As it turned out, for once, it actually wasn’t that hard and didn’t require Nym to put himself in any sort of danger to identify the source of the feverish corruption that had infected the Garden of Winter. He circled around the outside edge to examine the arcana from a few other angles, and it didn’t take long for a pattern to start to form, one that pointed not to the middle of the garden, but towards the back.
That was the hardest part, because what he was looking for was under an overhang that forced him to actually fly over the garden to get a good angle of sight on it. Even then though, he stayed well outside the range of the grasping tendrils of miasma.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
[Indeed. How strange.]
A gargantuan flower, easily big enough for him to sit on the petals, was growing out of the rocky soil. It wasn’t part of a bush or vine or any other plant life. Instead, it was a single flower growing on a stem that shot straight up out of the ground. Nym wasn’t an expert gardener, but it seemed… odd. More importantly, all of the red miasma that coated the Garden of Winter was coming from it.
Nym could see pulses of arcana shoot up through the stem, circulate into the petals, and then rise up into the air like gossamer stands carried away on the breeze. Except they weren’t carried away. More and more just kept coming out of the flower until the strand touched something, then it solidified into a new connection.
Almost the entire garden was coated, even places that would normally be sheltered from the flower’s magic had been tangled up by pixies who’d been snared and carried strands of it around. It wasn’t until Nym had to fly over to get the angle on the flower that he realized those miasmic tendrils were actually clouds of pixies attracted to the arcana constructs that made up his magic.
He spared a brief moment to wonder how they detected arcana. It was obvious now that there were plenty of species that could sense arcana in one form or another, though from what the fox had told him, being able to see active spell constructs seemed to be something unique to ascendants. When he considered it in a more limited capacity, even regular humans had magic to enable them to see the presence of arcana.
It was something to consider later though. He was working now. “Are you satisfied now?” he asked the ring.
[Not quite. This plant appears to merely be a conduit to the source of the corruption. You see how the magic rises up from below the ground? What is down there.]
“I could scry below, but you won’t get the arcana sight with it?”
[Why not? What kind of ascendant are you?]
“Uh… the kind who can’t see arcana through scrying spells?”
[Show me your spell,] the fox said.
Annoyed, Nym swiftly conjured up a scry anchor in front of him. “You see? It doesn’t see arcana like I do.”
[Of course it doesn’t. You don’t have a resonance loop integrated into the construct. How would the spell benefit from your own senses if the feedback is only one way?]
“I… what?”
A huge part of the construct was designed to send back whatever visual stimulus it received. If he understood what the fox was telling him correctly though, he needed the feedback to go… both ways? “How would that help? I already do that when I project sensory enhancing spells through the golems.”
[No you don’t. You feed that spell into them. That’s not the same as feeding your own senses to them. You need to think of it as if you were the scry spell and your anchor point is you. Feed your senses to it so that it can see what you see. Then loop its senses back to yourself so you see what it sees with your eyes.]
That made sense, kind of. Nym dismissed the scry anchor and started trying to build a new one, this time with a second sensory connection bridge that flowed the opposite direction. That proved to be too complex for it and the whole thing collapsed. He wasn’t sure if that meant he wasn’t building it correctly or just that he needed to be faster, but he was inclined to think it just wasn’t possible the way the spell was structured.
[No, not like that,] the fox scolded him. [Do you build two bridges for your wagon to cross a river? Integrate both directions into one structure.]
Nym kept trying, eventually forgoing everything except the linking structure of the spell so that he could iterate it faster. With the fox looking over his shoulder and offering quips of varying degrees of helpfulness, he eventually built something that he thought would do what he wanted.
Integrating it into the rest of the spell was more of a challenge. It was heavier, for one thing, and a bit wider. It forced him to switch around some steps and required both more stabilization portions and a faster cast to get everything in place before it fell apart. He suspected both issues could be solved by using a different intent filter to make the arcana more rigid, but that would cut down on the range of the spell if he did that.
