The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian had missed the demonstration—the blackened gauntlet was sitting on the table next to the regal cordyline—but not much of the lecture. She sat at the back near the door, flipped open her notebook and tried to focus.

As the end of class approached, her heart started racing. As soon as the bells started clanging, she was out the door, holding the repair satchel tight to her body so it wouldn\'t clank so loud. She looked down the corridor that led to the myrvite kennels. Sure enough, one of the cloaked figures had just finished opening one of the secure doors. She looked behind her.

Valen was looking, first at Mirian, then down the corridor.

"Did you see that?" she asked, as she had.

"How did you know that was going to happen?" Valen asked, which was not what she said the first time.

"I didn\'t," Mirian lied. Then, she thought of all the rumors Valen had spread, with not a single one she could ever trace back to her. "Well, I\'d heard a rumor. Strange people breaking into buildings, and the Torrviol guards aren\'t doing anything about it. Then at the end of class, I hear a weird noise and… yeah."

Valen looked up at her.

"Do you think we should tell someone? It sounds stupid, doesn\'t it? Who would believe us?"

Valen said, "Mirian, I wish I could figure you out."

Which was not what Mirian was expecting her to say. "Me? You\'re the weird one!"

To that, Valen let out an undignified guffaw.

"Look, if you want to tell Professor Viridian, go for it. I need to get to my next class."

"You and your bag of copper bells are dismissed," Valen said contemptuously, which was more like her usual self.

"Got it, oh short one," she replied, and hurried down the stairs.

She had her Enchantments exam next. As she walked there, she remembered one thing that was absolutely critical: Do not sit next to that one girl. The good news was, they\'d been using the glyphs that were on the exam constantly in the Spellbook\'s class Professor Eld was running next quarter, so she expected to do quite well.

She\'d gotten a D on the exam last time, but there was no way that was happening again. Mirian chose a spot well to the back of the class between two boys, since she had only the vaguest recollection of what the girl who had screwed up her exam looked like.

"Hey," one of the boys said, and waggled his eyebrows, which made Mirian roll her eyes. She picked up her stuff and moved, because no way was she going to get accused of cheating by Professor Eld because some idiot couldn\'t keep his mouth closed.

This time, she saw the blow-up that happened near the end of the exam from a distance. Some boy\'s paper and pen both went flying. But Professor Eld didn\'t dress him down, just snapped "get back to your seat," and to the girl he said, "And don\'t let it happen again." Well that was unfair. If Eld was going to be a dick, he should at least be a dick equally. She finished, this time with a few minutes to spare.

Then, it was off to Artifice Design.

Before class started, she said, "Professor Torres, after my presentation may I leave class? There\'s a leak above my dorm room, and maintenance said they were too busy to fix it, only I haven\'t had time between classes and I don\'t want it to flood my bed…."

Torres gave her a strange look. "That\'s a new one," she said. Seeing the bag of parts, she shrugged. "As long as you\'re here for the other presentations tomorrow and Sixthday. Case studies and feedback cycles are critical to design improvement, and I do not want you to miss it."

"Thank you," Mirian said.

This time, she gave her presentation with only half the "ums" of last time, and impressed Torres by anticipating the first few questions. Then she was out the door, walking as fast as she could to her dorm. It was a long walk between the dorms and Academy, but there was no way she was dealing with a soaked bed again. It was far too annoying to be countenanced. If she needed more time on the repairs, she could skip lunch.

She nailed the plywood into the floor over the third floor hole. The tricky one was nailing one of the squares to the ceiling. That involved a lot of concentration and casting lift object while holding the plywood in place with a broom handle. A good mage might be able to sustain one spell while casting a second. She was not good.

It took her a bit to find the lever, which was actually hidden behind a panel in the wall that she had not realized was a panel. She dumped the storage tin of water out the window, then placed it beneath. A bunch of water dumped out as she undid the broken pipe, but not enough to overtop it, and only some of it sprayed across the floor. With no small sense of satisfaction, she sealed it with the melt metal scroll, which disintegrated as she finished. Scrolls did that. The discount ink and cheaper paper fell apart as energy leakage from the mana channeled through it, but it was serviceable for simple spells you only needed to cast once on the cheap.

