The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Selesia finally woke up as they were entering the Semnol lands. Like Takoa, they were one of the semi-autonomous governments, sort of like what Florin was to Baracuel, but technically part of Akana and subject to some of its laws. Mirian hoped she didn't have to learn anything about it. She had enough useless information jumbled up in her brain.

"Hey. Doing alright?"

Selesia groaned. "I feel like a tree stump in its second year of decay," she said.

"Bloodleaf is a nasty poison. I have runes needed to cure it specifically because I've seen it before." She'd scribed it for use on herself, but given the strength of her aura now, she would probably just bump the temporal anchor in her soul against the wall of its housing, instantly removing her from the loop. The poison did more damage the stronger the aura, and given how difficult it had been to cure Selesia, she needed to avoid the poison. Poisons in general were annoying because they required specific rune sequences to counter. Technically, healing was supposed to use specific sequences too, but Mirian usually just used raw soul energy on the wound most of the time. Apparently, this could lead to dire consequences for a person in the long term, but she didn't have to worry about that.

The train began to slow as it approached Semnol's Tidewater City, the name of their capital. Mirian had them get off, using illusions to mask them both, then hide in a nearby pastry shop. Sure enough, several RID agents boarded the train they'd just left. She stopped by an artificer's shop for supplies. In a nearby cafe, she quickly scribed and assembled three devices, then had them get on the next train.

"The RID has magical telegraph lines between the major cities, which they maintain at great expense," she explained to Selesia. It had given Troytin the ability to rapidly mobilize the RID across the continent. She still didn't fully know what he had gotten up to in Akana. "We'll lose them soon enough."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because there's going to be three more mysterious fires in Tidewater. They'll be looking there." She'd assembled three 'seeds of chaos' devices while they'd waited for the next train.

"Oh. That's… kinda terrible, isn't it? What if it lands on someone's home?"

"They should land in the commercial district on one of the big warehouses, but yes, it's a risk," she acknowledged. "Selesia, if you ever get stuck in a time loop, just know it'll play absolute havoc on your morality. Especially if you start justifying things for the greater good. There's very little I can't justify to myself when the world is at stake."

"I guess so," she said, and then got a pensive look as she watched the countryside pass by. After a while, she noticed what Mirian was doing. "What is all that?"

"Notes on what the RID has been doing with mind magic," she said. "When I couldn't get Westerun to talk, I snuck into their headquarters a few times. Akana seems to have offered Westerun a better deal, so this isn't what they did to me, but it builds on it. Westerun and his team figured out how to impede memory, but all these documents imply it took a lot of time, and worked best on a malleable mind." When Selesia gave her a questioning look, she clarified, "Children."

"That's so gross," she said.

"Yes, though they seem to have killed roughly a hundred test subjects continuing the research. Gods know who they murdered. This seems to be the source of the sleep curse on—another person I've seen." Jherica, she thought, but didn't want to say out loud. "They stumbled on it. It turns out, controlling what a person thinks or does is difficult, but damaging their mind is relatively easy." Mirian sighed. "This could have been a series of experiments that helped us understand the brain and how to repair it, one of the things priests struggle the most to heal. Instead, it's yet another project about domination."

Mirian thought of Troytin. She thought of the rich men swarming the Golden Tower. She thought of General Corrmier as he tightened his grip over Palendurio.

Her voice became heavy with contemplation as she said, "Those who wish to dominate others must never be allowed to take power."

Selesia shivered. "Woah," she said.

"What?" Mirian asked.

"Your face got all stone-like, and when you said that, your eyes kinda glowed. I mean, it's one thing to consciously know you're a Prophet, and another to… feel it."

***

When they arrived in Takoa's First City, Mirian immediately fell in love with it. It was reminiscent of the larger Akanan cities, but there was a way the people carried themselves that made it feel more like she was walking into open arms. It wasn't that people smiled more, but there was something about the subtle way they acknowledged her as she passed them on the streets. The multicolored braided cords they wore gave them all a little more color, and the city was brighter for it.

The buildings also had more care put into them. In Mercanton, what mattered was how fast a structure could be put up. Here, each building had some sort of artwork and natural feature attached. One store had a mural depicting Saint Shiamagoth shielding Takoa during the Fifth Akanan War. Another's surface was covered in the kinds of curving wooden statues Takoa favored, each an abstract symbol or animal. Little gardens were everywhere, next to every shop and street.

This far south, the grip of the seasons loosened. The trees here had never lost their leaves, and Mirian could pretend, if only for a moment, that she had finally escaped the eternal fall and winter of the loop.

Selesia's family was very kind to her, and her mother didn't say anything even after she saw that Mirian had spent an hour scribing glyphs in the guest bedroom to ward it.

As she began to work on her leyline detectors, Mirian kept an eye out for anything suspicious. She deployed the first one on the southernmost tip of Akana in a port warehouse. Another, she levitated northeast of town on a large hill. She brought another one several miles back west by train, deploying it a few miles outside one of the small villages that dotted the coast.

