Ascendant

It took a week total, from the time Nym had first woken up and caught Cold Paw raiding his pack for food to where he currently stood, at the top of the now shattered pit, looking down at what he now recognized as an enormous version of the spell the matriarch had taught him to generate a blizzard. It was so huge that it took a conscious effort to distinguish it as individual strands of arcana and not just a massive aura. He understood how the spell worked now, and despite the size, he was sure he could put pressure on vulnerable portions of the construct to break it.

In order for the plan to be any sort of effective, he couldn’t limit himself to just one golem at a time. He could make four now, albeit at the cost of them being considerably less effective and durable. That was fine; he didn’t care if a worm shattered the golem in one blow, just that it could keep walking until it was ready to deposit the heat sources he’d given them.

Nym stood at the top of the pit, resting and recovering from the trip. He didn’t dare bring Cold Paw along this time, and it took him much longer than he expected it to find the place again. Nym had no interest at all in trying to navigate worm-filled tunnels by himself, so even though he’d worked out a basic snow burrowing spell with the matriarch’s help, he’d opted to fly through the blizzard despite having only a vague understanding of where he needed to go.

He lifted off the ground and flew to the floor of the pit. Here, in the center of the hive queen’s magic, he couldn’t hope to breach its flesh with fire, but he could trace the road that was its body as it disappeared into the ice. The pit was no longer a smooth, icy-walled hole, and even though new ice had grown over the broken slabs that had shattered when the hive queen moved, it was still easy to follow the trail of destruction.

Nym followed along the length of the queen’s body, scrying when he could to make sure he was heading in the right direction. Eventually, he found the mouth of the creature buried under tons of ice and snow. It was hard work digging down to it, but the task made much easier by the fact that the hive queen had already broken through the ice layer. Nym liked to think that he’d learned from past mistakes and wanted contingencies in place to flee into the sky if there was even the slightest chance of the enormous monster coming after him again.

All the preparations were done. He’d made himself as safe as he could. It was time to begin.

The hardest part was going to be maintaining so many spells at once, but Nym thought he could do it. He had already compressed clumps of dirt into balls and covered them in a layer of ice so that they’d hold their shape. He set them out next to him and cast the heating spell on each one, then wrapped them all in a thermal barrier.

The first golem coalesced into existence from loose snow and ice. It grabbed a ball and dropped down the tunnel to the hive queen and walked into its open mouth. None of the worms seemed to actually close their mouths unless they were using their teeth to tear into something, which Nym found weird, but when he considered that they didn’t actually need to eat and that the teeth were just another weapon, he guessed it made sense.

Or maybe it didn’t. Whoever had created the ice worms must have been crazy to begin with. He couldn’t divine a single reason a species like that needed to exist. Maybe they were created through some bizarre natural phenomenon of arcana somewhere in the deep, frozen northlands. It would certainly explain their physiology and weird instincts. Either way, he was happy to capitalize on the fact that every worm he’d seen, including the queen, always had its mouth open.

A second golem picked up another heated ball and followed the first one down to the hive queen. The arcana tether connecting him to the golem and allowing him to control it got harder to maintain, but Nym’s goal was to get them to walk far enough down to reach the frozen ice crystal heart of the hive queen and set off his heat bombs there. That was looking less and less likely as the first golem got out of range and the tether snapped.

He wouldn’t be able to maintain the thermal barrier around the balls for much longer either. Though they were relatively tiny, both the amount of heat they were putting off and the distance they’d been carried away from Nym made it extraordinarily difficult to hold the spell. Nym knew where the hive queen’s heart was, but it looked like he was going to have to move with the golems if he wanted to keep them walking.

He created the last two golems and sent them down into the queen’s maw, then slowly flew back towards the pit, trying to keep within a decent range of all three golems as they tried to burrow deeper inside the monster. Nym had a basic idea of what the queen’s guts looked like from scrying it, and though he didn’t really understand what the spell was showing him, he was hoping to bait enough worms into attacking around where the heart would be that it would be vulnerable to attack.

The thermal barriers went down soon after the fourth golem entered the maw. It was just too much work trying to hold them, his own barrier, keep his three remaining golems going, and fly along with them so they didn’t get out of range. The ice shells holding the dirt were already melting anyway, and he hoped that the heat sources would do their job.

It was time for the next portion of the plan. He was hesitant to start this section, since he was sure it would get the hive queen’s attention, but breaking the source of the blizzard should allow him to heat up the outer ice shell of the queen’s body and help direct the worms he was hoping to sic on her to the right spot.

He guided the golems as far as he could before they started to break down, and then abandoned them to conserve arcana. There were four major points of attack on the blizzard generating construct, two on the outer edges of it, one in the middle layer, and one at the center. His hope was that by attacking the arcana directly, he could do enough damage to cause the whole thing to collapse.

