The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

They all hesitated at the threshold of the final door.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

"Does it… is it going to reactivate?" Beatrice asked, peering out into the forest.

"I don't know. Levitation wands at the ready, though," Mirian said. The weight of the relicarium in her pack reassured her. Tentatively, she took a step out the door, ready to start incinerating any branch or leaf that so much as twitched funny.

The forest was still.

"Maybe we get a reprieve," Aelius said cautiously. "We studied the… well, they were third-hand accounts at least, but they implied that victors get a reprieve at the end. Wands out to be safe, though."

They walked with their heads on swivels, everyone tensed and ready to start casting, but the forest was quiet.

Then they got back to the entrance to the corridor.

"That's… a different door, isn't it?" Cediri asked. "I'm not crazy? The door was further to the left, hmm?"

Beatrice stared at it. "Yeah. Ah, shit. But that means Grimald and the others have to go back on their own. I hope they know to do that. We didn't plan a contingency… I mean, we have the general contingencies, so he should know."

"My crew has been instructed to attempt to open the door first, and retreat if they can't," Aelius said. "The way is clear. They should be able to make it back. They may already be on their way."

The new door opened up into several long corridors. Every so often, the corridor would bend. They took four right turns, but their path didn't take them to the entrance. Instead, they exited back into the Labyrinth.

"Where did we come out?" Mirian asked.

"I was hoping you knew," Beatrice said. "Aelius? I believe you have the most divination."

He nodded, and started paging through his spellbook. A few spells later he said, "My aura's nearly gone. But I think we're still on the third level. Obviously I can't give direction, but this area doesn't look too complex. Cediri, can you start mapping for us?"

Cediri nodded, face grim. He began with the first room, measuring its length and width, noting it precisely on his map. They moved to the next room. It was empty, but it offered a choice of paths.

"Left or right?" Cediri asked.

"Doesn't matter. Left," Aelius said.

They were loaded down with their takings from the Vault, lost, hungry, and exhausted. When Beatrice first said, "Is that shadow moving?" Mirian thought she was probably just tired. After all, shadows did tend to move when a light source passed by.

Then she looked again. The shadows in one of the corners of the room looked too dark, like it was a big coil of darkness that had been piled up on top of itself. Then she saw what looked like an arm emerge from that pile.

Aelius was the one who recognized it. "Slithering swarm!" he said, just as the shadow-beast leapt forward.

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Mirian sent a beam of fire at it, but the fire passed right through it. Aelius raised an aegis, and just in time. The shadowy mass cracked against the shield, the aegis glowing, and then the light from it was consumed by the python-like coil of shadows. Meanwhile, two dark arms reached out and grabbed Aelius, sending his spellbook and wand flying.

She shot again, this time with greater lightning, but the bolt seemed to get lost in the shadows.

"Shit!" said Beatrice, flipping through her spellbook.

"What's it weak to?" Mirian called out.

"You have to light it up first!" Cediri shouted. "Otherwise you'll never find its actual body!" He was clutching his notebook to his chest; left unspoken was that he clearly didn't have the mana to do it himself.

Mirian cast a simple light spell, since she didn't have anything special, pouring all the mana she could into it. At first the shadow-python ate it, a dark mass in an otherwise blindingly lit room. It continued to pull at Aelius as his kinetic shield shattered, dragging him forward into a gaping hole of darkness in the center of the mass. Then it let out a hissing sound as the light ate into it. Mirian vaguely remembered Viridian mentioning it used a natural light displacement spell—and she had just overwhelmed it.

Exposed, the slithering swarm was made of thin wires of black bone, those wires twisting and moving constantly. When Aelius tried to swat at it, the bones shifted away from his fist, then reformed when it left. Meanwhile, its hands were nothing—just shadows. It was using telekinesis to grab him, and there was a faint line of light where the spell dug into his soul, consuming the mana.

Beatrice started using the blunt force of a kinetic blow spell to smash at the creature's skeletal body. Finally, it dropped Aelius, leaving deep gashes on his arm and torso where it had grabbed him. As it retreated, it dragged his spellbook with it.

Mirian didn't have any bludgeoning force spells, so she tried slashing at it with force blades like the sorcerer was doing, but both of their efforts were useless. The thin cable-like bones sparked slightly when a blade hit them, but otherwise remained intact.

