The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 118 - Of Bronze and Bindings

The priests' moment of elation quickly turned to confusion. "Wait, it's just you? How did you get through the rock?" one of them asked.

Internally, Mirian groaned. I get to have this conversation again. "I'm the Seventh Prophet," she said simply, then added, "Undeclared. There's not enough time for a declaration through the pontiff, and there's several… complications that make it inadvisable." At least, for now.

Three of the priests stared at her, while the fourth burst out into hysterical laughter.

"Would one of you like to teach me how to make orichalcum?" she asked.

"That's… you really weren't sent by the Order?"

"The entire city is overwhelmed. The initial quake likely killed at least ten thousand, and the antimagic pulse that swept through destroyed most spell engines and a whole lot of spellbooks. The only timeline that is acceptable at this point is a timeline where the leyline eruption does not hit Palendurio. That means I need orichalcum to protect the measurement devices that will help me figure out more about the leyline breakdown. I also think, as a magically resistant material, it will be key in preventing the eruptions in the first place."

One of the priests gawked. "Wait, a leyline erupted next to the city?"

"Yes."

"But you didn't… if you're a Prophet, you would have seen it coming. You would have known. But…"

Mirian bit her tongue so she wouldn't sigh, then explained a bit about the events, summarizing heavily, and the nature of the time loop. "…so in each timeline, you have died, and will continue to die. But in some future, final timeline, you will live. If I can stop the apocalypse. Now, you would think 'stopping the apocalypse' would get people lining up to help me, but you'd be wrong. The usual reaction is disbelief, denial, and often despair. Often, I have to spend several loops figuring out how to convince someone."

By now, the group was looking at her with horror.

One of the priests said, "But you've seen the statue of the Ominian in Their lost Mausoleum?"

"That's right."

"Shouldn't that… and you've described it?"

"I have."

"Shouldn't that alone be enough to have you proclaimed?"

"I have no idea what the criteria are. No one has told me yet."

"God's blood," one of them whispered, which was not a curse a priest said lightly. "Sacred One, we are sorry for our colleagues' ignorance of the cosmic order," he said, kneeling. "If you say it is what you need, then it would be my honor to teach you our craft."

Finally! Mirian thought. For once, people that listen to reason.

Mirian shared out her water and food with them, since they had been trapped there for an entire day. The ventilation shaft, thankfully, remained unbroken, or the priests no doubt would have run out of air long before she reached them.

She learned that only a few select priests within the cults of Shiamagoth or Eintocarst were allowed to learn how orichalcum or mythril was made, and they were sworn to secrecy. But the Prophet was supposed to supersede the laws of all but the Elder Gods.

"The bronze alloy is key," one of the priests explained. "Very few metals can receive the celestial blessing. The blessing is best applied as the metal cools."

Mirian watched as one of the priests went through the process. "First, you must visualize the Ominian's blessing as light that surrounds you. Then, it helps to visualize that light as strands of a web. Hold in your hand the blessed skull of a chimera, and imagine it cutting open the web, until the strands of light flow past the skull and into the bronze."

As Mirian listened, her incredulity grew. "Mana. You're using your auric mana. This is—the visualization process is just like I was taught in the Academy. A chimera's skull is an arcane catalyst. I know how to do this part."

The priests exchanged worried glances. "But channeling arcane energy is forbidden."

Mirian waved a dismissive hand. "Yeah, I don't know what happened with that. I'm sure there's some weird historical reason."

"You mean Pontiff Cornelius Argen's Prime Declaration during the Reign of the Third Prophet?"

She sighed. "I'm sure that was it. Okay, so first you channel definitely-not-mana into the bronze. What next?"

The rest of the process was more complex. The special forge was designed to use mechanical properties to regulate heat, rather than a modern forge that used glyphs for precise regulation. However, for how outdated it was, it did an impressive job keeping the bronze cooling slowly. As mana was fed into the structure by one priest, a second priest started binding it to the metal with high-resonance soul energy from a sacrificed myrvite.

"Can I transfer that soul energy into my own soul repository?" Mirian asked. When they acquiesced, she was pleased to see that the resonance intensity needed for orichalcum only needed to be from something like a mature drake or greater wyvern. Any higher, and she'd have to start hunting bog lions.

