Once the pleasantries were done, Nym and Baracia dove right into the meat of the conversation. “How much do you know about what’s happening in our society, about the fight between two of our Exarchs?” the councilwoman asked.
“More than I want to, less than I should,” Nym said dryly.
“Then you are aware of the Ascendant Council’s major concern.”
“That Myzalik is somehow killing ascendants, which should be impossible.”
“Exactly. We can’t ignore a threat like this,” Baracia said. “He needs to be stopped.”
“So you’re siding with Niramyn?” Nym asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The memories he’d been given for review had only given him bits and pieces, mostly names and faces of who he assumed were important ascendants. The politics of it all were well hidden.
“Not exactly. It’s complicated.”
“Doesn’t seem complicated,” Nym said. “You want to stop Myzalik. Niramyn wants the same thing. Cooperate and stop him.”
“The Council as a whole can’t,” Baracia said. “There are too many old alliances and favors owed on both sides. So while many of us wish, individually, to stop Myzalik, we are unable to move as one group. This is complicated by the fact that not only is Myzalik owed favors by prominent council members, he has a large following who are also calling in their favors as well. It’s forced the Council to a standstill.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You all agree you want to stop this guy because he could be killing you next, but no one is willing to do it because of prior obligations to his faction. So your plan is to just let him do whatever he wants and hope that the people who don’t owe him a favor will take care of him for you.”
“That’s… not necessarily wrong, but it misses a great deal of nuance.”
Nym resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He left unsaid that it was likely anyone who could take a swing at Myzalik probably wasn’t willing to try, just in case they missed and found themselves suddenly mortal. If he had to guess, he’d say the only reason Niramyn was fighting back was that he had no choice. Myzalik was coming after him, had already tried once. Maybe when they fought next time, Nym could get a little brother out of it.
“There are of course a few ascendants who joined Niramyn when he returned, and they are calling in their favors as well,” Baracia said. “It’s a delicate situation, with favors and counter favors being traded and used to check each other. The politics of it is a bit of a nightmare. That’s why it was so interesting to encounter you, a fresh ascendant, barely even at Initiate rank, who is owed no favors and owes none. You could do anything you wanted and there would be no political backlash.”
“I suppose you have some ideas about what I should want to do,” Nym said.
“I wouldn’t want to tie us together by suggesting you do any favors for me,” she said. “But if you were to let me know what goals you have, I could advise on a possible course to meet those goals. As long as I don’t actually help you, there’d be no obligation on either end. It would just be idle chatter.”
Nym’s lips pressed into a thin line as he considered what Baracia was proposing. It was a frustrating, round-about, stupid, pointless fiction designed to let her off on a technicality, to maintain the polite façade that she was politically neutral just like the rest of the Council. He didn’t want to get dragged into a convoluted mess like that, and it might just be better to just thank Baracia for her time and get out of there.
Of course, if he did that, he might as well go straight back into hiding. He could fling himself off into some far corner of nothingness, work on his magic in peace, and abandon society completely. There were probably many ascendants out there, doing exactly that. But the thought of being alone, doing nothing but working on his magic, never talking to anyone or experiencing anything else… Nym couldn’t do it again, not forever. He’d already spent subjective years being trapped and alone, and Rizin hadn’t been spectacular company either.
He wanted to live his life, not just keep it. So he was going to play the game, at least a little bit. “I guess the first thing I need to figure out is if anyone in Myzalik’s camp is still trying to find me,” Nym said. “I can’t really make too many plans moving forward until I know who’s looking for me.”
No doubt Niramyn would like to get Nym back under his control. Both sides were potentially hostile to him, though he supposed not deadly, not anymore. What exactly ascendants did when they fought was still a bit of a mystery. It was something to do with their anchors, he knew. For beings who were supposed to be immortal, they placed a lot of value on time.
“Hmm… I do know some things about that, but I don’t think I can tell you without you incurring a favor. And if you owed me a favor, you’d end up tied to me instead of being a free agent.”
Nym’s eye twitched. She knew what he wanted to know, but wouldn’t tell him because ‘politics.’ He needed to come at it from a different direction, ask more oblique questions, he supposed. Maybe he wouldn’t get that specific answer, but he might piece it together from other information if he was clever enough.
“So, what’s common knowledge about Myzalik and his crew?” Nym asked. “What does everybody know? What’s the latest gossip?”
“Ahh. I see. Well then, have you heard what Karacho has been up to lately?”
“I haven’t,” Nym said. He also didn’t know who Karacho was.
“The way I heard it, he didn’t actually want to join Myzalik’s faction, but he owed a whole bunch of favors to Enkati and she called them all in to get him to help. He’s been all over the eighth layer hub, asking questions and running people down.”
