The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy-Chapter 278 - Luamin

Mirian slowed dramatically as she approached the doors of the mountain-sized Elder building. When she was low enough on the ground, she dismissed the camouflage barrier. When no light beam spells attacked her, she relaxed slightly.

She landed, feet touching gingerly down and stared up at the colossal doors. Torrian Tower could have fit beneath the arch.

When she took her first step forward towards them, though, she nearly lost her balance and stumbled forward in the strangest manner. The gravity here is all wrong, she thought. It was like she didn’t weigh as much. Those wizards studying gravity would love to hear about this, she thought. That wasn’t what she was here for, though.

Mirian considered the door. Opening it would take a great deal of force energy, even if the gates were perfectly balanced on their hinges or had some sort of assistance mechanism like the large gates of cities often did. Easier to blink through, she decided. She cast—

—and stumbled backwards, clutching her nose. With a trickle of soul energy, she healed the break.

Elder Gods. They can perceive and live in the fourth dimension. Of course they didn’t leave any holes for me to jump through, she thought.

She cast several divination spells on the door, trying to assess what was on the other side. The door blocked most attempts, which didn’t surprise her. All she could tell was what she already knew—that there was a great deal of arcane energy on the other side. It resisted all attempts to divine the materials it was made of. She sensed no mechanisms or locks, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist, just that she couldn’t sense them.

Nothing for it, she decided, and then used force push.

The doors didn’t move.

Either they were locked, or designed to be heavy enough to move that even her most powerful spells weren’t enough to budge them. She tried using force drill and coruscating beam on a small section, but the spells were both encountering magical resistance and a ward system like the one that had guarded the door to Eyeball’s chamber in Torrviol; the energy was moved around, then dissipated. Gaius’s energy-transformation ward scheme had apparently been inspired by a similar Viaterrian artifact, so if it worked like how she’d structured her own armor, the temperature of the entire door had gone up by, perhaps, a tiny fraction of a single degree. Given their size, they would be able to radiate heat away faster than she could heat them up, so even if she had unlimited mana—she didn’t—it would take more power than she had.

Or, since it was the Elder Gods’ construction, maybe they’d spread the temperature increase across time too, and even every arcanist on Enteria casting at the door wouldn’t be able to make the colossal things so much as warm. The Labyrinth Vaults were designed to be opened.

These gates weren’t.

Mirian ground her teeth and cracked open another cylinder of air. Whatever she wanted to accomplish here, she needed to do now. She didn’t have the mana for a return trip, and she couldn’t sleep since that would release the spells she was using to maintain her air bubble and temperature.

She started levitating again. The spell took hardly any mana here. She flew around the mountain-sized temple, looking for any other sort of entrance, intentional or not. She used her own fourth-dimension divination spells to look for holes or gaps in the structure that she wouldn’t be able to see with her eyes, but could blink through.

Nothing.

If arcane magic couldn’t work and blink was blocked, that left her with soul magic. She stood before the gates and reached out her hand, resting it against the cool material. It felt strange beneath her hand, like the smoothness had a complexity to it somehow. When she moved her hand across the surface, she had trouble even describing the sensation. It was like her hand could easily glide across it, but also like it was being slowed down by spiraling grooves.

She embraced her focuses, looking for soul energy within the door. Open, she commanded it, thinking of the glyphs and runes she used for soul-speech.

Still nothing.

Mirian could sense something else through her arcane sense. It wasn’t arcane energy or soul energy, though. When she focused on the sensation, she felt it prickling by her back. By the leyline repulsors, she realized. She dematerialized one of them, summoned it to her hand instead of to the armor, then touched it to the door.

The door didn’t move, but she felt arcane energy racing about. Not repulsors at all. She’d named them poorly, and only now was she discovering how versatile they might be.

Using it alone is insufficient. It’s like the tools Eyeball and Conductor use, but if simply touching them to the control panel or Gate was sufficient, I would be able to do it now. But it’s not enough. So… what?

She sat down cross-legged before the door and thought.

It was a door designed for the Elder Gods, that much was obvious. It resisted any attempts to force it open, but there also wasn’t an obvious locking mechanism. Merely commanding it to open didn’t work, but it did respond to a tool of the Elder Gods that she’d found in the Labyrinth.

Is it some magic they have I can’t conceive of? Or magic so advanced I have no hope of ever learning it? Perhaps. But that line of thinking was a dead end. She would proceed with the assumption there was a way to open the door, especially because that strange figure she’d seen tracking her back through time wouldn’t have done so if she’d simply gotten stuck at this door.