The priests continued with the process, showing her which runes were needed. All of them were surprised at how quickly she picked up rune construction.

"This is known as the eighth binding," she was told. "It's layered in this pattern with the second and fourth bindings."

"You don't happen to know the fifth through seventh bindings, do you?" she asked, hopeful.

"Unfortunately not. The bishops should be able to teach you those."

Mirian grimaced. The three bishops had refused to teach her. The other bishops were in Alkazaria, which was where a bunch of Arcane Praetorians and the southern traveler's armies were. She didn't like that. The archbishops would know, but she still hadn't figured out a good, low-risk way to talk to them yet.

Happily enough, though, after two days of instruction, Mirian was producing her own orichalcum. The priests were deeply uncomfortable with the idea that what they'd been doing all along was channeling mana like an arcanist, but Mirian's demonstration of how easy it was for her made it hard to dismiss her.

"There's sure to be a doctrinal crisis after this," one of the priests bemoaned.

"Probably a couple," Mirian said. "I'll… well, I'll try to learn a bit more about the history of it so I can navigate it smoothly. I think that's a long ways away, though."

Another priest said, "It's a horrible way to die. Trapped in a small room, with only air, each other, and your darkest thoughts, and no hope."

Mirian nodded. "I know. I wish… I wish there was more I could do. Always, I wish that." She still didn't know what to say to people about it. For all the cycles she was using to prepare, their fate was determined. They couldn't change it. They couldn't escape it. So many people were doomed to suffer and die. Worse, the more people she met, the more she knew their faces and names, and the harder it was to simply let it happen. Abandoning Jei to assassination. Abandoning Arenthia to execution. Abandoning Beatrice to death in the Labyrinth. Everad would always die alone in the dark, wondering if anyone would come. These priests would die the same way. Thousands would die trapped beneath their own collapsed homes, while Kathera was doomed to be cut to pieces in broad daylight. Lily would die in an Akanan artillery barrage. Nicolas, in that train car. Valen, in the Kiroscent Dome.

It was not right, what happened to all of them.

She found herself grinding her teeth.

"Are you alright, Sacred One?"

"Too much suffering," she whispered. "And none of it had to be this way. No. But I must continue."

After a break, Mirian asked next about mythril and adamantium, which Arenthia had mentioned. She was pretty sure those were the materials that made up the Sword of the Fourth Prophet.

"It's the same process, but mythril usually takes five priests channeling the blessing of… channeling mana, I suppose, into the alloy. And a… what was the term you used? A higher resonance in the soul. And we don't make adamantium anymore. Some was made during the Unification War to help defeat Atroxcidi, but I doubt any has been made since. Mythril requires a special alloy of titanium that requires two rarer metals that are hard to obtain, and adamantium requires both iridium and platinum, the former being one of the hardest metals to obtain in all of Baracuel. Both also require much more powerful blessings from the Ominian. The Order usually contracts with myrvite hunting teams, but since a lot of priests were getting killed during those expeditions, they've all but stopped."

He showed her the formulas, which Mirian recorded and memorized. Mythril would indeed take something as strong as a bog lion. Adamantium seemed to require something on par with a leviathan, which seemed impossible. She wondered how much mana it would take to form the materials, and if it was even possible for a single person to have that kind of capacity. Apparently, the spell resistance they offered was even greater, and she already knew from swinging the Fourth Prophet's sword around that the materials were incredibly strong. Worth pursuing, if I can. And if the Fourth Prophet found a way to bind something to his soul, I'll find a way too. Only, I can do better than a sword.

Mirian decided to stay with the priests, as the end came. She could hardly afford to drill so deep each cycle. It had taken most of a day to even reach them.

They made their way out. The priests were convinced they could get an audience with one of the archbishops, but Mirian had her doubts. The hours were ticking down now, and soon the end would come again.

"I wish I could see the Mausoleum," one of them said with a sigh. "It must be amazing."

"It is," Mirian said. "At first, it was a scary place to dream about, but now, I find it peaceful. I like to walk around it and…." Then she stopped. "The other bindings. The Second Prophet wrote them on the walls."

