Ascendant

Navarim was sent off to a waist-high pedestal to be what Brogan called the arcana battery of the operation. He did not look happy about being assigned the task.

“Alright, what’s your name? Brogan said.

“Nym.”

“Just Nym? No great house or family?”

“Just Nym.”

“Fair enough. Better in some ways. Nobles play too many politics. It gets in the way of the magic. Well, Nym, while Mage Navarim is powering up the obstacle course, I want to see you do some of the basics. Fly around in a circle for me, eight feet up, keep it level to the ground, nice and wide now.”

Nym opened up his soul well to arcana and filled it completely. He suspected that by the time Brogan was satisfied with his performance, he would be running dry. Then he lifted up and spun himself around in a circle overhead before stopping on front of the flight master mage.

“Not bad. Hard air style, cushions are a bit big, but you’ve got solid control over the size, so that’s just a matter of practice to narrow them down. Ok, head straight up as fast as you can for three seconds, then come back down as fast as you can and stop twenty feet off the ground.”

Nym took a breath, poured arcana into the spell, and shot off into the air. He was high enough that by the time he reached the count of three, Brogan was a black dot on the ground. Nym let the flight spell break and gravity pulled him back down. New cushions of air formed above him and pushed to help speed him up, then broke apart to be replaced by a full body cushion that hugged him and slowed his descent until he was hovering in place above Brogan’s head.

“Less good. Speed was alright, but the full-body brake is inefficient.”

“You said to be as fast as possible, not as efficient as possible.”

“Hah! So I did. So I did. Last test. Follow me.”

The old mage drifted upwards, his scarf billowing out behind him as he rose into the air “Ready?” he said. Then, without waiting for Nym to answer, he yelled, “Go!”

The mage zipped off at an astonishing speed, leaving Nym gaping at him for a second before he pushed his own arcana into acceleration and caught up. Brogan wasn’t so easy to keep pace with though. He shot off at odd angles, changing direction with such tight turns that Nym couldn’t match him. He was forced to make wider, ponderous turns every time Brogan went a different way, and each time he fell farther and farther behind.

That wasn’t to say that Nym wasn’t nimble in the air, just that an old master like Brogan changed direction without an inch of wasted space or losing any of his momentum. First he’d be going one way, then in a blink he’d shoot off in a completely different direction, as fast as if he’d always been going that way.

Nym narrowed his eyes against the wind and dashed tears out of them with his hand. He was flying as fast as he could, half-blinded by the sheer speed, and he still couldn’t keep up with the old master mage. But each time Brogan altered his direction, Nym got a look at the arcana around him and he was starting to figure out what was happening.

Experimentally, he loosened the constraint on the cushion of air supporting him. His flight became less stable, but when he rotated his body, the cushion moved with it, allowing him greater control over his trajectory. It worked great in theory, but in practice, the next time he tried to make a turn, he found himself rolling through the sky and had to reinforce the cushion to right himself.

The speed he’d bled off in those few uncontrolled seconds allowed Brogan to pull away from him again. The old man regarded him with a wolfish grin, easily visible from a hundred feet away. “Nice try! You’re learning,” he called back. “You got to know where to keep it tight and where to give it some freedom to breathe!”

With a howl of laughter, Brogan picked up speed and all but disappeared from Nym’s sight. Nym put on his own burst of speed and caught sight of the man skimming the tree tops at the edge of the air field. Somehow, he’d tripled the gap between them in a second. That was when Nym realized the old man had been playing with him the whole time. Nym was going all out just to keep up with him and the geezer was just screwing around.

Brogan shot straight up into the sky and Nym curved his trajectory to meet him rather than follow the exact same path. That wasn’t nearly enough to catch up, and the old man just flew over his head back to the beginning of the obstacle course where Navarim was still laboriously working over the arcana battery pedestal.

Nym landed next to Brogan a few seconds later. His chest heaved up and down and, despite the breeze of high-speed flight, sweat covered his face. In contrast, Brogan merely straightened out his scarf and regarded the boy. “You’re… really… good,” Nym panted out.

Brogan snorted. “Been flying for over a century now. I spent twenty years teaching every new mage that comes out of the Academy. I literally wrote the book used to teach new mages how to harness the wind. I would have to hang up my scarf if I lost to a little sprout like you.”

On the ground, Brogan lost most of the wild cheer he’d displayed while they were flying and regained his more serious, almost military-like manner. “Mage Navarim!” he yelled. “Is the obstacle course charged and ready yet?”

