Nym picked a day when Jharn was doing the overnight shift. He was younger than Navarim, not nearly as clever, and displayed considerably less institutional loyalty. Nym waited for hours in his room under the pretense of performing one of the many, many exercises Doliar had prescribed to work on his matrix. He scried every ten minutes or so until he noted Jharn sleeping, then continued to check up on him regularly for the next hour.
That was as good an opening as Nym was going to get. He crafted his teleportation spell with deliberation and care, knowing that it would have to be perfect to take him where he wanted to go. There was no platform on the other end to help guide the spell. He would be appearing somewhere else in the world, and it was completely on him to see the process through from start to finish.
He tried to picture it in his head, the sand, the waves, the smell in the air. He needed to hear the sound, to remember what it felt like standing there. That was the place he needed to be, and his magic was the bridge between what was and what could be. He shed arcana into the world, that essence of unreality so strong that it could change physical law.
And then, without any fanfare, what could be and what was merged. Nym disappeared from his bed and was standing on the beach. It really was just like he remembered it, right down to that thing in the water that always drew his attention. And now that he knew, now that he could see, he recognized the shark that guarded it.
It didn’t have an aura of arcana around it, at least not something he could detect. Nym flew over the water, and it appeared below him, summoned up from the depths by his mere presence. The shark swam circles underneath him, never stopping, chasing him as he flew to the center of the cove. The closer he got, the more agitated it became, to the point that it actually breached the water several times to leap at him.
Nym floated about fifteen feet over the surface of the water, and magic shark or not, it couldn’t come close to getting that kind of altitude. The water roiled under him as more sharks started to show up, equally agitated. He counted twelve fins cutting through the water immediately below him.
A few months ago, they would have been a problem for Nym. He wasn’t recovered to full strength yet, but he’d been exposed to hundreds of new spells and had taken the time to commit thirty or forty of them to memory. Some of them he’d learned for the express purpose of getting to the bottom of the cove.
Nym started with the simplest solution. He didn’t expect it to work in this case because there was obviously some sort of magical shenanigans going on, but it only cost him a few seconds to try. He cast a spell to hide himself from animals. If it worked, they would lose interest in him and proceed about their business as if he wasn’t even there. He’d tried it on a few squirrels back in the forest, and been able to walk right up to them while they were foraging.
The sharks did not ignore him, not that he’d expected them to. He let the spell fade away and started on the next one: scare animals. He didn’t think it would work any better, but it cost nothing to try. If it worked, the sharks would scatter. He finished it and peered down into the water. There were… maybe a few less? It was hard to tell.
He switched from trying to bypass the sharks to attempting to stay out of the water completely. Hydrokinesis bore down from the surface of the cove, splitting the water and pushing it away. It went down ten feet, then twenty, and then Nym couldn’t hold it anymore. The water came swirling back into place, and with it the sharks.
Nym switched to trying to magically grab the underwater thing and drag it up from the depths. It hadn’t worked before, but he was stronger now. He didn’t expect it to work again, but he was going to exhaust his safe options before he went into the water himself. But whatever it was down there, he still couldn’t grab it with telekinesis.
A scrying spell he’d learned specifically to look in water was his next attempt. It had a component in it to increase his visual range underwater, and he’d modified it with his own mobile anchor adjustments that allowed the scry to move independent of him. His mind was filled with a vision of the water, deep and dark. Even with the spell, he still couldn’t see very far.
The scry dove straight down to the bottom of the cove and swept around in circles, looking for the mysterious thing. It was there; he knew it was. He could feel it in his head, dragging at his attention. It was even stronger now than it had been almost a year ago. He was looking at right where it was, but as far as he could tell, there was nothing there.
All this meant to Nym was that he would need to go down himself. He had a number of spells he’d sought out specifically for that task as well. First, he needed the ability to breathe and see. Fortunately, mages had long ago created spells for that, and they’d recognized the need for multiple spells without having to feed them to keep them active.
Nym’s own attempts at creating new spells weren’t nearly as sophisticated. It was easier to make a spell that he continuously provided arcana to than to make one that invested an amount up front and then persisted for a set period of time without any further action on his part. The only one he’d ever really done that wasn’t like that was the spell he’d crafted to heat a solid surface for an extended period of time, and he’d been driven to that by the necessity of needing a warm place to sleep.
