Ascendant

It was two days before the healer showed up, and other than giving Nym a once over and healing the fractured rib for him, Nym wasn’t seen by the man again for another day after that. The barracks grew gradually quieter every hour as the healer got more and more soldiers back on their feet. He moved with some unseen logic, working on one soldier for a bit, then moving to another without completely healing the first.

An hour later, the healer would move back to the first patient again and heal him some more. Nym assumed it was some sort of triage system, where the healer had cataloged all the injuries and was dealing with the most severe first, but at no point in time did the healer feel the need to justify his decisions to anyone within earshot of Nym.

Finally, late into the second day of his work, he came back to Nym’s bed. “Let’s see how you’re doing,” he said. “Broken arm still, we’ll fix that easily enough. Already took care of the ribs. Ligaments are torn in the knees and one shoulder, abrasions on the hand. Somehow didn’t give yourself a concussion. This all happened in the battle a few days ago? Doesn’t look like it.”

“I-”

“Doesn’t matter,” the healer interrupted him. “It’s all going to be gone in a bit anyway.”

The healer’s aura rose up around him, a gentle green laced with strands of blue that pulsed slowly. The spell construct the man was using was one that was familiar to Nym: the pain relief spell. He’d wanted to cast that a hundred times over the last few days, but mindful of his own aching soul well and the mage’s warning about damaging it further, had suffered instead.

Not feeling how much he hurt anymore was an immense relief, both physically and mentally. The healer started working on his broken arm, then focused on the shoulder. An hour later, Nym was exhausted, but physically whole. He tried to be positive about the experience. He’d gotten to see several healing spells up close.

“You should rest a bit longer to recover from the healing, but before that, it’s time to talk about the damage to your soul well.”

Nym flinched. He almost didn’t want to know, but he needed to find out. “How bad?”

“Fairly severe,” the healer told him bluntly. “Bad arcana poisoning, though the mage who initially examined you may have overstated it. Or maybe he didn’t. You look much better now than you did when I first examined you, so maybe you’re just extraordinarily good at cleansing yourself of it. The real damage is to your sixth, twelfth, and twenty-second matrix nodes. I’ve got some bad news and some good news there.”

“Let’s start with the good news,” Nym said. “I could use some of that.”

“The good news is that it doesn’t look like you’ve done any permanent damage to them. They’re strained, the sixth one especially, but you should be able to recover fully as long as you follow your treatment plan.”

“That… is good news,” Nym said. An immense ball of tension and stress melted away. He was still a mage. He could still do magic. He mentally chided himself though, because he knew there was still a catch. “What’s the bad news?”

“You can’t do any magic while you’re recovering. Nothing at all, not even so much as creating a spring breeze or picking an apple off a tree branch out of reach.”

He’d gone days without using magic before when he was recovering from that third layer arcana injection. The downtime from work would set him back financially, but he still had most of what he’d kept from Valgo’s stash. There was enough in there to survive for a few months.

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“I’m not done yet,” the healer said. “The recovery process is complicated. Depending on how much you might already know, which I’m guessing is not a lot, you’re going to need to learn a few new things. That’s going to cost money. Maybe that won’t be a problem for you. Hopefully it won’t. But you’re looking at probably two weeks of sessions there with a personal trainer.”

“I can handle that. Money shouldn’t be an issue.” Well, it might be, but that wasn’t something the healer needed to know about.

“Two weeks of sessions to learn the recovery techniques you’ll need to repair the matrix nodes, then more time to actually practice them and perform the repairs. For three nodes, in the condition you’re in, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a year to fully recover.”

“A year,” Nym repeated. “Is that a joke?”

“I’m afraid not,” the healer told him.

“No, really though, it’s a joke, right?”

“Not even a little bit.”

Nym couldn’t go that long without magic! Even without this supposedly expensive personal training he needed, he didn’t think his remaining funds would stretch that far. “There’s got to be a faster way.”

“If you’ve got a lot of money, sure.”

Nym frowned. “What do you mean?”

The healer shrugged. “Theoretically, you could be back in action in a month or so. In reality? I doubt you’ve got that kind of money.”

“How would money help?”

“Once you’ve learned the recovery techniques needed, you’ll be able to start restoring the matrix nodes. Normally, the nodes are unaffected by arcana. They kind of have to be, since their whole job is to keep your soul well stable. What you’re going to learn how to do is open them up so they can be manipulated. Once you can do that, a healer such as myself can come in and speed this process up, but it’s still a process. How many sessions you can afford to pay for will determine how much faster it gets done.”

“And if the answer is ‘none,’ then I’m just holding the nodes in a malleable state so they can heal up on their own, which will take… a long time.”

“That’s about the size of it,” the healer agreed. “Even if you were a healer yourself, it wouldn’t help speed anything up because you can’t use magic without damaging them further. Your soul well needs to be empty so the nodes can heal.”

“If they’re not affected by arcana, why does it matter if I have any in my soul well?” Nym asked.