“Almost,” Navarim yelled back. “Thirty seconds to finish.”

“Too slow. Looks like you need to revisit your basic exercises if you can’t channel arcana faster than that.”

Brogan led Nym over to the start of the course. “This one has three sections. The first is the logs. They’ll change height and width randomly, so you need to be able to weave between the openings quickly before they disappear, and also react in time to avoid crashing into the logs when they pop up in your way.

“Second is the hoops. Once the magic gets flowing, they move up and down the length of the poles. Time your speed and predict where they’ll be when you reach them. Of course, you want to fly through each one as fast as you can.

“Finally the rope course. Eheheh, this one is a personal favorite. The ropes you see, they are alive. This one is all about reflexes and defense. If the ropes touch you, you’ll get shocked. The more you get shocked, the harder it will be to keep control and not bump into the next rope. Then you get shocked again. The solution is of course not to touch the first rope.”

The first two were fine. Nym could do those. The last one sounded difficult. He thought of how Brogan had made instantaneous direction changes and tried to imagine the old man doing it inside a giant box full of taut ropes. It couldn’t work. There had to be a different way to do it. Nym was half his size and he wasn’t sure he had enough control over his flight to worm his way through those ropes.

If he took it slowly, he could pick his way through, but that didn’t seem to be the point of the obstacle courses. It was all about how fast he got from the start to finish. It just didn’t make sense to have one at the end that slowed him to a crawl. But he didn’t know what he was missing.

“Ready,” Navarim said. He slumped back from the pedestal and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Were these batteries always this big?”

“Nope,” Brogan told him. “We upgraded them two years ago. Should be enough arcana to run the whole course four or five times now.”

“What! Why did I have to fill it all the way then?”

Brogan shrugged. “Because you were here.”

Muttering darkly to himself, Navarim stomped off to the side and sat down on the grass. He shot Brogan a nasty look when he thought the old man wasn’t looking, but based on the smirk Nym saw on his face, he guessed the flight master knew exactly what Navarim was thinking.

“Are you ready, or should I give you a few more minutes?”’ Brogan asked Nym.

He needed more than a few more minutes before he’d be back to full, but Nym straightened up anyway and said, “Ready!”

“Right. Good. Don’t die up there.” Brogan lifted his hand and announced, “Three, two, one, go!”

Nym shot up twenty feet and flew into the forest of pillars. He weaved through them at max speed, trying his best to fly through the empty spaces where the pillars couldn’t appear. That trick didn’t work long before two pillars would pop up on either side, then swell to three times their normal thickness. The first time it happened, Nym was so surprised that he couldn’t stop in time. He rolled onto his side and flattened himself out as much as possible, barely managing to squeeze through the gap.

The next time, he used the trick he’d picked up from Brogan and swerved straight up. He overcompensated and his feet flipped up, leaving him hanging upside down when he tried to start moving forward again, but Nym leaned into it and completed the rotation until they were behind him again, then pushed forward.

He completed his aerial acrobatics in what he felt was a respectable time. He might have done better if he was completely fresh, but the log forest part of the course had been more about reacting to new situations and he doubted he would have reached max speed in there anyway. The second part was where he knew his building exhaustion would hurt him.

Nym wasn’t a quitter though. He looped up high and soared through the first ring, then dipped low for the second one. He almost misjudged the timing, but a quick bump down from a new air cushion placed over his back corrected his course.

The rings started moving up and down faster after the first few, but Nym managed to squeeze through the rest without any serious issues. His strength was fading at the end, but he was confident he could complete the last segment. It needed precision, not power. He could go slow and steady. With that thought in mind, he flew through the gap between two of the logs on the outside frame work.

That was when he discovered he’d completely misinterpreted what the last segment of the obstacle course was. Brogan had even told him, but he was so distracted trying to figure out how to navigate it, he hadn’t listened. The ropes were alive. They thrummed with power and hissed out sparks. From the outside, they looked taut, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The rope closest to him reared back like a serpent about to strike, then shot forward. Nym cried out in surprise and spun to dodge it. The rope shot past him, but its entire length undulated and a coil smacked into Nym’s arm. He cried out again, in pain this time. His arm started to go numb, and he tucked it tight against his chest to avoid being struck again.

More ropes were coming to life around him, and even the first one that he’d only semi-successfully gotten past was curling around to attack from the back. There was no way Nym was going to make it through the rope course. He didn’t know how anyone could complete such a sadistic obstacle.

Still hissing sparks, the ropes all lunged for him at once.