The problem with learning from an archmage was that he was a very, very busy man. He generally spared only twenty minutes a day to answer any questions Nym had and point him in the right direction to explore and investigate. It wasn’t exactly what Nym had in mind when he’d requested help forging a fifth layer conduit, but it was what he got.
On the other hand, Nym did get access to a rather extensive library once he’d successfully managed to reforge a conduit that reached the Astral Sea. Archmage Veran recognized the need for a balanced set of spells and specifically pointed out a few tomes that contained some of the more immediately useful third circle spells.
Nym did learn that overland flight spell he wanted, though it would take some practice to hold it long enough to actually make the journey. The spell would make him fly so fast that without a few supplementary spells to help him see and protect him, it was a terrible idea to even try. He could just picture himself cut and bleeding, his clothes shredded around him and hanging off his body.
It wasn’t an elemental air spell either. Those were left behind with the second layer. Third circle spells didn’t much care about having materials to work with. They just used raw arcana to alter reality using whatever guidelines the spell had. That made the spells more arcana intensive and complicated, but also significantly less limited than their second circle counterparts.
Nym picked up a few other spells to go with his new flight spell. He found kinetic barrier’s older and meaner brother: hyperkinetic barrier, which could stop far more than small projectiles and would keep him from tearing himself to shreds up in the sky. He also found a spell called perfect sight which would allow him to navigate while flying, as well as let him see details much farther away than far sight did, even in the dark.
Greater telekinesis, dispel construct, and obscure self rounded out his new third circle repertoire. Greater telekinesis functioned just like telekinesis, only without being restricted to what he could physically carry himself. Finally, he could pick enemies up and just throw them away from him, though there was still a weight limit of a few thousand pounds. Nym could think of numerous times over the past few months when being able to just pick someone up and move them around without them being able to fight back would have been helpful.
Dispel construct was exactly what Nym had already been doing manually, just automated into an admittedly complex spell that would probably take longer to cast than it would to just do it himself. For mages who couldn’t see arcana though, he assumed it would be an extremely valuable spell to know. For him, it was mostly something he wanted to play with to see how it ‘saw’ enemy constructs. He had some vague notions about combining that with an illusion spell to create a new spell that imitated what he saw naturally.
Obscure self was his answer towards trying to remain discreet. It allowed him to exist as no more than a hazy memory to people, quickly forgotten and with indistinct details if someone asked about him. The spellbook promised the effect wouldn’t be obvious at the time, and people would only realize something had happened if they tried to remember specific details about their encounter with him.
The final new spell he learned was an alter weather spell. It wasn’t relevant or practical, but it was so similar to the one the ice worm hive queen had been using that Nym picked it just as an act of sentimentality. It only took him an hour to figure it out since he had first-hand experience with it already and knew the second circle version. There were some slight changes as it had an open spot in the construct for different types of weather instead of being locked in blizzard mode.
Perhaps more important to Nym were the once-a-week sessions where Archmage Veran continued to assist Nym in expanding his arcana channels, modifying his matrix, and altering his physical body to assist in making new conduits. Though Nym had never used much ritual magic himself, he knew the theory behind it. It involved investing arcana into objects to share the load of a spell, or in some cases another person, though that got trickier.
Nym’s mind became partitioned, allowing him to work on multiple spells at once. This wasn’t the same as what he’d previously done, where he built spells one at a time and then kept them powered. Instead, he could actually cast two spells at once, regardless of complexity. As Archmage Veran explained it, this would become necessary the stronger he got, and there were further levels of partitioning beyond it, but they had to be done incrementally or he would break his brain.
Really, the whole arrangement was far beyond the letter of their agreement, and even beyond the spirit of it. Nym suspected that at some point, he’d be asked for a big favor in return, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. They wanted him to take care of that reaper so they could close the Veil for good. Archmage Veran had already admitted that at best, he could hold it back, and even that had taken a tremendous amount of resources that would take months to build back up.
Nym was nowhere near ready to attempt something like that, so he hoped the archmage wasn’t planning on asking him any time soon. He was still learning how to effectively use third layer arcana in a combat scenario. It only took a few seconds to make the conduit now, but until he could do it instantly, he wouldn’t consider himself prepared.
That wasn’t to say that Nym didn’t ever fight. He regularly teleported back to the forest outside Ebalsan and did laps around the area to clean up undead and conduct salvage operations. He managed to recover a few of the Earth Shapers’ magical possessions he’d missed the first time, though most were damaged to the point of being unusable. Most of the camps had been picked through already by the army when they’d retaken the area, meaning it was hardly worth his time to fly around looking for them.
