“I don’t understand,” Nym said.
“You don’t need to understand to do it.”
“But-”
“Are you willing or not?”
“I mean, sure, it’s not a big deal. I just don’t get why.”
Rizin just stared at Nym, his lips pursed and reminding him disturbingly of Risa’s. Nym wanted to say something, but that would be an open invitation for the fox to double down on teasing him. It definitely wasn’t a coincidence that his appearance was so close to that of a person he’d had some form of intimacy with, however slight it had ended up being.
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll do it. Now spill. How does the age reversal spell work?”
“To start, I want to say that my knowledge is theoretical. I don’t need this spell, since I don’t age. If you tried to reverse my age by a thousand years, I’d just look exactly like I do now. Of course, I can’t jump around the timeline like ascendants can, so… trade-offs.”
“You can’t?” Nym asked, surprised. He’d just assumed anything he could do, Rizin could do too. Probably better, actually.
“No. My existence is tied very firmly to this body. I can act in different layers, but I can’t pull myself completely out of this one.” Rizin gave him a flat look. “This is not information to be shared, of course.
“Ascendants can dip out of the timeline in the inner layers by shifting themselves completely to the sixth layer, or farther. It doesn’t make a lot of difference exactly which outer layer you end up on, just that it puts you outside of time here.”
“What does this have to do with age reversal?” Nym asked.
“With the spell itself? Not much. I’m just explaining to you why it works on ascendants but not on other beings. You can fully withdraw from the inner layers. I’ll assume at this point that you know about alternate timelines.”
“Yeah. When changes are made to the primary, it can cause the timeline to fork until the change can be reconciled. If enough changes happen in a short period, or a single huge change occurs, it can cause the timeline to deviate completely into an alternate line. It’s like a sort of sideways reality. I have not experienced them myself; I was told it would take me a few more layers before I got to that point.”
“Exactly, yes. But just because you, Nym the ascendant sitting here eating lunch with me, can’t go to the alternate timelines doesn’t mean you can’t interact with it. And that’s what the age reversal spell does.”
“It… sends me to an alternate timeline? That doesn’t seem right.”
“No.” Rizin rolled his eyes. “It takes a version of you from an alternate timeline, a version that’s younger, and uses it as a model to rebuild your avatar in this timeline. If your mortal avatar were to die, you would need to do something similar to rebuild it, unless you no longer wanted to be Nym. You could build a new body completely from nothing instead of using an alternate version of you as your baseline.”
“But what if that alternate version of you is wrong in some way? I wouldn’t want a copy of myself that was missing all the changes I made to my body.”
“Exactly! That’s why it reaches through multiple timelines and sort of compiles matching traits to what you’ve got going for you now, and just put it all into a younger body. It’s extremely delicate. You want a safe place and an abundant amount of free time before you use this spell.”
“I used it once to turn back my age by a few years when I was learning how to do it,” Nym said with a frown. “It didn’t take that long.”
“You’re a new ascendant. You said yourself it’s barely been a decade to you personally, and I imagine most of that time was spent in the outer layers. There hasn’t been a lot to diverge, and you weren’t going back very far. The spell probably had lots of samples to choose from, with very little need to take pieces from different possibilities and merge them into one.
“Now imagine you’re a thousand years old, into the tenth or eleventh layer, with so many enhancements and alterations to your physical form that it would take years to rebuild them all. And it’s all balanced just right. How long do you think it would take the spell to find everything exactly the way you have it right now? How long would it take for it to put that all together into something that looks like you, only with less wrinkles and a fuller head of hair?”
Rizin had a point. Even now, Nym had tinkered with his physiology and his soul well enough that he would have a month or more of work to repeat all the spellwork if he focused every moment on nothing else. The more things he changed, the harder it would become to find an alternate timeline version of himself that matches those changes. Once the spell had to tap into multiple sources and merge them together to get what he was looking for, it would get cumbersome.
“And we can’t just take our own version of ourselves from the past because then we lose all the progress we’ve made. We could redo them, possibly faster, but why remake it when we can steal it from realities that never existed instead?”
“There you go. So, that’s the theory behind age reversal magic. You can’t cast the spell on anyone besides yourself, and mortals can’t cast it at all. Besides lacking access to sixth layer arcana, they would kill themselves in the process. Only an immortal can use this magic, and even then, only one like an ascendant who can survive wholly without a body in the inner layers.”
“I see. I have questions about some specifics,” Nym said.
Rizin groaned. “You are really asking the wrong person.”
“It’s fine if you can’t answer them, but if you can, I want to know.”
