The Abilanth of a hundred years ago looked a lot like the version Nym was familiar with. There were some superficial changes, sure, but the street layout was the same, and the walls limited the sprawling growth a city like Thrakus would undergo. The Academy still sat right where it always did, though the mages’ guildhall was in a different location. The spot Nym remembered it being was currently occupied by a runescribing business. It was the same building, so he assumed at some point in time, ownership would change hands.
That had practically nothing to do with why he was in 1115’s version of Abilanth, so other than noting the change and that he was unlikely to find Analia’s great great grandfather there, Nym ignored it. He floated above the city and studied it intently through his scrying spell, starting with the Feldstal manor. There were plenty of people there, and the interior looked far, far different than the future version he’d visited, but unfortunately, the man he was looking for wasn’t home.
The hidden lab in their library was there, but it didn’t look like anyone had used it in years. It was possible the current generation didn’t even know about it. There were a lot of books in there he didn’t recognize, five or six times as many as had existed when Nym had found it. He sent a copy of himself down to investigate what those other books were while he continued looking for the current Lord Feldstal.
Even after ascending, it turned out that finding someone was difficult. Limited as he was to the use of mortal magic with only a few sixth layer spells to his name, Nym didn’t expect to find Lord Feldstal quickly. If he’d been at home, maybe it would have been a different story, but that wasn’t the case. He’d just have to wait for the man to return home and visit his library so that Nym could reveal the secret lab to him. If Hozim was correct in his predictions, that would be all it took to renew the interest in the Collective’s mission. The mortals would take that discovery and run with it.
Finding the right moment to reveal the lab to Lord Feldstal was the trick of the job. It needed to be a time when he was alone in the library, and a nobleman was rarely ever alone at any time. Nym supposed a bodyguard or two wouldn’t necessarily be an issue, though he would prefer to not be responsible for any extreme measures being taken to ensure the proper secrecy Lord Feldstal would demand.
The actual Collective as he knew it itself wouldn’t come into existence for another two generations, but by tipping off this Lord Feldstal to the existence of the lab and all of the workings his own ancestors had left behind, Nym was laying the groundwork for him to carry on that research, to recruit others, and to secure funding.
The books hidden inside that lab were a pale shadow of the knowledge the Collective would have one day, but they laid the groundwork for what was to come. Nym’s copy made a few annotations, crossing out certain branches that led the wrong way, and completely removed no less than four books that focused on necromantic workings designed to empower enslaved spirits chained to their own moldering corpses as a sort of proto-wight.
That knowledge would exist elsewhere someday too, but it wouldn’t be in the hands of the Collective. He destroyed the books and teleported the ashes fifty miles straight up, where they were scattered beyond recovery. Then, once he’d tweaked the knowledge contained in the Feldstal labs, Nym started skimming forward in time. Lord Feldstal returned to his manor that evening, but never entered the library.
He went through his daily routine while Nym watched, waiting for his chance. Finally, after moving forward three weeks, Lord Feldstal visited his library one evening. He had a single guard with him, but the man stayed a respectful distance away, near the doors, and left Lord Feldstal to his reading.
The positioning wasn’t ideal, with the nobleman about a hundred feet away from the entrance to the lab, but Nym thought he could get Lord Feldstal’s attention. The hidden door in this time period was actually on mechanical hinges, and Nym figured that inducing a few failures in the mechanism would cause the door portion of it to fall forward. That ought to make a loud thump, and if it didn’t, Nym would simulate it.
His magic threaded its way through the room and rent steel, causing a loud squealing sound to fill the air. Lord Feldstal looked up immediately, but didn’t seem to know where the noise was coming from. So Nym broke another one. Now the nobleman was on his feet and approaching the bookshelf, though he still hadn’t figured out exactly what he was hearing.
It looked like the shelf was balanced well enough on its own that even without the mechanism to move it in place, it would still hold up. That ran counter to Nym’s goals, so he used greater telekinesis to shift it slightly, just enough that it would be obvious there was something behind it. He made sure to grab the shelf from the top so that it would groan under its own weight when he moved it.
“What in God’s name is that?” Lord Feldstal muttered to himself. He cast a quick glance around the library, then moved closer to examine the shelf.
Nym waited to make sure Feldstal was going to actually open it up and look around inside before he stepped out of reality prime and back to where Hozim waited for him. “All set?” he asked the other ascendant.
“Looks like it. Everything is happening as it should now. Incidentally, did you know they never fixed the hinges you broke?”
“Yeah, I remember moving the shelf the hard way when I found it in my time.”
