Ascendant

Nym didn’t want to say the last week was a total waste. He’d learned a lot about magic fundamentals and a few new spells. More importantly, he’d recovered a second memory that had showed him the importance of structuring his magic not only in the correct order, but also with the correct timing and in such a way that it would be altered. Learning how to essentially pin part of the spell in place to weave other elements around it would no doubt be invaluable in the future.

Being gifted with such a powerful offensive spell was also a boon he couldn’t afford to underestimate. For the first time since he’d woken up on that beach, he felt like he had a real option besides running away from problems. It wasn’t a perfect solution, as he’d already demonstrated by accidentally hitting Analia with it, but it worked very well.

He wasn’t sure it was worth it though. Valgo was a bad enough enemy, but after everything that had happened in the last few hours, he was sure House Feldstal would want him too. If they didn’t find him, the city guard would. He had murdered a dozen people and committed arson after all.

He absolutely had to get out of Abilanth now. There was no way around it. Even without the money, he needed to go. At this point, it was probably too late to use the guildhall’s teleportation platforms anyway.

Without the threat of imminent danger, the cold numbness fell away. All that was left was Nym, and he felt paralyzed by indecision. He almost wanted that other personality back just so he could feel like he was in control and the decisions were easy. But then he remembered how transactional he’d considered his relationship with Analia while he acted that way, how coldly he’d weighed her life and safety against the potential gains he could make by letting her die.

It scared him. He didn’t like who he was and the things he did when his life was on the line. He didn’t like that when he saw survivors among the bodies he’d made, the first thing he did was weigh whether it was worth the effort to the finish the job. He’d left enemies alive behind him, people who might recover and want revenge.

Since he couldn’t just summon the numbness whenever he wanted, he’d have to solve his own problems. Leaving Abilanth was still insurmountable though. He didn’t have the funds to take a teleport or buy supplies. He barely knew which direction to go if he left, but none of that mattered at this point. Valgo was still alive and would no doubt have a healer of his own to patch him back up, a hundred people had seen him flying over the city, and both the Feldstals and the guard would be coming for him. If he stayed, the only question was who would get to him first.

The plan was to wait for nightfall and sneak out. He only had to stay ahead of everyone for one day. It was sorely tempting to leave immediately, and if it were anywhere else, he would. But if there was any city in the world that could catch someone who was flying away, it was Abilanth, home of the Academy and hundreds of full-fledged mages.

Nym slunk around back alleys and hid from sight as the hours passed by at a crawl. Every time he saw another person, he flinched away. Every time he spotted a guard on the street, he fought down a feeling of panic. Eventually he found a dead-end alley with some garbage piled up that he was able to hide behind. He settled into place and started scrying the whole length of the alley, watching to see if anyone approached.

Hours and hours went by, with his throat getting dry and his stomach rumbling, but Nym refused to leave his hiding spot. Morning turned into noon, and noon into evening. In another hour or two, the sun would be hidden completely behind the mountain and he would leave.

It was the obsessive, even paranoid, scrying that saved him. He saw hands emerging out of the shadows behind him, saw them reach out to grab him. He jerked forward just in time to avoid being caught, but not fast enough to avoid fingers snagging onto his shirt. With a cry, Nym was pulled off his feet into the darkness.

He landed inside a pitch-black room and lashed out wildly with bursts of telekinetic energy. They slapped against a person, but weren’t strong enough to do more than elicit a grunt. Nym’s scrying spell snapped, the distance between the alley and wherever he’d been taken too great. He cast a night vision spell, and the room lit up just in time to see Valgo limping toward him with a knife in one hand. The burns across his body were half-healed, but the old thief was still crispy and obviously in great pain.

There was no time to build up the delicate construct of a lightning bolt, not when Valgo was already lunging at him. The only thing Nym could do was hurl himself back and to the side. He could see the aura of a night vision spell on Valgo’s face too, and knew he couldn’t rely on the darkness to shield him from getting stabbed.

This time there was no clever comments or banter. Valgo didn’t go for theatrics or speeches. He just came at Nym, relentless, with murder in his eyes. Nym reviewed his options while he maneuvered to keep his distance. The ceiling was too low to fly out of reach, and while Nym could rely on his air manipulation to dart around and stay away from the older man, Valgo had prepared well. There was no furniture to use as a shield, the only door was locked, and there were no windows. Nym was well and truly trapped.

One of them wasn’t walking out of the room alive, and Nym needed an uninterrupted second if he didn’t want to be the corpse left cooling on the floor. He was faster while he was flying, and he could use telekinesis to try to trip Valgo up, but that was pushing him to his limits and the thief hadn’t even started to use his own magic yet.

Valgo reached into his coat and produced a smaller, oddly-shaped knife. Nym had an instant to wonder why it looked so different than the other one the thief was holding, and then it was flying through the air at him. Panicked, Nym snapped his kinetic barrier up to deflect it and released his air cushions to try to dodge.

He had his flight back under control before he hit the ground, but in that one frozen moment where he tumbled, vulnerable, Valgo’s arm disappeared at the shoulder. It emerged from the darkness next to Nym and the blade of the knife slid into Nym’s stomach. It came back out, bloody up to the hilt, and Nym screamed.

