Nym stood in the air above the archmage’s camouflage screen. Below them, the mausoleum was crawling with undead, far more than there’d been the first time. Now, however, there were thirty other mages up there with him, all of them working jointly to hold the ritual spell that was keeping the tear held closed and thousands of new ghouls from spilling out into the world.
Archmage Veran was among them, was in fact sitting on a cushion of air right next to Nym. His presence alone was the sole reason they were maintaining the ritual with so few people. It was many, many times stronger than the one he’d fed by himself, and yet it was still barely enough to hold against the pressure pushing from the other side of the Veil.
A part of Nym was curious about this creature, this reaper, that he could sense but not see. He wanted to send his scrying anchors through the tear and view what was on the other side of the Veil, but he’d been warned in no uncertain terms that it would be the height of idiocy to attempt such a thing. It was almost certain to result in his death, which might be the best-case scenario for everyone involved. Another strong possibility was that the reaper would seize the spell and use it as leverage to work the tear open further, possibly enough to fully emerge through to the living world.
With that warning firmly in mind, Nym was instead spending his scrying efforts looking at the mausoleum and trying to determine what was underneath it. He’d picked up a few new third circle scrying spells just for the occasion, ones that could theoretically pierce scrying wards, or would at least let him know that there was something there instead of just glossing over them.
They’d worked when he was practicing the spell in Archmage Veran’s sanctum, but out in the real world, there was a lot more interference. All the mages and their ritual were only the first layer. There was magic coming off the mausoleum itself, and off every single undead below them. Normally he wouldn’t see it passively like that; it turned out his ability to see arcana was mostly limited to active workings of magic and occasional enchanted items, also usually only when they were active.
The scrying spell was different. It didn’t so much see arcana as it was sensitive enough that arcana could interfere with it, at least in the quantities currently on display. It was kind of like trying to feel out what something looked like when it was sitting in a bucket of mud, where the arcana was the mud.
He was mucking around, trying to get a feel for what the spell was trying to show him, but the sensations he was getting were so distorted as to be practically useless. What he could easily see with his eyes, the scrying spell had scrambled completely. It physically couldn’t go deeper either. He’d tinkered with it, trying to find a way to give the new scrying spell that component of seeing through solid objects his old spell had.
The results were… not great, but not so terrible that he didn’t feel it was worth the effort to try. Neither Nym nor Archmage Veran were expecting to get much information from the exercise, especially since the archmage’s own scrying spells had also failed to penetrate whatever scrying wards were present inside and underneath the mausoleum. Nym wasn’t really sure why he was trying when Archmage Veran himself had failed, but he guessed his mentor was hoping he’d come up with another of those unique ascendant spells.
That hadn’t happened. He knew there was something down there, and that it was heavily warded. They’d already been able to guess that info long before Nym had started poking at it with scrying spells, and in fact the warded area was so large that he couldn’t miss it. He reported his findings back to Archmage Veran, who took the news calmly.
“This is exactly what I was expecting,” the old man explained. “We never had much hope that our first plan would work, but it cost so little time and effort to try it that it would be criminally negligent to ignore the opportunity to gain free intelligence. Our next plan of attack will be to send a team down into the caves to physically survey the area.”
“That seems… dangerous,” Nym pointed out. “Going through the tunnels will be a long fight. Digging straight down from here will involve holding back a thousand or more ghouls, not to mention the geists, wights, and frost wraiths still floating around.”
“I believe we will simply be teleporting straight down into a nearby tunnel that we can scry.”
“Risky,” Nym said. “You’d have to be very accurate to teleport into a tunnel that size, not to mention the risk of there being undead on top of where you’re trying to go.”
“Well I am an archmage, after all, and I’ll have you to help,” Archmage Veran said.
“Me? What am I doing in this plan of yours?”
“Assisting me, of course. You’ll primarily be scrying, but your kit is versatile enough to help break wards, fend off ghoul attacks, drop tunnels behind us to cut off pursuit, or place barriers to protect us. I am certain we’ll find a good use for your talents.”
Nym was not keen on the idea of going back underground. It has been extremely stressful the first time, especially with Babkin driving the pace and nobody else able to keep up with him. This was more of a targeted precision strike though. He couldn’t see a place for the burly innkeeper in this mission.
“Who all will be going?” Nym asked.
The old man chuckled. “Not Babkin, if that’s what you’re wondering. He’s not recovered from his last rampage yet, even if this were not a delicate matter.”
