The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

The day before the winter quarter started, Mirian finished hastily assembling her first delving device. It took her almost the entirety of Seventhday to do, and she was exhausted by the time it was finished. It was not her best artifice, but the item would function well enough. The device used a spell called cave detection, which sent out sonic and x-ray shifted light pulses. If cast from a spellbook, the caster would get a vague mental sense of if there was a hollow space behind a solid object, and how distant it was. Since that sense was a mental component, it was far too mana-intensive for Mirian’s tastes. The device could be tuned by three glyphs on the side to detect near, medium, and far hollows. Instead of giving a vague sense, the device had a quartz crystal that glowed if it detected that hollow space. The stronger the glow, the more clear it was a real reading and not something else. The book had advised her that the spell was extremely prone to errors. Too much dense material between the device and the space, and it wouldn’t detect a hollow. Plenty of other things could also trigger a false positive. It was better than nothing, though.

She waited until after dinner, then she took it and the Academy glyphkeys—which she still hadn’t actually used—to Griffin Hall.

On the way there, she practically ran into Valen rounding a corner. Literally; Valen was short enough that she only belatedly saw her.

“Look who it is,” Valen said. “Where are you sneaking off to again?”

Mirian let out a sigh. Of course she would run into Valen. “Sorry, I know sunlight doesn’t quite reach all the way down where you are, but I’m not sneaking anywhere.”

“Really?” Valen said. “Totally normal to be taking the back alleys of the Academy in the evening, I guess. Where are you going?”

“Away from this annoying pest that just appeared in front of me. Why do you always bother me? What did I ever do to you?”

Valen seemed confused by this. “Can a girl not catch up with her fellow classmate?”

Mirian was usually in good control of her temper. She had, after all, had a lot of practice controlling it, ever since she was little. However today she was tired from relentlessly working and studying for days on end, having done almost nothing to actually relax. Before she even knew what she was doing, she’d shoved Valen against the alley wall with one hand and was holding her there, fingers pressed against her collarbone. She loomed over her, bringing her face close to the shorter girl’s and said in a low voice, “I am not in the mood for this shit. Leave. Me. Alone. Understood?”

Valen’s eyes had gone wide, and with her palm against her chest, Mirian could feel the other girl’s heart beating fast. In the silence of the evening, she could hear her breath. Valen made to move forward, but Mirian held her fast. Finally, Valen said in a meek voice that didn’t at all sound like her, “Yes. Got it. Yes.”

Mirian let her go, then stormed off down the alley, the anger she felt still radiating off her. She didn’t look back. That was stupid, she mentally berated herself. She could report you to the Academy. Or the guards. There was never any one thing with that girl. It was just a thousand little barbs. And what the hell did she mean by ‘sneaking off again’ anyways? That implied she’d seen Mirian on another late-night adventure. Was Valen stalking her? Now she did look back, but didn’t see her.

What was wrong with that girl?

She was annoyed at herself for letting such a small thing get to her. Maybe that’s what Valen needed, though. Maybe she would finally leave Mirian alone.

The street that Griffin Hall was on was practically deserted at this hour. A few students here or there walked about, or one of the townsfolk. Mirian sat on the nearby bench examining her notebook until the street really was empty, then pulled out one of the glyphkeys. She didn’t think the simple locks of the lecture halls would be alarmed, but… well, she had no idea. She’d never broken into a building before.

The first glyph key fit in the lock, but it didn’t do anything. The door was still firmly bolted. She didn’t hear any sirens wailing or magical horns trumpeting, though, so it seemed fine to at least try the keys. The second key didn’t fit. The third key, though, fit and turned in the lock. With a satisfying click!, the door unbolted and opened. Mirian quickly stepped in, and locked the door behind her.

She waited a moment, listening for any sound. When she heard nothing, she cast a light spell. Now that she looked more carefully at the inside of the lecture hall, she noticed something. While the front of the lecture hall facing the street had windows and the two sides had windows, the back where the lectern stood had nothing. And wasn’t the lecture hall shorter in length than the building itself? She retrieved her delving device and powered it up, letting a thin trickle of mana run through it before she sent a stronger pulse into the main conduit. She started by aiming at the back wall. The crystal glowed faintly, but the book had warned her that would happen. When she pointed it at the wall with windows, it also glowed faintly, the spell perhaps triggering off the space between the two walls of the adjacent building. She tried it three more times along the back wall. The third time, the quartz let off a bright flash. Five hells. It had worked.

She mentally marked the spot on the wall. Then she pointed the device at the floor.

When she triggered it, the quartz indicator glowed for a full thirty seconds, and far brighter than it had for the back wall. Damn, she thought. Something was below her. Was that just because of a passage under Griffin Hall, or was all of Torrviol like that?

