There was some argument about Nym’s participation, particularly from Ophelia. She got into a heated debate with Bildar off to one side of the room while the other four sat at the table and discussed what was going on.
“Wait,” Monick said at one point in the story. “You’re a necromancer now?”
“Uh, in that I know three spells that involve dead bodies, I guess. I don’t plan on making it an area of focus.”
“That’s gross,” Nomick said. “You should have just become an earth mage, like us. That’s the best kind of mage.”
“I… think I would probably go with air magic, if I had to pick any single element.”
“Bah. You have no taste.”
“I’m happy with the current direction of my growth,” Nym deadpanned. “Though I should probably spend some more time working on healing magic.”
He’d spent all those hours studying anatomy, after all. He needed to round that knowledge out with some practical experience parsing the information he could gain from diagnostics spells, and then acquire what was truly a prodigious number of spells designed to fix very specific problems. The more he learned, the more he realized he’d barely begun to acquire the knowledge an expert healer needed.
It was much, much easier to break things.
“Do you think you’ll go to Dohr?” Nym asked.
The twins glanced at each other and shrugged. “The boss’ll figure that out. I’m not keen on trying to survive the winter up here with how little we managed to save up, so I guess we’ll probably be heading south. We might go for Karu instead of Dohr though. It doesn’t much matter to me.”
“And do you think you’ll go with them?” Nym asked Analia.
“I’m not entirely sure where I’ll go next. Money is… limited. I need to cut all ties with my family now. Leaving Delvros does sound like a good idea, and it would be nice to have friends nearby, but I’m not convinced I want to go to Karu or Dohr. That entire country’s culture has a well-deserved reputation for being stubborn and unreasonable. The people you talked to were by no means unique. I’m told it can be quite frustrating to immigrate into their communities.”
“I… yeah, there were a few people I talked to who made it harder than it needed to be to ask for simple directions.”
Ophelia and Bildar returned to the table, neither looking happy. Without any sort of preamble, Bildar said, “We would like to go to Karu. We would like you to come with us, but we recognize that you can make your own choices, and that you are far more powerful than any other mage in this room. Situations that may seem unreasonably dangerous to us are not necessarily dangerous to you.”
He kept his eyes locked on Ophelia while he spoke, and she glared right back. This had been the gist of their harshly whispered argument, and while everyone else had done their best to ignore it, it wasn’t really possible to block out what they were saying.
“I’m going to stay, but it means a lot to me that you guys care.” Nym paused and frowned. “I know you’ve got stuff going on here in town, but leaving today would be better. We’re going to be throwing rocks at a hornets’ nest, and if the army screws up on the containment, there could be thousands of ghouls spilling out in every direction. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back here. I don’t know if this town will be safe.”
“We’ve got obligations here we’ve agreed to,” Ophelia said. “We won’t be ready to leave for at least a week. And besides, once we leave, how will you ever find us again?”
“Well, I do have an archmage tutoring me. I’m sure I could pick up some extremely long range scrying spells.”
“That… is a good point.”
“See,” Bildar said. “It’s fine. We’ll still see him again. He’s going to be fine, and the little prodigy over there will find us once it’s all over.”
“What about you, Analia?” Ophelia asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll take the week to consider what I want to do.” She seemed troubled as she spoke. “Right now, I have a lot more ideas about what I don’t want than what I do.”
“Guys, I want to stress again that I can’t promise Geldrin will be safe. If the ghouls make it this far, you might have to flee.”
“We’re days out from Ebalsan,” Bildar said. “It may be relying on you too much, but if everything goes sideways, I expect we’ll find out directly from you long before the first ghoul is spotted around here.”
“That’s… maybe true,” Nym admitted. “Still, if I’m not going to teleport you today, we should figure out where you’ll retreat to if needed.”
That plan ended up being simple. If for some reason Geldrin was overrun before Nym got back, the Earth Shapers and Analia would simply keep moving east to the next town, and the one after that, all the way back to Thrakus if they had to. None of them were expecting to need to, not in the least because if ghouls started to show up, the first thing they’d likely do was start building a wall around Geldrin.
Plans settled and lunch demolished, everyone went their separate ways. Nym and Analia flew back out to the countryside so she could continue hunting for various herbs and plants to experiment with. It was a casual flight, especially after the overland flight spell he’d been using throughout the morning. They barely even needed the shield of hardened air Nym put up out of consideration for her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Analia asked while they were flying.
“I guess,” he said. “It’s kind of a huge problem and I do have the power to help, so I probably should. Also how often do you get the chance to use an archmage’s library? There are so many third circle spells in those books. It would take me months just to catalogue everything I could learn there.”
“He would still help you make your fifth layer conduit though, even if you didn’t help,” Analia pointed out. “That was the deal you made for helping him last time.”
“That’s true,” Nym said.