“Fine, but then you go run that errand for me.”
“Okay, so there’s a part of the spell that looks like this, but what if…”
* * *
Eventually, Nym had picked Rizin’s brain of everything relevant he could get. Or maybe Rizin had just gotten sick of the questions. Either way, the conversation had ended, the meal was over, they’d released the spells preventing anyone from overhearing what they were saying or really even remembering that they were there, and they’d gone their separate ways.
It wasn’t hard for Nym to make the jump backwards, but Rizin’s den had a completely different set of defenses and he hadn’t been invited through them back then. Getting inside took a bit of effort, so much so that it ended up costing him close to a week of time before he finally worked his way through and appeared in front of the fox.
Rizin of three hundred years ago was a lot scarier than the Rizin he knew, though Nym was willing to bet that it was mostly a matter of perspective. His Rizin was a lot more friendly than the past version, probably because Nym hadn’t barged into his den in their original meeting. Also, past Rizin seemed to be… bigger, and growing.
“How did you get in here, ascendant?”
“Well it wasn’t easy,” Nym groused. “Knowing where the place was helped, but it still took me a few days to get through all the wards and misdirects.”
Rizin, now sized to the point where he was twice Nym’s height, leaned down from his cushion. “There is little point to a secret den if someone finds it. Now I need to either find a new one, or take care of you. After you explain how exactly you knew where it was, I’ll decide what to do.”
Nym rolled his eyes and said, “You sent me back here from the future of this timeline to give you a message, although I’m pretty sure now that the message was just an excuse to hassle me.”
“Unlikely,” Rizin said. “I’m not friends with any ascendants.”
“Who knows what the future will bring,” Nym said dryly. “Oh wait, I do. And you wanted your past self to know too.”
The fox gave him that same glare he’d grown so used to, and Nym smirked a little. “I guess some things don’t change, no matter how many years go by.”
“Ugh. Fine, let’s say that I believe you. What is this message?”
“Keeping in mind that I have no idea what this means and you’re a jackass who refused to tell me, my job is to tell you that the juniper shines in the spring of the lonely mountain.”
Rizin stared at him blankly, as though waiting for Nym to continue. When he didn’t, the fox heaved a sigh of disgust. “Whatever that means. Now, you’re going to tell me how you got in here.”
“Hey,” Nym said suddenly. “Are you missing a tail?”
“What? No!”
“Are you sure? I feel like you had one more in the time I come from.”
“Just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean I can’t make you wish you were dead,” Rizin threatened.
“Oooh, scary. You know, you almost never go full size around me. Why is that, do you think?”
Rizin snapped at him, but Nym teleported twenty feet back and avoided the gnashing teeth. He cocked an eyebrow at the fox, who was poised to leap forward.
“Definitely missing a tail. I could swear you had nine.”
“Maybe I’ll grow another one, just to spite you.”
Nym shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just saying, the Rizin I know can use eighth layer arcana, and you can’t. So, that’s something to look forward to in the future. And you’ll have a whole new ward set up. And you’ll have a spell I call ‘hidden presence’ that prevents ascendants from finding you with magic. So, you know, if you don’t have that figured out already, something to work on.”
“Are you telling me that you know fox magic?”
“Just the one spell,” Nym said. He wove an illusion of the spell construct in the air for Rizin to see. “This one. You teach it to me.”
“Impossible,” Rizin said. “I’d never… what’s so special about you?”
“You’ll see when you meet me again, I guess. I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
“Wait, what are you-”
Before he could finish, Nym vanished from the den.
* * *
Rizin of the past sat there, thoroughly confused. Somehow, he’d befriended an ascendant, of all things. Or at least, he trusted one enough to let him into his den in the future, and even teach him fox magic. That would probably prove to be exciting. No doubt having access to ascendant resources would open many new avenues for him to explore.
But first, he needed to redo his warding scheme. That annoying immortal had somehow managed to slip all the way through without disturbing anything, a feat Rizin would have said was impossible. He started poking at it, looking for the weakness he hadn’t known existed, and idly wondered what that message from his future self meant.
Knowing himself as well as he did, he suspected it was probably gibberish meant to waste his time. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was important in some way? He might not understand it now, but it could be relevant any time in the next few centuries. Was it an opportunity he’d left slip by and was determined to correct? If it didn’t happen in the near future, then why send an ascendant so far back to deliver it.
Damn himself anyway. Now he’d have to hang onto that phrase for possibly centuries, looking for whatever situation he was warning himself about, assuming it even existed. It was a lot more fun playing tricks on others than on himself.
