The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

The break passed far too quickly, and soon enough, Mirian found herself walking to class with Lily. By now, the weather had finally turned, so a light snowfall had coated Torrviol in a beautiful blanket of white. Lily, who had grown up with snow, found it annoying. Mirian, who had only ever seen it in the mountains of her home province, couldn't stop appreciating the beauty of it. The way the snow muted the sounds of the morning, the way it turned the pre-dawn world gray and smooth.

She tried explaining this to Lily, unsuccessfully.

"It just means more ice to slip on," Lily said.

"But just—just look at it!" Mirian said. "The world all… matches. It's organized. Clean. I know, I know that beneath it all, there's still all the mud and trash, and I know it gets all gross later, but the first snowfall… it's so nice. And it's spooky, but in a good way."

"Did I mention my enchanted glasses can't see ice as well as eyes can?"

"Oh. Really? Well, sorry."

"I should just get ice-climbing boots with the metal spikes and just eat all the dress-code violation demerits."

Mirian laughed at that.

Lily went off to Advanced Spell Empowerment. She'd passed the prerequisite examination, which they'd both rejoiced about during the break. Mirian went off to Artifice Design 426. This was a far less lecture-heavy class. That also, thankfully, meant fewer students.

Professor Torres had brought a spellrod to the class. "Artifice has come to be synonymous with spell engines, but it actually precedes spellbooks. Our first project will be designing a spell-rod. This one is five hundred years old," she said, as way of introduction.

The class murmured about that. It looked new. The rod was mostly solid brass, with thin tubes and lacquered pieces twisting around the outside like a musical instrument. The head of it was a polished green stone, with a quartz tip at the end.

"Rods are still used extensively in Persama. This one is from before the dissolution of the old empire, which might give pause to your idea that time is a forward march of progress. All that is done can be undone, but this is not a history class. Nevertheless, a spellrod employs an important principal: It is flexible. Wands only have a single pathway and cast a single spell. A rod can achieve the same efficiencies, but can contain dozens of spells if designed properly. I don't expect anyone in the class to produce this kind of mastery, but you will need to draw heavily from what you know about alchemistry and enchantment."

Professor Torres then launched into an explanation of the inner workings of the spellrod, complete with an illusionary diagram that shimmered in the air by the podium. Each rotating ring on the spellrod moved around a chain of glyphs and connecting gold mana channels around. With clever design, the artisan had made it so that each combination of rotations led to a different spell. This spellrod had 80 spells it could cast, which was impressive.

Mirian blinked. One of the books she'd seen in the library talked about the concept. As she wrote her notes, she tried to remember the title.

"…the design re-uses glyphs and channels constantly, and requires a great deal of planning to pull off. It's also much easier to use than a spellbook since it only requires channeling mana through a single conduit in the handle. However, it also requires a great deal more memorization. Unlike a modern spell engine, rods generally do not have an instruction manual that explains which glyphs to press. Your project will need at least nine possible spells."

The rest of the lecture covered some of the theory behind effective design and the material physics. Then, they started working on designs, with Torres roaming about giving suggestions.

Her next class with Professor Eld went about as well as the first. Eld's contempt for his audience always came across in his lectures. Unlike Torres, he wasn't going to give interesting projects, only rote practice and a lot of scathing comments. Mirian bore it, because she needed to. Eld was an ass, but glyphs were the foundation of the arcane professions.

Mirian's third class of the day was with Professor Atger, a man who looked like he'd stepped out of a board room. His silvered hair was freshly combed, and unlike the other professors who wore their normal clothes under the Academy jacket, he wore a full dress uniform.

In his introduction, he mentioned he had, in fact, worked on spell engines for one of the factories, designing one of the components of the spellforge in Palendurio. This didn't seem like that big an accomplishment to Mirian. The first capitol of Baracuel did, after all, have hundreds if not thousands of spellforges in it.

His lectures on spell engine alchemistry were straight from the textbook, though. Mirian was a bit disappointed. Did he really have nothing to add from his experience working for one of the companies?

