Ascendant

Nym was panting heavily after just a few minutes. He’d drastically underestimated the number of ghouls coming over his section of the wall. Air blasts weren’t that draining, but doing it over and over again was taking a toll. The hard air cushions he lifted people up with didn’t work any better, since the ghouls had a tendency to shred them as soon as they felt the air pushing up against their undead flesh.

It didn’t help that he’d been forced to create three new earth golems to help. Their primary function was to get under the ghoul and shove it off-balance so that the wind blast was as effective as it could possibly be. The tactic was working, but it seemed like more and more ghouls kept piling up on him. Nym didn’t want to admit it, but he didn’t think he could keep up the pace for twenty minutes.

Though he knew they were needed elsewhere, Nym kept hoping the reserves would show up to help him, just for a minute or two so he could catch his breath. A few soldiers with axes to chop up paralyzed ghouls might just be a more effective use of his magic, despite the fact that the paralysis spell was ten times more expensive to cast. That didn’t happen, of course. The loose wight was pressuring the east wall again, and so all the reserves were concentrated there. He was on his own, fully responsible for guarding the fifteen feet stretch of wall.

In a suspiciously coordinated effort, four ghouls leaped the walls at the same time. Nym hated when they did that. Half way down the wall, there were ghouls were clinging to the rough stone, their fingers dug into cracks in the stone, and other ghouls were using them as stepping stones to leap up. Nym needed to clear the wall, then push those ghouls off so that they couldn’t come at him waves.

He sucked in arcana and pulled together a lightning bolt as soon as he saw four of them popping up at once. He darted off to the right to get them lined up, then unleashed the spell, striking all four. Soldiers around him let our ragged cheers, but Nym ignored them. In his rush to build the spell, he’d used the arcana reserved for one of his golems. It crumbled to dirt, and none of the ghouls he’d struck with lightning had died.

They were smoking and stunned, but it wouldn’t last long. Nym summoned gusts of air in rapid fire spells, knocking all of them back. Then he leaned over the wall and shot another wind blast straight down to pry one of the barnacled ghouls free. Chest heaving, he moved to the second ghoul and blasted that one off too.

Before he could hit the third, a soldier off to the side screamed in agony. He went flying over the back side of the wall to land in the courtyard, a ghoul clinging to him. Nym scanned the courtyard, hoping at least one reserve was down there to take care of it. There wasn’t, of course. Nym didn’t have an instant kill spell, especially not at that range. All he could do was leap the back of the wall and swoop down to hit the ghoul with a paralysis spell, then pick it up and hurl it back over the wall into the woods.

That was so much easier than his current method, but also so much more taxing. Nym tried to use undead paralysis sparingly, but he’d been forced to fire it off several times in the last few minutes. He steeled himself against the fatigue the maneuver had brought on, knowing that the few seconds he’d left the wall undefended would cost him as soon as he got back.

The soldiers had tried to close on his section while he was taking care of the loose ghoul, but there were only so many of them and they were involved in their own battle. Nym rose back into the air to find another two ghouls about to leap into the courtyard. Howling winds smashed into them, sending them stumbling backwards, but not far enough to throw them loose. Undaunted, Nym hit them again, this time angling it up to lift them off their feet.

He landed on the wall and fell to his knees. Behind him and below, he could still feel the power building for the artillery mage’s spell, but not fast enough. He didn’t think they could hold the south wall much longer, certainly not before the spell was ready. But if they didn’t, the mages below would have to abandon it to defend themselves from the ghouls.

There was another ghoul on the wall, right in front of him. Nym didn’t know it where came from. Wearily, he pulled more arcana into his already aching soul well and paralyzed it. Sometime in the last few seconds, he’d lost the second golem, and he didn’t have the time to make new ones. Instead, he used air cushions to push the ghoul back off the wall.

He needed something to slow them down, even if only for a few minutes. Frantically, he went through his spells, trying to find anything that would work. He couldn’t raise the walls higher, and didn’t have the water to do anything with hydrokinesis. Air spells were stalling at best, and he was falling behind. Fire… might work. It wouldn’t stop a ghoul from attacking, but they might not cross a stretch of ground that was already burning.

Nym shook his head. It wouldn’t work with the wights commanding them. All it would accomplish was flaming ghouls on the wall, that much more dangerous to everyone defending against them. He didn’t have anything to stop them permanently, or even temporarily. The wall would be overwhelmed without reinforcements.

Two new ghouls crested the walls, and Nym hit them with blasts of air before they managed to climb over completely. One lost its grip and tumbled backwards, but the other fought through the surge of air and made it to its feet. More wind hit it, driving it back a step, but it braced against the lip of the wall and held on.

Then another ghoul appeared. Nym couldn’t take care of it with the arcana he had available. He opened another conduit, and his soul well bucked against the sudden surge. Nym held on to it, his teeth clenched, and doubled the area of the wind blast. It fairly screamed across the walls, so loud that it drowned out everything else.

The first ghoul lost its grip and went flying back out over the wall. Before the second could join it, a third one climbed up. Then a fourth. Nym pulled on the arcana as hard as he could, channeling it through him as fast as it came in. He had to push them back, had to keep them from reaching the courtyard.

Ghouls went flying, and Nym staggered forward, buffeted by his own spell. One unwilling step turned into two and then he was pressed up against the edge of the wall. Another ghoul was right below him, hand reached up to grab the top of the wall. When it saw Nym, it shifted targets and hooked its fingers into his shirt. Then it pulled.

