Ascendant

Analia’s room was full to bursting with books. There were at least a hundred of them piled up on the floor, all over the bed, and stacked on her trunk in the corner. There were so many in fact that he wasn’t sure how she managed to squeeze any space out for herself. Nym stepped past the door and picked up the nearest one, titled Althor’s Guide to Living Rune Sequences.

“Where did you get the money for all these?” Nym asked.

“Oh, who cares about that! That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said, pushing past him. “Look here!”

She pointed at a wall that had twenty or thirty sheets of paper tacked up on it. Most of them were filled with illustrations of a complicated spell construct covered by scribbled notes to the point of near-illegibility. The farther down the wall he went, the cleaner things got. It was clearly a spell of some sort Analia was working on, iterating it over and over again as she tried to get it working.

A lot of parts looked familiar, but there were whole sections that were completely new to Nym. He studied it intently for a minute while Analia watched, a smirk on her face. It was obviously a modification of his golem spell, but he couldn’t figure out what it actually did. Then he clicked.

“You made an air golem? He asked.

“Yes I did.” She was practically bouncing up and down with glee. “I just got the first one working half an hour ago. Watch.”

She went through the spell, weaving it together quickly and precisely, and a thing that Nym could best describe as a human-shaped outline of blurry air popped into existence in the middle of the room. It lifted up into the air and flew a few laps before landing, picking up a book, and handing it to Amalia.

“That’s amazing,” he said, matching her grin. “I’m not sure how practical it is, but you got it working in just a few days!”

“Oh it’s plenty practical,” she told him. “I also solved that problem you were having with your scrying spell. I can use the golem as an anchor and see through it, even with a far sight spell going.”

“Really?” he said, peering at the schematics for the spell again. “How did you… oh, I see. That is clever. The golem is an intermediary, so you could use far sight on it and then just connect to its senses to see what it sees. But how does that work if it doesn’t have eyes?”

“No clue, but it does. I was watching the shift change on the walls from a golem I had flying over the roof when you got here.”

“Huh… how about that. That’s really good. Can I study these?”

“Of course,” she told him. “But not right now. For now, tell me how things are out in the forest. The army is keeping everything quiet and this whole town has turned into a giant rumor mill.”

“Mostly fine. We got hit by a ghoul attack yesterday while we were extending the wall. I guess it was just our bad luck, but we all made it out alive. I’m working out of the forward command post now doing freelancer jobs. Supposedly it pays better, but today was my first day and there was a lot of paperwork before I got started. I only had time to do one job.”

“You’ll do better tomorrow. You’re going to have to if you want my spells. I am an expensive and highly paid spell researcher now, you know?”

Nym laughed. “I don’t want the spell that bad.”

“You say that now, but as soon as you can cast your own air golem, you’ll be back for more. And only the first sample is free. Oh! And also this book. I found it for you guys. It’s spells designed specifically to counter undead. Please make sure everyone gets a chance to study it. I don’t want you guys getting hurt.”

Nym took the book and flipped through it. It was only thirty or so pages and had maybe ten spells related to dealing with undead pests, like Analia had said. “Oh, there’s a spell in here to block your ability to smell them,” he said. “I’m definitely learning that one. They smell just awful when you burn their bodies. But right now, I’m more interested in your insane book collection. Where did they all come from?”

“Ah, that. Well…, you see, I may have used my family’s line of credit.” Analia’s face started turning red as she stuttered out the explanation. “You see, my dad’s here. Not ‘here’ here in Ebalsan, but nearby with the army. And I am a scion of the family, and I don’t know if you know this, but every noble family has a bloodline spell that’s only usable by members of the family, so it’s not hard to prove who I am. So you know, it wasn’t hard to get it set up to bill to the family account.”

“Won’t that tell them where you are though?” Nym asked.

“Maybe? But like I said, my father is here too, so hopefully when the bill makes it back to Abilanth, they’ll just assume they’re his expenses. Though there is a small, or maybe not so small, chance that the bills will go directly to him and he’ll realize I’m here.”

“That sounds bad.”

Analia shrugged. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what he did. I’m not happy about it, you know? How could I be? I just kind of want to ask him why. Why do it? Why was he so willing to risk my life chasing this crazy dream of making an ascendant? What even is an ascendant?”