The slithering swarm crawled up into a tiny hole in the ceiling, bringing the spellbook with it. That spellbook, Mirian saw, as the swarm pulled it inside the hole, was sparking as the pages were dissolved. It was eating it.

Then the last piece of the creature disappeared back into the ceiling.

Mirian released the light spell. Then, realizing they were all blind without it now, she cast it again, just at a lower intensity.

"If there are more of those down here, we're fucked," Aelius said simply. "We can't afford to go slowly. We need to get out of here fast. If we can rendezvous with the other team, good. Otherwise, we're no use to them dead."

They picked up the pace, with Cediri doing a cursory estimation of each room before they picked a path. Mirian kept an eye on their rear, with Beatrice and Aelius checking corners and ceilings and the Ennecus sorcerer keeping an eye on the front. There was a scraping sound in the room behind them, but Mirian intensified her light. They heard a screech, then skittering fading away, then nothing.

Mirian rushed over to heal Aelius. He let out a breath as the deep cuts mended, and said, "Thank you."

When they stepped into another room an hour later, Cediri said, "Damnit, we've been here. This was the right entrance to room 28. That means… let me check… alright. Back to room 34, and we take a left instead. Let's go."

They followed him, still wary of ambushes. A few labyrinthine horrors found them, but they died easily enough. An attack of that magnitude was almost relaxing.

Finally, they came across a passage up. The rock face wasn't quite sheer, but it was close enough.

"Everyone still have enough mana to levitate?" Mirian asked.

Cediri shook his head.

"Then I've got you. Wands out." Mirian put her arm around Cediri and under his armpit, using Lone Pine for a bit of extra endurance.

They cast, flying the forty feet up easily enough. "My aura's nearly gone," the Ennecus sorcerer said.

"Mine as well," Aelius said.

Mirian's own was starting to waver. She'd been casting spells for hours by now. Behind them, two slithering swarms emerged. She whirled and brightened her light. "Beatrice!" she called.

Beatrice turned and smashed her bludgeon into them. One of them backed away, hissing, but the other charged.

This time, Mirian drew her rapier. Resist this, she thought, and embraced the Dusk Waves. Her slash came faster than the exposed skeleton of the creature could evade. It screamed as she cut through an entire section of it. The other one slithered out the door then down a passage, the shadows reforming around it as it gained distance from Mirian's light.

"That blade of yours is something else," Aelius said.

Mirian nodded, adrenaline still running through her.

Aelius peeled his eyes off the door where the slithering swarm had gone and got out his own map to compare notes with Cediri. He shook his head. "None of these rooms match up. I don't know where we are on the second floor."

"We keep going," Cediri said. "Can't really rest until we make it back. Nothing to lose." He glanced at their packs. "Well, everything to lose. But you get the idea." He gave a nervous laugh, and they kept going.

It took another hour for them to find a staircase going up. The stairs were overgrown with a tangled fungus, and on the other side of the door was a small econode. Thankfully, most of the organisms appeared to be harmless, except for a few cockatrice. The cockatrice scolded them from one of the high branches of a tree, but didn't actually attack. It was a welcome reprieve.

Finally, nine rooms later, the Labyrinth had mercy on them. "These two rooms line up with the outer edge of my first level map," Aelius said. "If I'm right, that next room should have two doors and three alcoves on the north side."

When it did, the palpable tension they were all holding finally faded. Beatrice let out a sigh of relief. A few dozen more rooms, and they were in the elevator room.

Only when the elevator rumbled to a halt at the top of the shaft did Mirian finally let her guard drop.

At the top, the guards said, "Thank the Gods. We were worried. Ah… where are the others?"

Beatrice's face fell. "They didn't make it back yet?"

"Damn," Aelius said. "They might have waited longer than we wanted after that door closed. Their route up should be clear… maybe they're still on their way. Lower the elevator for them."

Together, they watched as the elevator descended down into that shaft of darkness.

What a cruel place, Mirian thought as the platform vanished in shadow. But I suppose they die anyways. She didn't have much hope that they'd return. Her attention turned to the relicarium on her back.

***

That night Beatrice slept for twelve hours. Mirian only slept ten, so she was awake and devouring a big platter of eggs, scimitar lion steak, and spiced potatoes when her friend arrived at the tavern.

