Nym flipped through a few more of the journal entries, but there was very little that was meaningful to him. It seemed that Jaspar wasn’t entirely happy with the results of the experiment, as he often lamented that he hadn’t managed to push the bounds of human possibility. The journal showed a man swinging between erratic and depressed as time stole away the chance he had to continue experimenting on his daughter.
“How much of this have you gone through already?” Nym asked her.
“I didn’t have a lot of time when I got it in here, and it’s been kept closed off. But I have spent the last few days thinking about this. It’s so hard to know, is my control below average because that’s just who I am, or is it a side effect from one of these experiments? I work hard. I’m smart. Why do I always struggle to keep spells stable? And it’s the same for so many things. How much is me, how much is what was done to me?”
Analia’s identity crisis aside, Nym had other questions. “What is this thing he keeps mentioning, what he was trying to turn you into. An ascendant? I’ve never heard of them.”
“I’m not sure, either. I guess maybe it’s a term for someone who’s really good at magic, or maybe someone who has the potential to be. The experiments I understand seem focused on increasing my potential to beyond-human levels.”
“Maybe there’s something in some of these other books that explains it,” Nym said. “It might help us understand exactly what these experiments were designed to do if we know what the end result is supposed to be.”
Nym went through book after book, but very little of it meant anything to him. There was a ton of stuff on anatomy, including some illustrations that made him blush, but he didn’t understand the annotations, other than that they were some sort of supposed circulatory system for arcana. He hadn’t read anything like that in the other books. As far as Nym understood it, arcana accumulated in the soul well and went directly out of the body to create the magical effect.
But if he was understanding the books right, the soul well was just the base that most mages used. By creating veins for arcana, a mage could increase the amount they could hold at once, though it made them more susceptible to arcana poisoning since it meant they were housing arcana in their entire body instead of focusing it to just the soul well, which was naturally built to hold arcana in.
The veins weren’t natural, and only experienced mages could, slowly, start to build them using magic to modify themselves. One of the primary goals of Jaspar Feldstal’s experiments was to create this network in his infant daughter’s body, something that he grafted onto her soul well and that would grow naturally with her throughout her life.
Prior to going over the research, Nym’s understanding was that the soul well’s size was fixed, and that it grew as the mage grew. There were no artificial ways to inflate it, and the path to more power was through enhanced conduit control combined with learning how to dump an entire soul well’s worth of arcana in an instant. Then again, it seemed like the more he learned, the more he realized how little he knew, and how there was so much that was deliberately kept from lower ranked mages.
They worked for hours, with Analia giving him topics to find that she pulled from the journals, and Nym scouring the reference texts so that they could try to figure out exactly what the journal entries were talking about. He wasn’t necessarily successful, but he sometimes found information for Analia, and her noble’s education gave her a much better foundation to understand what she was reading.
There were gaps, but the overall picture was grotesque. Her father had done numerous experiments on her, most of them dangerous, painful, or risky. She’d practically lived in the incubation tank for the first year of her life, its magic the only thing that kept her alive. Jaspar hadn’t limited his experiments to just her magical abilities either. He’d gone to work on her physical appearance, her voice, her brain, her musculature, everything he could.
That was bad enough on its own, but the real kicker came when Nym realized the age gap between Analia and her brother. “Bardin was nine when this all happened,” he said. “He knew something was up. Maybe they didn’t give him the details, but he had to question where his baby sister disappeared to for nearly a year!”
“He didn’t seem surprised when I confronted him about this,” Analia said wretchedly. Tears ran down her face freely; she’d given up trying to surreptitiously keep her face clean after the first hour. Her dress across her lap was wrinkled from her clutching it so tightly while she read, and her hair had started to come undone, leaving long strands falling over her face.
The two fell silent after that. Nym idly flipped through some of the spellbooks, but the magic was useless to him. For one thing, everything was from the third circle, and he hadn’t breached that barrier. For another, it was all made to interact specifically with the Feldstal bloodline. There were some base theories on body manipulation that he might one day find useful, but the spells themselves weren’t worth the effort to remember.
