The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 101 - Return to Frostland’s Gate

The levitation wand made the long trek to Frostland's Gate much more bearable. Being able to simply fly up the steepest part of the pass saved her a great deal of soreness and an entire day of travel. She was careful not to use it too much, though, lest she get ambushed by myrvites while she was low on mana.

This time, she passed the other traveler an entire obelisk earlier, missing the snowstorm as it hit the pass. The glaciavore was nowhere to be found, which was nice, but it also meant Mirian would have much less money to throw around. With the levitation wand, though, she made it to the village an entire day earlier.

Unfortunately, she wouldn't be able to afford the fancier rooms at the Kivinotsuur yet, so she took a free room. She got her own bed, glyph lamp and washing basin to herself, but it connected to a central shared living space that she'd be sharing with up to six other people, though only three of the rooms were actually occupied. Instead of her own hearth stone, there was one in the main area, and a few tables and shelves that anyone could use. Theft was not a great concern in Frostland's Gate because, well, it was a very small village. Even divination wards wouldn't do much to hide a stolen item, because one could easily find a warded chest by scanning for areas divination wouldn't work and using process of elimination.

Mirian used specific anti-divination wards that would block anyone using arcane magic to look for a focus or orichalcum, hiding the glyphs beneath her bed.

Next, she began moving around the village, her celestial focus from the underground pressed up against her chest, checking the souls of everyone she passed. Gradually, she made her way to the End of Civilization and took a seat at one of the tables. She took out her ink set and began to scribe the spells she'd want again in the Labyrinth, glancing up every so often to scan the souls of anyone new who walked into the establishment.

So far, there were no soul marks, and no other anomalies.

Working with Beatrice hadn't actually been any fun last cycle, so this time, Mirian changed tactics and sought out the other group that was researching the vault, the one led by Aelius. Unlike the Academy's expedition, Aelius didn't ever visit the taverns unless it was to deliver a short message. Instead, he kept to himself in a top floor apartment near the edge of town that looked out on the Endelice.

Mirian went to visit him.

"My name's Niluri. I've heard your team is delving the Labyrinth. Are you looking for more assistance?" she asked.

Aelius looked her over. "Come inside so we don't let all the cold air in. Would you like some tea?"

"No, thank you."

Aelius started brewing a cup for himself as he talked. "We have a formal recruitment process. Usually, that's done in Cairnmouth prior to our journey north."

"I've been contracted to do some research, and part of that means taking samples of Labyrinth structures and myrvites. My fees would be extremely minimal, and I can adhere to any expedition plan you lay out."

That made Aelius brighten. "How 'minimal'?"

"Three drachms per expedition."

Aelius raised an eyebrow. "That's very… low, for a guild mage. Given the dangers involved."

Mirian shrugged, glad that he just assumed she was in the guild already. Beatrice's team hadn't checked for a certification either. "I'm already making money off the first contract. Not enough to hire my own team, though, so here I am looking to be brought on. If you're full, I can talk to the other teams."

The kettle on the stove began to whistle, and Aelius took it off to pour the hot water into his cup. "Tell you what. The soldiers have some energy measurement gear they use to make sure people going on patrol actually can fight. Tomorrow, meet me there after breakfast. If you can manage 70 myr on the tri-point energy meter or can show me sustained spellcasting indicating a robust aura, I can let you on. But I need those numbers, or you're a liability down there."

Annoying, but fair, Mirian thought. She wondered if it was faster to hunt down the glaciavore next cycle, just to speed things up in town. "Excellent. See you then," she said.

She'd also confirmed that his soul was unmodified. Best to see that the rest of the cycle goes about the same as it did the last time. There'd always be small changes, but major changes might indicate another time traveler. Her own presence could be explained away as the manipulations of someone else, as long as she didn't demonstrate clear foreknowledge. Better to be careful.

The rest of the day, she finished up more of her spells, then found a book at the local library about lightweight armor designs. She paid the small fee to borrow it and spent the rest of the evening in the Lager Then Life tavern, surreptitiously checking for signs of soul magic on the population as she read through it. The book was interesting, and gave her some ideas on how she might make something that stopped smaller labyrinthine horrors or knives.

***

It was cold enough the next morning that even Miran's enchanted cloak wasn't doing much. Aelius and the others were clearly used to the cold by now, though.