The barrier collapsed and he crashed to the floor, holding his gut as blood poured out between his fingers. The old thief sneered and disappeared, only to show back up in the room kneeling next to Nym. He reached down and grabbed Nym’s hair to jerk his face up and expose his neck.

Frantically, Nym formed a solid barrier of air between him and the knife, with a kinetic barrier behind it. The knife punched through one, then the other, barely slowing down. A dozen telekinetic hands caught Valgo’s arm and held him back for a bare moment. Then the strain overloaded Nym’s arms and his muscles tore from the feedback.

That was all the time he needed though. It was sloppy, but the spark of elemental fire ignited in the spell and the construct collapsed on itself. Lightning bloomed in the air between the two of them, scorching Nym from his face to his feet and throwing Valgo across the room. The knife flashed as it went tumbling through the air to stick point-first in the ceiling.

Nym tried to move, but every part of him was in agonizing pain. If Valgo wasn’t dead now, then Nym was only going to live long enough for the thief to finish the job. He waited, too hurt to move, too weak to focus on making new magic, and stared into the darkness. His night vision spell had failed him when the lightning bolt went off.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the spell the healer had cast on him to numb pain. It wasn’t terribly complicated compared to the rest of the healing magic, but it was still hellishly delicate and Nym had only seen it cast once. He put it together slowly over the next ten minutes as arcana trickled through him. It was all he could do to hold a conduit open and weave the magic into something coherent. Half way through, it collapsed.

Nym nearly gave up, but no one was going to come rescue him. He started over. And over. And over. On the fifth attempt, he pulled it all together and the spell went off. Whatever it did though, it didn’t work. He was in just as much pain as before he’d started. Nym would have sighed if he could have moved his face.

An hour later, he managed to successfully cast the spell. If the lightning bolt hadn’t cauterized the knife wound in his stomach, he probably would have bled out long before he managed to pull it off. Once the pain receded, he realized that he’d stopped even putting pressure on it.

Slowly, he climbed to his feet. With his night vision spell back up, he looked down at himself. His clothes were in tatters, his skin blistered and burnt in a pattern that reminded him of roots or tree branches. It started on his cheek and spread out to cover his whole chest and curled down onto his right leg. A second pattern started at his left knee and traveled down to his feet.

It looked similar to the wounds Analia had, only with far more thorough coverage. Just looking at it sent new aches through him. If not for the pain suppression spell, he thought he would have collapsed again. With a broken laugh, he realized he’d been wrong before. He thought Professor Langdon’s off-the-cuff prophecy had been fulfilled with the initial strike, but if he’d finished Valgo off when he’d had the chance, he wouldn’t be in the shape he was in. He’d been struck by his own lightning because he kept screwing around instead of acting decisively.

Valgo was now thoroughly dead. Nym triple-checked and even used air magic to pull all the air away from the body for five minutes just to make sure the thief wasn’t faking. The only way to verify it any further would be to dismember Valgo, which Nym lacked the tools, time, energy, and willpower to do. Instead, he turned to the locked door and summoned up enough arcana to unlock it with scrying and telekinesis.

It didn’t take long to find a way out, but he had to stop for a quick detour. It seemed Valgo had retreated back to a secret base in the outer ring, which included his own personal vault. Nym found it casually with scrying magic while mapping out the interior to find an exit, and noted a plethora of mechanical traps in the room. Once he reached it, he dropped the scrying and checked to confirm there were a few wards set up as well.

The weakness of any ward was the material it was inscribed on. In this case, they were hidden behind panels that created false walls surrounding the room. It was easy enough to tear those down as they weren’t actually anchored to anything. Nym assumed they were made to be pulled away so that the wards could be serviced when needed, but for him, it just meant that he didn’t have to try very hard to get a knife in there to deface them.

He had no clue what the wards did, but it was easy enough to break them. Once that was accomplished, he floated over to a giant safe that stood up against the back wall and forced it open. Inside were a small fortune in gems and coins all conveniently packaged in a bag, along with a dozen different forms of identification for various cities, most of which Nym had never heard of.

Rounding off the haul was a small, mechanical crossbow designed to be used with one hand. The limbs were engineered to fold back against the stock, and the whole thing was stored in its own case complete with ten bolts. It was probably worth quite a lot, but Nym didn’t want it. He tossed it aside, along with everything else but the money and gems.

Then he let himself out a second story window, marked the location, and dragged himself through the air to the closest outer circle clinic. The healers on staff regarded him with blank horror when he staggered through the door, but he flashed enough gold around to be seen immediately.

They weren’t as good as Jorak and Mehta, but two hours later, he was able to walk back out under his own power. He was covered in new scars, especially a wide, puckered one on his stomach, which had been the hardest wound to treat. The healer told him he’d need to come back for follow up treatments to make sure infection hadn’t gotten into him. Nym agreed, though he had no intention of doing so.

It was deep into the night now. He was suddenly rich, and down one enemy, but he still needed to deal with the Feldstals if he wanted to stay in the city, assuming that was even an option. If Analia could defend him, he might save himself from being jailed for murdering their kidnappers. Otherwise the new plan was to use some of his stolen money to supply himself for the journey and leave as soon as possible. Nym snuck into the middle ring to visit the clinic he’d dropped Analia off at and check if he still had an ally among the nobles.