Ascendant

Ciana wouldn’t let Nym help that day. She just kept insisting that he needed to recover his strength and telling him to rest. If he was being honest with himself, she wasn’t wrong. He could barely walk on his own and he was still feeling weak from the arcana poisoning he’d somehow given himself prior to forgetting every detail about his life.

“What even is arcana poisoning?” he asked while she diced some vegetables pulled up from a scraggly garden right next to the shack.

“I don’t know much about it, just what Magister Tormin told me when he came to check on you the first night. I guess it comes from trying to pull too much arcana into your body, um, he called it a soul well I think, at once. It escapes from where it’s supposed to be and gets into the rest of you, which makes you sick until it dissolves. The more you take in, the sicker you get, and it can kill you if you have too much at once.”

“How would you even pull arcana into your soul well?” Nym asked. “I must have done it somehow.”

He thought about what the magister had done, that pale blue mist that had come from somewhere and been sucked into his body, and tried to remember if he’d ever done anything like that. If he had, it wasn’t coming to him. He didn’t even know how he’d start. He should have asked the magister for a hint when he had the chance.

He did have arcana poisoning, so that meant he could draw arcana into his body despite what the magister had said. Or maybe there were other ways to get arcana poisoning that he didn’t know about. But he had plenty of time to sit there and think about it, since Ciana had him back on bed rest. She wasn’t impressed with his fortitude, or, as she termed it, mule-headed stupidity.

It wasn’t like he was expecting her to give him a piggy-back ride home. There was nothing to be done about his feet, so there was no use complaining. He’d cleaned the blisters out as best he could, though the salt water stung enough to bring tears to his eyes, and now it was just a matter of time until they healed.

Ciana didn’t have much to offer him in the ways of mystical arcane knowledge, for which he could hardly fault her. It wasn’t like he had much of that kind of knowledge either, or any other knowledge for that matter. He was wearing borrowed pants, so his life was pretty much defined by accepting acts of charity at this point.

He would pay that debt back someday, hopefully soon.

* * *

It was sometime in the middle of the night when his eyes snapped open. The last bits of arcana in his body had finished dissolving and it felt like something in his chest broke open. A channel he hadn’t even known existed was suddenly unclogged. There was an empty space inside him that he could fill. He just needed to reach out and…

And he didn’t know what came next, but it gave him a starting point. Working mostly on instinct and still half asleep, his consciousness reached out and pierced the boundary of physical reality. The conduit was forged and his soul well slowly began filling. Nym willed the blanket off of him to float in the air above him.

It drifted up like it was caught on a strong breeze and flapped in place in the air. Nym gave it a sleepy smile and reached out to grab it, then pulled it back down into place. Tomorrow would be a new day and he’d be able to start repaying Ciana for her generosity.

* * *

He was up with the dawn, well before Ciana. Nym practiced creating the conduit that let arcana into his soul well over and over, expelling the magic in acts of minor telekinesis. He discovered that even though the magic was doing the lifting, it still tired him out as if he’d done it physically. It wasn’t possible for him to lift anything too big either. The limiting factor seemed to be his own body. Anything that was too heavy for him to lift couldn’t be budged by the magic either.

Where it really shined though was in time management. Sure, it was just as hard to move something with magic as it was physically in terms of sheer weight, but he could move lots of small things at once, and with remarkable finesse once he’d gotten a bit of practice in. Nym wasn’t even sure he had as much dexterity in his fingers as he did with magic.

Ciana came into the main room and stopped, her jaw hanging open and her eyes popping out when she saw five wooden spoons and two bowls swooping through the air in a large circle in front of Nym. He saw her and turned with a big grin on his face. “I figured it out!” he said. “It was the arcana poisoning that was blocking me. Once it cleared up, I could touch the magic and pull it in. I was careful not to pull too much though.”

“That’s amazing,” she told him. “Does that mean your memories came back too?”

The spoons clattered as they fell all at once. Nym picked them up again with his magic and put them away. “No,” he said softly. “Nothing came back to me. Even all of this is just what I figured out in the last few hours. It seems really easy to do though, way easier than what Magister Tormin made it look like. Maybe I already knew this before.”

“Maybe,” Ciana agreed. She came over and sat down next to him. “Good job either way. How are you feeling today?”

“I feel fantastic!”

“And how are your feet?”

“Uh…” Nym looked down at them and wiggled his toes. “They’re alright I guess.”

