Ascendant

The library was more of a mess than Nym was expecting. When they walked in, Analia took one look and said, “We’ll be lucky to get through this today.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have made such a mess,” Nym said.

She at least had the decency to look embarrassed, but Malk turned to snap at him, “She is the lady of the house, if she decides to tear the walls down, your place is to keep your mouth shut and get to work when your betters tell you it’s time to fix it.”

The sudden fury in Malk’s voice shocked Nym, and for a moment he was afraid the man was going to attack him. When that didn’t happen, Nym said, “You can do that if you want. I don’t work for House Feldstal though. I’ll help pick up the mess for two reasons: because Analia was nice to me, and because I want a chance to read some of these books.”

Malk snorted. “You should be sitting in a dungeon right now. No, you should be in a mage cell, not that I think you’re dangerous enough to warrant one.”

Nym had no clue what a mage cell was, but he resolved to research that some other time. It sounded nasty, and did absolutely nothing good for his ever-present fear of being captured by the city guards. If a mage cell was some sort of box that kept him from using magic like he assumed, he’d go completely mad in it.

Analia ignored Malk’s comments, or maybe she just didn’t feel like he’d said anything out of line. For all her casual disregard of the social hierarchy, she was after all a nobleman’s daughter. She could probably count on her fingers the number of people she’d actually have to listen to if they tried to give her an order. Nym was not on that very, very short list, of course.

She had some magical training already, so he just hoped she’d apply a similar mindset to learning from him. He wasn’t an Academy professor though, so he was missing a lot of the gravitas that came with the position, plus she was older than him, so he was fighting the always-uphill battle against that.

Analia surveyed the mess her wind spell had made with her hands on her hips. “Alright you two, time to get to work. First, I want any books with pages ripped out piled on this table. Loose pages next to them. If it’s obvious which book the page belongs to, set it over on the second table with the page on top. I will work on rebinding them while you sort through.”

That was what they did for the better part of an hour. Analia knew a spell that could repair torn pages as long as she had the book and the page that was missing. Nym watched curiously as she cast it repeatedly, noting the burst of arcana that popped between her hands each time. It looked like the spell had a complicated base that took her about thirty seconds to set up, followed by a sudden surge of arcana to connect everything at once.

He was itching to try the spell out himself, but didn’t want to explain how he’d learned it. As far as he knew, the ability to see arcana as other mages cast spells was something unique to him, and he’d kept it a secret to everybody. Someday, it was going to pay off big time, and he was going to learn some mighty fine magic on the sly from someone who had no idea what he was doing.

There was also the fact that if he ever ended up dueling another mage again, which was seeming more and more likely to happen, being able to cold-read their spells as they were being cast could be a literal life-saver. What he could do didn’t seem comparable in any way to an aura reading spell, which simply functioned to help show if someone was holding arcana in their soul well and get a rough idea of whether that amount was increasing or decreasing.

The book restoration project went well, in Nym’s opinion. There were hundreds of loose pages that had been torn out, and by the time they were done, they only had seven pages left needing homes. Analia didn’t recognize them, and set them aside for her brother to look at.

“Okay, next project. We need to properly reshelve these, but unfortunately, ‘we’ mostly means ‘me’ as Nym has no idea where anything is supposed to be and I’m pretty sure Malk has never touched a single one of these books before today.”

“I think one of them hit him in the head last night,” Nym offered up helpfully.

Analia let out a great, exaggerated sigh. “Doesn’t count,” she said sadly.

“So how are we supposed to help you then?”

She picked up a book, looked at it, and set it on an empty table. “This is now the table for all things legal and tax related.”

A different book went onto a new table. “This table is for alchemy texts. That one is for metal working.” She pointed at one table after another. “Medical. Engineering. Elementalism. Agriculture. Transport and logistics. House records. Spell books.”

Nym cast that last table a long lingering glance. There were already three books on it with many more likely to come. He wanted to spend as much of his time as possible going through them while he still had the chance. It was too bad he wasn’t setting the rules for his trade with the Feldstal scions. All he could do was watch the pile grow larger as the three of them sorted through the books.

He wasn’t ashamed to admit that Analia did all the heavy lifting. She sorted through books ten times faster than he did, both from familiarity and the speed at which she could read. That was fine. It was her library after all. But he was a little embarrassed that in the time it took him to skim through one book and determine which table it belonged on, Malk did three.

