“That’s one nice spell,” Nym said.
“I built it myself,” Archmage Veran told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever taught it to anyone else.”
“Yeah, I can see that. This thing is a monster.”
The spell in question, a long distance scry, was without a doubt the most complicated spell Nym had ever seen. He’d thought the golem series were bad, but this was so much worse. It was like mashing together teleportation, the detection portion of a communication spell, and various bits and bobs of vision enhancing magic together into one spell, and then stuffing that inside a framework for a golem spell that had the animating guts ripped out.
In theory, he was projecting his consciousness over hundreds or thousands of miles and forming a sort of spiritual body to see with. Then that spirit anchored the spells for vision and connected back to his mind to let him know what it found and receive directions on how to move. All of that was to say that it was a nightmare to put together fast enough to keep it from failing and required three different intent filters to be held simultaneously since not even his soul well could hold all the arcana needed at once.
The insane arcana input was a limiting factor for most mages; it would require them to work together in a ritualized version of the spell. Since it wasn’t designed as a ritual though, it would need to be overhauled if it was going to be used that way. That meant Nym could do it, and obviously Archmage Veran himself could cast the spell, but there were probably only a handful of people in the rest of the world with the capability to channel that much arcana that quickly.
Of course, Nym needed the ability to see arcana through his scrying spell. Now that he finally knew how to make that work, he wasn’t going to give it up. That made his version even trickier, but he managed it. Now he had long-range communication, with one person at least, and scrying, he’d advanced his third circle healing to the point where it could put together anything that might reasonably go wrong with a body, and he was working on his diagnostics spells to actually tell him what was wrong.
Additionally, he’d learned as much as he could about scarabs and curse-breaking, studied maps of the northlands, and been loaned a few potent tools by an archmage. He’d also gone out of his way to learn some of the standard versions of heating spells that didn’t require constant upkeep. Nym was about as ready as he could possibly be.
Well, that wasn’t true. He was still working on breaking into the fifth layer. Boring through the fourth was a slow, tedious process, one that he kept getting bogged down on. The deeper he burrowed, the harder it got to force the conduit through another revolution. He’d been told by his past self to use an arcana-flushed tip to punch straight through, but Nym had nowhere near that kind of willpower.
Instead he was borrowing his mentor’s method: a slow bore. Archmage Veran could pierce the fourth layer with about thirty seconds of calm focus. Nym could pierce… maybe half of it, with about two hours of work. Then his willpower started to flag and the fourth layer pushed him back out. It was actively fighting against him the entire time he was boring through it, like it was under pressure and wouldn’t tolerate an intrusion.
Clearly speed would be key. The harder and faster he pushed, the quicker he’d burrow through it. But Nym just didn’t have the mental strength to do it, not yet. Archmage Veran wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t managed to accomplish it. It was something almost no human achieved, and to expect to have mastered it with barely a few months to work on it was foolish.
“With this, I believe you are as prepared as you can be,” Archmage Veran said.
“I think so,” Nym agreed. “Good night’s sleep, bag full of rations, and I’ll head north first thing in the morning.”
“A word of unsolicited advice for you. Don’t be afraid to retreat if you find yourself in a dangerous situation without a clear plan of action. You have all the tools you need to know what you’re walking into and determine how best to handle it.”
“That’s good advice,” Nym said. “Thanks.”
“You are quite welcome. Well then, it’s quite late and I think both of us need our rest. Finals start next week and even though I don’t teach any classes directly, it somehow still means quite a bit of extra work for me.”
* * *
Nym appeared out of nowhere in the open sky above Glacial Valley. He spent a moment orienting himself, then pulled the fox ring out of his pocket and slipped it onto his finger.
[Hello? Can you hear me?] he sent out through the ring.
There was no answer.
[Fox? Are you there?]
Nym waited for a few minutes and tried again. Then he started flying around, shooting out another message every ten miles or so. Eventually, after an hour of looking, he got a response.
[What do you want? I am trying to sleep here!]
The fox appeared in midair in front of him, though Nym immediately recognized it as an illusion. It looked supremely annoyed as it glared at him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. You said to come back if I decided I was willing to clear out the scarab infestation.”
[Oh, that? I took care of that two weeks ago.]
“I… you… oh. I guess you don’t need any help then. I’ll just give you this ring back and go?”
[After waking me up, you think I’m just going to let you leave? Oh no, little half-scendant. That’s not how this is going to happen at all.]
Arcana rushed out of the illusion and grabbed hold of Nym. He tried to teleport, but the spell fizzled under the fox’s magical assault. A moment later, he was in an underground den, if anything that had vaulted ceilings could be called that. The real mystical fox sat in front of him, still looking grumpy as it perched on a gigantic padded cushion.