Then, she worked to get a fancy spell engine like the one Viridian had used brought down from Vadriach University. It was a mapping engine, and the same coordinate system that allowed one to indicate roads and rivers worked perfectly for showing the paths of the leylines. Getting it to add the intensity of the leylines was a week-long project. By the end of it, Mirian was seriously considering writing the designer a strongly worded letter just for the satisfaction of it.

Selesia and her parents watched when she finally activated it in their living room, having input the coordinates of her most recent data and all the measurements she'd recorded from using Sylvester Aurum's little empire to collect data for her.

A complex map of illusionary glowing lines appeared above the device, overlaid with another map showing a large portion of Enteria. Dozens of illusionary leylines snaked beneath the continents, glowing different colors based on their intensity. Mirian hit a switch, and the map moved through snapshots the leylines near the start of the cycle, in the middle of it, and near the end.

She started narrating her thoughts, more for herself than anyone else. "Hmm. It's Akana Praediar that has the most arcane energy running through its leylines. That energy then moves east." She switched back and forth between the snapshots.

"It changes a lot, near the end," Selesia said.

"Yes. As the energy moves eastward, the Baracueli lines reroute." She squinted at one of the lines linking Arborholm to Torrviol. "Fascinating. You can actually see the influence of the Akanan dreadnought airships pushing the leyline. There's a confluence of arcane energy beneath the Monument. It's not one line, but dozens. The frostlands and Endelice leylines connect to it." Mirian's heart started beating faster. She could see other places where more leylines than usual were meeting. One network was beneath Alkazaria. Under Palendurio, there were so many leylines feeding into it, it was like there was a pool of energy beneath it. More Monuments? She could see why her efforts to find the inferred gate under Palendurio hadn't worked. It was significantly further west than she'd thought, and deeper underground, beneath the water level.

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She continued to verbalize her thoughts. "If the Torrviol Monument is destroyed, the breakdown is much faster. But either way, the leylines start shifting, and the changes propagate down south. I still need to get readings from down there." Damn Ibrahim and that necromancer, she thought. Then something else struck her. "This is interesting. The leylines emerging from Tlaxhuaco are significantly less intense. The chain of disruption doesn't touch them."

"Is that weird?" Selesia asked.

"Maybe. I've also started taking data on ambient mana." Ever since her experience in the Endelice, she'd realized she needed to stop taking for granted what she had been taught was 'true' and investigate it herself. "There's the buildup of it in the frostlands. Then in Akana, there's a significant disruption. Gods above, I didn't realize the scale of the spell engine use. I don't understand, though. Why would the remnant D-class mana deplete the ambient mana in an area?"

She looked at her latest readings from the leyline detectors. The southernmost detector was picking up significantly more ambient mana than the northern ones. "If this gradient continues farther south, the same increased ambient mana seen in the frostlands is also in Tlaxhauco." Mirian thought of the strange simulation room near the end of the Frostland's Gate Vault. "It's all connected. I just need to model mathematically how." It was time to start recruiting the professors in Torrviol.

Selesia made a face. "I'm, like, pretty sure I just learned in lecture that ambient mana is uniform. But it's not, is it?" She turned to her mom. "You remember the First City?"

Her mother nodded. "That's when we first knew to start getting you arcanist lessons. You felt it."

Mirian raised an eyebrow. "Isn't this First City?"

"Yes," Selesia's mother said, "But that's just the traditional name for the heart of Takoa. Wherever we call home is the First City. But long, long ago, there was another First City, the one for which all the others take its name. Those who still venerate our ancestors and the old ways make a holy pilgrimage there."

A rush of excitement filled Mirian. "And there's… a difference in the ambient mana there?" I have to study it. Is it possible to repeat what I did up in the Endelice?

***

The rail lines heading northwest out of Takoa's port city only had a few cars for people. The rest were dedicated freight. Selesia joined her again, while her parents stayed behind. They understood what was going on, but they preferred to keep a sense of normalcy.

Despite the refrigerating enchantments cooling the train cars, Mirian could smell the piles of dead myrvites every time a train heading west passed by. She started calculating how many tons of myrvite meat was moving along the tracks. It was clear to her that Clement's numbers on harvested myrvite organs were no exaggeration. But what will they do when they run out?

Akana Praediar was a large continent, and for centuries, the few people living on it had mostly stuck to the coast, leaving the interior untamed. There were a lot of myrvites, but without some sort of scheme like Baracuel's spellward partitions and hunting permits, these sort of harvests couldn't possibly last.

They passed a pulp mill, which came with its own terrible stench, then a lumber yard. Mirian gaped at the scene. Stretching for what had to be miles were piles and piles of logs. The forests too, she realized. One of the old maps in Bainrose had called this area the Shian Woods, but now it was farmland and pastures. "How long ago was this all forest?" she asked Selesia.

