Ascendant

“Nym! You’re alive!”

He didn’t see Ophelia until she crashed into him, hugging him. “Hey! Stop, what are you doing?” he yelped.

“You idiot!” she scolded, pushing him out to arms-length. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Stop, I said. Stop!” He wiggled out of her grip and took a step back. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you come back to the outpost with the rest of us when the ghouls attacked?”

“Because there were other mages who were closer to the ambush and they needed help getting away?” Nym was confused. What else was he supposed to do?

“That’s the soldiers’ job to save them! You are supposed to retreat with the rest of the builders.”

“Excuse me, lady mage,” the soldier captain he’d been talking to interjected. “Your… um… son? Brother? Friend? Regardless, your companion saved probably twenty earth mages from being killed today and helped us destroy twice that number of ghouls. His talents are wasted on the backline making walls. A prodigy like that should be on the front line, driving the undead back so breakouts like this don’t happen.”

Ophelia was taken aback by the captain’s speech. “That’s… Nym… is that what you want to do? You’re… you’re young for it. We only brought you with us because we thought you’d be safe here at the back lines.”

Nym hadn’t really given it much thought. He’d mostly just wanted to stay with the Earth Shapers because he considered them his friends. At some point in time, he was going to go back to the coast to see Ciana, but he didn’t have specific plans beyond that.

“I don’t know. I kind of just came to help you with this and make some money. I figured we’d work together until all the undead were gone and they put a new patch on Ul’tuthik’s prison so new ones couldn’t keep getting out.”

The captain flinched and looked around. “Where did you hear that name?” he hissed, his voice pitched low. “That’s classified information.”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone,” Nym said.

The captain grimaced. “This is going to be a mess. You need to come with me to the forward command post. However you’re involved with this, they’ll sort it out.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you’re too many weird things wrapped up in one package. Your age. Your magic. What you know. Someone is going to need to sort through this, and it’s way above my pay grade.”

“Oh,” Nym said. He took a second to think about it. “I guess that’s fine. Are we going right now?”

The captain sighed. “We should, but it’s getting dark. God damn these undead. There’s no way we can risk a run like that in the dark. You’ll stay here at this fort with us tonight, and first thing in the morning, we’ll run you over to the forward command post. The guys in charge can figure this out then.”

Nym shrugged. “Is that okay, Ophelia?”

She chewed her lip and looked back and forth from Nym to the soldier. “He’s not in trouble?” she asked.

The captain shrugged. “I don’t think so. It’ll go better for everyone if he cooperates.”

“Can he stay with our crew tonight?”

The captain looked like he wanted to say no. “I really… shouldn’t allow it,” he said slowly. “Damn. Fine. I’ll assign a guard. Early tomorrow, we’re all going up together, understand?”

Nym nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was, but so far the soldiers had been friendly, and he didn’t think he’d have a problem getting away if they tried to capture him. He knew a lot more magic now than he did a few months ago.

The captain assigned two soldiers as guards outside the structure the Earth Shapers put up. When the others questioned Ophelia about it, she just said, “Nym is very important now. He’s going to visit the people in charge in the morning.”

The new shelter wasn’t nearly as good as the old. It was a similar size, but with a few stone pillars holding up a roof and otherwise open everywhere. There was no privacy to be had, but it was only temporary. There had been a huge influx of refugees fleeing to whichever outpost was closest to them, and the ones the Earth Shapers had ended up in had a surplus. It had led to a flurry of rapid-fire construction projects as they extended the walls and put up more shelters.

Night fell, and the group made dinner over an open fire. Nomick and Monick both thanked Nym about a dozen times for helping, though Nym still felt guilty about freezing when the ghouls first attacked. They brushed off his apologies without concern, and Nym slowly let himself relax. The awkwardness vanished and by the time they were all ready for bed, it was just like it had always been.

* * *

The soldiers entered their shelter at the crack of dawn and woke Nym up. Since it had an open floor plan, that meant they woke everyone else up too. They ignored the chorus of groans, curses, and a thrown shoe as they escorted Nym out into the sun. He stumbled after them, stifling a yawn as he walked, still half-naked.

“Take your clothes with you,” Ophelia said from behind, shoving a bundle into his arms when he turned to look at her.

“Whu…? Oh. Thanks.”

Nym got dressed and used hydrokinesis and terrakinesis to scrub himself as clean as he possibly could without access to a real bath, then followed the two soldiers to the captain’s tent. He looked significantly worse than he had the night before, with bags under his eyes and a slouch that had been absent the last time Nym had seen him.

“Oh? You’re here? Right, it’s morning. Sorry, we’ve been repelling ghouls all night. Extending the walls out put us too close to a lot of trees the bastards are using like ladders to get in. Let me just… Derket, where the hell did you run off to?”