Somewhere in the dorms, someone was swearing up a storm because their shower had just lost hot water. Mirian felt no sympathy, but she turned the lever back on. Then it was down to the second floor, where she used lift object to break open the lock. And it was broken, she realized. Oops. Well, she had made maintenance promise not to be mad at her, and also, no one was using the room anyways. With the last hole sealed, she was satisfied. It would at least last until everyone was done fixing whatever those spies were doing.

The maintenance building was locked up when she visited to drop off the satchel. Probably on lunch break, she thought, and rushed over to the cafeteria herself to buy a quick lunch for a few coral beadcoins. Two of them got her a plate of shepherd\'s pie and a bread roll. Thank the Gods for cheap food, she thought. She was absolutely famished. She\'d missed breakfast, and the attack on the Academy had meant she missed dinner.

That thought gave her pause.

Did skipping dinner… count? Had the food she\'d eaten before she woke up again in her bed followed her, or just the memories? After all, the wounds hadn\'t followed her.

Well, it would have to be a philosophical question for another time. She finished scarfing down her food and headed off to Arcane Mathematics.

The lecture made a lot more sense the second time through. She still found herself asking questions, but she was starting to see what Professor Jei was getting at. She was trying to model the path that arcane energy actually took. But she wasn\'t using three spatial dimensions as the coordinates. She was using four.

Mirian tried to visualize what that might look like. Professor Jei seemed to be able to keep it all in her head, but she needed to see it. She sketched out a few basic shapes, but got stuck on modeling a partial rotation. She could tell that a four dimensional path would only ever be visible in part from a single perspective. Worse, people couldn\'t directly see pure arcane energy, though most spells bled some sort of light.

"Why model arcane energy as traveling through an extra spatial dimension," she finally asked, when it was an appropriate moment.

Professor Jei\'s eyes lit up. "Data," she said simply, and for once, she smiled.

It made a sort of sense. Even a simple heat water spell seemed to simply begin at its target destination, with no indication of a space closed between them. That meant the arcane energy was traveling, just by an invisible path. That led her to another question: How had people figured out so much about the glyphs before they understood even the basic math behind it? Why was the mathematical understanding centuries behind the practical knowledge?

It was a fascinating line of questions, and she could immediately see why Jei was so interested in it all. It would also have to wait. Her priority had to be stopping the attack on the Academy. She still didn\'t understand what the spies were doing—it wasn\'t like they needed a map of the Academy, anyone visiting from Akana Praediar could just buy a map of Torrviol for a silver drachm. Maybe it had something to do with why they were attacking in the first place. But she couldn\'t think of anything so valuable that it warranted a war against Baracuel.

And she needed some sort of explanation. What was she going to say? Oh yes, our closest ally is about to launch a surprise attack on a school. Why? No reason, really, these sort of things just happen. How do I know? Well, the Gods gave me a vision of the future. Or maybe it was time travel. Normal stuff. Can you send the soldiers now?

Yeah, that would go over great. Five hells, she couldn\'t even think of what to say to Lily of all people!

She needed to figure out how to contact someone above the guards. The Crown Bureau seemed like the best bet. Only, they didn\'t have an office in Torrviol. And besides, wasn\'t this above that? This wasn\'t just some criminals causing mischief like she\'d thought at first. These had to be foreign agents, or employed as such. That meant she needed to talk to the Deeps, or the military. Well, she had no idea where the secret police liked to hang out. Wouldn\'t be very secret if she did. But they had to have some sort of public office, right? And where was the nearest military fort?

Her next problem was the only proof she\'d gotten was a half-illegible scroll written in Eskanar that she couldn\'t read. And she\'d given it to some random maintenance man! It might not even be proof. It might be a grocery list!

Mirian considered for a moment that even with this second chance, she was so far over her head it was ridiculous. Why hadn\'t the Gods chosen, say, a general of the army. Or a professor. She was twenty-two, and no one was going to take her seriously.