Since he never did figure out what was going on when two mages tried to arrest him, Nym avoided the army while he was there. Added to that the connection between the army and the Collective, and he spent more time flying around the countryside outside of the forest hunting random undead than he did flying over the trees.
Nym was fine with that. His actions when the undead had routed the army had been incredibly self-serving, much more Niramyn than Nym, and now that he was back in control of himself, he felt like he should make up for that. Hunting down undead over vast stretches of land was something he was well equipped to do.
Usually, it was too late to save whoever the ghouls had attacked. They tended to find small villages or isolated farmhouses and swarm them, often killing anyone who couldn’t flee. Nym would find great clumps of them squatting in the wreckage and annihilate them, then spend an hour or two scrying the surrounding countryside to pick up the ones roaming around by themselves.
It was tedious and somewhat heart-wrenching work. Very rarely were there any people left, and it made it work harder if there was. The ghouls would track down survivors, kill them, and be even more scattered. Once or twice, Nym would find a survivor before the ghouls did, but it rarely worked out that way.
* * *
Nym came upon something new one evening when it was just starting to get dark. Usually, farms were small and isolated. They grew enough for themselves and a little extra to trade in nearby villages and towns. This farm wasn’t like that though.
It was more of a plantation, bigger than some towns he’d seen, and completely walled in. The ghouls were attacking it, and they were well-enough organized that Nym suspected a wight was leading them, possibly two. The walls weren’t high enough to keep them out, nor were the farmhands skilled enough to do more than delay the undead despite outnumbering them five to one.
Nym swept the outer perimeter where the ghouls had breached the walls and used a lot of greater telekinesis to rip them away from whoever they’d attacked. The undead were flung back over the walls en masse, much to the confusion of the farm hands below.
Once he was reasonably certain he’d expelled the ghouls, he started excavating a large pit in the middle of one field. “Collect any free wood you’ve got and get a fire going in here,” he instructed the nearby farmhands. “The ghouls won’t die until they’re reduced to ash. Your job is going to be to keep any parts from crawling back out.”
“Who are you?” one of the older farm hands said.
“Just a mage passing by,” Nym said. He had no plans on identifying himself and was in fact using his obscurement spell to keep them from remembering what he looked like.
The new burn pit was near the wall, and Nym quickly started filling it with dismembered ghouls. His mage blades combined with greater telekinesis made the task almost trivial, even with the wights lurking somewhere in the background directing the ghouls. Nym put his new dual processes to work and set one part of mind to casting various detection and scrying spells to try to locate them, but his lack of range was working against him.
The farm hands were still fighting fresh ghouls as they came over the walls, but with Nym’s help, it was a lot easier to gang up on them and hack a ghoul up before it could cause real damage. The burn pit was going strong, with dozens of people surrounding it wearing cloth masks and wielding hoes and rakes to keep the ghouls burning inside from escaping.
The numbers were thinning, but Nym didn’t want the wights to escape. He needed to hunt them down now, before they cut and ran. “You guys can take this from here,” he said, turning to a nearby farm hand. “There’s some strong undead directing them from the back. I’m going to go hunt them down before they escape and start rounding up new ghouls.”
“Wait a second! What are we supposed to do without you?”
Nym looked around. Everywhere around him, farm hands were working in groups to pin ghouls down with whatever long-handled tools they had available, then hacking limbs off with wood-cutting axes. “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’ve killed enough of them that you can handle this. I’ll be back in a bit.”
There were more sounds of protest, but Nym ignored them. He flew over the wall and sent his mage blades to work on the ghouls approaching, but that was just a cover for his real activity: wight hunting. Once he was mobile, he was able to scan farther away from the plantation and found one of them quickly enough. It was hiding in an old wind-mill a quarter of a mile from the farm, organizing groups of ghouls and sending them out to run the distance in units.
That explained the weird mix of organization combined with a lack of adaption. The wights were doing just enough to help the ghouls exercise some pack tactics without being close enough to risk themselves. At least, they thought they were safe.
Nym cast his new hyperkinetic barrier and barged into the windmill. Mage blades flashed out, chopping two ghouls to pieces while the other part of his mind put together a lightning bolt to smite the wight where it stood. Mission accomplished, Nym lifted the whole heap of body parts and ferried them back to the plantation’s burn pits.
“One down,” he told the farm hand who was directing the defenses in his absence. “I think there’s another one, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“Wait!” the farm hand grabbed his sleeve. “Something happened up at the house. We heard screaming a few minutes ago. A few of us went to go check, but I haven’t heard back.”
Nym nodded. “I’ll check it out before I go.”
