The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

With her amulet now bound to her, Mirian spent the last two days of the cycle learning about the other artifacts they'd recovered. As the eruptions intensified, none of the delvers could bring themselves to hold to their original exclusivity agreement. There just was no point.

It turned out, her divination devices were fairly useful for discerning glyphs they couldn't see in the tri-bonded glyph constructions. This let them figure out how the triplicate bonds worked, though it didn't give them the slightest idea of what those glyphs did.

The other liquids they'd found in the Vault were equally as mysterious. One of them was a powerful acid, but no one was sure what its actual function was. Another that glowed with golden light seemed to be able to absorb vast quantities of heat to no effect. Elsadorra placed a sample over a fire for an hour, and the substance didn't so much as move.

The tools they'd found were equally unfathomable. No combination of channeling or energy inputs seemed to stimulate them.

Near the end, Aelius fell into a deep depression. He'd spent so much of his life in the Vaults, but now that they'd actually made it to the end of one, the world would end before he could understand its mysteries. And, as Beatrice explained the situation with the other time travelers that Mirian had conveyed to her, he realized he couldn't even share his triumph with the world.

He took to his bed, and stopped coming out even for meals. When it was Mirian's turn to deliver one to him, the only thing he said from the depths of the shadows in his room was, "It's not fair."

She could only agree.

Mirian spent the rest of her last hours madly conducting experiments with the artifacts they'd recovered, making a mess in Elsadorra's shop that nearly got her kicked out, end of the world be damned.

And that was all they had time for. A great wind began to howl across the frostlands, sounding like the world screaming, and then Divir came crashing down again.

***

The first thing Mirian did when she woke was manifest her new amulet. Since it included a celestial focus, with focused meditation, she could tap into it just enough as it orbited her soul and use that to summon the whole thing. When it coalesced around her neck, she elated. She looked over at Lily, and wanted to tell her—but dreaded having to explain why it was exciting. Also, it would create what General Hanaran would have called an 'operational risk.' It was imperative that Troytin didn't see what was coming, didn't even see what was possible, until it was too late.

She conducted her usual sabotage operations in Torrviol, and confirmed that the celestial focus material from the shrine in the underground was indeed gone. Then Mirian made her way back up to Frostland's Gate and battled through the Labyrinth again with the Torrviol and Ennecus groups, purely to take a single measurement. This time, they sent the second group back so they'd be at the Vault entrance when Mirian's group was opening the final door.

When they got to the end, she confirmed what she'd suspected: relicarium use, like the binding of Eclipse, was permanent. The amount she'd found was finite. With no end to the cycles in sight, she decided she'd take all the time her next project needed. Troytin was still making no moves into Palendurio beyond intelligence gathering, and even in that he seemed to be focused on finance and politics. Ibrahim was still smashing his armies into Alkazaria. For all she knew, the relicarium she'd found would be the last she'd find. She didn't want to settle for making a spellbook that was merely functional. She needed as much magical power at her disposal as she could manage. For that, she had a plan.

They made little progress on the other artifacts from the end of the Vault, even with Mirian's aid. There was something critical to be learned with those things, she was sure, but she would come back to it.

She said her goodbyes to Beatrice, not sure how long it would take until she was back north to visit her.

The moon came crashing down.

***

The next cycle, she headed to Cairnmouth with Mayor Wolden's fake Florinian ingots. While heading south, she resumed her disguise as Micael. After depositing the ingots and withdrawing a nice pile of gold, she checked in with Lecne so Troytin would see disruptions in the city. Once she'd done that, she took another train out east to the town of Second Cairn.

Second Cairn was significantly larger than Torrviol, but still much smaller than any of the port cities. Half of it was carved into an old quarry that had given so much stone to Cairnmouth. Once the spellwards had gone up, the city had expanded out from its fortifications, so the second half of the city was atop the cliffs, overlooking the buildings that were set into the quarry. The town had experienced regular spring floods for decades before modern spell engines and tunnel engineering had been added to bring those to an end.