Analia was lost in her own thoughts, no doubt trying to come to terms with everything she’d learned about herself. Once they’d finished combing through the journals, she’d spent a lot of time staring blankly ahead. Nym wisely gave her time and space.
Early morning stretched into afternoon, and while it would take months to even read everything hidden in the room, let alone comprehend more than a tiny fraction of it, there wasn’t really much left to be learned in general. He put the last journal back on the shelf and considered what he’d learned. Valgo wanted those journals for some reason, and Nym suspected it wasn’t so that he could modify them to work on his own kids. More likely, it was blackmail material.
What Jaspar had done in that room seemed highly unethical. It might even be illegal, but Nym didn’t know the laws well enough to guess. He wasn’t even sure if there were laws to cover something like this. Either way, the journals made it clear that Analia had almost died multiple times during the experiments, but Jaspar managed to preserve his research subject, which was what he cared about the most, especially since her mother had passed away soon after she was born. Jaspar viewed Analia as his last chance.
Experimenting on strangers without their consent was surely illegal, but doing it to his own family might be different. Then there was the fact that laws for nobles weren’t the same as laws for commoners, and mages had a whole other set besides that. Nym didn’t know if the fact that the experiments were designed to be beneficial even changed anything. It certainly didn’t seem to set Analia’s mind at ease, though that might have been more the fact that her father’s journals showed almost no interest in her well-being coupled with an apparent willingness to risk her life repeatedly.
“I think it’s time to go,” he said. “There’s nothing left to learn here but the details. And I don’t think you want to ever replicate this magic.”
“I want to burn everything in this room,” she said. “This shouldn’t have been done to anyone. How could he think this was alright?”
“I don’t know. But come on, let’s get out of here. I’m sure it’s about time for lunch.”
Together, they walked out of the hidden room and Nym placed the bookshelf back in front of it. The row of journals that Valgo wanted was left behind.
* * *
“I want to go with you,” Analia said suddenly.
“What?” Nym asked around a mouthful of scone.
“When you leave, I want to go too.”
Nym swallowed the scone, cleared his throat, and said, “What makes you think I’m leaving?”
“Oh come on, it’s obvious. Every time Bardin brings up that stupid indentured servant contract, you visibly cringe. Were you trying to hide that reaction? We all know you don’t want to sign it. Bardin still thinks he’s going to bring you around if he just dazzles you with enough gold and knowledge, but you’re not going to stay, are you?”
“No, probably not,” Nym admitted.
“You know that contract’s been ready for three days, right? The only reason Bardin hasn’t given it to you is he’s still working you over until he’s confident you’ll agree to it.”
“Unless he can remove all the years of servitude from it, I’m not going to sign it,” Nym said. “And since that’s kind of the whole point, it didn’t seem like something that we could negotiate.”
“No, definitely not. So you’re not going to sign it, and then you’ll leave, and when you do, I want to go with you,” Analia said.
“That seems like a terrible idea, no offense. I get that you’re mad at your dad, and I don’t blame you, but if you disappear, your family isn’t just going to shrug and move on. People will be looking for you, and they won’t hesitate to use force to find you.”
“So we take a teleport somewhere else, where they can’t find us.”
Nym started laughing. “You have no idea how expensive that is, do you? How much do you think this meal, half of which isn’t even going to be eaten, would cost you anywhere in this city?”
“Why does that matter? It’s not like I don’t have money!”
“For now, sure. Let’s assume you manage to sneak out with a big sack of gold crests. How long is it going to last you? Are you willing to eat plain bread, maybe an apple or a slice of cheese? Are you willing to sleep in trees and under bushes to keep the rain off? Can you wear the same clothes for weeks straight?”