The problem with learning from an archmage was that he was a very, very busy man. He generally spared only twenty minutes a day to answer any questions Nym had and point him in the right direction to explore and investigate. It wasn’t exactly what Nym had in mind when he’d requested help forging a fifth layer conduit, but it was what he got.
On the other hand, Nym did get access to a rather extensive library once he’d successfully managed to reforge a conduit that reached the Astral Sea. Archmage Veran recognized the need for a balanced set of spells and specifically pointed out a few tomes that contained some of the more immediately useful third circle spells.
Nym did learn that overland flight spell he wanted, though it would take some practice to hold it long enough to actually make the journey. The spell would make him fly so fast that without a few supplementary spells to help him see and protect him, it was a terrible idea to even try. He could just picture himself cut and bleeding, his clothes shredded around him and hanging off his body.
It wasn’t an elemental air spell either. Those were left behind with the second layer. Third circle spells didn’t much care about having materials to work with. They just used raw arcana to alter reality using whatever guidelines the spell had. That made the spells more arcana intensive and complicated, but also significantly less limited than their second circle counterparts.
Nym picked up a few other spells to go with his new flight spell. He found kinetic barrier’s older and meaner brother: hyperkinetic barrier, which could stop far more than small projectiles and would keep him from tearing himself to shreds up in the sky. He also found a spell called perfect sight which would allow him to navigate while flying, as well as let him see details much farther away than far sight did, even in the dark.
Greater telekinesis, dispel construct, and obscure self rounded out his new third circle repertoire. Greater telekinesis functioned just like telekinesis, only without being restricted to what he could physically carry himself. Finally, he could pick enemies up and just throw them away from him, though there was still a weight limit of a few thousand pounds. Nym could think of numerous times over the past few months when being able to just pick someone up and move them around without them being able to fight back would have been helpful.
Dispel construct was exactly what Nym had already been doing manually, just automated into an admittedly complex spell that would probably take longer to cast than it would to just do it himself. For mages who couldn’t see arcana though, he assumed it would be an extremely valuable spell to know. For him, it was mostly something he wanted to play with to see how it ‘saw’ enemy constructs. He had some vague notions about combining that with an illusion spell to create a new spell that imitated what he saw naturally.
Obscure self was his answer towards trying to remain discreet. It allowed him to exist as no more than a hazy memory to people, quickly forgotten and with indistinct details if someone asked about him. The spellbook promised the effect wouldn’t be obvious at the time, and people would only realize something had happened if they tried to remember specific details about their encounter with him.
The final new spell he learned was an alter weather spell. It wasn’t relevant or practical, but it was so similar to the one the ice worm hive queen had been using that Nym picked it just as an act of sentimentality. It only took him an hour to figure it out since he had first-hand experience with it already and knew the second circle version. There were some slight changes as it had an open spot in the construct for different types of weather instead of being locked in blizzard mode.
Perhaps more important to Nym were the once-a-week sessions where Archmage Veran continued to assist Nym in expanding his arcana channels, modifying his matrix, and altering his physical body to assist in making new conduits. Though Nym had never used much ritual magic himself, he knew the theory behind it. It involved investing arcana into objects to share the load of a spell, or in some cases another person, though that got trickier.
Nym’s mind became partitioned, allowing him to work on multiple spells at once. This wasn’t the same as what he’d previously done, where he built spells one at a time and then kept them powered. Instead, he could actually cast two spells at once, regardless of complexity. As Archmage Veran explained it, this would become necessary the stronger he got, and there were further levels of partitioning beyond it, but they had to be done incrementally or he would break his brain.
Really, the whole arrangement was far beyond the letter of their agreement, and even beyond the spirit of it. Nym suspected that at some point, he’d be asked for a big favor in return, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was. They wanted him to take care of that reaper so they could close the Veil for good. Archmage Veran had already admitted that at best, he could hold it back, and even that had taken a tremendous amount of resources that would take months to build back up.
Nym was nowhere near ready to attempt something like that, so he hoped the archmage wasn’t planning on asking him any time soon. He was still learning how to effectively use third layer arcana in a combat scenario. It only took a few seconds to make the conduit now, but until he could do it instantly, he wouldn’t consider himself prepared.
That wasn’t to say that Nym didn’t ever fight. He regularly teleported back to the forest outside Ebalsan and did laps around the area to clean up undead and conduct salvage operations. He managed to recover a few of the Earth Shapers’ magical possessions he’d missed the first time, though most were damaged to the point of being unusable. Most of the camps had been picked through already by the army when they’d retaken the area, meaning it was hardly worth his time to fly around looking for them.