"He did?"

"I found a note from the Fifth Prophet in one of the lost rooms down here and—"

"Lost rooms? In the Grand Sanctum?"

"Yeah, and there's an unattributed note in one, but it's obviously him. He mentioned… would that… work? Now I have to wait for that dream again."

"A note from the Fifth Prophet, and it's not in one of the vaults. Unbelievable."

After they emerged, they made a cursory effort to meet with the archbishops at Charlem Palace. They were 'too busy to meet' the 'supposed Prophet.'

The priests all had little crises of faith again, but Mirian had to roll her eyes at the ridiculousness of it. "That's how it usually goes," she said. "Thank you all again."

"We have done our duty. I am sorry that so few remember what that is."

They spent their last hour sharing a nice meal together.

The end came again.

***

Mirian spent the next cycle hunting down the metals and souls she'd need for mythril. She decided against renting any of the glyph-forges in Palendurio proper, since though Sulvorath might not understand soul magic, the Deeps and Specter certainly did, and might have people watching any of the forges that could make such an alloy. She ended up hiring a few arcanists and a blacksmith to enhance a glyph-forge in a small town up river of Palendurio. The town processed a great deal of special ores that came from the Casnevar range further east, so most of the groundwork for the project was already laid. With her modifications, they could first process the alloy, then keep the metals at the proper temperature while she hunted around the Casnevar Range for greater wyverns. When she returned, she was disgusted by the shoddy craftsmanship, and had to fix five of the glyph sequences herself.

Her first attempt went poorly, and she realized she needed to reformulate her soul repositories so that they could hold the soul of something like a greater wyvern or a bog lion without degrading it. This tripled the number of runes she'd need on the device, but she found she could still keep the repositories themselves quite small, as long as her runework was precise enough.

Three cycles after her first attempt, she finally succeeded in partially transforming a tiny ingot of the titanium alloy into mythril.

Meanwhile, in the realm of dreams, she hunted for the missing runic bindings.

When she dreamed of the Ominian's Mausoleum, she always started in the throne room, where that colossal statue sat, draped in calcified ichor. She gazed up at the tall, vaulted ceilings, scouring them now not for a place to connect to her memories, but for hidden runes. Hopefully, the Second Prophet wrote them somewhere I can see them.

Not for the first time, she wondered what the nature of her dreams were. Some were clearly symbolic, like the half-burning tree, or the sea where anchors came down like rain, or the endlessly growing forest. Others seemed to be real places, though she had no clue when they had existed. Sometime before humans had walked Enteria, it seemed. But the Mausoleum… it was built under the Persaman Triarchy. Is this what it looked like then, or now? Do I see it before the Second Prophet touched it, or after? Did his writing even survive?

Mirian had heard of lucid dreaming, and tried to apply the principles of it here. I'm holding a levitation wand, she decided.

Nothing happened.

I can fly, she thought, and tried to will that concept into existence.

She failed to do anything of the sort.

She tried channeling, but even if she imagined an arcane catalyst, there was nothing. When she tried to meditate as if she was focusing on her soul, she could see the currents of it swirling, but couldn't figure out how to manifest any sort of effect. When she spoke, no sound came out.

She began to walk the corridors.

For a Luminate building, the Mausoleum was surprisingly devoid of any writing. There was nothing even in archaic Adamic or even ancient Lorcadian. There were just the endless reliefs of strange creatures, carved in black stone. Tendrils frozen in grasp, eyes staring out of the walls, creatures with too many teeth and claws. Many of them resembled the labyrinthine horrors, only they were larger and more complex.

At first, Mirian wandered aimlessly. When the dream came again, she tried going in new directions, though it was nearly impossible to keep a mental map of the place in her mind. The rooms changed as she walked through them, and new corridors sprang up as she approached walls. It wasn't endless, and it was static, she had figured out that much, but the architects had packed a lot of rooms and passages in it. Which of the Elder Gods constructed it, she wondered. And if it happened during the Persaman Triarchy, wouldn't people have watched those same Gods do it? Is there a historical account of it? Or perhaps it was built long before that, and they simply lied about it.

