Ascendant

There were enough unexplained anomalies in Nym’s life that he couldn’t honestly rule out the idea that he might not be human. If that was true, he was even more confused about where he came from than before. He doubted the Creator who’d made the magic ice wolves had much to do with him though. If the matriarch hadn’t insisted that she’d known him personally, Nym would have dismissed the whole thing as some pagan creation myth.

So maybe it wasn’t the Creator who’d made him, but it could be something else. Sure, he had memories of a whole three people, some of whom had taught him things, but he knew enough about the possibilities of magic to know those kinds of memories could well be fake. Any mage capable of casting a third circle spell could do it.

Considering all the mysteries with his past, with the signs of rapid aging Professor Langdon had found, with his ability to see arcana that no one else seemed to have, it wouldn’t surprise Nym at this point if he wasn’t even an actual person. Maybe Analia wasn’t the only one grown in a glass tank. At least she was sure she started out human, despite whatever modifications her father made.

The fact that the matriarch’s offhand comment that he might have been made rather than born could quite possibly be correct was somewhat distressing. Nym wasn’t really sure how he was supposed to feel about that idea. Analia had probably gone through something similar when she’d learned the truth about herself.

With a shake of his head, Nym pushed it aside. It was just a theory, and he didn’t have any reason to think it was any more correct than any other theory. “I don’t want to think about this right now. Let’s go back to talking about the magic.”

Nym strengthened his intent and started weaving arcana again. Eventually he produced filtered arcana that was strong enough to hold its shape on its own, but still pliable enough for him to work with without ruining the construct. It was a monstrously hefty working, requiring him to forge a second conduit just to supply his soul well with enough arcana to complete it.

“Well, that’s neat,” he said, examining it with the matriarch. “It looks like it’s working. I can now make snow in a land that’s currently under fifty feet of it with an active blizzard making more even as we speak. What do I do with this?”

[With this? Nothing. You needed to understand how it works so that you can understand how to take it apart.]

“The hive queen,” Nym realized. “It’s casting a huge version of this all the time. That’s where all this snow is coming from. Hey, how long has this been going on? I’ve been freezing my ass off for a month in a nearby human city!”

[The heat hunters followed us down from the mountains. We do not feel the flow of time the same way humans do, measuring it with the sky fire. Most of us have never even seen the sky fire. I could not say how long it has been since we arrived in a way that would have any meaning to you.]

“You use this too though. You’re contributing to what’s happening here.”

The matriarch shook her head. [Do not be stupid. You have cast this spell yourself. How much snow did you add to the world around us? Our version is localized, but the heat hunters are creatures of instinct and hunger. They destroy anything that is not frozen, and they spread the cold endlessly.

“How endlessly do you mean? If we don’t kill the hive queen, is the entire world going to be covered in snow? Is that even possible?”

[I do not know. This land is the warmest we have ever traveled to, but it was not warm enough to fight against the heat hunter queen’s magic.]

As far as Nym understood things, Abilanth wasn’t that warm in the best of times. There was some solace in that, knowing that even if things spiraled out of control, at some point it would probably just be too warm for the worms to keep expanding. It didn’t much help him now, but it was comforting to know he wasn’t trying to prevent the entire world from being plunged into an ice age.

Still, he wished he could shove this off on someone older and stronger. There was a reason he hadn’t gotten involved with that undead business near Zoskan once he’d narrowly escaped the frost wraiths. For that matter, why did the disasters he got dragged into always involve him freezing his toes off? That didn’t seem fair.

“Okay, back on topic. I can cast this weather altering spell, at least a small version of it. I’ve got a few ideas for break points I could attack it at to cause the whole thing to unravel, but then what? I already tried killing the hive queen and it swatted me down like it was nothing. What can you show me that will let me take that thing down?”

Nym hadn’t really seen any overt weak points that he could exploit on the outside. Even the worms it spawned seemed like mere annoyances. The queen had flicked them off and crushed them like they were meaningless. Considering how many of them there were, maybe that was true.

The old wolf matriarch grinned at him, and Nym felt a chill down his spine. That was not a fun look. That was the kind of look that meant someone had something for him that he didn’t want anything to do with. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, taking an involuntary step back.

[Tell me, young maybe-human, what do you know about the art of breathing life into the unliving?]