Nym smiled and nodded. He had no idea who either of those people were or what lurking around the eighth layer meant. “Sounds like an annoying job, but at least he’ll have filled a bunch of obligations when he’s done.”
“That’s true. I don’t think anyone expected him to worm his way out from under Enkati. She’s not known for letting people go once she gets her hooks into them.”
That was good to know. He made a mental note to never ask Enkati for a favor, if he ever met her. Presumably, what with the society being only a few hundred people and them all living forever, he’d meet everyone eventually. That must get awkward when there were longstanding grudges involved.
However, it wasn’t relevant to him right now, not unless the eighth layer hub was in some way connected to mortal people in the core reality. Since that didn’t seem likely to be the case, he wasn’t sure why Baracia was talking about it. His best guess was that it was going to be something that was relevant later.
“Has he just been hanging around the hub, or chasing people down in other layers too?”
“I heard he’s got Abdun chasing down the lower layer stuff for him, but he’s extremely annoyed because Abdun went and got his anchors severed in a wide chunk of mortal time, and that’s right where the ascendants who are playing around in the core world are at.”
“Oh yeah? There been a lot of ascendants in that situation? Anchorless, I mean.”
“Better to say loose anchors,” Baracia corrected him. “They just need to be reattached somewhere new. And yes, it seems there’s a stretch of about a decade or so in real time where ascendants are descending down to the core reality to fight. The young ones can be so hotheaded, present company excluded of course.”
“Oh, uh, no offense taken, I think. So ascendants are fighting, and the losers are getting booted out of the core reality for a time out.” Nym had to wonder if it was really that much of a game to them. They couldn’t die, so they just bickered, except that the amount of destruction they could cause was on the scale of warring demi-gods. He hadn’t seen anything like that though. “When are they fighting?”
Baracia rattled off some numbers that Nym didn’t really understand. He knew ascendants measured time from specific events rather than linearly, but he didn’t have the frames of reference needed to translate that into something that made sense to him. “What, uh, what would that be on the Latorsikan calendar?”
“Hmm… let me think,” Baracia said. “1216 through 1225 is the range I believe they’re fighting over.”
Nym blinked at that. It was only a year into the future from what he considered to be present day. If the ascendants were fighting spell duels like he pictured, that could lead to a cataclysm that wiped out huge chunks of life on the planet. His friends could end up dead just as collateral damage, without any ascendant ever knowing about them at all.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Baracia said, noting the look on his face. “The Council holds them responsible for anything they break. The winners have to fix the landscape, revive anyone who dies, and so on. It encourages the fighters to limit themselves to reasonable levels, barely worse than mortals.”
That wasn’t all that reassuring. Nym could still vividly remember Archmage Veran raining destruction down across miles of woodland on the undead in there, or when he’d attempted to obliterate the corpse root and it had taken multiple mages working together just to protect themselves against the area effects of a spell that wasn’t even aimed at them. Two or three ascendants unleashing pinnacle spells would flatten an entire region in no time.
He supposed it was better than unraveling reality. At least the damage would be mostly reversible, but the idea of dozens of ascendants brawling at archmage levels over a decade long time span was more than a little unnerving. He’d foolishly assumed the ascendants would limit their fights to the outer layers, but it made a certain kind of sense that they’d fight in a place where victory actually had meaning: the place where time mattered. Suddenly, Nym found himself a lot more interested in getting some more details.
Baracia was more than happy to chat about who’d fought where, and who the winner was. Nym listened attentively and took down names and tactics whenever he could get them. After all, there was every chance he might end up fighting some of those same ascendants one day, and having a good idea of their tactics and tricks could only help him.
Nym lost track of time while they talked. The tea pot never got any emptier, and there was no day or night cycle to be seen through the windows. Without the need for sleep or other bodily functions to remind him, it was hard to care about passing hours. It couldn’t have been more than a day though. They’d covered a broad range of topics, but it hadn’t been that long.
Maybe it was two days. He frowned. Technically, it didn’t matter, but it bothered him that he couldn’t keep track when he was on the sixth layer. He needed to do something about that. Perhaps there was some sort of spell to keep track of subject linear time, even when they were in a reality where time didn’t exist.
“Nym, is there a problem?” Baracia asked. “You’ve gone quiet on me.”
“Oh, sorry. I was just wondering how long we’ve been having tea. It’s taking me a bit to wrap my head around the idea of unlimited time.”
“I understand. All of this takes some adjusting. No matter how well you prepare, a mortal can’t really understand a timeless existence. We’ve tried explaining it to them. It doesn’t work. It’s something you have to experience for yourself. As to your question though, subjectively speaking, it’s been fifty-six days.”
“What? No, that… that’s not right.”
“I can assure you it is.”
If that was the case… how had they talked for that long? And if he’d spent close to two months just casually chatting, how long had he really been trapped in Niramyn’s study?
