Ascendant

“I don’t get it,” Analia said.

“I’ll be honest… me neither.” Bardin gestured to the spell book on the table between the three of them. “This can’t possibly be right.”

“I developed this myself and I didn’t have any spells to study from, so it was a lot of trial and error, but this spell appears to be more or less the same one I use,” Nym said.

They’d gone over it. Nym had demonstrated his telekinesis spell. He’d broken down the movement of the arcana, and Bardin had announced that what he was using was a basic telekinesis spell with no frills or twists. He’d even pulled a beginner’s spell book off the shelves and pointed it out. If anything, the standard telekinesis spell actually did a slightly better job at weight transferal by spreading it out to impact all muscles instead of focusing on the arms and torso like Nym’s version did.

“So the real problem is the mind can really only keep track of so many things at once. It’s not hard to pick up ten or twenty objects in a bundle just by wrapping them in one big telekinetic grip, but then they all move as one. That’s not what you’re doing.”

Nym was holding twenty books in the air individually, each one rotating around him in a different pattern. It was a bit of a strain to keep them steady, but no one was grading him on the smoothness of their flight. “I’m not sure what to tell you. The only thing I’m really doing different than how the book describes it is how I handle the weight.”

“What does it mean then?” Analia asked her brother.

“Well, he’s also using less arcana than he should need by cutting the even spread of the weight out of the spell. Maybe that’s the key? Using less arcana makes it easier to run parallel discrete processes?”

Bardin lifted up seven books and set them to floating around. They trembled in the air, and one by one, fell back to the floor until he only had three left. “I could probably hold four steady indefinitely if I really put my mind to it, but I’d need to forge a tier three conduit just to keep the arcana flow in the positive,” he mused out loud.

The rest of the books landed in a stack on the table in front of him. The glow of arcana around him intensified and he cast a new telekinesis spell using Nym’s variations. All seven books rose back up into the air again. He lost control of two of them before they even stabilized, and the other five shook in place. One more thumped down, and the last four stabilized.

“I don’t think that’s the reason.” Bardin let out a loud, defeated sigh and returned the rest of the books to the table. Nym picked up the books off the floor with his own telekinesis spell and added them to the pile, while keeping up the orbit of the twenty books that were already spinning around overhead.

“Incredible,” Bardin said. “How are you keeping track of so many individual objects? Are you just that brilliant, Nym? Just doing the same thing as the rest of us, but five times better?”

“What’s to keep track of? I set the path and now it’s just going to do it until I tell it to do something else or I run out of arcana.”

“Huh… kind of like ritual magic but without the instruments. Your mind is just maintaining all of it at once without tying any of it to an object. But still… to keep that running for as long as you have, I can’t even calculate the tier that conduit is.”

Nym shrugged. He didn’t have a problem with running out of arcana. The limiting factor to his magic was usually his own exhaustion. A soul well could be filled and drained many, many times in a single day, but eventually all the arcana would poison him. The better his control, the longer he could go without suffering the symptoms.

“I guess if I couldn’t pull in new arcana fast enough, I’d just make a second conduit to the same layer,” he said. “But I’ve never had to do that. I only need to make two conduits if I want to do something like fly and use telekinesis at the same time.”

“What?” Analia came up out of her chair. She looked back and forth between Nym and Bardin. “It’s possible to have multiple conduits open at the same time?”

“You’ll learn about it in your third year. It’s not easy to do at all. Nym, how did you ever figure it out on your own?”

“Two conduits wasn’t the hard part. Keeping the arcana from mixing in my soul well was where it got tricky.”

Bardin started laughing. “Oh God, you really are just fumbling through all of this, aren’t you? You make multiple conduits based on… I don’t even know… instinct and raw talent, and intent filtering is the stumbling block? That makes me feel a lot better about all of this, you know? Less inadequate at being shown up by a twelve-year old.”

“Ten-year old,” Nym corrected.

“Sure, sorry. You’re very tall for your age then. Either way, so young that you should barely be doing anything beyond instinctive magic. Somehow, you’re doing things that are incredibly advanced or outright impossible based on what I know. I really don’t even know what to say. You’re going to be an archmage by the time you finish your Academy training.”

“I’m not going to the Academy,” Nym said. “I wanted to, but… I can’t even walk around the inner ring without getting hassled by the guards. They’ll throw me out as soon as they catch me. It’s happened a few times in the middle ring too.”

“Right, sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s something I was planning on talking to you about a little bit later. Noble houses sometimes take in talented commoners and sponsor their education in exchange for a contract of servitude. This is usually for trade professions like craftsmen, but your obvious magical talent would be an easy sell to our father. Every noble house needs more mages.”

