Nym just stared at the illusion blankly for a good twenty seconds. It looked nothing like what he saw when he looked into his own soul well, but he wasn’t going to tell the healer that. Finally, he asked, “What does this mean? Am I not healing right?”
“I’m not really sure what exactly you’re supposed to be healing from,” Faro told him. “There are some small cracks on a few of these. Look here. This whole section has some. Then there are these large ones here that are completely out of proportion with the rest. If this is matrix destabilization, it’s the strangest case of it I’ve ever seen.”
“Are you… are you saying I was misdiagnosed?” Nym asked. Part of him hoped the answer was yes, but another part was afraid that if it was, then whatever the real condition was would somehow be worse.
Faro just shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with your matrix. It looks like it should still hold arcana, so I’d recommend testing that with a very small amount before you leave. But otherwise, I’m going to have to refer you to a healer I know who specializes in soul well abnormalities. You’re actually in luck there. He works with the army and isn’t too far away right now, though he is also very busy for obvious reasons, so it may be a few weeks before you can see him.”
Nym heard, but he wasn’t really listening to anything after the healer said his soul well would hold arcana. Immediately, he forged a conduit to the first layer, then paused. He hadn’t cast a single spell in weeks now because he was afraid of damaging his matrix further. The healer said he should test it, but what if he was wrong? There was only one easy way to find out. Nym hardened his resolve, pulled on the arcana, and let it start to fill him.
It felt… weird, hard to describe, but definitely not normal. It didn’t hurt at least. That was an improvement over the last time he’d touched arcana. Hesitantly, Nym reached out to the other chair and wrapped it in telekinesis. It floated in the air, straining his arms somewhat with its heavy, solid weight.
He couldn’t stop himself from grinning. After weeks of holding himself back, he was casting spells again. “It works! It doesn’t hurt,” he said.
Second layer arcana flooded into him, and he floated up into the air. He frowned in concentration, pulled in more arcana, and started weaving it into something complex. Thirty seconds later, snow started to fill the air inside the clinic.
“Hey now!” the old healer protested. “I know the place is a bit shabby, but let’s not make it any worse.”
“Oh, this feels wrong now,” Nym said, ignoring the healer. The spell went off, but he was having problems pulling enough arcana through his soul well to keep it powered. He barely had time to realize it before his flight spell cut off and he fell to the floor.
“Oooowwww,” he groaned. “Something isn’t working right still.”
“No, I imagine not. But I must insist that you dispel this snow creating spell immediately.”
“Oh! Right, sorry.”
Nym basked in the coolness for just a moment longer, then stopped feeding the construct arcana. He immediately cast a thermal barrier to keep himself nice and cool. Grudgingly, he extended it to Analia. The strain that generated surprised him, but it was within his limits.
“Okay, so it looks like I can still use arcana, including my biggest, most complicated spells. But I’m struggling to keep things empowered now? I can’t use it as fast as I can pull it in.”
Simple hydrokinesis pushed his ability to pull arcana out of his soul well to its limits. He swept up all the snow, compacted it into a tight ball, and sent it out the window. Not two months ago, what he was doing wouldn’t have been enough for him to really even take notice. He shook his head. It was still better than nothing. And it didn’t hurt anymore.
“Hey!” Analia said. “Pay attention!”
“What? Oh! I’m sorry.”
The healer was talking, but Nym had stopped listening. He was so busy testing his new limits, comparing them to his old ones, and trying to figure out what had changed, that he’d ignored everything else.
Faro sighed. “It’s fine. You’ve just been given good news, of a sort. I understand that you’re excited. But understand that this does not mean you are healthy or that you should continue to use magic. There is something very off with your matrix, and I don’t know what it is. I’ve sent a message spell to my friend, a healer named Doliar Kents. If he agrees to meet with you, he’ll no doubt be able to tell you a bit more than I could. I am afraid he’ll be rather more expensive as well.”
“This has been a good day,” Nym said, still smiling.
The healer just sighed and shook his head. Then he turned to talk to Analia, “When he comes back to us, please let him know what I said. And please write down the best way to contact you so I can let you know when Master Healer Kents is available.”
Analia took care of those details while Nym poked around at his soul well. It didn’t look anything like the illusion Faro had crafted of it, but he supposed that that was just how the divination had organized the information it had given to the healer. He could finally see what the inside of his soul well looked like when he was connecting a conduit to it, filling it with arcana, and expelling it to form spells. Maybe he could figure out why he was having such a hard time releasing arcana at high speeds.
The pair stepped back out onto the hot street a few minutes later, Analia carefully stepping around the small puddle of melted snow near the door as they headed back to the Silver Gilder. “You did the thermal barrier thing?” she asked, looking down at her hand.
“Yep. It’s so much nicer.”
“It is,” she agreed. With a sigh, she added, “You should probably stop now. No license.”
