Two weeks of searching and scrying and hunting, two weeks of frustration and annoyance, two weeks of failure. At this point, Nym had run out of possible answers and was revisiting his most basic assumptions, trying to determine where he’d gone wrong. And he was coming up with nothing.
The only thing he had left to conclusively disprove was the idea that there had been a talisman generating the cursed scarabs originally, but that someone else had already found it and removed it. Even that idea didn’t fit all the facts, specifically that there was still more corrupted arcana flooding the infestation sites, but it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.
There was one fact that supported the idea: no new infestations had popped up. The ones that already existed were stable and growing, but the overall network wasn’t expanding anymore. His most recent theory was that the original talisman had been removed somehow, but that the scarabs had found some new source of power that they’d corrupted and used to fuel their growth.
It seemed impossible to him, and Archmage Veran had confirmed that he’d never heard of anything like that, but Nym had nothing else to explain what he’d found. It also didn’t explain the growth patterns he’d found, which behaved exactly as they expected if they assumed their initial ideas were correct.
And finally, after two weeks of pounding his head against the proverbial wall, Nym had a new lead. Operating under the idea that the corruption had started to spread near the old ship he’d discovered, but was now being powered from a new location, he’d started gathering information about how fast things were growing in an attempt to follow the trail of the most rapidly expanding infestations back to a new source.
All of that led him to a lonely little corner of the world, a great basin of ice easily a mile thick with another four of five miles of open air underneath it. The whole slab of ice sealing it off from the world was probably a hundred miles across, though he hadn’t taken the time to measure it accurately. That time had been better spent on making a lot of on-the-fly modifications to scry through that entire shielding ice layer. Since everything he’d put together pointed him to this location, he felt it was time well spent and persevered in his modification attempts.
With that perseverance came, eventually, victory. His scry anchor had lost almost all its flexibility in exchange for greater range, but this new version could just barely make it past the ice. That was all Nym needed though, to be able to scry through the ice so he could teleport down there.
He didn’t jump straight there, of course. He flew laps around the ice, scrying from different locations so that he could get a more complete picture of what he was dealing with, then layered up with a thermal barrier, a hyperkinetic barrier, a camouflage screen shaped into a full body orb, a net of fresh air, and one part of his mind held a lightning bolt ready to fire.
Only then did he cast teleport to bring him under the ice. He came out of the spell so close that his head nearly bumped against the ceiling and gazed out at the basin. Once, many years ago, it had probably been a deep lake, or maybe it would have been better described as an inland sea. Most of the water was gone now, with only small pockets left here or there.
There was no natural light through over a mile of ice, of course, but there were various spots of glowing lights below him anyway. It wasn’t enough to illuminate much of anything to him, instead making him feel like he was looking down at a new, unknown set of stars. Perfect vision didn’t need light to see by though, so the darkness hid nothing from him.
Now that he was under the ice, he could see the landscape easily. It was mostly bare rock, or rather lichen-covered rock, as the only plant life growing was that which didn’t need any light. There were animals, but they were the kind that sat immobile and waited for something to come by and be snapped up. Some of them were quite large, big enough to swallow him whole at least, but Nym had no intention of getting near them.
The one thing that stood out to him as truly interesting was a thousand-foot-tall slender needle of metal that rose out of the water remaining in the bottom of the basin. To his eyes, it glowed with arcana, practically blazed. It was probably the strongest source of arcana he had ever seen, and he included the likes of Archmage Veran and the mystical fox in that comparison. Whatever it was, it was far, far beyond mortal magic.
That didn’t mean it had anything to do with the cursed scarab infestation sweeping the northlands, but it was damned suspicious. Something was down here, doing something magical, and at a level beyond anything he’d ever experienced. It put Nym into a bit of a quandary. He was approaching something that could be significantly more dangerous than even the tear in the Veil had been, and the smart thing to do was to forget he’d ever seen it and leave.
But he had agreed to find the cause of the scarab infestation, and everything he’d been able to find had pointed him in this direction. If this was the source, then he had no choice but to keep exploring. He would do so carefully, and perhaps see about convincing the fox to come and help. It would probably know better than him what he was looking at anyway.
That seemed like a much better plan to Nym. His decision made, he cast a teleportation spell to leave. Instead of triggering, it unraveled the moment he finished it. Nym frowned and stared off into space, mentally reviewing what he’d done wrong. He had never botched a teleport before, not unless something was interfering with it.
It was almost like he was caught inside a teleportation ward, but there couldn’t possibly be one big enough to encompass the whole basin. He glanced down at the needle again. Maybe there could be. Something that strong would defy the limits of mortal magic. Perhaps that was how it stayed hidden, by trapping anything that came near.