“That’s a relief. I’m not sure how feasible this plan is though. If something goes wrong and we lose the ability to teleport out, we’re going to die down there. It would take hours of uninterrupted work to dig our way back out.”
“It’s a risk, to be sure, but I think you might be underestimating my prowess slightly. Even if they’ve managed to set up trap wards that block teleportation, I am sure that we can break through them. None of the mages who were killed and raised as wights were all that powerful.”
Nym was less confident. They’d lost quite a few third circle mages, and he was just starting to realize how big the gulf was between second and third layer arcana. There were a lot of things that simply weren’t possible to do with second circle spells, effects that were so far removed from reality that even as group rituals, they just failed. Third circle spells could handle them easily, however.
With an archmage on their team, they’d have access to pinnacle spells, but those took time to set up. They took time just to properly forge the conduit! Even the simplest pinnacle spell would take several minutes of prep work, and while Nym was confident he could hold a tunnel against an unlimited number of ghouls for five minutes, he was far more concerned about holding it against an assault team of wights casting third circle spells.
Individual wights were far easier to destroy than ghouls, but also far more dangerous. Nym had assumed that their first trip into the tunnels was to trim the number of earth mage wights and stop them from expanding, but now he wondered if it hadn’t all been a set up for the next stage of their master plan.
“Just how many wights did we kill the other day?” he asked. “And how many do we estimate are left.”
“One hundred and fourteen,” the archmage rattled off immediately. “Possibly as many as half of the total wights.”
“And what happens when the ones that are left drop the ceiling on us and bury this group of ours alive?”
“Why do you think I want you along, Nym?”
Nym shook his head. “I can’t stop a dozen wights from doing that.”
“No,” the archmage said. “What you can do is see the arcana from their magic and warn us ahead of time. There is no shortage of third circle mages powerful enough to cast the spells we need. What we don’t have is someone like you who can see the attacks coming.”
“Look, it’s not that I mind helping,” Nym said. “But this is asking for a lot. I appreciate you letting me look through your library, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good if I’m dead. I kind of have other priorities.”
He was still devoting the majority of his free time to forging a conduit capable of even reaching the fourth layer, let alone boring through it. Navigating the Astral Sea was a completely different experience. His conduit would be questing forth, then suddenly it was somewhere else, going in a different direction. Just intuiting which way was deeper into the third layer was a challenge by itself.
Archmage Veran had explained it as a mess of two-way gates. They were scattered randomly all over the Astral Sea, but thankfully they didn’t tend to move. Learning a pathway through, from gate to gate, was the key to reaching the fourth layer. He would never have a conduit long enough to just stretch the distance, but he didn’t have to. He just had to finish learning how to navigate the path laid out for him.
“I understand, Nym,” the old man said. “But perhaps it would help to think of this as a way to help yourself. After all, how much of my life is spent here right now? How much more help could I give you if I didn’t have to spend any time or energy on this mess. By assisting us in ending this threat once and for all, you’re freeing me up to focus on teaching you everything you want to know.”
Nym just gave him a flat stare.
“And I’ll devote some time and effort to figuring out how to break the aging curse you’re stuck under,” the archmage added.
That was tempting. Right now, the only sure way he had to break it was to become Exarch Niramyn again, and Nym still wasn’t sure he wanted to do that. He wanted the knowledge and the spells, sure, but he didn’t like the kind of person he used to be. It wasn’t entirely clear how much of a package deal that was, but Nym didn’t like his chances of remaining himself if he chose to unseal that part of his personality from the cube.
There was every possibility that the aging curse was some ascendant level magic and that there truly was no other possible way to break it. In that case, it didn’t matter how much he railed against the inevitable. He’d become Niramyn again or he’d die after a short life. If he was lucky, that short life would be twenty or so years ending in death by old age.
If it wasn’t ascendant magic though, he wasn’t likely to get someone better suited than an archmage working on his behalf. This was quite possibly the best chance he’d ever get to rid himself of the curse without following his past life’s plan. It just meant he needed to teleport into an underground tunnel, already a task with a very slender margin for error, hold back assaults from the undead roaming the tunnel for an indeterminate length of time, and deal with whatever was hiding behind some powerful anti-scrying wards.
That was simple enough, in theory. It might actually be suicidal, but it sounded simple.
“I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this,” he muttered to himself. “Fine. I’ll help. When is this happening and who all is going?”
