The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do about the shadowy figure she'd just seen. She spotted one of the Torrviol guards in the plaza. He stood out amid the dark cloaks moving about the courtyard, his black, white, and orange tabard bright even in the overcast day. The nearby lamplight glinted off his polished ceremonial plate armor. Each guard also carried a ceremonial halberd, though if it really came to fighting, they had four wands and a revolver at their belt.

She walked over to the man, wondering how one reported something like this. She'd never had to report a crime or anything like that before. "Hi, sorry to bother you."

The guard stood tall, not moving.

Mirian cleared her throat. "It's just… well, this sounds a bit silly, but I just saw a man, well, person, up on the roof, and they didn't look like a student. Atop the flat-roofed red-brick building there," she said, gesturing. "Then he jumped onto the Alchemistry building. His face was hidden. I don't think he's supposed to be up there." Then, still receiving no response, she said, "I just thought you might want to know."

The guard glanced at her. "I'll report it," he said, and continued to stand still, surveying the plaza.

"Great. Well, thank you. I'm… off to class," she said, and walked off. Glancing back, the guard has still made no move to go anywhere or do anything. Apparently 'report it' meant later–much later. Now Mirian felt like a fool, and she needed to get her head on straight because Alchemistry was going to take all her focus. She hoped the creepy cloaked man stayed away from the classroom.

The motto above the Alchemistry Building door read "Respect for the Fundamental Forces of the Universe," and below that, "In Memoriam," and the four names of the deceased, at least two of whom had not respected the magical chemistry they studied in the building. She made her way up three flights of stairs into the room, where Professor Sefora Seneca was waiting at the lectern, eyes on her pocket-watch. Professor Seneca was a middle-aged lady with dark hair and bright eyes who absolutely delighted in the subject. She alternated between excitedly talking about the subject and then surveying her audience of students, eyes full of pity because she could tell they clearly weren't getting it. "It's a complex subject, so it takes a lot of study," she was fond of saying. One student had heard it so much he commissioned a small banner with those words and presented it to her, and so she often would just punctuate a part of her lecture by simply pointing to the banner and looking out at the class over the rims of her thin spectacles.

Mirian hurried into class and hung her cloak on one of the pegs, then took a seat near the front of the room.

The nearby clock tower bell bonged out its six chimes. Professor Seneca snapped shut her pocket watch and began class immediately, ignoring the few students who were hurrying to their seats.

"Alright, class! Today we're going to do a grand overview of the principles of alchemistry. And before anyone asks, yes, this will all be on the exam tomorrow. After that, there will be time for questions."

She hit a rune on the lectern, and the lights dimmed. She hit another rune on the lectern, and a small spell engine installed in the ceiling came on, projecting an illusion spell onto a central pedestal in the front of the classroom. The illusion spell was preconfigured to show the various concepts Seneca described, and the technology still baffled Mirian. The spell-engines she had seen as a kid could heat a building, spin a turbine, or push an object, but nothing like this. The technology was growing in leaps and bounds, and she still felt a sense of wonder at it.

"Remember, we started our class reviewing the types of mana flows. The natural mana that orbits your soul is the auric mana. This is the stuff you have been using in all your spellcasting since your first year, so moving on. It can be used in spell engines, but spell engines are inefficient and extremely mana hungry, so directing your own mana flows into a spell engine is a good way to accidentally get your soul peeled apart, so don't do that."

"Will that be on the test?" a student in the middle row blurted out.

"It will be now!" Professor Seneca happily chirped. "No more interruptions, please. Mana traveling along an organism's aura–that includes humans–is considered in-flow. Think of it as the kinetic force of a moving object, like a river. The energy is in the motion. Your other classes cover that extensively, so we won't dwell on it. We contrasted that with alchemical mana, which is stored in magichemical bonds, much like chemical energy-rich substances like sugar or wood store energy. The three types of magichemical bond are each governed by a different equation."

The illusion in the center of the pedestal changed to show three pictures and three floating equations next to them. Several students in the class scrambled to write them down. Mirian found the color-coded tab in her notebook that was for the class and checked to make sure the equations she had written were correct. They were. Also, she'd memorized them already. Math was the easy part for her.

