Message was an undeniably useful spell, but it was also relatively difficult to cast and had a whole host of restrictions and limitations. The caster had to have at least a rough idea of where the recipient would be, and had to know them well enough to form an accurate mental image of them for the spell to latch onto. There was no feedback in the spell to actually let the mage sending the message know if it had been received, and the magic couldn’t just linger until it successfully found the recipient. Even if all the other conditions had been met, the spell might fail just due to the target taking a nap at an inopportune moment.
Nym would not have been surprised to get a message from Navarim, even though they weren’t all that close. Jharn would have surprised him just because the spell wasn’t really part of the mage’s established areas of expertise. But he really hadn’t interacted with Jaspar Feldstal after the first day, so it was quite a surprise to get a magical message from the man.
Apparently, the leader of the Collective had been paying more attention to him than he’d thought. That probably wasn’t a good thing. More than that, he didn’t think he could send a message back, and the deliberately cryptic wording didn’t give him much to go on. Lord Feldstal didn’t tell Nym what he wanted, or give him any directions.
He had to be missing something. There was no point to a message that Nym couldn’t respond to. Maybe this was the Collective’s way of getting him to come in voluntarily, to just send him a vague message and hope he’d start looking for someone to teleport him back to the base. That didn’t seem like a winning plan to him, and he wasn’t sure what the logic would be there. It wasn’t like Lord Feldstal could hold his own daughter hostage to ensure Nym’s cooperation.
He sent out another message to Analia, but it remained unanswered. The only thing Nym could think to do was wait and see if they tried to contact him again. While he waited, he flew the length of the walls to the next camp, then sent down a scry anchor to investigate the ruined buildings. There was a surprising amount of money there, but he supposed when he considered how isolated the labor camps were, it made sense that people were hoarding it when there was nothing to spend it on.
Nym added it to his stash, did a quick scan for anyone still alive, and flew off. Half an hour later, he was close to thirty crests richer, though most of it was in the form of shields and shims. His pack was getting heavy with coins now, to the point where it would clink when he walked. Nym had never had more wealth in his possession at any one time, not even when he looted Valgo’s hideout.
[I know you’re still here. Come to the table and negotiate. I realize I’ve grabbed a snake by the tail here, but surely we can work out something mutually beneficial.]
The message was different this time. Nym couldn’t quite place why it was, just that it was more open-ended. The arcana that carried it to him lingered in the air, like it was waiting for something. Nym examined it curiously, and found a hook on it, keeping it stuck to him while it stretched off into nowhere.
“Oh, that’s clever,” Nym said, realizing what it did. Somehow, Lord Felstal had modified it to accept a return message. It must have been hellishly expensive to cast it that way. He crafted his own message, but instead of picturing someone to send it to, he just attached it the message lingering around him.
[What do you want?]
With a kind of mental nudge, he unhooked the message spell from himself and let it snap backwards. It faded from his sight about twenty feet away, pulled back through whichever layer of reality allowed for it to travel the distance. He wasn’t confident it was a second circle spell, not without seeing it being cast.
The answer came back almost immediately. [We need your help to stop the undead.]
The message also had a response hook to it. Nym spent a moment considering what was going on. Lord Feldstal had obviously figured out something, but Nym wasn’t sure what. He was on the backfoot, probing Nym like he was expecting to be swatted down. Whatever he thought he’d learned, things would go better for Nym if he knew it too. If he somehow thought that Nym could turn this whole debacle around, well, it wasn’t like Jaspar Feldstal was a stupid man.
Nym sent his answer back. [What are you offering?]
[Release from the geas you agreed to.]
[And Analia?]
[Safe. We extracted her from the battle when it turned against us. She’s in a safe house I own, unaffiliated with the Collective. She can leave once the area is safe.]
Being released from the geas immediately sounded good to Nym, but at the same time, the Collective had gotten what it needed. By all appearances, anyone with at least a size twelve soul well would be able to grow it to the point that they could cast third circle spells just with the current techniques. Nym had benefited from it as well, but only in terms of speeding up what he would have accomplished on his own.