* * *

It took Nym two days to successfully cast what he was tentatively calling his ice golem spell. The matriarch made it look easy, almost as if she was simply willing them into existence. Beautifully detailed living copies of her sculpted out of ice appeared, rising up out of the snow. Nym’s version was not nearly as pretty.

It was shaped like a person in that it had the correct number of limbs and a trunk with a head on top. That was as far as the similarities went at first. Unlike the matriarch’s multiple copies, which were life-like in their movements, the single copy he managed to conjure up was stilted and often failed to do things like hold its balance when it tried to walk.

He spent a lot of time practicing to refine the spell into something useful while the matriarch laid down, head on her paws, and watched. It turned out that her stamina was awful, and she was really only good for a handful of demonstrations a day before she had to rest. That wasn’t to say that her coaching wasn’t useful, because the spells she was showing him were so much more complicated than the beginner spells he’d picked up in Abilanth or anything he’d worked out for himself.

Nym did not understand half of what he was doing or why the arcana was behaving in the way it did. He just wove it together under the matriarch’s direction and made the corrections and adjustments as he was instructed. Eventually he got something workable. It wasn’t a beautiful statue of ice, but it could walk without falling over and collapsing.

[Now that the easy part is done, we can move on to the next step,] the matriarch told him after his fiftieth or sixtieth golem.

They’d come up with a simple, relatively safe plan. As long as Nym could work the magic, he could essentially send golems into the hive queen to bait in worms. He had the golem part down, and he had the heating spell down, but now he needed to form the golem around a heated core that would slowly melt the golem from the inside and draw in the worms.

They’d tried ripping out rocks from the ground, which was still just about the total extent of Nym’s ability with elemental earth manipulation, and having the golems carry the rocks covered in the heated arcana. Unfortunately, the tests showed that the worms were too quick to jump in and destroy the golems. They didn’t make it even five feet if there was a worm anywhere near it.

Encasing the heated stones in the golem would hopefully shield the heat source until it was far enough in the queen that the worms would deal some damage to it while they burrowed in to attack. It would be a death of a thousand cuts, at least it would be if he could figure out how to get the golem to form around a stone core. The spell was designed to form one entirely out of cold aspected arcana, and would only use water in various flavors as raw materials.

Of course, layering a chunk of ice with heated arcana had predictable results. They’d worked on the problem for quite a while, trying to think of some way to modify the ice golems to carry a heated core inside them long enough to get into the hive queen before the worms noticed the heat. Nym just couldn’t find an intensity that wouldn’t melt its way free too fast, but also wouldn’t extinguish itself without ever breaking through at all.

“This would be so much easier if I knew even a little bit more about writing rune sequences,” he said. “If I could write them myself instead of just copying ones I’ve seen, I could just make something that does exactly what we want, but delayed by a minute before it activates.”

[I cannot help you with this. I know nothing of human writing techniques.]

“I know. I know. It’s just frustrating that I can’t get this to work,” he said. “I know what needs to be done, but not how to do it.”

If Analia was there, she could have done it easily. He was sure a basic rune sequence that just delayed the activation of a spell by a minute wasn’t that hard. He took a few cracks at it while the matriarch rested, but his lack of knowledge about how runes were actually built stopped him from making anything useful. The closest he got was a cobbled together sequence that used the light orb’s activation runes but edited to hold the ignition portion of his heating spell.

It blew up.

“Okay, this isn’t going to work! We need to take a step back and figure something else out,” he said.

[You may be correct. This is my fault. I did not consider the limitations of your melting spell and how it would interact with the frozen reflection of your spirit.]

“We’ll think of something.” He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. The truth was that they were no closer to figuring out how to kill the hive queen, and it had reached the point where worms were starting to make regular intrusions into the pack’s home. Nym had killed dozens of them in between his practice sessions with the matriarch.

There had to be some way to get heated arcana inside the hive queen, but Nym was not keen on the obvious option of taking it in himself. The whole point of the ice golems was to be a mobile, disposable unit that carried that arcana for him. “Wait… carrying the arcana,” he muttered. “I think we’ve been looking at this all wrong. What if instead of embedding the core inside the golem, I just wrap the stone in a thermal barrier for a minute and have the golem carry it?”