The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

At noon on the last day of Solem, the Baracueli scouts reported the advance of the Akana Praediar army through the old growth forest to the northwest. General Hanaran had gone back and forth about the best tactics for delaying the army, but in the end, decided an ambush was best. With bog lions and other nasty myrvites roaming the woods, sending regiments out to skirmish and retreat was too risky. The Akanan army was also better mechanized, whereas the Baracuel force had few wagons. A harassing force might be easily encircled, and Hanaran knew they could ill afford to lose anyone. Torrviol settled down to wait.

As evening approached, it was as if the whole town held its breath. Even the birds seemed like they’d been intimidated into silence.

Mirian found herself atop Bainrose castle, on the southwest tower. Lily, not knowing what else to do, had joined her, and was pacing about the tower.

Valen had joined one of the militia squads, even after Mirian told her it was a stupid idea. They’d argued, but Valen had insisted on being in the midst of the fighting and told her it didn’t matter in the end anyways, to which Mirian had to grudgingly admit she was right. Still, she was feeling annoyed about the whole thing, and a bit of regret. Didn’t she want to stick together at the end, like Selesia had? As it turned out, the answer was no.

Respected Jei was helping Professor Torres calculate range tables for her special artillery gun. From their vantage, Mirian could just make the two out down by the plaza. Mirian looked at the position of the sun, and felt something was wrong. Her gaze shifted to the belltower clock.

She frowned, and looked to the militia member at her side. “Tell General Hanaran the Akanans have new information. Either they did reconnaissance, or spotted the scouts, or got information some other way, because they’re not proceeding on their normal timetable.”

The militia member started down the stairs. Hanaran would be in the center of Bainrose, orchestrating the defense. Mirian hadn’t realized just how involved a battle was. The Akanans had made it look effortless when they moved through Torrviol, but then again, they’d done months of preparation and faced no real resistance. Now she saw the ridiculous amount of coordination it all took. The battle lines were stretched out over several miles, from the south hills around Torrviol and all the way to the lake, though the largest concentration of force was at Bainrose and the arc around it.

Torrviol was tensed like a muscle, ready to move. On the parapets, spotters were peering through lenses or busy controlling magical eye spells to reveal enemy positions. Operators stood by, listening in on magical cables. Artillery teams were standing by at the ready, ammunition piled by their guns. Spell engine wagons stood idle, ready to ferry about reinforcements.

In the distance, she heard the first sounds of gunfire. A few minutes passed, then she heard one of the nearby battle magi using a magical eye say, “Contact, grid fifteen. They’re out of cover, at least a dozen moving.” A nearby operator relayed the message.

There was a delay of a minute, then two, then one of the guns down on the ground roared out. Another moment passed, and then Mirian saw the bloom of fire in the forest.

A few hundred feet away, another gun, this one pointing west, opened fire. Then another. Then another, the distant thundering coming from maybe a mile off. Soon enough, Mirian lost track of which spotters were providing information for which guns.

It took some time for the Akanan guns to respond. She heard them, at first thinking they were one of the Baracueli guns off in the distance, then the shells hit. Lightning erupted in the plaza, but it stayed contained to a small area as the battle magi nullified the triggered spell. Across the battlements, Mirian saw shields go up. Magical eye spotters retreated into the towers, since they didn’t need strict line of sight to move their spells about.

“We should go down,” one of the militia members said to Mirian.

“No. I need to watch,” she replied. “You can if you’d like.”

Nearby, one of the observers said, “They’re setting up beyond our pre-sights. I don’t think we have anything in range of grids three or four.” A pause, as the observer listened in to a message. “Well, worth a try. I see three guns being set up. Big ones.”

The next shot that came was from the plaza—from Torres’s gun. Getting shot at in the basement at point blank range hadn’t been so loud as that gun going off two hundred feet away. Red lightning crackled along the barrel as the excess magic discharged off it. Whatever Torres had cooked up, it had incredible power. I need some earplugs next time, she thought. Of all the spells she had scribed down, sound-dampening wasn’t one of them.

“Hit! Hit!” cried the observer.

After that, there was too much going on for Mirian to pick out individual events. Every observer and operator was talking at once. Artillery boomed from town, from the forest, and everywhere shells fell. Fires broke out in the woods, only to be put out by enemy arcanists, while in town buildings crumbled apart as shells erupted within them. The initial volleys weren’t so bad though; with sorcerers and spell engines both putting up defensive shields, the shells’ damage was limited. The counter-battery fire, as Hanaran had called it, was also doing its job. Enemy guns were either silenced by destruction or being forced to reposition.