“Plus,” she continued on, “Won’t you just get your old magic back once you regain all your memories.”
“Theoretically. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
Nym took a minute to gather his thoughts. “I’m not sure I want them back now,” he said finally. “My old life, the ascendant life… I don’t think I was a very good person. The memories I do have are not pleasant ones. The enemies I have are terrifying to even think about. It might just be better to keep being Nym.”
“If that’s how you feel, then why are you pushing to get to the fifth layer?”
That was a good question, one Nym wasn’t sure of himself. Part of it was just a simple desire to keep advancing. There were still years of learning in regards to second and third circle spells, but he had an opportunity now to push past those and access what Archmage Veran called pinnacle spells. Even once he was able to cast them, the archmage confided that very rarely did he use them. Forging a conduit to the fifth layer wasn’t something done on a whim, at least not for humans.
That wasn’t the only reason though. Part of him did want to know what was behind that door, what secrets were locked away in that little metal cube. Even if he ultimately chose not to pursue it after that, he would at least have the key he needed to give him that option. And if it came down to it and someone from his past did find him, Nym might just be able to save himself by having the option to access those memories instantly.
“I guess I just feel like I need to,” he told Analia. “That’s probably not a very good explanation. It’s like… I can, so I should. I should have that option available, just in case I need to take it later.”
“I think I understand,” Analia said. She changed the subject. “Will you be working with my father again?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not entirely sure. I should know by tonight. I think our exploratory force that will be going into the tunnels is something Archmage Veran put together himself, but there’s going to be a lot of coordination with the army, so I guess we’ll see.”
“You’re going to leave us all behind eventually, you know that?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Nym said.
She shook her head. “No, you will. Look at you. You started over from nothing. It’s barely been a year, and you broke through to the third layer. Most mages never accomplish that, though I guess the number is higher than I thought. Still, in a year you’ve done what some people can’t manage in a lifetime, and mages live longer than regular people anyway. Where will you be next year, or the year after that?”
“Just because we’re not still studying together doesn’t mean I’m just going to forget that we’re friends.”
“It’s not even just that, Nym. Look at yourself. When we met, I would have said I was a year older than you. Now you look three or four years older than me. That’s a good reason to keep advancing if nothing else. You need to figure out how to break that spell.”
Nym grimaced and nodded. Archmage Veran hadn’t known how to break that spell either. It might force Nym to return to his previous life if for no other reason than his current life span was probably measured in less than two decades. He still had time for now, and he honestly was happy to age up a little bit more first. His soul well would keep growing up to as late as his early twenties, and it was much easier to get things done without being second-guessed all the time now that he didn’t look quite so young.
“One way or another, you’ll leave us behind. None of us can keep up with you. You’re aging five times faster than me. What’s the future going to look like for us in a year? Two years?”
“I don’t know,” Nym said. “I’m not going to stop being your friend just because we don’t look the same age anymore.”
They landed on a little glade halfway up the side of a nearby mountain. Analia gave him a long, searching look, but whatever she hoped to see, she must have been disappointed. She just sighed and said, “You don’t get it. I don’t think you ever did.”
“Don’t get what?” Nym asked, confused now.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Talk about what?”
She sighed again and said, “Thanks for bringing me back out. Don’t get yourself killed doing stupid things. I’ll see you in a few days, okay?”
“Yeah… be careful out here too. Ghouls aren’t the only dangerous thing in the world.”
* * *
Nym teleported back to Archmage Veran’s sanctum a few minutes later. The old man was already there, along with a few others. He recognized the uniforms of two people from the army, but not the faces. Standing next to the archmage, or really more looming over him, was Babkin. A woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties and was draped in layers of brightly colored clothes stood on the other side of the berserker.
“Who’s this?” a familiar voice said behind Nym. He turned around to see Leaf standing there, though he looked much different now. Gone were the casual clothes, and instead he wore a lot of armor and had a pair of swords strapped to his belt. Leaf looked him over and said, “You look familiar.”
“It’s Nym.”
“Impossible. You’re at least five years older than Nym.”
Babkin looked over his shoulder at Nym and nodded. “It is him,” the berserker said simply before turning back to the map he was examining with the rest of what Nym assumed was the strike force the archmage had assembled. Now that he’d been down south of the border, Nym realized he knew the source of Babkin’s accent. Somehow, it was not surprising.
“Huh,” Leaf said, scratching as his beard. “Well, that’s something new then. It’s been a day for new things. So you’re working for Veran, huh?”
“Something like that,” Nym said. “I got dragooned into coming along to flush these tunnels out.”
Leaf’s eyebrows shot up. “That seems like a bad idea.”
“Tell him that.” Nym pointed to the archmage.
“Well, don’t you worry. I’ll keep an eye on you,” Leaf assured him.
Nym just rolled his eyes.
