Nym made steady progress on fixing his matrix. The techniques the Collective knew helped him reinforce the net that connected individual nodes together while he rotated holding small pieces of his matrix in an open state. He’d found that trying to hold the whole thing at once did nothing, and it was only when he focused on a few at a time that he was able to shift them enough that they started to grow. The trick then became to rotate through each cluster and keep them all growing at an equal pace.
By Doliar’s estimates, it would be another few weeks before everything stabilized, but the more Nym worked on it, the more he was able to open his soul well back up. Already he was approaching his previous levels of arcana output, and he was hopeful that he’d surpass that soon enough. Combined with the new methods he’d learned for creating conduits, he was sure he’d be able to fly faster, make more golems, and hold more ongoing spells at once.
His new conduit was a coil shape, one that allowed him to hold its structure firm while snaking around any obstructions in the second layer. It only somewhat worked, as occasionally he still got caught on a big enough knot of arcana, but it was an improvement over his previous conduit. Making them flexible enough to move through the second layer worked fine until he reached the membrane blocking the third layer. All attempts at breaking through that barrier with any conduit he’d been able to reach it with had failed.
Navarim had been extremely helpful in advising him on his conduit, having recently made one that could reach all the way to the Astral Sea himself. It was on his recommendation that Nym had started experimenting with a coiling conduit. It had taken a few attempts to get one with the right balance between strong and flexible that allowed it to curl around arcana knots without breaking, but which would hopefully be enough to pierce the third layer.
And then, without any warning, three weeks after his talk with Jaspar Feldstal and his induction into the Collective, Nym broke through into the third layer. He was lying in his bed, testing the latest iteration of the new design, and it just… happened. At first, Nym wasn’t even sure what he’d done. Then the arcana swept into his soul well, and he jolted upright.
First and second layer arcana were similar, except that first layer felt a bit denser to Nym. Third layer was nothing like that. The arcana of the Astral Sea was agitated. It battered against the walls of his soul well like it was alive. It wasn’t painful, but it gave him an uncomfortable amount of feedback into the nodes that were still misaligned in his matrix.
Nym had just moments to realize what was going on, and then he was somewhere else.
* * *
“Why does every spell I try fall apart?” he asked.
“Because the arcana is different. You know this. You’ve felt it.”
He glared at the wall they were standing in front of. It showed the instructions needed for a teleportation spell, and was even enchanted to display it in four dimensions. He could watch the pattern being woven together in real time. He’d watched it over and over again.
“I’m doing what the instructions say, but my arcana doesn’t want to stay in place.”
“Perhaps it is your will that is lacking,” a new voice said. A man approached, his father. “If you are unable to master something as simple as the Astral Sea, how will you ever become truly powerful? I had thought you’d grow to be an exceptional man, not one who makes excuses.”
He screwed up his face into a scowl and said, “I’m five! Mother says I have plenty of time to grow up.”
“I do not care what excuses your mother makes for you,” his father said. “You are being personally tutored in these spells to give you every advantage, because you will need those advantages to keep hold of what is rightfully yours. Cease whining and prove you will be a man I can be proud of.”
There was no point in arguing with his father. One way or another, he would master the spell. No matter how many times he had to repeat the lesson, the day would not end until he’d completed it. His father would not let it be any other way. Even if he had to drag time backwards, there was only one acceptable outcome.
He had tried to compensate for the strange, chaotic pull of Astral Sea arcana, but there was no predicting it. There couldn’t be any compromise between his will and the arcana. He would have to force it into obedience.
He opened the conduit again to pit himself against the arcana. It filled his soul well to bursting, and he closed the conduit. Once it was sealed off from the rest of the third layer, it was easier to manipulate. Thirty seconds later, he’d saturated the arcana with his will, forced it into gentle calmness, and was ready to try again.
He wove the arcana into the spell focused on his destination, a mat on the other side of the room. His training arena was sealed off, preventing anyone from teleporting through that seal and, more importantly, preventing him from accidentally teleporting outside it. He was as safe as he could possibly be to practice such a dangerous spell.
Under his father’s baleful gaze, he finished constructing the magic and let it pull him through the arcana. He appeared across the room, one foot on the mat and one on the floor next to it. “Pathetic,” his father said. “Again. And don’t close off your conduit to make it easy on yourself.”
