Ascendant

It took five days for Nym to run out of food. He supplemented what he’d brought with him by foraging, but that only took him so far. Also, a diet rich in berries had its own drawbacks, digestionally speaking. The ability to manipulate water was a life saver. He resolved never to put himself through that again.

Early on the sixth day, he returned to Zoskan. Nym debated going through his usual gate where he was well-known or circling around town to try one where they might not recognize him. Working under the assumption that he’d be able to escape either way, he decided that he would better recognize if someone was acting weird if he was talking to the gate guards he knew.

He approached the gate on foot, his soul well brimming with arcana and ready to shoot thirty feet straight up, well out of their reach. And then they just waved him through with barely more than a casual greeting and an off-hand comment about him being out early today. Nym walked through practically in a daze, and more than a bit annoyed.

He’d spent the better part of a week living in the woods, wondering every night if he was going to wake up with something trying to take a bite out of him, and nobody even cared! He could have come back at any time. They probably didn’t even look for him for more than an hour before they gave up. It had all been for nothing!

At least he’d had the time to internalize some new concepts and advance his magic, but that wasn’t something he’d needed to go out into the woods to do. Grumbling to himself, Nym stomped down the still-empty streets in search of a food vendor who’d set up already. He forked over half of his remaining money, leaving him down to one shield two, to refill his pack, and headed over to the guildhall.

Nobody gave him a second glance, and the lack of attention itself had Nym worried. He’d been so sure that everyone knew about him, about what he’d done in Palmara. Nym wasn’t given to introspection, and he’d done his best to put the event out of his mind. He didn’t regret his actions, but the absolute coldness that had come over him when he did it still scared him. He didn’t like thinking about it.

It was all he could think about now. Every single person he saw had to know. In every casual glance, he saw secret disgust. He knew the guards were watching him, just looking for the chance to capture him, waiting for him to walk into the guildhall so he couldn’t escape. There would be a roof between him and freedom, and they could block off the doors and windows.

Panic started to overwhelm him. Quickly, he ducked into an alley and hid himself away while he struggled to get his breathing under control. His breaths came out ragged, and he clenched his hands into fists so hard that it hurt. That didn’t stop the shaking. Over and over, he tried to tell himself he was overreacting, that everything was fine.

He sat there, back leaning against a wall, chest rising and falling and so dizzy he could barely see while fear ran rampant through his mind. He tried to fight back fear with reason, to tell himself that it was fine, that he’d walked through town and nobody had stopped him. He was safe. He knew it, logically.

Cold fear twisted around his guts, fear that he couldn’t rationalize his way away from. It was only after half an hour that he got his breathing back under control and was able to open his eyes again. No one had found him, thankfully. He was still safe. But there would be no going to the guildhall today. Maybe not ever again. Just the thought of stepping into a building set his heart to racing.

Nym made his way back to the gate as fast as he could and left Zoskan. It wasn’t until he got back into the forest that he finally calmed down. Everything was fine, and he was vaguely disgusted with himself for panicking like that. Nothing had even happened, but just the thought of going back still made him uncomfortable. The farther he was from the guards, the better he felt. Outside of town, he was free.

Out in the forest, he was safe from people.

Nym flew deeper into the forest, deeper than he’d ever dared to go before, searching for a place of safety where he could rest.

* * *

He set up his camp on the bank of a wide, shallow stream. The canopy overhead was patchy, with plenty of space between trees to view the sky, and the underbrush was relatively sparse. It formed a thick wall on one side, mostly thorny bushes and tangled branches, but the other gave him a clear view down a number of wild game trails. Of course, the sky over the stream was clear of trees. He had quick and easy access to go airborne if something happened.

Nym spent the afternoon searching for and piling up deadwood next to a pit he gouged out of the ground with magic. The sun set below the tree line and the sky took on twilight hues. First one, then two, then dozens of stars showed up overhead, and Nym finally allowed himself to stop working.

He ate sparingly from his pack, both because he wanted to make it last and because he didn’t really feel up to eating. Just the thought made him queasy, but he forced a bit of food down. He went to bed early, curled up in his cloak next to the small fire he’d built. He laid there, but he didn’t sleep.

At some point, he finally dozed off, only to be awakened by the night sounds of the forest. For perhaps the thousandth time, he missed that month he’d spent on the coast with Ciana. They hadn’t had much, and one time his stalker shark tried to eat his arm, but he’d been happy and worry-free.