There was no reason to renew the geas when it dissolved on its own, and the only thing it was preventing him from doing that really mattered was leaving the country. More to the point, he already knew that there was a spell to absolve the geas. It was just a matter of finding someone to teach it to him before the geas started pushing to be renewed in a few years. He was willing to bet there were plenty of nobles who knew how to do it.
In short, being released from the geas sounded nice, but it wasn’t as valuable now as it would have been. Analia was still useful to him, and the part of his brain that liked to play nice was demanding he cooperate to rescue her. That part wasn’t in control anymore, and Nym pushed it aside. Analia was a somewhat poisoned resource now, tied too close to her father. Nym wasn’t sure how trustworthy she was anymore.
It wasn’t that he thought she’d betray him. It was that her father was entirely too good at keeping tabs on her. Her brother might have tried to keep her in Abilanth, but Jaspar Feldstal obviously had different plans for her. Nym couldn’t even begin to guess the extent of her father’s spying on his daughter and, by extension, Nym. The Collective also had weeks of data from various tests. It was possible they’d figured out he was an ascendant before he’d confirmed it himself.
That would certainly explain the change in attitude. They probably didn’t know what to make of him. Ascendants were supposed to be god-like beings, and here he was, getting taken out by a late-night hit squad and being forced into a geas. He could probably use their assumptions to force a good deal just by bluffing, but he wasn’t really sure what they had that was worth staying involved.
[We can meet, but you’ll have to offer more than that if you want me to stay and fight undead. This looks like a pretty decisive loss for humanity to me.]
There was no reply for a minute, then with a quiet crack, Lord Feldstal himself appeared in the air next to Nym. He floated easily, though his version of the spell used the same wind-based suspension Analia had used when they’d first met. Her father’s control was much finer, and even if his clothing whipped around him, the wind was sharply contained to only support him without any stray gusts.
“Hello,” he said, his voice modified with magic to cut through the winds holding him aloft.
“Hi,” Nym said, his arms crossed as he stood on a plane of hardened air. “Let’s start with what exactly you want me to do.”
Lord Feldstal gestured around at the forest. “This, all of this, is intolerable. The outbreak is no longer contained, and we have a solution in six months when we needed one yesterday. We want you to help to cull the undead and eliminate the source.”
“And why would I be able to do any of that?” Nym asked. He was sure he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the nobleman say it.
“Because you’re not human. You’re beyond us.”
“Am I?”
“I don’t know what games you’re playing,” Lord Feldstal snapped. He stopped himself and took a steadying breath, before continuing in a much calmer tone, “Whatever your reasons, you’re obviously an ascendant. I have a thousand questions I’d love to get the chance to ask, but this is more important. You could end this with a snap of your fingers. What price do we have to pay to get you to act according to your true nature, not this disguise you’re wearing?”
They’d made a lot of assumptions about Nym, most of them incorrect. That was the problem with the whole meeting. If he really could just wave a hand and make the undead disappear, he probably would have done it already. It was hard to bargain for something when he couldn’t come through on his end.
“What makes you think this whole mess is more important to me than maintaining this disguise?” Nym asked, stalling for time.
“I am very sure that the affairs of mortals fall far beneath an ascendant’s notice,” Lord Feldstal said dryly. His voice had a bit more spine in it, but he was still dancing around cautiously. He was still afraid of saying the wrong thing and being obliterated by a power he couldn’t comprehend.
Nym wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, but all he could do was hold to the bluff and hope to find a way out. He did still want Analia back, but that was barely enough to convince him to help at all, let alone reveal his ‘true nature.’
“Tell me what happened. You had this under control. What went wrong?”
Lord Feldstal hesitated before speaking. Nym could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes. He was trying to figure out what to reveal and what to hide, trying to figure out if he dared lie to the creature he thought Nym was. While he was thinking, Nym took the opportunity to cast a spell he’d rarely had a chance to use: the truth seeking spell he’d watched Bardin cast when they’d interrogated Nym back in Abilanth.
It wasn’t a perfect lie detector, and he wouldn’t trust it against a mage as powerful as Lord Feldstal normally, but right now, it might just give him the edge he needed. He waited with the spell running while the nobleman struggled to figure out how much he wanted to reveal.