“Alright, this is it,” he said. If it worked, he’d be able to see arcana through his scrying anchor. It would be another spell unique to him, since it relied on his own biological eyes to provide the arcana sensing portion, so there would be no sharing it with anyone else to grant them the ability to see arcana, but it would still be a step forward.
He wove the spell together as quickly as he could, felt it snap into place, and the scrying anchor popped into existence in front of him. It looked down, and Nym grinned to see all the tendrils of arcana wound through the Garden below.
“Hah, how about that. I’ve been trying to figure that out for months.”
[Ugh. Congratulations. Very good. Your mastery of extremely basic magical theory knows no bounds. It wasn’t tedious at all teaching you to do this.]
Nym laughed. “Yeah, yeah. Go be grumpy somewhere else. Now, let’s see what’s hiding under that flower.”
He sent the scry anchor down, deftly weaving it through the tangled miasma of arcana to the rocky soil. Through it, he saw that the flower itself was connected to a massive underground root system, or maybe root wasn’t the right word. It looked almost like a branch buried in the dirt so that only the flower part breached the surface.
Nym was about to follow it deeper when he realized something was happening on the surface. He blinked twice, reorienting himself to sight through his own eyes, and looked closer at the motion that had caught his attention. The miasma below was roiling, slowly rising upwards with new tendrils lashing out wildly. Some of them were following the connection between Nym and his scry anchor and arching up to where he hovered in the air.
“Would it be a problem if I ended up killing a bunch of these pixies?” he asked.
[I’m sure someone would care. Not me, but someone.]
“Good enough for me,” he said, and unleashed a lightning bolt into the miasma.
The pixies didn’t take that well. They lit up red both in his regular sight as they started to glow and with arcana as they swarmed up from the ground, trailing red miasma behind them. There were far too many for him to target individually, thousands maybe, so he pulled out another old trick he hadn’t used in a while.
Nym activated his aura spell in conjunction with lightning bolt to create an electrically charged area around him. Anything that entered got fried with lightning immediately, and that included every single pixie that got within five feet of him. They fell by the dozens every second, a little localized shower of glittering corpses that rained down on the frost-coated plants below.
Meanwhile, his scry anchor continued its journey underground, tracing the root system deeper until he reached the end of his range. That left Nym with little choice but to fly over the Garden to follow it, and then eventually land once he was outside the Garden’s reach.
“It’s going farther north,” he reported. “But I think the real answer is underground.”
[Yes, obviously. Do you not see the beetles? Look, they’re crawling all over the stem.]
“Yeah, so? They’re just bugs.”
[Those are scarabs, my naïve young half-scendant. Specifically, they’re a variety known as blood burrower scarabs. They’re the source of the corruption that’s infested the Garden of Winter. Give them another week or two to work and you’ll start to see the land physically change. The plants will die and it’ll become a desert.]
“That does sound like a problem for you guys. I’m guessing they’re not going to stop at the edge of the Garden, are they?”
[No. Infestations like this do not halt on their own. They spread and spread until someone takes action.] The fox’s voice turned shrewd. [You could take action.]
“I could,” Nym agreed, “But that’s not our deal, so I won’t.”
The fox’s laughter rang in his head. [That is fair. Perhaps we might make a new deal though. You expressed interest in breaking the aging curse. You might assist me in clearing out this infestation in exchange for my assistance.]
Nym thought about it for a second and shook his head. “I’ve already got a deal with an archmage to break that.”
He left unsaid that he wasn’t fully confident that Archmage Veran could actually break it, but he would certainly talk to the old man before he agreed to the fox’s terms. There was also the option of retrieving all his lost memories once he was able to draw in fifth layer arcana. He wasn’t so desperate yet that the fox had him backed into a corner.
The fox just kept laughing. Eventually it said, [You’ve fulfilled our bargain. You are free to do as you wish and I shall trouble you no more. The students you are protecting are safe from me. Keep the ring. When you change your mind and want to bargain, come back to this glacier and use it to contact me.]