Damn Senman for ruining all that. He just couldn’t take no for an answer and kept pushing to isolate Ciana, to get rid of any outside influence, to drive her to him so he could control her. Nym could have been safe, practicing new magic at his leisure for fun, and instead he was shivering next to a small fire and wishing his cloak had an extra lining on the inside. A chill mist had crept up on his little campsite at some time in the night, and his preparations were no longer enough to keep him warm.

It reminded him of his original trip through the forest, where no matter what he’d done, he couldn’t stay warm. He’d attributed it to being in a new environment away from the coast, but looking back on it now, that didn’t make sense. His own recent experiences of sleeping in the woods hadn’t been anything like that. It was only once he’d gone deeper in that things got too cold to stand.

Something was wrong. Nym watched the mist warily, trying to peer through it to see if anything was moving in the darkness while he thought of the various dangers he’d learned about from Cern and Babkin but had never actually seen personally. One name popped out at him: frost wraith.

Cern had warned him to just run if he ever encountered one on the grounds that there was no such thing as one frost wraith. Nym considered the mist again. It might be a sign of frost wraiths, or it might just be a coincidence of the weather. He could only see a few feet through it anyway, and only because his fire was still going and pushed both the darkness and the mist back a bit.

There was a first circle spell he’d worked out that let him see farther, but it didn’t help with seeing in the dark. He’d barely ever found a reason to use it, but with his new skills in intent filtering, he wondered if he could modify it into something that let him see better at night. That would be significantly more useful, in his opinion.

No matter how he fiddled with it, he couldn’t make it work. Instead, he tried taking the base spell and modifying it to accept second layer arcana. That wasn’t as easy as it sounded, and when he did finally get it working, it didn’t do what he wanted. Instead of seeing through the dark, everything became white and faded. The mist grew thicker, if anything. When he waved his hand through it, he found that he was able to see its outline in the mist, but it didn’t help with things farther away.

This was worse than nothing at all, so he dismissed the spell. Everything went black again except that little circle of light he was sitting in, and the more he looked it, the surer Nym became that the mist was actually alive after all. Little swirls of it played across his limbs, reminding him uncomfortably of a snake tasting the air with its tongue. It was getting steadily colder too, so much so that his breath was starting to come out in little steam puffs.

Whatever was happening, Nym wasn’t going to stick around any longer for it. He grabbed his pack and floated upwards in the air. With a last look around, he took off to the stream to gain full clearance and shot up over the tree tops. At least, that’s what he started to do. He really only made it about ten feet before he stopped in place.

It felt like the mist was clinging to him, dragging him back down to the ground. The feeling only got stronger when he left the circle of his camp fire’s light, and then again when he flew out over the stream. No matter how much he strained, he couldn’t fly out of the mist. The longer he fought, the more stuck he became.

Nym opened a second conduit to the first layer and used telekinesis to grab hold of the burning logs still in his fire. He pulled them across the clearing to float in the air next to him and burn the mist away. As the flames flared up, fed by the air currents he was controlling, he saw faces in the mist.

They were twisted caricatures of humans, with bizarre features and dead eyes. Each one was subtly different, a wider nose or jagged teeth pointing in a different direction. Their hair was wild around their heads, a halo of writhing strands that faded into the background blanket of mist. Hands reached out from bodies that were shapeless mist and Nym felt a sudden surge of cold when they slipped past the ring of fire to touch him.

Cern’s advice had been to run, but even with a ring of fire surrounding him, he was having difficulty gaining any altitude. Nym thought he could skim the surface of the stream, but it appeared that the mist was coming from the water itself, so he needed to get back on dry land and as far away from the stream as he could.

He pulled the burning logs closer to him, as close as he could without singing himself. The weight of the frost wraiths clawing at his limbs fell away, but he found he still couldn’t move more than a foot or so in any direction without it coming back. If he moved the fire with him, he found he could slowly proceed, but he was concerned that one of both spells would fail before he made it back to the ground.

It was close. He actually had to abandon about half of the wood and let it splash into the stream in order to keep the spell running, and he barely landed on grass when his flight spell gave out. Without the need to maintain it though, he was free to strengthen his telekinesis, and Nym had an idea. He grabbed all the wood he’d collected and planned to feed to the fire over the rest of the night and pulled it to him.

Then he dropped it all around him in a ring and sent the still burning logs into it to ignite the whole thing. The pressure from the mists disappeared completely, but the chill remained. It was lessened, but served as a reminder that he hadn’t escaped, only delayed. The ring of fire he’d created would last half an hour at most before it burned out, leaving him defenseless with hours to go until the light of the sun burned the mist away.

He needed to come up with something if he wanted to survive, and he needed to do it fast.