The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

When she started dreaming, Mirian was shocked. She hadn’t realized there was any sort of time that passed between her deaths and the loop resetting. That she found herself in a dream meant that there was, which was almost as strange as the dream itself.

She was drifting in an ocean, lingering in the depths while looking up at the shimmering sun-bright waters above. The hulls of huge ships dotted the water. All around her, the waters blackened and bubbled, and she realized the sea floor was not made of silt and stone, but bones and blinking eyes, and as the water churned, great tentacles thrashed about, stirring up a black ink that seemed to contain screaming faces within it. Above, a massive anchor came down, slamming into the writhing mass, and she heard an otherworldly scream rise and echo in the depths. Mirian swam for the surface, and as she did, more anchors came down, shooting into the sea floor like meteors. The sea became choked with dust, and the thick chains leading to the ships above went taut.

She saw a sundial, the white marble brilliant in the sunlight, and then a needle fell from the sky and pierced the gnomon, making the shadow it had cast splash into writhing smoke. The smoke rose, until the sun turned red and the sky bled.

She saw Torrviol, the sky overcast, but instead of rain coming down, it was the hands of clocks, spearing the soil, sparking as they hit paving stones, slicing into roof tiles. Where they struck, tiny disembodied hands crawled away from the craters like spiders. As the clouds parted, Mirian saw the moon above, only it wasn’t the moon, but a blinking eye, haloed by tendrils that crawled across the sky, searching.

She saw stone pillars erupting from the earth, and people made of pincushions fleeing about in panic. The clouds of ash the sharp stones kicked up coalesced into metallic needles, which in turn soared through the sky like birds, searching, until they dove into the pincushion people. When they struck, though, the doll-like people didn’t look injured, they looked enraptured. Their button-like eyes turned to the sky, where the moon-eye still looked about the land.

She looked down at herself, and she saw one of the needles had pierced her own heart. Only, when she tried to examine the needle, it changed as she looked at it. It became a clock hand, then a ship anchor, then the marble gnomon of the sundial, then a needle again, until somehow it was all of those things at once—and she looked up to see the giant eye in the heavens looking at her.

***

Mirian woke with a start, breathing hard. She had to clutch the bedsheets to make sure she wasn’t still falling. She looked over, where Lily still slept, and sighed. Some days, she was envious of the blissful ignorance everyone else languished in—but not all the pain and fear that would come with their end. Even that hateful marshal, Cearsia, must have despaired in the end.

Not that it made her any less of a monster. So that’s the face of the invasion, she thought. And they think that Baracuel is full of traitors. And yet, they’ve been planning this for… years, it seems. Did they really believe it, or was it just a lie they told themselves? Either way, too much still didn’t add up.

This time, Mirian was already in the gardens by Myrvite Studies when the second spy passed her. He’d come from the southern-eastern path, she saw. She noted the features of his surprised face again when she said, “Nice day for a walk, isn’t it?” in Eskanar. He glared at her, then walked by faster.

By Firstday, Mirian was ready to learn more about what happened to Professor Jei. She cast the minor disguise spell that she’d hastily scribed the night before and waited in Bainrose for the professor to pass her. She immediately saw what her mistake last cycle had been; Jei didn’t head for the basement. She headed for the third floor and let herself into the inner archives of the library, where students weren’t allowed. That was going to be a problem.

She replaced her Illusions class with Divination 201, and near the end of the cycle, she examined the doors and stoneworks leading into Bainrose’s archive. Sure enough, they were warded against divination; her amateur efforts at a seeker-stone were a dead-end effort.

Mirian had replaced Artifice Design with Applied Spellcasting 203, and got Lily to give her all the notes she had taken in that class when she’d taken it two years back.

“It’s a little late to think about switching focuses,” Lily had warned when she’d found out what Mirian’s class schedule was.

“Oh, I’m just looking for ways to add to my artifice degree,” she’d said.

Xipuatl continued his instruction in soul magic. She continued her relationship with Selesia. This time, when the spellward around Torrviol failed, she was waiting outside the south tower. As best she could tell, it was about when the arcane eruptions near Cairnmouth had occurred. That any evacuation of Torrviol would get entangled by myrvite encroachments seemed to just be bad luck.

Of course, it wasn’t the only thing. It seemed like everything was stacked against their survival, and that was before the moon started coming down. She would save her friends, though. She’d find some way. Or else, what was the point?

At the end of the cycle, she summited Bainrose again, but this time, the soldier who rappelled down was put off by something, and shot her instead. She bled out slowly on the ramparts, listening to the echo of guns tearing apart her home.

***

The memory of the pain lingered in her. Her mind kept going over the agony of it, like a tongue probing a mouth sore. In the end, it was only meditation that could clear her mind, which she did in the garden by the Myrvite Studies building. She let the soft drizzle and tentative birdsong ground her in the present. After that, she lingered on a bench near the corner of the garden and saw the spy heading from one of the paths by Torrviol Lake. She mentally marked the point.

When she wasn’t studying, practicing, scribing, or crafting, Mirian lurked around the second floor of Bainrose, cautiously testing the wards and locks leading to the third floor with divination spells. The problem was the wards were crafted to resist or nullify common divination tactics, which sent her back down the basement levels to scour the shelves for more creative methods than the class textbooks would teach her.

She also worked on incorporating what she was learning in Applied Spellcasting in the practice sessions in Combat Magic. After her certification, she modified the minor lightning wand to incorporate a socket. In that socket, she could add different modules. According to Professor Cassius, this is what a new generation of combat sorcerers were using in the battles with Persaman guerrillas. Fitting the glyphs into something small enough to fit on a wand required practicing the new techniques of glyph miniaturization she’d previously learned about from Torres, which would in turn be useful in making a proper seeker-stone later.

