The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

They first established communication protocols, and Mirian composed a letter to Liuan Var that would make its way by zephyr falcon, bouncing about aeries until it at last made it to Arborholm. Despite the cost of the delivery being absurd—it was a gold florin for each leg of the journey—money was of no consequence. Gabriel had figured out several different tricks for making money, most of which involved scams and heists.

"…and that gets me the initial money and connections. Getting the barges to collide is as simple as leaving a cask of ale in the right spot near the captain. That leads to a case under the magistrate where I can seize a bunch of assets of one of the guilds, which in turn can be leveraged for all the gold I need. That's what I usually do," he said. "Much easier. But if we need Urubandar under our thumb, I can do it like that," he said, and snapped his fingers. He said it with such casual confidence, Mirian didn't doubt he could.

"Did you reveal yourself as Prophet to do it?"

"No," he said. "With Ibrahim running around up north, it wouldn't do. Better to quietly gain leverage and connections among the lords and bureaucracies here and avoid an utterly pointless war."

That was interesting. It implied Ibrahim would turn south if he knew about another Prophet. But he'd never cared about Mirian's declarations.

She didn't like Gabriel. The way he'd been acting before Mirian had encountered him stirred a quiet anger in her. But he would bring over a decade of accumulated knowledge, and again, that was far more valuable to her—and Enteria—than three extra days in any given loop.

Unlike Liuan, Gabriel had no compunctions whatsoever about traveling with her. "It ought to be an interesting change, at least. I haven't been to Mahatan in… three years? Sort of stopped keeping track of the cycles after a bit. What are we on?"

"By my count, this is the 199th."

"Ah! Nearly a round number. We should celebrate, don't you think? Oh, don't glare at me again, I was joking."

As they prepared to travel upriver towards Alatishad, Mirian felt his gaze on her often. It wasn't leering, despite how she'd first encountered him, but analytical.

"That hairstyle is common in east Baracuel, isn't it?" he asked at one point. Mirian hadn't even thought about how her haircut could be used to track her hometown. As they boarded the barge, he said, "What happened to that first spellbook you had?"

The truth was she'd demanifested it and was now carrying around a hollow book that she could manifest her true spellbook inside of if she needed to cast.

"It stands out too much," she said. "So I keep it inside this," she said, holding up the hollow book. She'd weighted it with steel and put a lock on it so the pages stayed closed.

"Makes sense," he said, but she wasn't sure if he actually believed her. Gabriel didn't seem to have an attitude that wasn't 'casual,' but she was beginning to see that he wasn't a fool, either. After all, when he'd talked about dispatching Troytin's agents, he'd talked about it like it hadn't been any harder than making breakfast.

As they traveled up the river on a private boat, spell engines pushing them past the abundant barges, she asked, "So how much do you know about magic?"

Gabriel laughed. "You're about as subtle as a hammer to the head, you know. You want to know if my capabilities can threaten you. Was it Sulvorath that made you paranoid, or were you always cautious?"

Am I that obvious? Mirian worried. She could remember Nicolus scolding her as he'd coached her on manipulation. But she'd fooled Luspire and Aurum, so she couldn't be that bad. "He certainly made me more cautious. There's two time travelers still out of the picture due to his efforts. One's permanently cursed, the other is committing suicide as soon as the cycle starts."

"Oof. That's dark."

"Mostly, I need to know how much I need to teach you about leylines, or if you can help with divination as we look for the Madinahr Gate."

"Nothing much," he said. "And neither does anyone else. At best, I could get a bunch of University scholars to shrug their shoulders confidently at me. There's a leyline study going on in Urubandar, and another in Alatishad. The only thing they could say was that the cascade was unprecedented."

Mirian related what she'd learned about the energy overload that started in Akana Praediar and then disrupted the leylines around the east Persaman desert just below the Divir moon.

"Huh. So that explains what everyone thought was a gravity anomaly. But why would that have happened?"

"What do you mean?"

Gabriel leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on a plush stool. Outside the cabin window, they passed another barge loaded with fossilized myrvite. "I mean, when did the moon become suspended by leylines? What was the mechanism that formed it? And if the system was put into place intentionally, what function was that system supposed to serve?"

"The Elder Gods created Enteria and its two moons. As far as I can tell, the leyline network is an intentional cycle."

"Surely it's changed since the creation of Enteria. During the God's War if nothing else. A balancing act like that shouldn't have survived the Cataclysm. Besides, the holy texts say nearly nothing about the Divir moon, and it's only later entries that begin to reference it. The oldest texts, those from the three Prophets of Baracuel, only mention the Luamin moon."