After dreaming of it a dozen times, she finally decided to be systematic about it. She went counter-clockwise, starting with the direction she had dubbed 'west,' though it wasn't clear if that was true, or if 'west' as a concept could even exist in a place where space distorted as it did. Always, the shadows played across the walls, and the light was always soft.

When it came time to go north, past the throne of the Ominian, she paused. It felt sacrilegious to go behind that colossal statue. She hadn't noticed it before, but it was like there was a current pushing her back from going there. For some reason, she had never attempted it.

Willing herself forward, she approached. As the statue grew larger, she felt something, radiating from the marbled skin-like stone. Is that the source of the pressure? It prickled her arcane sense.

Mirian reached out to touch the statue, but couldn't bring herself to do it. Instead, she moved around. Anticlimactically, there was nothing there. But beyond, there was a towering window, some fifty feet up.

There were other windows, high in the vaulted ceiling, but they were always too distant to see properly out of. Mirian approached this one and saw—stars.

More stars than she had ever seen in the night sky, even far from the city, even on perfectly clear nights. It seemed impossible there were so many of them. There was a thick band of them across one part of the sky. Is this what astronomers mean by the galactic band? she wondered, and then wondered if becoming an arcanist had been a mistake after all. It's beautiful, she thought, and couldn't help but stare out at that endless expanse until the dream ended.

Another cycle passed, and Mirian set out from Torrviol for Frostland's Gate to see what kind of rune work she could do with the stronger myrvite souls she could find up that way. She'd start with binding the glaciavore's soul, and see what she could do from there.

This time, she set up a drop point for Valen, Jei, Nicolas and Torres to leave her letters, but did nothing else beyond burning the registrar's files on her way out. A merchant she hired would then pick up the goods from that drop point (there would be supplies mixed in with the letters to be less suspicious) before he set out for Frostland's Gate. Nurea had assured her that the merchant could be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

Hopefully, the lack of any major changes has him on edge, she thought.

She became impatient, waiting for the right dreams, but try as she might, she couldn't figure out how to influence which dreams she had. Each day, she became impatient for sleep, when usually it was the opposite.

One night when she was walking next to the Ominian, across a land of strange stone spires and thick jungles, she tried pushing her thoughts and questions toward Them. The giant statue slowly turned and looked down at her. In those eyes, she saw—

a field of endless stars

a sky full of majestic wings

an expanse of ocean, glittering

rolling hills, covered in amber grass

a sea of trees, trunks the size of towers

and an expanding cloud of shadow, full of burning eyes, and in that writhing smoke—

She woke, heart pounding. How does one communicate with something so… incomprehensible? When she had looked in those eyes, she had felt time stretching back beyond imagination, felt memories with such weight they should have crushed her.

It was just after the myrvite stampede that she had the dream of the Mausoleum again. This time, she turned her gaze back.

There again was a direction she'd somehow never gone, like it seemed wrong to simply turn away from the Ominian on Their great throne.

The hall leading back was colossal, the ceiling so high it felt there should be stars hanging in it. As she walked, it felt for a time like she wasn't moving at all, like she was a ghost drifting through a place out of time.

Then, all of a sudden, the hallway morphed and she was standing in a vestibule. Colossal pillars of star-lit black stood in perfect rows. High above, between the pillars, she could see more stars, but this time, there was a strange glow emanating from below that made those stars fainter.

Blocking the exit was a gargantuan double door. The rings dangling from the handle were taller than she was. What lies beyond these doors? she wondered. From the glow coming from beyond the windows, it seemed like there was something, but though she tried to push against them, they didn't budge.

She turned around to explore the foyer, and that's when her eyes caught sight of faint color, blooming by the wall next to the corridor she'd come from.

Her heart leaped as she walked over to it. All this time, it's been there. Waiting for me to read it.

Gently, she extended her hand, tracing them over the runes. Over three thousand years, it's been here. Written by a hand who knew what it's like.

The instructions were written in a language she didn't know, but seemed to use similar symbols to archaic Adamic. She traced her hands over the symbols again and again, committing them to memory, smiling as she did.

One binding left.