Selesia scrunched up her face in thought. "Uh… it's been like this ever since I was young. I think maybe my grandma said she used to play in them?"

Mirian had trouble wrapping her head around it. It seemed impossible to conceive of such a large area transforming so completely. After a time, the landscape seemed unchanging. It was just fields and fields, and one seemed much the same as the others. "I don't know much about the First City. Uh, the first First City," Mirian said.

Selesia laughed. "That's normal. I don't even think they teach about it in other parts of the country. It's an old Takoa legend. During the God's War, people fled and tried to hide. Everywhere, they died in terrible infernos that spewed from the Gates of Fire. The old cities all were turned to ash, and the people were forced to scatter far from the Gates. Then, the Ominian directed Saint Shiamagoth to protect Their people, and He descended upon what would become the First City. While the Ominian defended Enteria from the sky, Shiamagoth shielded them on the ground. So now, when you reach a certain age, you take a pilgrimage to the spot He stood at and pray."

Miran furrowed her brow. "The Gates of Fire?" She mentally thought about the translation. "Ah, the Infernal Holes that were part of the Cataclysm. I guess 'hole,' 'portal,' and 'gate,' are all the same word in Friian."

"I don't think it's a translation thing. The words for 'gate' and 'hole' are separate in the old Takoan language. Ah, don't ask me about it though, we only learned a bit in elementary school, and when I stopped talking to my grandma in it, I sort of forgot most of it."

Mirian breathed in, thinking of her dreams. The air still smelled pungent. "The Ominian showed me the wall of fire from the God's War. It was so vast—it stretched across the stars. They didn't show me how They stopped it. It seems impossible, even for a God. As it approached Enteria, I could feel—I could feel the despair." She shivered. "If They could stop that, though… how can They not stop this?"

Selesia obviously didn't have an answer.

As the landscape passed them by, Mirian fell into a reverie. How important are those old histories? How much was myth, and what truths still hide in the old legends? And does any of that help me stop the apocalypse? She couldn't help but suspect knowledge of the Elder Gods and the old Prophets had to contain clues.

Soon enough, they reached their station. The small town they arrived at must have been only a few decades old, but it somehow already looked downtrodden. As Mirian pulled her leyline detector through town on a spellcart, several people gave her dirty looks.

"You look too Persaman," Selesia explained.

"Ah. That again," Mirian said with a sigh. There was no point even acknowledging them. Whatever she did, nothing would change.

Once they were far enough down the road, Mirian started levitating them and the leyline detector, leaving the spellcart behind. They flew past an abandoned mine, heading west near the coast.

"Why'd they abandon such a holy city?" Mirian asked as they flew.

"Dunno. It was like, a thousand years ago. Or maybe a few hundred. A long time. I don't think anyone knows anymore."

Eventually, they began to see trees again. They passed over a thick swamp, full of tangled brush and cypress trees sitting atop their little root spires. Mirian saw a crocodile floating down below, as well as several birds she didn't recognize.

"That was annoying to pass through by boat as a kid, let me tell you," Selesia said. "I think I got bitten by maybe a hundred insects."

An hour later, the swamp dried as the landscape ascended into shallow hills.

"Just ahead. There. That's the pyramid."

Mirian had to blink a few times as they approached the 'pyramid' Selesia had just pointed out. At first, she couldn't see it as anything except a big grass and tree covered hill. Then, she began to understand. It wasn't a true pyramid, but a hill that had been shaped and then reinforced with stone. Bits of that stone facade were now scattered about, though the top of the dirt mound had long ago been lopped off. Erosion had torn big strips off the artificial hill, but she could imagine what it once looked like. They landed, and Mirian looked at her feet. An old obsidian tool was sticking out of the ground. Farther up, fragments of pottery and brick jutted out of the tufts of grass. A few dozen feet away, there was the foundation of a house, the stone weathered away and the walls all fallen. Little by little, she began to see the traces of the ancient city.

Then, she closed her eyes, and little by little, she could feel a stir in the ambient mana. It was nothing like the abundance of mana up in the Endelice, but there was something here.

At the start of the cycle, she hadn't at all intended to come here. Over the years, she had often wished for a straightforward path, an easy road to follow. But that's not how life works, she knew now. The Ominian had shown her. When she had first stumbled into Palendurio, she could never have predicted the path that would lead her to confronting Apophagorga. If there is no road, I must wander, and in wandering, I will create the path.

Mirian breathed in the air. It had a humid, weighty feel to it. Few traces remained of the great city, but as Mirian walked, she felt the weight of time bearing down on her. When the wind whispered through the leaves and the grass, she could imagine it was old voices of long dead generations speaking to her.

"This place is beautiful," she told Selesia. "Please. Show me your city."

Selesia smiled back at her, and they began to walk.