The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

In between bouts of research, Mirian had made several preparations for her journey north. She'd enhanced the enchantments on her cloak and bedroll, created a small enough leyline detector that it fit in her pack, and set enchantments into her regular clothing as well. She'd also had the cobbler make her a pair of actual snowshoes, which were a lot easier to use than ones made of ice.

The Endelice Mountains were legendarily nasty. But something was stirring in her. She was tired of watching people making the same mistakes. Tired of seeing the same cruelties and conspiracies. Tired of needing to worry about other prophets. Mirian had a lot of practice at controlling her temper, but she could still feel the hot embers of it inside her.

She decided to go as far as she could, not out of necessity, but because she wanted an excuse to unleash. For all the terror of it, it had felt good to fight Apophagorga.

She set off north, and didn't look back.

Mirian quickly made her way out of the valley that protected Frostland's Gate and hit the frostlands for which the town was named. Coniferous trees quickly gave way to endless stretches of snow. Now that it was Duala, true winter had started piling up snow like dunes. Mirian had given herself seven days to push north as far as she could. The largest eruption had already taken place, but she'd also made herself a crude map that would keep her away from the places she already knew had smaller arcane eruptions.

She set off across the snow-drenched tundra, alternating between walking and levitating. Out in the open, the winds were brutal, sending blinding snow swirling about. Even with her enchantments freshly charged with mana, she could feel the chill of the harsh winds stabbing at her.

As she marched and flew through the tundra, she found a surprising amount of life hiding in the icy desolation. The approaching winter had coated all the world here in deep snow, but there were still plants clinging to life beneath the drifts, still animals huddled in their burrows waiting for a spring that wouldn't come.

Five hours into the first day, Mirian was surprised to find she'd assumed the Lone Pine dervish form without consciously deciding to do so. She was fit enough that her legs didn't ache yet, but she was being hard-pressed by the slog. Always, she was fighting the wind, both when she levitated and when she walked.

At night, she dug a shelter in the snow, then pulled out the leyline detector. She'd added the simple sequence of glyphs that repelled myrvites on a set of parallel mana conduits, then added a detect life celestial spell that would wake her up if a creature with a large enough soul approached.

Sure enough, the blare of a trumpet woke her up at night. Mirian immediately summoned her spellbook and cast prismatic shield. A frost wyrm burst through the snow and lunged at her, circular mouth biting at the shield. She started with a soul-binding to make sure her repositories were charged. Kinetic and thermal spells did little against their armor and ice-coated scales, so Mirian unleashed greater lightning.

Booming thunder echoed across the tundra, the flickering bolts illuminating the night. The wyrm fell over, dead.

Mirian surveyed the night with detect life. There were small burrowing creatures nearby, but no predators. Still, she'd have to move camp; the frost wyrm corpse would attract swarms of scavengers, many of which would attack her if they thought they could get away with it.

She levitated a mile further north, carved out a new burrow, then hunkered down to sleep again.

***

Mirian was attacked twice more that night, leaving her with less sleep than was ideal, but enough for her to carry on. The glaciavore attack near dawn was close enough to when she wanted to set off that she carved up a chunk of the beast and used fire spells to cook it. In the long term, glaciavore meat would damage her liver, but there would be no long term. Six days remained.

By noon the next day, she'd at last made it to the edge of the forest that sat at the foothills of the Endelice Mountains. Here, the conifers weren't the typical pines and firs found further south. Their sap was blue, and shimmered slightly, as if with moonlight. The tangle of roots over the ground was thickened by a blanket of fungal hyphae that resembled hoarfrost. From time to time, the fungus made a loud creaking noise that echoed through the woods. The mushroom-trees that were up here didn't have broad domes. Instead, they were pointy, and mottled blue and white.

That was as much as Mirian had learned in her myrvite ecology classes. Few expeditions had been sent this far north, and fewer still had returned. Viridian had theorized that, given the low solar energy and extreme temperatures, a different paradigm of ecology existed in this forest. Frost wyrms and glaciavores took a lot of energy, and that energy had to come from somewhere. The population density of the large predators only made sense if ambient mana was being taken up at a higher rate by the myrvite flora here.

As Mirian walked through the strange world, she thought he was right. When she passed the pointy mushroom-trees, she could feel subtle changes in the currents of ambient mana. She wasn't detecting the ambient mana directly, of course, but how it pushed up against her aura in different ways. By looking at her aura, she thought she could see eddies and currents flowing through the forest.

She kept walking. The shelter of the forest left paths where the snow wasn't so deep, so she was able to hike most of the day and let her auric mana recover. A glaciavore tried to sneak up on her while she set up camp, but she killed it, leaving her with an easy dinner. Interestingly, the glaciavore's cold aura didn't cause the plants up this way to freeze and burst open. She wondered what properties of the myrvite trees let them do that. Something with the sap, perhaps?

She slept, waking near midnight as several frost scarabites passed by. They approached the ward, but then scrambled away, somehow knowing she wasn't easy prey for them.

Well before sunrise, a snow-crown reindeer walked by. Its massive antlers had a faint golden glow to them, illuminating it with its so-named ethereal crown. It watched Mirian, and Mirian watched it. Then, it headed back into the forest, rejoining a few dozen others of its herd that were grazing. As dawn's light crept above the horizon, they moved along.