“Good to hear. Tell you what. You stay here and keep practicing and I’m going to go check my snare lines to see if we caught anything for breakfast.”

He nodded eagerly. “I can do that.”

Once she’d left, Nym dove back into the magic. He wanted to see if he could fly, but it turned out he couldn’t pick himself up. Nym didn’t know if that was because he couldn’t lift his own weight, or if that was just a rule that telekinesis didn’t work that way. It inspired him to try levitating a broken branch and hang off it, but all that happened was as soon as he tried to put his weight on the branch, it fell down.

That wasn’t really conclusive evidence either way. He needed to find another kid about the same size and see if he could lift them up with his magic. There had been a few out and about that he’d seen when they’d taken their trip to Palmara; he was sure he could find one that fit the bill. That was an experiment that would have to wait though, since he didn’t think Ciana would be taking him back there until he was able to walk long distances.

He felt like he should probably get up and at least attempt to walk around, but he was getting tired from the magic. When Ciana did get back, she found him on his back on the ground, chest heaving as he watched the clouds go by.

“Are you alright?” she said.

“Might have overdone it,” he told her. “Just catching my breath. I’m fine.”

“Well, look. Nothing on the snare lines, but one of the traps in the cove caught a crab. We’ll have a nice meal after all.”

Nym groaned as he rolled over and forced himself up-right. “What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Just come in when you’re ready.”

It didn’t take long for the smell coming out of the shack to set his stomach rumbling. Deciding he’d rested enough, Nym scrambled to his feet and went inside to float out the bowls and spoons for Ciana to fill.

* * *

The next day, his feet had healed enough to run around. The callouses weren’t thick yet, but they were there. Ciana was deeply suspicious of the speed at which he’d developed them, but she just shrugged and told him that since nothing else about him had been normal, there was no reason for this to be any different.

She showed him the route she took from trap to trap she’d set around the shack, both on land and underwater. The land traps rarely caught much as there weren’t a ton of small game animals living so close to the sea where the soil was sandy and plant life was scarce. There were forests farther inland with better hunting, but her father had made his living as a fisherman, so her home was right on the coast.

Most of the food she caught came from the underwater crab traps. The problem was that Blood Fin Cove was not safe to swim in and there had even been occasions of the local sharks tipping over row boats. The shallows were only marginally safer as the young sharks could get around in as few as a few feet of water and would happily take a bite out of a person’s leg.

Ciana had a wide boat that looked more like a box she floated around in, hauling up the traps one at a time to check the contents before sinking them back down to the sea floor. Usually they were empty. Unfortunately, there was very little in the way of fish in the cove and attempts at line fishing usually resulted in losing the hook to whatever shark took it.

It was dangerous work, but Nym thought he could it do relatively safely if he stood on the beach and used his magic to pull the traps up instead. It even worked, for about two traps. The weight was too much for him after that and he had to take a break to recover. It would be the work of the entire day to check every trap, so that idea was dead unless he came up with some clever way to determine which traps were full and only pull those up.

He did figure out that distance was a factor. The ones that were closer were somewhat easier to pull up, although hauling anything through the water was a chore. If he went out in the boat, he could do more, but that defeated the point.

Instead, Ciana took him out in the boat and they alternated hauling up the traps to check them. They were almost all empty. The next day was the same story. By the third day though, they’d noticed something strange.

“Nym,” Ciana said slowly as she pointed out into the water. “Why is this shark following you?”

“What?” he said, following her finger to see a shark circling around them. “They all look the same. How can you tell?”

“It’s got that scar near its fin, see? Every time you come out on the boat with me, this one shark shows up. I never see it otherwise.”

“Uh… maybe it thinks I’m good looking?”

Ciana gave him a flat stare. “I am sure that is not the reason.”

“Well I don’t know. Is it a problem? There’s always sharks out there.”

“No, I guess not.” She watched it swim another circle. “As long as it doesn’t try to tip the boat. I don’t like that it seems obsessed with you.”

She shook her head and handed him the hook she used to fish the trap line off the buoy it was tied too. “Here, your turn to pull one up.”

He scooped the rope up, eyeing the shark the whole time. Once the rope was in the boat, he started hauling up hand-over-hand until the empty trap broke the surface. With a sigh, he let it sink back down and grabbed the oars to head over to the next buoy.

The shark followed them like a puppy as they did their circuit around the cove. It didn’t disappear until they beached the boat and dragged it up above the tide line.