He was probably exaggerating. A hundred crests would no doubt set Analia for life in moderate comfort, but nothing about the manor was moderate. It was all luxurious, opulent, and wasteful. She’d lived her entire life like that.
“Plus,” he continued, “What about Malk? He’s your personal bodyguard. At some point, he’s going to realize what you’re doing and stop you. There is no way his orders are ‘let Analia do whatever she wants, up to and including risking her life.’ How are you going to get away from him when he tries to bring you home?”
“That’s… I hadn’t thought threof that.” She frowned and looked down at the pastry on her plate. She’d barely nibbled it, and that right there told Nym all he needed to know about her survival abilities. Any kid back at the warehouse would have scarfed that down in two bites, just to be sure no one else got it first.
“Look, I like you, but the streets will eat you alive, and that’s where I’m going back to. Stay here and enjoy your life of luxury, where you have a clean bed and clean clothes and all the food you could want and no one is going to try to kill you in your sleep for your shoes. You don’t have to worry about freezing to death at night, or guards hitting you so hard they break bones just because you’re in the wrong part of town.”
“It can’t be that bad if you’d take that over working for my family,” she said.
“Well it’s possible that I’m not making the best choice, right? And for me, that’s choosing an entire life of servitude. You notice that none of the staff is eating at this table with us, don’t you? So you’re going to be giving up a lot better of a deal than I would be.”
Analia crossed her arms and glared at him. “Don’t try to talk me out of this. My mind’s made up.”
“Well mine’s not!”
“Fine, how about this. I’ll hire you. I’ve got enough money to get us both out of here. You teach me how to survive, and I’ll teach you all the fancy magic stuff I learned through years of having private tutors.”
That brought Nym up short. It was a terrible idea. He knew it was, but he could leave Abilanth if he took Analia with him. He could get away from Valgo, go back somewhere warmer, and learn more magic. If he could convince Analia to make reasonable purchases, they could both live off whatever modest sum she managed to abscond with.
He was going to regret this.
“How are you planning to sneak out?” he asked.
Nym flipped through a few more of the journal entries, but there was very little that was meaningful to him. It seemed that Jaspar wasn’t entirely happy with the results of the experiment, as he often lamented that he hadn’t managed to push the bounds of human possibility. The journal showed a man swinging between erratic and depressed as time stole away the chance he had to continue experimenting on his daughter.
“How much of this have you gone through already?” Nym asked her.
“I didn’t have a lot of time when I got it in here, and it’s been kept closed off. But I have spent the last few days thinking about this. It’s so hard to know, is my control below average because that’s just who I am, or is it a side effect from one of these experiments? I work hard. I’m smart. Why do I always struggle to keep spells stable? And it’s the same for so many things. How much is me, how much is what was done to me?”
Analia’s identity crisis aside, Nym had other questions. “What is this thing he keeps mentioning, what he was trying to turn you into. An ascendant? I’ve never heard of them.”
“I’m not sure, either. I guess maybe it’s a term for someone who’s really good at magic, or maybe someone who has the potential to be. The experiments I understand seem focused on increasing my potential to beyond-human levels.”
“Maybe there’s something in some of these other books that explains it,” Nym said. “It might help us understand exactly what these experiments were designed to do if we know what the end result is supposed to be.”
Nym went through book after book, but very little of it meant anything to him. There was a ton of stuff on anatomy, including some illustrations that made him blush, but he didn’t understand the annotations, other than that they were some sort of supposed circulatory system for arcana. He hadn’t read anything like that in the other books. As far as Nym understood it, arcana accumulated in the soul well and went directly out of the body to create the magical effect.
But if he was understanding the books right, the soul well was just the base that most mages used. By creating veins for arcana, a mage could increase the amount they could hold at once, though it made them more susceptible to arcana poisoning since it meant they were housing arcana in their entire body instead of focusing it to just the soul well, which was naturally built to hold arcana in.