As the foothills rose, the forest shrank, then faded altogether. Spread out before her were the towering Endelice, rising up from a sea of gleaming blue glaciers. The sight was otherworldly, but she'd seen it before as she and the Ominian trekked up this way in her dreams. Still, its beauty, not just its temperatures, could freeze her. She inhaled in the sharp, frozen air as she took in the view, then continued on.

Mirian took shelter in a hollow beneath a great cliff. There, she had to repair several of the glyphs enchanting her clothes; the temperatures were cold enough that the enchantments had been overtaxed and broken. As she continued on, she began to channel a warmth spell instead of just relying on charging the wards from time to time.

Another night and day passed, and she reached the true Endelice. Between every mountain was a great glacier. The ice groaned and creaked, the sounds echoing off the cliffs. Mirian levitated up atop the nearest glacier and began to make her way across the ice. She ditched the snowshoes, instead affixing crampons to her boots so the steel spikes would dig into the glacier as she walked.

Above the Endelice, greater wyverns, larger than any she'd seen, circled above. One spotted her walking across a glacier and dove at her, but she sliced it apart with electric force blades as it came down. The wyvern hit the ice hard enough to send small cracks through it. I didn't know they could get that big, she thought.

By the fifth day, Mirian felt like she was fighting the Battle of Torrviol again. It seemed impossible for so many predators to be in the mountains, but they felt as endless as the glaciers and the jagged peaks. She was sleep deprived and even with the Lone Pine form, her muscles ached. Her skin was raw and cracked from the endless frigid winds, and above, the sky stormed with thick clouds that had blotted out the sun; the world was now lit only by the faintest light that bled through the storm and the flicker of arcane eruptions.

And yet, she'd never felt more alive.

She flew again, soaring through the thick blankets of snow falling from the sky, using a low powered force shield to keep the gales at bay, then landed on a mountainside and kept trudging onward. The ambient mana here had changed. It felt thicker here; her aura had shrunk from the pressure. Somewhere in the distance, a wyvern roared, the bellow echoing off the glacial ice, even through the howling winds.

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Mirian stubbed her toe on something, then looked down. A rock, she thought at first, then no, glaciavore carapace. She looked around, eyes straining as they peered through the dark blizzard. More glaciavore carapace was scattered about. Almost as if…

Mirian caught the glimmer of a strong soul in her peripheral vision and whirled, putting up a prismatic shield just in time. A massive creature, like a centipede only as tall as an elephant and covered in blue and white carapace, came scrambling at her, six huge fangs protruding off the side of its mouth. It clamped down on the shield, and the shield lit up with radiant cracks. Its dozens of spiny legs skittered about the snow. The upper ones stabbed down like scythes, sending more luminous fissures through the shield.

An ice carnipede.

She sent a powerful force blast at the creature, then levitated back. When it charged again, she levitated to the side and used electric force blades to slice at the front legs. She severed one of them, and jolts of electricity sent others spasming.

Mirian knew she could fly away. But she didn't come here to run. A giddiness joined her adrenaline. With one hand, she opened up with greater lightning, hitting the ice carnipede with a constant blast of electricity. The colossal creature writhed under the assault, but she could see its soul realigning to fortify its own spell resistance.

She grinned and switched to her mana siphon mixed spell as she levitated to escape another lunge.

The siphon failed to grab hold onto the soul. Hmm, so the binding can only stick if there's an opening. Then I'll make one, she decided. Mirian had studied several curses at this point. There was Specter's wand, the heart-attack wand of the Palendurio assassins, and the wand of the Mercanton assassin who was the back-up plan. She had come up with the spell enervating soulblades. There was no point testing it on small creatures that fell apart to the force component, but here was a perfect test-case: a soul strong enough to resist an archmage.

Mirian cast it. The blades were invisible, but with her soul-sight, she visualized them as sharp shadows slashing at the bright soul of the carnipede. The carnipede twisted and hissed, jabbing its scythe-legs down, cracking the ice beneath the snow. It reared up, and a jagged wave of ice erupted from beneath it, stabbing towards Mirian.

She levitated above it easily, her prismatic shield deflecting the icicles that flew up after her. A fascinating natural spell, she thought. She slashed again, and parts of the carnipede's soul became jagged around the edges. This time when she cast mana siphon, she was able to twist away pieces of its soul with her binding. Rapid necrosis spread through the section of the carnipede she'd just attacked as its soul there dimmed and blackened under the assault. Mirian turned the new mana against her foe, sending another blast of greater lightning at it.

This time, the carnipede turned to run.

"Where are you going?" Mirian shouted above the gale. She used an enhanced lift person to grip the beast and pushed upward on its front, dumping the rest of the siphoned mana into the spell. The carnipede—which had to weigh several tons—flailed as its front end was toppled over. It twisted and flailed, but its thick icy armor gave it poor flexibility. When one side was forced over, the rest of it came with it. It landed on its side, legs scrambling for purchase on the ice.