Finally, with many errors on his part, it was done. Analia directed the reshelving of the upper shelves to  Nym for his telekinesis and did the lower shelves herself. Malk stood off to the side and glowered at Nym’s back while he worked, which he found extremely uncomfortable.

 After a quick break for lunch, they returned to the library. Since Bardin still wasn’t back yet, they both chose books and settled into overly large chairs stuffed to bursting. Nym chose a book that described different techniques for arcana control needed in various spells.

The book referred to his own personal style as conducting, where he simultaneously held open his conduit to allow new arcana to pour into his soul well and spun it out into the world to create magic. The pinnacle of conducting was to balance the input and output perfectly so that it flowed in a never-ending stream. That seemed like an unnecessary goal to him, but the book recommended the style for those whose soul wells were underdeveloped and unable to hold large quantities of arcana.

Nym didn’t think he had that problem, though if he was being honest, he didn’t have much to compare to. His magical stamina was steadily growing and showing no signs of slowing down, which led him to the second chapter.

The book referred to casting by using a massive pool of arcana all at once as erupting, which someone apparently thought was a stupid name, judging by the crude jokes scribbled into the margins of the page. He had to agree, but regardless of the author’s nomenclature, the style itself was important to master. Some spells simply had to be done in a hurry or required too much focus to work the magic and hold a conduit at the same time.

For those spells, eruption was the answer. The style focused on building up the soul well to hold absolutely massive amounts of arcana, and then burning it in a short window. It was the preferred style for combat specialists who often couldn’t afford to take things slowly, and was generally paired with huge conduits that were difficult to hold in place but which could refill the mage’s soul well. The mage would then alternate between refilling and draining his soul well.

Nym could see the usefulness, but he’d never had an issue keeping a conduit open when things had been tense, so he didn’t think it was a style he would be pursuing.

Most mages fell somewhere between those two extremes and covered for their weaknesses with a variety of other techniques. The book recommended learning leaching, the act of pulling arcana out of the environment, and intercepting, the act of stealing arcana being woven into a spell by another mage.

It took Nym a bit to figure out what the book meant by leaching, as he’d never really noticed any sources of arcana in the world around him. There were occasional exceptions, such as the light orbs, but such enchanted objects obviously weren’t what the book meant. Finally it dawned on him that it was talking about tapping into the soul wells of other living beings to take their arcana.

The final recommendation was to use what was known as ritual magic. This involved the mage slowly building up arcana in a large, complicated spell. Generally speaking, the amount needed was far greater than a single mage could draw in through a conduit in any reasonable amount of time, and multiple mages often collaborated to accomplish a goal.

There were lots of props and tools that went into ritual magic, necessary if for no other reason than to temporarily house the excess arcana the mage generated, and of all the techniques described in the book, Nym felt it was the least relevant to him personally. He couldn’t see himself working hand-in-hand with other mages, nor did he have the finances to afford the trappings of ritual magic. For now, he’d settle for increasing his own repertoire and leave group castings for a future date.

 Bardin had excellent timing. He showed up just as Nym was putting the book back on the shelf, having finished it from cover to cover. He strode into the library and made a show of looking around, paying special attention to the places that Analia had reshelved herself.

“Like it never happened,” he said. “Wait, no…”

He switched two books around and nodded to himself. “There we go. Like it never happened.”

Analia rolled her eyes at his antics, but it was easy to see she was excited. “Finally. Does it always take you this long?”

“To do my job? Yes. We have a schedule and everything. Same time, every day.”

“Why do you even bother? It’s not like you need the money.”

Bardin gestured towards the library around them. “This right here? This is nothing compared to what the Academy keeps just in the restricted sections. I teach first years simple stuff that the actual professors don’t have the patience for. In return, I get unlimited access to stuff you can’t even imagine yet. And between you and me, there are more restricted sections even I don’t get to see.”

“You haven’t even read half the books in this library,” Analia told him.

“So? Most of them are boring. Like this whole shelf here is nothing but tax ledgers. Who wants to read that?”

There was really no arguing there. All of them, with the possible exception of Malk, were interested in magic above all else. Nym still wasn’t sure if the bodyguard was a mage or not, but he wasn’t going to rule the possibility out.

“Anyway, I am here now, so let’s get to it. I am just dying to know. Plus, I’m totally going to swindle Professor Lakridge out of some reagents he’s hoarding when I bet him on how many I can do at once.” Bardin rubbed his hands together eagerly and led them to an open space in the center of the library. “Nym, please describe your telekinesis spell to us.”