The veins weren’t natural, and only experienced mages could, slowly, start to build them using magic to modify themselves. One of the primary goals of Jaspar Feldstal’s experiments was to create this network in his infant daughter’s body, something that he grafted onto her soul well and that would grow naturally with her throughout her life.
Prior to going over the research, Nym’s understanding was that the soul well’s size was fixed, and that it grew as the mage grew. There were no artificial ways to inflate it, and the path to more power was through enhanced conduit control combined with learning how to dump an entire soul well’s worth of arcana in an instant. Then again, it seemed like the more he learned, the more he realized how little he knew, and how there was so much that was deliberately kept from lower ranked mages.
They worked for hours, with Analia giving him topics to find that she pulled from the journals, and Nym scouring the reference texts so that they could try to figure out exactly what the journal entries were talking about. He wasn’t necessarily successful, but he sometimes found information for Analia, and her noble’s education gave her a much better foundation to understand what she was reading.
There were gaps, but the overall picture was grotesque. Her father had done numerous experiments on her, most of them dangerous, painful, or risky. She’d practically lived in the incubation tank for the first year of her life, its magic the only thing that kept her alive. Jaspar hadn’t limited his experiments to just her magical abilities either. He’d gone to work on her physical appearance, her voice, her brain, her musculature, everything he could.
That was bad enough on its own, but the real kicker came when Nym realized the age gap between Analia and her brother. “Bardin was nine when this all happened,” he said. “He knew something was up. Maybe they didn’t give him the details, but he had to question where his baby sister disappeared to for nearly a year!”
“He didn’t seem surprised when I confronted him about this,” Analia said wretchedly. Tears ran down her face freely; she’d given up trying to surreptitiously keep her face clean after the first hour. Her dress across her lap was wrinkled from her clutching it so tightly while she read, and her hair had started to come undone, leaving long strands falling over her face.
The two fell silent after that. Nym idly flipped through some of the spellbooks, but the magic was useless to him. For one thing, everything was from the third circle, and he hadn’t breached that barrier. For another, it was all made to interact specifically with the Feldstal bloodline. There were some base theories on body manipulation that he might one day find useful, but the spells themselves weren’t worth the effort to remember.
Analia was lost in her own thoughts, no doubt trying to come to terms with everything she’d learned about herself. Once they’d finished combing through the journals, she’d spent a lot of time staring blankly ahead. Nym wisely gave her time and space.
Early morning stretched into afternoon, and while it would take months to even read everything hidden in the room, let alone comprehend more than a tiny fraction of it, there wasn’t really much left to be learned in general. He put the last journal back on the shelf and considered what he’d learned. Valgo wanted those journals for some reason, and Nym suspected it wasn’t so that he could modify them to work on his own kids. More likely, it was blackmail material.
What Jaspar had done in that room seemed highly unethical. It might even be illegal, but Nym didn’t know the laws well enough to guess. He wasn’t even sure if there were laws to cover something like this. Either way, the journals made it clear that Analia had almost died multiple times during the experiments, but Jaspar managed to preserve his research subject, which was what he cared about the most, especially since her mother had passed away soon after she was born. Jaspar viewed Analia as his last chance.
Experimenting on strangers without their consent was surely illegal, but doing it to his own family might be different. Then there was the fact that laws for nobles weren’t the same as laws for commoners, and mages had a whole other set besides that. Nym didn’t know if the fact that the experiments were designed to be beneficial even changed anything. It certainly didn’t seem to set Analia’s mind at ease, though that might have been more the fact that her father’s journals showed almost no interest in her well-being coupled with an apparent willingness to risk her life repeatedly.
“I think it’s time to go,” he said. “There’s nothing left to learn here but the details. And I don’t think you want to ever replicate this magic.”
“I want to burn everything in this room,” she said. “This shouldn’t have been done to anyone. How could he think this was alright?”
“I don’t know. But come on, let’s get out of here. I’m sure it’s about time for lunch.”