Fortunately, the ones he’d learned didn’t require he keep an open line of arcana feeding them. He cast the spells in quick succession, then considered his next course of action. If he went into the water without doing anything else, the sharks would attack him. He needed to either defend himself somehow, or kill or otherwise immobilize the sharks. Or he needed to move so fast that they couldn’t catch him, but he didn’t know how long he’d be down at the bottom even if he could pull that off, so Nym dismissed that idea out of hand.
He hadn’t found an easy solution to this problem. There were plenty of ways to kill sharks, but the more he killed, the more the blood in the water would call in more. Nym could end up spending hours slaughtering them only to be forced to leave when he ran out of time without ever actually accomplishing his goal.
So he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he’d found instructions for what some mage had deemed a meta-spell buried deep in one of Analia’s books. It was a way to take a spell he already knew, tear it apart, and modify it to function in a different method. There was a whole set of knowledge in this category that Nym had never known existed, but which he was completely fascinated by.
In this case, he would be taking the daze spell he’d learned months ago, modifying it to work on animals, and then turning it into an aura that automatically smacked anything that got too close to him with it. It was going to cost him roughly four times as much arcana as normal each time he dazed a shark, but he was still fresh and expected he could last through a solid fifty dazes, more if he got some recovery time.
It would be more than long enough to swim straight down through a hundred feet of water, grab the thing, and come back up. The only sticking point Nym saw in his plan was that he wasn’t exactly sure what it was that was down there, or how long it would take to extract it. He just had a chronic, incessant need to go to that one particular place. It had faded somewhat as he’d traveled farther and farther away, but now that he was back at Blood Fin Cove, it was near overwhelming.
He could feel it like an itch in his teeth, under his scalp, behind his eyes. It made him twitchy coming back to it suddenly after being away for so long. One way or another, he was getting down to that spot tonight. He was just going to be smart about it so he didn’t kill himself in the attempt.
Nym cast his aura daze spell and lowered himself to the water without actually going into it. The first shark swung around towards him, then suddenly veered off course. It cruised in a straight line past him, going on momentum alone. Three more sharks hit the aura in quick succession. Nym observed their reactions to it and frowned.
It was very possible he might end up getting hit by a shark just because it was coming straight at him when it got hit with the daze effect. He had a deflection spell he’d picked up that was designed to stop physical matter from passing through it, but the area of effect was barely bigger than his head and didn’t last long. It could be tricky using it if he had multiple sharks coming at him at once.
He’d been hoping they’d just stop dead in the water when they got too close, but that didn’t appear to be in the cards. On the bright side, the daze aura worked and it looked like it was taking upwards of a minute for them to regain their wits. He didn’t see any degradation in effectiveness when they came back in and took a second hit. If anything, it seemed to work better with repeated attacks.
He was as prepared as he could reasonably be. He had three different spells going and was planning on using hydrokinesis to speed up his trip down. If for some reason everything else stopped working, he could freeze an approaching shark into a block of ice to buy time and give himself some cover. It would cost way more arcana than he wanted to spend, but it was a last resort option.
Nym released his flying spell and dropped into the water. His hydrokinetic magic grabbed him and pulled him deeper, fortunately fast enough that the sharks who entered his daze aura shot by overhead instead of crashing into him. In the first few seconds, he must have been hit twenty times, but he’d filled his soul well to its maximum before he went in and that had been enough to keep the aura going.
If they continued to attack him at that speed, he would have to retreat, but the number of sharks on him dropped dramatically as they drifted off, unaware of their surroundings. A new shark came by every second or two, but he could easily handle the strain of just one at a time.
His water breathing and underwater vision spells were working, and with hydrokinesis pulling him straight down, it took less than twenty seconds to reach the bottom of the cove. Confused, he looked around for the thing. He could still feel it, knew exactly where it should be, but saw nothing. Nym bent down and ran his hands over the spot, trying to find something that all his magic told him didn’t exist.
His fingers closed on something hard and square. It was like a little metal box, except completely invisible. This then was it, the object of his fascination that had called out to him to come to it. Nym clutched it tightly to his chest and shot straight up until he breached the surface, then called new magic to wrap him in air and lift him free from the water.
Moments later, he was standing on the sand again. Hydrokinesis pulled the water away from him, and he dismissed the remaining magic. Finally, with no spells modifying his senses, Nym could see what he was holding. It was a small thing, maybe six inches to a side, a perfect cube made of some sort of delicate white crystal shaped like a lattice. Despite the apparent gaps in its surface, he found it to be completely smooth, his fingers tracing over the air like it was solid.
Now he just needed to figure out what it was.