Mirian switched to lift object, picking a boulder from above. This one did weigh at least two tons. She lifted it over the center of the carnipede, then brought it hurtling down.

There was a loud crunch! of ice and carapace as the boulder smashed into it and the carnipede let out a hissing scream. Mirian used soul siphon alongside mana siphon, using both spells to recharge her, then brought the extra mana to bear again. This time, along with greater lightning, she hammered it with electric blades at the limbs and force drill at its exposed underbelly. She didn't relent the assault, even as it scrambled back upright, only continued to hammer it with a half-dozen force spells, all while continuing to channel lightning. When it seemed weakened, she picked the two-ton boulder up again and smashed it down on the creature's head.

This time, it stilled, and its soul began to dissipate.

Mirian breathed in the air, so cold it felt jagged. This is a good spot, she decided, and went up a few hundred feet where there was a nice outcropping. There, she used shape stone to carve out a cave in the mountainside to shelter in while she started taking data from the leyline detector.

On the last day, she alternated studying the readouts and looking out at the vast mountainous landscape. It felt vaguely familiar. This place… she could hear the Ominian saying, as they'd passed over these lands in her dream. It was harsh beyond belief, completely inhuman, and yet, beautiful beyond description. The way the glowing arcane fires sent glimmers across the deep blue glacial ice was like nothing else.

***

The next loop, Mirian brought Jei up north too.

Lily kept looking at her while they walked through the forest. "But she's a professor," she said, even after Mirian had explained.

"I am merely taking undeniable evidence to its logical conclusion," Jei said.

"It's super weird, though," Lily muttered.

"I've gotten used to it, at least," Mirian said. "Do you mind if I speak Adamic to Jei? It's easier for her to talk."

"You know Adamic?" Lily said.

"Apparently I learned it as a kid before I was taken north for adoption, and then a Deeps necromancer secretly put a memory curse on me, except the curse seems to have trouble interacting with the subconscious, so I kept my knowledge of the language, and can sometimes access fleeting memories. Typical kid stuff," Mirian said.

Lily gaped at her. "That's… so cool! I mean, that sucks. You're adopted? I didn't… I mean…. Okay so Beatrice and I used to pretend we were secret royalty when we were kids, and we'd talk about what we'd do when we were brought back to the royal court and what kind of dresses we'd wear."

Mirian laughed. "I didn't know that," she said. "Make sure you bring that up when we see Beatrice."

"Oh, she'll kill me if I do," Lily said, smiling.

Mirian turned to Jei and swapped to Adamic. "Anyways, I was up in the Endelice Mountains, and I noticed ambient mana readings were different up there. It got me thinking—is that unique to the Endelice Mountains, or does ambient mana vary significantly? In Akana Praediar, it's different, but I think that has more to do with how many spell engines they're using, and how much D-class mana is leaking out."

Jei considered this. "Ambient mana in Zhighua is much the same as in Baracuel," she said. "But that reminds me of an old tale. The… hmm, Adamic doesn't have a good translation for the concept. Let's use the term 'sky-emperors.' The sky-emperors were not regular emperors. They had special mandates, and gained their title by accomplishing some feat of legend. In one tale, Sky-Emperor Sun Shuen traveled deep into Jiandzhi. Ah, wait, that name also translates. Sun Shuen went to the Land of Spires, deep in the jungles of Zhighua. There, she found a place where the ambient mana was different. The term 'ambient mana' is more literally, 'world aura' in Gulwenen. Deep in the forgotten lands, Sun Shuen contemplated the world aura. After she did, the sky blessed her with that aura, and she spread that blessing to Zhighua. Her reign was one of great prosperity. It helped renew the Zhiguan Empire." Jei paused. "Are you still bad at history? This was some four thousand four hundred years ago. Before the First Prophet."

"I'm not as bad at history, I've learned… well, not enough, clearly. Thank you. Wouldn't she be an empress though?"

"The Zhighuan titles weren't gendered. Emperor was the primary ruler."

"Hmm. So these sky-emperors were… extraordinarily powerful. And did great things. Legendary things. Kind of like the Prophets?"

Song Jei gave Mirian a soft smile. "I hadn't made the connection before today. In school, we were taught that time distorts history, and the farther back you go, the more exaggerated the stories become. But perhaps there is some truth to those old legends. Some westerners will crow about how that none of the Prophets were Zhighuan is proof of our inferiority. If it was proven that a Zhighuan Prophet came before the First, I would find great amusement in that. Perhaps one day, you will know for sure."

Mirian smiled. "Interesting." She contemplated the tale as they walked. Lily and Jei made small talk as Jei awkwardly tried to make Lily feel less awkward. It didn't seem to be working. "The ambient mana up north could be different because of the unique ecology. I think that's how Professor Viridian would frame it."

"Indeed," Jei said.

"But, it also could be different because of the massive amount of arcane energy discharging from leylines up north. That was my initial hypothesis."

"Also a reasonable explanation," Jei said.

"But perhaps there are places where the ambient mana… I like that phrase, 'world aura.' If the world aura is different…" Mirian went back into reverie. The Ominian had taken her up north many times. She hadn't been able to think of why. "Is it a clue?" she muttered.

It was worth investigating.