Nym’s feet left the stone and he found himself tumbling through open air. Shrieking in surprise, he tried to pull together a flight spell, only to discover that the ghoul had flung itself off the wall with him. They fell together, Nym unable to disentangle himself. Desperately, he kicked the ghoul away. The shirt tore and the undead lost its grip on him.

He hit the ground, and all he knew for a second was pain, pain in his arm, pain in his legs, and pain in his chest. Nym came back to himself, crying and huddled up on the dirt. His brain screamed at him, told him he needed to get back in the air, that the ghouls would tear him apart, but it was a small voice drowned out by the pain.

He lay there in a heap, unmoving for long seconds. Something grabbed his broken arm, and he screamed in pain. Eyes wide, he looked up to see a ghoul about to sink teeth into him. Arcana surged into his soul well and spires of stone erupted around him. The ghoul holding him and three other ghouls nearby were skewered, which didn’t kill them of course. They just turned their efforts to breaking the stone restraining them.

But it gave Nym enough time to pull more arcana through his ragged soul well and blast the ghoul holding him with a bolt of lightning. Part of Nym was pleased with himself at the increased control. A few months ago, he would have fried himself with that spell, but now it struck only the ghoul, forcing it to release him. Desperately, wove together the magic he needed to fly. It didn’t want to come, and he wobbled a few feet off the ground before sinking back down.

“No, no, no no no no no nonononono,” he muttered. His magic had never failed him like this. It couldn’t, not now. He grabbed it and pulled with all his might. Something tore inside him, but it came, just enough to get back into the air.

Nym lurched over the wall, clipping it with his legs, and crashed onto the stone, half hanging over it. Immediately, there were soldiers there, grabbing onto him.

“Am I… safe?” he mumbled when the soldiers grabbed hold of him and pulled him over onto the wall itself.

“Get a stretcher,” someone said. “Take him to the barracks.”

“I… think I need… healer,” Nym said.

That was the last thing he remembered before the pain took him.

* * *

The air smelled like burnt ghoul when Nym woke up. He was in a building with a low ceiling, filled with the moans and groans of injured soldiers. Sunlight streamed in through a few windows, as well as wisps of acrid smoke.

The first thing he noticed when he tried to move was that his ribs were busted up. Every breath hurt, but moving was so much worse. Either there was no healer at the ninth outpost or there were too many people with more immediate concerns, because the only treatment it looked like he’d received was a splint for his broken arm and a sling for it to rest in.

The real problem was he had the mother of all arcana poisonings. The only time he’d ever come close to the pain he was feeling now was the very first night, when the magister had told Ciana he was going to die. Nym had been asleep for almost all of that though, and he envied his past self that luxury. Just the thought of forging a conduit and pulling in arcana made him want to cry.

An hour or so after he woke up, someone stopped by to check on him. A man, maybe thirty years old but with hair already starting to gray moved from bed to bed, talking softly with the soldiers for a minute or two before moving on. It wasn’t until he got to the bed Nym was in that he got a good look at the man.

He was tall, with stocky shoulders and his hair shorn down to the scalp. He was dressed in a standard military uniform, blue clothes with black boots and belt, though he wasn’t wearing any of the armor most of the soldiers Nym had met sported. A mustache covered his upper lip, and a goatee his chin.

“You’re awake,” the man said. “Good. Welcome back to the world of the living. Good news is that we held the outpost. Bad news is that you need to see a real healer, and ours died in the fighting. The next few days of your life are going to be extraordinarily unpleasant.”

“Because of the arcana poisoning or because of the busted ribs?” Nym asked.

“Oh those are both bad, no doubt. I’m sure you feel like you were run over by a whole parade of horses right now. But I’m more concerned about matrix destabilization.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Nym confessed.

“No? You’ve got some gaps in your education. Think of it as a kind of framework for your soul well. It reinforces it, helps it hold its shape when you’re brimming with arcana. When it gets damaged, say for example if you did something incredibly stupid like pulled in far, far more arcana than you can hold in a very short period, your soul well’s like a barrel that’s leaking. No matter how much water you pour into it, it keeps coming out the hole in the side.

“That’s bad for obvious reasons. You can’t hold arcana safely since it will seep into your body and give you arcana poisoning. Trying to power through that to use magic anyway can result in the leaks getting bigger. So until you’ve healed up a bit and we can figure out exactly how badly you’ve damaged your soul well, my advice would be not to use any magic.”

Nym wasn’t really sure what to do with that information. He couldn’t just not use magic. It was who he was. If he wasn’t a mage anymore, he didn’t know what he was. Desperate to think about anything else, he asked, “How is the outpost doing?”

“We got the artillery spell off about three minutes after your dive off the wall and drove the wights off. Pretty sure we killed at least one. After they disappeared, the ghouls went down. We lost twelve soldiers and one mage, our healer, and two cooks. Twenty-two more injured enough to be on bed rest. We need a new healer, like I said, and also a crew of earth mages to help repair the outpost.”

“I… thanks,” Nym said. “I think I want to go back to sleep.”

“Have some water first,” the mage said, producing a cup from a nearby table that Nym hadn’t noticed. He sipped at it, thanked the mage again, and closed his eyes. The soft drone of the man’s voice as he moved on from bed to bed slowly faded, but the pain remained constant. Tears rolled down his face, unnoticed.