Ascendant

“How do you know all of this? Can you use magic too?” Nym asked.

“Er, I live next to the magister. Amos goes there for lessons twice a week and I overhear a lot. He was on his way back from his lesson today when you bumped into him.”

Nym noticed she hadn’t exactly answered his second question, but he decided to gloss over it. If she didn’t want to talk about it, he wasn’t going to force her. Besides, she’d been nice and helpful so far. It would be rude to pry into her personal life if she decided not to share.

“What’s wrong with him anyway? I’ve never met anyone so arrogant? Is he nobility or something?”

Lathia let out a laugh. “He wishes. His father is a wealthy merchant. If they could buy a noble title, I’m sure they would. Failing that, the whole family makes sure we all know that they have money and we don’t. Thus, we are all inferior human beings in their eyes.”

“If that’s how they feel, why do they even live here?”

Lathia shrugged. “Money reasons, I assume. The Nestar family has never deigned to speak to me, and I am very happy to keep it that way.”

He started to laugh, only to wince and grab at his chest again. “Owww,” he groaned. “So this will go away on its own?”

“There is a thing I overheard Magister Tormin tell Amos once. He said it was a meditation technique used to purge the body of arcana and speed up recovery from arcana poisoning in case Amos actually overdrew himself and flooded his soul well.”

“That sounds like it would help.”

“Yeah,” Lathia agreed. “The thing is, I don’t know how to teach it to you. I only know what I overheard them talking about. So it might not help unless you can get Magister Tormin to explain all the parts I can’t tell you about.”

“That’s fine. Anything would be better than nothing.”

“Okay, I’ll do my best to explain it the way I heard it. First, you have to be able to feel the arcana in your body. That’s what the meditation part is for. It’s to help you figure out where the arcana spread to. Once you know that, you have to figure out how to manipulate it. Magister Tormin said the key was to take it in small chunks and break it down in your soul well, then make a reverse conduit to drain it back to whatever layer it came from.

“That was very important too. I remember him stressing that a lot to Amos, to not try to release the first circle into the second layer or the other way around. That was a bad idea. If he didn’t think he could hold his conduit stable in the second layer to discharge extra arcana, he was better off waiting for it to break down naturally.”

Nym was silent until he was sure Lathia was done. “I have… follow up questions,” he said. “What is a layer? What’s the difference between a first and second circle? How are you supposed to siphon the arcana out of your body into your soul well?”

She just gave him a helpless shrug. “I’m just telling you what I heard the magister say. I don’t know how to do the technique itself. Why would I?”

Lathia was protesting a little too hard for it to be honest, in Nym’s opinion. Whatever she was keeping secret though wasn’t his business. Nobody had forced her to help him, and he was learning a lot from their conversation. “But the circle thing? And the layers?”

“Right, those. That I can tell you a little bit about. The way magic works is there are what they call layers of reality, and the act of magic is bringing in some of the essence of one of those layers to ours. The further you get from the real world, the harder it is to bring in the magic, but the more powerful the spell. According to Magister Tormin, almost everybody who can use magic of any kind is only able to draw on the first layer, which lets them use first circle magic.

“Some people who are super talented or lucky or whatever can pull from the second layer, like the magister and Amos. There’s supposed to be a third layer past that, but you’ve got to be a real prodigy to reach that one. Third circle mages are really rare, and their magic is so powerful that they’re all rich and important.”

“So… by that logic, I can’t meditate away this arcana poisoning because it’s from the second layer, and I can only reach the first.”

“Oh, hrmm.” Lathia frowned. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Sorry, I didn’t think of that.”

There went all Nym’s hopes. It was going to be a long, unpleasant slog home. Every muscle in his body ached like he’d been beaten with a stick, and in some cases that was basically true. He just knew he’d have a bruise across his back from Amos’s shoving telekinesis attack, and that foot-plant on his shoulder had been pretty hard too.

“I guess I should start the trip home then. Probably going to need a lot of breaks to rest,” Nym said. He stood up with a groan and used his own magic to fetch the sack of onions. It hurt and the magic came sluggishly, but not as much as it would have to bend over and pick them up. Plus it was easier to keep them all in place until he managed to pinch the split seam closed.

Lathia watched him with a frown. “How did you do that?” she said. “You shouldn’t be able to do any magic right now.”

“Why wouldn’t I be able to?” Nym asked.

“Because… the disruption?”

“Wait, that’s supposed to completely stop me from using any magic? It just feels like things are sore.”

Lathia stood up and dusted her pants off. She held out a hand for Nym to shake, but he had both of his full with his onions. “Sorry,” he said, presenting an elbow to touch her fingers instead. He wiggled it up and down in an approximation of a hand shake.

“You’re a weird kid, but I like you. You keep doing things that you shouldn’t be able to do. Swimming with sharks. Using magic while suffering from arcana poisoning. Plus I saw how many things you picked up at once.”