“No one’s going to see this,” he protested.
“Probably not, but money’s tight. We can’t afford the fine just in case someone’s got an aura reading spell going and notices.”
“I guess,” Nym said. He let the spell fail and immediately regretted it when the heat hit him. From the look on Analia’s face, he knew she was feeling the same way. He smirked at her and said, “You asked for this.”
“Hush. Maybe we should look into getting licenses soon. I think I could probably pass now.”
“Ehhhhh, maybe. I want to figure out what’s up with this weird matrix thing and get that fixed first. I need to see that other guy, um… Dal… Dar… D-something.”
“Doliar,” Analia supplied.
“Yeah, him.”
“You’re so scatterbrained today,” she said. She grabbed his arm and hugged it as they walked. “But I’m glad you’re in a good mood.”
Nym blinked and looked down at her. “Uh… yeah… What’s… um…”
She looked over at him, her face the picture of innocence. “Is there something wrong?”
“No?”
“Good, come on. I’m hungry.”
And she dragged him to a restaurant for lunch which thankfully was much cheaper than the places she preferred to frequent. It still set them back one shield two for the meal, but Nym didn’t complain about the price. It was, after all, a fantastic day.
* * *
Analia wanted to talk when they got back to the Silver Gilder, but Nym begged off, saying he was tired and needed to make sure everything was alright with his soul well. They said their goodbyes and each went to their own rooms.
“What was with her?” he muttered to himself.
He didn’t want to offend her, but she’d been weirdly in his space all afternoon. All he’d really wanted was to get back and so he could go over the list of spells he’d jotted down to practice. There were over fifty of them on there, everything from a scent tracking spell to a wide range scry to a few more offensive options. His time on the ninth outpost’s walls had taught him the need for that.
He’d focused heavily on spells to combat undead, expanding greatly on that thin primer volume Analia had found for him, but there’d been enough run ins with human opponents that he’d picked up non-lethal subjugation spells like paralysis, blindness, and smothering aura, and then he’d rounded his arsenal out with a few elemental attacks like hail stones and crushing earth, though those had been much harder to find. Apparently, that kind of magic was heavily restricted.
But it was all academic with no practical experience, and Nym resolved to fix that immediately. A lot of his new spells couldn’t be practiced from his bed, but there were a few that he could work on. Additionally, he wanted a chance to really get in there and study what was going on in his soul well when he used magic.
And none of that was even considering his growing knowledge base in anatomy and medicine. He wasn’t deluding himself into thinking he could rightfully be called a healer, but there were another three or four spells in that category he was eager to try. He was looking forward to refining his pain blocker spell now that he had some official materials to guide him, and he’d picked up two first circle spells as well: quick regeneration and purge. The first sped up natural healing time, and the second was used to expel ingested toxins, which was a fancy way of saying it made people throw up.
Nym wasn’t actually that eager to try that last one out, though it did work on other people. He wished he’d known how to do it back in Palmara when he’d been dealing with that stuck up rich kid, Amos.
Nym used telekinesis to start pulling specific books out of the stacks, the ones that contained the spells he most wanted to practice. He flipped the first one open to the page he’d marked down on his list and started reading. He wanted the directions to be fresh in his mind before he actually tried to cast it.
* * *
Analia didn’t slam the door behind her. That would be unladylike and unbecoming of her. But she wanted to. “Boys are dumb,” she huffed out.
It could have been a nice afternoon, but no, Nym had his head in the clouds the whole time. He didn’t notice any of her hints. She’d had to literally grab onto his arm to get him to pay any real attention to her. That’s what she got for listening to Ophelia’s advice, at least, when it was about Nym.
Ophelia also had plenty to say on the subject of magic, and there, Analia was an eager student. While she didn’t see herself ever going heavily into the field of earth magic, it never hurt to round out her skill set, and the older woman knew a remarkable number of spells unrelated to her specialty. The amount of practical knowledge she’d gained about rune sequences in a mere month of casual conversation easily bested a year of book learning.
Sure, Ophelia was heavily specialized, but the foundation was the same no matter what kind of rune sequence she wanted to write. Some of the things Analia had learned, her books had never even hinted at. Some of those things were flat out wrong, according to the books, but they worked anyway.
She sat down and started mentally composing a message to the older woman about the healer’s news. The Earth Shapers would definitely want to know, and it wasn’t like the idiot boy was going to have the presence of mind to tell them. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered trying with him.
She should take some time to teach him the message spell though. It only had a range of a few miles before it started getting expensive and cumbersome to cast, but it was useful in a pinch. For a range of the room across the hall, it would be easy and instantaneous, and thus, perfect. And he wouldn’t be able to ignore her when she wanted to talk to him, either, or make the excuse that he couldn’t message her back.
Analia flopped onto her bed and smiled.