“It looks like that doesn’t change either. Well then, congratulations on your first successful favor! I have plenty of other projects in times I’ve already been, if you’re interested in learning some new tricks. Perhaps you’d like to learn how to reverse the age on your mortal form? That one is all but mandatory for any ascendant who’s going to spend time in the core reality. The years pile up quicker than you could imagine.”
“That would be useful,” Nym said, though he thought he could figure that one out himself. The fragmented knowledge floating in his head had actually touched on the reversal of aging, though it mostly went over some of the dangers of improperly performing the spell. It wasn’t a simple time reversal, but a delicate procedure designed to restore the body to youth while at the same time preserving all of the enhancements and modifications the ascendant had performed on himself.
Still, if it was a choice between having an experienced ascendant guide him through the process or hacking something together through trial and error, that wasn’t a hard decision to make. While he was at it, he also wanted to learn how to scry across layers. It would be nice to be able to pinpoint exactly what he was looking for before dropping into reality prime.
The two continued to hash out deals as Nym worked on generating new anchors and spreading them out. At this point, he just needed to invest arcana and effort into it, something he could easily do while he spoke with Hozim. They were placed at the older ascendant’s instruction so that Nym could get access to time periods Hozim wanted work done in, but he showed Nym how to move them around later if he needed to.
Their talk was interspersed with a few other jobs at different time points, sometimes simple things like spooking superstitious people into taking the left path instead of the right to keep them from meeting a grisly end, other times requiring Nym to actually spend days or even weeks helping someone, or setting up an area with precious resources that might not be discovered for years or even decades.
Once, he even went into what he considered the future, only about fifty years or so. That was by far the most bizarre job he undertook, and he had to firmly resist the urge to peek on his friends, just to see what they looked like when they were all old. If he’d found out any of them had died, he was sure he’d end up devoting time and energy to finding out how and preventing it. It was better to let things play out naturally than to have an ascendant interfering in their lives.
That was a sad realization for him, knowing that he might briefly visit them occasionally, if he ever cleared up his issues with other ascendants trying to find him, but that he wouldn’t be part of their lives again. He simply couldn’t afford to waste the years directly around his ascension on socializing, not when it was so hotly contested by the factions being championed by Niramyn and Myzalik.
While Nym worked at making new anchors, Hozim explained the exact mechanics of the age reversal spell and guided him through shaping it. It was more or less what Nym had expected, but it was nice to have a few potential flaws pointed out without having to discover them the hard way. By the time they were done with their meeting, Nym had spent a year of his time in reality prime. Those weeks were scattered quite liberally around a span of about three centuries, a range which was only going to keep expanding.
“I think that’s about everything for now,” Hozim said. “This has been a very profitable arrangement for me, and I hope you feel the same.”
“I do,” Nym said, which was mostly true. He probably could have figured out everything Hozim had shown him on his own without spending a year of time, but it had been nice to have the company and the instruction.
“Then I’ll leave you to practice, for now, but if you’d like to learn a few new spells, I’ll show you where to find me.”
Hozim launched into a lengthy explanation about navigating the sixth layer’s hub, which was achieved through a few artificial reference points the ascendants had set up that marked common meeting locations, and also through personal invitations to individual abodes. “Here, let me give you the waypoint for my own home,” the ascendant said, after explaining how to set up the personal reference points. “This is similar in a way to knocking on a door. It lets me know that you’re trying to visit me.”
Then the strangely-dressed ascendant disappeared. Nym took a moment to orient himself and teleported back to his own sanctuary. After visiting Baracia’s again, he had a few ideas for how he wanted to update it, and his magical defenses could use some work. Right now, the only thing that was keeping it safe was the persistent hidden presence spell he’d tied to it. Anybody who stumbled across it accidentally would be able to breach the defenses with ease.
Additionally, if Nym was going to be hosting other ascendants eventually, he felt an upgrade in décor was in order. Baracia’s home, as outrageously expensive and flamboyant as it was, wasn’t an outlier. Even the common areas that ascendants shared were some sort of opulent dream that the richest kings and queens back in the core reality could scarcely imagine.
Humming to himself as he worked, Nym started redecorating. Rooms got shuffled around, new ones added, and sizes altered. He borrowed some design philosophies from other areas he’d seen, and though it was nowhere as outrageous, his sanctuary was much more refined by the time he was done.
“Maybe I’ll get the hang of this ascendant thing after all,” he said, hands on his hips while he surveyed his work. If these were the people he was going to be spending eternity with, it would help to learn their culture.