Once the pleasantries were done, Nym and Baracia dove right into the meat of the conversation. “How much do you know about what’s happening in our society, about the fight between two of our Exarchs?” the councilwoman asked.
“More than I want to, less than I should,” Nym said dryly.
“Then you are aware of the Ascendant Council’s major concern.”
“That Myzalik is somehow killing ascendants, which should be impossible.”
“Exactly. We can’t ignore a threat like this,” Baracia said. “He needs to be stopped.”
“So you’re siding with Niramyn?” Nym asked, afraid he already knew the answer. The memories he’d been given for review had only given him bits and pieces, mostly names and faces of who he assumed were important ascendants. The politics of it all were well hidden.
“Not exactly. It’s complicated.”
“Doesn’t seem complicated,” Nym said. “You want to stop Myzalik. Niramyn wants the same thing. Cooperate and stop him.”
“The Council as a whole can’t,” Baracia said. “There are too many old alliances and favors owed on both sides. So while many of us wish, individually, to stop Myzalik, we are unable to move as one group. This is complicated by the fact that not only is Myzalik owed favors by prominent council members, he has a large following who are also calling in their favors as well. It’s forced the Council to a standstill.”
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You all agree you want to stop this guy because he could be killing you next, but no one is willing to do it because of prior obligations to his faction. So your plan is to just let him do whatever he wants and hope that the people who don’t owe him a favor will take care of him for you.”
“That’s… not necessarily wrong, but it misses a great deal of nuance.”
Nym resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He left unsaid that it was likely anyone who could take a swing at Myzalik probably wasn’t willing to try, just in case they missed and found themselves suddenly mortal. If he had to guess, he’d say the only reason Niramyn was fighting back was that he had no choice. Myzalik was coming after him, had already tried once. Maybe when they fought next time, Nym could get a little brother out of it.
“There are of course a few ascendants who joined Niramyn when he returned, and they are calling in their favors as well,” Baracia said. “It’s a delicate situation, with favors and counter favors being traded and used to check each other. The politics of it is a bit of a nightmare. That’s why it was so interesting to encounter you, a fresh ascendant, barely even at Initiate rank, who is owed no favors and owes none. You could do anything you wanted and there would be no political backlash.”
“I suppose you have some ideas about what I should want to do,” Nym said.
“I wouldn’t want to tie us together by suggesting you do any favors for me,” she said. “But if you were to let me know what goals you have, I could advise on a possible course to meet those goals. As long as I don’t actually help you, there’d be no obligation on either end. It would just be idle chatter.”
Nym’s lips pressed into a thin line as he considered what Baracia was proposing. It was a frustrating, round-about, stupid, pointless fiction designed to let her off on a technicality, to maintain the polite façade that she was politically neutral just like the rest of the Council. He didn’t want to get dragged into a convoluted mess like that, and it might just be better to just thank Baracia for her time and get out of there.
Of course, if he did that, he might as well go straight back into hiding. He could fling himself off into some far corner of nothingness, work on his magic in peace, and abandon society completely. There were probably many ascendants out there, doing exactly that. But the thought of being alone, doing nothing but working on his magic, never talking to anyone or experiencing anything else… Nym couldn’t do it again, not forever. He’d already spent subjective years being trapped and alone, and Rizin hadn’t been spectacular company either.
He wanted to live his life, not just keep it. So he was going to play the game, at least a little bit. “I guess the first thing I need to figure out is if anyone in Myzalik’s camp is still trying to find me,” Nym said. “I can’t really make too many plans moving forward until I know who’s looking for me.”
No doubt Niramyn would like to get Nym back under his control. Both sides were potentially hostile to him, though he supposed not deadly, not anymore. What exactly ascendants did when they fought was still a bit of a mystery. It was something to do with their anchors, he knew. For beings who were supposed to be immortal, they placed a lot of value on time.
“Hmm… I do know some things about that, but I don’t think I can tell you without you incurring a favor. And if you owed me a favor, you’d end up tied to me instead of being a free agent.”
Nym’s eye twitched. She knew what he wanted to know, but wouldn’t tell him because ‘politics.’ He needed to come at it from a different direction, ask more oblique questions, he supposed. Maybe he wouldn’t get that specific answer, but he might piece it together from other information if he was clever enough.
“So, what’s common knowledge about Myzalik and his crew?” Nym asked. “What does everybody know? What’s the latest gossip?”
“Ahh. I see. Well then, have you heard what Karacho has been up to lately?”
“I haven’t,” Nym said. He also didn’t know who Karacho was.
“The way I heard it, he didn’t actually want to join Myzalik’s faction, but he owed a whole bunch of favors to Enkati and she called them all in to get him to help. He’s been all over the eighth layer hub, asking questions and running people down.”