Mirian pondered that. It seemed ridiculous. "Are you saying the Divir moon wasn't always up there?"

Gabriel shrugged. "Maybe. It would make sense. You haven't been to Mayat Shadr yet, have you? I think you should go see it at some point."

Mirian had been so focused on studying the leylines that she'd paid very little attention to the moon itself. After all, it wasn't exactly in reach. There were old stories of archmages trying to reach the moons, but it was inevitably a tale of hubris, much like the ones about delving too deep in the Labyrinth. Modern research indicated that the air got thinner higher up, so several wizards had posited that, if one went high enough, there would be no air at all. That was an ongoing debate though.

"What do you know of the Divir moon?" she asked.

"Not much. There was a researcher at Vadriach University studying astronomical bodies, but when I wrote to get a copy of his research, I was told they were incapacitated and I would have to negotiate the release of their notes either with him if he woke, or their estate if they didn't. I considered making a trip out there, but never got around to it."

Mirian's eyes went wide.

Gabriel noticed. "What?"

"What… was that researcher's name, if I may ask?"

"Professor Sio Jherica. Why?"

She closed her eyes and ground her teeth in frustration. The amount of damage Troytin had done… "That's one of the time travelers."

"Huh. No shit. Maybe that great bastard in the big chair really did have a plan."

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"So… what was he looking for? What property of that moon could help us?"

Gabriel shrugged. "I was hoping they could tell us. I took a look myself and it turns out it's not that easy."

"What do you mean?"

"You have any lensing spells? Give it a try. It's a pretty clear day, you can see Divir well enough from here. We can even stop the boat so it's easier."

Gabriel went and talked to the captain of the vessel, who anchored them. Once the boat was still, Mirian summoned her spellbook within its fake casing, then cast several layers of lens spells, pointing them at the moon. She immediately noticed two problems. One, no matter how steady she held the spells, they seemed to shake just enough that the moon was a difficult target to hit. Second, there was some sort of distortion that made it impossible to make out much detail.

"See? So there's a way to increase the stability and correct for distortions, but I couldn't figure out what glyphs they were using for that. In the end, I put the lensing spells on a spell engine, did some trigonometry, and just found myself staring up at a bunch of blurry, jagged rock. No great revelation there. Even the ancients supposed that if Enteria was made of stone, the moons would be too. Another dead end, I thought."

"Hmm. Maybe," Mirian said. "There's some property of that moon that's more than just rock."

Gabriel nodded. "Otherwise, the explosion wouldn't be quite so big. But if the Ominian thinks we're supposed to go investigate Divir, they might have made it easier to get to. It's just like the Labyrinth." Gabriel told the captain to put them back on their route, then headed back to his plush chair and got back to lounging.

"How far did you get?" Mirian asked.

"Fourth level. The only entrance to the fifth level I found was blocked by an entropic antimagic field. I've died in a lot of nasty ways, but that just didn't quite seem worth it to me. And that was assuming it didn't shred my identity along with my soul."

Interesting, she thought. It seemed likely she'd return to the Labyrinth. After all, the leylines were down there. Atroxcidi and the Gates came first though. They sat in silence, the rush of the river and the shouts of laborers echoing over the water. "So you understand that there's no telling what Atroxcidi's mastery of necromancy can do. And we don't know what Ibrahim has told him."

"You don't have to worry about that. See, I like being alive. There's so many fun things to do. And I like who I am, and who I am is a product of my memories. There's a reason I didn't bother sailing north into that particular shit-storm."

Mirian still was wary. But if we are to work together, we must trust each other, she assured herself. That starts somewhere.

***

Once they docked at Alatishad, it was simple enough to join one of the armed caravans that moved north to Mahatan. While Gabriel hunted down reliable mercenaries, Mirian hired a large carriage with a sorcerer who would act both as guard and driver of the eximontar.

"No spell carriage?" Gabriel asked when he saw it.

"Don't like them," she said. Now that she'd become aware of it, she couldn't ignore the D-class mana the spell engines produced. It was constantly scraping at the edges of her aura, and she found herself distracted by it like it was a sore tooth.

The carriage came with a workshop in miniature, much like what she used when she was using a train around Baracuel. Persama had a few trains running, but over the course of years of fighting, most lines had been cut by one group or another. Merchants and travelers that had to leave the convenience of the Setarab River or the coast had gone back to banding together in caravans to cross the desert.

