Ascendant

Nym was tossed around in the snow. He layered a kinetic barrier over a thermal barrier and tried to escape the maelstrom, but there was nowhere to go. If he got caught between those icy teeth, he’d be ground into nothing. His only hope was to go deeper, past the teeth. He couldn’t fly now, but he could use the snow burrowing spell to push himself through the snow he was stuck in.

His path was nothing even remotely close to a straight line, and he wasn’t entirely sure which direction he needed to move in. As the snow shifted around him, he just focused on keeping away from the teeth. It was perhaps the most chaotic and confusing thirty seconds of his life. All of the snow and ice was steadily being pulled deeper in, and Nym with it.

The walls compressed around him, squeezing him and pressing a bunch of smaller ice chunks into him. For a second, Nym thought he was caught between two teeth, and then the pressure vanished and he was pushed through the other side. Everything calmed down, giving him a chance to breathe again. Nym dug his way free of the snow and let the kinetic barrier drop. A quick night vision spell revealed his surroundings to him.

It looked like he was inside an ice-coated tunnel. Side passages branched out from the main tunnel in every direction, including through the floor and ceiling. Hesitantly, Nym took to the air and moved away from the piled-up snow and ice, which was still churning somewhat as new material came in from behind and pushed it all forward.

He felt awful, and not just because he was pretty sure he’d been eaten. Something in that arcana attack the hive queen hit him with was lingering. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said he’d overstrained himself and had arcana poisoning again. That would mean the hive queen had hit him with an arcana injection though, which had disturbing implications.

If it could do something like that, it might not be as mindless as he’d assumed. Most of its actions had appeared instinctive though, and the smaller worms were driven by nothing but instinct. Perhaps its attack had just been a natural reaction to being targeted by arcana. If the wolf matriarch could see it, there was no reason to assume the hive queen couldn’t. Nym made a mental note to be more careful about assuming he was the only thing around that could see spells being cast.

Weirdly, the air was actually a bit warmer inside the hive queen than it had been outside. Perhaps the blizzard itself had contributed so much to the temperature, but either way, once he got out of the snow, the thermal barrier took less arcana to keep active.

That was good, because his soul well was already protesting the additional draw of the flight spell and the dull ache in his body started to grow. Nym needed to find a way out, and fast. Things were going to get worse for him though, because without magic he was both lost and blind. He had two objectives: spread flammable arcana all over everything, but especially all over the hive queen’s heart, and light it up, and find a way to that wound the smaller worms had chewed in its flank so he could escape.

He flew forward slowly, using a scrying spell that he flicked back and forth between seeing what was directly in front of him and scanning for his target. What he found instead was one of the lumps like what was at the bottom of the pit. Inside were little crystalline ice spheres, each one maybe a half a foot wide. Larvae worms were curled up inside them, barely a few feet long and with their legs and mandibles more stub that anything.

Those weren’t what he was here for, but he wondered if they would attack the queen from the inside if he heated things up. Experimentally, he coated the eggs with arcana, then made a trail of it leading deeper into the queen’s body. He sparked the arcana and watched it burn. Ice splintered and cracked, very unlike what real ice would do. He supposed it was different because the ice was alive and made up the monsters’ bodies.

After a bit, the eggs started to split open and the larvae spilled out. They twitched a bit, but weren’t a very impressive strike force. Mostly they just ended up attacking each other instead of the queen. Nym vaguely regretted wasting the arcana on the experiment when he was already feeling weak from the hive queen’s counterattack. He’d learned something, but didn’t see any value to it.

He gave up on flying after that. He had to prioritize the thermal barrier above all else, and scrying for his targets was more important than flying around aimlessly. Walking sucked for a few different reasons, mainly that the increased cold from contact with the ‘floor’ of the inside of the queen’s body radiated cold and made it harder to keep the thermal barrier going. It was still less expensive than flight.

The other reason was that the hive queen wasn’t done moving. It seemed to have settled more or less back into place, coiled around the pit or however it rested, but there were still occasional shifts and adjustments. Whenever that happened, it was a guarantee that Nym would be thrown from his feet.

Still, the queen was only a few thousand feet long. That was a few minutes of walking in a straight line, and its insides were surprisingly open, not like a flesh-and-blood creature at all. There was air to breathe, though it smelled off. He couldn’t quite place why, just that it wasn’t clean. It was pitch black in there, but that hadn’t been a problem with Nym for weeks now. At least, it wasn’t on a normal day.

