Ascendant

Arcana dribbled along behind him as he trudged forward, leaving a trail from the larvae clutch to his current position. Nym tracked through the hive queen’s body blind, taking turns seemingly at random as he tried to narrow down the source of the arcana. It got trickier where the larger arteries intersected each other, especially if there were smaller tunnels looping around and connecting them, but he was making progress.

He bounced off a wall of ice and tumbled backwards. “Ow!” he said. Somehow, the arcana was flowing through what he was sensing as an exit, but he couldn’t get through. Left with no choice, he conjured up a new scrying anchor to see what the problem was.

Nym stifled a groan when he got a look at it. The wall was relatively thin and perforated with hundreds of holes no wider than his finger that let the arcana pass through. Nym finally understood why he couldn’t find the heart. It wasn’t a big lump of ice sitting inside a chamber. It was the chamber itself, which had eight spots like the one in front of him, some sort of sieve that let arcana come out from it to be distributed throughout the hive queen.

The ice wall was maybe a foot thick. A single lightning bolt would probably break it. Nym hesitated, both because he would drain almost all of his recovered arcana in addition to it hurting like crazy, and also because the hive queen so far didn’t seem to have noticed him creeping along inside of it, still alive and unchewed.

But he didn’t think he could get his own arcana into the room through the pinholes, and a single lightning strike seemed less risky than igniting his arcana and drawing a pack of worms to the wall so they could chew it while he waited around. Nym took a deep breath, grit his teeth, and started pulling more arcana through his soul well.

The lightning bolt arced through the air, twisted somewhat farther to the side than he wanted, and struck the ice. It exploded in a cloud of hail stones, many of which struck Nym. He raised an arm to shield his face, mentally cursing that he hadn’t stood farther back. Before he could check on the damage, the queen shifted and he was thrown into a wall. Another shift sent him sprawling in the other direction.

Finally it settled back down and Nym was able to enter its heart. That was a misnomer, of course. The queen didn’t have any internal organs, as far as he could tell. But enormous amounts of arcana appeared in the chamber and pushed outwards. He’d disturbed the balance of something, and now the arcana was rushing out of the opening he’d busted open instead of flowing evenly through each exit.

Standing in the heart chamber, he could actually feel it on his skin. It was so thick and so much stronger than the arcana he was used to, it was seeping into his body. If he hadn’t already had arcana poisoning, he thought he could get it just from exposure to the hive queen’s heart. Shaking his head and working quickly, Nym started layering his own arcana throughout the chamber. He took some time, probably more than he should, to visit each sieve-like exit, and shoot arcana into that.

Then he cast a heated wall spell on the floor he was standing on just to make sure the worms found the place. It was probably overkill, and he groaned under the strain of the arcana expenditure, but he wasn’t interested in ever coming back. He wanted the hive queen dead, the blizzard cleared up, and to fly far, far south where they didn’t know what snow looked like.

Nym trudged back out and retraced his steps, leaving as much arcana as he could force out of his body behind him. It was good thing he could follow the trail and no longer needed to scry, because he didn’t think he could maintain the thermal barrier and lay down arcana to ignite if he had to use magic to navigate too.

The larvae were somehow still chewing at the ice separating them from freedom, though holes had started to appear. Nym was surprised, considering how easily the adults had torn through a random spot on the queen, but then again, there were relatively few adults on the outside of the queen compared to the wound he’d incited them to make.

Nym closed his eyes tight and cursed silently. He was at the end of his stamina. All he needed to do was light the match and fly away, but there was one last log fallen on the road. The smart thing to do was wait for them to finish and slip out. Using more arcana to speed the process up would just make it harder to fly away.

Standing there holding the thermal barrier and watching light trickle in from the tears in the hive queen’s skin would cost him too. It was hard to say which was going to drain him more, so he decided to take the middle ground and cast another heated wall spell on the lump of flesh. Hopefully it would attract more adult worms to tear through it faster. As soon as they showed up, he was going to light up the arcana trail and fly away.

It didn’t take long after that. More worms showed up and within thirty seconds, he could see the sky. Snow filled the air again, but not as thick as it had been when the blizzard was going at full strength. Perhaps his sabotage of the heart chamber had weakened the hive queen’s magic. He hoped so. It would be easier to fly away if the blizzard was weaker.

Worms spilled through the torn flesh into the hive queen’s body, and Nym ignited the trail of arcana. It flared up in sudden flames and started to burn away, alleviating his biggest fear, that the intensity of the cold and wind would prevent it from catching again. That didn’t happen, but Nym almost got ran over by the first worm to rush past him to attack the hive queen’s body.