Nym picked a day when Jharn was doing the overnight shift. He was younger than Navarim, not nearly as clever, and displayed considerably less institutional loyalty. Nym waited for hours in his room under the pretense of performing one of the many, many exercises Doliar had prescribed to work on his matrix. He scried every ten minutes or so until he noted Jharn sleeping, then continued to check up on him regularly for the next hour.
That was as good an opening as Nym was going to get. He crafted his teleportation spell with deliberation and care, knowing that it would have to be perfect to take him where he wanted to go. There was no platform on the other end to help guide the spell. He would be appearing somewhere else in the world, and it was completely on him to see the process through from start to finish.
He tried to picture it in his head, the sand, the waves, the smell in the air. He needed to hear the sound, to remember what it felt like standing there. That was the place he needed to be, and his magic was the bridge between what was and what could be. He shed arcana into the world, that essence of unreality so strong that it could change physical law.
And then, without any fanfare, what could be and what was merged. Nym disappeared from his bed and was standing on the beach. It really was just like he remembered it, right down to that thing in the water that always drew his attention. And now that he knew, now that he could see, he recognized the shark that guarded it.
It didn’t have an aura of arcana around it, at least not something he could detect. Nym flew over the water, and it appeared below him, summoned up from the depths by his mere presence. The shark swam circles underneath him, never stopping, chasing him as he flew to the center of the cove. The closer he got, the more agitated it became, to the point that it actually breached the water several times to leap at him.
Nym floated about fifteen feet over the surface of the water, and magic shark or not, it couldn’t come close to getting that kind of altitude. The water roiled under him as more sharks started to show up, equally agitated. He counted twelve fins cutting through the water immediately below him.
A few months ago, they would have been a problem for Nym. He wasn’t recovered to full strength yet, but he’d been exposed to hundreds of new spells and had taken the time to commit thirty or forty of them to memory. Some of them he’d learned for the express purpose of getting to the bottom of the cove.
Nym started with the simplest solution. He didn’t expect it to work in this case because there was obviously some sort of magical shenanigans going on, but it only cost him a few seconds to try. He cast a spell to hide himself from animals. If it worked, they would lose interest in him and proceed about their business as if he wasn’t even there. He’d tried it on a few squirrels back in the forest, and been able to walk right up to them while they were foraging.
The sharks did not ignore him, not that he’d expected them to. He let the spell fade away and started on the next one: scare animals. He didn’t think it would work any better, but it cost nothing to try. If it worked, the sharks would scatter. He finished it and peered down into the water. There were… maybe a few less? It was hard to tell.
He switched from trying to bypass the sharks to attempting to stay out of the water completely. Hydrokinesis bore down from the surface of the cove, splitting the water and pushing it away. It went down ten feet, then twenty, and then Nym couldn’t hold it anymore. The water came swirling back into place, and with it the sharks.
Nym switched to trying to magically grab the underwater thing and drag it up from the depths. It hadn’t worked before, but he was stronger now. He didn’t expect it to work again, but he was going to exhaust his safe options before he went into the water himself. But whatever it was down there, he still couldn’t grab it with telekinesis.
A scrying spell he’d learned specifically to look in water was his next attempt. It had a component in it to increase his visual range underwater, and he’d modified it with his own mobile anchor adjustments that allowed the scry to move independent of him. His mind was filled with a vision of the water, deep and dark. Even with the spell, he still couldn’t see very far.
The scry dove straight down to the bottom of the cove and swept around in circles, looking for the mysterious thing. It was there; he knew it was. He could feel it in his head, dragging at his attention. It was even stronger now than it had been almost a year ago. He was looking at right where it was, but as far as he could tell, there was nothing there.
All this meant to Nym was that he would need to go down himself. He had a number of spells he’d sought out specifically for that task as well. First, he needed the ability to breathe and see. Fortunately, mages had long ago created spells for that, and they’d recognized the need for multiple spells without having to feed them to keep them active.
Nym’s own attempts at creating new spells weren’t nearly as sophisticated. It was easier to make a spell that he continuously provided arcana to than to make one that invested an amount up front and then persisted for a set period of time without any further action on his part. The only one he’d ever really done that wasn’t like that was the spell he’d crafted to heat a solid surface for an extended period of time, and he’d been driven to that by the necessity of needing a warm place to sleep.