Nym stood in the air above the archmage’s camouflage screen. Below them, the mausoleum was crawling with undead, far more than there’d been the first time. Now, however, there were thirty other mages up there with him, all of them working jointly to hold the ritual spell that was keeping the tear held closed and thousands of new ghouls from spilling out into the world.
Archmage Veran was among them, was in fact sitting on a cushion of air right next to Nym. His presence alone was the sole reason they were maintaining the ritual with so few people. It was many, many times stronger than the one he’d fed by himself, and yet it was still barely enough to hold against the pressure pushing from the other side of the Veil.
A part of Nym was curious about this creature, this reaper, that he could sense but not see. He wanted to send his scrying anchors through the tear and view what was on the other side of the Veil, but he’d been warned in no uncertain terms that it would be the height of idiocy to attempt such a thing. It was almost certain to result in his death, which might be the best-case scenario for everyone involved. Another strong possibility was that the reaper would seize the spell and use it as leverage to work the tear open further, possibly enough to fully emerge through to the living world.
With that warning firmly in mind, Nym was instead spending his scrying efforts looking at the mausoleum and trying to determine what was underneath it. He’d picked up a few new third circle scrying spells just for the occasion, ones that could theoretically pierce scrying wards, or would at least let him know that there was something there instead of just glossing over them.
They’d worked when he was practicing the spell in Archmage Veran’s sanctum, but out in the real world, there was a lot more interference. All the mages and their ritual were only the first layer. There was magic coming off the mausoleum itself, and off every single undead below them. Normally he wouldn’t see it passively like that; it turned out his ability to see arcana was mostly limited to active workings of magic and occasional enchanted items, also usually only when they were active.
The scrying spell was different. It didn’t so much see arcana as it was sensitive enough that arcana could interfere with it, at least in the quantities currently on display. It was kind of like trying to feel out what something looked like when it was sitting in a bucket of mud, where the arcana was the mud.
He was mucking around, trying to get a feel for what the spell was trying to show him, but the sensations he was getting were so distorted as to be practically useless. What he could easily see with his eyes, the scrying spell had scrambled completely. It physically couldn’t go deeper either. He’d tinkered with it, trying to find a way to give the new scrying spell that component of seeing through solid objects his old spell had.
The results were… not great, but not so terrible that he didn’t feel it was worth the effort to try. Neither Nym nor Archmage Veran were expecting to get much information from the exercise, especially since the archmage’s own scrying spells had also failed to penetrate whatever scrying wards were present inside and underneath the mausoleum. Nym wasn’t really sure why he was trying when Archmage Veran himself had failed, but he guessed his mentor was hoping he’d come up with another of those unique ascendant spells.
That hadn’t happened. He knew there was something down there, and that it was heavily warded. They’d already been able to guess that info long before Nym had started poking at it with scrying spells, and in fact the warded area was so large that he couldn’t miss it. He reported his findings back to Archmage Veran, who took the news calmly.
“This is exactly what I was expecting,” the old man explained. “We never had much hope that our first plan would work, but it cost so little time and effort to try it that it would be criminally negligent to ignore the opportunity to gain free intelligence. Our next plan of attack will be to send a team down into the caves to physically survey the area.”
“That seems… dangerous,” Nym pointed out. “Going through the tunnels will be a long fight. Digging straight down from here will involve holding back a thousand or more ghouls, not to mention the geists, wights, and frost wraiths still floating around.”
“I believe we will simply be teleporting straight down into a nearby tunnel that we can scry.”
“Risky,” Nym said. “You’d have to be very accurate to teleport into a tunnel that size, not to mention the risk of there being undead on top of where you’re trying to go.”
“Well I am an archmage, after all, and I’ll have you to help,” Archmage Veran said.
“Me? What am I doing in this plan of yours?”
“Assisting me, of course. You’ll primarily be scrying, but your kit is versatile enough to help break wards, fend off ghoul attacks, drop tunnels behind us to cut off pursuit, or place barriers to protect us. I am certain we’ll find a good use for your talents.”
Nym was not keen on the idea of going back underground. It has been extremely stressful the first time, especially with Babkin driving the pace and nobody else able to keep up with him. This was more of a targeted precision strike though. He couldn’t see a place for the burly innkeeper in this mission.
“Who all will be going?” Nym asked.
The old man chuckled. “Not Babkin, if that’s what you’re wondering. He’s not recovered from his last rampage yet, even if this were not a delicate matter.”