After the lecture, though, she ran into Nicolus. Again, there were three girls practically mobbing him, but he said something and walked right toward her, motioning that Mirian should join him. "Our one class together, Nurea says. We'll need to study for this one," he said. "He's reading—"

"—straight from the textbook," Mirian finished.

"And the textbook is shit," Nicolus said. "Not my opinion, by the way, that's the opinion of Professor Torres, and she ought to know."

"Huh. Yeah, she would. How did you find that out?"

"One of my cousins on my father's side works in the administrative office in the Artificer's Tower, two doors down from her office. They talk."

"That's lucky."

"Sort of," Nicolus said. "You shake enough trees, you're bound to get fruit eventually. I happen to have a family of tree-shakers. Does Secondday and Fourthday after five o'clock work for you?"

Mirian checked her notebook. "Yeah."

"Hah! You even have a schedule in there. Right, same place. Nurea already has a list of books to look at. We'll divy 'em up and explain them to each other. I've also got one more joining us, real smart kid. Now I've gotta run." Nicolus sighed, and gestured behind him. "Drama."

The geology classes of the Academy didn't have their own special building, just a section of one. Class was just southeast of the Kiroscent Dome, and just north of the Market Forum where Torrviol stopped being an academy and started being a small but prosperous town.

The professor of Geoarcanology, Marcel Holvatti, looked a lot like a clone of Atger, only slightly paler and with more of a hunched posture. He also had thick glasses, and casually wore a hand-lens that dangled off a lanyard around his neck.

The spell engine he used was an older one, but the illusions of geologic rock layers and short animations showing how rock layers got formed were clear and informative.

The lecture felt more like a business presentation than anything academic, with Professor Holvatti constantly mentioning 'return on investment' and 'energy return ratios.' Apparently, he had been a part of Baracuel's Bureau of Industry after several expeditions to Persama. Still, the information was simple and concise, and Mirian found it all interesting. Apparently, myrvite fossils had only formed during a specific period of time, after something called the "Inundation Period" (she'd have to look that up later), but before any bacteria or decomposers had evolved to deal with the magical volatility of myrvites. And apparently, Persama had not always been so desert-y. Holvatti mentioned finding huge palm leaf imprints in the rock, and fossils of jungle raptors and jaguars now only found in Tlaxhuaco. That was interesting to imagine. She drew a little picture of a jaguar looking confused in a desert.

Mirian was glad that the class felt straightforward enough. It needed quite a bit of trigonometry, but only some basic calculus, and most of it was just conceptual, which was easy for her.

Her last class of the day was Artifice Physics, which was back in the Artificer's Tower. Based on her silvering hair, Professor Endresen seemed about as old as the other two professors, but she carried herself very differently. When she spoke about researching arcane energy flows, it was with an unrestrained passion, like if she wasn't speaking to students in a lecture hall she might be out in the Market Forum explaining it to the crowd, whether they were willing or not. Her pale skin and accented Friian placed her firmly in the far north of Baracuel.

"The other forces of the universe are quite straightforward," Endresen was saying. "Heat and kinetic energy can be modeled with very simple equations. Gravity is simple as well, with the small interactions and the Divir Anomaly excepted. But the arcane force is absurdly complex. How is it that an illusion spell can create the complex light and sound of what a person has imagined or drawn? Not only is arcane energy versatile, it can transform into other types of energy. We know the how, but only at a superficial level. The research questions here are notoriously difficult to study, yet there can be no path forward but to attempt to. To succeed in this class, though, you must become comfortable asking questions to which there might be no answer."

Fortunately, though Professor Endresen was constantly making dramatic statements about the mysteries of the universe and the condition of humanity, she also did teach them facts, not just intriguing questions. "To be clear," she told them, "what I am telling you is based on our best evidence. Many times, in research, we discover something we thought was true is not. We understand magic and physics far better than we did a few centuries ago, but even fundamental truths can be uprooted. It will only be those with open minds, who truly consider the reality before them, who will make discoveries."