"Alchemical mana is classified in three ways: One is usefulness to humans. Remember, this form of classification is archaic, but it's still used everywhere so you need to know it. A-class mana is the only mana that is safe to channel. Classes go A through D, and D-class mana will kill you instantly. Again, a metaphor: You can get energy from eating plants. A-class mana is like a carrot. Great. Eat as many as you want. Using B-class mana is like eating plants that will give you diarrhea; you can do it a little bit, but it will hurt. Using D-class mana is like eating a piece of anthracite coal. Yes, it used to be a plant. Yes, there's lots of energy in there. No, you can't use it; don't eat toxic rocks."

She didn't pause, because this was stuff they'd covered back in the 200 level classes, though a few students were hurriedly jotting notes about it anyways. Embarrassing.

"Next, mana is classified on a volatility scale. One is perfectly volatile, which means it is in the process of exploding. Zero is perfectly stable. The average human aura has mana orbiting in a flow of about 0.1. The average myrvite fossil has a stability of one thousandth of that. Incredibly stable, right up until that's disrupted, and then it has an index of 0.9, which is why it kills you if you try to use it. This leads us to the Tarrian-Bolt equations of flow transformations…"

The lecture continued, with the projected equations and diagrams also changing. Here and there, Mirian took more notes, but mostly, it was already in her notebook, written in her neat but tiny handwriting, color-coded, and with tiny equations or diagrams next to the words.

One of her classmates, Nicolus, leaned over at one point to get a closer look at her notes. "Damn," he said, raising both eyebrows for emphasis, then went back to his own notes, which were chicken-scratch that she wondered if even he could read.

Mirian blushed.

Nicolus was one of those handsome types that had his good looks magnified by his easy confidence. Adding to that he was tall, muscular, and apparently came from a very wealthy family. These days, wealthy families tended to send their children to the extremely prestigious foreign schools west of Baracuel, but the Torrviol Academy was ancient and renowned enough that it was still a respectable choice.

Mirian had stayed away from Nicolus, mostly because he was at the center of a great deal of relational drama she did not want distracting her from her studies. She hadn't even noticed he'd sat next to her, which was no doubt causing immense consternation for someone.

She focused back on the lecture.

Next, Professor Seneca covered the third classification, which was magichemical molecule-type. Here, there were a dozen categories, each with a hundred common alchemical compounds. This was what most of the lecture time and labwork had focused on, and also the part that gave Mirian a headache. She had stayed up in the Bainrose Castle Library for hours each night, and she still barely felt like she understood it. It wasn't that Seneca was a poor alchemy teacher, it was just, as she kept saying, really hard.

With five minutes left before the class ended, Seneca started taking questions. Most of the questions were stupid, and just proved that some of the students hadn't been listening, so Mirian tuned them out and paged through her notes.

Nicolus leaned over. "Hey. Want to study together? I have a personal tutor who will help us."

Mirian's heart skipped a beat. Then she felt kinda silly. This wasn't like a date or anything. "Sure," she said. "My last class ends at four o'clock."

"Great," he said. "I'll meet you after that in front of Bainrose Castle, under the gatehouse so we don't get rained on." Then he stood up and left, which got him a glare from Professor Seneca, though she kept powering through the questions without missing a beat. A minute later, the belltower rang out that it was ten minutes till eight, and Mirian headed for her next class.

Myrvite Ecology 351 was in one of the strangest buildings of the campus. On the northern periphery of the academy, the Myrvite Studies building was based on an old granite arena where gladiators used to duel. The crumbling stone walls had been refurbished, and the second half of the arena had been replaced with a modern building of tall glass windows and concrete covered in plaster. The plaster gargoyles and designs showed all the creatures that the arena had once hosted in its glory days: various chimeras, wyverns, bog lions, razor lizards, and more. In the middle of the arena, where the action had taken place, was a resplendent greenhouse, packed with magical plants.

Professor Viridian's classroom was on the fourth floor, overlooking the greenhouse. It was easy to get distracted by the glistening silver petals of the moonlily, or the softly shimmering flames of the fireweed, or any number of the beautiful plants below. Professor Viridian himself sometimes drifted off during a lecture and stared out at the view. He was, Mirian thought, at least pushing seventy, and had such a stereotypical gray bushy beard that he might as well have just worn a sign saying 'wizard' on it.

Viridian was a wizard, which was to say, his primary job at the Academy was magical research. Obviously, most of it involved magical plants.

