In many ways, it would have been kinder to let Analia proceed with her suicidal combat plan. The amount of pain breaking the multiple geases her father had laid on her was going to inflict was indescribable, and as much as he wanted to shield her from it, not even Nym had that kind of power. It was going to hurt, both physically and mentally.
Before they got to that, Nym needed to mold his copy to take her place. He took her back to one of his sanctums and opened a scrying window for her to see through. Together, they watched the copy, linked to Nym and Nym linked to Analia, take point on an assault against some sort of fortified manor a hundred miles outside the city.
There was a whole contingent of aerial mages leading the first strike, every one of them specialized in causing destruction. Under the fake Analia’s direction, they rained fire and ice from the sky. Men and women swarmed out of the manor and returned fire, filling the air with brilliant flashes of light, hurricane-strength winds, and shimmering lances of solid ice. Earthen shields rose from the grounds as whole groups of mages worked in concert to pull them up in seconds.
Analia’s job was to break defenses and kill important enemy targets. She’d specialized in that over the last few years, and her repertoire was full of spells that focused on pin-point accuracy and bypassing or outright ignoring defenses. When that wasn’t possible, she had a full set of ward-countering spells, including one particularly nasty piece of work that was designed to overload the targeted ward with arcana and cause it to explode.
“This spell would work better if you could cast it from a distance,” Nym said when Analia’s copy used it to bust apart a thermal ward that was preventing the fire from spreading across the manor’s roof. The copy had broken it apart, but the backlash caught her in the explosion, forcing her to drain her own strength defending from the explosion she’d set off.
“We couldn’t ever figure out how to do it from more than ten feet away. The farther the magic has to travel, the weaker it gets. How is it that no one is noticing that’s not me? Some of those spells you’ve used aren’t even spells I know.”
“I’m sure several of them have taken note, but the copy is channeling a spell that deflects attention away from her. Look there. See how that one mage is sniping at anyone flying? He hasn’t even tried to take a shot at your copy.”
“Oh, yeah.” Analia peered into the scrying illusion he was projecting for her. “She should look more tired. That much magic would wipe me out, not even counting the stuff you’re doing to keep anyone from looking too closely at me.”
“It won’t be an issue. Your copy is actually casting five or six spells no one can see for each flashy explosion or ice spear anyway. A lot of enemy mages have found spells going wide at the last second. By my count, at least fourteen people on your team are only alive because of ‘your’ interference, and that’s not even considering how many enemy mages ‘you’ve’ killed.”
Analia didn’t even bat an eye at the death toll. Once, it would have been a monumental decision she wrestled with, trying to find another way. Now, she accepted it, maybe even reveled in it. Killing wasn’t a last resort for her; it was a preferred solution. Nym expected that mindset to cause her a lot of grief over the next day. He’d held off on breaking her mind until the battle was over so that she could witness what happened.
With her copy taking point, the casualties to her side were non-existent, but the enemy mages were completely decimated. Within a few minutes, they’d been routed and abandoned their defense of the manor. Many of them flew off into the wilderness, and groups of three mages peeled off to chase them down.
“That seems like a bad strategy,” Nym remarked. “You’re losing three units for every one of theirs.”
“It’s not about battle tactics. Every one of them is a slaver. We don’t want them surviving to regroup later and start up again in a new location. This is the fourth time we’ve crushed this cartel, and every time they break apart and the majority of them survive.”
“Hmm.”
Nym teleported the fleeing mages one at a time, always sending them backwards until the arms of their pursuers. After the initial surprise, Analia’s team captured or executed the fleeing mages there, then returned to the battle. She gave him a questioning glance.
“What?” he asked.
“How will they explain that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not that worried about it. My only concern here is you, and the fact that you’re practically vibrating in place. You want to be out there, fighting for your life and dying for a worthy cause.”
She didn’t answer.
“I think that’s enough of this,” Nym said. “Your friends are safe. The battle is won. I’ve even disabled the teleportation platform the cartel was trying to use to evacuate. Your copy will make sure nothing goes wrong. It’s time to focus on healing you.”
“How bad will it be?” she asked, fear in her voice.
“Bad, but I won’t let you die. You’re going to need time to recover, days at least, probably weeks. And then you’ll have a lot of mental scars that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. Things are never going to be like they were before.”
“I know. I’m scared, but… I trust you.”