Between the low clouds and the forest, Mirian spotted two colossal shapes moving in the distance. “There!” she said, running over to get the attention of one of the observers.

His eyes went wide. “Those can’t be airships. They’re too big to be airships!”

The conversation moved along the ramparts. Mirian couldn’t hear it, but she could see the soldiers gesturing and pointing at those incoming behemoths.

A few minutes later, General Hanaran emerged from the stairs to see for herself. She gaped at the spectacle, then looked at Mirian. “How?” the general asked.

“Last time I tried to ask, Marshal Cearsia threw me overboard,” she replied.

“Gods’ blood. Alright, airburst shells might make them hesitate, but we need to get through that armor. Arm guns seven through fourteen with magnetic ripper shells…” Hanaran retreated back down into the castle, barking orders as she went. Across the rooftops of the castle and the town, soldiers ran about, unloading and reloading guns, with cranes moving new boxes of ammunition up.

Mirian opened up her spellbook and turned to the remote whisper spell. Casting it, she said, “Torres, can your cannon hit those airships?”

There was a pause, with more guns thundering. Then Mirian heard the reply in her ear: “Probably not, but it might give them a scare.”

Tension on the battlements grew as the airships approached. Mirian watched as the portholes in the hull opened and the guns bristled out.

Across Torrviol, the gun crews were scrambling to come up with firing solutions. Mirian ran over to one of the nearby guns to help out. It was, after all, just math. She argued briefly about the angle needed with one of the crew. The soldier relented, cranking the wheel that controlled the gun elevation up a few notches.

“Fire!” cried the corporal.

Guns lit up all over town. The sky flashed with airburst spells as lightning crackled out and flames like flowers blossomed in the air. Most of the shells burst too far away to do much damage to the airships, but some exploded above the decks, which must have sent the crews atop them scrambling for cover. A few well-placed shots impacted the armored hulls, though most of the power was absorbed by magical shielding, which Mirian watched crackle across the airship bottoms. The shot from Torres’s gun in the plaza went wide, streaking past one of the wings like a little angry meteor.

The volley did its job, though. Both airships veered aside, turning so their broadside was facing Torrviol, but far further out than they usually did. When the airship guns replied, and a shot slammed into one of the nearby towers of Bainrose, sending stone crumbling, even as a spell engine shield flashed.

“Gods!” Lily cried out. “I can’t take this, Mirian, I’m going below. Stay safe, please?”

It was a ridiculous thing to ask, and just as ridiculous to promise, but Mirian did.

Over the next few hours as night fell, the battle became even more confused. Firefights between infantry erupted across the defensive line, with fireballs and lightning bolts arching through the night. The artillery duels continued, while the two airships above circled like vultures. They’d climbed in elevation and were keeping their distance, but were still peppering the town with plunging fire that even the spell engine shields were struggling to stop.

Then, another shot landed near Bainrose, but instead of exploding into lightning or fire, the shell seemed to disappear into the earth.

Then the earth shook, sending Mirian staggering.

“Damn! They’ve swapped to earth-shaker shells,” one of the soldiers cried out.

That can’t be good, Mirian thought.

Another shot hit the northern wall, and when the shell exploded, it sent fissures through the stone, sending a piece of the battlement sliding off the wall in a slide of jagged rock.

“Evacuate the walls!” one of the captains shouted.

The southwest tower practically exploded, rock cascading down as the artillery piece atop it tumbled down, crew included. There was a reason castles had fallen out of favor.

Mirian headed down the ladder, then down the spiral staircase. Stopping at the second floor, she went to the balcony and looked down. One of the priests was healing a man with a bleeding leg, while the other sat meditative, perhaps trying to recover his power. Another point for Xipuatl, Mirian thought. If the power was purely divine, one wouldn’t need to recover like an exhausted arcanist. She wondered if there was a soul-equivalent to a mana potion.

More injured were sat along the walls on cots, some in agony, some asleep. In the middle of the room, General Hanaran loomed over the battlemap as her staff moved pieces about, adjusting them back as another earthquake jostled everyone. People circled her like a locust cloud, relaying orders or bringing in the newest reports.

“Get me inertial wards around the keep!” one of the staff snapped.

“Can we set off the spellbombs?” another was saying.

“Not yet,” a woman by the operators shouted. “They’re still not moving to the edge of the woods. Right now it would hit a few infantry at most.”

Mirian took note of the positions on the map as best she could. A pity; she’d thought the spellbombs were a great idea.

“They’re hitting the northern positions hard,” another said, while Mirian heard another man say, “Hold the southern guns until they’re out from behind those hills. We can’t waste ammunition on suppression.”