Today, Professor Viridian had brought another potted plant to class. He rejected all of the newfangled spell engine technology, preferring to show off his examples, writing any notes he wanted on an old-fashioned chalk board. This was strange enough even among the older faculty that they'd needed to wheel a chalk board into the room especially for him.

The plant of the day looked unusually normal for a magical plant. The large leaves were a beautiful mix of maroon and pink, but Mirian had seen mundane plants with red leaves too. Unlike most of the plants, this one was in a pot surrounded by glowing runes. Those were either to protect it–or protect them.

"Regal cordyline, ruby variety," he said, as way of introduction. "There's a mundane species of this plant as well. Note the long, thin, striped leaves. This variety prefers shade and tropical conditions, so you won't see it outside of Tlaxhuaco or a greenhouse. It absorbs ambient mana, like any of the myrvite plants, and produces glycoaurate 15-A." Professor Viridian moved to the chalkboard and sketched out a quick diagram. "Now, you are making a connection. Professor Seneca has made you memorize this compound, because it is used in seventeen different spellbook glyphs. What is its classification?"

The class was silent. Professor Viridian waited patiently. No matter how long it took, he always waited for a response. Mirian didn't particularly like drawing attention to herself in class, so she waited for someone to answer, even though she knew.

Annoyingly, Valen raised her hand to answer. "Glycomyriate," she said, which was, unfortunately, correct.

Mirian didn't like Valen. For five years, she had insulted, belittled, and occasionally started rumors about Mirian. Mirian, for the most part, just tried to stay away from her. Sadly, they both were on the path of the artificer, which meant their classes often overlapped.

"Yes, and what do we know about glycomyriates?"

"Very volatile when their mana flow is destabilized," Valen said, which was also correct.

"Observe," Professor Viridian said. He put on a gauntlet–this was not a small one, either, it was steel plated with prismatic runes glowing along it–which looked ridiculous on his thin boney frame. He then reached through the magic barrier the pot was projecting and plucked a single leaf.

The plant erupted in golden light, activating the barrier which flashed white. Mirian could feel the heat even from the second row. The golden light rose until it was above the plant, then spun in a circle, crackling.

"Observe, the golden crown," the professor said, "hence regal cordyline. Wear proper protective gear, or you're likely to lose your arm. And despite many advances in healing, we cannot regenerate your limbs." Viridian showed off the black singe marks that now coated the gauntlet. Smiling, he dropped the now burnt leaf on the table, and began the lecture.

Professor Viridian was not just a leading researcher in myrvite studies; he was also a fantastic teacher. Mirian found she remembered just about everything he talked about. She'd been lucky enough to have him her first year. Everyone knew that myrvites were what you called the various magical plants and animals, but Mirian had learned from him all sorts of fascinating facts she'd never heard before.

Now, his lectures were equally fascinating, as Professor Viridian described how the ambient mana–untouchable by humans, except for the small amount that accumulated as an aura around their soul–made its way through the whole ecosystem. The process was incredibly complex. He also always connected what they learned to their other classes. Each alchemical compound they were hearing about in Seneca's class was given life as Viridian either brought in a plant or small myrvite creature that produced it.

As he talked, Mirian liked to sketch little pictures of the plants or animals he presented with a connecting diagram. And Nicolus seems to like that, she thought. Friendship with Nicolus would solve a lot of her life problems. Money, for one–the boy was notoriously generous. But he was also very protective of his friends, and bad things happened to people who messed with them.

Four pages of notes later, Mirian left the class, head bursting with diagrams and terms. As she was heading for the stairs, though, she saw something strange: Another cloaked figure, heading away from them down one of the long stone corridors. This time, she knew it was trouble. The corridor led to the myrvite kennels, where several dangerous magical creatures were kept for study.

Someone was next to her. "Did you see that?" she asked, not even realizing who she was talking to until she saw–

Oh, great, she thought.

Valen.

"Sorry," she muttered, "I didn't realize–"

"Yeah," said Valen, which surprised Mirian. "Isn't that corridor forbidden? That wasn't a researcher, they wear that bright warded clothing."

Mirian stood there dumbly, not knowing what to say to Valen of all people being… normal. "We should tell Professor Viridian," she said. "Something weird is going on."