"Are they back yet?" Beatrice asked, the slightest note of hope making its way into her voice.

Mirian shook her head. She handed Beatrice a piece of paper she'd been working on over breakfast.

"What's this?"

"Myrvites breach the spellward in a day. This is how you make sure no one dies. Tell them you found a divination device in the Vault or something, whatever you need to. I just want two of the ice wyrms that attack, but I can take care of that myself."

Beatrice looked at her, blinked a few times, then sat down.

"Something for you, Beatrice?" the restaurant owner asked.

"Double the usual," she said, eyes not leaving Mirian. Quietly she said, "You've grown cold."

Mirian didn't say anything to that.

"I guess… I guess I haven't fully understood how… Gods. How many times…?"

"In the Labyrinth? Not as many as you might think. It's a cruel place, but the worst cruelty I've seen has been other people doing things to each other. Her eyes met Beatrice's, and the other woman nearly recoiled.

"Do you want to… talk about it?"

"Thank you, but no," Mirian said, as politely as she could manage. "Believe me, you're better off not knowing. I'm not entirely numb to it, but I am… I am colder now. Necessity has chilled my grief. I am sorry. I really am. And when it matters, when it finally matters… but I don't know how many years from now that might be." She didn't want to say what she was really thinking. How many decades from now that might be.

For all that she'd grown, for all the mastery of the arcane arts she'd achieved, it was still nothing in the face of the crisis. I don't even fully understand what causes it, never mind how to stop it. But Beatrice didn't need to know that.

"So what is it that we found down there? The thing you wanted so badly?" She nodded at Mirian's pack.

She hadn't let it out of her sight. When she'd slept, she'd tied the pack to her by two silk ropes, even though her room was warded, just as an extra layer of precaution.

"I can't tell you. But if I'm right, it should help a lot."

"Good," Beatrice said. "We all knew the risks going down there. I mean, I never actually thought… but if it makes a difference, that…" She swallowed hard. "That helps." She tried to smile, and failed.

"It will make a difference," Mirian said softly.

They ate in silence after that, and then Beatrice went back to her room to grieve for her friend.

***

Over the next few days, Mirian began her work.

First, she carefully measured the relicarium. She'd calculated the surface area and the amount of relicarium needed to create her ideal spellbook. Her plan was to leave that much, plus a little extra, in reserve. Unfortunately, that accounted for almost all of the luminous substance.

But there was a little left over. That meant she would be able to test the process of creating a soulbound item.

She started by measuring her celestial focus, then sketching out the design for a new amulet in her notebook. It took a bit of finessing to get everything to fit, but the amulet's surface area would be minimal. By her calculations, there was just enough extra relicarium for her test item. There were plenty of additions she would have liked to make, but not enough of the special material for them.

When the myvites swarmed Frostland's Gate on the 19th as usual, Mirian let the townsfolk handle them while she took care of her ice wyrms. She bribed Cediri (who took the coin as a matter of principle) for a manticore's mantic sac, which he'd smuggled all the way up north and hidden in his stash, then paid Elsadorra to help her with the alchemy. Ice wyrm skulls ground down and mixed with three extracts from a mantic sac, heated slowly for several hours, then rapidly cooled, created an extremely potent arcane catalyst. The result was a thin disk of marbled white and black glass.

The titanium alloy she needed involved more bribery; there wasn't much of the rare metals to be had, and it had to be salvaged from a special experimental spell engine (which involved paying off two arcanists). Mirian promised to replace it by the end of the next month. Then she had to work with the blacksmith to adjust the alloy's ratios slightly so it could be used in mythril.

The good news was, she didn't need much. Then, it was on to the crafting. She'd done enough artificing with fine metal that she was able to make the thin chain and the amulet setting mostly on her own, borrowing some of the artificing tools from another local arcanist. Then it was back to the smith. With his help, they reheated and treated the metal using the Luminate's process, and Mirian imbued the ice wyrm souls in it. The resulting mythril was some of her finest work.

She set both her new arcane catalyst and the celestial focus from the underground in the amulet. Then, she created a special mold to hold the amulet so it could just barely be coated by the relicarium when she added it.

