-to-energy transformation. Force, fire, lightning—even sound. Whatever I use. Generally, such broad alarm wards weren't used because something like lift object was perfectly legal to cast, while force blades was not. Ward schemes in cities needed to be specific.

Her trick of cracking key glyphs by heating them up would trigger the alarm before it disabled the sequence. The necromancer had also proven a master of energy transmutation arrays; if his undead soldiers had layers of protection, no doubt, the door to his hideout did as well. I could blast through the drakes and simply trigger the alarm. But that doesn't exactly send the right message. Nor does butchering them with Eclipse.

The cave was relatively tall but narrow, twisting several times before it bottlenecked in a passage just large enough for the drakes to move through. Then it opened up again slightly. Back there was the door. There was no going around the drakes. And, with Ibrahim on his way, she didn't have time to do anything elaborate, like lure the drakes out with meat.

But despite his innovations, Atrah Xidi doesn't seem to have been able to use tri-bonded sequences to combine runes and glyphs. Then soul magic is safe to use without alerting him.

An idea struck her. There was a way to bypass the drakes, and do so in a way that sent a message of diplomacy to the arch-necromancer. From Viridian, she knew desert drakes had a symbiotic relationship with two-headed vultures. The vultures, circling high in the sky, often indicated prey. Once the drakes had killed the prey, they shared it with the vultures.

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Mirian assumed the form of the Dance of the Dusk Waves, speeding up her reactions and movements. As she entered the cave, she heard the guttural growls and hissing of the five drakes. She darted towards the first one, placing her hand on it. Share with, she sent, and patterned the edge of her soul with the same patterns she'd seen with the two-headed vultures. By now, she'd mana drained enough of them to know their rhythms.

The first drake looked confused. Mirian repeated the communication, then leapt back as one of the other drakes snapped at her. She backed up. It had been quite some time since she'd run the Frostland's Gate Labyrinth, but the motions still came instinctually to her. She ran up one of the boulders in the cavern, then leapt over the attacking drake, kicking off one of the walls to adjust where she landed. In the narrow confines, the larger drake would have trouble turning. The two juveniles behind it came at her next, but she placed her hands on each of their snouts. Share with two-headed vulture, she told it. Turning, she repeated the same instructions to the drake that was snarling and trying to turn. Since it couldn't see her, the soul communication worked better. The drakes still weren't sure about her, but some innate behavior written into them made them hesitate.

Blocking the way to the door, though, was the matriarch. Mirian had never seen a drake so large. Only a thin echo of sunlight was this deep in the cave, but she thought she saw the glint of a metal collar on the drake. A pet? I made the right move not just slaughtering them. I wonder how Ibrahim gets around it, though. The matriarch snapped at her. Mirian leapt back, then scrambled up the rough-hewn wall of the cave to get some height on it. When the matriarch turned to snap its tail at her, she leapt to the other wall, briefly embracing the Last Fires form to give her fingers the extra force needed to grip the small handholds.

This time, the matriarch used one of its innate spells, and a haze of sand filled the cavern, choking Mirian. Desert drakes liked to use the spell to hide or to blind their prey, but Mirian already had detect life going. When the tail snap came again, Mirian launched herself back to the other wall, but the haze made it impossible to see the holds. Her fingers came away bloody as she fell, thudding to the hard stone floor, pain shooting up her legs and spine. While she ran raw soul energy through herself to heal the damage, the large drake came forward, head snapping at her. She was forced to leap back. The rough sand battered at her skin, and Mirian raised her cloak to her mouth so she wouldn't choke.

I just need to touch it, she thought, but without arcane magic, that was proving to be more difficult than she anticipated. The matriarch's agitation was also riling up the rest of its family. Frustration coursed through her. Every minute she was delayed was another minute Ibrahim drew closer. And if she screwed up, pissing off the necromancer, then Ibrahim would for sure know what she was trying to do.

Mirian retreated from the drake's snapping jaws, only to stumble on a rock behind her. She went sprawling, and as her cloak fell away from her mouth, she choked on sand.

