Ascendant

Nym could barely see grim death coming his way through the murky water, but he knew what being out of the boat meant. The other sharks were still circling, but his shark, the one with the scar near the fin, was coming straight at him. He appeared in the dark water, barely feet from Nym, jaws open as his powerful tail propelled him forward.

Then his arm was in the shark’s mouth and teeth punctured his skin around his bicep. Skin broke, blood wafted into the water, and pain blocked out any rational thoughts Nym might have had left. Time slowed down to a stop as the tooth bit down. And in that frozen fragment, everything was washed away and he found himself somewhere else.

* * *

A woman floated in front of him, supported on cushions of air. She smiled down at him and said, “One more time. You’ve almost got it. The conduit is strong enough to hold, you just need to stretch it farther. Just copy what I’m doing.”

She was surrounded by a brilliant corona of colors, magic pouring into her soul well from at least four different layers. He could make out multiple conduits, each one connected to a different layer, but that was still too advanced for him. While she wouldn’t or couldn’t drop her connections to the higher layers, she’d forged the conduit to the second layer specifically for him.

“Can you make it again?” he asked.

“Of course.”

And she did, slowly so that he could follow along. Laboriously, he forged the conduit one strand of willpower at a time. Instead of a needle like he’d used to reach the first layer, he wove his will together into something stronger and sliced through the metaphysical layer they called Phase Shift to connect to the second layer, what they called the Edge of the Horizon. He barely had the strength to breach Phase Shift, but he did have it. What he lacked was the technique to mold his willpower and force the magic to obey him.

The mental construct fully realized, he forged the conduit and quested out of reality with it. The first layer was as easy to find as it had always been, and he drove his will into it like a splinter under its skin. The farther he pushed the harder it got, but he refused to let the arcana of the first layer into the conduit. It could reach farther, he knew. It would reach farther.

There was something at the edge of his awareness. That was his goal, to stretch his conduit to touch it, and to punch through. Seconds passed and he was just about to admit defeat again when he broke through. It was by a fingernail’s width, but it was enough. The conduit was at the Edge of the Horizon, and he opened it greedily, letting the wash of second layer arcana flood his soul well.

 “I did it!”

“Good, now let me show you how to use the magic…”

They worked for hours as he learned how to weave it in different patterns, internal and external, to a variety of basic elemental effects. He was sitting on top of his own cushion of air, legs crossed and a globe of water orbiting his body, when a door opened to reveal a tall, thin man dressed in opulent robes with long hair tied back behind his head in an intricate pattern.

“How is he doing?”

“See for yourself,” the woman said, indicating the boy with the wave of a hand. “He’s working on multi-casting from a single conduit right now.”

“How long did it take him to learn to reforge his conduit?”

“Two hours.”

The man’s eyes glittered as he regarded the boy. “Excellent. I’ll have Omarin come in tomorrow to start working on combat casting. He’ll need to learn to defend himself while working his magic.”

“So soon?” the woman protested. “He’s only three.”

“So what? Do you think his enemies are going to care? As soon as it becomes known how quickly he’s advancing, he will be a target. It’s better for him to learn to defend himself now.”

The boy’s concentration faltered as he listened to them and he sprawled out of the floor. Tears came to his eyes as he picked himself back up, but rather than comfort him, the man said, “There, see. This is exactly what I mean. Just paying attention to a conversation is too much for him. What is he going to do when someone hits him with an arcana injection?”

The man squatted down in front of the child and looked him in his tear-rimmed eyes. “Understand this, son. All of the world is against you, and the only thing you can truly rely on is your own strength. You will grow strong, stronger than anyone else, or you will break one day when it turns out you are too weak.”

The woman gave the man a frosty look, but didn’t contradict him. “If that is all, you may go,” she told him.

The man stood up and told her, “Omarin will be here at dawn to commence his combat training.” Then he disappeared, leaving the boy alone with a scraped knee and a woman who made no effort to comfort him.

* * *

Time resumed, and Nym wove his conduit with a speed he hadn’t known he possessed. It pierced the second layer easily, struck something outside his awareness and started to unravel, but nonetheless flooded his battered soul well with arcana. The water around his arm hardened, forcing the shark’s jaw open and letting him slip his arm back out.

