Ascendant

“So obviously something is messed up here,” Ophelia said. “But I cannot for the life of me figure out what I did wrong on these calculations. I expected it to be high just because it took three of us to hold the spell, but more in line with Analia’s. She’s already enough of an outlier as it is.”

“Whatever the correct number is, it’s obvious that Ermy, sorry, Nym, is strong,” Bildar said. “What he lacks is a thorough education. Now, we were hoping you’d want to come, and I may have picked up something to help you out which I couldn’t give you earlier on account of how buried it was in the wagon.”

Bildar revealed a book he’d been holding behind his back and handed it to Nym. “I had Nomick pick it up for me just to make sure it was a recent edition. There’s no telling what stuff was true back when I took the licensing exam but isn’t today. This is a primer that goes over relevant laws for different parts of the world in relation to mage-craft. It should tell you everything you need to know to pass that portion of the written exam.”

“And I,” Monick added, “will be tutoring you while we travel on the various spells we had to know to pass the practical portion a few years ago when I took it.”

“He means ‘we’ will be tutoring you,” Nomick said. “There’s not a lot to do on the road, so it’s easy enough to lecture and walk.”

“Wow, uh… thanks, guys. That’s really kind of you. You don’t have to do this,” Nym said.

“It’s fine. You need to get a license so you’re not hobbled every time we go into a town. Plus, they give you one of these,” Bildar said, displaying a leather band on his wrist. On the inside was a small disc with three concentric circled inscribed into it surrounding a solid core. A line started in the center and reached out through two of them, but didn’t quite touch the third.

“This looks familiar,” Nym said. “I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

“It’s a common mage symbol. Anyone who’s proven they can pull arcana from the Edge of the Horizon is legally allowed to use it, whether they can just barely do it or they’re on the verge of pushing past that layer to the next,” Bildar told him.

“Oh! Right. The magister in my old village had this on a plaque next to his door.”

“That’s… kind of tacky. It’s generally considered to be in poor taste to use it for anything that’s not identification purposes, but technically there’s no rule against having it made into a plaque.”

“He was that kind of person,” Nym said, remembering the abrasive old man’s accusations that Nym must be lying simply because he couldn’t figure out what the issue was.

“Anyway, like I said, once you get a license, you can commission something with the symbol on it showing you have it. It’s not unusual to see rings or amulets. I think for a little while, there was a fad where women were getting the design on earrings?” Bildar looked to Ophelia for confirmation.

“Among other piercings. Not all of them were visible upon casual inspection.”

“So that’s kind of our group goal over the next few weeks. Get you, and Analia if she needs help, trained up as much as possible. Nobody’s expecting you to be able to pass the exam with only a month or two of dedicated prep time, but if we can get you that much closer, we’ll consider it a win. Plus since neither of you are technically our apprentices, there’s really no better time than now, while we’re traveling far away from towns and cities, to practice.”

“That all sounds great,” Nym said. “When do we start?”

“Tomorrow,” Monick said. “I’m still writing down all the spells I can remember needing and trying to remember how to cast them. A few are quite worthless on their own and really only serve to easily prove that you’ve mastered some concept or another, so they’re a bit hazy in my memory.”

The conversation died down as dinner neared its completion and everyone started settling down for the night. There was a brief flurry of post-meal activity as the earth mages worked together to raise a circular wall around their camp site, including a separate pen for the oxen. Ophelia and Nym scribed rune sequences to strengthen them, though she said it was very unlikely they’d need them. There was some debate about putting up a roof, but as the weather was clear, they opted to skip it.

It was a good night for Nym in a lot of ways. The earth mages reminded him a lot of Ciana, whom he found himself thinking about and missing more every day. Now that he had the magic to defend himself against a group of adults, he was a lot less anxious about the idea of going back to Palmara. He still had no plans to go into the town itself, but the thought of being near it no longer scared him.

Analia opened up her trunk while they were winding down and pulled a fold-out screen made of some thin paper from it. She set it up and invited Ophelia to join her, and the two of them bid the rest of the group good night before disappearing behind it.

The screen started glowing in Nym’s sight. Both silhouettes disappeared and all sound from behind it cut off. Once Nym knew to look, he saw a tiny line of runes scribed around the framework, which he was interested in reading, but decided it would be in bad taste to do so after it had been activated. He made a mental note to ask Analia for a look in the morning.

One by one, other auras popped up around various items. Bildar had a sleeping bag that was enchanted in some way, and the twins each had pillows and blankets.  Nym suspected there were probably other mundane items enchanted to be more effective hidden behind Analia’s privacy screen, but couldn’t tell with it active.