The quarry itself had been closed not because it ran out of stone, but because it ran into an entrance to the Labyrinth. Unlike the Frostland's Gate section, no Vault had been found, even with expeditions that had bravely probed down into the fourth level. Instead, they'd found numerous abundant econodes, complete with valuable flora and fauna. Myrvite hunters regularly went in, coming out with rare magichemicals and myrvite parts.

Beyond the town, but still within the spellward, ranchers kept pens of myrvites. Most of them were low-threat creatures, but several dangerous kinds were kept as well, locked behind their own spellwards.

Mirian's conversations with Calisto and Aelius had given her a decent idea of what to expect. The Ennecus Guildhall wasn't exactly hard to find; it was made of the local marble and decorated with banners showing the old coat of arms of the family. The stripped knighthood is a really sore subject for them, she noted. There was a cursory guard at the wrought-iron gate, wearing the kind of regalia one might expect of a knight. Between the gate and the guildhall was a nice looking garden.

"Hi. I'd like to arrange a meeting with Cain Ennecus," she said.

The guard looked at her with that sort of tired contempt that guards were so fond of looking at her with.

"Can I see a secretary, or…?"

"No visits without an appointment," the guard said.

"Ah, excellent. And how does one get an appointment?" Neither Calisto nor Aelius could tell her that, since it was one of those things they didn't need to pay attention to. They had both suggested talking to the secretary, but the secretary was in the guildhall.

"You don't," the guard said, bored. "Move along or I'll call the city guard."

Why are people like this? Mirian bemoaned. "I have information I'm assured he's quite interested in. I was working with Torrviol Academy, and happened to make the acquaintance of Calisto. She told me—"

"We get plenty of people who have 'interesting information.' And learning his daughter's name isn't particularly difficult. Last warning," the man said. Enjoy more content from empire

Mirian made a face. Cediri was really good at intuiting whether or not a person would take bribes. Despite all she'd been through, she had no idea how you were supposed to go about it. So she just asked, "Do you take bribes?"

Apparently that wasn't the way to go about it. The guard pulled out a signal wand.

"Fine, I'm leaving," she said. She rounded the corner, got out her wand of levitation, and when no one was watching, quickly moved herself over the wall. One day, levitation won't solve my problems, but not today! she thought.

She made her way through the garden along the side paths so she wasn't in view of the gate, then up to the front door. It was daytime, so the spell engine security system was off, and the door unlocked. She walked inside. The entrance hall was fancy enough, with a semicircular second floor balcony overlooking the large foyer. Underneath that balcony was a large mahogany desk and a woman going over paperwork.

"Oh!" the secretary said. "We don't have any appointments scheduled today." She gave Mirian a quizzical look.

"I'd like to get one on the books," Mirian said. "Long story short, I've heard Cain Ennecus is looking for information on Elder titans. I happen to have information on them, and was hoping we could collaborate."

The secretary blinked. Apparently 'Elder titan' meant nothing to her.

"Anyways, the Academy has given me a bit of coin for a research grant, so I think he'd find that collaboration quite beneficial."

"Wonderful," said the secretary. "I can inquire. If he is interested in a meeting, I can send a message your way. What inn are you staying at…?"

"Haven't checked into one yet. Do you have a recommendation?"

"Oh. Hmm. The Chimera's Roost is said to be quite nice. If you have the coin to stay." The secretary was trying to sound cheery, but couldn't help having a bit of skepticism leak into her voice.

"Sure, send a message there. Micael Nezzar. That's information on a live Elder titan, and if he has what I'm looking for, I think I can get some grant money for both of us."

"Have a nice day, Micael," she said as Mirian left.

Mirian took the side paths through the gardens, using detect life to see if anyone was observing from the other side. When there were no more pedestrians nearby, she levitated back over the wall and went to find a room in the Chimera's Roost. Hopefully, the guard and secretary didn't talk to each other all that much.