She was acting nonchalant about the whole thing, but Nym could hear the hurt she was trying to hide in her voice. She flopped down on the bed with a heavy sigh and waved a hand at a stack of books on the trunk. “That pile is me trying to figure out what he was doing. I couldn’t get a lot on the subject. Turns out what they call human transmutation is a bit of a taboo subject. There aren’t too many people willing to even admit that they know anything about it. It’s no wonder his lab was hidden even from his family.”

There were four books in the pile. Nym picked the top one up and flipped through it to see a lot of anatomy diagrams, including a few that illustrated the metaphysical portion of a mage. It featured the soul well in a person’s chest with lines going out in every direction like veins that reached into the limbs. The next picture added small capillaries that reached out to fill in more space.

“Is this even possible?” Nym asked, showing Analia the diagram.

“Supposedly. They’re like channels etched into a mage’s body to handle overflow from the soul well. The main ones, the big ones that run down to your toes and fingers, are supposed to be pretty easy to form, if painful and time-consuming. They’re good for maybe an extra twenty percent increase to how much arcana your body can hold without giving yourself arcana poisoning, but you need to be able to use third layer arcana to do it right.”

“This says it’s not safe to do on another person,” he said.

“Nope,” she agreed. “But that didn’t stop my dad.”

“You’re able to hold more than twice as much arcana as the average mage though,” Nym said. “So he didn’t stop at the main lines, did he?”

“Probably not.”

Nym saw her hands clutching at her skirt and belatedly realized she’d been worrying the cloth for the last few minutes while he read. He put the book down and sat in front of her on a cushion of air. “Hey, you know this doesn’t make you any less of a person, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” she said quietly. “It’s not that. It’s just… he’s my father. How could he do that?”

Nym had precisely one memory of the people he thought might be his parents. The man who was probably his father had been arranging for his three-year-old son to start combat training and admonishing him that he couldn’t rely on anything in the world but his own strength. He shuddered to think about what kind of life he’d been destined to lead, and what had gone wrong for him to end up waking up on a beach without even knowing his own name.

“I understand,” he said. “Lately… I’ve been wondering, am I even a real person? And if I’m not, what does that mean? I have this one memory of my family, maybe it’s not even real, but I think it must be. If it is, I’m only a few years old, and a woman is teaching me elemental magic. Then a man shows up and starts talking about how I need to start combat training. I think they’re my parents, but who tells a baby that he needs to learn to defend himself since no one else will?

“What kind of people even were they that they thought it was appropriate to teach someone that young magic? How does a baby learn magic? It can’t be a real memory, right? It’s got to be a dream or something, unless I’m not a person. There’s so much stuff that no one can explain about me. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I’m someone’s experiment that got misplaced.”

Analia didn’t say anything, but her hands stopped moving. She looked up from them to meet Nym’s eyes. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, even if no one else gets it, I do. We’ll be experiments together, right? But I’m not going to let that define me. I want to know where I came from, but I don’t need to be whatever those people wanted me to be. I’ll live for myself.”

“That sounds good. I like that. I’ll live for myself too.”

“Good. But, you know, if you need to punch your dad in the face, I would support that,” Nym told her sagely. “Just keep in mind that the option to do that exists.”

Analia laughed, but it was sad little sound. “Thanks, Nym.”

Nym looked around the room at all the books. “You’re welcome,” he said. “So, have you read all these?”

“Oh God, no. Of course not. I’ve only had a couple days and I’ve been working on the golem spell. I’m stocking up for later when I have more time.”

“Do me a favor when you do,” he said. “See if you can find out anything about something called the Creator. The magic snow wolves told me that he, or it, or whatever it is, made them, just whipped up life out of nothing but raw arcana and intent. The matriarch I talked to said she’d met him, that she was one of the original generation.”

“That’s impossible,” Analia said. “Not even an archmage could create life out of nothing like that. Maybe someone modified some wolves and they passed down some traits.”

Nym shrugged. “I don’t know. The more I learn about magic though, the more I wonder how good a handle humans have on what’s really impossible. Every time I think I have a lead into what happened to me, I keep hearing things like ‘no idea how they did this,’ and ‘shouldn’t be possible.’”

“You are pretty impossible sometimes,” Analia told him.

“You’re one to talk.”

She smiled, a real genuine smile this time. Nym smiled back, and then gave the books an appraising glance. “So, what kind of spellbooks did you pick up? I’m thinking I need to learn some magic for underwater travel and self-defense.”

“Why would you need something like that? I thought you were drawn to the skies, not the seas.”

“Well, you see, there’s a certain shark I need to have a word with…”