To do that, he was using a modified arcana injection. Instead of blasting arcana directly into the hive queen’s soul well, he struck at the construct directly. The first and easiest point wasn’t hard to pry open, as it was already under strain from supporting other parts of the construct. Once it started to collapse, Nym was able to move onto the second spot.

That proved to be significantly more difficult just from the sheer volume of arcana he needed to shift, but without the golems and the thermal barriers on his heat bombs to maintain, he managed to pry the arcana out of position. This gave him access to the interior of the construct, which he attacked mercilessly. The inner workings of the spell were much more delicate, and the whole construct fell apart practically the moment he reached the center.

There was an instant and noticeable change in the air around the pit. The wind died down and with that, the snow that was still floating settled to the ground. No new snow replaced it, and for the first time since he’d woken up to Cold Paw burrowing into his camp site, Nym got a good look at the world around him.

Other than the pit itself, there was nothing to see but miles and miles of snow leading back up the mountains. Occasional lone peaks poked up out of the frozen landscape, but they seemed stunted with so much snow built up around them. Near the pit itself, the snow was much rougher. Icy remnants of his last encounter with the queen created hills in the snow where they’d been buried after erupting out of the pit, but even those were starting to smooth back out as the snow got deeper and deeper.

It was a beautiful scene, but it lasted only a few moments before the frozen countryside around the pit started bucking wildly as the queen started moving. Ice cracked and ground against itself, then was thrown into the air. Coils of the hive queen’s body were revealed as they emerged from the snow, leading up to its monstrous head. Mandibles thirty feet long swung through the air as the queen searched for him, and Nym made sure to keep his distance.

He swooped around to where its body still lay in the snow and started coating it with flammable arcana. Without the cold-inducing blizzard spell running, it was easy to ignite it, and he flew the length of its body doing so. Behind him, worms started popping up and attacking the queen.

That was all well and good, but he needed to focus the damage where the heart was. For that, he needed to get closer to the mouth. Now that the blizzard was clear, it was much easier to aim, and he fired off a pair of lightning bolts back-to-back into its icy hide. Cracks appeared in it and he saw steam hiss away into open air before cooling down.

So far, the plan was going well. He’d deposited heat sources inside the queen which hopefully its spawn would dig their way towards. He’d broken the weather controlling spell that prevented him from heating up its surface and gotten the worms to attack her. And he’d started pummeling approximately where he thought the heart would be on the monstrous creature, though it was too vertical for the smaller worms to get at it easily.

Below him, hundreds of worms were crushed into piles of fine powder by the thrashing of their queen. That wasn’t the main goal of the attack, but Nym wasn’t going to complain about it. He laid down more arcana where the worms were already digging into the queen, hoping they’d go deep enough to get all the way inside and go after the heated balls he’d left there.

He spotted an opening in the queen’s hide. It looked like nothing so much as a narrow gap in a wall of ice, but the worms disappearing into it weren’t coming back out. Nym flung out tracer lines of arcana onto the worms and let them pull it in deeper, then ignited it. Fire flashed in the open sky as the lines burned down to the queen and ignited inside her, which drew in even more worms to the wound.

 Nym let out new lines and attached them to random worms burrowing their way in. He was well away from the queen’s thrashing and high enough up that he’d be out of its reach. Even if this didn’t kill it, he was definitely doing damage and it was costing him relatively little arcana. He was content to whittle away at the hive queen for as long as possible.

The queen curled up on itself and lunged towards its own flank. Nym thought for a second it was killing the worms invading it, and it certainly did scrape many of them off its body. Then arcana flashed up the threads he’d spun out to the burrowing worms. It flowed up his own spell, homing in on him despite his thermal barrier making him invisible.

Nym had just an instant to sever the threads before it hit him, and he managed to cut almost all of them. Then the arcana slammed into him through the remaining few and everything went dark. He lost control of all of his spells and started falling, but he couldn’t focus his mind enough to get them going again. The fall itself could kill him, and if it didn’t, the worms would. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that knowledge scratched at him desperately, trying to get his attention.

He came back to himself a moment later and immediately cast his flight spell. The world slowed down around him, but it was dark now for some reason. There was a single white circle of light that he had only a moment to see, and then he crashed into a jagged shelf of ice.

Everything started moving and Nym found himself plastered to a wall. The circle of light disappeared and a blast of cold air rolled across him, followed moments later by tons of ice and snow. It rolled over him, sweeping him up and pushing him farther away from the light, which was bad enough on its own.

Then the walls started moving and more of those jagged ice shelves gnashed together, chewing up the ice.