The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy-Chapter 170 - Finding the Castrellas

On the 166th loop, Mirian took a train to Cairnmouth, bought some forged papers from the Syndicate, then took a passenger ship to Arborholm in Akana Praediar. She disguised herself as an Akanan soldier and snuck into the fort outside of the city. There, she met a promising young intelligence officer named Troytin.

There was no hole in his soul, nor any marks on it. He did have a strange story about a hole appearing above his bedroom, but was as stumped as anyone as to how it got there. He seemed like a nice young man, though a few soldiers who knew him mentioned that if he got a few drinks in him, he’d reveal something of a mean streak.

Mirian left, satisfied.

Once they docked back in Cairnmouth, she headed straight for Arriroba. By then, the train from Alkazaria to Madinahr was running again, so she spent the journey relaxing and eating significantly more food than her waiters in the dining car expected.

“Hey,” she said, when she saw Granpda Irabi. “Can we talk?”

He looked her over, then saw her eyes. He nodded gently.

“Did you know I was adopted?” Mirian asked as they slowly walked along the trail that led to the cliff overlook.

“Your parents never discussed the matter with me. But, yes. It must have been hard to find out. How did you learn it?”

“A heritability textbook in Professor Viridian’s class. And I can’t remember my childhood, except sometimes I can. But there’s a curse on me,” she said, gesturing to her head. “It does something to suppress those memories, especially if I think too hard about it.”

Irabi nodded.

“When did I first arrive here?”

“You were five,” Grandpa Irabi said slowly. “You were clutching onto your father’s hand. I have never seen a child more scared or furious before or since.”

“My father. My real father?”

“Is Jeron any less your real father because you’re adopted?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I wish they’d told me. I don’t like lies. I like the truth.”

Irabi nodded. “Many say they love the truth, because they like the idea of that, not the reality of it. But I believe you when you say it. Perhaps they should have. But they didn’t. People tell many lies out of love. We can’t fix the past, though. All we can do is move forward.”

Mirian started laughing at that. She knew Irabi hadn’t meant it like that, but it was just too hilarious. She laughed so hard she started crying. It took her a few minutes to recover.

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“I’m a Prophet now,” she said when she recovered. “I live the same month over and over. The past is all I have. There’s no future anymore. Not yet.”

Irabi looked at her. Their eyes met. “That must be hard,” he said at last. “I can see it’s worn on you.”

They started walking again. “What do you remember from back then? I remember my fath—Jeron tutoring me in Cuelsin, then Friian. I remember being angry a lot at school. I remember trying to run away.”

“There was a doctor who came and saw you. Most people in the village thought he was very nice.”

“But not you,” Mirian said.

“Not me. His name was Silou Westerun.”

Mirian felt a twinge of recognition. I’ve seen that name before. Was it in Specter’s papers? Or did Arenthia mention it? She summoned her new spellbook and wrote the name down on her notes page.

Irabi watched this without comment, though his eyes danced with curiosity. “Well, that’s quite the trick,” he said when she was done. “I don’t know much else, I’m sorry to say.”

“If he’s still alive, I’ll find him,” Mirian promised. They walked in silence, winding their way up the cliffs. “It just… it sucks. Knowing your parents have lied to you all this time. That they’re not… why didn’t they tell me? And what happened to my real family?”

“Jeron and Dhelia love you very much,” Irabi said. “They’re on a trip to see you, you know. With Zayd.”

“I know,” Mirian said sadly. “They never make it in time. I miss Zayd.”

They continued up the path. Irabi let a leaf from a nearby shrub move through his fingers before he let it slide away. “Jeron and Dhelia are your family. Your birth parents are also your family. Perhaps it is a blessing. You have two families to love, which is more than most people get.”

Mirian smiled. “I guess I never thought of it like that.”

At the top of the cliffs, Irabi said, “In the end, they are the best ones to explain themselves. No doubt, you will decide whether or not they made a poor decision or not, but first, you must hear them.”

“You’re right, of course,” Mirian said. “I always appreciate your wisdom.”

Irabi smiled, and they watched the village from the clifftop together, letting the breeze tousle their hair.

Mirian spent two more nights there, eating food with other families and chatting. Then, she left. With Troytin gone and Ibrahim still silent, it was time to find her family.

***

In Madinahr, Mirian found an old classmate working the docks. She pointed her towards the office that handled passenger ships, and with a kind smile, she convinced one of the secretaries to check the manifests. Sure enough, her family had departed in the month of Cerelorn, well before the time loop had started.