There was some argument about Nym’s participation, particularly from Ophelia. She got into a heated debate with Bildar off to one side of the room while the other four sat at the table and discussed what was going on.
“Wait,” Monick said at one point in the story. “You’re a necromancer now?”
“Uh, in that I know three spells that involve dead bodies, I guess. I don’t plan on making it an area of focus.”
“That’s gross,” Nomick said. “You should have just become an earth mage, like us. That’s the best kind of mage.”
“I… think I would probably go with air magic, if I had to pick any single element.”
“Bah. You have no taste.”
“I’m happy with the current direction of my growth,” Nym deadpanned. “Though I should probably spend some more time working on healing magic.”
He’d spent all those hours studying anatomy, after all. He needed to round that knowledge out with some practical experience parsing the information he could gain from diagnostics spells, and then acquire what was truly a prodigious number of spells designed to fix very specific problems. The more he learned, the more he realized he’d barely begun to acquire the knowledge an expert healer needed.
It was much, much easier to break things.
“Do you think you’ll go to Dohr?” Nym asked.
The twins glanced at each other and shrugged. “The boss’ll figure that out. I’m not keen on trying to survive the winter up here with how little we managed to save up, so I guess we’ll probably be heading south. We might go for Karu instead of Dohr though. It doesn’t much matter to me.”
“And do you think you’ll go with them?” Nym asked Analia.
“I’m not entirely sure where I’ll go next. Money is… limited. I need to cut all ties with my family now. Leaving Delvros does sound like a good idea, and it would be nice to have friends nearby, but I’m not convinced I want to go to Karu or Dohr. That entire country’s culture has a well-deserved reputation for being stubborn and unreasonable. The people you talked to were by no means unique. I’m told it can be quite frustrating to immigrate into their communities.”
“I… yeah, there were a few people I talked to who made it harder than it needed to be to ask for simple directions.”
Ophelia and Bildar returned to the table, neither looking happy. Without any sort of preamble, Bildar said, “We would like to go to Karu. We would like you to come with us, but we recognize that you can make your own choices, and that you are far more powerful than any other mage in this room. Situations that may seem unreasonably dangerous to us are not necessarily dangerous to you.”
He kept his eyes locked on Ophelia while he spoke, and she glared right back. This had been the gist of their harshly whispered argument, and while everyone else had done their best to ignore it, it wasn’t really possible to block out what they were saying.
“I’m going to stay, but it means a lot to me that you guys care.” Nym paused and frowned. “I know you’ve got stuff going on here in town, but leaving today would be better. We’re going to be throwing rocks at a hornets’ nest, and if the army screws up on the containment, there could be thousands of ghouls spilling out in every direction. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back here. I don’t know if this town will be safe.”
“We’ve got obligations here we’ve agreed to,” Ophelia said. “We won’t be ready to leave for at least a week. And besides, once we leave, how will you ever find us again?”
“Well, I do have an archmage tutoring me. I’m sure I could pick up some extremely long range scrying spells.”
“That… is a good point.”
“See,” Bildar said. “It’s fine. We’ll still see him again. He’s going to be fine, and the little prodigy over there will find us once it’s all over.”
“What about you, Analia?” Ophelia asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll take the week to consider what I want to do.” She seemed troubled as she spoke. “Right now, I have a lot more ideas about what I don’t want than what I do.”
“Guys, I want to stress again that I can’t promise Geldrin will be safe. If the ghouls make it this far, you might have to flee.”
“We’re days out from Ebalsan,” Bildar said. “It may be relying on you too much, but if everything goes sideways, I expect we’ll find out directly from you long before the first ghoul is spotted around here.”
“That’s… maybe true,” Nym admitted. “Still, if I’m not going to teleport you today, we should figure out where you’ll retreat to if needed.”
That plan ended up being simple. If for some reason Geldrin was overrun before Nym got back, the Earth Shapers and Analia would simply keep moving east to the next town, and the one after that, all the way back to Thrakus if they had to. None of them were expecting to need to, not in the least because if ghouls started to show up, the first thing they’d likely do was start building a wall around Geldrin.
Plans settled and lunch demolished, everyone went their separate ways. Nym and Analia flew back out to the countryside so she could continue hunting for various herbs and plants to experiment with. It was a casual flight, especially after the overland flight spell he’d been using throughout the morning. They barely even needed the shield of hardened air Nym put up out of consideration for her.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Analia asked while they were flying.
“I guess,” he said. “It’s kind of a huge problem and I do have the power to help, so I probably should. Also how often do you get the chance to use an archmage’s library? There are so many third circle spells in those books. It would take me months just to catalogue everything I could learn there.”
“He would still help you make your fifth layer conduit though, even if you didn’t help,” Analia pointed out. “That was the deal you made for helping him last time.”
“That’s true,” Nym said.
