Ascendant

Myzalik whirled in place, eyes wide and his mouth twisted into a horrified grimace, just as the god killer spell struck him. Nym watched through his visage for that first tell-tale physical change. Something, anything at all, was all he needed, proof that the spell had took hold. He looked for hair thickening on Myzalik’s head, or his skin getting smoother, his shoulders narrower.

There was nothing, and Nym knew his worst fears had come to pass. The Exarch who’d invented the spell was protected from it in some way. All Nym had accomplished was giving the man a good scare and painting a massive target on himself. Any second, Myzalik would obliterate his visage and appear to deal with Nym in person.

But then he saw it. The fine lines around Myzalik’s eyes stretched tight and vanished. Unlike Abdun, Myzalik could still fight back, and he did. Arcana lanced out around him, and though Nym couldn’t match its quality, he could still work against whatever spell his victim was trying to cast. His own arcana poured out, mixed sixth and seventh layer, and attacked Myzalik’s spells. He pried the spellforms open, dispelled the Exarch’s magic where he could, slowed it down where he couldn’t.

He didn’t have to win this. He just had to hold on for four more seconds. Even weakened by the god killer spell, the Exarch was still easily overpowering him. Forty different spells blossomed in the aura of arcana around him, and Nym managed to break at most five of them. He slowed down the formation of six more.

Myzalik shuddered and grabbed at his chest. Spells twisted around him and shot through, coming out into other realities and even alternate timelines as he tried desperately to forge new connections to replace the ones god killer was erasing. Nym did his best to hinder those spells, but Myzalik protected them with a screen of other magics designed to focus Nym’s attention, spells that if ignored would sever his own anchors.

If he lost his access to this time frame, his plan would be unsalvageable. Desperately, he fought back against the magic, dodging or deflecting it as best he could. It was only the fact that almost all of Myzalik’s attention was on fighting off the effect of his own god killer spell that Nym survived for even an instant.

Since that was the situation, however, he found himself up to the task of fighting off a bare sliver of Myzalik’s attention. Three seconds had passed since he’d struck the Exarch, and far from being reduced to a child, he was still holding strong as a grown man. He was definitely younger, but at barely a fraction of the rate it had affected Abdun.

Nym caught something strange in the arcana storm around Myzalik. All of his spells had been forged with arcana from the outer layers, but then in the middle of that was a sliver of magic from the Astral Sea. It started to shape into a spell he recognized, and Nym’s breath caught.

If Myzalik got that teleportation spell off, he’d break the link between the visage and the god killer spell. Nym lashed out with six different limbs of arcana, all focused on attacking that spell before it fully formed. Barriers of solid arcana blossomed between him and Myzalik, each one heavy with power and actually strong enough to draw Nym’s own arcana towards them.

He resisted the pull, slipped three of the limbs past the makeshift walls, and dug into the teleportation spell. It was too late to pull it apart, but he could and did slice off the part of the spell that specified a target destination. With nowhere to go, Myzalik merely blinked in place without moving.

God killer was moving faster now, and the Exarch appeared to be in his early twenties or late teens. His soul well started to contract as his body regressed, and the many, many augmentations he’d made vanished. His ability to fight back was weakening, and Nym started keeping up with the various spells Myzalik wove.

He saw the exact moment the Exarch accepted his fate. Rather than give up, he turned his attention from preserving his life to taking vengeance on Nym. If he could have trusted the spell to do its work, Nym would have fled then and there. But without his interference, Myzalik would escape the radius of the spell. His options were limited now that his immortality was broken, but he could escape the same way Niramyn had if Nym wasn’t there to stop him.

Myzalik realized it too, but it was too late. If he’d fled the moment the spell hit him, Nym suspected he’d have successfully escaped permanent damage. He might not have been an Exarch anymore, but he would have still been immortal. Whatever power he’d lost could have been recovered.

Perhaps it was because he was used to being unchallengeable, to never losing to anything but another Exarch, but Myzalik hadn’t run. He’d fought, and without Nym’s interference, might even have beaten his own spell. Immortal they might be, but they were still humans, as prone to errors in judgment, petty jealousies, and irrational compulsions as anyone else.

Myzalik appeared to be a boy now, seven or eight years old. He was still struggling to draw in arcana, to escape in some way. The spell had run for fifteen seconds, more than three times as long as it had taken to destroy Abdun, and it still hadn’t completed its work. It was impressive, in a way.

Nym lashed out with arcana designed to daze Myzalik, to interrupt his thoughts and leave him vulnerable. It would not have worked against any ascendant, or even some mortals. For his purposes now, it was more than enough.

Myzalik stopped struggling.

The magic took him.

Nym killed an Exarch.