“They’re not normally affected by arcana, unless you put too much strain on them, which you did. Now you need to learn how to… to relax the node, for lack of better term, so that it can be repaired, but you can’t do the repairs while relaxing the nodes since your soul well won’t hold any arcana.”

Nym sighed. “So there’s really nothing I can do but throw money at healers to help speed it up? There’s no way to relax just the nodes I need to fix while the others stay stable?”

The healer shrugged. “Probably, but I bet it’d take you longer to learn how to relax one specific node instead of all of them than it would take to just relax all of them and let it heal naturally. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have other duties to attend to so that I can get back to my assigned outpost.”

“Right, sorry. Thanks for explaining,” Nym said.

The healer left him alone to his thoughts. Nym was fine now, physically speaking. He could get up and walk out the door if he wanted, but then what? He couldn’t go anywhere. Without his magic, he was just a regular kid. He could still see magic, but it didn’t do him any good if he couldn’t use his own. Nym wouldn’t be able to leave the outpost without an escort, unless he wanted to risk being eaten by a ghoul.

His only hope for speeding this up was that somehow being able to see arcana helped. He’d never looked inside his own soul well, but up until a few days ago, he’d never seen another person’s conduit either. There was some hope there, and even if it didn’t work, the damage wasn’t permanent. It might be a long, slow, process, but he would recover someday.

In the meantime, he’d figure something out. If he had to run around doing errands for somebody, that was what he’d do. Before that, he needed to get off the front line, which meant figuring out when the next rotation was so he could head back to safety with the soldiers leaving the outpost.

Nym pulled himself out of bed and looked at his clothes folded on the trunk at the foot of it. They were stained with smoke and blood and who knew what else, and had collected quite a few new rips and tears. Almost without thinking, he forged a conduit to cast a mending spell. As soon as he pulled arcana through it, pain spiked him and broke his focus.

“Oh, right,” he said dully.

Mechanically, he dressed himself. Somehow, for all the damage the rest of his clothes had taken, the shoes were still in decent shape. It was a minor miracle, all things considered. It wasn’t enough, not even close, but it was something to focus on, one thing gone right from the whole disaster. When he felt ready, he walked out of the barracks to see what he could find out.

Three days was a lot of time for a crew of earth mages to fix things. The outpost itself looked almost exactly like he remembered, except with a lot more bare earth where there used to be grass. The people were another matter. Men and women worked, grim-faced and silent. Tasks were completed quietly and efficiently, with almost no conversation between soldiers when they passed each other by.

That could be mistaken for a professional military atmosphere if that was all there was to it. They were after all holding an outpost deep in what was essentially enemy territory, but even the soldiers that weren’t working were quiet and withdrawn. There were no games being played, no gambling, no boisterous stories or roughhousing. What Nym did see was a lot of the off-duty soldiers drinking by themselves with a sort of quiet determination, even when they were surrounded by their fellows.

“Oh, good,” a voice said. “Tann said you were up. I was just coming to get you.”

Nym looked over to see a familiar woman walking up to him. It took him a moment to place where he’d seen her before, and it didn’t click until he saw the two swords strapped across her back. She was an average height with a slender build, shoulder-length dark red hair framing the youthful face of a woman in her early twenties. “You were the mage on the north wall with the sword magic,” he said.

“That’s me,” she confirmed. “You can call me Yura. Come with me?”

“Okay,” Nym said, falling into step with her. “Where are we going?”

“To talk to Captain Lygan first, then I’m supposed to get you started on fixing your matrix destabilization.”

She turned back to look at Nym, who’d stopped in his tracks. “You’re going to help me get my magic back?” he asked.

“I’m going to show you some of the exercises. You’ll still need a professional to help once you get back to town.”

“Why are you helping me? How do you know how to do this?” Nym asked as he caught back up to her. They walked between a pair of soldiers guarding the door into the central building of the outpost.

“Mostly because the captain told me to. Also because I’m probably the only one here who has first-hand experience with matrix destabilization. It’s… not uncommon with people who have larger than average soul wells. We all get used to being able to just do more than the other mages around us, pushing harder and ignoring warnings because we’ve always been fine before. And then, one day we’re not.”

She paused to think about it. “Not that I’m saying you were wrong to do what you did. You didn’t even need to be here, and chances are we would all be dead without your help. So… you know… thank you for that.”

“I didn’t… I mean… Uh, you’re welcome?”

“Just to warn you, Cap’s not happy. It’s nothing you did wrong, just the lack of reinforcements he requested has him in a bad mood. For now, you just focus on getting through these next few months and get yourself put back together, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. We’re here.” Yura came to a stop in front of a door that Nym vaguely recognized as where the sweeper team he’d joined had spoken to the captain when they’d reported the ghoul swarm. She reached up and knocked, waited a beat for the captain’s somewhat muffled permission to enter, and then swept through, dragging Nym along in her wake.