The Abilanth of a hundred years ago looked a lot like the version Nym was familiar with. There were some superficial changes, sure, but the street layout was the same, and the walls limited the sprawling growth a city like Thrakus would undergo. The Academy still sat right where it always did, though the mages’ guildhall was in a different location. The spot Nym remembered it being was currently occupied by a runescribing business. It was the same building, so he assumed at some point in time, ownership would change hands.
That had practically nothing to do with why he was in 1115’s version of Abilanth, so other than noting the change and that he was unlikely to find Analia’s great great grandfather there, Nym ignored it. He floated above the city and studied it intently through his scrying spell, starting with the Feldstal manor. There were plenty of people there, and the interior looked far, far different than the future version he’d visited, but unfortunately, the man he was looking for wasn’t home.
The hidden lab in their library was there, but it didn’t look like anyone had used it in years. It was possible the current generation didn’t even know about it. There were a lot of books in there he didn’t recognize, five or six times as many as had existed when Nym had found it. He sent a copy of himself down to investigate what those other books were while he continued looking for the current Lord Feldstal.
Even after ascending, it turned out that finding someone was difficult. Limited as he was to the use of mortal magic with only a few sixth layer spells to his name, Nym didn’t expect to find Lord Feldstal quickly. If he’d been at home, maybe it would have been a different story, but that wasn’t the case. He’d just have to wait for the man to return home and visit his library so that Nym could reveal the secret lab to him. If Hozim was correct in his predictions, that would be all it took to renew the interest in the Collective’s mission. The mortals would take that discovery and run with it.
Finding the right moment to reveal the lab to Lord Feldstal was the trick of the job. It needed to be a time when he was alone in the library, and a nobleman was rarely ever alone at any time. Nym supposed a bodyguard or two wouldn’t necessarily be an issue, though he would prefer to not be responsible for any extreme measures being taken to ensure the proper secrecy Lord Feldstal would demand.
The actual Collective as he knew it itself wouldn’t come into existence for another two generations, but by tipping off this Lord Feldstal to the existence of the lab and all of the workings his own ancestors had left behind, Nym was laying the groundwork for him to carry on that research, to recruit others, and to secure funding.
The books hidden inside that lab were a pale shadow of the knowledge the Collective would have one day, but they laid the groundwork for what was to come. Nym’s copy made a few annotations, crossing out certain branches that led the wrong way, and completely removed no less than four books that focused on necromantic workings designed to empower enslaved spirits chained to their own moldering corpses as a sort of proto-wight.
That knowledge would exist elsewhere someday too, but it wouldn’t be in the hands of the Collective. He destroyed the books and teleported the ashes fifty miles straight up, where they were scattered beyond recovery. Then, once he’d tweaked the knowledge contained in the Feldstal labs, Nym started skimming forward in time. Lord Feldstal returned to his manor that evening, but never entered the library.
He went through his daily routine while Nym watched, waiting for his chance. Finally, after moving forward three weeks, Lord Feldstal visited his library one evening. He had a single guard with him, but the man stayed a respectful distance away, near the doors, and left Lord Feldstal to his reading.
The positioning wasn’t ideal, with the nobleman about a hundred feet away from the entrance to the lab, but Nym thought he could get Lord Feldstal’s attention. The hidden door in this time period was actually on mechanical hinges, and Nym figured that inducing a few failures in the mechanism would cause the door portion of it to fall forward. That ought to make a loud thump, and if it didn’t, Nym would simulate it.
His magic threaded its way through the room and rent steel, causing a loud squealing sound to fill the air. Lord Feldstal looked up immediately, but didn’t seem to know where the noise was coming from. So Nym broke another one. Now the nobleman was on his feet and approaching the bookshelf, though he still hadn’t figured out exactly what he was hearing.
It looked like the shelf was balanced well enough on its own that even without the mechanism to move it in place, it would still hold up. That ran counter to Nym’s goals, so he used greater telekinesis to shift it slightly, just enough that it would be obvious there was something behind it. He made sure to grab the shelf from the top so that it would groan under its own weight when he moved it.
“What in God’s name is that?” Lord Feldstal muttered to himself. He cast a quick glance around the library, then moved closer to examine the shelf.
Nym waited to make sure Feldstal was going to actually open it up and look around inside before he stepped out of reality prime and back to where Hozim waited for him. “All set?” he asked the other ascendant.
“Looks like it. Everything is happening as it should now. Incidentally, did you know they never fixed the hinges you broke?”
“Yeah, I remember moving the shelf the hard way when I found it in my time.”