Nym pulled her into a hug and said, “It’s okay to be scared. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it before it got this bad.”
“It’s not your fault, it’s… I couldn’t believe he would do that to me, at first. Who would do something like this to a stranger, let alone to their own child?”
“When you’re better, you can decide what you want to do about that. There’s no hurry. Now, come on, let’s get you comfortable, and then I’m going to put you to sleep. When you wake back up, the hard part will be over.”
A bed appeared for Analia. Once she was lying down and comfortable, Nym dismissed the scrying illusion and cast a spell to put her to sleep. Her eyes closed immediately, and Nym got to work. The bed disappeared, leaving her on a cushion of air that took up just enough space to hold her and also served to keep her from moving around. Hopefully the illusion of normalcy gave her some comfort in her last few moments of consciousness.
There were three geases tied to Analia, all tangled around each other. The first was simple enough. It demanded that she stay as close to Nym as possible, and that when she wasn’t near him, she attempted to correct that. It had driven her practically insane, and she’d fought that compulsion by developing violent habits that drove her to exhaustion, then forced her to start moving again as soon as she could.
The second geas was tied closely to the first, and it called for her to tell her father everything she learned about Nym. This one was subtler, and in some ways easier to resist. It didn’t force her to seek Jaspar Feldstal out, but she did need to make some attempt to communicate with him. She’d been sending regular letters every month saying that Nym was gone once he’d disappeared as a way to deal with the compulsion. The geas didn’t exactly punish her for not having new information, but it was a burr in her brain, a constant agitating force that twinged every time she sent another letter saying the same thing. It must have been a maddening distraction.
The third geas was both the easiest and the hardest to deal with. It was a simple command not to tell anyone that she was under a geas, to actively hide and protect that secret. As long as no one suspected anything, the geas didn’t do anything but compel her not to tell anyone. That was easy enough to comply with, but also a sort of soft torture, being trapped inside her own head and not able to ask for help when she’d desperately wanted to.
Even if Nym had figured it out years ago, he didn’t think she would have been able to tell him the truth. Only someone who knew about the geas was allowed to talk to her about it, which Lord Feldstal had no doubt meant to be only himself. Nym could have confronted her with suspicions, and she would have been forced to deny them. By coming to her not as her friend, but as an ascendant, a being of god-like proportions, and telling her that he knew, not guessed, but knew, she’d accepted it.
The first two geases were wound tightly around each other, each reinforcing the other and strangling her free will. The final geas wrapped it all up into a neat little package that protected itself. He would need to break that one first, but before he did, her soul well needed to be shielded against the backlash. Snapping the connection would flood her with all the arcana it had leached out of her and leave her vulnerable to more damage as the other two geases continued to function.
Analia had never reached the third layer and started the process of converting her body into a soul well. Coincidentally, that helped protect against arcana poisoning, up to a point, and it would have helped here too. He couldn’t do it for her, or rather wouldn’t. Instead, he opened up a conduit between the two of them and built an artificial partition around where the three geases connected. Any backlash would pass through her and into him, where he would deal with the damage.
Then would come the hard part: holding Analia together through the physical pain that would come with reversing the damage the geases had done to her brain. If there was any point where she might die just from the shock, it was there. Ironically, the other two geases would help at this point, but there would be scars. When he removed the final geas, things would be at their worst.
And then they’d find out how much was left of Analia beneath the layer of compulsions that had taken over her life, and how much could be rebuilt. Nym was confident he could heal the physical damage the geases had done to her mind, but the rest would take time and effort and care.
He’d spent a great deal of time thinking about this procedure, how best to perform it with a focus on her survival and limiting the damage to her mind. He could fix her brain, could even fix any damage to the soul well with a bit of time. It was her way of thinking, her personality, that he wasn’t sure about.
She would live through the breaking of the geases. Whether she would still be Analia was still in question. There were going to be changes, and all he could do was give her the time and care she needed to reconcile those. Hopefully that would be enough.
Heart heavy with worry, Nym started the delicate process of detaching the first geas from her soul well and unraveling it from around her mind. It had put down deep roots, but one at a time, he gently pried it loose. His patient whimpered in her sleep and tried to thrash, but the cocoon of air held her still and safe. His magic rejuvenated her body even as it worked on her mind.
And slowly, one painful spot at a time, he broke her free from the spells tormenting her.
