The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 87 - Hiding

The Cult of Zomalator was a small bunch, but what they lacked in size they made up for in eccentricities. They spoke in both the ritualistic language of the Order and the unceremonious slang of the Cairnmouth streets. With Priestess Arenthia dead, the tacit assumption was that Lecne would lead them. Lecne seemed to still be in denial that he was the most senior priest of the sect, and corrected anyone's attempt to give him a new title.

She met Pelnu when she helped out in the kitchens. The Cult had a small alms operation. They made sure the locals stayed fed and healthy, and in turn, the locals made sure everyone understood that no one mentioned the Cult to any authorities. Two of the local gangs did routine patrols around the neighborhood. Pelnu, apparently, had once been a part of the first, and regaled Mirian with various heists and adventures he'd been on with them before joining the Cult.

When she mentioned to Lecne she was surprised that such a man would become a priest, he said, "That's who Zomalator is for. He's the Redeemer. The one who shows us that our past sins don't dictate our future. Who is greater: the man born good, or the man born evil who becomes good by his own dedication?"

That was her first lesson in the heretical God they worshiped.

There were others, too, apparently with similar backgrounds to Pelnu. Tlati had committed some horrible crime that she never mentioned, while Sethra had apparently walked the streets for a number of years before joining. Maruce had been a soldier serving in one of the garrisons down in Persama, but made it clear it was not something he wished to discuss. To each, prayers came as easy as curses, but when they held their sermons for their God, she could feel their dedication in the air, like a prickling electricity. Lecne's proclamation that she was a prophet meant more to them than anything they said to her in words. When they did pray, she knew she was in safe hands.

As long as she stayed hidden, at least. She got restless not being able to leave the temple, but knew it was the best tactic. After examining the wards they had, she gave the specifications of what spells she'd need to Pelnu, who apparently had done some unsanctioned casting as another way to make money. He came back with Mirian's own spellbook and ink set. "Not an easy thing to fence," he said. "Seems they didn't realize how strict the magic shops are with checking arcanist credentials, and the Syndicates don't need this sort of basic shit. Got it for a steal."

"Good!" Mirian laughed. "That's how they got it."

When he watched Mirian scribe several dozen spells purely from memory, he got quiet. "Damn," he said when she was done. "I know how hard that is to do, and damn. It's one thing to know, and another to believe."

Mirian spent a full day reinforcing the existing wards, then another day adding to them. The third day, she worked on inscribed stones that would further disrupt divination in an area, then gave them to Pelnu so he could scatter them all over the city so that the other time traveler's proxies couldn't locate her by process of elimination. He even left one on a train to Palendurio. No doubt legitimate diviners would be annoyed by the widespread disruptions, but her efforts were necessary.

"Your portraits, madam," Lecne announced coming back from the market one day, and slapped down a mass-printed poster. It read, 'Wanted: Mirian Castrella - Warning - Dangerous necromancer - Murderer - Armed with magic - Capable of illusions - If sighted, report immediately - 250 gold doubloon reward if information leads to her capture.'

"They got my hairline all wrong," Mirian said, grimacing at the picture. "And the nose—ugh. That is not what my nose looks like."

"A neat trick," Lecne said. "Money is absolutely worthless if the timeline just resets, so offer as much as you want."

"Not completely worthless. But yes. I generally like to take out the biggest loans I can. As long as they come due after the 5th of Duala."

Lecne snapped his fingers. "We'll do it!" he said. "Pelnu will have all the ingredients he's ever asked for. That'll make a lot of people happy. I think that counts for something."

"If only for a little while," she agreed.

"In the long term, we all end up dead. Even the Gods, on a long enough time horizon. What matters is the path we take. Every path is temporary; here it's just a matter of scale." He sighed. "It is… but it is hard to understand that this me won't… persist. The grand chain of memories, the path of history—will avoid this me. But it is good to know that some me will see Arenthia again."

There were duties Lecne had to attend to, and religious rituals, but when he wasn't busy, Mirian spent as much time as she could learning from him.

"All celestial magic requires a focus," he said at their first lesson.

"A Tlaxhuacan man told me it's made from an 'elder reliquary,'" Mirian said. "Do you know why he'd use that term? He was quite adamant it was the correct translation."

They were in the ritual room, so Lecne's eyes went to the grand painting as he thought. "Interesting," he said. "Not sure. Maybe the higher secrets of the Order have some clues about that. Anyways, all celestial magic requires soul energy to power it. This doesn't mean you have to kill anything, by the way, but you can see why it's easy to accuse people of necromancy if you don't like them. For our purposes, we're going to define necromancy as the subset of celestial magic that involves death magic, disfiguring souls—that's a curse, you know about those—or animating nonliving material with soul energy, which is definitely necromancy. However, if the Order comes knocking, they're not going to give a shit about technical definitions. Their classification of what 'necromancy' is comes down to 'people we don't like using soul magic,' and the Order is ruthless about this. Comes from needing to suppress the pagan religions during Unification War and consolidate power, but I doubt you care about the history."