Nym could already tell he wasn’t interested just from the description of the contract. He’d rather be free and figure his magic out on his own than owe years of service to someone else. He didn’t want to be rude though, especially since he’d barely gotten a chance to look at the Feldstal library. Also, he was an intruder turned guest, so he still needed to be on his best behavior.

“You would pay for me to attend the Academy?” Nym said. “How much would that cost?”

“The standard contract for craftsmen is ten years, but their training is usually only two years. The Academy is a six-year curriculum and even if we had you stay here instead of in on-campus housing, it’s quite expensive. There are a lot of factors that determine tuition, mainly what classes you end up taking, but conservatively, a thousand crests would be my guess. I would have to speak with the accountants to run the numbers, but I am guessing your contract will need to be for twenty years. The terms would be laid out to include an additional year of service for every hundred crests you go over.”

The number was overwhelming. He would be years making that back in Zoskan, and it was a complete impossibility here. He was never going to attend the Academy unless he sold himself into servitude. He’d be an old man by the time he was free again, and that assumed the Feldstals didn’t find some other way to keep their hooks in him.

“That is a really long time,” he said, dazed just thinking about it.

“It’s just a guess. Don’t take anything I said as a guarantee. It could be less, could be more. Promise to consider it though. No offense Nym… but you’re in a really bad position. This could literally save your life.”

That was also true. He was homeless and being pressured by a thief who wouldn’t think twice about disposing of him if Nym became too inconvenient. He had no way to make any money to afford food and shelter. Really, when he considered it, his best options were to either swipe something valuable on his way out, pawn it for two crests, and take a teleport to literally anywhere else, or to sign the contract, no matter how bad the terms were.

“What about a contract to just keep access to your library? I could teach myself a lot from the books here.”

Bardin nodded. “I’m sure you could. You have managed some amazing things already teaching yourself, but this library is a fraction of the size of the Academy’s and everyone benefits from having actual teachers. I’m not saying you couldn’t get there eventually on your own, but you will be a master mage by the time you graduate from the Academy.”

That was probably true, but Nym didn’t like the deal. He didn’t want to take it. “I guess we can hammer out the details once the actual contract is drawn up,” he said.

Analia had been silent throughout the conversation, but she interjected there. “Exactly! Nym’s right. That’s a conversation for another day. Right now, I want to know how he does his flight spell. That was the deal we have already.”

Bardin held his hands up in mock surrender. “You heard the lady, Nym. Let’s move on with today’s agenda.”

“Okay, so for how I fly, I am using basic air manipulation to create cushions that hold me up. I actually did spend a week or so with a master mage who did the same thing, so I’m pretty sure there’s not anything new for you guys here.”

“Oh? Who was it. I know most of the masters who’ve come out of the Academy in the last decade.”

“His name was Brogan,” Nym said.

“Brogan… Brogan… hmm… older man? Very military when he’s on the ground, borderline insane in the air?”

“That’s him.”

“Who’s that?” Analia asked.

“He does flight training for mages going into the military. I’ve heard he used to teach at the Academy thirty years ago, but he… uh… left… due to differences of opinion with the administration of the time.”

“That sounds like a fancy way of saying he got fired,” Analia said.

“Well,” Bardin began, “Yeah… pretty much. I guess he didn’t care to follow the curriculum agreed upon by the other professors. Told them they were a bunch of incompetent idiots. There’s a few stories that float around the classrooms, even today, about the fights he got into with some of the other professors.”

“So, if you trained with this Brogan fellow, you must be pretty good,” Analia told Nym.

“Brogan is a horrible old monster,” Nym said flatly. “He let me use the training grounds, but I wasn’t part of his classes. That… that didn’t go well when we tried that.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there.”

“Nothing I want to think about too much,” Nym said.

“But still,” Bardin said. “If you’re using the same flight technique as Master Brogan, that must be a good one. I’ve never heard of an air cushion method.”

“What does the Academy teach for flight spells?” Nym asked, curious.

“We don’t. There’s a slow falling spell we learn just in case, but flight is generally considered to be very difficult and dangerous to practice with. It’s very easy to have a fatal accident. The fact that Analia not only is proficient with a flight spell, but that she’s only thirteen, is quite the feather in our house’s cap.”

Analia didn’t look proud though. If anything, Nym thought she looked extremely uncomfortable all of the sudden. He wouldn’t have guessed that she was the type of person to be embarrassed by some praise, but he supposed everyone had their quirks.

“Mine is a bit different than hers. I started using telekinesis as a base. Basically instead of picking up other things, I wanted to be able to pick up myself. So I solidified the air around me and use magic to move it while it holds onto me. Here, let me show you what I mean…”