Ascendant

A cold, rational calm descended on him. He needed to take action to save himself, and he couldn’t allow emotions to cloud his judgement. That feeling, so alien to Nym, was something he’d pulled away from every time he’d felt it coming on since he’d killed Senman. But he knew he needed it now, and he welcomed the emotional numbness that came with it.

Analyzing the situation was the work of moments. He had a ring of fire and his enemy was a living fog bank that had rolled in and constricted his movements. Worse, the chill he felt was obviously magical in nature. It sapped his strength far quicker than it should have. He couldn’t even tell how many frost wraiths were hiding in the mist. He needed to change the situation if he was going to survive.

Nym’s first thought was to pour on the pyrokinesis. His control was lacking, but if there was ever a situation where more fire was a good thing, it was this very one. The problem was that he was standing right in the middle of the source, and he couldn’t get too far away from it. He was certain to be burned alive if he fueled the fire with his magic.

If he could just regain his mobility, it would be so easy to torch everything. Of course, if he had his mobility, he wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. He needed something else. Air magic was his specialty, but his attempts at blowing away the mist just punched random holes that were immediately refilled with more mist. Now that the frost wraiths weren’t on top of him, it was difficult to pick them out of the background.

Air and fire were out. He couldn’t think of any way earth would help him right now. That left water. Normally he would source the water he needed to work magic from the river, but in this case, he decided to try to pull it from the mist. It would be harder to gather it, but the point wasn’t to do anything with it, just to get rid of the mist.

Nym sat down in the center of the circle of flames. He forged his conduit as wide open as he could and let arcana pour into his soul well. It was the work of moments to fill it completely, and then he set about grabbing hold of the water in the mist and pulling it out. It condensed into thousands of little droplets, clumping together and raining down, threatening to put out his only defense.

Nym took control of the water near him and caused it to all gather into one giant orb the size of his torso. Once it was big enough, he shot it off into the stream to splash harmlessly, then repeated the exercise. Arcana flowed into his soul well with each inhale, and out with each exhale. He worked the magic, again and again, slowly breaking down the mist that shrouded the forest.

As he did, the frost wraiths lost their cover. At first, it was only glimpses before they faded away again, but the mist continued to thin, and soon enough he could see them fluttering around him, looking for a way to breach the barrier of fire he’d surrounded himself with. The flames were weakening, running low on fuel, but their protection wasn’t completely gone yet.

He split his concentration to channel arcana into his flight spell. Instead of using it on himself, he captured a frost wraith in a thin shell of hardened air, then squeezed that shell. Without a corporal body, it was easy to condense it into a tiny stone the size of his thumb. Then he did it again, and again, and again. His focus wavered, and he couldn’t manage another.

As soon as he stopped concentrating on it, the spell snapped and the frost wraiths flowed back out, unharmed and full size. There was no way he was going to stop the hundreds of wraiths swarming the area that way. Maybe he didn’t have to though. He just needed to clear a path to escape. That was a gamble, since he didn’t know how wide spread the frost wraiths were, and if he left the circle of protection his fire offered him, he’d be feeling their icy claws on him immediately.

That was fine for a minute or two, but they could restrain him too, and drag him back down into a horde of them. If he hadn’t been next to the fire when the mist first rolled in, they would have pinned him in place and frozen him to death without him ever being able to do anything about it. He might not even have woken up.

Nym shook his head. He’d have to risk it. He was fast and agile in flight. Thanks to his work thinning the mists, he could see the wraiths now. There were a lot of them, but he thought he could manage enough of them to get a clear shot at the sky and flee at top speed. As long as he got high enough up, he could escape.

How high that was and whether or not he’d freeze from the purely mundane cold of high-altitude flying was a matter of debate. What was certain was that staying on the ground was not an option. He needed a way out, the sooner the better. He was only going to get more exhausted the longer this all dragged on.

Nym stood up and plotted out his course. Working on the assumption that the higher he went, the thinner the mist would be, and the thinner the mist, the fewer frost wraiths there would be lurking in it, his plan was to go straight up. He was starting to slow down now, too tired, too drained, to think clearly. This would likely be the only chance he had to survive the night.

To start, he poured arcana into the fire and caused it to spread through the remaining wood. The fuel would burn up in less than a minute, but while it lasted, he would be as protected as he could possibly be. Then he crafted the air cushions he needed to propel himself straight up. Finally, he started picking off targets, not bothering to encase them in shells, but simply creating walls of air and swatting them away.