She made her way down to the basement next, where Professor Cassius sat on one of the study chairs, eyes hollow and face gaunt. She didn’t need to measure his aura to know he was nearing total depletion of his mana. If he continued, he might start getting soul abrasion, and that would take far longer than a few days to recover from. Not that it mattered much.

Here the bookshelves also had been scattered to the walls. Mirian could hear spells and gunfire echoing down the open catacomb passages, while soldiers milled about or rested.

“How’s the defense?” Mirian asked.

“Not good,” Cassius rasped. “They’ve been pushing harder here than anywhere. They have perfect knowledge of the areas here. Akanan earth specialists broke down several walls to flank our defensive positions. We’ve retreated to the fourth defensive line. After that, the last line we can hold is here.”

“Can Hanaran send more troops?”

“The line is stretched thin as it is. We simply don’t have enough people or firepower. The other infantry are fighting war wagons with small arms and a handful of arcanists. Drawing down their numbers risks a breakthrough.”

Mirian didn’t know what a breakthrough entailed, but it sounded bad.

Another earthquake shook Bainrose. Plaster dust scattered into the air, and more books fell off their shelves. More gunfire echoed through the catacombs.

“Can you collapse the catacombs?”

“We don’t have the spell power. It’s too stable. There’s too much solid rock to move.”

The idea had been to hold Bainrose as the center of the defense, but the castle was the primary objective of the Akanans. What if we retreated, and let them have the castle? No one knows how the Divine Monument down there works, anyways. They can’t do much with it in four days.

Mirian moved back to the central hall. It still looked strange with all the shelves out of place. She found Lily crouched down in a corner. “Hey,” she said. “You doing okay?”

Lily shook her head. “I know there will be another me that wakes up after this, but… but this is me. And I don’t… I don’t want to die.”

Mirian hugged her, but that was all she could do. There were no words that could comfort her, and even the sweetest lie felt too bitter to tell.

Respected Jei found her next, spotting her from across the room. “You have taken note of the new positions? And how long it took them to shift ammunition?”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s just… it’s a lot to remember. Gods I wish there were memory spells, or I could take just one notebook back with me.” She kept her arm around Lily.

Jei nodded. “The mind is still the frontier of magic. Too complicated. I spent many years researching it.”

She had, Mirian realized. Of course she’d tried to find a way to understand the mind. She’d wanted to fix her sister.

“You must become good at memory tricks. Repetition. Songs can help with that.”

“You can help?” Mirian said, puzzled.

Song Jei rolled her eyes. “Not me. Music!”

Mirian laughed. “Right. Right, sorry.”

“Viridian taught you many tricks too. Conceptual schema, for when you need understanding and not details. The better connected the information is, the easier it is to retrieve. Getting good sleep helps. Needing to explain or teach something forces you to learn it better. Viridian can explain it all better than I can. You know about the house with rooms trick for sorting memories?”

“Oh Gods, not that,” Mirian said, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, I guess I need to try that. Whenever I think about a house, though, I always come up with the tiny apartment my family lives in, and then it feels like there’s not enough room for everything. If I try to imagine a bigger house, I spend all my time thinking about what should be in the rooms and then it’s just me imagining how I’d decorate it.”

Jei sighed. “Discipline, Mirian. You need discipline.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

A smile cracked through the sadness on Lily’s face. “What’s your bedroom look like?”

“Gods, I don’t know, I never got that far in my imagination. I’d just be glad not to have to share a room with Zayd. I love him, but when he wakes up in the middle of the night he goes straight to me and pokes me until I’m awake. And he babbles in his sleep! Total nonsense, but it would wake me up all the time.”

Bainrose shook again.

“I gotta go talk to Hanaran. We might need to evacuate the castle,” she said, giving Lily one last squeeze before she stood.

General Hanaran, however, would not discuss it. “Someone else explain it,” she snapped. “I’m busy running a war!”

One of her general staff pulled Mirian aside. “All our communication lines meet up here. It’s the central strongpoint of the line. It’s also protecting our supply routes, and it overlooks all the nearby positions we hold. I really can’t overstate how important it is we don’t retreat from Bainrose.”

“It’s also their primary objective,” Mirian said. “You might not have a choice if they break through in the basement.”

The staff member gave her a fake smile. “I’ll be sure to advise the general that.”

The ground shook again, but this time it kept shaking. There was a tremendous roar, and then Mirian could feel the pulse of intense magic as it brushed by her aura. “Torrian Tower,” she whispered.

Another tremor shook the castle. The noise eclipsed even the guns. Officers exchanged glances of fear. An operator called out, “Torrian Tower has been bisected. Two of the western streets, two southern streets, and half the plaza is blocked off. Numerous casualties.”