“I suppose if the only alternative is Amos, I can see why you’d prefer a weirdo like me.”

“Exactly! That one’s my house right there, next to Magister Tormin’s like I said. Come visit sometime. It’s nice to have someone to talk to about all this magic stuff.”

They parted ways there, with her going back across the field to the village and him starting the long slog back west to the coast. It took him twice as long as normal, which was still an hour faster than his first trip ever.

He got back and set the bag of onions down near the front door, then went to lay down. Ciana was nowhere to be found, to his surprise. Her chore was to check the snare lines while he went to town, and she should have beaten him back by a wide margin considering the extra time it took to walk home. Hopefully the delay was due to an abundance of wild game and they’d eat good for the next few days.

With nothing better to do than reflect on what he’d learned, Nym stared up at the ceiling from the pallet they’d made for him so Ciana could reclaim her bed. It was strange that Lathia wanted to hide her own abilities. She obviously had more than a passing interest in magic if she was listening in on all of the lectures the magister was giving to the rich twat. Maybe she didn’t want to admit that she was basically stealing classes from him. If she couldn’t do magic, it was just stuff she overheard, but if it was useful information, someone would probably want her to pay for it.

Or maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe she really couldn’t do magic herself, but wished she could and was deeply fascinated by it. That would be awful for her to be so close to the topic without actually being able to participate. Nym hoped that wasn’t the case, and that she could do magic but didn’t want people to know.

The meditation technique she described sounded interesting, but learning about the layers of magic was more immediately relevant to him. He couldn’t use the technique to clear out arcana poisoning even if he did know exactly how to do it. But reinforcing his conduit so that he could pierce through the first layer to reach the second was something he could practice.

That’s what he did for the next half an hour, until the pain became too much and he needed a break. Trying to make a magical breakthrough while suffering from an enemy attack on his soul well wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. He was too stubborn to give up completely, and once the pain had subsided, he started working on it again.

Nym had to admit that he didn’t really know what he was doing, and experimentation was both tedious and, for now, painful. After the third round of trying to figure out how to tap into the second layer, he was forced to concede defeat. It was something to practice later, and he was starting to get distracted by the fact that Ciana still hadn’t returned yet.

The sun was sinking into the ocean and he’d started preparing vegetables for the stew pot when she finally stalked through the door, empty-handed. “Checking the lines didn’t go well?” he asked.

She stomped over to the log they shared when they were eating and snarled, “That damn Senman. I just found out that that son of a bitch has been stealing from my snares. Every time he came by to give me some extra food he caught, it was something he took off my traps!”

Nym peered at her. It was hard to tell in the fading light and with flickering shadows from the fire dancing across her face, but he was pretty sure. “Is that a black eye?” he asked.

Ciana turned her head away. “I may have had some strong words with him when I caught him looting one of my snares. Things… may have escalated.”

“I guess you didn’t win?”

“What makes you say that? You should see what he looks like now!”

“Well,” Nym said slowly, dragging the word out. “I guess I just thought that if you’d caught him in the act, and had a fight with him about it, you would have come back with some food if you’d won.”

Ciana scowled at him. “You’re too damn smart for your own good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Talk to the captain of the guard. Can’t prove anything, but hopefully it’ll at least get some eyes on him and they might catch him up to no good. But enough about me!”

Ciana turned to glare at him. “I heard all about your escapades today. Tell me, what in God’s name possessed you to pick a fight with the son of the richest man in town?”

“Oh, uh, you know about that, huh?”

She snorted. “Yeah, brawling in front of Apari’s store. She’s such a gossip. Everyone knows about it. By the way, everyone also knows you can do magic now. But don’t try to sidetrack me! What were you thinking?”

Nym wanted to protest that he wasn’t the one who was dragging the conversation around, but he was smart enough to read her mood and knew better than to argue. He was already in trouble as it was.

“It wasn’t my fault. I bumped into him on accident and he was unreasonable about it.”

“Of course he was. He’s rich! Rich people don’t have to be reasonable about anything they don’t want to. Worse still, Magister Tormin’s been polishing his ego for going on two years now when they found out he could do magic. They think he’s good enough to head up to the Academy in Abilanth for serious training.”

“Well it’s not like I knew that! I didn’t even know who he was. I was just trying to keep the onions from falling out of that hole in the bag when I was leaving the store and there he was.”

Ciana sighed. “Tell me everything that happened. I want it straight from your mouth, and then we can work on damage control. Trust me, a little shithead like him being humiliated by you, this isn’t over. You’ll be seeing him again.”

That was just great. Nym had his very own rich bully who could probably get away with anything. He was hurting and hungry and it’d be nothing but vegetables in the stew. Tonight couldn’t get much worse. Almost on cue, the fire popped and some cinders fell on his foot. Nym yelped in pain and scooted back.

There it was. It was worse. Perfect.