Ascendant

Nym allowed himself a few seconds to just stare at the now-closed gate. When Niramyn came back out, he was going to be far stronger than Nym, too strong to defeat. If he could find a way into the sanctuary, maybe he could attack Niramyn before it was too late, but Nym didn’t think he had the ability to do that. This sanctuary had been set up by an Exarch at the height of his power, after all.

Maybe he could trick the gate into letting him in. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken advantage of Niramyn’s credentials. Catching his opponent in the middle of some delicate operation could make for an easy victory, especially if he did it quick enough.

The runes were hideously complex, but also intimately familiar. He may not have been Niramyn, but he’d literally learned from the Exarch’s own memories. He was as close as anyone was going to get. When it came to doing magic, Nym knew how Niramyn thought. He understood the logic behind Niramyn’s choices because they were the same choices he would make.

The rune sequences were too sophisticated to be easily tricked. There was a key spell needed just to activate them, something of Niramyn’s own devising. He’d been in the midst of casting it when Nym had appeared. Unfortunately, Nym hadn’t caught the entire spell, but he could reverse-engineer it from the final result. The question was whether he could do it quickly enough.

Whatever he was going to do, he needed to make a decision quickly. Niramyn’s timeline scrambling spell was already fading away, and with it went Nym’s cover. He had at best a few minutes of core reality time. But then, he knew exactly what he needed to figure out. There was no need to stand in front of the gate to do it.

Nym stepped back into the sixth layer, and found as he transitioned across that he could see the connections between the gate and the sanctuary. It was a simple matter to follow the lines of arcana through the sixth layer and appear just outside what amounted to a room-sized box. It was a featureless cube of gray draped with wards, very similar to the ones Nym himself set up. The major difference was that it lacked his hidden presence spells, or the prophetic wards he’d integrated into his own designs.

So there were some things Nym could do that even the mighty Niramyn didn’t know about. Nym wondered if there was a way to use that to his advantage. That would come later. First, he needed to crack the rune sequence on the gate or, failing that, tear right through the wards protecting the place. They couldn’t last forever, or even very long. In fact, now that he looked at it, they would fail in less than a week if they maintained their current use of arcana and Niramyn didn’t do anything to strengthen them.

Nym could use that time to prepare himself. He would need to figure out the exact moment the wards failed if he was going to prepare an ambush. No, it would be better to figure out when they were weak enough that he could force them to fail. If he could get Rizin to help him prepare the field, they could do the same thing they’d done to Abdun.

Excited now, Nym started working on deciphering the warding scheme. It was as complex as anything Myzalik had used, but so much easier to sort through. Nym knew the weaknesses in such a design, knew where he could poke holes in it.

The plan came together in his head. There were risks, certainly. The biggest one was spending a week in the core reality, vulnerable to other ascendants interfering with him. But if everything went well, he could recover from his miss with Niramyn. Hope wasn’t dead, not quite yet.

Nym dipped back into the core reality, to a time about a month before the initial cast of god killer on Niramyn. He appeared in the sky above the ice fields of the frozen north and sought out Rizin.

* * *

“No,” the fox said. “And also, how are you ­again in my den? Do you just go around cracking my defenses every few decades for the fun of it?”

Oh, right. Nym had forgotten that in this time period, Rizin didn’t know him yet except for that brief conversation they’d had a hundred years earlier. He hadn’t developed the friendship he held with the fox in a hundred years yet, and Rizin was rightfully distrustful of him.

“Would you change your mind if I said we became good friends in a hundred years?” Nym asked.

The fox snorted. “I’d say to leave the lying to me. I’m better at it.”

That ruined the bulk of Nym’s plans. Rizin couldn’t jump through time with him, and the one in the time period he needed wasn’t willing to help. The clock wasn’t going to stand still for him while he tried to change Rizin’s mind either. Nym was going to have to do it without help.

Or did he?

“Fine, my apologies for intruding then. I’ll see you in… oh, sometime in the next two years or so.”

“No you won’t,” Rizin growled at him. “I’ve had enough of you.”

“Please, for the chance to mess with me at our first meeting? Back when I was still mortal? I’ll be seeing you.”

Nym stepped back out of time.

* * *

“Did you succeed?” Rizin of a hundred years into the future said.

“No. I missed my shot. I think I can get a second chance, but the you in that time period was-”

“Uncooperative,” Rizin said. “Yes, I remember. From my point of view, you were just this annoying ascendant who kept popping up and breaking through all the spells I’d laid out to keep my den hidden. I had fully intended to eat you that day you first met me on the trails until I realized you were half an ascendant at that time.”

Nym just stared at him for a second. “Oh.”

“In my defense, you were incredibly annoying, and a security threat besides.”

“But you don’t feel that way now,” Nym said.

“I don’t think there’s much I can do to help you in this fight,” Rizin said.