With that done, she had to go hunting for more myrvite souls. Most of the myrvites had fled from the northern eruption, so she flew south for nearly an hour, and at last located a glaciavore and several bastion elk that served the purpose.

The last step involved the relicarium itself.

She placed it into the mold using Elsadorra's droppers, making sure none of it went to waste.

The Pontiff himself hadn't known the process of using it to create a soulbound item, nor had it been explicitly recorded. Instead, Mirian had the process of binding an item already coated in relicarium—the Sword of the Fourth Prophet—and knowledge of how the nine primary bindings worked. She'd also read some of the discussions on the Relic Destroyer, that Pontiff who'd had his name damned and erased from history, and what he'd done to the Holy Pages. The Holy Pages couldn't be bound directly, but he hadn't known that, so had likely tried to use the correct ritual. Critical steps and runes were missing, but it at least gave her some important hints on how the process worked.

She knew the second part of her work would involve binding it to her soul. The first part involved a lot of deduction and theory.

Mirian's idea was that the relicarium was much like lava before it became rock. It currently existed in an excited state, and would crystallize, becoming permanently fixed, if stimulated in the right way. For rocks, that just meant the removal of heat energy, which was trivial. For something like this, she thought it might involve first moving the relicarium into a lower energy state. Like taking ultraviolet light and shifting it into visible light, she needed to remove energy from the equation. This was because in order to add Eclipse to her soul, she'd needed to add that energy back, but linked to her own soul, putting it back in the excited state.

From the initial divination she'd done, the relicarium gave off energies that both celestial runes and arcane glyphs gave off. By pinpointing which runes and which glyphs, she could reverse engineer which ones she'd need. Just like arcane energy could displace light to create shadow, she could displace the arcane and celestial energy in the relicarium.

Over several more days, Mirian created arcane divination devices to pinpoint the glyph energies. That was time consuming, and complicated. All the energy was mixed together, but her readings on arcane telegraphs and waveforms ended up being critical. There were formulae to turn a complex waveform into the distinct simple waveforms that had assembled it. Applying that theory to Jei's mathematics gave her an equivalent she could use for glyphs.

Mirian borrowed an abacus from the tax office, wishing she had one of those fancy spell engines Viridian had gotten from the Akanans. Instead, she calculated it all by hand. In the end, her entire desk was covered in papers filled with equations, but she'd done it.

And once she had the simple energy forms, she knew the glyphs.

Pinpointing the celestial runes was trickier, since she couldn't create a divination device. Instead, she had to analyze the resonance by feel. Fortunately, she made a breakthrough on the 26th of Solem when she realized that the only runes involved were the ones used in the nine bindings. That simplified things immensely.

Xipuatl would be amazed at how much progress I've made, but there's still so much I don't know. I wonder if he would see something I've missed? She only hoped she had gotten it right.

By the 3rd of Duala, with the apocalypse fast approaching, Mirian had divined or deduced what she hoped was all the detectable energies in the relicarium, and all of the glyphs and runes she would need. She carefully scribed each one, triple-checking the sigil formations and testing each one.

Then, she began to cast the inverted spell.

At first, nothing happened. Then, the relicarium began to vanish. Her heart sped up. There had been no trace of the relicarium on Eclipse when she'd bound it, except for the special surface it had left on the blade.

She began the bindings, and elated when they found a grip on the amulet.

She'd done it!

Mirian struggled to contain the ninth binding, as she had before. And as before, the light around the amulet intensified, as the relicarium was re-excited, but now only when in contact with her soul. The amulet bled into the air, and her room darkened. And new threads, shining with a beautiful nacreous luster, joined her soul.

She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Waves of emotions washed over her. She thought of Xipuatl, tutoring her, and her long hours of practice with Jei. She thought of Nicolus teaching her politics and manipulation, and the long hours she'd worked with Torres and Ingrid improving her craft. She thought of Lecne and Arenthia, and now Rostal, her dervish tutor. Thank you, she whispered to them. And to Grimald, who lay dead somewhere in the Labyrinth. The team they'd left behind had never returned.

Now, with the celestial focus and an arcane catalyst a part of her, she would never be without her magic. And with the mythril chain permanently attuned to her soul, she would be highly resistant to any direct attacks on her.

So much still lay before her, but for now, she simply sat still, savoring her triumph, and let the moment wash around her.

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