***

She passed some of the time by getting to know the routines of Second Cairn. She still wasn't sure if she should expect other time travelers. Maybe there were others and they were laying low because of Troytin and Ibrahim. Maybe it was just the three of them. Mirian stayed cautious, looking for any strange signs or uncanny souls, and kept a low profile.

She passed the rest of the time experimenting with tri-bonded glyphs. She could create an artifice device that would move a scribe's pen in the exact form of the glyph she needed. With three of those devices using three scribe's pens, she just had to simultaneously channel into the three pens and the devices. This took some practice, and only started a few fires, but she figured the end of the world would come before the innkeeper found out.

After five days of waiting, Mirian suspected she'd been blown off. She asked around about the Ennecus Guild at the various taverns. Plenty of people worked for the guild, though as hired labor, not members. The Ennecus family owned enough of the myrvite ranches to be a known entity around town. There were bigger ranches owned by wealthier families, but those families were either the noble houses or other absentee owners who let a manager run the operations. A great deal of money passed through Second Cairn. Through it. Very little of it stayed. There were visible signs of neglect and poverty in the town, and its streets felt far more dangerous than Frostland's Gate.

Cain Ennecus was not his father. Calisto romanticized her grandfather's adventures. Cain thought he'd wasted too much of the family fortune pursuing old legends. Calisto was either oblivious to her father's disagreements with her, or had thought she could force the issue. Mirian realized she'd approached making a deal with Cain Ennecus the wrong way.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

She returned to the guildhall, needing to sneak in again, and this time, the secretary called the guard on her. Mirian retreated to her room in the inn and contemplated what to do. She didn't at all know how well Troytin's reach was in this area, and came down on the side of excess caution. She fled town, first going down to Palendurio, then heading out east to one of the smaller towns there. She spent the rest of the cycle exercising her magic. She modified her wand of levitation so the conduits had higher capacities for mana flow, allowing her to fly faster. She then spent a great deal of time doing sprints while under the form of Blooming Iron. When her auric mana ran low, she started doing physical sprints. When she tired of that, she found a quiet spot under the trees to meditate.

It was a peaceful way to pass the time until the moon came down again.

***

For the next cycle, Mirian started by getting in Calisto's good graces. Interestingly enough, Professor Viridian didn't get his special spell engine, so his lecture was instead about myrvite overhunting, a lecture that also had Calisto nodding along. I wonder what I said to him that led to him requesting one? She'd known for some time Viridian was particularly primed to behave very differently due to small changes in a cycle, but she'd initially assumed the change was because of Troytin's work on his side of things. Or maybe it was him, and he didn't get what he wanted out of it, so he's changed it again.

There was no way to be sure, so she didn't spend too much time speculating.

This time, when she and Calisto studied together and she brought up the myrvite titan, she had a different suggestion.

First, she showed Calisto a report she'd fabricated. After that got her excited, she said, "You know, before I came to Baracuel, I was working on an artifice project for detecting myrvite energies. The distances it covered… this Apophagorga wasn't detected too far from Second Cairn. I think I could recreate the device, given enough resources."

Calisto got very excited. "Really? I knew they were working on some advanced stuff in Akana, but I didn't know that. A device that did that could be used to track sustainable ecologies. Maintaining spellwards and cages is expensive, so a tracking device could save… but I've never heard of anyone who could do it."

Mirian stroked her chin. "Let me see if I can make a proof-of-concept," she said. "If we could find a myrvite titan though… I mean, my academic career would be set!"

"I can think of four different ways we could become rich," Calisto said. "And famous. The legendary myrvite hunters, Micael and Calisto." She gave her a smile. "If you can make a proper myrvite detector, let me know. I'd love to see it in action."

Mirian had two ideas for that. The first was to create a fake device that she could manipulate any way she wanted. But that wasn't very interesting, and it wouldn't progress any of the research ideas she had, so she shelved that as the 'backup plan.'