If he couldn’t teleport out, that still didn’t mean he was trapped. A mile of ice was a lot, but he could theoretically burrow all the way back to the surface. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t need to go that far. He’d just check every few hundred feet to see if he’d escaped the outer bounds of the needle’s teleportation blocking effect.
Except when he tried to break the ice, he found his magic slipping away from it. Elemental water did nothing, but perhaps that was to be expected in the presence of something so powerful. It was mere second layer arcana, after all. Even his third circle spells failed though. Heat didn’t cause it to melt and greater telekinesis couldn’t even grab onto it, let alone rip chunks out of it. Lightning bolts flashed through the darkness and rebounded away.
As each spell failed one after another, Nym started to grow concerned. Eventually, he ran out of ideas and decided to call for help. He worked the long range communication spell that connected him to Archmage Veran, only to have it fizzle out after failing to find a target. The spell was successful, it just couldn’t figure out where the archmage was.
That shouldn’t be possible unless he was dead or had physically changed so much the spell no longer recognized him. He supposed the archmage might have just lost an arm or a leg in the last few hours, but that seemed unlikely. That was probably more interference from the needle’s magic. Nym was worried now. It almost felt like the needle was deliberately thwarting his attempts to leave.
That thought gave him pause. As far as he was aware, a sapient magical item was impossible, but he had to throw out all the rules as he knew them at this point. What was impossible for humans could be trivial for ascendants, and this giant metal spike was definitely in the realm of ascendants. Whatever it was doing, whatever it wanted, Nym wasn’t strong enough to resist it.
That was happening more and more frequently, that whole running into things that were far beyond him. He’d thought he was past that stage of his new life once he’d reached the third layer, and that his progress towards the fifth layer would outpace any new threats. Running into the fox had deflated his ego, and now this thing looked to be even stronger.
He wasn’t sure how he knew that; he just did. He could recognize first or second layer arcana, even third and fifth layer now, and he knew which was stronger by sight. Fourth was a sort of grey area, in that nobody actually used it, but he supposed he would know it if he saw it in action. The fox had been beyond fifth layer, maybe beyond whatever came after that, given its general contempt for ascendants.
The needle was beyond the fox. It was heat and light and weight all wrapped up in a glowing steel splinter that pierced through the darkness. It was the darkened sky overhead cast down below his feet. It was vast, endless, immeasurable, and unknowable.
It was terrifying.
The more Nym contemplated that needle, the less certain he was that it was even something an ascendant could have created. He couldn’t even imagine the kind of power contained in it, perhaps enough to crack the world in half. Whatever being had created it and left it there must have been beyond imagining.
Idly, Nym examined the creatures that lived down in the dark, wondering if there was more to them than he’d initially suspected. Living so close to such incomprehensible power had to have some sort of an impact on them, but no, they were every bit as ordinary as he’d first concluded. They looked like and behaved like bottom feeders, motionless, conserving energy, waiting for the next meal to get too close.
They were easy enough to dodge. Nym got as far away from the needle as possible, hoping against hope that he would outdistance it. He wasn’t surprised when he failed. That thing was strong enough to reach across the planet, and if he got outside of its range, that would only be because it was deliberately limiting itself.
He found no weak points in the ice, and the stone itself was similarly reinforced. The whole basin was sealed off from the world by magic, leaving Nym to wonder how in the world he’d gotten through to begin with. It was possible the barrier was one-way only, freely allowing in anything but letting nothing go.
Having finally exhausted every single idea he could come up with, there was really only one single possibility left: approach the needle and see what it is. If he was lucky, he’d find a way to turn it off. If he was really lucky, he’d confirm that it was somehow powering the corrupted scarab arcana and end that as well. Realistically, neither of those seemed likely.
He wouldn’t find out by floating up near the ice though. Nym flew down through the darkness, his magic giving him sight. He came to a stop a few feet away from the tip of the needle, which was glowing a brilliant, eye-searing pinkish white. And though it was hard to see, there was movement to it. It was alive in some way.
The glow intensified, blinding him, and the last thing he saw was a tendril lashing out to touch him. Then it disappeared completely, and he found himself standing in a room of lustrous, gleaming metal.
A… thing stood before him. It looked like a statue of a woman carved from marble, but so life-like that it wouldn’t surprise Nym if it started moving. At least, that’s what he thought until it turned to look at him. It turned out it was quite surprising indeed.
“Welcome,” the statue said in a neutral, pleasant tone. “How may I assist you, Exarch?”