Mirian had warmed on history slightly, though some parts still seemed boring. "We'll skip that part of the lesson for now," she said. She couldn't see how events that far back could be relevant to her present situation.

Lecne reached back and unclasped an amulet he was wearing beneath his shirt, then brought it out and placed it on the table. It looked like stone, but it also looked like flesh. Something about the texture of the minerals looked like skin under a microscope, though the color was similar to the sarcophagus that was in the center of the room: white, with veins of pale and dark red minerals ran through it. Like Xipuatl's focus, it was imbued with subtly glowing runes, though the material had been kept in its rough, natural form, not carved and polished.

When she touched it, it had the strange unreal feel, but the mood it emanated—she didn't know what else to call it—felt more like the necromancer's wand than the jade bird.

"Runes can only be carved on organic materials. Wood. Bone. Leather. Or paper."

Mirian turned the focus over in her hands. It looked for all the world like a rock. A strange rock, sure, but definitely a rock. "Except for focuses."

Lecne said, "Well, that's the question, isn't it? As I said, the Order might know more about that, but it would be in the higher circles of secrecy, and I never learned those. And I'm not a theoretician. I like celestial magic because it helps people. Very practical."

"So when a cleric heals someone, do they take from their own soul? Or the soul of the person they're healing?"

"For tiny wounds? A bit of both. Practically unnoticeable. But if it's a bigger wound, they're probably using a repository. Well, that's the official term. It's a soul battery. Sounds a bit crass, but that's what they are."

"A soul battery?"

"You use specific runes to bind the soul energy in a container, like a skull or wooden statue. You know how the Order usually has someone blessing animals that are slaughtered for food?"

Mirian's face must have betrayed her shock. "Wait, really? Gods above—so when we're having baduka boar for dinner—?"

"That boar's spirit is also probably helping heal torn muscles or kitchen accidents over at the hospital. It's practical enough; the animal dies anyways. Might as well use all the bits. And the Gods seem not to mind. Well, most of them."

When it was laid out like that, celestial magic felt so much less mysterious. Xipuatl's right, she thought. All magic has to be a unified system. So many of the arcane physical laws seem the same. But as Nicolus would say, the Order has no political motivation to encourage research, because then it's undermining its own power. So they've been suppressing it.

It bothered her to think of the Luminate Order that way. They were holy—she'd spent all her life going to the temple. Yet she had a hard time dismissing the way Nicolus described the forces motivating people and institutions. It had, after all, helped her talk to the power-brokers of Torrviol and mobilize people for the battle. But for the Order especially, she wanted to think better of them. But if they're better, why would the priests turn you in to the Arcane Praetorians? They're not supposed to answer to them.

"I've done all my soul magic so far with plants," Mirian said. "So I know a few runes."

"Plants. Huh. That seems… harder? The focuses don't really interact with their souls very well. They're docile, though, whereas an animal soul will fight you. The instinct to live is powerful."

Mirian certainly could understand that. She still hated the idea of committing suicide, even if she'd seen how it could be necessary for her given the conditions of the time-loop.

Lecne started with basic meditation exercises and soul-observation, but quickly moved on when it was clear Mirian had already mastered that. When he started showing her various runes, though, all of them were new. She'd expected some sort of overlap with what Xipuatl had taught her, but Lecne seemed unfamiliar with the runes she described, and when she attempted to make one with the soul of a garden plant, she was unable to get the rune to manifest using his focus.

"We'll leave plants to the Tlaxhuacans," Lecne said. Then he began instructing her on basic rune creation.

They used roaches—the damn things were everywhere, so they were easy enough to find. Mirian didn't like handling them, so she used a force grab spell to move them into position, then gently impaled them with the world's tiniest force spike.

Lecne just picked them up and smashed them with his bare hands. "Nothing more satisfying," he proclaimed with a smile.

Like arcane glyphs, the celestial runes created spells through complex sequences. And just like how different alchemical reagents were needed to form glyphs, different kinds of soul energy were needed for different runes. The basic runes could use almost any kind of soul, but as Mirian had started to learn from Xipuatl, some runes needed a very specific kind of soul, usually from a myrvite. Then, more soul energy was needed to pass through the runes in sequence, but unlike auric mana, which basically did what you wanted it to, the soul moved about on its own.

Thankfully, Mirian seemed to have a knack for it.

At one point, Lecne stared at her. "This really is your first loop learning from me? I know you said you worked with this Xipuatl guy, but that was plants. This is… are you just messing with me?"

"Promise," Mirian said, and felt very pleased with herself. Soul magic was intuitive in a way that arcane magic never had been. Guiding auric mana felt like using math to calculate how to throw a dart and hit a marked wall. Guiding a soul felt like being able to eyeball the distance and just nail the target.

Each day, Lecne would walk around the neighborhood. On the 8th of Solem, he came back with a newspaper. "Not that I doubted you," he said, handing it to her. One article covered the front page: the catastrophic defeat of the Baracuel garrison, the seizure of all three of the forts guarding the Southern Range passes, and the Persaman rebellion now threatening Alkazaria. The south riverlands were all panicked, and the article demanded the Baracuel assembly call for aid from Akana Praediar.