With her reaction time, it felt like it was happening in slow motion. She saw the glow of the matriarch's soul as its claw came down towards her. Mirian's first instinct, as her hands scraped against the sandy cave floor, was to summon her spellbook and end the fight. Then, she realized something. Conductor talked to me with the soul language when I wasn't touching it. I just have to extend my soul—The Sinister Hand of Shadow form needn't only be for suppressing spells. Auramancy can be used for other things.

She scrambled back from the claw, letting it smash the cave floor where she'd been, then swapped forms. The outer layer of her soul spread out, scraping at the drake's.

STOP! she commanded.

To her surprise, it worked. The matriarch froze, and it let go of the sandstorm spell.

Let me pass. I mean you no harm, she thought to it. When it growled, she focused her will. This creature wasn't looking for diplomacy, but strength.

This time, she commanded it. LET ME PASS. The matriarch backed away, then put its snout against the ground, indicating it was trying to be non-threatening.

Mirian caught her breath, then walked to the door. The matriarch drake growled at her, but she seemed to have cowed the beast. Stay, she reminded it as she turned her back on it to look at the door at the end of the cavern.

Glyph sequences ran across the border of the door and the frame, carved directly into the rock. As she'd suspected, there were complete alarm sequences. In the center of the door was a ring of orichalcum. Within that circle was a disk of bone, engraved with runes. Of course. When she'd been searching through the desert, she'd been on the lookout for steel, a clear indicator of human presence. The mechanism being pure orichalcum meant it was undetectable by divination because of the metal's resistance to spells.

The metal would be aligned to Atrah Xidi. Unlike the soulbound objects she carried, it was isolated, so she wouldn't be directly interacting with his soul. That was good. She would need to realign the metal to her own soul in order to operate the door mechanism. Only once she had done that, control of the orichalcum disk would then allow control of the runes embedded in the bone. She could add soul energy, which could in turn ever so slightly manipulate the bone disk itself. Her best guess was that detect bone glyphs embedded in the door then would become active. It was a clever way to make sure the Deeps—who knew of, but didn't use orichalcum—would be stymied, and the Praetorians—who wore orichalcum but didn't use soul magic—would be equally impeded.

Mirian placed her hand on the circle, feeling the burn along the edge of her soul. Gradually, she forced it into alignment. Once she could sense the metal beneath her fingers, she realized she was wrong. No glyphs were in the door at all. This was a necromancer. Of course he could manipulate bone without glyphs. There were runes she didn't know, but like a wand, she could simply channel soul energy into them and the result was that the thick bone spikes holding the door closed retracted. The door opened.

The sandstone hallway before her was dark.

"Atrah Xidi! I come in peace," she called. Her voice echoed. Other than that, there was silence. The drakes behind her were quiet.

She closed the door behind her and continued down the hall, risking a light spell now that she was past the detection wards. With every step forward, her anticipation grew. The hall led to stairs that were cut into the stone. Beneath the plateau, the air was cool. A welcome relief from the desert. Mirian called out her greeting again. This time, the echo was different.

At the bottom of the stair, there was an arch that opened up into a colossal chamber. There were eight wide pillars, each riddled with nooks, reaching up to a ceiling some hundred feet tall. All the walls around the room also had nooks. Each one had a mummy in it, covered in runes. Storage for his army, Mirian realized. There were thousands of them. He constructed them all. Amazing.

"Atrah Xidi!" Mirian repeated.

On the opposite side of the chamber was a stone door. It rumbled down as Mirian approached, and a figure wearing a dark cloak emerged. She couldn't make out his features beneath the cowl of his hood, but she recognized the way he walked, from watching him at Mayat Shadr.

The arch-necromancer took several steps forward, and then he froze.

"Atrah Xidi. I come in peace. My name is—"

The man lowered his hood. His face was gaunt, and his skin reminded her more of the mummy soldier of his she'd seen than anything living. He looked at her with his gray eyes, so bright they shone silver in the dark. "Naluri," he whispered, the reverence he placed on the name echoing in the chamber.

Mirian's mouth fell open. She recognized that face. Those eyes.

The memory curse was overwhelmed. She felt it fragmenting with the pressure. Atrah Xidi cast briefly, and the curse shattered entirely.

"Dad?" she whispered.

And the memories came pouring back.