Ascendant

Nym touched down on the roof of the guild house and crouched low. He peered over the edge and watched the guardsmen from Palmara pour out the door and spread out to look for him. None of them looked up, but he wasn’t willing to wait around for them to think to. The real question was how he was going to get out of Zoskan. The fastest and most direct way would be to fly straight over the wall and not look back.

He already had supplies for the road and had gotten back the rest of his money from Babkin, so Nym was, through fortuitous coincidence, as prepared as he possibly could be to flee. The only problem was that he didn’t know where to go. It wasn’t safe to talk to Navarem now, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to return to Zoskan once he left. The ultimate goal of getting to Abilanth seemed less and less likely.

Nym shook his head. He’d figure things out later. His immediate problem was getting away from the group from Palmara. He could do that. It was as simple as flying over the guildhall and landing on the street behind it. Then he just walked away and left town through the nearest gate. Though it was still early, the guards didn’t stop him. Apparently, word hadn’t spread, or if it had, the Zoskan guards weren’t interested in helping detain him for questioning.

Once he was far enough away, he took to the sky and flew off into the woods. It was unlikely anyone knew where he was or was quick enough to follow him even if they did. He had time to consider his options, though there were distressingly few left to him.

The first and simplest was to just keep going. He could cut through the forest for a day or two, find the road again, follow it to the next town and start over. That plan had a number of drawbacks, like the fact that he didn’t even know where next town was, and he didn’t like the idea of foraging for food and water again. He also wasn’t keen to be sleeping in the forest, not after the incident with the spiders, but he’d already resigned himself to sleeping outside again even before he’d run into the guards.

The second idea he had was to lay low for a few days, maybe even a week or two. He’d run out of food eventually and have to start foraging or risk a trip back into Zoskan, but it gave him time to see if the Palmara guards would hang around looking for him or give up and go home. If they did, there was a possibility this was all just a minor distraction and he could resume living his life once they left. That would be ideal, as he still wanted access to the air field and to eventually use the teleportation platform in the guildhall.

He had other, worse, ideas like going on the offensive, lifting men up with his magic and dropping them from great heights. That idea made him a bit queasy and he immediately wrote it off. In the end, he decided to treat the whole thing as an extended camping trip. He’d stay out for as long as he could, and then use the gate guards to judge if it was safe to go back. If they tried to stop him or capture him, Nym would just fly away, come back at night, and fly over the wall so he could resupply before he hit the road for good.

Decisions made, he flew deeper into the forest to find a good camp site. It would ideally be far enough away from the edge of the woods to avoid casual detection and be open to the sky so he couldn’t be trapped. A source of nearby fresh water would be necessary too, as he didn’t have a waterskin to take anything with him. That sounded simple enough to find.

Humming to himself, Nym started exploring. Everything was going to be just fine.

* * *

By the second day, he’d decided he missed hot meals more than anything else, although a comfortable bed was a close second. The cloak was a good purchase, and he silently congratulated himself for buying it. There had been no other incidents with things like giant spiders coming up on him in the middle of the night, which was his biggest concern.

He spent his days practicing his magic. Nym felt he’d gotten pretty good at air magic, but his skills with water magic had lagged behind, and his earth and fire abilities were practically non-existent. If he ever wanted a solution to a problem that didn’t involve running away, he needed to fix that. He didn’t have much of a lesson plan beyond just figuring it out as he went.

Water wasn’t too hard to practice. It was easier to find a stream to work at so he’d have an abundant source of it, but then it was just a matter of creating some drills to improve his coordination, finesse, and gross power. Water was heavy, and moving a little bit at a time was easy, but even using second layer arcana, he had trouble controlling large volumes at once.

Still, Nym felt like he was making progress. He was able to sling water around to slap against trees with resounding cracks that shattered bark and branches, if not with as much accuracy as he would like. He could see himself getting visibly better the more he practiced. It was just a matter of time and effort to catch up to his abilities with air.

Earth, on the other hand, was frustrating. The problem was that unlike air and water, it wasn’t flexible. He could rip a large chunk of dirt out of the ground and fling it around, but it felt like there should have been so much more he could do. Forcing it into a shape like he did with air and water was impossible. Even moving it around was exhausting.

Nym felt like he was doing something fundamentally wrong when it came to terrakinesis. What should probably have been his strongest defensive element barely functioned at all for him. He could see the shape of his magic reaching out to it, rearranging it and bending it to his will, but it was a fight. The earth didn’t work with him like air did. Using a light touch resulted in nothing happening.