Mirian imagined walking through the Mausoleum of the Ominian, running her hand over the whorls and spines in the stone, looking up at the reliefs of strange creatures and twisted architecture. There were now thousands of places she’d associated with memories. She thought of the different schools of magic, of hundreds of different artifacts she’d designed, of countless spells and lessons. She walked through places where she’d battled, walked past the places across Enteria. Her hand touched statues that reminded her of myrvites, both plants and animals. She thought of her soul ascensions, of her long conversations with Professor Jei or Torres. Mathematical formulae flitted through her mind alongside design principles, but nothing that could help her here. She thought of countless conversations on politics, on the alloys needed to create the soul-infused metals, on conversations with her father, of looking at her mother’s tomb. Her dead body had looked so peaceful, much like—

She opened her eyes. Soul-infused metals like orichalcum and mythril change properties as the soul infuses them, and when the soul resonance changes. She had tried making a lock before that used orichalcum in the mechanism, which would resist spells that attempted to pick it. However, her own spells had no such difficulty. Imagine a lock keyed to soul energy. One could create a door that only opened for a specific myrvite. Or, a specific person. The other part was the Gods themselves. Xylatarvia’s body had crashed down in the mountains of Tlaxhuaco. The Cult of Zomalator had that painting of the great God being mined. Moving soul energy through the focuses changes its properties. The Tlaxhuacans call the focuses Elder Reliquaries—vessels for Them.

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Mirian had five focuses integrated into her armor. She dematerialized the black focus she’d gotten from her father and held it in her hand. The dark stone looked much like the material that made up the Mausoleum and the flesh of the Ominian.

With one hand, she touched the leyline regulator to the door. With the other, she touched the reliquary of DIVITRIUS. She pushed soul energy through it.

The flows in the gate stirred. She sensed arcane and celestial energy moving about, but the pattern seemed chaotic. Untamed.

It wasn’t enough to just put soul energy through the reliquary. The gate was looking for something more. A specific pattern.

She couldn’t think like Mirian Castrella, nor Naluri Nezzar. Friian, Adamic, Cuelsin, Eskinar—those languages of humans wouldn’t do. She had to think in glyphs and runes. Think like an Elder God.

This place…

It was the Ominian she’d walked with in the dream, side by side. The Ominian who she understood best. She closed her eyes, imagining the places they’d walked. The majesty of the Endelice, glimmering ice stretching around from horizon to horizon. The golden fields of Baracuel, long before humanity had stepped there. Wyverns, pinwheeling across the sky, silhouettes before a sunset of brilliant burning oranges, pinks, and cyans. The great forests of Akana Praediar, before they were burned, seas of green dotted by colorful mycanoid trees. The shining sands of Persama, a sandstorm blowing across the desert like the brushstroke of a painter.

She felt the tears welling up in her eyes. She opened them and looked up.

There it was: glorious Enteria. Her reason for everything. It sat in the void, half shrouded in shadow, half shining with brilliant swirls of color. On the dark side of the planet, she could just make out dancing sparks of orange and violet; eruptions and leylines. Even wounded, it spat out dazzling fire.

She persisted for her family, for her friends—but more, she persisted because Enteria. The beauty of it. Every tragedy, every villain, every child’s game, every heroic action, every love story, existed because Enteria did. From it came, life, and from life was fabricated all the pains and joys that existed.

The currents in the door shifted. Not enough. That was her. She had only seen a fraction of it. What did DIVITRIUS see?

The pains and joys of life were more than just for people. She saw a scimitar lion, roaring triumph over a kill. She felt a chimera, body mutated, cast out by its parent, left to fend for itself. She was a mother drake, sitting still, dreaming of fire. She heard the lithe footsteps of a petal demon, stalking through the jungle. She felt the sorrow of a manticore, looking at a clutch of broken eggs.

Energy was spreading through the door, the flesh of the Ominian its nexus.

Not enough. The sorrows and triumphs of life were more than just the myrvites it was easiest to relate to.

She saw a tree, reaching for the light trickling through a tiny gap in the canopy. She felt the humid breeze passing over a patch of moss on a distant island. She saw a single blue flower growing in the desert, defying the blazing glory of the sun itself. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

And that was not the end.

Enteria contained ecosystems none of them had experienced. The Ominian wandered them, too. And not just in a single lifetime. They’d seen mountains rise and crumble. Rivers burrow into canyons, canyons become valleys, and valleys become seas. They’d seen stars born and wink out. Seen the first steps of humanity on Enteria, and seen Divir’s fall, wiping out the last one. She imagined herself, not just walking along a single path, but every path, and seeing not just what was, but what could be.

