After a year spent wasting his time mucking around in the minds of various weak-willed humans, Abdun was desperate to be off this job. He was of the opinion that Nyramin had actually died when he’d fled, but Exarch Myzalik wasn’t interested in the opinions of a lowly sixth layer ascendant such as himself. Then again, even if he’d reached the eleventh layer, Abdun doubted it would make a difference. Exarch Myzalik listened only to Exarch Myzalik.
This lead was a bit more promising than the ones he usually followed up on. A group of humans researching some pathetically low-level soul well modification techniques thought they’d stumbled upon an actual ascendant to use as a test subject. The idea was laughable really. No ascendant would ever submit to the will of a bunch of humans, most of them were barely even able to touch the third layer.
But they knew the ascendant as Nym, who appeared to be a teenage boy. Much to Abdun’s surprise, when he’d reviewed the data, the numbers did indicate that their research specimen was abnormally strong. Oh, it wasn’t ascendant level by a wide margin, but maybe it was deathly-injured ascendant level.
What really convinced him wasn’t the research notes themselves, but when he’d started reviewing the timeline and recognized the boy who’d fought the giant ice worm monster. He followed it backward a ways to see the kid fighting the undead that were roaming the area courtesy of a mid-sized dimensional void with a badly mangled patch job on it, then forward to see where he was now.
Abdun followed the kid’s advancement to the third layer and noted a brief sliver of a second where time seemed to scramble and distort. It could just be temporal interference. That happened sometimes, after all, but this kid was getting more suspicious by the minute. The kid spontaneously teleported soon after, despite giving no indication that he’d learned the spell. It could have been something he’d learned in theory prior to being able to cast it, but Abdun felt the spell was executed too smoothly for that to be the case.
He traced the teleportation to a small cove on the west coast of the continent and watched the boy employ far too many spells for what amounted to fighting off some big fish, just so he could dive into the water. The boy swam down to the bottom, groped around blindly in the silt for a few seconds despite having a water-sight magic active, then gave up and swam back to the surface.
Abdun frowned. The boy’s body language was triumphant, like he’d overcome some great obstacle. All he’d done was dive through perhaps a hundred feet of water and come back up again. Surely humans didn’t consider that an achievement of any merit. Abdun skimmed backward through the boy’s timeline again and rewatched the scene. Down, touch bottom, and up. What was there to celebrate?
Confused now and sensing that he’d somehow missed something, Abdun followed the timeline forward again. The boy flew over to a seaside shack, barely more than a box with more holes than walls, and woke the woman sleeping inside. The two spoke for a bit, and the boy dug a shabby hole in the ground under the shack. It was a painfully slow process, taking hours to do something that would have taken a second for any real ascendant.
Then just before the boy teleported away with the sunrise, the timeline vanished completely. It was like the kid existed one moment, and then never had the next. Someone or something was interfering with the boy’s timeline. Everything else was perhaps atypical behavior, but still human. Mortals couldn’t interact with time though, not like this. They could barely even look ahead, let alone alter it. Either this Nym person was actually Niramyn, or another ascendant had taken an interest in him.
Abdun teleported himself to the seaside shack and looked down at it. Whatever was going on here, he wanted to see it with his own eyes. It was possible someone was interfering with the sensory feedback his spell was giving him. If anyone tried it in person, he’d know.
The woman living in the shack, the one named Ciana, was there right now. Abdun started trawling through her memories, looking for the night she’d talked to the boy. He found it easily enough, but the memory had holes in it. It was subtle, no doubt. He might not even have noticed it if he hadn’t come in person. But they were there.
They were talking about… something. Whatever it was must have been made by an ascendant, since it was strong enough to cover even the memory of its existence from Abdun’s spells. Perhaps Exarch Myzalik himself would be able to uncover more, but this wasn’t what Abdun wanted. He’d wanted to deliver Niramyn himself to his master, to bask in the glory and accolades, to claim a fitting reward.
This Ciana woman was an important piece of the puzzle, too valuable to just be left lying around, waiting for something to happen to her. It was best if Abdun harvested her soul now for interrogation whenever he needed. That would help keep the knowledge intact and slow down any other ascendants who found her. Reviewing someone’s memories just from their timeline was markedly harder than doing so from their mind in present time.
He'd be damned if he’d let some other ascendant claim the prize after a year of mucking around in mortal minds looking for Niramyn. It was only fitting that he be rewarded fully and singularly for his patience and his tenacity. He reached into the sixth layer and began constructing the spell that would reap the woman’s soul from her body and seal it in a soul trap.
* * *
It was a good thing Abdun was an egotistical idiot. He spent so much time trying to figure out what his next move should be and refusing to ask for help that he’d given Ferro more than enough of an opportunity to construct his attack. It was a tenth layer spell, the strongest Ferro knew. Making it fast without being detected was impossible, but Abdun gave him plenty of time to build it slowly.