Only he had nothing of the sort, but that was fine by Nym. He’d spent plenty of time sleeping outside with nothing over his head. Compared to the week of traveling to reach Thrakus, it was downright pleasant with both the fire and the relatively warm night air. Nym curled up in his cloak, the hood bunched up to act as his pillow, and went to sleep.

* * *

The next few days were a blur as Nym and Analia passed the little book of mage laws back and forth, discussing it and quizzing each other on the more esoteric rules of some regions. Some of them made no sense at all, but when Nym asked about the reasoning, nobody could give him a good answer. The important part was knowing the laws though, not why they were that way, so Nym studied diligently.

Practical training was a different matter. Monick scribbled down schematics for spell constructs to do things like create different colored lights or make phantom sounds that mimicked everything from bird cries to creaking timber to metal clanging against metal. There were spells to clean things, spells to mend small tears, spells to foretell cards being drawn, spells to hide the smell of things.

The problem was that while Monick knew the spells and could demonstrate them easily, his scribblings were not very accurate and if Nym had to base his own casting based on the scrawled diagrams of how the constructs were supposed to look, they would fail. This usually meant he had to cast it a dozen times the wrong way before he could convince Monick to demonstrate so he could ‘see what the outcome was supposed to look like,’ but in actuality to study a real construct.

It was worse in some ways for Analia. She already knew many of the spells Monick was trying to show them, but the ones she didn’t, she struggled with. Nym took to noting down which spells she was having the most problems with and, after he’d reverse-engineered them from Monick’s demonstrations, made his own schematics. He was by no means a professional, but his drawings were far, far more accurate. She had little trouble casting the spell using his notes, which were structured similarly to the spells that had been stored in her family’s library.

Oddly, many of the spells weren’t even second circle. Nym found himself drawing from the first layer, Phase Shift, more during those few days of training than he ever had during his normal activities. There was a lot of depth there that he’d missed out on when he was scrambling to increase his strength. The spells weren’t necessarily powerful, but being able to mend tears with magic would have saved him a lot of headaches.

He also found that other than it being marginally easier to stop his conduit in the first layer, the spells weren’t necessarily any less complex. When he mentioned it, Monick said, “Yeah, that’s probably because you’re using the same mental construct for your conduit for both. A first circle spell just needs a needle that can pierce reality to bring in arcana. You can do it basically instantly. Second circle spells need a pipe that can hold against the pressure of pushing through the membrane between two levels of reality.”

“So what about third circle spells then? It can’t just be ‘bigger and stronger’ or there’d be a lot more of them,” Nym said.

“Ah, well… that’s complicated. You know how the conduit goes so far into the second layer and then it just kind of hits a wall?”

“Yes.”

“Right, well, that’s not really a wall. Here, let me show you.”

Monick cast a quick spell and a patch of the road turned to sand. He drew a circle in it, then two more circles around it. “Here in the center is us, reality as we know it.  To reach the first layer, we just have to poke through this membrane surrounding our reality. Easy enough. To reach the second layer, it’s the same thing, except our reach has to be a little bit longer.”

Then he scattered a hand full of rocks inside the ring that represented the second layer. “These things are hard points in the arcana. We can’t just power through them. We have to go around them. But since we can’t see into the arcana, we’re going in blind. So now the conduit doesn’t just need to be strong, it needs to be flexible. We need to avoid obstacles.”

Monick squatted down and drew a line out from the center, bisecting the first circle in a straight shot, and then weaving back and forth through all the rocks he’d dumped in the sand. “And once we get to the end, then we can pierce this membrane and get to the third layer, what we call the Astral Sea. That arcana is far enough removed from reality to do all sorts of crazy stuff. But it’s not easy to reach.”

“Huh… so all I need to change to reach the third layer is make the conduit flexible enough to go around the rocks?”

“Easier said than done, my friend. There are a few points where people fail. The first is simply making a flexible conduit. It’s not as easy as you might think. Most mages do eventually figure that part out, but then they just can’t hold the conduit long enough to make it all the way through the second layer. And for the ones that do that, the hard fail at the end comes when they’ve got a conduit that wriggles like a street walker doing a lap around the docks, but it’s not strong enough to pierce the membrane.”

“Wriggles like a… what? Nevermind, I don’t want to know. So, in order to draw in Astral Sea arcana into your soul well, you need a strong, flexible conduit that can provide feedback so you know when you’ve run into a rock but still has a sharp tip for piercing the third layer. Wow, that’s got to take a lot of practice.”

“I wouldn’t know. I can’t do it myself. I don’t know anyone who can outside a few of the older masters at the Academy,” Monick told him.

“I met one, once. They were crazy, but also scary strong.”

“Yes they are, my young friend.” With a wave of his hand, Monick transmuted the sand back into road dirt. “Now, as I was saying, the key to this spell is that the construct has to be flexible to allow for the arcana to build up before it releases…”