The ship was routed to Alkazaria. If she knew her parents well enough—and she knew at least a thing or two about them—her mother would want to take a barge up the Ibaihan River, then take the overland trails where they’d then take another ship from Westbay. That would take them to the Florin Principality. Then, they’d head along the west coast of Baracuel where they’d probably stop by Palendurio and Cairnmouth. That was, after all, the same route they’d taken Mirian on when she was little. The only difference is they’d eventually make their way all the way up to Torrviol for Mirian’s graduation.

The question, then, was how far had they gotten. They’d be in no hurry, she was sure, and would want to show Zayd all the sights and shrines they could.

Likely, given the timelines involved, they’d be about halfway through their route.

Mirian took a train through Alkazaria to Westbay, thankful now that Ibrahim wasn’t continuing his assault. She’d have to figure out what the man was up to and if there was any hope of them working together, but now that she had a means of permanently removing someone from the loops, she was in no rush for that confrontation. Unlike Troytin, he hadn’t overtly attacked her, though it was hard to say what he hoped to accomplish with his ridiculous conquest. Maybe he’d realized how stupid it was. Though given that he’d spent ten years grinding away at his personal war, probably not. Well, she could always hope.

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At Westbay, the port office was decidedly a great deal more hostile, and threatened to call the guard on her. Mirian left, then broke into their office at night and went through the manifests herself. The secretary had atrocious handwriting, but so had several of her professors. She was able to decipher it. Sure enough, three passengers, last name ‘Castrella,’ had departed for Florin on the Flower of the Tides. It would be her father who would want to wander the city. There were a great deal of museums and art exhibits, as well as the kind of architecture he found fascinating. Many of his schoolhouse lectures had devolved into asides on building styles and elaborate drawings on the chalk, especially once the other children figured out the right question could cut the time they had for the grammar lesson.

Of course, her mother would be visiting the workshops, where some of the best artisans on the continent came to set up shops, often under the patronage of some wealthy donor.

Mirian spent the day flying along the coast toward Florin. She checked the names of the ships they passed, but none of them were the Flower of the Tides.

The Florin Principality was on the southern tip of Baracuel. Technically, it was autonomous, but given it was a single city with a bit of farmland and a minuscule military, it relied heavily on Baracuel finding it more valuable as an ally than a province. As Nicolus had explained, a great deal of the old Baracuel nobility’s wealth had been hidden in Florinian banks during the Unification War, and then after the war it became a useful place to hide assets.

The city itself was surrounded by colossal walls on the landside, and perforated with canals and docks on the seaside. It brought back vague memories of seeing the shining palace dome and floating through the canals, gaping at the colorful buildings. Of eating fried breaded fish and sweet candies. Of walking through busy streets where well-dressed merchants strode about in embroidered coats.

She used total camouflage to get over the walls without being seen, then found a deserted alley to dismiss the spell. Walking through the wide boulevards and across the ubiquitous stone bridges crossing the canals, Florin hadn’t changed at all from her memory. Well, except everything seemed a bit smaller now. She had been a little older than Zayd when they’d brought her.

Mirian began investigating the inns asking about for the Castrella family. It was a large city, though, and so many travelers and merchants passed through that it had a staggering number of inns. ‘Two dark haired parents traveling with their young child’ didn’t exactly narrow things down.

The innkeepers also tended to be cagey. “We don’t discuss which clients are doing business with us,” one told her haughtily.

A flash of anger went through Mirian. She thought about how she could send the man flying back into the wall. Maybe if he was begging for mercy, he’d be more pliable.

Then she shook her head, dismissing the thought.

Normally, there was a very simple solution for finding relatives. Blood or a scraping of skin added to a divination machine would usually do the trick. But I can’t exactly do that, can I?

After another day of no progress, Mirian went back to her old habits of establishing artifice workshops in her room. She’d chosen a luxurious inn that included a large bathhouse on the third floor that looked out to the ocean, and her room was large and open, full of fluttering translucent fabric rather than walls. She tore a few down in one of the corners and started carving glyphs into the hardwood table.

With a few fabricated bank transfer papers, Mirian had enough silver and gold florins to start throwing at the problem. She hired a large private detective firm, showing the investigators a fully formed illusion of her parents and little brother so they’d know them by sight.

“Don’t interact with them at all. As soon as you know where they are or where they’re staying, you get a bonus in gold,” she told them.

It was a strange request, but the corporations of Florin prided themselves on their dedication to their clients, and were used to getting odd tasks from the wealthy families that hired them.