Since he never did figure out what was going on when two mages tried to arrest him, Nym avoided the army while he was there. Added to that the connection between the army and the Collective, and he spent more time flying around the countryside outside of the forest hunting random undead than he did flying over the trees.
Nym was fine with that. His actions when the undead had routed the army had been incredibly self-serving, much more Niramyn than Nym, and now that he was back in control of himself, he felt like he should make up for that. Hunting down undead over vast stretches of land was something he was well equipped to do.
Usually, it was too late to save whoever the ghouls had attacked. They tended to find small villages or isolated farmhouses and swarm them, often killing anyone who couldn’t flee. Nym would find great clumps of them squatting in the wreckage and annihilate them, then spend an hour or two scrying the surrounding countryside to pick up the ones roaming around by themselves.
It was tedious and somewhat heart-wrenching work. Very rarely were there any people left, and it made it work harder if there was. The ghouls would track down survivors, kill them, and be even more scattered. Once or twice, Nym would find a survivor before the ghouls did, but it rarely worked out that way.
* * *
Nym came upon something new one evening when it was just starting to get dark. Usually, farms were small and isolated. They grew enough for themselves and a little extra to trade in nearby villages and towns. This farm wasn’t like that though.
It was more of a plantation, bigger than some towns he’d seen, and completely walled in. The ghouls were attacking it, and they were well-enough organized that Nym suspected a wight was leading them, possibly two. The walls weren’t high enough to keep them out, nor were the farmhands skilled enough to do more than delay the undead despite outnumbering them five to one.
Nym swept the outer perimeter where the ghouls had breached the walls and used a lot of greater telekinesis to rip them away from whoever they’d attacked. The undead were flung back over the walls en masse, much to the confusion of the farm hands below.
Once he was reasonably certain he’d expelled the ghouls, he started excavating a large pit in the middle of one field. “Collect any free wood you’ve got and get a fire going in here,” he instructed the nearby farmhands. “The ghouls won’t die until they’re reduced to ash. Your job is going to be to keep any parts from crawling back out.”
“Who are you?” one of the older farm hands said.
“Just a mage passing by,” Nym said. He had no plans on identifying himself and was in fact using his obscurement spell to keep them from remembering what he looked like.
The new burn pit was near the wall, and Nym quickly started filling it with dismembered ghouls. His mage blades combined with greater telekinesis made the task almost trivial, even with the wights lurking somewhere in the background directing the ghouls. Nym put his new dual processes to work and set one part of mind to casting various detection and scrying spells to try to locate them, but his lack of range was working against him.
The farm hands were still fighting fresh ghouls as they came over the walls, but with Nym’s help, it was a lot easier to gang up on them and hack a ghoul up before it could cause real damage. The burn pit was going strong, with dozens of people surrounding it wearing cloth masks and wielding hoes and rakes to keep the ghouls burning inside from escaping.
The numbers were thinning, but Nym didn’t want the wights to escape. He needed to hunt them down now, before they cut and ran. “You guys can take this from here,” he said, turning to a nearby farm hand. “There’s some strong undead directing them from the back. I’m going to go hunt them down before they escape and start rounding up new ghouls.”
“Wait a second! What are we supposed to do without you?”
Nym looked around. Everywhere around him, farm hands were working in groups to pin ghouls down with whatever long-handled tools they had available, then hacking limbs off with wood-cutting axes. “Keep doing what you’re doing. You’ve killed enough of them that you can handle this. I’ll be back in a bit.”
There were more sounds of protest, but Nym ignored them. He flew over the wall and sent his mage blades to work on the ghouls approaching, but that was just a cover for his real activity: wight hunting. Once he was mobile, he was able to scan farther away from the plantation and found one of them quickly enough. It was hiding in an old wind-mill a quarter of a mile from the farm, organizing groups of ghouls and sending them out to run the distance in units.
That explained the weird mix of organization combined with a lack of adaption. The wights were doing just enough to help the ghouls exercise some pack tactics without being close enough to risk themselves. At least, they thought they were safe.
Nym cast his new hyperkinetic barrier and barged into the windmill. Mage blades flashed out, chopping two ghouls to pieces while the other part of his mind put together a lightning bolt to smite the wight where it stood. Mission accomplished, Nym lifted the whole heap of body parts and ferried them back to the plantation’s burn pits.
“One down,” he told the farm hand who was directing the defenses in his absence. “I think there’s another one, but I haven’t found it yet.”
“Wait!” the farm hand grabbed his sleeve. “Something happened up at the house. We heard screaming a few minutes ago. A few of us went to go check, but I haven’t heard back.”
Nym nodded. “I’ll check it out before I go.”