Keeping the arcana under control was much harder when it was still connected to the Astral Sea. It took more willpower than he had, or at least it took special techniques he had no knowledge of. His father watched him struggle, silently judging him, as he tried over and over to master the spell in a manner that would satisfy the man.
Hours later, he still couldn’t do it. With a snort of disgust, his father told him, “I’ll be back to check on you tomorrow. You won’t like the consequences if you’re still failing.” He turned his glare on the man who was supposed to be the instructor. “Neither of you.”
* * *
Nym came back to himself with a gasp. The vision had come out of nowhere, and it had been so much more intense than the previous two. Maybe it was because he wasn’t in some life-or-death situation and hadn’t been expecting it to happen, or maybe it was just the amount of fear he’d felt, but it took him a long time to calm down again.
He’d thought the trigger for the memory visions was his life being in danger, but obviously that wasn’t the case. The time with the shark and the time with Valgo had both been dangerous, but he hadn’t gotten a vision when he was fighting the ice worms or that giant bird. As far as he could tell, there was no immediate danger to him while in his own bed.
So the triggers were something else. Perhaps there was no logic to them, and each was different, or there was a pattern he was missing. The memories could be predetermined, and the vision just triggered as soon as he could use the spell that it was about. He was making more assumptions, he knew. It was entirely possible he’d have another vision that didn’t teach him a new spell.
The simple fact of the matter was that three data points weren’t much better than two. All he’d really done was eliminate one possible answer that he was already confident was incorrect. He couldn’t try to plan around forcing more visions to come when he had no real answers to what triggered them.
What he could do was test the vision. It wasn’t that he had any reason to doubt the accuracy of what he’d learned, but if he truly was a third circle mage now, a master mage, he would need to be able to control his new arcana. He forged the conduit again, pushing to reach the third layer. It took precious seconds, far too many to be useful in an instant, but he was confident he’d get better with practice.
Third layer arcana poured into his soul well and pushed against the matrix holding it in place. Much like his memory-self, Nym cut the conduit and took the time to fully infuse the arcana with his will. Already he had ideas about filtering the conduit with intent that would require some experimentation and research.
Nym was going to be very careful with his next moves. He was still tied to the Collective for years to come, and it wasn’t like he had a lot of leverage in that relationship. He had one technique they wanted, and they’d more or less gotten it out of him already. If Analia’s father decided to have him abducted and murdered now, it wouldn’t cost the Collective much. The only thing really keeping him safe was the geas Lord Feldstal had agreed to.
A geas could be broken though, and Nym had no doubt that Lord Feldstal already knew how to do it. It wouldn’t even surprise Nym to learn that the nobleman had already freed himself. There was precious little in the way of trust for the Collective as a whole, despite his friendship with a few members. Nym just hoped that when they’d wrung every last drop of useful information out of him, they didn’t decide it was more expedient to dispose of him.
He wanted to say they hadn’t given him any reason to think like that, but the truth was that they’d abducted him, and now he had two members of the Collective following him around. At least one of them was with him at all times, not that it mattered. They’d proven they were more than capable of investigating him without his knowledge.
Six months ago, he would have said it was time to run for it. Now he had friends. He couldn’t just leave them behind, not in the least because he didn’t trust the Collective not to hold them hostage against him. So Nym decided to keep this little breakthrough to himself. He teleported across his room, once, just to confirm that it worked, and then he released the rest of the arcana.
He would need to learn a strong and versatile repertoire of third circle spells before he considered anything drastic, and since he barely got a moment to himself outside his own bedroom anymore, it would be difficult to practice. So far, he’d just grabbed at whatever was in front of him without a lot of planning. It worked alright most of the time, but every now and then he ran into a problem that he wasn’t equipped to handle at all.
He wanted the Collective’s project to succeed both because its success would mean the end of his obligations to them, and because on a much grander scale, it would lead to stopping an outpouring of undead and repairing a tear in the Veil between the world and the afterlife. That might take some time while they built up their roster of master mages, but it would happen.
Nym briefly considered just telling them he’d reached the third circle. Surely if there was an organization equipped to train him, it would be the Collective. The problem was he wasn’t sure what it would cost him, how much tighter he’d be binding himself to the organization, and there was no way he could think of to find out what they’d share without first telling them why he needed it. He’d keep it in mind as a backup option, but for now, he would see what he could accomplish on his own.