Then its sneer faded into a grin, and it laughed. “Gotcha,” it said.
Nym, his heart still beating a million times a minute, stood there wide-eyed. “What?”
“I was just messing with you because you interrupted my nap. I still need the scarabs cleaned up. You’re going to handle it?”
Nym stared at the fox blankly while his brain tried to catch up. Finally he said, “I thought you were going to try to kill me.”
“Please, if I wanted to kill you, there would be no ‘try’ to it, and you would never know it was coming until it had already happened.”
“I’m already regretting this.”
“So you don’t want me to break that curse on you?”
Nym shrugged. “Can you?”
“Of course I can! I said I could, didn’t I?”
“You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t necessarily believe every word out of your mouth to be the honest truth.”
The fix snickered. “Good. That means you’re smarter than you look.”
Nym wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be offended by that. Before he could figure it out, the fox went on, “Yes, I can. I can even do it without hurting you in any way, shape, or form. You’ve got a few memory lock curses on you that I couldn’t do unaided without some risk, but the aging curse is simple enough. Any sixth layer caster could manage it.”
“There aren’t too many of those just lazing around,” Nym said.
“Lucky for you that you met me then,” the fox said with a smirk.
“Fine, let’s make it official then. I’ll eliminate the scarabs and find the cursed talisman that’s making them. In return, you will break the curse that is making me age rapidly.”
“This I do agree to abide by,” the fox spoke, arcana infused into its voice. “This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to.”
The words had the feel of a ritual to them. Nym saw a stirring of arcana surround the fox as he spoke, something nebulous that was there one instant, gone the next. It sat upright on its cushion, looking down at Nym, and waited.
“Um. This I do agree to abide by. This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to?” Nym repeated.
Again there was a swirling of arcana around him, something more solid this time. He could see the links between him and the fox. It tightened around them and settled into Nym’s skin, and he could all of the sudden feel the pact between them. It wasn’t something he’d expected, but since he’d had no intentions of not honoring it, it was a nice little bit of insurance.
“Excellent. Now, let me get a good look at you. This will be delicate. Come, have a seat right here.”
A chair materialized out of nothing between them. Blinking, Nym sat down in it. Even though he knew it was an illusion, it appeared as solid and real as any other chair he’d ever seen. “How are your illusions so strong?” he asked.
“Perhaps it is not an illusion. Or perhaps it is your mind that is fooled into believing a chair is there, when there is really nothing at all. After all, what is the nature of reality to a being such as myself? It is a malleable thing, easily shaped according to my will and desire. Now, hold still.”
“What exactly are you doing?”
The fox rolled its eyes. “What did I just swear I would do?”
“Wait, already?” Nym asked. “I thought you’d wait until I was done.”
“Feh. You swore the pact. You would not be able to do that if you did not whole-heartedly plan on honoring your portion of the bargain. For myself, this is a simple matter that will only take a few minutes to discharge. Now, be quiet so I can concentrate.”
Nym sat there while the fox hopped down from its seat and circled around him. With each lap, it grew bigger and the shadows around it shifted more violently. By the ninth lap, it was twice as tall as he was and the darkness seemed to frame itself around the fox.
“Be unbound by this curse. Let it be cast off, let it fall away. May it be uprooted from your being wholly, and may your spirit be brightened by escaping its shadow.”
Each word resonated with arcana, a sort of audible spell construct that Nym didn’t fully understand. It enveloped Nym fully, not just in his physical being, but to his soul well and his mind. The sound got louder and the arcana pulsed through him until he could hear nothing else, feel nothing else.
Then, with a great tearing sensation, the feeling disappeared. With it gone, he felt a void in himself, something hollow that had been ripped away. Nym looked down at himself in wonder. “I feel… light. I could practically float away,” he said.
“Yes, well, that’s to be expected. It was a heavy curse. It tied up much of your body and mind’s resources maintaining it. Your magic should be significantly easier without it.”
“What does that mean, easier?” Nym opened a conduit to the second layer and pulled in arcana. It rushed in, faster and smoother than ever, and it just kept coming, and coming. More poured in, more than he’d ever held. “God, that is amazing.”
The fox rolled its eyes. “Go play somewhere else, half-scendant. I am going back to sleep. Come find me when you’ve completed your half of the pact.”
And with that, Nym was back in the sky over Glacial Valley, falling rapidly and laughing all the way. He caught himself on a current of arcana, barely even formed into something like a flight spell, and allowed it to whisk his body away through the air.
“That’s one nice spell,” Nym said.