Nym considered the piece of jewelry on his finger with its fox-head emblem. It almost seemed to wink at him, and he shuddered before slipping it off and pocketing it. “Not likely,” he muttered, somehow afraid he might be cursing himself just by saying it out loud. But no, he wasn’t that superstitious.
It was time to get back to his chaperoning job. Nym flew out of range of the Garden and broke the construct holding his lightning aura in place, then followed the trail back south until he found the class huddled more or less into one tight group and moving slowly along.
“How’s it going on your end?” he asked as he touched down next to Professor Lakton.
“Slow, as I’m sure you can see,” she said with a sigh. “I’m keeping them all close together, which has been a job in and of itself. Did you get everything taken care of?”
“Kind of, but I think we’re going to have to cancel the trip. The Garden is infested with a bunch of blood burrower scarabs.”
The professor’s face paled, something Nym found particularly impressive given how white it already was. “God protect us. There hasn’t been an outbreak in Devros in thirty years. They’re usually not seen on this continent.”
Nym conjured up an illusion of a few of them crawling along a stem that he’d seen. “They look like this. Does that help?”
“Those are scarab beetles, yes, though not necessarily blood burrowers. Are you sure of the type? They aren’t usually found in cold climates either.”
Nym just shrugged. “That’s what our uninvited guest called them. It seems risky to walk into that.”
“Hmm. Yes. If they are blood burrowers, the students will get sick just from being close by. We’d best take a break and then start back.”
“I can start teleporting them back to the base,” Nym said. “You go back with the first group to let them in, and I’ll get the rest back as I can. This many… maybe half an hour to do them all?”
“I seriously doubt you can teleport twenty-three people in half an hour,” Professor Lakton told him.
“Guess we’ll find out, unless you want another four hours of walking through the cold and snow, at minimum.”
She sighed and nodded. “Very well, let’s get started. Class! We’re going to have to cancel this trip. I will explain more once we’re back on Academy grounds. Gather close please and prepare for teleportation.”
As it turned out, for once, it actually wasn’t that hard and didn’t require Nym to put himself in any sort of danger to identify the source of the feverish corruption that had infected the Garden of Winter. He circled around the outside edge to examine the arcana from a few other angles, and it didn’t take long for a pattern to start to form, one that pointed not to the middle of the garden, but towards the back.
That was the hardest part, because what he was looking for was under an overhang that forced him to actually fly over the garden to get a good angle of sight on it. Even then though, he stayed well outside the range of the grasping tendrils of miasma.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
[Indeed. How strange.]
A gargantuan flower, easily big enough for him to sit on the petals, was growing out of the rocky soil. It wasn’t part of a bush or vine or any other plant life. Instead, it was a single flower growing on a stem that shot straight up out of the ground. Nym wasn’t an expert gardener, but it seemed… odd. More importantly, all of the red miasma that coated the Garden of Winter was coming from it.
Nym could see pulses of arcana shoot up through the stem, circulate into the petals, and then rise up into the air like gossamer stands carried away on the breeze. Except they weren’t carried away. More and more just kept coming out of the flower until the strand touched something, then it solidified into a new connection.
Almost the entire garden was coated, even places that would normally be sheltered from the flower’s magic had been tangled up by pixies who’d been snared and carried strands of it around. It wasn’t until Nym had to fly over to get the angle on the flower that he realized those miasmic tendrils were actually clouds of pixies attracted to the arcana constructs that made up his magic.
He spared a brief moment to wonder how they detected arcana. It was obvious now that there were plenty of species that could sense arcana in one form or another, though from what the fox had told him, being able to see active spell constructs seemed to be something unique to ascendants. When he considered it in a more limited capacity, even regular humans had magic to enable them to see the presence of arcana.
It was something to consider later though. He was working now. “Are you satisfied now?” he asked the ring.
[Not quite. This plant appears to merely be a conduit to the source of the corruption. You see how the magic rises up from below the ground? What is down there.]
