Ascendant

Nym needed to take a break, but he was afraid of a repeat of the worm monster incident. Cold Paw seemed to be getting more anxious as they traveled too, coming back to tug at his sleeve every time Nym stopped for any reason. Reluctantly, but aware of the danger, he forced himself to keep moving. The strain of keeping up the thermal barrier and night vision was wearing him out, so much so that he was long past even considering casting a flight spell as well.

He rounded a bend in the tunnel and stumbled forward when they were abruptly out in the open, in a spacious cavern made entirely of snow and ice. The ceiling was at least fifty feet overhead, made of solid ice with who knew how many feet of snow piled on it. And there were dozens of wolves there. Small ones scampered around, playing with each other. Large ones lazed in little holes they’d dug in the walls, sometimes half-buried in loose snow.

And then there were the monster-sized ones. He saw two of them immediately, both four or five times the size of Cold Paw, and both noticing him as soon as he entered. One of them stood up, shaking off loose snow and three different pups, and started walking the length of the cavern towards them.

“Um, am I allowed to be here?” Nym asked Cold Paw. The wolf just huffed at him, then sat down next to him to wait for the big one to reach them.

It reached them and crouched down to Nym’s eye level, sniffing at him. Nym could feel its growl in his bones, but the wolf looked at him with intelligence. It wasn’t a wild animal, whatever it was. It turned its attention to Cold Paw, and the two made various noises. Arcana flashed between them in silent communication.

Cold Paw must have vouched for him, because the old monster turned away with a sniff and walked back to the middle of the cavern, where it plopped down in an explosion of snow that sent several pups rolling away from it. They all leaped back to their feet and raced forward to crawl all over the old one again.

“What have you gotten me into?” he asked the wolf, who just grinned up at him, tongue hanging out of his mouth. “Well, come on then. Where are we going?”

Nym felt a lot of wary eyes on him as he walked through the cavern, mostly from the adult wolves. The pups, Cold Paw just barely not fitting into that category, mostly romped around or watched him, their little tails ablur. The more Nym looked around, the more he realized that a lot of the wolves were injured in some way or another, and that there were suspiciously few adults compared to the number of pups playing in the middle of the cavern.

Cold Paw led Nym to a wide-mouthed cavern near the back. He followed the young wolf inside, thankful once again that he’d figured out night vision. Otherwise he’d be completely blind and would have missed a positively ancient looking wolf curled up in the back. When they entered, it stood up on shaky legs and hobbled forward.

[You are a human mage? My progeny has brought you here, claiming you can aid us.]

“I am only an apprentice mage. I don’t know what help you need, or if I can do it.”

[The pup says you slew two of the heat hunters on your way here.]

“The worm monsters? I guess so, yeah. They didn’t seem very interested in me.”

The heat of his camp site must have attracted them. Once he’d put his thermal barrier back up, they’d lost interest in him. Somehow, they tracked heat and, apparently, hated it. As long as he wasn’t losing any warmth, they either didn’t see him or didn’t care. That made him feel a lot better about traveling the tunnels.

[A new hive has appeared near our hunting grounds. They are voracious, implacable. Many of our best hunters have fallen to them. If they are not stopped, we will have to flee.]

“And you want me to do it? You know I’m just a kid, right?”

[Do human children often have the ability to summon lightning?]

“Well… no. But still.”

[If you do not think you can help, or do not wish to, then please depart.]

Nym looked over at Cold Paw, who regarded him with too-smart eyes. “First you try to steal my food, now this? You’re lucky you’re cute.”

He took a deep breath and asked the wolf, “What do I need to do?”

* * *

Nym spent a few hours resting in a small circle of heat, which fascinated all the pups endlessly. They were not shy about crawling all over him, and once they found out he gave out pets, he was practically buried under them until a few of the adults showed up to herd them away. Nym was left alone with Cold Paw, who’d flopped down in the snow just outside the heat circle and patiently waited for him to recover.

Mostly he thought about what the matriarch wanted him to do, which was to kill hundreds of worms in their nests and more specifically, their queen. That was the priority target. Even if he couldn’t kill the other worms, killing the queen would ensure the eventual end of the hive as it was needed to maintain the cold environment and replenish their numbers.

According to the matriarch, the worms were magical creatures, so magical in fact that the queen itself generated immense amounts of snow and kept the area cold. They were weak to extreme heat, and while the queen was much bigger than the ones Nym had seen, it shared its progeny’s weaknesses. That included a crystalline heart that kept their ice-like bodies alive and moving.

If he hadn’t been terribly motivated to help before, finding out how much of his current weather troubles could be blamed on magical ice worms certainly changed that. Nym idly wondered if he’d have avoided the whole problem simply by following the roads that curved away from the mountains instead of flying straight through them.

“I can’t believe I let you drag me into this,” Nym told Cold Paw, who just wagged his stubby little tail back.

[Boom!] the wolf said in his mind. Nym rolled his eyes.

“Okay, I’ve taken enough of a break. Just give me a minute to get ready.”