In many ways, it would have been kinder to let Analia proceed with her suicidal combat plan. The amount of pain breaking the multiple geases her father had laid on her was going to inflict was indescribable, and as much as he wanted to shield her from it, not even Nym had that kind of power. It was going to hurt, both physically and mentally.
Before they got to that, Nym needed to mold his copy to take her place. He took her back to one of his sanctums and opened a scrying window for her to see through. Together, they watched the copy, linked to Nym and Nym linked to Analia, take point on an assault against some sort of fortified manor a hundred miles outside the city.
There was a whole contingent of aerial mages leading the first strike, every one of them specialized in causing destruction. Under the fake Analia’s direction, they rained fire and ice from the sky. Men and women swarmed out of the manor and returned fire, filling the air with brilliant flashes of light, hurricane-strength winds, and shimmering lances of solid ice. Earthen shields rose from the grounds as whole groups of mages worked in concert to pull them up in seconds.
Analia’s job was to break defenses and kill important enemy targets. She’d specialized in that over the last few years, and her repertoire was full of spells that focused on pin-point accuracy and bypassing or outright ignoring defenses. When that wasn’t possible, she had a full set of ward-countering spells, including one particularly nasty piece of work that was designed to overload the targeted ward with arcana and cause it to explode.
“This spell would work better if you could cast it from a distance,” Nym said when Analia’s copy used it to bust apart a thermal ward that was preventing the fire from spreading across the manor’s roof. The copy had broken it apart, but the backlash caught her in the explosion, forcing her to drain her own strength defending from the explosion she’d set off.
“We couldn’t ever figure out how to do it from more than ten feet away. The farther the magic has to travel, the weaker it gets. How is it that no one is noticing that’s not me? Some of those spells you’ve used aren’t even spells I know.”
“I’m sure several of them have taken note, but the copy is channeling a spell that deflects attention away from her. Look there. See how that one mage is sniping at anyone flying? He hasn’t even tried to take a shot at your copy.”
“Oh, yeah.” Analia peered into the scrying illusion he was projecting for her. “She should look more tired. That much magic would wipe me out, not even counting the stuff you’re doing to keep anyone from looking too closely at me.”
“It won’t be an issue. Your copy is actually casting five or six spells no one can see for each flashy explosion or ice spear anyway. A lot of enemy mages have found spells going wide at the last second. By my count, at least fourteen people on your team are only alive because of ‘your’ interference, and that’s not even considering how many enemy mages ‘you’ve’ killed.”
Analia didn’t even bat an eye at the death toll. Once, it would have been a monumental decision she wrestled with, trying to find another way. Now, she accepted it, maybe even reveled in it. Killing wasn’t a last resort for her; it was a preferred solution. Nym expected that mindset to cause her a lot of grief over the next day. He’d held off on breaking her mind until the battle was over so that she could witness what happened.
With her copy taking point, the casualties to her side were non-existent, but the enemy mages were completely decimated. Within a few minutes, they’d been routed and abandoned their defense of the manor. Many of them flew off into the wilderness, and groups of three mages peeled off to chase them down.
“That seems like a bad strategy,” Nym remarked. “You’re losing three units for every one of theirs.”
“It’s not about battle tactics. Every one of them is a slaver. We don’t want them surviving to regroup later and start up again in a new location. This is the fourth time we’ve crushed this cartel, and every time they break apart and the majority of them survive.”
“Hmm.”
Nym teleported the fleeing mages one at a time, always sending them backwards until the arms of their pursuers. After the initial surprise, Analia’s team captured or executed the fleeing mages there, then returned to the battle. She gave him a questioning glance.
“What?” he asked.
“How will they explain that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not that worried about it. My only concern here is you, and the fact that you’re practically vibrating in place. You want to be out there, fighting for your life and dying for a worthy cause.”
She didn’t answer.
“I think that’s enough of this,” Nym said. “Your friends are safe. The battle is won. I’ve even disabled the teleportation platform the cartel was trying to use to evacuate. Your copy will make sure nothing goes wrong. It’s time to focus on healing you.”
“How bad will it be?” she asked, fear in her voice.
“Bad, but I won’t let you die. You’re going to need time to recover, days at least, probably weeks. And then you’ll have a lot of mental scars that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. Things are never going to be like they were before.”
“I know. I’m scared, but… I trust you.”