“Hey, you don’t think I’m annoying now, do you?”

“But maybe there is something that could help you,” the fox mused.

“Rizin…”

“More amusing than annoying anymore,” Rizin admitted. “Still a security threat.”

A cloak pin with a fox head on it materialized in front of Nym, who reached out to grab it. “What is this?” he asked.

“Fox magic. It will make it harder to keep track of you, both physically and magically. It can also project illusions, ones that should fool even an ascendant’s sight. It won’t save you from an area bombardment, but it might give you enough of an edge to tag Niramyn with your god killing spell. That’s the best I can do for you.”

Nym conjured up a cloak and pinned the fox head on it. “Thank you,” he said softly.

“You’re welcome. Good luck. I hope you survive. It has been… surprisingly nice having a peer of sorts to talk to.”

“Thanks. I’ve… I’ve got this.” He hoped

Nym skipped backwards to where he’d left the timeline outside Niramyn’s sanctuary.

* * *

The wards started to crumble. Niramyn had to know what was going on inside his sanctuary, but he didn’t appear to fight back. Nym left them in a state of collapse, one shove away from shattering completely, and began his preparations.

There wasn’t a lot he could do, not if he wanted to have god killer primed and ready to go. More than that, he was counting down the seconds to rip Niramyn out of the sanctuary. Every moment that went by only saw the Exarch growing that much closer to his former power.

He obscured the timeline with everything he knew to use, laid out his locking spells to keep Niramyn from escaping, wove together the god killer spell. It took all the focus he had to prepare that spell and still reach out to tug that last thread that collapsed the wards and tore open the wall into Niramyn’s sanctuary.

Immediately, Nym projected an illusion of himself, or at least of a powerful, brash, overconfident ascendant, charging into the breach. The fox head pin’s arcana started draining, far faster than he’d expected. He shouldn’t have been surprised by that, he knew. It was a tool designed for an ambush, barely good for more than a single use.

Something materialized in the breach, something both dark and light, blinding in its brilliance and in its unknowable shadows, something that hurt Nym’s head to look at. It caught his life-like illusion and banished it before disappearing itself.

Nym held the god killer spell perfectly balanced, ready to strike. But it would only hold for a few seconds. If Niramyn didn’t appear, Nym would have no choice but to go in after him, which was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. Technically, the sanctuary hadn’t been located on reality prime, and god killer wouldn’t function inside it without the stabilizing framework that Nym had no way to recreate.

Of course, with the wards breached and the core reality reasserting itself over that space, it was possible the spell would work just fine now, but Nym had no plans on testing that if he didn’t have to. He’d expected the Exarch to come barreling out as soon as the decoy had taken the hit, secure in the knowledge that he’d defeated whatever upstart ascendant had taken a swing at him.

Niramyn appeared in the air overhead, and the spatial and temporal traps snapped down on him. They were strong, but Nym could tell at a glance that Niramyn had advanced to the ninth layer. He was too strong to be held for long, but maybe long enough…

Nym let loose god killer for the third time. For the third time, it struck home.

Abdun had gone through a steady regression, becoming young again by about six or seven years every second. He lacked the experience or power to fight the spell, and it had taken him smoothly. Myzalik, by contrast, had fought it all the way. He’d gotten younger in spurts, all the while fighting Nym off. He’d lose a year or two of age, then nothing for a few seconds, then a whole decade all at once.

Niramyn wasn’t like either of them. The instant the spell hit, he regressed from late-twenties to eighteen. The arcana held in his soul well practically exploded out of him, suddenly far too much for him to hold onto. The next instant, before Nym could even begin to follow up, the Exarch snapped the spatial locks and vanished.

Nym teleported after him, determined to end the fight. If not for those locks, he would have lost. Niramyn would have teleported immediately. But Nym had placed the locks, and the god killer had gotten him one last time before he vanished.

Niramyn didn’t look eighteen anymore. He looked fourteen or fifteen at the oldest. Maybe less. He wasn’t going to suddenly pull in ninth layer arcana and obliterate Nym’s temporal anchors with it. He wasn’t even going to use eighth layer, or seventh, which Nym could probably have defended against, at least for a second or two.

If Nym was right, Niramyn wasn’t even going to use sixth layer arcana, because he couldn’t. The spell had broken a few seconds short of killing him, but the reason it had worked so quickly was simple: Niramyn had artificially inflated his age with some sort of magic, and the spell didn’t care about that. It knew that a week ago, he’d been a teenager, so it rewound him by one week and took all those fake years he’d packed on away.

And then it had gone one step further back. Niramyn had all the knowledge of an ascendant, but he was mortal, Nym didn’t need god killer to slay a mortal.

He just needed to catch Niramyn before he escaped to a new hiding place. Nym wove the magic, locked onto the teleportation, and jumped after him.