“I don’t understand,” Nym said.
“You don’t need to understand to do it.”
“But-”
“Are you willing or not?”
“I mean, sure, it’s not a big deal. I just don’t get why.”
Rizin just stared at Nym, his lips pursed and reminding him disturbingly of Risa’s. Nym wanted to say something, but that would be an open invitation for the fox to double down on teasing him. It definitely wasn’t a coincidence that his appearance was so close to that of a person he’d had some form of intimacy with, however slight it had ended up being.
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll do it. Now spill. How does the age reversal spell work?”
“To start, I want to say that my knowledge is theoretical. I don’t need this spell, since I don’t age. If you tried to reverse my age by a thousand years, I’d just look exactly like I do now. Of course, I can’t jump around the timeline like ascendants can, so… trade-offs.”
“You can’t?” Nym asked, surprised. He’d just assumed anything he could do, Rizin could do too. Probably better, actually.
“No. My existence is tied very firmly to this body. I can act in different layers, but I can’t pull myself completely out of this one.” Rizin gave him a flat look. “This is not information to be shared, of course.
“Ascendants can dip out of the timeline in the inner layers by shifting themselves completely to the sixth layer, or farther. It doesn’t make a lot of difference exactly which outer layer you end up on, just that it puts you outside of time here.”
“What does this have to do with age reversal?” Nym asked.
“With the spell itself? Not much. I’m just explaining to you why it works on ascendants but not on other beings. You can fully withdraw from the inner layers. I’ll assume at this point that you know about alternate timelines.”
“Yeah. When changes are made to the primary, it can cause the timeline to fork until the change can be reconciled. If enough changes happen in a short period, or a single huge change occurs, it can cause the timeline to deviate completely into an alternate line. It’s like a sort of sideways reality. I have not experienced them myself; I was told it would take me a few more layers before I got to that point.”
“Exactly, yes. But just because you, Nym the ascendant sitting here eating lunch with me, can’t go to the alternate timelines doesn’t mean you can’t interact with it. And that’s what the age reversal spell does.”
“It… sends me to an alternate timeline? That doesn’t seem right.”
“No.” Rizin rolled his eyes. “It takes a version of you from an alternate timeline, a version that’s younger, and uses it as a model to rebuild your avatar in this timeline. If your mortal avatar were to die, you would need to do something similar to rebuild it, unless you no longer wanted to be Nym. You could build a new body completely from nothing instead of using an alternate version of you as your baseline.”
“But what if that alternate version of you is wrong in some way? I wouldn’t want a copy of myself that was missing all the changes I made to my body.”
“Exactly! That’s why it reaches through multiple timelines and sort of compiles matching traits to what you’ve got going for you now, and just put it all into a younger body. It’s extremely delicate. You want a safe place and an abundant amount of free time before you use this spell.”
“I used it once to turn back my age by a few years when I was learning how to do it,” Nym said with a frown. “It didn’t take that long.”
“You’re a new ascendant. You said yourself it’s barely been a decade to you personally, and I imagine most of that time was spent in the outer layers. There hasn’t been a lot to diverge, and you weren’t going back very far. The spell probably had lots of samples to choose from, with very little need to take pieces from different possibilities and merge them into one.
“Now imagine you’re a thousand years old, into the tenth or eleventh layer, with so many enhancements and alterations to your physical form that it would take years to rebuild them all. And it’s all balanced just right. How long do you think it would take the spell to find everything exactly the way you have it right now? How long would it take for it to put that all together into something that looks like you, only with less wrinkles and a fuller head of hair?”
Rizin had a point. Even now, Nym had tinkered with his physiology and his soul well enough that he would have a month or more of work to repeat all the spellwork if he focused every moment on nothing else. The more things he changed, the harder it would become to find an alternate timeline version of himself that matches those changes. Once the spell had to tap into multiple sources and merge them together to get what he was looking for, it would get cumbersome.
“And we can’t just take our own version of ourselves from the past because then we lose all the progress we’ve made. We could redo them, possibly faster, but why remake it when we can steal it from realities that never existed instead?”
“There you go. So, that’s the theory behind age reversal magic. You can’t cast the spell on anyone besides yourself, and mortals can’t cast it at all. Besides lacking access to sixth layer arcana, they would kill themselves in the process. Only an immortal can use this magic, and even then, only one like an ascendant who can survive wholly without a body in the inner layers.”
“I see. I have questions about some specifics,” Nym said.
Rizin groaned. “You are really asking the wrong person.”
“It’s fine if you can’t answer them, but if you can, I want to know.”