Ferro appeared behind him just as the weak ascendant was getting ready to reap Exarch Niramyn’s mortal companion. He stabbed his fingers into Abdun’s back and grasped at his soul well, then triggered the magic that would disperse his victim’s timeline. It was a temporary setback, eating away maybe six months of history and pushing him out of time for perhaps a year into the future.
Despite Abdun’s relative weakness as a mere initiate into ascendancy, he was still technically an ascendant. It was impossible to really kill him. Ferro doubted he’d broken even a quarter of the anchors holding Abdun’s place in time. Not even his own master, an Exarch, could fully disperse another ascendant’s timeline. Though Ferro was humble enough to admit that Exarch Niramyn could still have banished him out of time for decades instead of a mere eighteen months.
By then, hopefully his master would have fully returned to power. Ferro was doing his best to track the Exarch and reach him before anyone else did, but it wasn’t easy to pierce the many, many layers of obfuscation keeping him hidden. Those protections were no doubt better than anything Ferro himself would provide, seeing as to how he was only the fourteenth most powerful ascendant, and only three of those stronger than him had any sort of loyalty to Exarch Niramyn.
If any of them found his master before he regained his strength, Ferro shuddered to think of the results. Myzalik was perhaps the single greatest threat any ascendant could face, an Exarch who specialized in time manipulation. He would have dispersed Abdun for at least five years, and there would be a chain of contingencies woven in to keep dispersing the ascendant within milliseconds of him slipping back into the timestream, effectively locking him out for centuries before the chain ran its course.
As much as it pained Ferro to admit it, his own master couldn’t duplicate such a feat. He had far more raw power, enough to disperse an ascendant for two or even three times longer than Myzalik, but he didn’t specialize in time manipulation in the same way. And now… now he wasn’t even a real ascendant anymore. No doubt many of those who had previously been loyal were shifting over to Myzalik’s camp, the treacherous sycophants.
Ferro still believed in his master, and when Exarch Niramyn made his glorious return to power, he would no doubt be rewarded handsomely for that faith. Even better than the reward would be watching his rivals come back, groveling and struggling to worm their way back into his master’s favor. It would be a delicious scene that Ferro fully intended to immortalize in crystalline memory.
In order to make sure that happened, he needed to do his best to interfere with any other ascendants who were hunting for his master. That meant staying ahead of them, if not finding the Exarch himself. This human woman, Ciana, was a potential weak point, but his master’s current form had a fondness for the woman. Ferro would not be rewarded for plucking her from the timestream.
So he’d layered the physical area with detection wards and planted more subtle sensors in the timeline surrounding Nym’s meeting with her. He was a spider sitting at the center of a gossamer web, waiting for ascendants to touch one of the strands so that he could pounce, all so that he could buy his master more time. As long as no one too strong for him came along, he could keep the hunters at bay.
With Abdun dispersed through time, he reset the trip lines and disappeared again. He’d spent more time than anyone studying the timeline at what mortals called Blood Fin Cove, and even he couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened there. It was quite the puzzle, and thankfully it had served as a distraction four times now that allowed him to ambush would-be pursuers.
Sooner or later, someone stronger was going to follow the trail of the dispersed ascendants, and when that happened, Ferro hoped he’d be able to slow them down, or that he would have at least found his master first and could whisk him away from danger.
Abdun had been about to reap the woman’s soul, and Ferro honestly considered doing it himself. It wasn’t like they couldn’t reconstitute her existence out of the timeline later if Exarch Niramyn decided he wanted her back. But no, that might serve to draw more interest to the area, and anyone strong enough to overcome him would be able to read her memories regardless of whether she was physically present.
It was better to leave her as bait and ambush the weaker ascendants who came sniffing around. He was just lucky one of Myzalik’s copies hadn’t shown up personally to investigate. If that happened, Ferro shuddered to think of his master’s chances of survival. It had been many, many centuries since he’d been afraid of dying, but this new magic that severed all temporal anchors, it scared him in a way he could scarcely remember from back when he was mortal.
One didn’t advance as an ascendant by being timid. Ferro would do whatever he could to become stronger, even take risks like he hadn’t needed to take in hundreds of years, not since he was a human himself. He allowed himself a small smile as he remembered his first meeting with the Exarch. He’d been a young human of about a hundred years, so proud that he’d reached the level of archmage, so ignorant of what true power was.
Exarch Niramyn had taught him better.
Ferro retreated several hundred miles out over the ocean, wrapped his body in a shell of arcana, and plunged into the icy black waters to sink all the way down to the bottom. He burrowed into the mud a mile below the surface, then slipped into a pocket of pseudo-reality to wait and to monitor the situation. He would react when the next threat emerged.
He would give his master as much time as possible.
Author's Note: This is the end of book 1, but the story continues on.