Well, at least she could try.

"Lily, where\'s the nearest military base?" she asked when she got back to the dorm. She was pleased to see her bed was not flooded by gross ceiling water.

Lily looked at her like she\'d sprouted a third head. "I\'m fine, yeah, my day was great, thanks for asking. How are you?"

Mirian groaned. "Sorry. I just… it happened. For me, it feels like it happened earlier today. I know it sounds absolutely unhinged, but… it wasn\'t a dream. The Academy gets attacked. And you…." She started crying, very suddenly. One moment she was trying to stay calm and rational, and the next moment the emotions slammed into her and it was all she could do not collapse.

"It\'s just… you died. I watched it. Everyone died. I died," she said, through tears. "And I have to stop it somehow, but I don\'t know how, and I don\'t even know who I can trust, except you."

Lily came and sat next to her on the bed and wrapped her arm around her. She ran her hand through her hair and whispered, "It\'s okay. It\'s okay," which made Mirian just cry harder.

It took awhile for her to get it all out of her system, and her handkerchief was soaked with tears and snot by the end of it, but she felt better. After one last sniffle, she said, "Thanks."

Lily asked. "I hate to be, uh, skeptical, I mean, I really want to believe you…."

"No, I get it. I\'d be skeptical too."

"…can you… prove it? Like, predict the future?"

"Sort of. Maybe? Like, the last time I did this, Nicolus—the family Sacristar big-shot who always has a gaggle of girls around him—he sat next to me in Alchemistry and invited me to a study session. Which would be tonight, actually, and last time you stayed out late too. But I sat in a different seat this time. So the weird cloaked guy, I predicted—"

"Weird cloaked guy?"

"—but the study session isn\'t going to happen now. Akana Praediar spies are roaming around the Academy, breaking into buildings. No, I don\'t know why." Mirian snapped her fingers in realization. "But they do it again tomorrow! In the library! And they go to the third basement floor where there\'s this huge mysterious door, and made them think it was someone else who escaped out the latrine." She looked at Lily. "I\'m not really helping prove my case."

"What\'s the weather tomorrow?"

"Cloudy with a bit of rain."

"Bad example," Lily said. "What else?"

"If I tell you, that might change it," Mirian said. "I have an idea. I\'ll write down a prediction, and then I\'ll give it to you tomorrow after it happens. I don\'t think I\'ve done anything that would change this one. I might have screwed up the spy thing that happens tomorrow night."

She scribbled down a note, folded it, then got some wax from her desk to seal it shut. "Here," she said. "Hide it from me, and don\'t open it until I say."

Then she sat at her desk and started writing a letter.

"What\'s that for?" Lily asked.

"Trying to convince the Deeps or the military to investigate. I mean, it\'s an invasion force, an army. It wasn\'t small. How did it land without being detected? How did it make it fifty miles inland to Torrviol before there was any resistance? Whatever they\'re doing, there\'s some sort of sign of it. Remember in History 201 we learned about the first battles involving primitive spell engines? When Baracuel and Akana Praediar teamed up to attack the Zhighua coast to open it up to trade?"

"No," she said.

"The army made a dust cloud that could be seen for miles around. And even though they landed miles away, some peasant village that wasn\'t on any of their maps detected them, so the first city that was supposed to be a surprise attack already had its gates closed."

"I\'ll take your word for it. Mirian, are you sure you shouldn\'t just… I mean, one of our professors, or maybe a priest could help you. Maybe even… a healer?"

Yeah, she thought Mirian was crazy. "I\'ll talk to the priest on Seventhday. I always go to the temple then."

The letter went through several drafts. She tried to think of the most plausible way that she could have found out about the attack without any sort of evidence and went with overhearing a blond-haired man with an Akanan accent discussing it with a guard, with money changing hands and all. That covered why she wasn\'t just going to the local guards. She also mentioned seeing the cloaked figures and all the break-ins that the maintenance guy had talked about.

She copied the letter three times. That way, if one of the letters was lost the others would make it.

Next, she had to figure out where to send them to.

This she vowed, though: One way or another, she would stop the attack.