The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian returned to Griffin Hall after classes, spellbook in hand, and descended into the underground. Immediately, she cast her new reveal iron spell. Faint glows popped up in places she expected, such as a wrought iron railing on the staircase, but there was nothing notable. She walked a few dozen feet, then tried again. Same result. Then again. Finally, she got to the split in the passages, and this time the spell revealed a long luminous line behind the wall. Just like the switch in Griffin Hall, she thought. Mirian cast detect passage next, which was more mana intensive. There seemed to be a false positive telling her the ceiling was a passage—it obviously wasn't, but there was probably a building directly above her—while the other result was just along where the iron mechanism behind the wall was. A few minutes of study, and Mirian found it. In retrospect, it was obvious—the brick was more worn down than the others, polished by fingers pushing into it a thousand times. There was a rumble, and a stone wall a few feet away swung open. Mirian felt the elation of success.

That feeling faded quickly when she realized the passage was another hall that connected, via another secret door, to more of the underground. She wasn't totally sure, but she thought she recognized this section. Mirian wracked her brain, trying to remember the convoluted layout from the map. What she'd found was a shortcut. But at least she had an answer to where Jei usually went: through passages like these. She just needed to find the ones Jei actually used.

She found five more hidden doors in the underground. One led through a particularly gristly tunnel; there was the skeleton of a soldier, still clad in rusting armor, sword by their side. Mirian stepped gingerly around it. Probably not the one she was using. After a few hours, she stopped before she disoriented herself and got totally lost. There was no getting around it. She'd need to make that stupid cartography device again, or she was never going to find what she was really looking for.

***

The next day she had no time to craft the device, though, or explore. She dedicated the day to preparing for her combat certification, crafting not just the usual assortment of wands, but the new ones she'd need for the second level. Then the next day were the tests themselves and registration, and by the end of the Mirian was as tired as grave-dirt.

She'd just barely passed the second certification level. The first level cert hadn't been a problem, but the second level one was. She was too used to carefully channeling spells, while the instructors wanted much faster reaction times, and more power in each spell. Doing both tests on the same day had almost completely depleted her mana, so she spent some time lying in bed considering the ceiling before setting out to eat her second lunch of the day. There was another issue she had to contend with; everything she was doing demanded mana. Reading textbooks was fine, but real expertise came from practice, and she was practicing a lot. Every glyph she set down and every project she worked on also demanded mana, and come second quarter, her teachers would also be having her cast spells. It had never been a problem for her before, but it was becoming clear she needed to work on her aura.

"How do you get more mana for the empowered spells?" she asked Lily that evening. Mirian had insisted they celebrate their success at the trials by taking them up to one of the rooftop diners by the market square. It was cold, but a little heater by the table kept them warm. Both the view and the fare were excellent. She'd gotten a duck kabab and a rich vegetable soup that both tasted even better than they smelled.

"Huh, that's right, you haven't taken those classes. You're really trying to take a 300 level combat class? What happened to artifice?"

Mirian shrugged. "Why not both?"

"I mean, I guess. It worked for Professor Torres, didn't it? There's a bunch of ways you can go about it, but the research is also mixed because measuring auric mana directly is tough. The soul gets in the way with its spell resistance. People can self-report flow, capacity, and generation, but only in relative terms. Then, there's the causality problem."

Mirian knew about that one at least. "Yeah, you can figure out it's increased, but not why. Too many variables."

"Yup." Lily paused to take a bite of her savory pie. The bakers had gotten the crust perfectly flaky. "So, some people think you just get more mana over time, and that's it. Others suggest meditation, though some of them say meditation only works in special places. Then there's the people who say it's just a matter of practicing spells. But if you practice a spell enough, you get more efficient at casting it, which seems like it improves your capacity, but it's just for that spell, so one study we read said all auric mana improvements are illusionary and your auric mana is fixed. But one wizard we studied thought if you practiced stripping your auric mana almost entirely, it's like working a muscle, you gotta really push it to the limits before it grows. Another one said that was totally bogus and it has to do with eating a special diet of myrvites. Then we read another guy who said eating myrvites was probably just producing traces of alchemical mana in the aura, so that was only a temporary improvement."

"What you're saying is: nobody knows."