He finished getting the thermal barrier up, and extended it to cover Cold Paw too. The wolf did not like that, not at all. He rolled around in the snow repeatedly, trying to dispel the barrier, but Nym held it steady. As long as they were covered, the worms wouldn’t see them, at least if his theory about them only seeing heat was right. And it seemed pretty obvious, so he was confident about that.

The two left together, heading into tunnels that were bigger and curved randomly. They were probably dug by the worm monsters instead of the wolves. The walls were rimed with ice instead of merely being hard-packed crunchy snow like Cold Paw’s tunnels had been. Somehow, that made Nym more nervous. Invisible or not, he could easily picture some worm running him over.

That didn’t happen, thankfully, but Nym found that extending the thermal barrier to cover a second person made it three times harder to hold active. The trip was boring, but also exhausting. The exotic nature of traveling via under-ice snow tunnels had long since lost its appeal. Hours went by, with the tunnels widening and narrowing for no discernable reason. Without Cold Paw’s guidance, Nym would have gotten hopelessly lost once they started intersecting with each other.

The tunnels started growing lighter. At first, Nym thought he was mistaken, but soon it was unarguable. He dismissed his night vision spell and found that he could see the world around him in shades of white and blue. A thousand feet down the tunnel revealed the source.

They’d reached their destination. Unlike the wolf cavern, the hive was open to the air. Solid ice walls stretched up to the sky, easily a hundred feet high. Frigid cold air radiated out of an enormous lump of quivering ice in the center of what Nym could only describe as a pit, rolling across the floor and up the walls.

The whole thing was washed in an aura of arcana. Nym could practically see the snowflakes forming out of thin air and being swept up the walls to burst into the open air above. Writhing around on the floor were dozens and dozens of the worm monsters. Nym watched as the ones coming in crawled all over the fleshy lump, and then, infused with frigid arcana, raced off into new tunnels.

One of them started heading towards the tunnel they were observing from. “Good time to test, I suppose,” he told Cold Paw. “If this goes wrong, I’m going to fly us both straight up.”

Then he wove together a lightning bolt spell. He took his time, made sure he had it right, and watched the worm approach. When it was twenty feet away, he unleashed the magic. Lightning boomed, sending the snow rolling away in a wave, and the worm writhed in agony. He hadn’t struck it directly, unable to forge a path for the lightning in the ever-shifting currents of air, snow, and arcana. Unlike the ones in the tunnel he’d fried earlier, it didn’t die right away.

That didn’t happen until eight other worms converged on it and started eating it alive. Nym could only assume that they didn’t differentiate between sources of heat. Anything that was warm was fair game. If that was true, Nym thought he might have a rather easy solution to the whole mess. The mound of ice was obviously important to the whole operation, but if he coated it with arcana and ignited it, would the worms turn on it?

“Come on, I don’t want to leave you here,” he told Cold Paw.

The two of them rose up into the air, which immediately put a lot of stress on Nym’s soul well. The wind was incredibly cold and fast, stressing both his thermal barrier and his flight spell. It would have been significantly harder to maintain the thermal barrier, but Cold Paw didn’t need it once they were off the ground. Nym worked quickly, fighting his way into the center of the ice-infused arcana maelstrom, and started laying out lines of arcana.

Once he had a solid net, he tried to ignite it, only to find that no matter how big of a spark he generated, the frigid coldness of the ice lump doused it immediately. Nym didn’t think he had enough left in him to try a second time. His conduits were struggling to keep his soul well from going dry, and if he lost the thermal barrier, he’d freeze in moments. If he lost his flight spell, it would be even worse.

Nym needed to protect the ignition spark from the cold, and now that he thought about it, he had a perfect spell for that. He encased a small piece of the web in a thermal barrier, fought off the wave of sickness that came from overextending even further, and ignited the arcana web.

The resulting inferno was brilliant, but brief. When the fire cleared away, a pattern of scorch marks marred the lump’s surface, but it seemed otherwise unharmed. A few of the worms had paused for a second and focused on the lump, but were already resuming whatever they’d been doing.

He had one more option left, but he was hesitant to waste the arcana on it. Slowly, painfully, he constructed a new lightning bolt and sent it towards the lump. It didn’t hit where he was aiming, but the lump was so big that even a few feet off, it still connected. Unfortunately, it had no more effect than to leave a pock-marked scar on the ice.

 “Okay, we need to get out of here,” he told Cold Paw. “I have to find a place to recover before we try something else.”

Not really sure where else to go, Nym flew straight up into the open air. They touched down in the snow, and he asked, “Can you make us a little cave under the snow, just something to protect us from the wind?”

The little wolf immediately started digging a burrow, and Nym gratefully followed him in. He was getting tired again, and it was getting hard to think. Once he was settled in, he let everything go except his personal thermal barrier, and tried to steady his breathing. He had no idea how he was going to destroy that lump.

Nym rested, and he plotted. He discarded a few ideas, filed a few more as maybes, and then he had an idea. He grinned. It was beautifully simple, and he was reasonably confident it would work, as long as he could make it big enough.