Nym smiled and nodded. He had no idea who either of those people were or what lurking around the eighth layer meant. “Sounds like an annoying job, but at least he’ll have filled a bunch of obligations when he’s done.”
“That’s true. I don’t think anyone expected him to worm his way out from under Enkati. She’s not known for letting people go once she gets her hooks into them.”
That was good to know. He made a mental note to never ask Enkati for a favor, if he ever met her. Presumably, what with the society being only a few hundred people and them all living forever, he’d meet everyone eventually. That must get awkward when there were longstanding grudges involved.
However, it wasn’t relevant to him right now, not unless the eighth layer hub was in some way connected to mortal people in the core reality. Since that didn’t seem likely to be the case, he wasn’t sure why Baracia was talking about it. His best guess was that it was going to be something that was relevant later.
“Has he just been hanging around the hub, or chasing people down in other layers too?”
“I heard he’s got Abdun chasing down the lower layer stuff for him, but he’s extremely annoyed because Abdun went and got his anchors severed in a wide chunk of mortal time, and that’s right where the ascendants who are playing around in the core world are at.”
“Oh yeah? There been a lot of ascendants in that situation? Anchorless, I mean.”
“Better to say loose anchors,” Baracia corrected him. “They just need to be reattached somewhere new. And yes, it seems there’s a stretch of about a decade or so in real time where ascendants are descending down to the core reality to fight. The young ones can be so hotheaded, present company excluded of course.”
“Oh, uh, no offense taken, I think. So ascendants are fighting, and the losers are getting booted out of the core reality for a time out.” Nym had to wonder if it was really that much of a game to them. They couldn’t die, so they just bickered, except that the amount of destruction they could cause was on the scale of warring demi-gods. He hadn’t seen anything like that though. “When are they fighting?”
Baracia rattled off some numbers that Nym didn’t really understand. He knew ascendants measured time from specific events rather than linearly, but he didn’t have the frames of reference needed to translate that into something that made sense to him. “What, uh, what would that be on the Latorsikan calendar?”
“Hmm… let me think,” Baracia said. “1216 through 1225 is the range I believe they’re fighting over.”
Nym blinked at that. It was only a year into the future from what he considered to be present day. If the ascendants were fighting spell duels like he pictured, that could lead to a cataclysm that wiped out huge chunks of life on the planet. His friends could end up dead just as collateral damage, without any ascendant ever knowing about them at all.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Baracia said, noting the look on his face. “The Council holds them responsible for anything they break. The winners have to fix the landscape, revive anyone who dies, and so on. It encourages the fighters to limit themselves to reasonable levels, barely worse than mortals.”
That wasn’t all that reassuring. Nym could still vividly remember Archmage Veran raining destruction down across miles of woodland on the undead in there, or when he’d attempted to obliterate the corpse root and it had taken multiple mages working together just to protect themselves against the area effects of a spell that wasn’t even aimed at them. Two or three ascendants unleashing pinnacle spells would flatten an entire region in no time.
He supposed it was better than unraveling reality. At least the damage would be mostly reversible, but the idea of dozens of ascendants brawling at archmage levels over a decade long time span was more than a little unnerving. He’d foolishly assumed the ascendants would limit their fights to the outer layers, but it made a certain kind of sense that they’d fight in a place where victory actually had meaning: the place where time mattered. Suddenly, Nym found himself a lot more interested in getting some more details.
Baracia was more than happy to chat about who’d fought where, and who the winner was. Nym listened attentively and took down names and tactics whenever he could get them. After all, there was every chance he might end up fighting some of those same ascendants one day, and having a good idea of their tactics and tricks could only help him.
Nym lost track of time while they talked. The tea pot never got any emptier, and there was no day or night cycle to be seen through the windows. Without the need for sleep or other bodily functions to remind him, it was hard to care about passing hours. It couldn’t have been more than a day though. They’d covered a broad range of topics, but it hadn’t been that long.
Maybe it was two days. He frowned. Technically, it didn’t matter, but it bothered him that he couldn’t keep track when he was on the sixth layer. He needed to do something about that. Perhaps there was some sort of spell to keep track of subject linear time, even when they were in a reality where time didn’t exist.
“Nym, is there a problem?” Baracia asked. “You’ve gone quiet on me.”
“Oh, sorry. I was just wondering how long we’ve been having tea. It’s taking me a bit to wrap my head around the idea of unlimited time.”
“I understand. All of this takes some adjusting. No matter how well you prepare, a mortal can’t really understand a timeless existence. We’ve tried explaining it to them. It doesn’t work. It’s something you have to experience for yourself. As to your question though, subjectively speaking, it’s been fifty-six days.”
“What? No, that… that’s not right.”
“I can assure you it is.”
If that was the case… how had they talked for that long? And if he’d spent close to two months just casually chatting, how long had he really been trapped in Niramyn’s study?