"Basically." Lily took another bite. "This is so good. How did you know about this place?"

"Lucky guess. Saw it from the market and thought it looked good. Well, that's a lie, I smelled it first. So what'd your professor say?"

"She said it's probably all true, but you have to do it right. There's plenty of evidence that people have increased their mana traits, but some people see way more growth than others. Like, if you practice a spell wrong, you're not going to get better. If you meditate wrong, you're not going to improve. If you don't actually push yourself to your limit, your capacity doesn't improve. And mana generation is almost certainly tied to food because it's tied to your soul which is tied to you and you need food." Lily paused and chewed thoughtfully. "Also, everyone knows you get super hungry after casting a bunch of spells, just like exercise."

The Academy was full of rumors and talk, and Mirian had heard the basic gist of those ideas, but it was good to hear which parts the magical research actually supported. "If we could measure souls directly, that would sure help." Then she blinked, realization dawning on her.

"Yeah, but you can't," Lily said, just as Mirian was thinking I've always heard you can't, but necromancers have to be able to do it. If auric mana can be measured, and they siphon auric mana from souls, they've done it. She leaned back in her chair. So why does everyone say you can't? I can't be the only one who's thought of that. Obviously I can't talk to a necromancer… but maybe Xipuatl knows. If she could learn to sense her own soul, not just her auric mana, she would be able to see if what she was doing was working.

"Well you just got thoughtful," Lily said.

Mirian smiled. "It's a lot to think about. So what do you do?"

"Practice, mostly. When I meditate, I can see my auric mana, but it doesn't feel like I can do anything with it."

"Yeah, same for me," Mirian said. But of course she couldn't influence it. That's why people needed an arcane catalyst to cast spells. That got her wondering—could a catalyst be used in meditation? What did the auramancers that Akana was using do to mess with their auras? And why did every answer she got always lead to more questions?

Overhead, the first stars were coming out, and the Divir moon twinkled brightly. She tried not to think too much about that.

***

The next day, Mirian sold the wands from her first level combat certification to one of the students in her dorm. The more advanced wands, she kept. She'd need them for her classes, and it would save her the time of needing to build a spellrod again. Then, she got to work on making another cartography device. Now that she knew the pitfalls to avoid and what supplies to purchase ahead of time, it only took her most of a full day. After dinner, she headed for Bainrose.

This time, Mirian had made the cartography device slightly smaller so it actually fit in her satchel. She'd still have to get it out to use it, but it wouldn't be quite so suspicious. She headed down to the second basement level, then surreptitiously got out her spellbook and started casting.

Detect passage turned out to be a useless spell. The refurbished catacombs constantly triggered the spell in every direction, including down rows of bookcases. Problematically, the faint light from reveal iron's glow was visible to anyone, so Mirian had to wait until a given section was empty of students before quickly casting it. Fortunately, she had a pretty good idea of where the soldiers had come out, so it only took her three tries to find the hidden steel switch embedded in the wall. Then it was a matter of hunting down the switch. Unlike Griffin Hall, there were no bricks, just thick stone blocks.

Another student came around the corner and caught her poking at the wall and gave her a funny look. Mirian pretended to read a book off the shelf until he left, then went back to searching. Then she realized—there wasn't a switch on this side. She tried using her phantom magnet to press and pull at the steel behind the wall, but as she suspected, it wasn't strong enough to do the job.

She needed to enhance it.

Mirian took out her wand of flame bolt and used one of her tools to pry open the wooden casing. The glyphs that intensified a basic fire spell were almost entirely the same ones that would intensify a magnetic spell. All she needed to do was scribe one more glyph on her phantom magnet page, which she quickly did. Then, she just needed to channel through most of the glyphs in the wand, avoiding the last ones in the sequence, then direct the mana into her spellbook. Mirian clenched her jaw in concentration. What she was doing was dangerous. If she failed to hold onto the direction of the stream, the mana would take the easiest path, which was straight through the fire wand. She had to keep control, or she might cause a flame burst next to a bunch of books.