“I built it myself,” Archmage Veran told him. “I don’t think I’ve ever taught it to anyone else.”
“Yeah, I can see that. This thing is a monster.”
The spell in question, a long distance scry, was without a doubt the most complicated spell Nym had ever seen. He’d thought the golem series were bad, but this was so much worse. It was like mashing together teleportation, the detection portion of a communication spell, and various bits and bobs of vision enhancing magic together into one spell, and then stuffing that inside a framework for a golem spell that had the animating guts ripped out.
In theory, he was projecting his consciousness over hundreds or thousands of miles and forming a sort of spiritual body to see with. Then that spirit anchored the spells for vision and connected back to his mind to let him know what it found and receive directions on how to move. All of that was to say that it was a nightmare to put together fast enough to keep it from failing and required three different intent filters to be held simultaneously since not even his soul well could hold all the arcana needed at once.
The insane arcana input was a limiting factor for most mages; it would require them to work together in a ritualized version of the spell. Since it wasn’t designed as a ritual though, it would need to be overhauled if it was going to be used that way. That meant Nym could do it, and obviously Archmage Veran himself could cast the spell, but there were probably only a handful of people in the rest of the world with the capability to channel that much arcana that quickly.
Of course, Nym needed the ability to see arcana through his scrying spell. Now that he finally knew how to make that work, he wasn’t going to give it up. That made his version even trickier, but he managed it. Now he had long-range communication, with one person at least, and scrying, he’d advanced his third circle healing to the point where it could put together anything that might reasonably go wrong with a body, and he was working on his diagnostics spells to actually tell him what was wrong.
Additionally, he’d learned as much as he could about scarabs and curse-breaking, studied maps of the northlands, and been loaned a few potent tools by an archmage. He’d also gone out of his way to learn some of the standard versions of heating spells that didn’t require constant upkeep. Nym was about as ready as he could possibly be.
Well, that wasn’t true. He was still working on breaking into the fifth layer. Boring through the fourth was a slow, tedious process, one that he kept getting bogged down on. The deeper he burrowed, the harder it got to force the conduit through another revolution. He’d been told by his past self to use an arcana-flushed tip to punch straight through, but Nym had nowhere near that kind of willpower.
Instead he was borrowing his mentor’s method: a slow bore. Archmage Veran could pierce the fourth layer with about thirty seconds of calm focus. Nym could pierce… maybe half of it, with about two hours of work. Then his willpower started to flag and the fourth layer pushed him back out. It was actively fighting against him the entire time he was boring through it, like it was under pressure and wouldn’t tolerate an intrusion.
Clearly speed would be key. The harder and faster he pushed, the quicker he’d burrow through it. But Nym just didn’t have the mental strength to do it, not yet. Archmage Veran wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t managed to accomplish it. It was something almost no human achieved, and to expect to have mastered it with barely a few months to work on it was foolish.
“With this, I believe you are as prepared as you can be,” Archmage Veran said.
“I think so,” Nym agreed. “Good night’s sleep, bag full of rations, and I’ll head north first thing in the morning.”
“A word of unsolicited advice for you. Don’t be afraid to retreat if you find yourself in a dangerous situation without a clear plan of action. You have all the tools you need to know what you’re walking into and determine how best to handle it.”
“That’s good advice,” Nym said. “Thanks.”
“You are quite welcome. Well then, it’s quite late and I think both of us need our rest. Finals start next week and even though I don’t teach any classes directly, it somehow still means quite a bit of extra work for me.”
* * *
Nym appeared out of nowhere in the open sky above Glacial Valley. He spent a moment orienting himself, then pulled the fox ring out of his pocket and slipped it onto his finger.
[Hello? Can you hear me?] he sent out through the ring.
There was no answer.
[Fox? Are you there?]
Nym waited for a few minutes and tried again. Then he started flying around, shooting out another message every ten miles or so. Eventually, after an hour of looking, he got a response.
[What do you want? I am trying to sleep here!]
The fox appeared in midair in front of him, though Nym immediately recognized it as an illusion. It looked supremely annoyed as it glared at him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. You said to come back if I decided I was willing to clear out the scarab infestation.”
[Oh, that? I took care of that two weeks ago.]
“I… you… oh. I guess you don’t need any help then. I’ll just give you this ring back and go?”
[After waking me up, you think I’m just going to let you leave? Oh no, little half-scendant. That’s not how this is going to happen at all.]
Arcana rushed out of the illusion and grabbed hold of Nym. He tried to teleport, but the spell fizzled under the fox’s magical assault. A moment later, he was in an underground den, if anything that had vaulted ceilings could be called that. The real mystical fox sat in front of him, still looking grumpy as it perched on a gigantic padded cushion.