Nym just stared at the illusion blankly for a good twenty seconds. It looked nothing like what he saw when he looked into his own soul well, but he wasn’t going to tell the healer that. Finally, he asked, “What does this mean? Am I not healing right?”
“I’m not really sure what exactly you’re supposed to be healing from,” Faro told him. “There are some small cracks on a few of these. Look here. This whole section has some. Then there are these large ones here that are completely out of proportion with the rest. If this is matrix destabilization, it’s the strangest case of it I’ve ever seen.”
“Are you… are you saying I was misdiagnosed?” Nym asked. Part of him hoped the answer was yes, but another part was afraid that if it was, then whatever the real condition was would somehow be worse.
Faro just shrugged and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with your matrix. It looks like it should still hold arcana, so I’d recommend testing that with a very small amount before you leave. But otherwise, I’m going to have to refer you to a healer I know who specializes in soul well abnormalities. You’re actually in luck there. He works with the army and isn’t too far away right now, though he is also very busy for obvious reasons, so it may be a few weeks before you can see him.”
Nym heard, but he wasn’t really listening to anything after the healer said his soul well would hold arcana. Immediately, he forged a conduit to the first layer, then paused. He hadn’t cast a single spell in weeks now because he was afraid of damaging his matrix further. The healer said he should test it, but what if he was wrong? There was only one easy way to find out. Nym hardened his resolve, pulled on the arcana, and let it start to fill him.
It felt… weird, hard to describe, but definitely not normal. It didn’t hurt at least. That was an improvement over the last time he’d touched arcana. Hesitantly, Nym reached out to the other chair and wrapped it in telekinesis. It floated in the air, straining his arms somewhat with its heavy, solid weight.
He couldn’t stop himself from grinning. After weeks of holding himself back, he was casting spells again. “It works! It doesn’t hurt,” he said.
Second layer arcana flooded into him, and he floated up into the air. He frowned in concentration, pulled in more arcana, and started weaving it into something complex. Thirty seconds later, snow started to fill the air inside the clinic.
“Hey now!” the old healer protested. “I know the place is a bit shabby, but let’s not make it any worse.”
“Oh, this feels wrong now,” Nym said, ignoring the healer. The spell went off, but he was having problems pulling enough arcana through his soul well to keep it powered. He barely had time to realize it before his flight spell cut off and he fell to the floor.
“Oooowwww,” he groaned. “Something isn’t working right still.”
“No, I imagine not. But I must insist that you dispel this snow creating spell immediately.”
“Oh! Right, sorry.”
Nym basked in the coolness for just a moment longer, then stopped feeding the construct arcana. He immediately cast a thermal barrier to keep himself nice and cool. Grudgingly, he extended it to Analia. The strain that generated surprised him, but it was within his limits.
“Okay, so it looks like I can still use arcana, including my biggest, most complicated spells. But I’m struggling to keep things empowered now? I can’t use it as fast as I can pull it in.”
Simple hydrokinesis pushed his ability to pull arcana out of his soul well to its limits. He swept up all the snow, compacted it into a tight ball, and sent it out the window. Not two months ago, what he was doing wouldn’t have been enough for him to really even take notice. He shook his head. It was still better than nothing. And it didn’t hurt anymore.
“Hey!” Analia said. “Pay attention!”
“What? Oh! I’m sorry.”
The healer was talking, but Nym had stopped listening. He was so busy testing his new limits, comparing them to his old ones, and trying to figure out what had changed, that he’d ignored everything else.
Faro sighed. “It’s fine. You’ve just been given good news, of a sort. I understand that you’re excited. But understand that this does not mean you are healthy or that you should continue to use magic. There is something very off with your matrix, and I don’t know what it is. I’ve sent a message spell to my friend, a healer named Doliar Kents. If he agrees to meet with you, he’ll no doubt be able to tell you a bit more than I could. I am afraid he’ll be rather more expensive as well.”
“This has been a good day,” Nym said, still smiling.
The healer just sighed and shook his head. Then he turned to talk to Analia, “When he comes back to us, please let him know what I said. And please write down the best way to contact you so I can let you know when Master Healer Kents is available.”
Analia took care of those details while Nym poked around at his soul well. It didn’t look anything like the illusion Faro had crafted of it, but he supposed that that was just how the divination had organized the information it had given to the healer. He could finally see what the inside of his soul well looked like when he was connecting a conduit to it, filling it with arcana, and expelling it to form spells. Maybe he could figure out why he was having such a hard time releasing arcana at high speeds.
The pair stepped back out onto the hot street a few minutes later, Analia carefully stepping around the small puddle of melted snow near the door as they headed back to the Silver Gilder. “You did the thermal barrier thing?” she asked, looking down at her hand.
“Yep. It’s so much nicer.”
“It is,” she agreed. With a sigh, she added, “You should probably stop now. No license.”