By now, Mirian had made the trip north several times so she knew exactly how many guards would be necessary to scare off bandits. Gabriel was equally unbothered. He had yet to use any of the wands he carried, but Mirian had surreptitiously used divination while he slept to identify them, figuring it out glyph by glyph. He had a wand of levitation, a wand of searing fire, a wand of force shield, and a wand of magnetic manipulation. He hadn't mentioned what kind of myr rating he could hit, but then again, neither had Mirian.

As they traveled, Gabriel pondered the horizon with his shirt off. "Spend enough time here and you come to appreciate the sun," he told her. "Besides, it's how I do my best thinking."

Mirian stayed in her carriage, paging through her glyphs. She had tried a great deal of divination already. Unlike Palendurio and Alkazaria, there was no easily identified obsidian anomaly. More precise data with the leyline detectors had gotten her nowhere; there was just too much energy moving through the system too fast. That had led her back to classic spells like detect cave, but no matter how she adjusted the parameters of the spell, she didn't find any large spherical caverns under the city. She did find several smuggler's dens, a half dozen buried tombs, and a cave full of the strangest creatures she'd ever seen, including a completely transparent lizard.

By the time Mahatan came into view, she had made no breakthroughs on how to proceed, and Gabriel just said, "Nah, still thinking about it."

Mahatan was an oasis city. The oasis was large, but more than large, it was deep. It allowed for Mahatan to have enough farming for complete self-sufficiency. Mirian wasn't quite sure what sort of trick of hydrology allowed it, but according to Holvatti, somehow rainwater from the Jiandzhi ended up in it. Something about underground rivers, with scholars debating how that was possible or why it was such a unique phenomenon. Either way, the end result was a great deal of pumps and covered aqueducts that fed the farms surrounding the oasis and the city so that Mahatan had a practical immunity to sieges. The high walls of the city were solid stone packed with earth, raised long ago by the Persaman Triarchy so that the city could be a fortress that their armies could sortie out of as they conquered the riverlands and western regions.

Now, the walls were less rigorously maintained, but given the outbreak of war, there were still sorcerers and guards that patrolled the walls.

Beyond the walls were the Nine Spires of the Isheer. They reminded Mirian of Alkazaria's spires. Mahatan also produced a beautiful turquoise dye, and its residents were proud of the color. The whole city shone turquoise and white in the heavy sun, while behind it, the Grand Oasis waters sparkled.

The beauty was tainted by the pit mines east and north of the city. Gray dust blew in from that direction so that as one entered the city, the facade of white stucco seen from the south gained a new dimension of dirty dark stains, and one could smell them. People complained, but it was those mines that generated most of the city's wealth, so complain was all they did.

"You're familiar with the archives?" Mirian asked as their caravan waited outside the city gates for the guards to check them over for smuggled goods or fugitives.

"Extensively," Gabriel said.

"That's where I'm going to start. If we can find a historical attestation of where the Gates of Fire were, we've as good as found it. The location of near-Cataclysm or pre-Cataclysm ruins are the next best thing."

"Hmm. Has that actually worked for finding a gate?" he asked.

"No. As I've said, if you have a better idea, I'll hear it."

He shrugged. "Not yet."

The gate guards made their way up to their carriage. The eximontar snorted impatiently.

"What brings you to Mahatan?" one of the guards asked, clearly bored.

"Legitimate business," Gabriel said, and flipped him and his companion a gold florin each. They flashed him a toothy grin and moved on.

When they were gone, Mirian said, "You've seen them before, then?"

"No. They just seemed the type."

"How is it every time I try to bribe someone they turn out to be honest?" Mirian grumbled.

Gabriel shrugged.

"Do the guards normally cause trouble?"

"No, I've just become incredibly bored of talking to them. I would pay a gold florin to swat a fly at this point."

They made their way into the city. As they dismounted from the carriage, Mirian at last caught a better glimpse of the bracelet Gabriel wore around his ankle. Usually, his loose-fitting pants hid it, but there was a moment as he was adjusting his sandal that she saw it clearly. Light reflected off celestial focuses differently than other objects.

Priests kept their focuses around their neck. She'd only seen one group of people wear them around their ankles.

"So what did you do before the time loop started?" she asked.

"Legitimate business," Gabriel said, deadpan. "This way. I know a luxury inn by the archives."

"Next to a brothel?" Mirian asked.

He grinned. "Of course. But they have other luxuries you might like too. Good security," he said, and winked.

As they walked through the street, Mirian stopped thinking about the Mahatan Gate. She wondered instead how much she should trust her fellow time travelers. What could she get away with keeping a secret? What benefits were there to opening up? Gabriel could be a potent ally. But he was also someone she needed to keep an eye on.

The same would be true of any others. There was no telling what the time loop had done to change them.