She could feel the mana flows slipping. She closed her eyes and refocused, thinking not of the path of the mana as traveling through space, but through something else. She thought of the flow diagrams she'd doodled in her journal, and suddenly knew why the mana flow was so hard to control. It just needed to bend—there! Her hands were trembling, but the spell had succeeded. She moved the center of the magnet downward, and to her delight, she heard the rumble of stone. Yes! She quickly entered the passage, then shut the door before any students wandered by. Then she cast a light spell.

Now that she could see it, the lever that opened the door was obvious, and she'd been right—it was only on this side. She placed the second half of the flame bolt wand casing back, though without properly repairing the mana channel she'd broken and re-gluing the case, there was no way she could safely use it. Channeling mana into it after that was liable to make it explode, maybe even igniting the arcane catalyst. Mirian fished out her mapping device and got to work.

The northern tunnels had a very different feel to them than the ones directly under Torrviol. Bainrose's basement may have been made on top of the old catacombs, but the passages north were plainly just old catacombs, and despite what the history books had said, not all of the interred corpses had been moved. The tunnels were narrow and filled with crevasses, making them perfect for hiding rodents that liked to squeak or skitter off just as she was passing them (Mirian only swore loudly twice). If the Torrviol underground had been maze-like, these tunnels were just a straight-up maze. When she walked past a full skeleton that was splayed out in a narrow hall, she wondered if the librarian hadn't been exaggerating when she said several students had gotten lost and died in the passages.

Mirian was glad she'd make the cartography device again, or there was no way she'd make sense of the passages. At each junction, the halls turned at odd angles, then wormed around in anything but a straight line. Alcoves that once held tombs looked at a glance to be another hall, but dead-ended immediately. The sepulchers, shrouded in shadows, made it hard to see how long each passage was. Mirian used red ink from one of her pens to mark a route back to the passage on the map herself. She was about to leave when she saw another skeleton.

Unlike the others she'd seen, this skeleton was complete. It wasn't a piece, and it wasn't decayed, though it did have the gnaw-marks of rats. No, what made it different was it was wearing the uniform of an Arcane Praetorian. The pants had been half-eaten away and the flesh mostly stripped, but whoever had killed them hadn't bothered to take the armor. And it was murder, she was sure. There was the small entry of a bullet in the back of the head, and the forehead of the skeleton was utterly ruined. Mirian didn't need to be a coroner to figure that one out.

Professor Holvatti had said something interesting once: that bones were a lot like rocks. Mirian cast date rock. The spell wouldn't be precise, but it would give a general sense of how long the bones had been lying around. Three years. Very recent, as far as these catacombs were concerned. But—what the five hells did that mean? She was sure she would have heard about a royal guard who went missing in Torrviol.

The personal effects of the skeleton had been stripped, but as the coat had decayed, something had fallen out of the red and silver doublet. It was a letter, she realized. Carefully, she reached under the ribcage to grab it, then gingerly unfolded it. Parts of it were torn or stained dark brown, but somehow, pieces of the note were still legible.

Adria,

…me in Bainrose… show you that will help your inves…

…risky to communicate by lett…

Signed,

…iokli…unn

Mirian tried to make sense of the note. This Adria—she'd been lured down here. But the name of the person who'd sent her the letter was incomplete. And they'd been sloppy enough to leave it, it seemed. Still, this was an agent of the crown. An Arcane Praetorian! Someone elite enough their disappearance or death should have caused notice.

She carefully placed the letter between the pages of her notebook. Then she glanced over. Poking out of a pile of dirt and ash was… a wand. The killer must have missed this, she thought. It was barely visible, and maybe when it had been left, it wasn't visible at all. She picked it up and dusted it off. It had a beautifully polished obsidian handle, and the wood shaft was delicately carved with scrollwork. Despite that, there was no indication of what kind of wand it might be, and deep underground in a narrow passage was not a good place to experiment with it. She stashed it in her satchel, then turned back to her mapping device so she could head back out.

As she rounded the corner, though, she saw movement ahead and froze, fear gripping her. A deep hissing filled the catacombs. From the shadows emerged a chimeric beast, both of its heads fixated on Mirian. The first head was that of a viper, and the second was of a snapping turtle. It was covered in gray-green scales, with a dark shell protecting most of its body. A long tail flicked about behind it. With its bulk, it took up the entire passage.

Mirian had just looked at the map, so she already knew: it was blocking the only way out.