Ascendant

The plan was simple. Nym was going to hit it with an arcana injection. For something that size, and the amount of arcana it was putting out constantly, it would have to be a massive attack, but he had time to build it up. Casting it with a ritual would be best, but he lacked the equipment or practice. So, instead, he was going to do a sustained and channeled arcana injection and hopefully poison whatever that crystalline lump was.

Nym took his time setting it up. He’d never actually used the spell against a living target before, but to his knowledge, the hardest part was getting the timing right. In this case, the target was always channeling arcana, so that shouldn’t be an issue. The real concern was whether he could inject enough of his own arcana into its body to have a noticeable impact.

“Wait here,” he told Cold Paw. “If I don’t come back, you’ll have to make it back on your own. You can dig back down, right?”

[No come back?]

The wolf regarded him somberly, no yips or tail-wagging this time. “Ah, don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Nym told him.

He started building his spell slowly, widening the base of the construct to four times the size he’d practiced with. Everything about it was bigger, more draining, harder to keep stable. What he was doing would never have worked in a fight with another mage. But the lump just sat there, being lumpy as worm monsters crawled over and around it.

In his sight, the arcana injection spell was massive, taller than he was, a needle of pure arcana poised over the middle of the ice-coated pit. With a thought, he willed it down. It flashed through the air and pierced the ice lump at speeds too fast for mortal eyes to follow. Without slowing, it vanished into the monstrous lump’s soul well.

The reaction was immediate. The whole thing convulsed, which was somewhat sickening to look at, and the worm monsters crawling on it were bucked off in every direction. As one, every single worm that Nym could see began writhing in agitation. A deafening wail, so loud that it drowned out the howling blizzard winds around him, rose from the pit.

Worms burst out of the ice all around the pit, waving wildly and searching for the source of the attack. Hundreds of new worms thrashed about, barely anchored to the ice as ten or fifteen feet of sinuous living ice lashed through the air. They couldn’t see him through the thermal barrier, and even if they could, he was floating directly over the center of the pit. Nym was safe.

He cast a scrying spell to check on Cold Paw, who the worms could actually reach if they knew where to find him. The wolf was curled up in the den he had dug out for them, ice crusting over the walls and providing an extra layer of protection from the worms’ heat finding senses. For the time being, Cold Paw was safe. Nym resumed his assault.

More and more worms were pouring into the pit now, called back by the overmind that controlled the hive. He considered throwing down fire, just to see what would happen, but the last time he’d attempted that, it had been a waste of time and arcana. Lightning at least damaged the lump, even if it was incredibly difficult to aim.

He fired a bolt, then a second, and watched as cracks spread through the ice. The damage wasn’t significant, but it did attract the attention of the smaller worms. They started swarming over the lump, hacking at the ice he’d super-heated with his spell. Their mandibles tore into it, ripping out chunks of crystalline flesh and destroying it.

The ice below him rippled. Nym blinked and peered down through the snow. Visibility was bad, but he was sure ice didn’t do that. Something else was going on. Before he could figure out what, the floor of the pit shattered and was pushed upwards amidst a sudden hailstorm of broken ice shards.

It wasn’t just the floor, either. Huge chunks of the walls were blasted out as something enormous flexed beneath them. Worms and ice chunks the size of horses were scattered through the air, smacking into each other at high speeds and breaking apart.

It was pure luck that saved him in that initial explosion. The largest chunks that burst from the wall went flying mostly horizontally, with the smaller pieces that broke off from collisions scattering in every direction. He was struck repeatedly by fist size chunks of ice that flew hundreds of feet up. Between the deafening noise of exploding ice and the pain of being struck by dozens of small, heavy objects, Nym lost track of his surroundings.

He felt his flight spell start to unravel, and desperately scrambled to shore it up. The last thing he needed was to fall into the chaos below him. He would be ripped apart in seconds. In fact, he decided a tactical retreat was the best plan of action. Before he could get moving, something rose out of the cloud of snow blanketing the bottom of the pit.

It shot up, and up, and up, so high that Nym barely managed to fly out of the way before it rose up past him. It looked similar to the worm monsters he’d already dealt with, except a thousand times bigger and it’s body was covered in seven more icy lumps, each one a few hundred feet apart. The one Nym had been attacking was somewhere near the middle of its body, and in light of the creature’s full size, Nym was amazed at his own stupidity.