“Plus,” she continued on, “Won’t you just get your old magic back once you regain all your memories.”
“Theoretically. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
Nym took a minute to gather his thoughts. “I’m not sure I want them back now,” he said finally. “My old life, the ascendant life… I don’t think I was a very good person. The memories I do have are not pleasant ones. The enemies I have are terrifying to even think about. It might just be better to keep being Nym.”
“If that’s how you feel, then why are you pushing to get to the fifth layer?”
That was a good question, one Nym wasn’t sure of himself. Part of it was just a simple desire to keep advancing. There were still years of learning in regards to second and third circle spells, but he had an opportunity now to push past those and access what Archmage Veran called pinnacle spells. Even once he was able to cast them, the archmage confided that very rarely did he use them. Forging a conduit to the fifth layer wasn’t something done on a whim, at least not for humans.
That wasn’t the only reason though. Part of him did want to know what was behind that door, what secrets were locked away in that little metal cube. Even if he ultimately chose not to pursue it after that, he would at least have the key he needed to give him that option. And if it came down to it and someone from his past did find him, Nym might just be able to save himself by having the option to access those memories instantly.
“I guess I just feel like I need to,” he told Analia. “That’s probably not a very good explanation. It’s like… I can, so I should. I should have that option available, just in case I need to take it later.”
“I think I understand,” Analia said. She changed the subject. “Will you be working with my father again?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m not entirely sure. I should know by tonight. I think our exploratory force that will be going into the tunnels is something Archmage Veran put together himself, but there’s going to be a lot of coordination with the army, so I guess we’ll see.”
“You’re going to leave us all behind eventually, you know that?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Nym said.
She shook her head. “No, you will. Look at you. You started over from nothing. It’s barely been a year, and you broke through to the third layer. Most mages never accomplish that, though I guess the number is higher than I thought. Still, in a year you’ve done what some people can’t manage in a lifetime, and mages live longer than regular people anyway. Where will you be next year, or the year after that?”
“Just because we’re not still studying together doesn’t mean I’m just going to forget that we’re friends.”
“It’s not even just that, Nym. Look at yourself. When we met, I would have said I was a year older than you. Now you look three or four years older than me. That’s a good reason to keep advancing if nothing else. You need to figure out how to break that spell.”
Nym grimaced and nodded. Archmage Veran hadn’t known how to break that spell either. It might force Nym to return to his previous life if for no other reason than his current life span was probably measured in less than two decades. He still had time for now, and he honestly was happy to age up a little bit more first. His soul well would keep growing up to as late as his early twenties, and it was much easier to get things done without being second-guessed all the time now that he didn’t look quite so young.
“One way or another, you’ll leave us behind. None of us can keep up with you. You’re aging five times faster than me. What’s the future going to look like for us in a year? Two years?”
“I don’t know,” Nym said. “I’m not going to stop being your friend just because we don’t look the same age anymore.”
They landed on a little glade halfway up the side of a nearby mountain. Analia gave him a long, searching look, but whatever she hoped to see, she must have been disappointed. She just sighed and said, “You don’t get it. I don’t think you ever did.”
“Don’t get what?” Nym asked, confused now.
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Talk about what?”
She sighed again and said, “Thanks for bringing me back out. Don’t get yourself killed doing stupid things. I’ll see you in a few days, okay?”
“Yeah… be careful out here too. Ghouls aren’t the only dangerous thing in the world.”
* * *
Nym teleported back to Archmage Veran’s sanctum a few minutes later. The old man was already there, along with a few others. He recognized the uniforms of two people from the army, but not the faces. Standing next to the archmage, or really more looming over him, was Babkin. A woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties and was draped in layers of brightly colored clothes stood on the other side of the berserker.
“Who’s this?” a familiar voice said behind Nym. He turned around to see Leaf standing there, though he looked much different now. Gone were the casual clothes, and instead he wore a lot of armor and had a pair of swords strapped to his belt. Leaf looked him over and said, “You look familiar.”
“It’s Nym.”
“Impossible. You’re at least five years older than Nym.”
Babkin looked over his shoulder at Nym and nodded. “It is him,” the berserker said simply before turning back to the map he was examining with the rest of what Nym assumed was the strike force the archmage had assembled. Now that he’d been down south of the border, Nym realized he knew the source of Babkin’s accent. Somehow, it was not surprising.
“Huh,” Leaf said, scratching as his beard. “Well, that’s something new then. It’s been a day for new things. So you’re working for Veran, huh?”
“Something like that,” Nym said. “I got dragooned into coming along to flush these tunnels out.”
Leaf’s eyebrows shot up. “That seems like a bad idea.”
“Tell him that.” Nym pointed to the archmage.
“Well, don’t you worry. I’ll keep an eye on you,” Leaf assured him.
Nym just rolled his eyes.