The puncture marks were barely skin deep, not enough to cripple the muscle. Nym forced the water around him straight up and burst into open air. His flight wasn’t supported though, and as the water settled back down, he started falling. He landed half-in the boat with his legs in the water, and Ciana grabbed hold of his shirt to haul him the rest of the way to safety.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“Second layer,” Nym said, coughing and trying to stop his head from spinning. “Hydrokinesis. Much more efficient than…”

He trailed off and looked towards the center of the cove. There was… something… there. He couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. It was down at the bottom buried in the sand and silt. Now that he thought about it, they’d been getting close to that when his stalker shark had gotten aggressive.

It could be a coincidence. That shark was weird anyway. It followed him all over the cove, but usually it just circled around, making its presence known without doing much to interfere. It could be that they’d just spent too long on the water or it was just hungry enough to try something today.

“Focus,” Ciana said, shaking him by his shoulders. “We’re still on the water with no way to move. Can you get us back to the shore?”

Nym forged a new conduit using the weaving technique he’d remembered, but he was still weak from his explosive burst of arcana and the best he could manage was a first circle spell to push them to the shore. Ciana took up the harpoon and menaced any sharks that got too close to the prow and they slowly made it into the shallows.

She dug the harpoon into the sand and used it to drag the boat forward until the water was barely a foot deep. Then she hopped out and dragged it up onto the sand. “Out,” she ordered. “This thing is heavy enough already.”

Nym dragged himself onto the beach and promptly collapsed face down. “My everything hurts,” he said. “Think I gave myself arcana poisoning again.”

“I’ll take care of getting the boat above the tideline. Think you can make it home without help?”

“Just going to lay here for a bit,” he said. “Too tired to walk now.”

And that was what he did, for the next 6 hours. He only moved once, when water started lapping at his feet, and then only to crawl a few feet higher up the beach. Ciana came down to check on him a few times, but he just waved her off and told her he was fine.

He laid there and thought about what he’d remembered, his first returned memory. He had no idea what it meant, but he was pretty sure he’d seen his parents. The faces were unfamiliar to him, and the conversation seemed extreme. He had to wonder if they were really his memories. It was too outlandish to be real.

There was no denying the technique worked though. He’d been trying to reach the second layer with no results and it honestly felt like cheating to just get handed the solution like that. He hadn’t earned it that way. On the other hand, not losing his arm to a shark was pretty nice too. He liked having two arms. In light of that, he was willing to take the dirty victory.

Nym wondered what other skills he could uncover hidden in his lost memories, but not at the expense of literally swimming with sharks to gain them. Once he was recovered, he had plenty to parse anyway. Reaching the second layer was just the first step. The arcana was richer, rife with impossibilities that were truly magical. The woman, his maybe-mother, had been floating in the air. He could do it too.

Nym looked at the bluffs and the narrow trail leading up them. His first goal was to float himself to the top. Second goal, he amended. His first goal was to stand up without anything hurting or getting dizzy. Once he’d recovered enough to have coherent thoughts and give himself a mental one-over, he considered the meditation techniques Lathia had told him about.

It wasn’t exactly the same situation, but now that he had reached the second layer, maybe he could find something useful there. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, trying to feel the arcana that had leaked out of his soul well into his muscles and bones. To his surprise, he found it was easy to locate. The problem was that there wasn’t actually all that much there.

It seemed that his aches and pains were plain old muscle fatigue. The first circle magic he’d been using was hard on his body in the same way physically performing the actions would have been. He’d put himself through the wringer and was extremely sore, and there just wasn’t a lot that he could rush fixing. Time was all he really needed.

He did work on extracting some of that excess arcana, but it turned out finding it and moving it were two very different skill sets. The arcana was dissolving on its own faster than he could remove it, a process that still took hours. Eventually though, as the sun was setting on him and Ciana had just come down to check on him for the fifth time, he felt well enough to make an attempt.

Staggering to his feet, Nym crossed the sand and stepped onto the scrub grass that bordered the base of the bluffs. With one hand on the stone wall, he forged a new conduit and sent it out to the second layer. It took about thirty seconds to fill his soul well, a mildly uncomfortable act still, like poking already-bruised flesh, and then he set about weaving the arcana into thick cushion of air.

Pressure pushed against his legs and hugged his chest. It pushed up and his feet rose off the ground by a few inches. Nym’s confidence grew with each second and he flew higher. The bluffs were maybe thirty feet tall and even though he wasn’t really ascending any faster than if he just walked, he was still flying.

With a broad grin, he manipulated the cushion to push him forward once he crested the ridge. Both feet touched down on the prickly grass and he let out a deep sigh of contentment. “Honestly,” he said aloud, “It was kind of worth the shark. The arm barely even hurts anymore.”