Nym made steady progress on fixing his matrix. The techniques the Collective knew helped him reinforce the net that connected individual nodes together while he rotated holding small pieces of his matrix in an open state. He’d found that trying to hold the whole thing at once did nothing, and it was only when he focused on a few at a time that he was able to shift them enough that they started to grow. The trick then became to rotate through each cluster and keep them all growing at an equal pace.
By Doliar’s estimates, it would be another few weeks before everything stabilized, but the more Nym worked on it, the more he was able to open his soul well back up. Already he was approaching his previous levels of arcana output, and he was hopeful that he’d surpass that soon enough. Combined with the new methods he’d learned for creating conduits, he was sure he’d be able to fly faster, make more golems, and hold more ongoing spells at once.
His new conduit was a coil shape, one that allowed him to hold its structure firm while snaking around any obstructions in the second layer. It only somewhat worked, as occasionally he still got caught on a big enough knot of arcana, but it was an improvement over his previous conduit. Making them flexible enough to move through the second layer worked fine until he reached the membrane blocking the third layer. All attempts at breaking through that barrier with any conduit he’d been able to reach it with had failed.
Navarim had been extremely helpful in advising him on his conduit, having recently made one that could reach all the way to the Astral Sea himself. It was on his recommendation that Nym had started experimenting with a coiling conduit. It had taken a few attempts to get one with the right balance between strong and flexible that allowed it to curl around arcana knots without breaking, but which would hopefully be enough to pierce the third layer.
And then, without any warning, three weeks after his talk with Jaspar Feldstal and his induction into the Collective, Nym broke through into the third layer. He was lying in his bed, testing the latest iteration of the new design, and it just… happened. At first, Nym wasn’t even sure what he’d done. Then the arcana swept into his soul well, and he jolted upright.
First and second layer arcana were similar, except that first layer felt a bit denser to Nym. Third layer was nothing like that. The arcana of the Astral Sea was agitated. It battered against the walls of his soul well like it was alive. It wasn’t painful, but it gave him an uncomfortable amount of feedback into the nodes that were still misaligned in his matrix.
Nym had just moments to realize what was going on, and then he was somewhere else.
* * *
“Why does every spell I try fall apart?” he asked.
“Because the arcana is different. You know this. You’ve felt it.”
He glared at the wall they were standing in front of. It showed the instructions needed for a teleportation spell, and was even enchanted to display it in four dimensions. He could watch the pattern being woven together in real time. He’d watched it over and over again.
“I’m doing what the instructions say, but my arcana doesn’t want to stay in place.”
“Perhaps it is your will that is lacking,” a new voice said. A man approached, his father. “If you are unable to master something as simple as the Astral Sea, how will you ever become truly powerful? I had thought you’d grow to be an exceptional man, not one who makes excuses.”
He screwed up his face into a scowl and said, “I’m five! Mother says I have plenty of time to grow up.”
“I do not care what excuses your mother makes for you,” his father said. “You are being personally tutored in these spells to give you every advantage, because you will need those advantages to keep hold of what is rightfully yours. Cease whining and prove you will be a man I can be proud of.”
There was no point in arguing with his father. One way or another, he would master the spell. No matter how many times he had to repeat the lesson, the day would not end until he’d completed it. His father would not let it be any other way. Even if he had to drag time backwards, there was only one acceptable outcome.
He had tried to compensate for the strange, chaotic pull of Astral Sea arcana, but there was no predicting it. There couldn’t be any compromise between his will and the arcana. He would have to force it into obedience.
He opened the conduit again to pit himself against the arcana. It filled his soul well to bursting, and he closed the conduit. Once it was sealed off from the rest of the third layer, it was easier to manipulate. Thirty seconds later, he’d saturated the arcana with his will, forced it into gentle calmness, and was ready to try again.
He wove the arcana into the spell focused on his destination, a mat on the other side of the room. His training arena was sealed off, preventing anyone from teleporting through that seal and, more importantly, preventing him from accidentally teleporting outside it. He was as safe as he could possibly be to practice such a dangerous spell.
Under his father’s baleful gaze, he finished constructing the magic and let it pull him through the arcana. He appeared across the room, one foot on the mat and one on the floor next to it. “Pathetic,” his father said. “Again. And don’t close off your conduit to make it easy on yourself.”