After a year spent wasting his time mucking around in the minds of various weak-willed humans, Abdun was desperate to be off this job. He was of the opinion that Nyramin had actually died when he’d fled, but Exarch Myzalik wasn’t interested in the opinions of a lowly sixth layer ascendant such as himself. Then again, even if he’d reached the eleventh layer, Abdun doubted it would make a difference. Exarch Myzalik listened only to Exarch Myzalik.
This lead was a bit more promising than the ones he usually followed up on. A group of humans researching some pathetically low-level soul well modification techniques thought they’d stumbled upon an actual ascendant to use as a test subject. The idea was laughable really. No ascendant would ever submit to the will of a bunch of humans, most of them were barely even able to touch the third layer.
But they knew the ascendant as Nym, who appeared to be a teenage boy. Much to Abdun’s surprise, when he’d reviewed the data, the numbers did indicate that their research specimen was abnormally strong. Oh, it wasn’t ascendant level by a wide margin, but maybe it was deathly-injured ascendant level.
What really convinced him wasn’t the research notes themselves, but when he’d started reviewing the timeline and recognized the boy who’d fought the giant ice worm monster. He followed it backward a ways to see the kid fighting the undead that were roaming the area courtesy of a mid-sized dimensional void with a badly mangled patch job on it, then forward to see where he was now.
Abdun followed the kid’s advancement to the third layer and noted a brief sliver of a second where time seemed to scramble and distort. It could just be temporal interference. That happened sometimes, after all, but this kid was getting more suspicious by the minute. The kid spontaneously teleported soon after, despite giving no indication that he’d learned the spell. It could have been something he’d learned in theory prior to being able to cast it, but Abdun felt the spell was executed too smoothly for that to be the case.
He traced the teleportation to a small cove on the west coast of the continent and watched the boy employ far too many spells for what amounted to fighting off some big fish, just so he could dive into the water. The boy swam down to the bottom, groped around blindly in the silt for a few seconds despite having a water-sight magic active, then gave up and swam back to the surface.
Abdun frowned. The boy’s body language was triumphant, like he’d overcome some great obstacle. All he’d done was dive through perhaps a hundred feet of water and come back up again. Surely humans didn’t consider that an achievement of any merit. Abdun skimmed backward through the boy’s timeline again and rewatched the scene. Down, touch bottom, and up. What was there to celebrate?
Confused now and sensing that he’d somehow missed something, Abdun followed the timeline forward again. The boy flew over to a seaside shack, barely more than a box with more holes than walls, and woke the woman sleeping inside. The two spoke for a bit, and the boy dug a shabby hole in the ground under the shack. It was a painfully slow process, taking hours to do something that would have taken a second for any real ascendant.
Then just before the boy teleported away with the sunrise, the timeline vanished completely. It was like the kid existed one moment, and then never had the next. Someone or something was interfering with the boy’s timeline. Everything else was perhaps atypical behavior, but still human. Mortals couldn’t interact with time though, not like this. They could barely even look ahead, let alone alter it. Either this Nym person was actually Niramyn, or another ascendant had taken an interest in him.
Abdun teleported himself to the seaside shack and looked down at it. Whatever was going on here, he wanted to see it with his own eyes. It was possible someone was interfering with the sensory feedback his spell was giving him. If anyone tried it in person, he’d know.
The woman living in the shack, the one named Ciana, was there right now. Abdun started trawling through her memories, looking for the night she’d talked to the boy. He found it easily enough, but the memory had holes in it. It was subtle, no doubt. He might not even have noticed it if he hadn’t come in person. But they were there.
They were talking about… something. Whatever it was must have been made by an ascendant, since it was strong enough to cover even the memory of its existence from Abdun’s spells. Perhaps Exarch Myzalik himself would be able to uncover more, but this wasn’t what Abdun wanted. He’d wanted to deliver Niramyn himself to his master, to bask in the glory and accolades, to claim a fitting reward.
This Ciana woman was an important piece of the puzzle, too valuable to just be left lying around, waiting for something to happen to her. It was best if Abdun harvested her soul now for interrogation whenever he needed. That would help keep the knowledge intact and slow down any other ascendants who found her. Reviewing someone’s memories just from their timeline was markedly harder than doing so from their mind in present time.
He'd be damned if he’d let some other ascendant claim the prize after a year of mucking around in mortal minds looking for Niramyn. It was only fitting that he be rewarded fully and singularly for his patience and his tenacity. He reached into the sixth layer and began constructing the spell that would reap the woman’s soul from her body and seal it in a soul trap.
* * *
It was a good thing Abdun was an egotistical idiot. He spent so much time trying to figure out what his next move should be and refusing to ask for help that he’d given Ferro more than enough of an opportunity to construct his attack. It was a tenth layer spell, the strongest Ferro knew. Making it fast without being detected was impossible, but Abdun gave him plenty of time to build it slowly.