Fortunately, the ones he’d learned didn’t require he keep an open line of arcana feeding them. He cast the spells in quick succession, then considered his next course of action. If he went into the water without doing anything else, the sharks would attack him. He needed to either defend himself somehow, or kill or otherwise immobilize the sharks. Or he needed to move so fast that they couldn’t catch him, but he didn’t know how long he’d be down at the bottom even if he could pull that off, so Nym dismissed that idea out of hand.
He hadn’t found an easy solution to this problem. There were plenty of ways to kill sharks, but the more he killed, the more the blood in the water would call in more. Nym could end up spending hours slaughtering them only to be forced to leave when he ran out of time without ever actually accomplishing his goal.
So he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he’d found instructions for what some mage had deemed a meta-spell buried deep in one of Analia’s books. It was a way to take a spell he already knew, tear it apart, and modify it to function in a different method. There was a whole set of knowledge in this category that Nym had never known existed, but which he was completely fascinated by.
In this case, he would be taking the daze spell he’d learned months ago, modifying it to work on animals, and then turning it into an aura that automatically smacked anything that got too close to him with it. It was going to cost him roughly four times as much arcana as normal each time he dazed a shark, but he was still fresh and expected he could last through a solid fifty dazes, more if he got some recovery time.
It would be more than long enough to swim straight down through a hundred feet of water, grab the thing, and come back up. The only sticking point Nym saw in his plan was that he wasn’t exactly sure what it was that was down there, or how long it would take to extract it. He just had a chronic, incessant need to go to that one particular place. It had faded somewhat as he’d traveled farther and farther away, but now that he was back at Blood Fin Cove, it was near overwhelming.
He could feel it like an itch in his teeth, under his scalp, behind his eyes. It made him twitchy coming back to it suddenly after being away for so long. One way or another, he was getting down to that spot tonight. He was just going to be smart about it so he didn’t kill himself in the attempt.
Nym cast his aura daze spell and lowered himself to the water without actually going into it. The first shark swung around towards him, then suddenly veered off course. It cruised in a straight line past him, going on momentum alone. Three more sharks hit the aura in quick succession. Nym observed their reactions to it and frowned.
It was very possible he might end up getting hit by a shark just because it was coming straight at him when it got hit with the daze effect. He had a deflection spell he’d picked up that was designed to stop physical matter from passing through it, but the area of effect was barely bigger than his head and didn’t last long. It could be tricky using it if he had multiple sharks coming at him at once.
He’d been hoping they’d just stop dead in the water when they got too close, but that didn’t appear to be in the cards. On the bright side, the daze aura worked and it looked like it was taking upwards of a minute for them to regain their wits. He didn’t see any degradation in effectiveness when they came back in and took a second hit. If anything, it seemed to work better with repeated attacks.
He was as prepared as he could reasonably be. He had three different spells going and was planning on using hydrokinesis to speed up his trip down. If for some reason everything else stopped working, he could freeze an approaching shark into a block of ice to buy time and give himself some cover. It would cost way more arcana than he wanted to spend, but it was a last resort option.
Nym released his flying spell and dropped into the water. His hydrokinetic magic grabbed him and pulled him deeper, fortunately fast enough that the sharks who entered his daze aura shot by overhead instead of crashing into him. In the first few seconds, he must have been hit twenty times, but he’d filled his soul well to its maximum before he went in and that had been enough to keep the aura going.
If they continued to attack him at that speed, he would have to retreat, but the number of sharks on him dropped dramatically as they drifted off, unaware of their surroundings. A new shark came by every second or two, but he could easily handle the strain of just one at a time.
His water breathing and underwater vision spells were working, and with hydrokinesis pulling him straight down, it took less than twenty seconds to reach the bottom of the cove. Confused, he looked around for the thing. He could still feel it, knew exactly where it should be, but saw nothing. Nym bent down and ran his hands over the spot, trying to find something that all his magic told him didn’t exist.
His fingers closed on something hard and square. It was like a little metal box, except completely invisible. This then was it, the object of his fascination that had called out to him to come to it. Nym clutched it tightly to his chest and shot straight up until he breached the surface, then called new magic to wrap him in air and lift him free from the water.
Moments later, he was standing on the sand again. Hydrokinesis pulled the water away from him, and he dismissed the remaining magic. Finally, with no spells modifying his senses, Nym could see what he was holding. It was a small thing, maybe six inches to a side, a perfect cube made of some sort of delicate white crystal shaped like a lattice. Despite the apparent gaps in its surface, he found it to be completely smooth, his fingers tracing over the air like it was solid.
Now he just needed to figure out what it was.