“I could scry below, but you won’t get the arcana sight with it?”
[Why not? What kind of ascendant are you?]
“Uh… the kind who can’t see arcana through scrying spells?”
[Show me your spell,] the fox said.
Annoyed, Nym swiftly conjured up a scry anchor in front of him. “You see? It doesn’t see arcana like I do.”
[Of course it doesn’t. You don’t have a resonance loop integrated into the construct. How would the spell benefit from your own senses if the feedback is only one way?]
“I… what?”
A huge part of the construct was designed to send back whatever visual stimulus it received. If he understood what the fox was telling him correctly though, he needed the feedback to go… both ways? “How would that help? I already do that when I project sensory enhancing spells through the golems.”
[No you don’t. You feed that spell into them. That’s not the same as feeding your own senses to them. You need to think of it as if you were the scry spell and your anchor point is you. Feed your senses to it so that it can see what you see. Then loop its senses back to yourself so you see what it sees with your eyes.]
That made sense, kind of. Nym dismissed the scry anchor and started trying to build a new one, this time with a second sensory connection bridge that flowed the opposite direction. That proved to be too complex for it and the whole thing collapsed. He wasn’t sure if that meant he wasn’t building it correctly or just that he needed to be faster, but he was inclined to think it just wasn’t possible the way the spell was structured.
[No, not like that,] the fox scolded him. [Do you build two bridges for your wagon to cross a river? Integrate both directions into one structure.]
Nym kept trying, eventually forgoing everything except the linking structure of the spell so that he could iterate it faster. With the fox looking over his shoulder and offering quips of varying degrees of helpfulness, he eventually built something that he thought would do what he wanted.
Integrating it into the rest of the spell was more of a challenge. It was heavier, for one thing, and a bit wider. It forced him to switch around some steps and required both more stabilization portions and a faster cast to get everything in place before it fell apart. He suspected both issues could be solved by using a different intent filter to make the arcana more rigid, but that would cut down on the range of the spell if he did that.
“Alright, this is it,” he said. If it worked, he’d be able to see arcana through his scrying anchor. It would be another spell unique to him, since it relied on his own biological eyes to provide the arcana sensing portion, so there would be no sharing it with anyone else to grant them the ability to see arcana, but it would still be a step forward.
He wove the spell together as quickly as he could, felt it snap into place, and the scrying anchor popped into existence in front of him. It looked down, and Nym grinned to see all the tendrils of arcana wound through the Garden below.
“Hah, how about that. I’ve been trying to figure that out for months.”
[Ugh. Congratulations. Very good. Your mastery of extremely basic magical theory knows no bounds. It wasn’t tedious at all teaching you to do this.]
Nym laughed. “Yeah, yeah. Go be grumpy somewhere else. Now, let’s see what’s hiding under that flower.”
He sent the scry anchor down, deftly weaving it through the tangled miasma of arcana to the rocky soil. Through it, he saw that the flower itself was connected to a massive underground root system, or maybe root wasn’t the right word. It looked almost like a branch buried in the dirt so that only the flower part breached the surface.
Nym was about to follow it deeper when he realized something was happening on the surface. He blinked twice, reorienting himself to sight through his own eyes, and looked closer at the motion that had caught his attention. The miasma below was roiling, slowly rising upwards with new tendrils lashing out wildly. Some of them were following the connection between Nym and his scry anchor and arching up to where he hovered in the air.
“Would it be a problem if I ended up killing a bunch of these pixies?” he asked.
[I’m sure someone would care. Not me, but someone.]
“Good enough for me,” he said, and unleashed a lightning bolt into the miasma.
The pixies didn’t take that well. They lit up red both in his regular sight as they started to glow and with arcana as they swarmed up from the ground, trailing red miasma behind them. There were far too many for him to target individually, thousands maybe, so he pulled out another old trick he hadn’t used in a while.