"Almost done," said the soldier setting up the tri-point meter. Frostland's Gate used a partially collapsed stone wall to back the stone cairns they set up as targets. "Alright, there. Ready. Clear the range!" he announced, even though the range was already clear. Good safety practice, though.

Mirian hadn't actually tested her energy output since her lessons with Archmage Luspire had ended. She'd been somewhere around 60 myr at the time. However, she knew she'd already surpassed that number because she'd stopped the bullets that would have killed Arenthia, and that put her at 70 myr at least. Somehow, she'd taken an upward leap in power in just a few months that wasn't explained just by her normal practice routines. In fact, she'd cut back on practice significantly since Sulvorath's attacks on her.

There was one obvious thing she'd started doing that was different: soul magic. There had to be a connection. At the very least, her exercises in modifying her own soul and manipulating myrvite soul energy had some sort of connection to her aura strength. She could see how the currents of her soul moved faster, and see the echoes of that in her aura.

"Go ahead," Aelius said, watching the meter.

Mirian pulled out her greater lightning wand, made sure the tip was aligned with the tri-point meter's detector. When she had been saving Beatrice, she'd been utterly focused on that one spell. She tried to put herself into that mindset again, then unleashed. The distorted roar of the lightning was loud enough it set some hounds barking in a nearby house, and when she was done, there was a faint echo off the nearby hills.

Aelius looked at the tri-point meter, then back at her, then at the meter again. Then he looked at the soldier, who looked at Mirian, then back to the meter, then back at Aelius, who was looking at Mirian.

"Does it say 81 myr?" Aelius asked the soldier.

"Yes sir, it does," the soldier said.

"Well I'll be damned," he muttered. Then he extended his hand. "Our next delve is on the 14th. Be a pleasure to have you with us."

They shook on it.

***

When the Ennecus Group met at the Labyrinth's entrance, Aelius was already having a tense conversation with the soldiers guarding the door.

"…haven't returned yet," she heard the soldier saying.

"No indication? No message?"

"Nothing. But they're usually quite careful. They brought blocking engines, so maybe… they could be holding out."

Mirian didn't need to ask. She already understood: if the timeline didn't change in a meaningful way, Beatrice, Grimald and Cediri would all die in the myrvite ambush down there.

A deep melancholy wormed its way into her. She'd promised to save Arenthia. She needed to save Torrviol and her friends. But how could she let Lily's sister die?

You can't save everyone, she realized. Jei had said it to her, but she hadn't fully grasped it. She'd have to make choices. Horrible choices.

How can it be this way, Ominian? she asked.

She realized Aelius was talking to her. "—ready, Niluri?"

"Yeah. Let's go," she said.

The rest of the group consisted of another sorcerer and another mage, plus two 'heavies,' which was what Aelius was calling his frontline warriors. Like Grimald, both of them also were wielding warhammers. Mirian checked over their souls as they went down the elevator. Then she was silent, even as the rest of the Ennecus Group talked over their plans.

It was getting hard to pretend to care. How many people had she met while in this time loop? Dozens? Hundreds? How many more would she meet?

She had a purpose, and that was what mattered. What she did in the final cycle mattered, and even that only if she could stop the moon falling. Which meant fighting any of the other time travelers that stood in her way. Which meant figuring out what was going on with the leylines. Which meant…

The elevator stopped, and the team formed up.

"You know how this works, yeah?" one of the heavies, Gromaer, asked her.

"I've done this before," she said.

They crept through the first level in ominous silence, footsteps echoing. The team was on edge, except for Mirian. As they glanced at her, walking with total unconcern, she thought maybe they got more nervous.

Aelius checked and rechecked his map as they moved. Unlike Cediri, he'd opted to use a magical frame device, like what Mirian had made to map the Torrviol Underground, but much less bulky and more robust. Soon enough, they were at the stair to the second level.

"No sign of them up here," the mage said. She'd been casting divination spells. Mirian hadn't bothered; she knew where they'd find them. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, she cast detect blood. Naturally, the blood still running through their bodies was the most prominent signal. But a dim glow suffused the floor of the room and the hall, where the faintest stains still marred the floor.

That was the only sign of the other expedition. Otherwise, they were gone.

"Shit," Gromaer said, keeping his weapon ready.

"Do the horrors ever leave bodies behind?" Mirian asked.

Aelius shook his head.

"Expect an ambush," Mirian said.

"Always," Gromaer said. "Though we might also find nothing. If this damn thing were predictable, I would sleep a hell of a lot easier at night."