Then its sneer faded into a grin, and it laughed. “Gotcha,” it said.
Nym, his heart still beating a million times a minute, stood there wide-eyed. “What?”
“I was just messing with you because you interrupted my nap. I still need the scarabs cleaned up. You’re going to handle it?”
Nym stared at the fox blankly while his brain tried to catch up. Finally he said, “I thought you were going to try to kill me.”
“Please, if I wanted to kill you, there would be no ‘try’ to it, and you would never know it was coming until it had already happened.”
“I’m already regretting this.”
“So you don’t want me to break that curse on you?”
Nym shrugged. “Can you?”
“Of course I can! I said I could, didn’t I?”
“You might be surprised to learn that I didn’t necessarily believe every word out of your mouth to be the honest truth.”
The fix snickered. “Good. That means you’re smarter than you look.”
Nym wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be offended by that. Before he could figure it out, the fox went on, “Yes, I can. I can even do it without hurting you in any way, shape, or form. You’ve got a few memory lock curses on you that I couldn’t do unaided without some risk, but the aging curse is simple enough. Any sixth layer caster could manage it.”
“There aren’t too many of those just lazing around,” Nym said.
“Lucky for you that you met me then,” the fox said with a smirk.
“Fine, let’s make it official then. I’ll eliminate the scarabs and find the cursed talisman that’s making them. In return, you will break the curse that is making me age rapidly.”
“This I do agree to abide by,” the fox spoke, arcana infused into its voice. “This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to.”
The words had the feel of a ritual to them. Nym saw a stirring of arcana surround the fox as he spoke, something nebulous that was there one instant, gone the next. It sat upright on its cushion, looking down at Nym, and waited.
“Um. This I do agree to abide by. This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to?” Nym repeated.
Again there was a swirling of arcana around him, something more solid this time. He could see the links between him and the fox. It tightened around them and settled into Nym’s skin, and he could all of the sudden feel the pact between them. It wasn’t something he’d expected, but since he’d had no intentions of not honoring it, it was a nice little bit of insurance.
“Excellent. Now, let me get a good look at you. This will be delicate. Come, have a seat right here.”
A chair materialized out of nothing between them. Blinking, Nym sat down in it. Even though he knew it was an illusion, it appeared as solid and real as any other chair he’d ever seen. “How are your illusions so strong?” he asked.
“Perhaps it is not an illusion. Or perhaps it is your mind that is fooled into believing a chair is there, when there is really nothing at all. After all, what is the nature of reality to a being such as myself? It is a malleable thing, easily shaped according to my will and desire. Now, hold still.”
“What exactly are you doing?”
The fox rolled its eyes. “What did I just swear I would do?”
“Wait, already?” Nym asked. “I thought you’d wait until I was done.”
“Feh. You swore the pact. You would not be able to do that if you did not whole-heartedly plan on honoring your portion of the bargain. For myself, this is a simple matter that will only take a few minutes to discharge. Now, be quiet so I can concentrate.”
Nym sat there while the fox hopped down from its seat and circled around him. With each lap, it grew bigger and the shadows around it shifted more violently. By the ninth lap, it was twice as tall as he was and the darkness seemed to frame itself around the fox.
“Be unbound by this curse. Let it be cast off, let it fall away. May it be uprooted from your being wholly, and may your spirit be brightened by escaping its shadow.”
Each word resonated with arcana, a sort of audible spell construct that Nym didn’t fully understand. It enveloped Nym fully, not just in his physical being, but to his soul well and his mind. The sound got louder and the arcana pulsed through him until he could hear nothing else, feel nothing else.
Then, with a great tearing sensation, the feeling disappeared. With it gone, he felt a void in himself, something hollow that had been ripped away. Nym looked down at himself in wonder. “I feel… light. I could practically float away,” he said.
“Yes, well, that’s to be expected. It was a heavy curse. It tied up much of your body and mind’s resources maintaining it. Your magic should be significantly easier without it.”
“What does that mean, easier?” Nym opened a conduit to the second layer and pulled in arcana. It rushed in, faster and smoother than ever, and it just kept coming, and coming. More poured in, more than he’d ever held. “God, that is amazing.”
The fox rolled its eyes. “Go play somewhere else, half-scendant. I am going back to sleep. Come find me when you’ve completed your half of the pact.”
And with that, Nym was back in the sky over Glacial Valley, falling rapidly and laughing all the way. He caught himself on a current of arcana, barely even formed into something like a flight spell, and allowed it to whisk his body away through the air.