The light spell winked out, so Mirian recast it. Annoying. She needed to scribe a longer light spell. Though as she closed her eyes and felt at the auric mana around her soul, she could tell her mana was flowing slower, and the current of her aura far more shallow. All the glyph work and spells she’d needed over the past few days had been draining, and she hadn’t given herself time to properly recover. Using the persistent light spell was out of the question; it would drain too much mana too fast.

Mirian looked around for… something. A hidden switch. A disguised lever. She tried pulling on an old sconce on the wall that held a torch before glyph-lights became common. She tried pressing various bricks in the wall. She examined the lectern and looked for a hidden button. By her fourth light spell, she was ready to give up. The damned passage was there, but there just was no way to get to it. Then she had an idea. The passage was old. Old enough it was unlikely to be using the new-style glyph switches that were on everything. So it must be mechanical. If it was mechanical, it was probably metal, and if it was metal, it was probably iron or steel.

She cast her phantom magnet spell. Sure enough, she could feel something in the wall pulling at the magnet when she hovered it close. By tracing where the pull was strongest, she found that there was iron that went all along the back of the wall until it ended abruptly.

She pushed on the brick, and sure enough, a portion of the wall opened, revealing a hinged door and a shadowy passage beyond. Oh, so it had been a hidden brick-switch, she’d just given up before she pressed enough bricks.

The hinges of the door were well oiled, and so was the lever on the other side to close it. Briefly, Mirian had a vision of herself closing it and getting trapped, but she dismissed the thought. Professor Jei had apparently used it after class constantly, so it certainly wasn’t going to do that.

Mirian closed the door behind her. A tight spiral staircase of dark brick descended down a floor, then led her under the building. The tunnel was narrow, but high enough she didn’t have to stoop. The walls were the same dark brick as the spiral staircase, and while they were clearly old and sometimes crumbling, the place wasn’t overly dirty. Likely, Professor Jei had cleaned it with a few spells.

Immediately, she was faced with a decision. The passage split off in three different directions. She closed her eyes and visualized where she was and what direction she was facing. She went right. Bainrose was that direction.

That passage led to a staircase made of slate that went down a level and into another tunnel that ran perpendicular to the one she was in. This tunnel was larger and held up by horseshoe arches of a very different style. The color was faded, but it appeared someone had once painted the stones the same red and white colors of the Artificer’s Tower. Here and there was rotted wood. Then there was a shrill squeak! and a shadow zipped by her. Mirian started, then realized: right. Duh. Rats. Of course there were rats in the underground tunnels below a city.

It looked to Mirian like intricately worked plaster had once lined the sides of the tunnel, but most of it had crumbled away through the years. Mirian now had to once again choose a direction; her little light wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the ends of the tunnel in either direction. She chose right again, still fairly sure that would lead her under Bainrose.

Instead, the tunnel reached a dead-end. Huge chunks of granite rubble blocked off the tunnel, though someone had set up a shrine to Altrukyst, the guiding God, the God of travel. The statue was a smaller one, the kind generally found in a household shrine. Someone had brought it here, then carved the rubble behind it so it vaguely resembled a door. The lantern the statue was supposed to hold had fallen to the ground and shattered, though she could still see the stylized eye carved into the front of it. Strange place for a shrine, she thought.

She headed back, passing the staircase she’d come from. She walked by a place where a thin trickle of water dripped down over white lichen and a yellow slime mold. Then the tunnel was blocked off by thick iron bars. The bars were well-rusted, and she thought she might get tetanus just looking at them. When she kicked one, though, she could tell it was sturdy. Her force-blades and tiny magnet weren’t going to do anything to it, and there didn’t appear to be any sort of door that bypassed them.

Mirian backtracked, this time picking the forward passage. It wound around at slight bends until she was thoroughly disoriented, then ended in another three-way split. She hesitated, and was about to take the right passage when she heard a faint echo. Was it rats? Or voices?

The passages weren’t safe. The spies might be using them, she thought. Maybe they attacked Professor Jei down here. If she was caught down here, it might be a lot worse than dying. There was no magistrate to make sure her imprisonment followed the guidelines of the crown’s law.

There was another reason to head back. Her auric mana was nearly depleted, and though she’d thought about buying a mana elixir, she hadn’t actually bought one. She’d have to explore the underground another time. She headed back the way she came. At least now she knew where one of the secret passages started.

She shut the secret passage, then cast minor disguise so that her hair went from dark to light, eyes went from gray to blue, and facial features slightly shifted. Since it was a new spell for her, it wasn’t great. Close inspection might reveal it as an illusion, but it was dark out now and she didn’t plan on letting anyone closely inspect her. Quietly, she slipped out Griffin Hall and locked the door behind her. Two students walking down the street give her a funny look. It was a bit weird for a student to be leaving a lecture hall this late. She ignored them and slipped down an alley, then let the disguise spell drop.

As she headed back to the dorms, Mirian saw the first flakes of the snowfall that would be covering the campus tomorrow drifting past the glyph-lamps.