“No one’s going to see this,” he protested.
“Probably not, but money’s tight. We can’t afford the fine just in case someone’s got an aura reading spell going and notices.”
“I guess,” Nym said. He let the spell fail and immediately regretted it when the heat hit him. From the look on Analia’s face, he knew she was feeling the same way. He smirked at her and said, “You asked for this.”
“Hush. Maybe we should look into getting licenses soon. I think I could probably pass now.”
“Ehhhhh, maybe. I want to figure out what’s up with this weird matrix thing and get that fixed first. I need to see that other guy, um… Dal… Dar… D-something.”
“Doliar,” Analia supplied.
“Yeah, him.”
“You’re so scatterbrained today,” she said. She grabbed his arm and hugged it as they walked. “But I’m glad you’re in a good mood.”
Nym blinked and looked down at her. “Uh… yeah… What’s… um…”
She looked over at him, her face the picture of innocence. “Is there something wrong?”
“No?”
“Good, come on. I’m hungry.”
And she dragged him to a restaurant for lunch which thankfully was much cheaper than the places she preferred to frequent. It still set them back one shield two for the meal, but Nym didn’t complain about the price. It was, after all, a fantastic day.
* * *
Analia wanted to talk when they got back to the Silver Gilder, but Nym begged off, saying he was tired and needed to make sure everything was alright with his soul well. They said their goodbyes and each went to their own rooms.
“What was with her?” he muttered to himself.
He didn’t want to offend her, but she’d been weirdly in his space all afternoon. All he’d really wanted was to get back and so he could go over the list of spells he’d jotted down to practice. There were over fifty of them on there, everything from a scent tracking spell to a wide range scry to a few more offensive options. His time on the ninth outpost’s walls had taught him the need for that.
He’d focused heavily on spells to combat undead, expanding greatly on that thin primer volume Analia had found for him, but there’d been enough run ins with human opponents that he’d picked up non-lethal subjugation spells like paralysis, blindness, and smothering aura, and then he’d rounded his arsenal out with a few elemental attacks like hail stones and crushing earth, though those had been much harder to find. Apparently, that kind of magic was heavily restricted.
But it was all academic with no practical experience, and Nym resolved to fix that immediately. A lot of his new spells couldn’t be practiced from his bed, but there were a few that he could work on. Additionally, he wanted a chance to really get in there and study what was going on in his soul well when he used magic.
And none of that was even considering his growing knowledge base in anatomy and medicine. He wasn’t deluding himself into thinking he could rightfully be called a healer, but there were another three or four spells in that category he was eager to try. He was looking forward to refining his pain blocker spell now that he had some official materials to guide him, and he’d picked up two first circle spells as well: quick regeneration and purge. The first sped up natural healing time, and the second was used to expel ingested toxins, which was a fancy way of saying it made people throw up.
Nym wasn’t actually that eager to try that last one out, though it did work on other people. He wished he’d known how to do it back in Palmara when he’d been dealing with that stuck up rich kid, Amos.
Nym used telekinesis to start pulling specific books out of the stacks, the ones that contained the spells he most wanted to practice. He flipped the first one open to the page he’d marked down on his list and started reading. He wanted the directions to be fresh in his mind before he actually tried to cast it.
* * *
Analia didn’t slam the door behind her. That would be unladylike and unbecoming of her. But she wanted to. “Boys are dumb,” she huffed out.
It could have been a nice afternoon, but no, Nym had his head in the clouds the whole time. He didn’t notice any of her hints. She’d had to literally grab onto his arm to get him to pay any real attention to her. That’s what she got for listening to Ophelia’s advice, at least, when it was about Nym.
Ophelia also had plenty to say on the subject of magic, and there, Analia was an eager student. While she didn’t see herself ever going heavily into the field of earth magic, it never hurt to round out her skill set, and the older woman knew a remarkable number of spells unrelated to her specialty. The amount of practical knowledge she’d gained about rune sequences in a mere month of casual conversation easily bested a year of book learning.
Sure, Ophelia was heavily specialized, but the foundation was the same no matter what kind of rune sequence she wanted to write. Some of the things Analia had learned, her books had never even hinted at. Some of those things were flat out wrong, according to the books, but they worked anyway.
She sat down and started mentally composing a message to the older woman about the healer’s news. The Earth Shapers would definitely want to know, and it wasn’t like the idiot boy was going to have the presence of mind to tell them. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered trying with him.
She should take some time to teach him the message spell though. It only had a range of a few miles before it started getting expensive and cumbersome to cast, but it was useful in a pinch. For a range of the room across the hall, it would be easy and instantaneous, and thus, perfect. And he wouldn’t be able to ignore her when she wanted to talk to him, either, or make the excuse that he couldn’t message her back.
Analia flopped onto her bed and smiled.