It took four days. By noon of the 22nd, they’d found them. Mirian happily paid out the bonus.

Jeron and Dhelia were staying at the Seventh Golden Bloom, though the name was far more pretentious than the actual building.

By then, several strange glowing lights had been seen flickering beneath the ocean, and three leviathans had passed only a half kilometer from the docks, sending the whole harbor into a panic. In the mutterings of sailor’s bars and nervous conversation of merchants, anyone with ears could understand something was terribly wrong, but no one was quite sure what.

Only a few days left, Mirian knew.

She made her way to the Seventh Golden Bloom that evening and waited.

Sure enough, before dinner time, the door opened, framing two adults and a short, tired looking child. It was Zayd who spotted her first.

“Mi-ri?” he said, eyes going wide. When she stood, he shouted, “MI-RI!” and charged into her full tilt, causing one man to swear as he had to swerve out of the way.

Zayd hugged Mirian’s legs with the raw fervor only children could muster. “Zayd,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders since she couldn’t hug him back. “I’ve missed you so much.”

She looked up at her parents. Real enough, she decided. Jeron was looking at her with a wide open mouth. Dhelia’s eyes had gone wide, but then her brow furrowed into stern motherly concern while she tried to figure out what kind of conversation she needed to have with her wayward daughter.

“Mirian,” her father finally said, “Aren’t you… ah, supposed to be attending classes right now?”

“Let’s go somewhere private to talk,” Mirian said. “My treat.”

Her mother asked, “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Quite a bit. I’ll tell you the whole thing over dinner,” she said. “We’ll eat at the Sovereign's Aerie. They have private dining rooms. Hey Zayd! Want to go eat really good food?”

“Yes!” Zayd said, finally letting go of her. His exhaustion had evaporated, replaced by boundless energy.

Mirian picked him up and spun him around, then carried him in one arm.

“Uh… we don’t have the money for that,” Jeron said.

“My treat,” Mirian said, jangling one of her gold-stuffed pouches.

Zayd started babbling about all the sights they’d seen, though his pronunciation still needed work so it was hard to understand him. “We were on a boat! I saw a purple fish and a blue fish but not any red fish and then there was a leviathan and everyone started running around on the deck and I saw them cast spells! That was the second boat not the first boat the first boat was boring. And then we went up one of the spires and I could see eeevverrrything!”—Zayd flung his arms wide, hitting Mirian’s face—“Oops sorry Mi-Ri, anyways, it was really high up and everyone looked tiny then we went to a bunch of temples and Da-Da said they were important so we all had to pray and be quiet like in class. Well, we don’t pray in school but you know what I mean. Oh and we saw a drake from the boat, the first boat not the second boat and I ate a lot of good food it was chicken but it tasted good not like at home but one of them was too spicy and I spit it out but you’re not allowed to do that at a rest-a-ront because it’s against the law. But then we had a soup and there’s candy sticks and I got to eat one because I was good in the temple!”

Zayd continued without interruption until they’d made it to the Sovereign's Aerie, rarely stopping to breathe, and mixing everything around so it was utterly impossible to say what order things occurred in. Clearly, though, he’d been having a great deal of fun. Jeron and Dhelia looked on with growing concern.

“Okay, I’m going to put you down,” Mirian said when they were outside the doors. The Aerie was at the top of a tower that overlooked the bay. “Then I’m going to cast an illusion to make us all look rich and fancy because they have a dress code. You ready to be rich and fancy?” Mirian glanced up to make sure her parents understood she was talking to them too.

“Yes!” Zayd said.

“Rich and fancy people don’t talk much, and they all walk around like this,” she said, puffing out her chest and assuming a haughty look.

Zayd immediately puffed out his chest and frowned as he mimicked Mirian.

“This is going to set back years of etiquette lessons,” she heard her father say.

“Perfect,” Mirian laughed, and had to hold back tears. Gods I’ve missed you, Zayd. She manifested her spellbook and cast a greater disguise, enhanced for multiple targets. She visualized each piece of clothing she was mimicking as light played around them, constructing their outfits piece by piece so that they’d blend in with the richer crowd. Then the spell settled, and she dismissed her spellbook again. The mana cost was exorbitant. It was nothing a sixth year student would ever be able to manage. Already, she could see the look of worry on her parent’s faces. But she wanted to have a proper conversation with them. And if Troytin hadn’t been lying about the other time travelers, she wanted to make sure that conversation wasn’t going to the wrong ears.

They walked into the restaurant.