“Fine, but then you go run that errand for me.”
“Okay, so there’s a part of the spell that looks like this, but what if…”
* * *
Eventually, Nym had picked Rizin’s brain of everything relevant he could get. Or maybe Rizin had just gotten sick of the questions. Either way, the conversation had ended, the meal was over, they’d released the spells preventing anyone from overhearing what they were saying or really even remembering that they were there, and they’d gone their separate ways.
It wasn’t hard for Nym to make the jump backwards, but Rizin’s den had a completely different set of defenses and he hadn’t been invited through them back then. Getting inside took a bit of effort, so much so that it ended up costing him close to a week of time before he finally worked his way through and appeared in front of the fox.
Rizin of three hundred years ago was a lot scarier than the Rizin he knew, though Nym was willing to bet that it was mostly a matter of perspective. His Rizin was a lot more friendly than the past version, probably because Nym hadn’t barged into his den in their original meeting. Also, past Rizin seemed to be… bigger, and growing.
“How did you get in here, ascendant?”
“Well it wasn’t easy,” Nym groused. “Knowing where the place was helped, but it still took me a few days to get through all the wards and misdirects.”
Rizin, now sized to the point where he was twice Nym’s height, leaned down from his cushion. “There is little point to a secret den if someone finds it. Now I need to either find a new one, or take care of you. After you explain how exactly you knew where it was, I’ll decide what to do.”
Nym rolled his eyes and said, “You sent me back here from the future of this timeline to give you a message, although I’m pretty sure now that the message was just an excuse to hassle me.”
“Unlikely,” Rizin said. “I’m not friends with any ascendants.”
“Who knows what the future will bring,” Nym said dryly. “Oh wait, I do. And you wanted your past self to know too.”
The fox gave him that same glare he’d grown so used to, and Nym smirked a little. “I guess some things don’t change, no matter how many years go by.”
“Ugh. Fine, let’s say that I believe you. What is this message?”
“Keeping in mind that I have no idea what this means and you’re a jackass who refused to tell me, my job is to tell you that the juniper shines in the spring of the lonely mountain.”
Rizin stared at him blankly, as though waiting for Nym to continue. When he didn’t, the fox heaved a sigh of disgust. “Whatever that means. Now, you’re going to tell me how you got in here.”
“Hey,” Nym said suddenly. “Are you missing a tail?”
“What? No!”
“Are you sure? I feel like you had one more in the time I come from.”
“Just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean I can’t make you wish you were dead,” Rizin threatened.
“Oooh, scary. You know, you almost never go full size around me. Why is that, do you think?”
Rizin snapped at him, but Nym teleported twenty feet back and avoided the gnashing teeth. He cocked an eyebrow at the fox, who was poised to leap forward.
“Definitely missing a tail. I could swear you had nine.”
“Maybe I’ll grow another one, just to spite you.”
Nym shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just saying, the Rizin I know can use eighth layer arcana, and you can’t. So, that’s something to look forward to in the future. And you’ll have a whole new ward set up. And you’ll have a spell I call ‘hidden presence’ that prevents ascendants from finding you with magic. So, you know, if you don’t have that figured out already, something to work on.”
“Are you telling me that you know fox magic?”
“Just the one spell,” Nym said. He wove an illusion of the spell construct in the air for Rizin to see. “This one. You teach it to me.”
“Impossible,” Rizin said. “I’d never… what’s so special about you?”
“You’ll see when you meet me again, I guess. I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
“Wait, what are you-”
Before he could finish, Nym vanished from the den.
* * *
Rizin of the past sat there, thoroughly confused. Somehow, he’d befriended an ascendant, of all things. Or at least, he trusted one enough to let him into his den in the future, and even teach him fox magic. That would probably prove to be exciting. No doubt having access to ascendant resources would open many new avenues for him to explore.
But first, he needed to redo his warding scheme. That annoying immortal had somehow managed to slip all the way through without disturbing anything, a feat Rizin would have said was impossible. He started poking at it, looking for the weakness he hadn’t known existed, and idly wondered what that message from his future self meant.
Knowing himself as well as he did, he suspected it was probably gibberish meant to waste his time. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was important in some way? He might not understand it now, but it could be relevant any time in the next few centuries. Was it an opportunity he’d left slip by and was determined to correct? If it didn’t happen in the near future, then why send an ascendant so far back to deliver it.
Damn himself anyway. Now he’d have to hang onto that phrase for possibly centuries, looking for whatever situation he was warning himself about, assuming it even existed. It was a lot more fun playing tricks on others than on himself.