Ironic, given what was about to happen.

Mirian wondered what this southern time traveler's goal was. Whoever they were, they seemed as uninterested in stopping the apocalypse as this "Sulvorath" who had attacked her in the north. She considered that even if Sulvorath hadn't sicced the Impostor and all her agents on her to stop her from defending Torrviol, this southern rebel might have caused the same outcome simply by drawing Fort Aegrimere's garrison south before Mirian could get it to come north. Of course, if the southern traveler's victories became big enough, the Akanans conspirators hiding behind it all might change their reaction when they saw Persama rising up and threatening them.

This southern time traveler who was leading Dawn's Peace, she felt curiosity towards. She so badly wanted to know the experiences of another person like her, to hear their thoughts, to have another person to work with. But clearly, it was not a mindset she could assume they shared. She would have to approach them from a position of strength, which would be difficult because they'd have an entire army at their back, and a mastery of the region's events.

As for Sulvorath, she couldn't muster curiosity, just a burning hatred.

While she'd focused on protecting Torrviol through magic and strategy, he'd clearly worked to master command of the intelligence apparatus, not just of Akanan Praediar, but of Baracuel as well. By the 12th, Lecne had managed to talk to one of his contacts in the Temple of Four, who in turn sometimes talked in secretive fine dining establishments with other people in high places.

"Whoever is going after you is getting pushback, at least," Lecne told her as they ate dinner. He insisted Mirian sit at the head of the long table, while the priests all sat along the sides. Pelnu had cooked up some sort of delicious stew that was full of vegetables, aromatic spices and tender strips of flank steak and they were all eating it ravenously. "All of a sudden, someone's pushing the manhunt for you hard. Seems to have originated somewhere in the Deeps. Only, the Praetorians have never heard of you, and the magistrate up in Torrviol denies filing the charges. The Deeps come back with a special order, but to do that they have to bypass the mayor, so all his bureaucrats are suddenly dragging their feet on everything, which gets the Deeps to pull back their order. This is all in addition to the city council getting pissed that they're having guards pulled for searches, because the big merchants suddenly have less bodies protecting their shipments, and one of them just got heisted because of that, so they're getting an earful from the big money. Still best to stay hidden, I'd say, but they're no longer putting up the wanted posters, and the consensus is you're some nobody that isn't even in Cairnmouth, so what's the fuss?"

Mirian nodded. "He spent all that time making sure he could manipulate people in Torrviol, but this is probably his first time trying to influence Cairnmouth." She ate another mouthful of soup, and contemplated it. Cairnmouth politics would be complicated. Nicolus had mentioned it a little bit. There were the big shipping companies, but then each of the noble households had a lot of sway. Then there were also the Syndicates, which the Deeps sometimes used, and sometimes did their own thing, but always were looking to keep their illicit money flowing. Then there were the crafting guilds in the west of the city, and the industrialists in the north, and that was just the basics she'd learned about so far.

"Variables," Mirian said, thinking aloud. "There's always going to be background chaos, and the more complex the system, the harder to manipulate it. Do you have contacts in Palendurio?"

"Yeth," Lecne said through a mouthful of stew. "Therth another—'scuse me—there's another branch of the cult there. Why?"

"Nothing yet. But I think I have an idea of how to keep the other guy busy." Even in Torrviol, small changes had meant it was impossible to predict the actions of certain people, even as some events always turned out basically the same. The more chaos she introduced into the timeline, the harder it would be for Sulvorath to see a pattern. Even something simple, like getting a priest down in Palendurio to wave a Persaman flag around in the public square would introduce a multitude of small changes. Hundreds of people would see it, then act differently around thousands of more.

Random changes, meaningless to her goals, and different in each loop, would cause confounding variables to hamper the other time traveler. It was like that airship she'd seen in the forest—probably Sulvorath's now that she thought about it. He could land it in a new place each time, and so the effort he expended to gain an advantage was a hundred-fold less than the effort she would have to expend to find the airship. He wanted to hunt her? Fine. He could have a hell of a time looking.

She started thinking about all the small changes she could make that would require little effort from her, but might have a larger effect on events in different cities across Baracuel. She'd have to target the Praetorians and the Deeps especially—keep them busy so that they didn't actually want to find her. For example, encouraging the criminal underworld to act out in Cairnmouth would put more pressure on the guards and agencies to ignore her. She was a nobody as the timeline started, and she could use that to her advantage.

Then, while the other traveler was busy with that, she could find a way to deal with him.

She had her own advantages. He'd used the Impostor to curse her, which implied that even after all this time, he didn't actually know soul magic. So that would be her first task. If she mastered soul magic here, she could gain a critical advantage.

"Can you teach me to use soul magic to disguise myself? Like what Marva does?" Mirian said at last. An undetectable, undispellable disguise might even let her start operating in Torrviol under his nose.

Lecne took another bite. "I suppose so. We'll get there soon enough, if you keep learning at this pace. But it doesn't work like you think it does."

"Sounds exciting," Mirian said. She was eager to get her new plan started.