On the range, Daith was suitably impressed by her work, though adding the function lowered the resulting spell intensity. Right now, she was only adding modules that did things like increase aura penetration, making it more likely that a target was temporarily paralyzed, or another glyph set that changed the color of the lightning (which was nifty, but almost completely useless). The more complicated glyphs that Lily was working with might let her bounce the lightning from one target to another, or cause the lightning to rapidly convert to heat energy in the target, which might be useful against that horrid chimera she’d fought in the catacombs.

Her progress was slow, but steady. Eventually, she might be able to unlock a heavily warded door or win a duel against one of the spies (without sneaking up on them while they were distracted by a pitched battle), but she needed more time. Fortunately, that was what she had.

She studied the celestial runes again with Xipuatl. She caught Valen sneaking about following her, though the girl was predictably unrepentant. She died on the walls of Bainrose again.

***

It took Mirian four more loops to finish tracing the route the second spy took. It might have only taken three, but she hadn’t realized she’d need to skip the end of Alchemistry to make it in time. The spy took a ridiculously circuitous route. On that twelfth cycle, though, she finally found it: the building the spies were using.

It was an unremarkable door set inside an unremarkable building, one block south of the prison and one block north of the train station. In retrospect, it was the most obvious place. It had a good view of the station, so they could watch people and goods come and go from Torrviol. It was near the guardhouse, so they had quick access to the corrupt captain. It was near the edge of town, so they could easily avoid the street lamps if they wanted. Mirian also suspected it was near one of the secret passages leading to the underground, since she’d seen Akanan soldiers suddenly emerge in the area as the attack on Torrviol progressed.

The building next to it seemed to have an absentee landlord, and was boarded up, so the first floor apartment the spies were using also having boarded up windows didn’t draw any attention. Mirian had walked right by the place on her way to or from the train dozens of times before the time loop had started and never looked twice at it. After she watched the spy emerge from it, she spent some time examining the building, looking for any other entrances or exits. She noticed that Roland, the guard who patrolled by the train station, passed by the building frequently, and when he wasn’t on patrol, his spot on the platform allowed him to look down the street and see the entrance of the building. That made it annoying to try and cast any of the divination spells she’d need to test its wards during the day. That, and the constant foot traffic, since even when the train wasn’t running, the crates and goods they’d offloaded were still being moved about town by people with wagons and carts.

She eventually found a time at night when no guard was on patrol, though only when the midnight train wasn’t scheduled. Then she could finally open up her spellbook and cast spells without anyone wondering what she was doing. Mirian was surprised to detect few glyphs or wards. There were the usual ones that strengthened the door, and a magnetic repulsion ward on the lock to prevent easy picking (though a good thief would just use a non-magnetic pick set), but nothing else she could detect.

She was about to try using lift object to carefully align the tumblers in the lock when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Hastily, she closed her spellbook. Was it a guard? One of the spies?

Then she caught a glimpse of the figure as she ducked into an alley.

Of course. Valen.

Mirian quickly walked to the alley, where she nearly tripped over Valen, who was squatting down next to a barrel. Valen cleared her throat and stood, apparently pretending she hadn’t just been hiding all of three seconds ago.

“What on Enteria are you doing?” Mirian hissed, standing close to her so she couldn’t just walk off.

“I could ask the same thing of you, but one of us has class,” the other girl said, not even a hint of penitence for following Mirian in dark alleys past midnight.

“Gods above, you are so full of shit! How do you manage it?”

“Takes one to know one, I suppose,” Valen said. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were casing that house. Only, I can’t figure why that one, because you don’t board up the windows if you’re still living there.”

Mirian couldn’t think of a reasonable lie, and Valen always seemed to know when she was fibbing anyways. “It’s packed full of Akanan spies,” she said.

That actually shook Valen off her game. “Wait… what? Really, are you—wait, why would you tell me that?”

“I need you to know what I’m doing is important so you don’t go blabbing about it to the whole Academy. Which I know you would otherwise do.”

Valen blinked a few times, and Mirian realized it was probably slightly uncomfortable for the other girl to have her neck tilted up, so she took a step back. The girl finally asked, “Are you… one of the Deeps?”

“Obviously not,” Mirian said, then when that got a smirk from Valen, she realized that was exactly what someone from the Department of Public Security would say.

“That explains…” Valen started, but trailed off.

“Exactly how long have you been trailing me?”

“Ever since you started acting really strange. All of a sudden you’re skipping classes, visiting the crafting shops at odd hours to make questionable devices, taking out improbably large loans, sneaking about at odd hours—you’re terrible, you know that? Anyone trained to look for signs of an operative immediately would peg you as an asset. Whoever trained you should be fired.”

Mirian’s brow furrowed. “And who exactly trained you?”

“My dad,” Valen said with a shrug. “Not on purpose. But when he got drunk, he wanted to tell someone all the stuff he got up to.”

She thought about the situation. She wasn’t properly prepared to burst in the front door tonight anyways. There was no point denying all the odd stuff Valen had clearly seen her doing. How do I salvage this? she wondered, and decided the best option was to go along with it. “Listen, I’m clearly in over my head. There wasn’t supposed to be a nest of Akanan infiltrators here, and I’m not getting back-up. They’re too busy down south with another, uh, incident. Which I can’t tell you about, so don’t ask. I could… uh… use some help.”

Valen’s response was to give the biggest, most genuine smile she’d ever seen on the girl. “I’m in. What do you need?”

Huh, Mirian thought. It was not the response she’d expected.