The better idea was using her apprenticeship with Endresen to access the labs and artifice in Torrian Tower. Detecting myrvites can be done by detecting the magichemicals specific to them, but with glyphs it's complex and power intensive. The range on the devices is just as bad as standard divination. The leyline detector worked on the principle of letting energy come to it, not projecting energy out, so the range was hundreds of miles. I can't make something sensitive enough for those kind of ranges for smaller creatures… but celestial magic is so much better at detecting life energy, and works on the same principle of simply detecting energy that's already radiating out.

The key would be to tri-scribe a triple-bonded glyph set that incorporated the key rune that her celestial detect life spell used. With Torrian Tower's precision tools, she could put together something capable of rapidly testing pairs of glyphs to see if they could work with the rune.

And then I'd have an actual working celestial-arcane spell. I already know it can be done from the Labyrinth. Xipuatl, if only you knew!

She just needed to make sure Troytin didn't get wind of her project. She also needed to depart with Calisto before the eruptions—or bombs—prevented their journey.

Mirian sent Nicolus south to Palendurio, hoping Troytin's attention would follow him.

He didn't. Troytin continued to send Zephyr falcons back to Akana Praediar. Presumably, most of his changes were taking place there, but Mirian had no good way of knowing what he was up to. Nicolus's uncle had been her only contact there, but Troytin knew about that connection, and if he wasn't outright assassinating the man, he was certainly monitoring him.

Through the Professors, Mirian at least knew that no one was making any progress on the Divine Monument. Troytin still didn't know about soul magic or that Jei's equations implied the need of a second device.

She turned her focus to the tri-bonded glyphs. She worked in parallel on a second project for Professor Endresen, using that as cover for why she was spending so much time in the artifice labs of the tower. In truth, she could finish that part of the project in under an hour each day, leaving most of her hours for the tri-scribing experiments.

It was nice to conduct the experiments in a place where the room already had automatic fire suppressing spell engines at work and mobile kinetic barrier projectors, as well as blast-resistant tools. It made the hundreds of failed glyph-pairs that exploded milliseconds after being scribed much easier to deal with.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of combinations to try, and it seemed clear that she would need to include a flux glyph, which meant she had to pay close attention to what she was pairing it with. That at least narrowed down the possibility, though even she didn't have all the pairings memorized. She spent plenty of time paging through giant reference books.

It was attempt number 214 that worked. Mirian had already been in motion, ready to clean up the inevitable mess and start over again when she realized the tri-scribed sequence wasn't exploding. She had to blink a few times.

The rest of the divination artifice was trivial. She simply had to connect the new tri-bonded set to a relatively simple detector and an illusionary projector so the results would be easy to read.

She brought Calisto over to the Myrvite Studies building.

"It'll show red lights to represent cockatrice, blue-green for the wyverns, and green for the drakes," she said. "Very small myrvites are displayed a pale red." She activated the device. Her explanation wasn't quite true; what was really going on was the device was turning the intensity of the soul energy into a color in visible light, cross-referencing that with the location it detected it, and then putting that on a two-dimensional grid. Non-magical life like humans and extremely weak-souled myrvites like Viridian's plants wouldn't show up because they weren't within the range she'd scribed the device to project. As a flourish, though, she'd also made a short sequence that mapped large stone obstructions of a certain thickness and height to show up on the illusion as gray shapes, which made the map look extra fancy.

Calisto practically swooned when she saw it. "You made this? Oh my Gods, I can even see the sigil bees moving around the gardens! You think it can detect something bigger?"

"I know it can detect something bigger," she said. "You think your dad would be interested in this?"

Calisto licked her lips. She's thinking about how much money this could help her family make. I've got her. "You think Professor Endresen might loosen your leash a bit?"

"I'm sure I could convince her of that," she said, suppressing a smile.

Morning the next day, they were already on the train, heading toward Second Cairn.