In the end, Nym decided to ignore it for now. He could see better gains working on literally anything else, and there was plenty of work to do on his hydrokinesis spell. That left only one other basic element: fire. The less said about that, the better. Nym could generate enough of a spark to light his camp fire if he was careful about shredding his tinder as small as possible. If moving earth was like pushing against a wall, fire was like fighting a whole swarm of insects. It was impossible to keep it corralled and under control.

They went on his list of things to get help on, hopefully in the form of an instructor, but a few good books on the subject would be minimally acceptable. Once again he cursed Babkin for cutting his ability to generate money. There weren’t a ton of resources to be had in Zoskan, but he hadn’t been able to get even a single book from the bookstore. Brogan was as close as he’d gotten to hiring a tutor, and the old man didn’t so much teach him as allow him to observe what others were doing and copy it, then build on it.

The best thing that had come from his time on the air field was a throw-away comment he’d overheard one of the student mages make. Nym hadn’t recognized its importance when he’d heard it, but now that he had days on end with no other distractions, he found himself going through everything looking for clues.

The student had been complaining that he was having trouble keeping his intent stable to filter his arcana. It was a foreign concept for Nym, that apparently some mages had to filter natural arcana to better align with the spell they wanted to create. He’d never had that problem, so he’d dismissed it from his mind and focused on what he was doing.

It took him days to realize he’d been handed the key to his problem. For weeks he’d been trying to figure out how to pull arcana from two layers at the same time without them mixing, with no success. Once he realized that he could create a filter of intent over one of the conduits to alter the arcana coming through, he remembered some of Cern’s mixtures. The liquids in the jars were clearly different, and just as clearly holding themselves separate, layered on top of each other without ever combining.

Nym felt like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. It took some tinkering to figure out how to apply that filter of intent, but once he did, everything slid into place. He stood there in the middle of the forest, laughing like a mad man, as he held first and second layer arcana in his soul well, one layered on top of the other, and they stayed that way.

Still laughing, he floated up into the air and used telekinesis to pluck a leaf off a tree twenty feet away. It sped across the clearing to land, undamaged, in his open hand. “It was so simple,” he said out loud. “How did I not figure this out immediately?”

Then his soul well went dry and he fell on his butt. His conduits were both significantly smaller than either one would be on its own, and he couldn’t pull in arcana fast enough to sustain his flight spell. Nym shook his head and stood back up. His tailbone smarted, but he was still in a good mood.

He could finally harvest that patch of skywort bloom hidden behind the waterfall, but he no longer had anyone to sell them to. That was somewhat disappointing to think of how much money was just sitting there. He considered trying to cut a deal with someone in Therm’s group to use them as a middleman. Rosunde or Dumont would probably be the most amicable to the idea.

It would be another week before they were out again, and he didn’t want the plants going bad, so he’d hold off on grabbing them. Also, he didn’t have a spare pack and his current one was holding what was left of his food and his rolled-up cloak. But those were minor issues, because he had finally succeeded in his goal!

He played with intent filtering and managed a marginal increase to his terrakinesis, but not enough that he judged it would be useful as anything other than a novelty. True pyrokinesis remained out of his reach, for now. But Nym wasn’t worried. He’d added a new tool to his kit and it was just a matter of practicing with it.

He had two new goals: increase the pull on his conduit to maintain indefinite flight while pulling from two layers at once, and brush up on the first circle spells he’d worked out on his own but had fallen to disuse since flying was so much better, and more fun. Now he could do both, and he would.

It rained that night. Nym stretched himself to his limits using his magic to create a barrier to keep himself dry and his fire lit, which worked for about an hour. It was fascinating to watch the rain drops splatter against an invisible shell while it lasted, but the smoke from the camp fire quickly filled up the sphere of hardened air. He tried to adjust it to add vents, which kind of worked, but he still found himself getting dizzy and lost his concentration.

Nym was drenched from rainwater before he managed to focus and build a new shelter. Instead of a full shell, he created a simple lean-to that protected him just as well from the rain but used a quarter of the arcana. That worked for a while, until Nym fell asleep and the spell unraveled. He was quickly woken up by the blast of cold water on his face while his camp fire hissed and sputtered.

It was a long, wet, cold, miserable night. When it finally stopped raining the next morning, he was exhausted from holding the spell and not being able to sleep. Camping sucked.