It was gentler on his soul well to hold the scrying spell and frequently move the anchor back and forth between plotting out his own course and searching for the heart than it was to switch between night vision and scrying. That didn’t mean it was easy, and holding both spells was a constant gnawing ache. He needed to wrap this up soon, but he still hadn’t found the hive queen’s heart.

A hissing sound filled the air, followed by loud pops that echoed around inside of the queen. At first, Nym thought it must be something he was hearing from outside, even though he hadn’t heard anything since being eaten. There was nothing else inside the queen except the larvae, and those were tucked away in their eggs.

His scrying anchor found it a moment later. One of the egg clutches had hatched. The ice forming their shells lay on the ground, shattered as the larvae twitched. They were bigger than the first clutch of eggs Nym had found, maybe two or three times the size. Unlike the ones he’d seen up close, these ones had fully formed mandibles and legs.

It didn’t take long for them to escalate from twitching to writhing, and within a minute or two of watching them, the larvae were fully mobile. Fortunately, his thermal barrier was working the same as it did with the fully grown version, and the worms didn’t seem to realize he was nearby. Instead, they piled back into the lump that had held their eggs and started attacking it.

Nym watched, confused. He hadn’t done anything to heat that area up, but they were acting like he had. Even stranger, his scrying showed him more worms swarming over the outside of the lump, also chewing on it. It looked like they would eventually tear through it, perhaps providing him with an exit once the larvae had all escaped.

He could only assume this was part of the normal lifecycle, since as far as he knew, he’d done nothing to influence it. That might explain why the worms were so willing to attack their own queen once he’d started heating it up. They’d mistaken the hot spots as some sort of signal to release the hatched young. That was a nice stroke of luck for Nym. It meant he didn’t need to keep looking for that wound the worms had dug into the queen’s flank and could fly through the hole a hundred feet away once the worms finished enlarging it.

In the meantime, he went back to looking for the heart. He knew it was in the top half of the worm, and thought it was close enough to the mouth that he should have already passed it. It was easy to miss things when scrying since he only saw things in a roughly ten feet wide sphere. Either he hadn’t gone as far as he thought, or he’d already passed it and missed it.

Nym decided to backtrack a bit and check behind him again. At this point, escape was a higher priority and he didn’t want to get too far away from his exit strategy. He shot a line of arcana towards the clutch of larvae to mark the trail and retreated back the way he came. The scry anchor swept out around him in circles, searching for the heart. It occurred to him that he might not even realize if he saw it.

For all he knew, it was just another giant lump of ice. It could blend right in with the rest of the hive queen’s innards. He wished he knew anything about the anatomy of these monsters. The queen was just so hard to search due to its size, and the smaller worms appeared to be more or less solid ice when he scried on them. There were little pockets with no ice that he suspected aided in the articulation of their bodies, but nothing like a flesh-and-blood creature.

By his best guess, Nym had been in the hive queen for about fifteen minutes. It felt like he should have been able to walk from one end to the other by now, but he had to admit he was going much slower than normal since he was creeping forward blind and getting weaker by the minute. He gave himself two more minutes to find the heart before he bailed, and it was only two minutes because the worms were still working on getting through the lump. If they’d already chewed their way to freedom, he’d leave without hesitation.

Scrying revealed nothing new. It was the same egg clutches he’d already passed, the same empty tunnels that wound through the queen for some inexplicable reason. There were dozens of tunnels large enough for him to pass through that twisted around each other, and hundreds of smaller tunnels that branched off from them. Nym wondered if it was a weight thing. Since its outer shell was so heavy, the inside might need to be hollow so it could lift its own bulk.

The time was up. Nym confirmed his route back and dropped the scrying spell so he could start building up arcana to fly away. It was only once he let go and everything went black that he realized the truth. The tunnels in the hive queen were a sort of cardiovascular system that pumped arcana through its body. The arcana seemed to infuse itself in the queen, meaning it wasn’t even fully circular. He could see it becoming visibly thinner as it swept past him.

It would be a delicate process, but he was confident he could find the source of the arcana. The real question was whether he was in good enough shape to enact the final step of the plan he’d cooked up with the wolf matriarch. If he left now, he might not be able to get back inside without allowing himself to be eaten again, and the golem stage of their current plan hadn’t really worked out.

Nym turned to track the flow of arcana upstream to what he hoped was a heart that wasn’t too far away.