“That’s a relief. I’m not sure how feasible this plan is though. If something goes wrong and we lose the ability to teleport out, we’re going to die down there. It would take hours of uninterrupted work to dig our way back out.”
“It’s a risk, to be sure, but I think you might be underestimating my prowess slightly. Even if they’ve managed to set up trap wards that block teleportation, I am sure that we can break through them. None of the mages who were killed and raised as wights were all that powerful.”
Nym was less confident. They’d lost quite a few third circle mages, and he was just starting to realize how big the gulf was between second and third layer arcana. There were a lot of things that simply weren’t possible to do with second circle spells, effects that were so far removed from reality that even as group rituals, they just failed. Third circle spells could handle them easily, however.
With an archmage on their team, they’d have access to pinnacle spells, but those took time to set up. They took time just to properly forge the conduit! Even the simplest pinnacle spell would take several minutes of prep work, and while Nym was confident he could hold a tunnel against an unlimited number of ghouls for five minutes, he was far more concerned about holding it against an assault team of wights casting third circle spells.
Individual wights were far easier to destroy than ghouls, but also far more dangerous. Nym had assumed that their first trip into the tunnels was to trim the number of earth mage wights and stop them from expanding, but now he wondered if it hadn’t all been a set up for the next stage of their master plan.
“Just how many wights did we kill the other day?” he asked. “And how many do we estimate are left.”
“One hundred and fourteen,” the archmage rattled off immediately. “Possibly as many as half of the total wights.”
“And what happens when the ones that are left drop the ceiling on us and bury this group of ours alive?”
“Why do you think I want you along, Nym?”
Nym shook his head. “I can’t stop a dozen wights from doing that.”
“No,” the archmage said. “What you can do is see the arcana from their magic and warn us ahead of time. There is no shortage of third circle mages powerful enough to cast the spells we need. What we don’t have is someone like you who can see the attacks coming.”
“Look, it’s not that I mind helping,” Nym said. “But this is asking for a lot. I appreciate you letting me look through your library, but that doesn’t do me a lot of good if I’m dead. I kind of have other priorities.”
He was still devoting the majority of his free time to forging a conduit capable of even reaching the fourth layer, let alone boring through it. Navigating the Astral Sea was a completely different experience. His conduit would be questing forth, then suddenly it was somewhere else, going in a different direction. Just intuiting which way was deeper into the third layer was a challenge by itself.
Archmage Veran had explained it as a mess of two-way gates. They were scattered randomly all over the Astral Sea, but thankfully they didn’t tend to move. Learning a pathway through, from gate to gate, was the key to reaching the fourth layer. He would never have a conduit long enough to just stretch the distance, but he didn’t have to. He just had to finish learning how to navigate the path laid out for him.
“I understand, Nym,” the old man said. “But perhaps it would help to think of this as a way to help yourself. After all, how much of my life is spent here right now? How much more help could I give you if I didn’t have to spend any time or energy on this mess. By assisting us in ending this threat once and for all, you’re freeing me up to focus on teaching you everything you want to know.”
Nym just gave him a flat stare.
“And I’ll devote some time and effort to figuring out how to break the aging curse you’re stuck under,” the archmage added.
That was tempting. Right now, the only sure way he had to break it was to become Exarch Niramyn again, and Nym still wasn’t sure he wanted to do that. He wanted the knowledge and the spells, sure, but he didn’t like the kind of person he used to be. It wasn’t entirely clear how much of a package deal that was, but Nym didn’t like his chances of remaining himself if he chose to unseal that part of his personality from the cube.
There was every possibility that the aging curse was some ascendant level magic and that there truly was no other possible way to break it. In that case, it didn’t matter how much he railed against the inevitable. He’d become Niramyn again or he’d die after a short life. If he was lucky, that short life would be twenty or so years ending in death by old age.
If it wasn’t ascendant magic though, he wasn’t likely to get someone better suited than an archmage working on his behalf. This was quite possibly the best chance he’d ever get to rid himself of the curse without following his past life’s plan. It just meant he needed to teleport into an underground tunnel, already a task with a very slender margin for error, hold back assaults from the undead roaming the tunnel for an indeterminate length of time, and deal with whatever was hiding behind some powerful anti-scrying wards.
That was simple enough, in theory. It might actually be suicidal, but it sounded simple.
“I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this,” he muttered to himself. “Fine. I’ll help. When is this happening and who all is going?”
