Ascendant

The testing continued for another hour, though Professor Langdon didn’t feel the need to explain much of what they were doing for Nym’s benefit. He followed their instructions to the letter and did his best to keep control of his fears and his temper. It did not help that the professor often chatted with Bardin about him, both of them acting as if he wasn’t even in the room.

He grit his teeth and forced himself to play along. Even for just the chance of recovering his missing memories, he cooperated. There were a lot of technical terms being thrown around which Nym didn’t really understand, but eventually Professor Langdon ran out of tests and invited them back to the sitting room to go over the results.

“This is quite an unusual case,” they said, for probably the eighth time. Nym felt a twinge in his eyelid.

“What were you able to determine, Professor?” Bardin asked.

“First, as I said during the original diagnostic spell, you seem to be four months old. Do you know about object reading spells? They interact with items in a temporal fashion to see history related to them. We can do the same for people, but it’s a lot less reliable, especially with mages. For you, it comes up with some random scattered moments in your time line, but nothing older than a few months.”

“What does that mean?” Nym asked, again. He’d been asking variations of that question for an hour while the professor babbled in circles.

“Obviously it means that the spell is wrong, unless you have reason to believe that you are a baby stuck in a pre-teen’s body.” The professor paused and gave Nym an intent stare. “No? Well, it’s always best to rule out all possibilities.”

“Naturally I wanted to test this magically as well, so the next set of tests was to determine your actual age. The results were… inconsistent. Biologically, you’re eleven years old. If I had to guess, I’d say you have a birthday coming up in the next two months. However, your body shows signs of rapid aging, maybe as much as four or five times as fast as normal.”

“Wait, what’s this now?” Bardin cut in. “Are you saying that he’s actually a toddler who grew up too fast?”

“Well, no, not necessarily,” the professor said. “I was not able to determine how long he’s been under this effect. It could have started a month ago, or a year. Or yes, perhaps it’s been going on his whole life. I don’t know.”

“What does it mean?” Nym asked.

“No idea,” the professor told him, their eyes sparkling. “It’s fascinating though. Anyway, in regards to your memories from before the incident, I can’t find anything. There is no evidence of tampering, no signs you’ve been attacked by anything that devours thoughts, dreams, or memories. In fact, the cut off is so clean that it’s suspicious itself.

“Whatever happened to you did too good a job of cleaning up after itself. It doesn’t look natural. There’s this sharp cut off in your past where everything just… stops happening. It’s like you were spun wholesale out of the arcana and dumped onto this world, like you didn’t exist at all prior to waking up on the beach you told me about.”

That wasn’t exactly true. He did have one single memory from when he was younger, but he hadn’t shared it with anyone since Ciana and he didn’t want to start now. It indicated that he belonged to a family that was important, which meant that maybe he was vulnerable to that family’s enemies, which meant he didn’t want to be found by those enemies without the aegis of his family’s protection. Nym considered sharing the information briefly, but he didn’t trust Bardin not to find a way to use the information against him, and he didn’t trust Professor Langdon not to tell Bardin even if Nym found a way to pass the information on without the nobleman hearing it.

“Do you know how to fix me?” Nym asked instead.

“I don’t have a clue. Whatever happened to you isn’t something I’ve ever seen before. I fully believe that you have no memories older than a few months though, so I can confirm that at least. I know that doesn’t help you much personally, but it should help lay to rest any concerns about the veracity of your claim.”

“It’s still kind of worrisome though, Professor,” Bardin said. “You are a master mage, capable of casting third circle spells, who specializes in divination. If you don’t know how to proceed, who else could? Even worse, if you can’t even diagnose what happened to him, let alone fix it, how powerful is whoever did this? And why would anyone do any of this to a child?”

Professor Langdon started laughing. “Oh, I forget how young you are sometimes. Third circle magic is respectable, but you don’t make it to archmage without reaching the fifth layer. They are capable of magics I can’t even dream of. There are stories of a mythical sixth layer past that, the realm of God, but who could say if it’s real. Personally, I think the idea serves to give archmages something to strive for, to let them keep reaching for that next plateau.”

“Why don’t I know about any of this?” Bardin demanded, bewilderment plain on his face. “I work for the Academy!”

The professor just shrugged. “I’m not responsible for anything other than divination classes. This seems like something that would be under the field of general knowledge to me. I really couldn’t say why we don’t teach new mages about the five layers of extra-reality from which we can draw arcana.”

“But… the Astral Sea… it’s endless. That’s why it’s the Astral Sea. It’s impossible to forge a conduit that transcends an endless distance… isn’t it?”