Keeping the arcana under control was much harder when it was still connected to the Astral Sea. It took more willpower than he had, or at least it took special techniques he had no knowledge of. His father watched him struggle, silently judging him, as he tried over and over to master the spell in a manner that would satisfy the man.
Hours later, he still couldn’t do it. With a snort of disgust, his father told him, “I’ll be back to check on you tomorrow. You won’t like the consequences if you’re still failing.” He turned his glare on the man who was supposed to be the instructor. “Neither of you.”
* * *
Nym came back to himself with a gasp. The vision had come out of nowhere, and it had been so much more intense than the previous two. Maybe it was because he wasn’t in some life-or-death situation and hadn’t been expecting it to happen, or maybe it was just the amount of fear he’d felt, but it took him a long time to calm down again.
He’d thought the trigger for the memory visions was his life being in danger, but obviously that wasn’t the case. The time with the shark and the time with Valgo had both been dangerous, but he hadn’t gotten a vision when he was fighting the ice worms or that giant bird. As far as he could tell, there was no immediate danger to him while in his own bed.
So the triggers were something else. Perhaps there was no logic to them, and each was different, or there was a pattern he was missing. The memories could be predetermined, and the vision just triggered as soon as he could use the spell that it was about. He was making more assumptions, he knew. It was entirely possible he’d have another vision that didn’t teach him a new spell.
The simple fact of the matter was that three data points weren’t much better than two. All he’d really done was eliminate one possible answer that he was already confident was incorrect. He couldn’t try to plan around forcing more visions to come when he had no real answers to what triggered them.
What he could do was test the vision. It wasn’t that he had any reason to doubt the accuracy of what he’d learned, but if he truly was a third circle mage now, a master mage, he would need to be able to control his new arcana. He forged the conduit again, pushing to reach the third layer. It took precious seconds, far too many to be useful in an instant, but he was confident he’d get better with practice.
Third layer arcana poured into his soul well and pushed against the matrix holding it in place. Much like his memory-self, Nym cut the conduit and took the time to fully infuse the arcana with his will. Already he had ideas about filtering the conduit with intent that would require some experimentation and research.
Nym was going to be very careful with his next moves. He was still tied to the Collective for years to come, and it wasn’t like he had a lot of leverage in that relationship. He had one technique they wanted, and they’d more or less gotten it out of him already. If Analia’s father decided to have him abducted and murdered now, it wouldn’t cost the Collective much. The only thing really keeping him safe was the geas Lord Feldstal had agreed to.
A geas could be broken though, and Nym had no doubt that Lord Feldstal already knew how to do it. It wouldn’t even surprise Nym to learn that the nobleman had already freed himself. There was precious little in the way of trust for the Collective as a whole, despite his friendship with a few members. Nym just hoped that when they’d wrung every last drop of useful information out of him, they didn’t decide it was more expedient to dispose of him.
He wanted to say they hadn’t given him any reason to think like that, but the truth was that they’d abducted him, and now he had two members of the Collective following him around. At least one of them was with him at all times, not that it mattered. They’d proven they were more than capable of investigating him without his knowledge.
Six months ago, he would have said it was time to run for it. Now he had friends. He couldn’t just leave them behind, not in the least because he didn’t trust the Collective not to hold them hostage against him. So Nym decided to keep this little breakthrough to himself. He teleported across his room, once, just to confirm that it worked, and then he released the rest of the arcana.
He would need to learn a strong and versatile repertoire of third circle spells before he considered anything drastic, and since he barely got a moment to himself outside his own bedroom anymore, it would be difficult to practice. So far, he’d just grabbed at whatever was in front of him without a lot of planning. It worked alright most of the time, but every now and then he ran into a problem that he wasn’t equipped to handle at all.
He wanted the Collective’s project to succeed both because its success would mean the end of his obligations to them, and because on a much grander scale, it would lead to stopping an outpouring of undead and repairing a tear in the Veil between the world and the afterlife. That might take some time while they built up their roster of master mages, but it would happen.
Nym briefly considered just telling them he’d reached the third circle. Surely if there was an organization equipped to train him, it would be the Collective. The problem was he wasn’t sure what it would cost him, how much tighter he’d be binding himself to the organization, and there was no way he could think of to find out what they’d share without first telling them why he needed it. He’d keep it in mind as a backup option, but for now, he would see what he could accomplish on his own.