“The third circle mages working in shifts to keep the Veil pinned closed were doing a shift change. Something must have gone wrong; we’re still not sure what. The Veil opened enough for the reaper to reach out. It started killing mages and raising them as wights. Things cascaded from there and before we knew it, we’d lost thirty mages to the undead. The tear opened up completely and thousands of ghouls passed through with plenty of new wights to command them.”
“The reaper didn’t pass through as well?” Nym asked.
Lord Feldstal shook his head. “The tear still isn’t big enough. We called in Archmage Veram to help. He’s still there, as far as I know, holding the tear closed by himself. He can’t do anything else but buy us time. If he lets go, the tear will open up and start expanding again. Then everything gets worse. But he’s still just a man, for all his power. He can’t hold it forever.”
“And you want me to go fix it all,” Nym said. “Just make all your problems go away.”
“Please.” There was a hint of begging in the word.
There were no lies there that he could detect, but Nym couldn’t do what Lord Feldstal wanted. He’d have to refuse and leave, pretend like he just wasn’t interested. “That sounds like a lot of work for very little reward. Your offer is to remove a geas I could remove myself and guarantee the safety of your own daughter, who is already quite safe. In return, I have to shed my anonymity, derail my own plans, and clean up a mess I had nothing to do with.”
“She would also be free to continue traveling with you, for whatever your plans are,” Lord Feldstal said weakly.
“Your concern for her well-being is touching,” Nym sneered. “I almost can’t believe you subjected her to all your little experiments when she was a baby.”
The nobleman bristled and Nym feared he’d pressed too far. Then Lord Feldstal sighed and shrunk back into himself. “Fine, if none of that is enough, what else could we offer?”
“I doubt you have anything I want that bad,” Nym told him.
“If not me, perhaps Archmage Veran himself might have something to interest you. It might only be a trinket by your scale, but trinkets can still be fascinating.”
Nym was about to refuse again, when he felt something grab hold of him. The world pinched him and suddenly he was standing in the air above the ritual site next to a man who looked to be in his fifties. He had his eyes closed and an intense aura of arcana roiled around him.
“You look quite young for an ascendant,” the man said.
“Archmage Veran, I assume?” Nym asked.
Message was an undeniably useful spell, but it was also relatively difficult to cast and had a whole host of restrictions and limitations. The caster had to have at least a rough idea of where the recipient would be, and had to know them well enough to form an accurate mental image of them for the spell to latch onto. There was no feedback in the spell to actually let the mage sending the message know if it had been received, and the magic couldn’t just linger until it successfully found the recipient. Even if all the other conditions had been met, the spell might fail just due to the target taking a nap at an inopportune moment.
Nym would not have been surprised to get a message from Navarim, even though they weren’t all that close. Jharn would have surprised him just because the spell wasn’t really part of the mage’s established areas of expertise. But he really hadn’t interacted with Jaspar Feldstal after the first day, so it was quite a surprise to get a magical message from the man.
Apparently, the leader of the Collective had been paying more attention to him than he’d thought. That probably wasn’t a good thing. More than that, he didn’t think he could send a message back, and the deliberately cryptic wording didn’t give him much to go on. Lord Feldstal didn’t tell Nym what he wanted, or give him any directions.
He had to be missing something. There was no point to a message that Nym couldn’t respond to. Maybe this was the Collective’s way of getting him to come in voluntarily, to just send him a vague message and hope he’d start looking for someone to teleport him back to the base. That didn’t seem like a winning plan to him, and he wasn’t sure what the logic would be there. It wasn’t like Lord Feldstal could hold his own daughter hostage to ensure Nym’s cooperation.
He sent out another message to Analia, but it remained unanswered. The only thing Nym could think to do was wait and see if they tried to contact him again. While he waited, he flew the length of the walls to the next camp, then sent down a scry anchor to investigate the ruined buildings. There was a surprising amount of money there, but he supposed when he considered how isolated the labor camps were, it made sense that people were hoarding it when there was nothing to spend it on.
Nym added it to his stash, did a quick scan for anyone still alive, and flew off. Half an hour later, he was close to thirty crests richer, though most of it was in the form of shields and shims. His pack was getting heavy with coins now, to the point where it would clink when he walked. Nym had never had more wealth in his possession at any one time, not even when he looted Valgo’s hideout.