The acolytes rushed to prepare more spaces for the injured, but even the vast keep was running out of room. Mirian wasn’t exactly an expert on battles, but it was clear that too much of the defense hinged on Bainrose. They couldn’t afford to lose it, but they couldn’t afford to hold it, and once they did, everything would collapse.

She turned to Jei. “They always destroy the tower. Now I know it’s not just by chance. What’s there? Did the spies ever break into it? What is it the wizards are working on in there?”

Jei frowned. “Security is easy. One entrance, very hard to break into. The pretender—the one who we thought was Praetorian Adria—would have gone inside. No one else. Lots of research in the tower. I do not know what scares them.”

Damn. “Would Torres know? Cassius?”

“No.”

“Endresen then. Shit, is Professor Endresen still around? I need to talk to her.”

Jei glanced up, thinking. “I might know where. Let’s go.”

Mirian gestured for Lily to follow them. As she left, she heard the operators trying to figure out where the massive shot that had taken down the tower had come from. Wherever the gun was, it was far enough away that the battle magi were having trouble tracking it down. It seemed the Akanans were now using sound-suppression spells to help keep their artillery hidden.

As they passed through the plaza, Lily gaped at the horror of it. Torrian Tower had indeed fallen, the dark stone spire crumpled across the buildings. Magical energy still crackled from its interior. Everywhere, the town was pocked with smoldering craters. Dust and smoke hung in the air, with the arcanists being too taxed and busy to deal with it.

The thundering of guns, muted inside the castle, was constant outside. Spell-infused shells streaked across the sky. They ran in short bursts from shelter to shelter, and Mirian was glad they did. While under one of the spell-engine shields, a shell exploded directly above them, sending out pulses of vibrations that shook the ground beneath them and sent them all sprawling to the ground. Without the shield, they’d certainly have been turned into paste.

Lily’s glasses had gone flying. Mirian picked them up and handed them to her, then pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go,” she said, though her ears were ringing and she couldn’t hear her own words.

They made it to a barricaded intersection, where a squad of Baracueli soldiers waved them through. North, Mirian could see a firefight, with rifle infantry crouched behind a barricade shooting at someone. The sorcerers near them sent out volleys of force blades, fireballs, and ripples that could only be magnetic spells, while still others worked to maintain shields that were warding against the same. Flashes of light and arcane energy lit up Torrviol like a summer storm.

They found Professor Endresen by the market forum, where a large spell engine rumbled, casting a high shield above the tents. It all looked like chaos to Mirian; everywhere, people were running about, pushing about boxes of ammunition or fossilized myrvite in carts, or carrying wounded to a set of tents where several more priests worked on healing the worst injured. In other places, groups of soldiers sat and rested, having already fought for hours. From over by the outdoor theater, there was gunfire. Soldiers still holding one of the underground passages, Mirian knew.

She glanced above at the Divir moon. It was well past midnight, nearly dawn, so it was the 1st of Duala now. Only a few days left.

Endresen wasn’t doing anything with her magic. When they found her, she was carrying a box of bandages in her arms.

“I need to know why the Akanans would find Torrian Tower dangerous,” Mirian said to her.

Endresen stared at her, then saw Jei. “Ah, you must be Mirian. Our very own resident time traveler. Now there’s a physics mystery I wish I had time to solve.” She dropped the bandages near one of the physicians and wiped her brow.

“Sorry, right, we haven’t met yet. I took your 480 class a few times. Well, the start of it. But you do research in Torrian Tower. Why are they afraid of it?”

Endresen nodded while pursing her lips, thinking about the question. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she finally said. “I’ve been trying to isolate theorized arcane particles. No luck so far on that. My colleagues…? Lots of things. Novel alchemistry applications. Trying to create myrvite synthetics. Other arcane research—well, some don’t believe in an arcane particle, they’re positing some sort of particle-less field theory which sounds like nonsense to me. The tower’s mostly full of a lot of very fine-tuned detectors good at sensing very small things. I certainly can’t think of anything they’re doing with military applications.”

Mirian cast her gaze upward. “This is going to take so long,” she told no one in particular.

Endresen shrugged.

They helped carry more supplies, as more casualties came in. When the Kiroscent Dome was hit, they mounted a search-and-rescue effort to try and save the citizens and students who had been sheltering there. They had to abandon the effort though, as the airships were growing more daring, and a Baracueli sergeant shouted the rescue party away as observers sighted the airships coming in for another pass. They made their way back to the forum.

Around dawn, there was blessed relief from the attack as the Akanans relented. Skirmishing continued throughout the morning, but the battle had lost a great deal of its intensity.