They moved forward, also taking a right, then continuing toward the third level, the silence being far more disturbing to the team than a fight would have been.

There was nothing, though.

"Here it is," Aelius said when they got to the shaft that led to the third level. "Perimeter sweep first. It's too damn quiet."

They fanned out, checking the adjacent rooms. All but one was empty.

"Eco-node," the sorcerer called out. "All small stuff."

Viridian had lectured on those. Sometimes, a random room of the Labyrinth would have a bunch of plants and animals usually found on the surface; a small sample of an ecosystem. Usually, the rooms were small, and only held smaller critters among the flora. Other times, they were absolutely massive, and even held megafauna or myrvites not ever found on the surface.

"Where's it from?" Aelius called back.

"Zhighua, from the looks of it. These vines… and the bamboo. Plus I think that's a shimmerbug. So, Zhighua." How a room just under a tundra forest got a bunch of tropical plants and bugs was just another mystery of the Labyrinth.

"Anything… worthwhile?"

"Don't think so, sir."

"Then let's descend."

Unlike the last level, which involved a very nice staircase, descending here meant going about fifty feet straight down. The shaft of stone was smooth and rectangular, except for a few downward sloping protrusions of dark rock with shapes like that of a quartz crystal.

They got out the ropes and anchored them to places in the stonework, then climbed down, with one of the arcanists using lift object on the supplies, then lift person to give assistance to the heavies, since climbing with armor wasn't easy.

Mirian could have used her wand of levitation, but since the wand was illegal to possess, she just climbed like the rest of them.

The entrance to the Vault introduced the first closed door she'd seen in the Labyrinth. Like the Divine Monument, everything about it was clearly the work of the Elder Gods. The stonework was covered by a spiderweb of strange metals, with rings of glyphs around different nodes.

"Took a long time to figure this one out," Aelius said to Mirian. He glanced down at a notebook he carried. The rings of glyphs around the nodes could move, it turned out, and he spun them to match the diagrams in his notebook. As he was spinning the rings, Mirian realized she could see a pattern in the glyphs being used. Archmage Luspire had made her practice reading spells from every different category, and she'd spent so many cycles memorizing them that she realized the symbols on the door weren't at all random.

Something like a xerivar glyph indicated a path of motion, while something like a yili and makrovi paired to outline the first set of coordinates. Other glyphs spoke to different substances, or energy, or indicated an interaction with the caster's mind, such as pulling images or sounds.

The second circle of glyphs, if one read it in a circle, said something like, 'web of metal spreads radially in forty-eight directions,' then listed the coordinates of all four corners of the door, then ended with, 'spin clockwise results in cast forward,' and Aelius had put the glyph indicating 'cast forward' within the brackets of a metallic circle.

It was a door filled with riddles.

Jei had long said that math was the language of the universe, but math could only describe so much. Language, too, had severe limitations. What if the Elder Gods had come up with something more exact? The glyphs were a language, she realized.

For a moment, she was stunned by the revelation. How hadn't she seen it before? The Elder Gods would never say something like 'red cube' as letters or sounds, they would specify the exact wavelength of light and the precise coordinates of each vertex. Were her dreams so different? The Ominan spoke to her, but not through words. It was always through images, and feelings.

"How did you figure it out?" she asked, curious if they'd hit on the same solution.

The sorcerer laughed. "Brute force! We alternated with the other team and spent hours and hours trying every possible combination. We got lucky, though. We were only about a tenth of the way through the different combinations before we landed on the correct one."

The door split open silently, the stone cracking apart along the webs, then floating up to the ceiling where it hovered.

"It stays open until the next shift in the Labyrinth, if you were worried," Aelius said.

The inside of the Vault was different than the rest of the Labyrinth. There were more doors, and more… things. Strange mechanisms that reminded her of workshop tools. Plinths of stone that looked like someone had mushed together all the geometric shapes they'd learned about in math class. Illusionary projections of glyphs, though there were so many she didn't recognize she couldn't make sense of them. Another place in the wall where an illusion showed a strange shape that shifted and distorted as it rotated.

At each of the cardinal points in the middle of the walls were closed doors. They had no handles or apparent opening mechanisms.

"Welcome to the Frostland Vault," Aelius said. "If you see the automaton, shout, and we'll retreat to the entrance. We should have a few hours before it shows up though." To the rest of the crew he said, "Alright, get to work people."