[I know you’re still here. Come to the table and negotiate. I realize I’ve grabbed a snake by the tail here, but surely we can work out something mutually beneficial.]
The message was different this time. Nym couldn’t quite place why it was, just that it was more open-ended. The arcana that carried it to him lingered in the air, like it was waiting for something. Nym examined it curiously, and found a hook on it, keeping it stuck to him while it stretched off into nowhere.
“Oh, that’s clever,” Nym said, realizing what it did. Somehow, Lord Felstal had modified it to accept a return message. It must have been hellishly expensive to cast it that way. He crafted his own message, but instead of picturing someone to send it to, he just attached it the message lingering around him.
[What do you want?]
With a kind of mental nudge, he unhooked the message spell from himself and let it snap backwards. It faded from his sight about twenty feet away, pulled back through whichever layer of reality allowed for it to travel the distance. He wasn’t confident it was a second circle spell, not without seeing it being cast.
The answer came back almost immediately. [We need your help to stop the undead.]
The message also had a response hook to it. Nym spent a moment considering what was going on. Lord Feldstal had obviously figured out something, but Nym wasn’t sure what. He was on the backfoot, probing Nym like he was expecting to be swatted down. Whatever he thought he’d learned, things would go better for Nym if he knew it too. If he somehow thought that Nym could turn this whole debacle around, well, it wasn’t like Jaspar Feldstal was a stupid man.
Nym sent his answer back. [What are you offering?]
[Release from the geas you agreed to.]
[And Analia?]
[Safe. We extracted her from the battle when it turned against us. She’s in a safe house I own, unaffiliated with the Collective. She can leave once the area is safe.]
Being released from the geas immediately sounded good to Nym, but at the same time, the Collective had gotten what it needed. By all appearances, anyone with at least a size twelve soul well would be able to grow it to the point that they could cast third circle spells just with the current techniques. Nym had benefited from it as well, but only in terms of speeding up what he would have accomplished on his own.
There was no reason to renew the geas when it dissolved on its own, and the only thing it was preventing him from doing that really mattered was leaving the country. More to the point, he already knew that there was a spell to absolve the geas. It was just a matter of finding someone to teach it to him before the geas started pushing to be renewed in a few years. He was willing to bet there were plenty of nobles who knew how to do it.
In short, being released from the geas sounded nice, but it wasn’t as valuable now as it would have been. Analia was still useful to him, and the part of his brain that liked to play nice was demanding he cooperate to rescue her. That part wasn’t in control anymore, and Nym pushed it aside. Analia was a somewhat poisoned resource now, tied too close to her father. Nym wasn’t sure how trustworthy she was anymore.
It wasn’t that he thought she’d betray him. It was that her father was entirely too good at keeping tabs on her. Her brother might have tried to keep her in Abilanth, but Jaspar Feldstal obviously had different plans for her. Nym couldn’t even begin to guess the extent of her father’s spying on his daughter and, by extension, Nym. The Collective also had weeks of data from various tests. It was possible they’d figured out he was an ascendant before he’d confirmed it himself.
That would certainly explain the change in attitude. They probably didn’t know what to make of him. Ascendants were supposed to be god-like beings, and here he was, getting taken out by a late-night hit squad and being forced into a geas. He could probably use their assumptions to force a good deal just by bluffing, but he wasn’t really sure what they had that was worth staying involved.
[We can meet, but you’ll have to offer more than that if you want me to stay and fight undead. This looks like a pretty decisive loss for humanity to me.]
There was no reply for a minute, then with a quiet crack, Lord Feldstal himself appeared in the air next to Nym. He floated easily, though his version of the spell used the same wind-based suspension Analia had used when they’d first met. Her father’s control was much finer, and even if his clothing whipped around him, the wind was sharply contained to only support him without any stray gusts.
“Hello,” he said, his voice modified with magic to cut through the winds holding him aloft.
“Hi,” Nym said, his arms crossed as he stood on a plane of hardened air. “Let’s start with what exactly you want me to do.”
Lord Feldstal gestured around at the forest. “This, all of this, is intolerable. The outbreak is no longer contained, and we have a solution in six months when we needed one yesterday. We want you to help to cull the undead and eliminate the source.”