“Captain Tainer, sir,” one the Nym’s ‘escorts’ said. “The lieutenant had to be taken back to the rear base for medical treatment. One of the ghouls tore his arm off two hours ago.”

“Damn it! Why is this the first I’m hearing of this?” the captain snarled. He forced himself to stop and took a deep breath. “Okay, fine. It’s fine. You two are this young mage’s guard now. You take him to forward command and get him in front of Commander Seskrit. Tell him that Mage Nym here has classified information learned from a prior engagement with the enemy and what he’s done for our forces here on the south east sector.”

“Sir!” Both men saluted, and they were off.

Nym had to lift all three of them over the wall, as it hadn’t been built with any sort of gate. There was a lot of squinting up into trees and flinching at any sort of loud noises as they traveled, which Nym felt was perfectly reasonable after the day they’d all had yesterday.

“Do you think there are a lot more ghouls roaming around here still?” he asked.

“Don’t know. It was a really big outbreak. No one’s sure how they managed to gather in numbers like that. The forward units would usually break something like that up before it gets this close to the edge. So… either they went down for some reason, or it formed behind their lines.”

Both soldiers shuddered. “It’s bad news. If the forward units are dead, then we’re losing control of the situation. If the ghouls massed behind the forward lines, then they’re being directed by wights, which wasn’t the case before, at least not this close to the wall.”

“I suppose we’ll find out pretty soon,” the other soldier said. “We’ll be right at the heart of the front line in a few hours.”

Most of that time was spent forcing their way through the underbrush to reach the road running between Ebalsan and forward command. Nym offered twice to fly them over, but both time the soldiers declined. “We’re not really supposed to do that,” one of them said by way of explanation.

“If you’re sure. I’m sick of this though, so I’ll be overhead. Yell if you need me.”

Then Nym flew up over the branches and drifted slowly through the sky, keeping an eye on both of the soldiers as they watched him. They seemed upset, but it wasn’t like he didn’t offer to fly them over too. After an hour of watching them struggle, he called down, “Change your mind yet?”

There was a brief discussion below as they argued about it, until finally one of them yelled back, “Yes. If you’re sure you don’t mind?”

He picked them both up and flew them the last mile or so over the forest to land on the road. They took a break then, since they were ahead of schedule now, and had a late breakfast. It was road food straight from Nym’s pack, but he was happy to share.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” one of the soldiers said, “But you’ve got to be the nicest, least pretentious and stuck-up mage I’ve ever met. Most of the time mages just stare down their noses at us soldiers.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“It’s because of the magic,” the other soldier said. “It takes a lot of talent to use ‘real magic’ instead of soldier skills. We’re all trained to forge a conduit so we can do forced marches and increase our strength when we fight, but we can’t do the kind of stuff you can do.”

Nym thought about that for a second. “But that’s almost everyone. Why would they look down on just soldiers?”

Both of them started laughing. “Mages do look down on everyone, but soldiers more so because we can use some magic, but not real magic. It’s like they think we’re lazy and just not trying hard enough.”

“But you’re not like that. It’s refreshing to be treated well. Don’t lose that, huh? Maybe when you get a bit older, see about adjusting some of your colleagues’ attitudes.”

“Now don’t go pitting the boy against the world,” the first soldier said. He turned to Nym and added, “It’s nice that you’re so well-mannered, was all I was trying to say.”

“Well… okay then.”

Now that they’d alerted him to it, Nym watched the faint, almost translucent auras appear around them when they started drawing in arcana, and the trio started off deeper into the forest. He watched the spell structures they used, but didn’t find much new there. It was mostly just basic muscle reinforcement, using arcana to keep themselves fresh. Occasionally, one of them would pull in arcana to sharpen their senses and scan the trees bordering the road.

Nym spent the trip trying to look past the aura of arcana he always saw and make out the conduits they’d forged to reach the first layer. Once he thought to search the aura for it, it wasn’t hard to find. What he saw confused him though. His own conduits were straight, rigid things, like a sharpened reed that punctured through reality and let arcana flow to him through its hollow core.

The soldiers’ conduits were nothing like that. They were curled around themselves and scrunched up, and reminded him uncomfortably of some of the gutted victims’ intestines he’d seen yesterday. They didn’t so much pierce the membrane between realities and just pile up on it until it was stretched and strained so much that arcana started to seep in around the floppy, bunched up conduit and get absorbed through the surface.

It was no wonder the soldiers weren’t able to draw in second layer arcana. They weren’t even really reaching the first layer with their technique. It was more like they were pushing on a wet cloth, then sucking their fingers dry. Nym wondered if it was just a lack of willpower that caused it, or poor training, or if some people were really just built that way.

He thought back to some of the things he’d read in Analia’s father’s journals and considered if it was possible to fix a conduit.