Nym pulled together his flagging strength and flew up through the hole before it became completely clogged with worms. They were coming from every direction, scrambling over the ice and swarming over the queen. Many of them were heading for the open cavity in its side, but many more were tearing at it, trying to dig straight down.

He flew slowly, barely as fast as his early attempts had been. Nym wanted to fly faster, wanted to do better than limping through the air, but it hurt too much to pull more arcana through his soul well. The spell was barely getting enough to function, and the thermal barrier was starting to fall apart as the much colder air outside the hive queen hit him.

Below him, the hive queen let out a roar that shook the snow and caused it to jump. Nym spun and flew backwards so he could watch it spasm as its children ate it from the inside out. His lips curled up into a grim smile. “That’s what you get for trapping me in your stupid blizzard,” he said.

The hive queen rose up to its full height, but Nym was too far away for it to reach him. There was no trailing arcana for it to chase, and though he imagined he was visible through his failing thermal barrier, he didn’t think he needed to be concerned unless it started chasing him.

That didn’t happen, thankfully. It thrashed about, sending tremors through the ground and throwing snow up into the air. A large part of him wanted to stay and watch it die, but his practical side urged him to find a place to rest. He searched out one of the mountain peaks that poked up through the snow, wanting something that would both accept a heated wall spell and would hopefully be far away from any worms that were still roaming around.

Nym practically dragged himself up the last fifty feet of the mountain he picked out, all of his spells having given out. His limbs were so heavy and his soul well ached so bad that he spent several long minutes weighing the pros and cons between casting one last heated wall spell or just hoping his clothes would keep him from freezing to death. It was close, but in the end, he powered through and collapsed on the now-warm stone to sleep.

* * *

It was the middle of the night when Nym woke back up. Everything hurt, but the sky was clear for the first time in a week. He took that as a good sign that the hive queen was dead. Not desiring in any way another round with that monster, Nym could only breathe out a sigh of relief.

Now that he was awake and relatively safe, he needed to figure out exactly how injured he was. Physically, he was bruised from top to bottom. Most of it came from being swallowed, he thought. He’d be tender for a while, but he’d heal. He didn’t think anything was broken, and as far as he could tell, he’d escaped the ravages of frostbite.

Magically speaking, things were a different story. The arcana injection, if that’s what it was, had hit him hard. He’d made very little progress in clearing that out, and his soul well was strained to the point that it still hurt when he woke up. Since there was no way Nym could just not use magic if he expected to survive, he was in for an unpleasant few days while he healed up.

The last problem was that he was ravenous, but had no food on him. His pack was safely stored near the roof of the matriarch’s cave, far away from Cold Paw’s bottomless pit of a stomach. It was probably safe. Definitely.

Nym groaned. There had better be some food left when he got back.

There was nothing he could do about that now. Instead, he sat down and tried to cleanse the arcana poisoning in his body. Nym normally found this relatively easy, easy enough that he could do it in combat. The arcana the hive queen had hit him with was fighting him like nothing he’d ever experienced. He chipped away at it, but it didn’t want to break down.

All things considered, his best guess was that he’d had his first brush with third layer arcana. It was unfortunate that it was an arcana injection, but then again, an offensive third circle spell probably would have outright killed him. He was sure the arcana lodged in his body would break down given enough time, even if he did nothing to speed up the process.

It made it difficult to function, but when the sun came up, Nym forced himself to get back in the air and confirm the hive queen’s death. He found it easily enough, all of its massive length splayed out in the snow and ice, tore open in multiple places, and with its crystalline body no longer glinting in the light. The icy flesh was dull now, more mud colored than the natural ice around it.

That was dead enough for him. Nym could still see a few worms crawling around the carcass, but he was in no condition to fight them. He flew off, still far slower than he wanted, and found his way back to the wolves’ den.

That was harder to find, but he knew approximately where it was and through some judicious use of scrying, he found the tunnels leading to it and dug his way down. He was met by three full-grown beasts all standing at alert when he entered the den, followed by a dozen excited pups that swarmed all over him.

Normally Nym would have been happy to be buried in a wolf pup avalanche, but as sore as he was, he had to escape their affections by flying overhead. That didn’t stop them from chasing after him, but when he approached the matriarch’s den, they gave up. She met him at the entrance and took in his condition at a single glance.

[It is done?]

“It is,” he said.

[Fine work, wolf’s friend. Come in and regale me with the tales of your victory.]