Ascendant

The road leading away from Abilanth was treacherous, deliberately so. In his studies of geography, Nym had learned that he’d been living in a capital city, one that they’d built on the side of a mountain to protect themselves from the neighboring country. He didn’t feel the politics or history of it was all that interesting, but the short version was that he was living inside a country called Delvros and they were not on friendly terms with Nordram to the east.

In the event that he and Analia were barred from using the Delvros teleport network, their new goal was to travel on foot and cross Nordram’s border far enough away from any check points that they could slip in unnoticed. The plan relied heavily on Nym’s growing ability for overland flight.

That was all well and good, but he didn’t see how Analia was going to catch up to him. Her original flight spell taxed her so heavily that she’d exhaust herself in minutes, and she was nowhere near proficient enough after only a few days of practice with his version to safely fly hundreds of miles. All of that assumed she was able to get away from her family, who were surely watching her much more closely.

Still, he owed Analia a lot, and if she’d said to go with this plan, it wasn’t like he had anywhere better to be. So Nym flew south, bypassing the many twists and turns of the road below him as it snaked around. He saved hours by being able to fly over ravines and canyons or bypassing narrow, treacherous stretches that hugged sheer walls and were exposed to thousand foot drops. For Nym, it was background scenery as he flew.

By the time morning came, he was twenty miles away and the steep mountain slopes started to flatten out. It was still a barren landscape of snow framed by craggy peaks, but he’d gone probably three times farther than he would have on foot. Nym kept an eye out for a sheltered place to rest with an eye towards caves or even just nooks in the stone, anywhere that he could get out of the eternal winds and the snow swirling through the air. It had been coming down, all night, thicker and thicker.

Eventually, he found a wide ridge of stone about ten feet tall that had a thick overhang. There was a spot where the ridge curved around and made a pocket that protected from the wind in three directions. Nym landed nearby and scried out the nearby landscape for anything living. When he found nothing, he entered and settled down to rest.

It was cold, but there wasn’t any snow built up and it was dim enough that he felt he could get at least a quick nap. Nym wrapped himself in his cloak, snacked on some of the rations he’d purchased, and settled in the back, facing towards the entrance. He was so tired that he didn’t even realize he was drifting off before his eyes closed and he slumped over.

* * *

The sound of snuffling woke him up. It was fully dark when he opened his eyes and he could hear some sort of animal nearby. A quick night vision spell showed him a creature with white fur pawing at his pack, trying to get it open. He was about two feet tall at the shoulder and vaguely wolf-like, but with a short bushy tail and a narrow muzzle that was currently wedged under the flap of his pack. His paws were huge relative to the size of its body and Nym could see scrapes on the rock where the animal had paced around his pack trying to get at it.

“Hey!” Nym protested. “That’s not yours!”

The animal, whatever he was, looked up at him calmly, then shoved his snout back into Nym’s pack. Nym climbed to his feet, filled his soul well, and pulled the pack away with telekinesis. The animal hopped after it, but Nym held it overhead out of its reach. He stood there underneath, staring up at the pack, then looked to Nym expectantly.

“What? I told you it wasn’t yours,” he said.

A sparkling sheen of arcana started forming around the wolf, and a tendril lanced out to strike Nym before he had a chance to react. Instead of an attack, words formed in his mind.

[Food?]

Nym jumped in surprise. “You can talk?”

[Yes talk. Food?]

With a sigh, Nym grabbed the pack out of the air, opened it, and pulled out a piece of jerky. He tossed it over and the creature snapped it out of the air. He chewed happily while Nym watched with a bemused expression. The chunk of meat was soon gone and the wolf resumed staring at the bag.

“Sorry, but I need the rest. I’ve got a long way to go,” Nym said.

[Go where? No path.]

Nym turned to the exit, only to find it blocked by a wall of frozen snow. It was stacked higher than the overhang and he realized with a start that the lack of light was not because he’d slept through the entire day, but rather that he’d been entombed by the weather. There was a single tunnel dug through the snow, narrow enough to be uncomfortable for him to pass through, but perfect for his uninvited guest.

Nym pushed at the wall with hydrokinesis and ripped the ice supporting it out. It resisted, but fortunately wasn’t too thick for him to overpower it. Snow fell into the nook, and with a second push, he blew a hole open all the way to the surface. The makeshift tunnel immediately collapsed, and it took him a few more rounds before he’d widened it enough to pass through.

Nym flew up into open air, only to find that he couldn’t see anything more than a few feet away. The snow was coming down so thick, and with so much wind behind it, that there was no visibility at all. He could only make a guess as to which direction he wanted to go, even if he was willing to fly in it.

Already, he could feel the chill starting to seep through his pants. Nym had no choice but to wait for the blizzard to pass by. He retreated back under the ridge where, while it was still cold, at least it wasn’t a total white out. The wolf-thing sat near the hole Nym had made and watched him come back in. He let out a huffing sneeze as snow powder dislodged by Nym’s passage sprayed his face.

“Guess I’m stuck here for a bit,” he told the creature.

[Share food?]

“You’ve got a one-track mind, don’t you?” Nym hugged the bag close, keeping his precious food supply safe from the wolf. “I told you I don’t have enough to share.”

The blizzard was a major problem. He had no firewood and despite his new, insulated clothing, it was freezing out. If ever there was a time and place to finish figuring out that internal heating spell, it was now. Even if he figured out the spell, that only solved one problem. There was no telling when he’d be able to travel again, and he didn’t have unlimited food. He could starve, leaving nothing but a half-frozen corpse that someone would eventually find months from now when the weather turned and everything started to melt.