“They’ve outrun their logistics,” one of Hanaran’s general staff told Mirian triumphantly. When Mirian gave her a befuddled look, she said, “No army moves as fast as the Akanans did forever. To make it that many miles from the coast in only a few days meant doing it without enough supply wagons. They had to carry in all that ammunition they just used, and they’ve probably used most of it. Which is good. We’re damn near out of shells and bullets ourselves. No doubt, supply caravans are bringing them more, but until then, we won’t be pressed so hard.” She looked at one of the maps longingly. “I just wish we had the numbers to circle around and cut them off. Well, and some way to take down those damned airships. I still can’t figure out how they even stay up in the sky!”

Mirian thanked her, and headed for the tent camp with the others. The dorms had all been basically leveled in the fighting, and the buildings in Torrviol were either being occupied by soldiers or were severely damaged and unsafe to stay in, so hundreds of tents had been set up by the lake shore by the fish market. Even with the amount of arcanists Torrviol had, few people had the kind of mana left to routinely cast heating spells, so a few thin blankets were all she had to ward away the morning chill. She slept poorly, waking when a stray shell landed nearby or to raised voices as people argued.

Some shift in noise levels startled her awake. When she left from the tent, blinking at the bright day, she saw soldiers and artillery moving in their direction. She realized they were hastily trying to erect another defensive line.

“Castle Bainrose has fallen,” a woman with a militia band tied around her arm told her when she asked.

“Where’s General Hanaran?”

“No one knows. Rumor is she died in the fighting. The Akanans used some sort of new magical weapon that brought down the east wall. It was like a geyser of energy. We’re all just praying they only could use it once.”

Mirian felt her heart race, and the grogginess of sleep fell off. That wasn’t the Akanans, she knew. In the distance, she could just make out the bulk of Bainrose through the dust and smoke, but the low elevation of the area and the other tall buildings were blocking too much. She needed a better view.

She made her way to the Artificer’s Tower, ignoring several soldiers who told her it wasn’t safe.

Only one of the skybridges between buildings was still intact. Mirian crossed to the center. The Kiroscent Dome was no longer blocking her view; it had been demolished completely. A massive crater had opened up near Bainrose. She could still see residual energy crackling through it, a mix of violet and orange, the colors so intense they seemed more like afterimages than anything real.

A gunshot sounded out and pinged the bridge. Mirian ducked back into the building. The eruptions happen here, she realized. She just had to survive long enough to see them.

Mirian made her way back down the lake to find Endresen, thinking a physicist must know something about the eruptions, or at the very least, how to study them. She’d just found Lily to help her look when a collective gasp from the crowds of people made her turn.

A bright light was growing over by the plaza in front of the castle. There was a tremendous sound, like arcing electricity. She’d only heard it once before: when she’d seen the leyline erupt. Her eyes widened, and she raised her spellrod to start channeling a shield.

The light erupted, a rainbow of colors that blinded Mirian, even as she threw an arm across her eyes. The crowd gasped and screamed, but for a moment, there was no movement. They were all blind.

Except Lily, it seemed. Her magical glasses could compensate for the incredible brightness. “What’s happening, Mirian?” she asked, shouting to be heard over the electric roar.

“Describe it to me,” Mirian shouted back.

“It’s like… like a giant lightning bolt, but it’s all the colors of the rainbow. It’s gone impossible high into the sky, it—ah!”

As Lily cried out, Mirian’s shield evaporated, like it was a sheet of paper trying to stop a hurricane. Everything was quiet, she realized. The guns had stopped firing, but the spell engines were also silent. When she could see again, she looked down at her spellrod and found all the glyphs had burned away. When she reached for her aura, she realized it was gone entirely—scoured away.

People were shouting and running, but Mirian’s eyes were drawn to the sky. “Look!” she called out. The two airships, glinting in the sunlight high above, were smoldering with magical fire. They hung in the sky a moment longer, then started plummeting to the earth.

She wondered what had happened. Had the Akanans seized the Divine Monument and activated it, not realizing what it would do? Or was something else responsible for the magical eruption here? If the strange monument was a weapon, did the Akanans have one? Was that why the eruptions started as Akana Praediar started its war? And how did any of that connect to the second moon?

She still had so much to learn. Still, it was with some satisfaction she watched the airships smash into the ground, erupting in colossal columns of magical and mundane flame. The earth trembled with their impact. Then, it trembled again, and this time, the shaking didn’t stop.

“I’ll see you again soon,” Mirian told Lily, and gave her a hug. Cracks formed in the ground, bleeding brilliant energy.

Then the world erupted beneath their feet.