Nym activated his aura spell in conjunction with lightning bolt to create an electrically charged area around him. Anything that entered got fried with lightning immediately, and that included every single pixie that got within five feet of him. They fell by the dozens every second, a little localized shower of glittering corpses that rained down on the frost-coated plants below.
Meanwhile, his scry anchor continued its journey underground, tracing the root system deeper until he reached the end of his range. That left Nym with little choice but to fly over the Garden to follow it, and then eventually land once he was outside the Garden’s reach.
“It’s going farther north,” he reported. “But I think the real answer is underground.”
[Yes, obviously. Do you not see the beetles? Look, they’re crawling all over the stem.]
“Yeah, so? They’re just bugs.”
[Those are scarabs, my naïve young half-scendant. Specifically, they’re a variety known as blood burrower scarabs. They’re the source of the corruption that’s infested the Garden of Winter. Give them another week or two to work and you’ll start to see the land physically change. The plants will die and it’ll become a desert.]
“That does sound like a problem for you guys. I’m guessing they’re not going to stop at the edge of the Garden, are they?”
[No. Infestations like this do not halt on their own. They spread and spread until someone takes action.] The fox’s voice turned shrewd. [You could take action.]
“I could,” Nym agreed, “But that’s not our deal, so I won’t.”
The fox’s laughter rang in his head. [That is fair. Perhaps we might make a new deal though. You expressed interest in breaking the aging curse. You might assist me in clearing out this infestation in exchange for my assistance.]
Nym thought about it for a second and shook his head. “I’ve already got a deal with an archmage to break that.”
He left unsaid that he wasn’t fully confident that Archmage Veran could actually break it, but he would certainly talk to the old man before he agreed to the fox’s terms. There was also the option of retrieving all his lost memories once he was able to draw in fifth layer arcana. He wasn’t so desperate yet that the fox had him backed into a corner.
The fox just kept laughing. Eventually it said, [You’ve fulfilled our bargain. You are free to do as you wish and I shall trouble you no more. The students you are protecting are safe from me. Keep the ring. When you change your mind and want to bargain, come back to this glacier and use it to contact me.]
Nym considered the piece of jewelry on his finger with its fox-head emblem. It almost seemed to wink at him, and he shuddered before slipping it off and pocketing it. “Not likely,” he muttered, somehow afraid he might be cursing himself just by saying it out loud. But no, he wasn’t that superstitious.
It was time to get back to his chaperoning job. Nym flew out of range of the Garden and broke the construct holding his lightning aura in place, then followed the trail back south until he found the class huddled more or less into one tight group and moving slowly along.
“How’s it going on your end?” he asked as he touched down next to Professor Lakton.
“Slow, as I’m sure you can see,” she said with a sigh. “I’m keeping them all close together, which has been a job in and of itself. Did you get everything taken care of?”
“Kind of, but I think we’re going to have to cancel the trip. The Garden is infested with a bunch of blood burrower scarabs.”
The professor’s face paled, something Nym found particularly impressive given how white it already was. “God protect us. There hasn’t been an outbreak in Devros in thirty years. They’re usually not seen on this continent.”
Nym conjured up an illusion of a few of them crawling along a stem that he’d seen. “They look like this. Does that help?”
“Those are scarab beetles, yes, though not necessarily blood burrowers. Are you sure of the type? They aren’t usually found in cold climates either.”
Nym just shrugged. “That’s what our uninvited guest called them. It seems risky to walk into that.”
“Hmm. Yes. If they are blood burrowers, the students will get sick just from being close by. We’d best take a break and then start back.”
“I can start teleporting them back to the base,” Nym said. “You go back with the first group to let them in, and I’ll get the rest back as I can. This many… maybe half an hour to do them all?”
“I seriously doubt you can teleport twenty-three people in half an hour,” Professor Lakton told him.
“Guess we’ll find out, unless you want another four hours of walking through the cold and snow, at minimum.”
She sighed and nodded. “Very well, let’s get started. Class! We’re going to have to cancel this trip. I will explain more once we’re back on Academy grounds. Gather close please and prepare for teleportation.”