“Eeeehhhh… technically, yes? You’re a bright boy, I’m sure you’ll figure it out someday. And if not, there’s no shame in that. Almost nobody ever actually makes it to the fourth layer, and even the ones that find it, only a fraction of a fraction manage to pierce it. Maybe build up some clout with the school and ask Headmaster Veran to explain it. He is an archmage, after all.”

The professor turned away from the nobleman, who stood there flummoxed, and resumed examining Nym. “Back on topic, shall we? Now, I did say that there’s this clean cut four months ago, but imagine your life as a string. It proceeds forward in a straight line from the day you’re born to the day you die. That’s the flow of time. Some people describe it as a river with a current because you can only go one way, and with magic you can try swim against the current to slow time down, or with it to speed time up. But you can’t ever go backwards, you can only change the speed you go forward.

“But for the purposes of this discussion, time is a string stretching across your life. Except, you don’t have a string beyond a few months ago. It leads into the future normally enough, but nothing behind it. It just vanishes. There’s no birth event at the beginning. What there is… are little knots. Seven of them, if I’ve counted correctly, stacked on top of each other, all taking place in a fraction of a second.

“I have no idea what these knots are, other than to tell you that they are a snarl in your memories. I tried to pick one open and see what was in there, but it was too complicated for me to unravel. So that’s the best advice I can offer you. Figure out what those seven knots are, find someone who can work with them, and see if they can give you any clues.”

That was annoyingly vague. Once he cut through the long-winded explanation, the professor’s advice wasn’t really anything better than ‘find someone who is better than me to try to help you.’ Nym didn’t have a clue where he was going to find someone like that. He wouldn’t even be at the Academy now if not for Bardin’s connections.

 “Do you know anyone who could do that?” Nym asked.

“Not anyone who’s still breathing. Samric Olethal was arguably better than me at divinations, but he’s been dead for twenty years now and I was spot on in predicting that, so I guess I won in the end. There are a few prognosticators among the Glacial Valley tribes who tend to have some pretty unique abilities, but they’re all trolls and they are not friendly towards humans. Not at all. Nope. They will definitely try to eat you if you go there.”

Nym bit back some harsh words and did his best to remain polite. “Is there anything you can tell me at all to help?”

“Sure. All sorts of things. If you keep screwing around with your problems instead of taking care of them, you’re going to get struck by a bolt of lightning. You’ve got a family reunion coming up soon, though it’s a small one. And, um... I’m not really clear on this one, but something to do with a necromancer? It’s kind of foggy. Still a ways off, I think. It’s kind of in a bit of a feedback loop. The less you divine about it, the less likely you are to interact with that future event.”

“Oh… I don’t know what any of that means.”

He didn’t have any family, at least not that he could remember. Maybe they meant he’d meet someone he was related to but not know it.

Professor Langdon snorted. “Well of course you don’t. You’re not supposed to. It’s the future! Took me sixty years to get to this level of skill. If you did it at your age, well, I’d just die of embarrassment. Might take you with me on my way out too.”

“What do I do next then?” Nym asked, dreading the answer.

“I don’t have a clue! But good luck. Come back someday and let me know how it all turned out, won’t you?”

Nym had learned a lot of vulgar words in his time being homeless. He used all of them in the next few minutes, and when he started running out, he mixed them into new combinations to keep going.

* * *

“So that could have gone better,” Bardin said once they were back in the carriage.

“I know. I’m sorry. It was a very frustrating conversation.”

“Yes, but still. The professor was doing us a favor, after all.”

Nym stared out the window through the crack in the curtains and watched houses go by. After a few blocks, he said, “What would you do, if you were me?”

“Well that’s easy. I’d come back to my estate, have dinner with my sister and me, and work on rounding out your basics some more so that you’ll be ready to enter the Academy as a student when the next term starts.”

In other words, Bardin still expected him to sign that contract and become indentured to his family for twenty years or more. Nym had just days to extract as much information from the Feldstal library as he could. Hopefully they would let him look at the actual spellbooks instead of just going over theory.

He didn’t know what he’d do after that. He couldn’t imagine himself signing that contract, and once he left the estate, it would be back to taking care of himself, scrounging for food, trying to dodge the guards and Valgo. He might just try his luck filling a bag with as much food as he could get his hands on and flying towards warmer weather. If he was fast enough, he wouldn’t freeze or starve.

“I guess we’ll just take it one day at a time,” he said out loud. Bardin nodded in agreement, thinking that Nym was going along with the future he’d laid out for the boy.