The visage vanished, and Nym drew in a deep, shuddering breath. His heart slammed against his ribcage repeatedly, and his hands shook. Sweat covered his brow, and he sat down heavily, collapsing onto the ground without even making the effort to conjure up anything to sit on.

He hadn’t thought his mortal body could even have reactions like that anymore. It was unpleasant and reminded him of his early days when everything had been so overwhelming that he’d basically shut down instead of dealing with it. And as much as he wished it was over now, there was more work to be done.

Reality pushed against him suddenly, hard and absolute, and he found himself back in the sixth layer. Laughing helplessly, he shook his head. He’d been so focused on finishing off Myzalik that he’d stopped keeping track of the seconds. It was a good thing the spell had ended when it did. Another few seconds, and he’d have been forced out of the core reality before he had confirmed the Exarch’s death.

Niramyn had let go, relinquished his body to the Nym persona that had grown into a whole new existence, and reality wouldn’t stand for there being two of him at the same time, not even if one was immortal and the other not. Nym was forever locked out of the next few years, having already lived them once.

He needed to move quickly, but he took a minute to recover his strength. This next part should be easier in a lot of ways, but the timing was going to be even tighter. Worse, they hadn’t been able to pull the memory of him to plan it out down to the second. All their attempts to scry during the moment in question had been unsuccessful. Nym was going in blind, and it would be all on him to make sure he pulled it off.

He knew roughly what was going to happen, but only from memories formed when he’d been subsumed by Niramyn. Everything from that time was jumbled and overwhelming. Nym didn’t trust them to be accurate, and he couldn’t plan a strategy around what he thought might have happened.

That wasn’t to say he had no advantages. He knew exactly where and when he needed to appear. It was just what he needed to do once he got there that was still in question. Niramyn would have some spells to defend himself with, and Nym wouldn’t have time to construct the god killer spell again. If everything went right, he wouldn’t need it, not right then.

He was under no illusions that things were going to go as easily as they had with Abdun. There was no time to prepare, and Niramyn, despite his massive ego, was many, many times smarter than Abdun had been. Worse, he wouldn’t have Rizin to help. Still, it was his best chance.

The goal was to subdue Niramyn and transport him to another time, then execute the one-time Exarch before he could regain his power. If he could have constructed the god killer spell while in the sixth layer and brought it with him when he appeared in the core reality, everything would have been so much simpler.

That wasn’t an option, though, so he’d be doing it the hard way. Nym had reviewed this plan repeatedly; he knew which spells to cast, what order to cast them in, and how to make sure Niramyn didn’t shake them off. He’d given himself a few precious minutes to reaffirm that his plan was sound, and now it was time to implement the last phase.

Nym prepared every spell he could, and then he slipped back into the timeline a second after he’d activated Niramyn’s memory cube. He could see his body, now controlled by the immortal ascendant, already reaching for sixth layer arcana somehow, that connection restored with the recovery of his memories.

Nym unleashed spells designed to lock Niramyn down spatially and temporally. They surged out, stuck themselves to Niramyn, and were resisted by his own magic. The gate below Niramyn’s feet flared to life as the runes lit up, and Nym knew he had only a single second to tag the Exarch with the lock before he missed his window.

The lock snapped closed around Niramyn, and started to pull him back out of the gate. The gate itself provided an unexpected resistance to the magic, but Nym’s spell was still strong enough to overcome it. Niramyn wouldn’t be saved by just that. All it did was buy him a second.

Nym knew he had caught Niramyn, and he knew he’d failed. Some fragmented shard surfaced in his thoughts, and he watched what happened next with a sort of grim horror. It played out exactly as he knew it must.

Arcana slapped against Niramyn, the locking spell that would keep him from slipping into his sanctuary. The gate itself pushed back against the spell, tried to force it out, slowed it down just enough for Niramyn to unleash his own spell.

Niramyn’s counterstroke blew the spellform apart. The spatial lock was destabilized so badly that the whole thing disintegrated on the spot, despite Nym’s attempts to hold it together. The trap broke, and Niramyn resumed his descent through the gate. There was nothing Nym could do to stop him.

Just before the Exarch disappeared, he let out one final spell, the one that had thoroughly foiled Nym’s attempts to catch him. A pulse of arcana rippled out into the timeline and scrambled it. It was weak, as far as ascendants were concerned, only sixth layer. But it only had to wash out a handful of seconds, and it did.

That arcana pulse was what had prevented Nym from scrying this scene and forced him to rely on the faulty, fragmented memories he’d barely retained when he’d been severed from Niramyn’s being. If not for that, he would have planned it better, would have known what he needed to counter.

Instead, the Exarch had broken through the spatial lock and fled into his sanctuary, where he would recover and emerge much stronger, too strong for Nym to fight.

He had failed.