“And why would I be able to do any of that?” Nym asked. He was sure he knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the nobleman say it.
“Because you’re not human. You’re beyond us.”
“Am I?”
“I don’t know what games you’re playing,” Lord Feldstal snapped. He stopped himself and took a steadying breath, before continuing in a much calmer tone, “Whatever your reasons, you’re obviously an ascendant. I have a thousand questions I’d love to get the chance to ask, but this is more important. You could end this with a snap of your fingers. What price do we have to pay to get you to act according to your true nature, not this disguise you’re wearing?”
They’d made a lot of assumptions about Nym, most of them incorrect. That was the problem with the whole meeting. If he really could just wave a hand and make the undead disappear, he probably would have done it already. It was hard to bargain for something when he couldn’t come through on his end.
“What makes you think this whole mess is more important to me than maintaining this disguise?” Nym asked, stalling for time.
“I am very sure that the affairs of mortals fall far beneath an ascendant’s notice,” Lord Feldstal said dryly. His voice had a bit more spine in it, but he was still dancing around cautiously. He was still afraid of saying the wrong thing and being obliterated by a power he couldn’t comprehend.
Nym wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation, but all he could do was hold to the bluff and hope to find a way out. He did still want Analia back, but that was barely enough to convince him to help at all, let alone reveal his ‘true nature.’
“Tell me what happened. You had this under control. What went wrong?”
Lord Feldstal hesitated before speaking. Nym could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes. He was trying to figure out what to reveal and what to hide, trying to figure out if he dared lie to the creature he thought Nym was. While he was thinking, Nym took the opportunity to cast a spell he’d rarely had a chance to use: the truth seeking spell he’d watched Bardin cast when they’d interrogated Nym back in Abilanth.
It wasn’t a perfect lie detector, and he wouldn’t trust it against a mage as powerful as Lord Feldstal normally, but right now, it might just give him the edge he needed. He waited with the spell running while the nobleman struggled to figure out how much he wanted to reveal.
“The third circle mages working in shifts to keep the Veil pinned closed were doing a shift change. Something must have gone wrong; we’re still not sure what. The Veil opened enough for the reaper to reach out. It started killing mages and raising them as wights. Things cascaded from there and before we knew it, we’d lost thirty mages to the undead. The tear opened up completely and thousands of ghouls passed through with plenty of new wights to command them.”
“The reaper didn’t pass through as well?” Nym asked.
Lord Feldstal shook his head. “The tear still isn’t big enough. We called in Archmage Veram to help. He’s still there, as far as I know, holding the tear closed by himself. He can’t do anything else but buy us time. If he lets go, the tear will open up and start expanding again. Then everything gets worse. But he’s still just a man, for all his power. He can’t hold it forever.”
“And you want me to go fix it all,” Nym said. “Just make all your problems go away.”
“Please.” There was a hint of begging in the word.
There were no lies there that he could detect, but Nym couldn’t do what Lord Feldstal wanted. He’d have to refuse and leave, pretend like he just wasn’t interested. “That sounds like a lot of work for very little reward. Your offer is to remove a geas I could remove myself and guarantee the safety of your own daughter, who is already quite safe. In return, I have to shed my anonymity, derail my own plans, and clean up a mess I had nothing to do with.”
“She would also be free to continue traveling with you, for whatever your plans are,” Lord Feldstal said weakly.
“Your concern for her well-being is touching,” Nym sneered. “I almost can’t believe you subjected her to all your little experiments when she was a baby.”
The nobleman bristled and Nym feared he’d pressed too far. Then Lord Feldstal sighed and shrunk back into himself. “Fine, if none of that is enough, what else could we offer?”
“I doubt you have anything I want that bad,” Nym told him.
“If not me, perhaps Archmage Veran himself might have something to interest you. It might only be a trinket by your scale, but trinkets can still be fascinating.”
Nym was about to refuse again, when he felt something grab hold of him. The world pinched him and suddenly he was standing in the air above the ritual site next to a man who looked to be in his fifties. He had his eyes closed and an intense aura of arcana roiled around him.
“You look quite young for an ascendant,” the man said.
“Archmage Veran, I assume?” Nym asked.