Nym pulled her into a hug and said, “It’s okay to be scared. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry I didn’t see it before it got this bad.”
“It’s not your fault, it’s… I couldn’t believe he would do that to me, at first. Who would do something like this to a stranger, let alone to their own child?”
“When you’re better, you can decide what you want to do about that. There’s no hurry. Now, come on, let’s get you comfortable, and then I’m going to put you to sleep. When you wake back up, the hard part will be over.”
A bed appeared for Analia. Once she was lying down and comfortable, Nym dismissed the scrying illusion and cast a spell to put her to sleep. Her eyes closed immediately, and Nym got to work. The bed disappeared, leaving her on a cushion of air that took up just enough space to hold her and also served to keep her from moving around. Hopefully the illusion of normalcy gave her some comfort in her last few moments of consciousness.
There were three geases tied to Analia, all tangled around each other. The first was simple enough. It demanded that she stay as close to Nym as possible, and that when she wasn’t near him, she attempted to correct that. It had driven her practically insane, and she’d fought that compulsion by developing violent habits that drove her to exhaustion, then forced her to start moving again as soon as she could.
The second geas was tied closely to the first, and it called for her to tell her father everything she learned about Nym. This one was subtler, and in some ways easier to resist. It didn’t force her to seek Jaspar Feldstal out, but she did need to make some attempt to communicate with him. She’d been sending regular letters every month saying that Nym was gone once he’d disappeared as a way to deal with the compulsion. The geas didn’t exactly punish her for not having new information, but it was a burr in her brain, a constant agitating force that twinged every time she sent another letter saying the same thing. It must have been a maddening distraction.
The third geas was both the easiest and the hardest to deal with. It was a simple command not to tell anyone that she was under a geas, to actively hide and protect that secret. As long as no one suspected anything, the geas didn’t do anything but compel her not to tell anyone. That was easy enough to comply with, but also a sort of soft torture, being trapped inside her own head and not able to ask for help when she’d desperately wanted to.
Even if Nym had figured it out years ago, he didn’t think she would have been able to tell him the truth. Only someone who knew about the geas was allowed to talk to her about it, which Lord Feldstal had no doubt meant to be only himself. Nym could have confronted her with suspicions, and she would have been forced to deny them. By coming to her not as her friend, but as an ascendant, a being of god-like proportions, and telling her that he knew, not guessed, but knew, she’d accepted it.
The first two geases were wound tightly around each other, each reinforcing the other and strangling her free will. The final geas wrapped it all up into a neat little package that protected itself. He would need to break that one first, but before he did, her soul well needed to be shielded against the backlash. Snapping the connection would flood her with all the arcana it had leached out of her and leave her vulnerable to more damage as the other two geases continued to function.
Analia had never reached the third layer and started the process of converting her body into a soul well. Coincidentally, that helped protect against arcana poisoning, up to a point, and it would have helped here too. He couldn’t do it for her, or rather wouldn’t. Instead, he opened up a conduit between the two of them and built an artificial partition around where the three geases connected. Any backlash would pass through her and into him, where he would deal with the damage.
Then would come the hard part: holding Analia together through the physical pain that would come with reversing the damage the geases had done to her brain. If there was any point where she might die just from the shock, it was there. Ironically, the other two geases would help at this point, but there would be scars. When he removed the final geas, things would be at their worst.
And then they’d find out how much was left of Analia beneath the layer of compulsions that had taken over her life, and how much could be rebuilt. Nym was confident he could heal the physical damage the geases had done to her mind, but the rest would take time and effort and care.
He’d spent a great deal of time thinking about this procedure, how best to perform it with a focus on her survival and limiting the damage to her mind. He could fix her brain, could even fix any damage to the soul well with a bit of time. It was her way of thinking, her personality, that he wasn’t sure about.
She would live through the breaking of the geases. Whether she would still be Analia was still in question. There were going to be changes, and all he could do was give her the time and care she needed to reconcile those. Hopefully that would be enough.
Heart heavy with worry, Nym started the delicate process of detaching the first geas from her soul well and unraveling it from around her mind. It had put down deep roots, but one at a time, he gently pried it loose. His patient whimpered in her sleep and tried to thrash, but the cocoon of air held her still and safe. His magic rejuvenated her body even as it worked on her mind.
And slowly, one painful spot at a time, he broke her free from the spells tormenting her.