Nym exploded into the air, shooting past dozens of grasping hands faster than they could grab hold of him. He weaved through the frost wraiths swooping through the air, shivering as bursts of cold washed over his skin. Up he went, fifty feet, then a hundred. His blood was ice in his veins. At two hundred feet, the whole of the forest was sprawled out below him, and bare tendrils of mist reached up to him, trails for the frost wraiths to follow.

A sweep of wind severed them, leaving Nym alone in the moon light. His limbs trembled with cold and fatigue, though he was to the point where he wasn’t really feeling the chill anymore. That was probably not a good thing. He wasn’t sure. It was getting harder and harder to think. He clung to his goal: escape. The frost wraiths were still below him, and even now more tendrils of mist were arching up into the night sky to reach him.

Nym flew north in a drunken line. He weaved back and forth, struggling to maintain altitude and direction. The mist thinned out as he pulled away from the deep forest and the air gradually grew warmer. Part of that was that he kept getting lower to the ground, but he didn’t realize how low until he crashed into a tree he hadn’t seen in front of him.

Fortunately for him, he had slowed down to barely a trudge. Unfortunately, the shock of impact broke his concentration completely and the flight spell ended. Nym flailed about as he fell, hooking arms and legs that he could barely feel around branches. He ended up tangled up in a few of the thicker ones after falling a few feet and breaking the thinner branches near the top.

That was where Nym spent the night, cradled in a random tree’s wooden clutches, shivering and barely conscious. The sun came up a few hours later, revealing a thin-limbed boy with a torn cloak half draped over him, too delirious to answer the questions of the man standing at the base of the tree, too weak to fight back when the man climbed up and freed him, and too uncoordinated to climb down himself after.

The last thing Nym remembered was being laid out on the ground and covered in another blanket while the morning sun burned away the last of the dew on the grass. Then there was darkness.

* * *

Nym woke up in a bed in a strange room. He shot upright as a surge of panic swept through him. With effort, he suppressed it and took a breath. There was no one else near him. He wasn’t restrained in any way. There was a window in the room with closed shutters. He could open them and fly away.

He was not trapped. There was no need to panic.

It still took him a few minutes to calm down. Once he managed it, he was annoyed that he couldn’t summon the cold calmness from last night. Something had broken in his brain when those guards from Palmara had cornered him, like every deep dark fear he’d never dared to even give form crashed down on him all at once. And it just kept happening. He didn’t feel safe anywhere anymore.

If he had the choice, he would take cold, ruthless calculation he’d once shunned. He would live with that wrapped around him like a cloak if that meant the overwhelming fear never came back.  Nym couldn’t summon it at will though. It seemed to show up whenever it felt like it, not when it was convenient for him.

He climbed out of the bed on shaky legs and gave himself a once over. He still had all his fingers and toes, but was covered in bruises, especially on his chest and arms. “Stupid tree,” he muttered, though he could barely even remember hitting it.

His clothes were on a table next to the wall, dirty and torn. Of his pack, there was no sign, and his cloak was fit to be cut up for rags and not much else. That was a blow there. Now he had no food, no money, and nothing to keep him warm at night. He was back to where he’d started when he’d first come to Zoskan, except now he was injured on top of it and he’d already burnt his bridges in town.

He would thank whoever had saved him and follow the road to the next town. There didn’t really seem to be any other options, and there was no point in staying anymore. He’d never get the crests he needed for that teleport to Abilanth. It would be faster to fly there himself, not that he actually knew where it was.

Nym got himself dressed, thankful that if nothing else, he’d saved his shoes and that his flight jacket was only splitting at a few seams. He could get that repaired. It wasn’t a total loss. Then, just because of how paranoid he’d gotten, he forged a conduit and filled his soul well with arcana before he opened the door.

There, sitting in a pair of chairs in front of a massive hearth, were two men. The first was the man he vaguely recognized as having found him and gotten him out of the tree he’d spent the night in. He was tall and well-muscled, his head shaved and a sharp goatee jutting off his chin. His bare arms were covered in scars, and he held a clay cup in his hands that had steam rising off it.

The other was Babkin. Nym groaned. Of course it would be. The big innkeeper looked over at him and nodded. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Nym.”