Two weeks of searching and scrying and hunting, two weeks of frustration and annoyance, two weeks of failure. At this point, Nym had run out of possible answers and was revisiting his most basic assumptions, trying to determine where he’d gone wrong. And he was coming up with nothing.
The only thing he had left to conclusively disprove was the idea that there had been a talisman generating the cursed scarabs originally, but that someone else had already found it and removed it. Even that idea didn’t fit all the facts, specifically that there was still more corrupted arcana flooding the infestation sites, but it didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere.
There was one fact that supported the idea: no new infestations had popped up. The ones that already existed were stable and growing, but the overall network wasn’t expanding anymore. His most recent theory was that the original talisman had been removed somehow, but that the scarabs had found some new source of power that they’d corrupted and used to fuel their growth.
It seemed impossible to him, and Archmage Veran had confirmed that he’d never heard of anything like that, but Nym had nothing else to explain what he’d found. It also didn’t explain the growth patterns he’d found, which behaved exactly as they expected if they assumed their initial ideas were correct.
And finally, after two weeks of pounding his head against the proverbial wall, Nym had a new lead. Operating under the idea that the corruption had started to spread near the old ship he’d discovered, but was now being powered from a new location, he’d started gathering information about how fast things were growing in an attempt to follow the trail of the most rapidly expanding infestations back to a new source.
All of that led him to a lonely little corner of the world, a great basin of ice easily a mile thick with another four of five miles of open air underneath it. The whole slab of ice sealing it off from the world was probably a hundred miles across, though he hadn’t taken the time to measure it accurately. That time had been better spent on making a lot of on-the-fly modifications to scry through that entire shielding ice layer. Since everything he’d put together pointed him to this location, he felt it was time well spent and persevered in his modification attempts.
With that perseverance came, eventually, victory. His scry anchor had lost almost all its flexibility in exchange for greater range, but this new version could just barely make it past the ice. That was all Nym needed though, to be able to scry through the ice so he could teleport down there.
He didn’t jump straight there, of course. He flew laps around the ice, scrying from different locations so that he could get a more complete picture of what he was dealing with, then layered up with a thermal barrier, a hyperkinetic barrier, a camouflage screen shaped into a full body orb, a net of fresh air, and one part of his mind held a lightning bolt ready to fire.
Only then did he cast teleport to bring him under the ice. He came out of the spell so close that his head nearly bumped against the ceiling and gazed out at the basin. Once, many years ago, it had probably been a deep lake, or maybe it would have been better described as an inland sea. Most of the water was gone now, with only small pockets left here or there.
There was no natural light through over a mile of ice, of course, but there were various spots of glowing lights below him anyway. It wasn’t enough to illuminate much of anything to him, instead making him feel like he was looking down at a new, unknown set of stars. Perfect vision didn’t need light to see by though, so the darkness hid nothing from him.
Now that he was under the ice, he could see the landscape easily. It was mostly bare rock, or rather lichen-covered rock, as the only plant life growing was that which didn’t need any light. There were animals, but they were the kind that sat immobile and waited for something to come by and be snapped up. Some of them were quite large, big enough to swallow him whole at least, but Nym had no intention of getting near them.
The one thing that stood out to him as truly interesting was a thousand-foot-tall slender needle of metal that rose out of the water remaining in the bottom of the basin. To his eyes, it glowed with arcana, practically blazed. It was probably the strongest source of arcana he had ever seen, and he included the likes of Archmage Veran and the mystical fox in that comparison. Whatever it was, it was far, far beyond mortal magic.
That didn’t mean it had anything to do with the cursed scarab infestation sweeping the northlands, but it was damned suspicious. Something was down here, doing something magical, and at a level beyond anything he’d ever experienced. It put Nym into a bit of a quandary. He was approaching something that could be significantly more dangerous than even the tear in the Veil had been, and the smart thing to do was to forget he’d ever seen it and leave.
But he had agreed to find the cause of the scarab infestation, and everything he’d been able to find had pointed him in this direction. If this was the source, then he had no choice but to keep exploring. He would do so carefully, and perhaps see about convincing the fox to come and help. It would probably know better than him what he was looking at anyway.
That seemed like a much better plan to Nym. His decision made, he cast a teleportation spell to leave. Instead of triggering, it unraveled the moment he finished it. Nym frowned and stared off into space, mentally reviewing what he’d done wrong. He had never botched a teleport before, not unless something was interfering with it.
It was almost like he was caught inside a teleportation ward, but there couldn’t possibly be one big enough to encompass the whole basin. He glanced down at the needle again. Maybe there could be. Something that strong would defy the limits of mortal magic. Perhaps that was how it stayed hidden, by trapping anything that came near.