Together, they walked out of the hidden room and Nym placed the bookshelf back in front of it. The row of journals that Valgo wanted was left behind.
* * *
“I want to go with you,” Analia said suddenly.
“What?” Nym asked around a mouthful of scone.
“When you leave, I want to go too.”
Nym swallowed the scone, cleared his throat, and said, “What makes you think I’m leaving?”
“Oh come on, it’s obvious. Every time Bardin brings up that stupid indentured servant contract, you visibly cringe. Were you trying to hide that reaction? We all know you don’t want to sign it. Bardin still thinks he’s going to bring you around if he just dazzles you with enough gold and knowledge, but you’re not going to stay, are you?”
“No, probably not,” Nym admitted.
“You know that contract’s been ready for three days, right? The only reason Bardin hasn’t given it to you is he’s still working you over until he’s confident you’ll agree to it.”
“Unless he can remove all the years of servitude from it, I’m not going to sign it,” Nym said. “And since that’s kind of the whole point, it didn’t seem like something that we could negotiate.”
“No, definitely not. So you’re not going to sign it, and then you’ll leave, and when you do, I want to go with you,” Analia said.
“That seems like a terrible idea, no offense. I get that you’re mad at your dad, and I don’t blame you, but if you disappear, your family isn’t just going to shrug and move on. People will be looking for you, and they won’t hesitate to use force to find you.”
“So we take a teleport somewhere else, where they can’t find us.”
Nym started laughing. “You have no idea how expensive that is, do you? How much do you think this meal, half of which isn’t even going to be eaten, would cost you anywhere in this city?”
“Why does that matter? It’s not like I don’t have money!”
“For now, sure. Let’s assume you manage to sneak out with a big sack of gold crests. How long is it going to last you? Are you willing to eat plain bread, maybe an apple or a slice of cheese? Are you willing to sleep in trees and under bushes to keep the rain off? Can you wear the same clothes for weeks straight?”
He was probably exaggerating. A hundred crests would no doubt set Analia for life in moderate comfort, but nothing about the manor was moderate. It was all luxurious, opulent, and wasteful. She’d lived her entire life like that.
“Plus,” he continued, “What about Malk? He’s your personal bodyguard. At some point, he’s going to realize what you’re doing and stop you. There is no way his orders are ‘let Analia do whatever she wants, up to and including risking her life.’ How are you going to get away from him when he tries to bring you home?”
“That’s… I hadn’t thought threof that.” She frowned and looked down at the pastry on her plate. She’d barely nibbled it, and that right there told Nym all he needed to know about her survival abilities. Any kid back at the warehouse would have scarfed that down in two bites, just to be sure no one else got it first.
“Look, I like you, but the streets will eat you alive, and that’s where I’m going back to. Stay here and enjoy your life of luxury, where you have a clean bed and clean clothes and all the food you could want and no one is going to try to kill you in your sleep for your shoes. You don’t have to worry about freezing to death at night, or guards hitting you so hard they break bones just because you’re in the wrong part of town.”
“It can’t be that bad if you’d take that over working for my family,” she said.
“Well it’s possible that I’m not making the best choice, right? And for me, that’s choosing an entire life of servitude. You notice that none of the staff is eating at this table with us, don’t you? So you’re going to be giving up a lot better of a deal than I would be.”
Analia crossed her arms and glared at him. “Don’t try to talk me out of this. My mind’s made up.”
“Well mine’s not!”
“Fine, how about this. I’ll hire you. I’ve got enough money to get us both out of here. You teach me how to survive, and I’ll teach you all the fancy magic stuff I learned through years of having private tutors.”
That brought Nym up short. It was a terrible idea. He knew it was, but he could leave Abilanth if he took Analia with him. He could get away from Valgo, go back somewhere warmer, and learn more magic. If he could convince Analia to make reasonable purchases, they could both live off whatever modest sum she managed to abscond with.
He was going to regret this.
“How are you planning to sneak out?” he asked.