There was no way he was killing that thing. He wasn’t even willing to fight it. The new plan was to grab Cold Paw and fly far, far away. Then the wolf could make them a new tunnel and they could get back to the rest of his pack, where Nym was going to tell that matriarch that she was out of her mind, and then he’d flee the area, blizzard be damned.

The worm hive queen had other ideas. Nym didn’t know if it had other ways to sense him that the smaller worms didn’t or if it was just a consequence of mass, but either way its many, many legs started scratching at the air as it undulated in place. Nym was struck a glancing blow by one, which felt a lot like what he assumed getting run over by a horse would feel like, and he tumbled through the air to crash into the snow.

It was a good thing there was a blizzard going, or the impact of the fall could have killed him. It still smarted, though not nearly as much as the actual hit from the hive queen had. He got buried so far down that it actually took an application of hydrokinesis to dig himself back out. He was shivering by the time he got back in the air. The hit had disrupted his concentration on everything he’d been holding, and without the thermal barrier to protect him, his clothes just didn’t do enough.

Worse, without the thermal barrier, the worms could see him. They came boiling up out of the snow right behind him, lunging upwards to impressive heights that he just barely managed to outpace. He ignited a ball of arcana inside the mouth of the closest one, charring it and causing several of the nearby worms to turn on it and attack.

With that moment’s reprieve, he got his thermal barrier back up. It was too late to save him from the cold, but hopefully it would still render him invisible. It seemed to be working, from what he could tell. The worms below were still in a frenzy, but they were lashing out randomly now instead of leaping out of the snow at him. He counted himself extremely lucky that they only had one real sense for spotting him, and seemed to be extremely stupid.

He was out of the range of the queen now, so he just needed to get his bearings, figure out where Cold Paw was, hope that the wolf was safe from all the worms, and get away from the pit. He immediately sent out his scrying anchor to sweep around the outskirts, trying to find the den. The landscape had been so drastically changed in just the last few minutes that he’d lost track of where he was and could only guess which way he needed to go.

A shadow fell over him. Nym looked up. The hive queen loomed over him, blocking out the sun, its enormous body aimed his way as it descended. Nym had a moment to realize how stupid and careless he’d been, assuming that the queen was the same as the regular worms. Of course it would be smarter, or have better senses.

There was no way he was going to outpace it, so he pushed every bit of arcana he had into flying sideways. If he was fast, he thought he could avoid the trunk of the main body, but it would be dicey getting between the hive queen’s legs. They were long enough and spread wide that he didn’t think it was possible to fly past them.

An instant movement spell would be perfect, even if it was just a hundred feet in the blink of an eye. He didn’t know any spells like that, but twice now his magic had come through in a life-or-death situation. He’d unlocked a new memory at the last moment and recalled some bit of magic he once knew. If there was ever a time for that to happen again, it was right now. He had less than a second to save himself. Surely the world would fade to white and he’d see a vision of himself teleporting around a training yard.

The hive queen descended on Nym like the vengeful finger of God as he darted out of the way, left to save himself under his own power. He would have liked to claim credit for deftly dodging between the legs when everything slammed down into the snow, but the truth was that it was sheer luck. Surviving everything since the queen emerged from beneath the ice had been nothing but luck.

His luck ran out there, since there was no dodging the wall of snow and ice that exploded out from underneath the queen’s body when it body slammed the ground below where Nym had been flying. It smacked into him, hurling him forward and carrying him along a hundred feet or more until he came to a stop, buried deep in the snow.

Nym took a moment to think. His first priority was keeping up the thermal barrier. It was the only thing protecting him from being spotted, at least by the regular worms. It hadn’t worked against the queen for some reason. That was a problem for another time.

He needed to unbury himself from the snow, but he wasn’t even sure which way to go, or if his hydrokinesis was up to the task. There was nowhere for him to push the snow too, and he had no idea how far down he was. A simple scrying spell would fix that. If his luck continued to hold, he wouldn’t be too far from the surface.

Before he could cast that, the snow around him started rumbling. Nym mentally scrambled to shift from escaping to fighting, to begin the process of weaving together another lightning bolt spell. Before he could put it together, the snow to his left disappeared completely and a twitching black nose appeared.

Cold Paw regarded him, head cocked. [Go now?]

Nym let out a huge sigh of relief and let the lightning bolt spell fall apart. That wolf was getting all of the jerky when they got out of here. Nym reached up and ruffled his ears, causing Cold Paw to let out an excited little yip. “Yeah. Leaving sounds good. Let’s go.”