If he couldn’t teleport out, that still didn’t mean he was trapped. A mile of ice was a lot, but he could theoretically burrow all the way back to the surface. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t need to go that far. He’d just check every few hundred feet to see if he’d escaped the outer bounds of the needle’s teleportation blocking effect.
Except when he tried to break the ice, he found his magic slipping away from it. Elemental water did nothing, but perhaps that was to be expected in the presence of something so powerful. It was mere second layer arcana, after all. Even his third circle spells failed though. Heat didn’t cause it to melt and greater telekinesis couldn’t even grab onto it, let alone rip chunks out of it. Lightning bolts flashed through the darkness and rebounded away.
As each spell failed one after another, Nym started to grow concerned. Eventually, he ran out of ideas and decided to call for help. He worked the long range communication spell that connected him to Archmage Veran, only to have it fizzle out after failing to find a target. The spell was successful, it just couldn’t figure out where the archmage was.
That shouldn’t be possible unless he was dead or had physically changed so much the spell no longer recognized him. He supposed the archmage might have just lost an arm or a leg in the last few hours, but that seemed unlikely. That was probably more interference from the needle’s magic. Nym was worried now. It almost felt like the needle was deliberately thwarting his attempts to leave.
That thought gave him pause. As far as he was aware, a sapient magical item was impossible, but he had to throw out all the rules as he knew them at this point. What was impossible for humans could be trivial for ascendants, and this giant metal spike was definitely in the realm of ascendants. Whatever it was doing, whatever it wanted, Nym wasn’t strong enough to resist it.
That was happening more and more frequently, that whole running into things that were far beyond him. He’d thought he was past that stage of his new life once he’d reached the third layer, and that his progress towards the fifth layer would outpace any new threats. Running into the fox had deflated his ego, and now this thing looked to be even stronger.
He wasn’t sure how he knew that; he just did. He could recognize first or second layer arcana, even third and fifth layer now, and he knew which was stronger by sight. Fourth was a sort of grey area, in that nobody actually used it, but he supposed he would know it if he saw it in action. The fox had been beyond fifth layer, maybe beyond whatever came after that, given its general contempt for ascendants.
The needle was beyond the fox. It was heat and light and weight all wrapped up in a glowing steel splinter that pierced through the darkness. It was the darkened sky overhead cast down below his feet. It was vast, endless, immeasurable, and unknowable.
It was terrifying.
The more Nym contemplated that needle, the less certain he was that it was even something an ascendant could have created. He couldn’t even imagine the kind of power contained in it, perhaps enough to crack the world in half. Whatever being had created it and left it there must have been beyond imagining.
Idly, Nym examined the creatures that lived down in the dark, wondering if there was more to them than he’d initially suspected. Living so close to such incomprehensible power had to have some sort of an impact on them, but no, they were every bit as ordinary as he’d first concluded. They looked like and behaved like bottom feeders, motionless, conserving energy, waiting for the next meal to get too close.
They were easy enough to dodge. Nym got as far away from the needle as possible, hoping against hope that he would outdistance it. He wasn’t surprised when he failed. That thing was strong enough to reach across the planet, and if he got outside of its range, that would only be because it was deliberately limiting itself.
He found no weak points in the ice, and the stone itself was similarly reinforced. The whole basin was sealed off from the world by magic, leaving Nym to wonder how in the world he’d gotten through to begin with. It was possible the barrier was one-way only, freely allowing in anything but letting nothing go.
Having finally exhausted every single idea he could come up with, there was really only one single possibility left: approach the needle and see what it is. If he was lucky, he’d find a way to turn it off. If he was really lucky, he’d confirm that it was somehow powering the corrupted scarab arcana and end that as well. Realistically, neither of those seemed likely.
He wouldn’t find out by floating up near the ice though. Nym flew down through the darkness, his magic giving him sight. He came to a stop a few feet away from the tip of the needle, which was glowing a brilliant, eye-searing pinkish white. And though it was hard to see, there was movement to it. It was alive in some way.
The glow intensified, blinding him, and the last thing he saw was a tendril lashing out to touch him. Then it disappeared completely, and he found himself standing in a room of lustrous, gleaming metal.
A… thing stood before him. It looked like a statue of a woman carved from marble, but so life-like that it wouldn’t surprise Nym if it started moving. At least, that’s what he thought until it turned to look at him. It turned out it was quite surprising indeed.
“Welcome,” the statue said in a neutral, pleasant tone. “How may I assist you, Exarch?”