“It looks like that doesn’t change either. Well then, congratulations on your first successful favor! I have plenty of other projects in times I’ve already been, if you’re interested in learning some new tricks. Perhaps you’d like to learn how to reverse the age on your mortal form? That one is all but mandatory for any ascendant who’s going to spend time in the core reality. The years pile up quicker than you could imagine.”
“That would be useful,” Nym said, though he thought he could figure that one out himself. The fragmented knowledge floating in his head had actually touched on the reversal of aging, though it mostly went over some of the dangers of improperly performing the spell. It wasn’t a simple time reversal, but a delicate procedure designed to restore the body to youth while at the same time preserving all of the enhancements and modifications the ascendant had performed on himself.
Still, if it was a choice between having an experienced ascendant guide him through the process or hacking something together through trial and error, that wasn’t a hard decision to make. While he was at it, he also wanted to learn how to scry across layers. It would be nice to be able to pinpoint exactly what he was looking for before dropping into reality prime.
The two continued to hash out deals as Nym worked on generating new anchors and spreading them out. At this point, he just needed to invest arcana and effort into it, something he could easily do while he spoke with Hozim. They were placed at the older ascendant’s instruction so that Nym could get access to time periods Hozim wanted work done in, but he showed Nym how to move them around later if he needed to.
Their talk was interspersed with a few other jobs at different time points, sometimes simple things like spooking superstitious people into taking the left path instead of the right to keep them from meeting a grisly end, other times requiring Nym to actually spend days or even weeks helping someone, or setting up an area with precious resources that might not be discovered for years or even decades.
Once, he even went into what he considered the future, only about fifty years or so. That was by far the most bizarre job he undertook, and he had to firmly resist the urge to peek on his friends, just to see what they looked like when they were all old. If he’d found out any of them had died, he was sure he’d end up devoting time and energy to finding out how and preventing it. It was better to let things play out naturally than to have an ascendant interfering in their lives.
That was a sad realization for him, knowing that he might briefly visit them occasionally, if he ever cleared up his issues with other ascendants trying to find him, but that he wouldn’t be part of their lives again. He simply couldn’t afford to waste the years directly around his ascension on socializing, not when it was so hotly contested by the factions being championed by Niramyn and Myzalik.
While Nym worked at making new anchors, Hozim explained the exact mechanics of the age reversal spell and guided him through shaping it. It was more or less what Nym had expected, but it was nice to have a few potential flaws pointed out without having to discover them the hard way. By the time they were done with their meeting, Nym had spent a year of his time in reality prime. Those weeks were scattered quite liberally around a span of about three centuries, a range which was only going to keep expanding.
“I think that’s about everything for now,” Hozim said. “This has been a very profitable arrangement for me, and I hope you feel the same.”
“I do,” Nym said, which was mostly true. He probably could have figured out everything Hozim had shown him on his own without spending a year of time, but it had been nice to have the company and the instruction.
“Then I’ll leave you to practice, for now, but if you’d like to learn a few new spells, I’ll show you where to find me.”
Hozim launched into a lengthy explanation about navigating the sixth layer’s hub, which was achieved through a few artificial reference points the ascendants had set up that marked common meeting locations, and also through personal invitations to individual abodes. “Here, let me give you the waypoint for my own home,” the ascendant said, after explaining how to set up the personal reference points. “This is similar in a way to knocking on a door. It lets me know that you’re trying to visit me.”
Then the strangely-dressed ascendant disappeared. Nym took a moment to orient himself and teleported back to his own sanctuary. After visiting Baracia’s again, he had a few ideas for how he wanted to update it, and his magical defenses could use some work. Right now, the only thing that was keeping it safe was the persistent hidden presence spell he’d tied to it. Anybody who stumbled across it accidentally would be able to breach the defenses with ease.
Additionally, if Nym was going to be hosting other ascendants eventually, he felt an upgrade in décor was in order. Baracia’s home, as outrageously expensive and flamboyant as it was, wasn’t an outlier. Even the common areas that ascendants shared were some sort of opulent dream that the richest kings and queens back in the core reality could scarcely imagine.
Humming to himself as he worked, Nym started redecorating. Rooms got shuffled around, new ones added, and sizes altered. He borrowed some design philosophies from other areas he’d seen, and though it was nowhere as outrageous, his sanctuary was much more refined by the time he was done.
“Maybe I’ll get the hang of this ascendant thing after all,” he said, hands on his hips while he surveyed his work. If these were the people he was going to be spending eternity with, it would help to learn their culture.