They’d seen the best of all possible worlds.

And they’d seen the worst. War on a scale she couldn’t comprehend. Tragedy beyond measure. The death of things in the great void that were beyond her imagination.

They had died. Or perhaps, They had lived. Perhaps it was neither, and They walked an edge beyond her understanding.

She grew dizzy, her mind stretching into unnatural thoughts and shapes. She didn’t feel like a person anymore. She was no body with a soul, but a construction, much like the Ominian’s Reliquary, of compounds and unliving matter shaped into a strange vessel. She began to wonder if such a vessel was necessary. What if her soul could escape it, and flow into the strange construction at her feet.

The door was flush with energy. She felt it pulsing like a heartbeat, like it was as much alive as she was.

She commanded it.

OPEN.

There was a deep rumbling beneath Mirian’s feet. Silver dust trickled down from the gap between the doors as they slowly swung inward.

She gasped as if she’d been holding her breath for days. Her thoughts felt like they were distorted, like when she saw reality, she didn’t see the same thing as before. It took her a moment to remember how to move her body. Took her longer to put her ideas of why she was here and what she intended to do back in order. Her soul had momentarily flowed in different patterns, but it wasn’t like an ascension—it had been something else. Her mind still reeled from it.

Before her, the gate stood open.

She cast a light spell and stepped in.

The inside of the structure was made of strange materials and stranger formations. There were great sweeps of a dark metal arching across the ceiling in helices. Webs of tubes that looked iridescent from one angle, and matte gray from another. The walls and floor were carved with fractal patterns that swirled around each other, and like the flesh of the Ominian, it felt like those patterns formed eyes that bored into her. A strange sound began to emerge, traveling through the floor into her air bubble. The more she focused on it, the less she seemed to be able to hear it. It was only when her mind quieted that she could hear it—like a deep resonance, gradually shifting and pulsing. Beneath that, there was a deep rumbling, like the fires of a forge.

Mirian walked close to one of the walls and peered at a section of it, layering lens spells to better see. Even the complex micro-glyphs carved into the Labyrinth’s structure seemed simple compared to the walls. There were crystal lattices woven together so that glyphic and runic structures interlaced with each other. Mirian could think in glyphs and runes, could improvise spells with that language, but seeing this took her breath away. It was complexity beyond what she could fathom. Subtle energies flit through the walls in waves, moving back and forth like waves in a tub, only much faster. When she tried to get a sense of what was happening through divination, the readings were all jumbled, and she instantly got a splitting headache.

She stepped away from the wall and continued on.

Gradually, she felt the arcane energy intensify. On the surface, she’d felt subtle trickles of arcane energy moving about, but this wasn’t like the leylines. The farther she went, the more she was sure: it was coming from a single place.

After passing more mind-bendingly complex mechanisms, the hallway descended into the depths of Luamin. She continued on and on, and finally, annoyed at the strange half-walk half-leap steps she had to take, resumed levitating so she could speed along her journey.

Gradually, she became aware of another light, deep on the other end of the plunging tunnel. She dismissed her light spell and continued on.

The light grew more and more intense, until Mirian wondered if there was a bloody sun stuck in the wall somewhere. The light was strange, causing the walls to fluoresce with colors she had trouble naming with words. It was only with glyphs that she could hope to describe them. She kept flying. As the corridor brightened, she put up a veil spell to dampen it. She wobbled as she levitated. Something strange was happening to the gravity. She switched over to using force energy to fly; it didn’t take much. At last she came to a chamber.

The chamber was as large, and on each wall were two great devices on either side, each making the most complex spell engines she’d seen look like wooden blocks for a child. A transparent crystal looked out into something beyond, with a third device just next to it.

She peered through the strange window and gasped.

There was a sun down here. The window was looking out into what must have been the center of Luamin. It wasn’t rock, but a great hollow, so large as to be baffling.

And in it, was what she could only describe as an arcane sun. The huge burning sphere took up the entire center of the chamber, casting the spherical wall in a surreal glow. She watched as patterns of fire swirled about its surface.

She’d had a hunch about the nature of Luamin, but she’d never imagined it would look like this.

By the crystal viewing glass was that third machine. This one had several glowing needles sticking out of it, with spaces for dozens more. Temporal anchors.

“This must be what’s powering the time loop,” she whispered.

Behind her, she heard a voice speaking directly to her mind.

“This place is forbidden.”

She turned. There he was: the mysterious man with a jaw of metal tubes.