In many ways, Professor Endresen was the exact opposite of Atger. She presented almost no information that was in the textbook. When a student asked about this at the end of class as they were all gathering their things to leave, she said, "Why would I repeat what you read? If you want the information again, read it again. I'm here to tell you what the textbook cannot."

"It helps me to hear the information, though," the student protested.

"Then read it out loud," she said, and Mirian had to stop herself from laughing as she left the classroom.

***

The second day of classes went much the same as the first. This time, Nicolus wasn't waiting beneath the archway. Mirian stood around awkwardly, waiting to see if he'd show up, then realized he probably was already in the study room and went off to find him.

"Mirian! This is the guy I was telling you about. Xipuatl."

"Close," Xipuatl said.

Nicolus just laughed. "I'm never going to get it right. There's a phoneme he uses I just can't even hear."

"Good to meet you, Xipuatl," Mirian said, shaking his hand. He had a firm grip.

He said, "Well, she got it right." Xipuatl was obviously Tlaxhuaco. His dark skin and facial features would have said as much if his name hadn't. There weren't many in the Torrviol Academy. Really, there weren't many in all of Baracuel.

"His family was Tlaxhuaco nobility, and so when contact was reestablished between Baracuel and Tlaxhuaco, his family married into Baracuel nobility. I had no idea that was even a thing until I met him," Nicolus said.

Xipuatl scoffed. " 'Reestablished contact' has got to be the worst euphemism for what happened I've heard."

"That's the term they used in my history class," Nicolus laughed. "They did worse, too."

Mirian wasn't quite following. She'd never paid too much attention in history class.

Xipuatl rolled his eyes. "Let's get started," he said.

Sire Nurea, whose facial expression had not changed from "unamused" the whole time, started distributing a cart full of library books to the table, which they all started paging through. After an hour of reading and skimming, plus some discussion, they decided on one textbook and two supplements to focus on.

"This one of the ones Professor Torres suggested?" Xipuatl asked.

"She suggested all of them," Nurea said. "Called it 'a good start.'"

"Gods," Nicolus said. "I wonder what it would have been like to be in a class with her. Anyone with an ego about being smart would have had to just slice their wrists open right then and there."

"Anyone can read books. It's just one of many paths to mastery," Xipuatl said. "And one that's often overstated. No book I've read has been as instructional as actually practicing with magic."

"That's more expensive," Mirian said, thinking of all the artifice designs she'd like to practice, but couldn't afford to. And thinking of that crazy-old rod Professor Torres had.

"You need both, though. Practice and theory. That's what held back the Tlaxhuaco. All practice, no theory. Their shamans couldn't compete with battlemagi, which is why they had to cede so much."

"A total misinterpretation of the historical facts," Xipuatl rebutted. "The reason they lost was Baracuel's militarism, honed by five hundred years of warring with each other. It was that their magic was all for war. They still can't compete with Tlaxhuaco's druids." He paused, then said, "Druid's the technical translation, based on the fifteen categories of magic, not our term. And our farming practices are also superior."

Nicolus held up his hand. "Sorry, sorry. I wasn't trying to start anything."

"Well, it's one of the reasons I'm interested in academia," Xipuatl said. "A great deal of Tlaxhuaco knowledge needs to be integrated into the theoretical frameworks Baracuel established."

Nicolus leaned back in his chair, tapping the table thoughtfully. "Do you think it shifts the paradigm like spell engines did?"

"Not in the same way. Spell engines have their own problems, though."

"Oh?"

"What happens when the fossilized myrvite that fuels them runs out?" Xipuatl asked.

"Well, we'll have to solve that in a few hundred years, won't we?"

Xipuatl made a grunting noise that indicated he still had problems with that answer, but by that point, everyone was tired, so they left.

The two boys bickered, but it was an otherwise solid study group. She appreciated how seriously they both took their studies. It was only the second day, but for once, Mirian felt like she had a pretty good grasp on the quarter.

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