Nym rested against the back wall, as far from the snow and ice as he could get, and focused on channeling his arcana. He’d figured out how to use it as fuel and make lines for it to follow when he ignited it, but short of setting himself on fire, that wasn’t going to warm him up. He needed to practice modulating it so that he could wrap himself in arcana that was warm instead of burning.

He started with the intent filter he’d used to lay out lines of flammable arcana, then tried to mellow it down. He wanted arcana that would radiate heat slowly instead of something that would burn up in an instant. Nym sprayed it across the wall and ignited it, but instead of the wall releasing warmth out into the make-shift cave, a one single spot in the arcana heated up. The rest remained inert.

Nym wasn’t disappointed though. He’d been working on this for close to two months now, and this was the first time he’d gotten his magic to generate any sort of heat that wasn’t at maximum strength. He’d come a long way from his early attempts where it took all his focus to get kindling to ignite.

Nym tried a few configurations while the wolf watched. Eventually, he got bored and started trying to get into Nym’s pack again. Nym shooed it off a few times before giving up and splitting his concentration to hold the pack overhead on a cushion of air. The animal sat underneath the floating pack and stared straight up at it, all the while whining piteously.

“Stupid thing,” Nym muttered, not sure if he meant himself or the animal. He fetched another scrap of jerky out and tossed it over. The wolf gulped it down happily, then resumed staring at Nym.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

A jumble of images came through the telepathic link, mostly memories of snow flying through the air as the wolf dug through it at top speed. Nym couldn’t find a name anywhere in there, just a lot of sensory information about smell and the feeling of snow on the wolf’s paws.

“Uh… Dig? Snow? I don’t know how to translate this. Cold Paw? How about that? Can we go with Cold Paw?”

[Cold Paw,] the wolf repeated. [Is Good.]

After another hour of fiddling, he finally figured out how to get the heat spell to spread properly. The key was in the arcana he’d used as a fuel. It didn’t want to spread properly when he made it slow-burning, and while it was possible to manually ignite a hundred different spots, it was tedious and slow. Once he’d altered his intent and lowered the threshold needed for the ignition to spread, he was able to pick a few random points and soon the entire wall was radiating heat.

Cold Paw was fascinated by that for a few minutes, but eventually he must have decided it was too warm. He went over to the ice wall and rolled around in the loose snow, then stood up and shook the flakes out of his coat. Then he resumed staring at the pack. Nym rolled his eyes and went back to experimenting.

The rock wall was still too hot to touch, which meant that he couldn’t coat himself in arcana. That wasn’t really what he was ultimately trying to accomplish anyway, but it would be a step in the right direction. His current use of pyrokinesis was only working because the wall was rock. He was sure if he tried it on a wooden building, the heat would quickly build up until the material it was stuck to ignited.

He wondered if he was going about it completely backwards. Perhaps instead of trying to add heat to his body, he needed to be pushing cold away from himself. As long as he never let the spell drop, it would be functionally the same thing, only without the risk of spontaneously combusting if he didn’t cast the spell perfectly.

Or maybe the whole concept was just too complicated to be performed with basic elementalism. Every theory he came up with, even the ones he couldn’t make work, relied on constant input from him. If his focus wavered, things would start to fall apart. If he didn’t hold the exact right amount of focus, he could put too much arcana into the spell and it would overload.

A large part of the appeal of the more complex spells that didn’t rely on elemental control was that they were less effort to maintain. If he’d done the spell right in the first place, it would last as long as it was designed to. He had no doubt there were spells that were designed to do exactly what he was trying to accomplish, but he hadn’t found them in the short time he’d had access to an actual library.

It took a few more hours of experimentation, but eventually Nym had a thermal barrier which blocked out all sources of warmth or cold. He pressed his bare hand up against the ice and held it there for ten minutes, then dismissed the spell and examined his fingers. They felt fine. None of the cold had gotten through. The spell did the same thing for his heated wall, though after a few minutes, it became more of a strain to hold the barrier in place.

“I guess I just needed the proper motivation,” he told his new friend. “And that was being stuck in a frozen hole during a blizzard, where I’d either figure it out or freeze to death.”

With that one problem solved, Nym turned to the next issue. He didn’t know how long he would be stuck here, and while he did have extra supplies, he didn’t want to run out before he’d gotten a single day’s travel away from Abilanth. He especially couldn’t afford to keep giving away his meat, no matter how pathetic Cold Paw’s whining was.

New snow had filled in the hole Nym had made to the surface, so he had to punch it back out again to check on the weather. The blizzard was still going strong, with at least another three feet of snow built up just in the last few hours. Visibility was even worse, if anything.

When he came back down, the wolf was gone. Nym just sighed and sat down, his back against the ice wall. “It’s going to be a long few days,” he said out loud.

Suddenly Cold Paw’s head popped up right next to him and let out a yip. With a startled yell, Nym leaped to his feet. The wolf just sniffed at him, stubby little tail wagging, and pulled at his sleeve. Bemused, Nym let him drag him over to the hole he had dug through the snow and ice.

“What, you want me to come with you?”

[Follow. Meet family.]

Nym wasn’t really in any danger from the cold now, and if he needed a break, he could always blast his way down to the stone below and create a new heated shelter on the floor while using hydrokinesis to freeze the snow into a ceiling overhead. The weather wasn’t really getting any better, and the idea of meeting more talking animals had him curious.

“Okay, I guess let’s see what’s out here under the ice.”

He crawled into the hole after his new friend.