Ferro appeared behind him just as the weak ascendant was getting ready to reap Exarch Niramyn’s mortal companion. He stabbed his fingers into Abdun’s back and grasped at his soul well, then triggered the magic that would disperse his victim’s timeline. It was a temporary setback, eating away maybe six months of history and pushing him out of time for perhaps a year into the future.
Despite Abdun’s relative weakness as a mere initiate into ascendancy, he was still technically an ascendant. It was impossible to really kill him. Ferro doubted he’d broken even a quarter of the anchors holding Abdun’s place in time. Not even his own master, an Exarch, could fully disperse another ascendant’s timeline. Though Ferro was humble enough to admit that Exarch Niramyn could still have banished him out of time for decades instead of a mere eighteen months.
By then, hopefully his master would have fully returned to power. Ferro was doing his best to track the Exarch and reach him before anyone else did, but it wasn’t easy to pierce the many, many layers of obfuscation keeping him hidden. Those protections were no doubt better than anything Ferro himself would provide, seeing as to how he was only the fourteenth most powerful ascendant, and only three of those stronger than him had any sort of loyalty to Exarch Niramyn.
If any of them found his master before he regained his strength, Ferro shuddered to think of the results. Myzalik was perhaps the single greatest threat any ascendant could face, an Exarch who specialized in time manipulation. He would have dispersed Abdun for at least five years, and there would be a chain of contingencies woven in to keep dispersing the ascendant within milliseconds of him slipping back into the timestream, effectively locking him out for centuries before the chain ran its course.
As much as it pained Ferro to admit it, his own master couldn’t duplicate such a feat. He had far more raw power, enough to disperse an ascendant for two or even three times longer than Myzalik, but he didn’t specialize in time manipulation in the same way. And now… now he wasn’t even a real ascendant anymore. No doubt many of those who had previously been loyal were shifting over to Myzalik’s camp, the treacherous sycophants.
Ferro still believed in his master, and when Exarch Niramyn made his glorious return to power, he would no doubt be rewarded handsomely for that faith. Even better than the reward would be watching his rivals come back, groveling and struggling to worm their way back into his master’s favor. It would be a delicious scene that Ferro fully intended to immortalize in crystalline memory.
In order to make sure that happened, he needed to do his best to interfere with any other ascendants who were hunting for his master. That meant staying ahead of them, if not finding the Exarch himself. This human woman, Ciana, was a potential weak point, but his master’s current form had a fondness for the woman. Ferro would not be rewarded for plucking her from the timestream.
So he’d layered the physical area with detection wards and planted more subtle sensors in the timeline surrounding Nym’s meeting with her. He was a spider sitting at the center of a gossamer web, waiting for ascendants to touch one of the strands so that he could pounce, all so that he could buy his master more time. As long as no one too strong for him came along, he could keep the hunters at bay.
With Abdun dispersed through time, he reset the trip lines and disappeared again. He’d spent more time than anyone studying the timeline at what mortals called Blood Fin Cove, and even he couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened there. It was quite the puzzle, and thankfully it had served as a distraction four times now that allowed him to ambush would-be pursuers.
Sooner or later, someone stronger was going to follow the trail of the dispersed ascendants, and when that happened, Ferro hoped he’d be able to slow them down, or that he would have at least found his master first and could whisk him away from danger.
Abdun had been about to reap the woman’s soul, and Ferro honestly considered doing it himself. It wasn’t like they couldn’t reconstitute her existence out of the timeline later if Exarch Niramyn decided he wanted her back. But no, that might serve to draw more interest to the area, and anyone strong enough to overcome him would be able to read her memories regardless of whether she was physically present.
It was better to leave her as bait and ambush the weaker ascendants who came sniffing around. He was just lucky one of Myzalik’s copies hadn’t shown up personally to investigate. If that happened, Ferro shuddered to think of his master’s chances of survival. It had been many, many centuries since he’d been afraid of dying, but this new magic that severed all temporal anchors, it scared him in a way he could scarcely remember from back when he was mortal.
One didn’t advance as an ascendant by being timid. Ferro would do whatever he could to become stronger, even take risks like he hadn’t needed to take in hundreds of years, not since he was a human himself. He allowed himself a small smile as he remembered his first meeting with the Exarch. He’d been a young human of about a hundred years, so proud that he’d reached the level of archmage, so ignorant of what true power was.
Exarch Niramyn had taught him better.
Ferro retreated several hundred miles out over the ocean, wrapped his body in a shell of arcana, and plunged into the icy black waters to sink all the way down to the bottom. He burrowed into the mud a mile below the surface, then slipped into a pocket of pseudo-reality to wait and to monitor the situation. He would react when the next threat emerged.
He would give his master as much time as possible.
Author's Note: This is the end of book 1, but the story continues on.
