Ascendant

Captain Lygan didn’t look up from his paperwork. He had bags under his eyes and several days of stubble on his face. Somehow, he seemed even thinner than he had the first time Nym had seen him. The sweat spots were still dotting his brow, but they’d multiplied and started to run down his face. Absently, he rubbed a hand across his forehead and wiped it on his pants.

“Captain,” Yura said again, clearing her throat.

“Hmm? Oh, sorry.” The captain looked up finally and his face softened when he saw Nym. “How are you feeling, young man?”

“Physically? Much better after the healer got to me. But in other ways…” Nym trailed off.

“I understand. You sacrificed a lot for this outpost, to help keep my men alive. Thank you for that.” Captain Lygan wiped fresh sweat off his face. “Unfortunately, the beast of bureaucracy strikes again. Technically, you’re not a soldier. Technically, you’re not entitled to receive medical care from army healers for injuries suffered.”

“Oh,” Nym said. “That’s… I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s not fair, but I don’t get to change the rules. I petitioned for your recovery, but the best I was able to secure was a healer to fix up the physical wounds you suffered without cost to you. Your long-term recovery will be left to you to secure. I’m sorry. The best I can do for you now is give you a head start with what little time you have.

“Mage Yura will get you started on the path of recovery. A new squad of soldiers will be here in six days to relieve our active-duty roster. You will remain here until then, and return with the relieved soldiers. Hopefully, this whole undead outbreak will be taken care of by the time you’re ready to fight again.”

“I understand,” Nym said. “Thank you.”

The captain studied Nym for a moment. He gave a soft sigh and shook his head. “Dismissed.”

“Sir.” Yura saluted and turned on her heel. She beckoned Nym to follow her and led him to a hallway with eight doors.

“This is what we call the mage barracks. It’s really just officers’ rooms, which means it’s tiny and cramped and the beds suck, but at least you don’t have to share the room with thirty or forty other people,” she explained. “This one is empty right now. Lucky you. You’ll be staying here for the rest of the week and practicing what I’m going to teach you.”

Yura opened the door and gestured for Nym to walk in. She hadn’t been joking about the size, but considering Nym had nothing but the clothes on his back, it wasn’t like he needed something grand and luxurious. There was a bed in one corner and a small, one-person table with a chair pushed in on the other wall. A single sheet and a thin blanket were folded on the bed. There was no pillow.

Yura followed him in and claimed the chair for herself. “Alright, time for your first lesson.”

“Already? Don’t you have things you need to do?” Nym asked.

“This is the thing I need to do. Did you have something better to do? I would have thought this was important to you.”

“No. No, you’re right. This is the best use of my time.” Nym sat down on the bed and faced the older mage. “What do I need to do?”

* * *

Nym had a headache. It was not that he thought Yura was a bad teacher or anything, it was just that what she was trying to explain to him was a really weird concept to wrap his head around. He was very tempted to ask her to demonstrate, but without revealing what he could see, he couldn’t find an excuse.

The technique was kind of like making a conduit in reverse, except it wasn’t really like that at all. The way she’d explained it, he needed the same mindset he had when reaching out to a different layer of reality to harvest arcana from it, only flipped inside out to reach into his own soul well. That wasn’t particularly descriptive; thus, Nym had a headache.

“Can you explain it a different way?” he asked. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

“That’s natural. There’s a reason it takes weeks to master this. I don’t expect you to get it on your first attempt,” she assured him. “I’m just trying to help you set up a foundation so when you get back to civilization, whoever is helping you won’t have as much work to do. That’ll save you some money and time.”

“Okay, so then, I just… make a conduit, but not to anywhere?”

“You make a conduit to your soul well.”

“All of my conduits go to my soul well,” Nym told her. “What do I do with the other end?”

“There is no other end,” she told him.

The headache got worse.

They went on like that for another half an hour, with her giving explanations that made no sense, and him getting more frustrated. Finally, he struck on an idea. “You’ve gone through this right? You’ve been on my side of this, trying to wrap your head around the concept?”

“I have,” Yura said. “Why?”

“Can you do it and kind of break it down into the smallest steps possible, and explain what you’re doing with each step so I can follow along?”

Of course, he was banking on his recently discovered knowledge that he could in fact see a conduit behind an arcana aura if he looked right, and hoping that Yura’s statement that he was making a type of conduit was correct. If so, he could watch her form it in real time and hopefully increase his own understanding of the technique.

“If you think it will help,” she said. “Give me a minute. I haven’t had to do this in a few years.”

Yura closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. Nym watched closely, hoping to see something forming even without a cloud of arcana hugging her form. And then, with no warning at all, he did. It was like a small hole in the world, overlaid on her chest. On the other side of that hole was an endless expanse somehow confined to her body, and in the center was a glittering sphere of light made out of what appeared to be marbles with gossamer threads tying them all in place. The ‘conduit’ was what bridged that gulf between Yura and the soul well inside of her.

“I have reached into my soul well and created a pathway to open it to the world,” she said calmly, her eyes still closed. “It is a conduit to myself, starting at my soul well and having no other end.”

Nym understood now why he was having such a hard time. That hole wasn’t a conduit at all. Instead, it more closely resembled what would happen when he pulled arcana from his soul well to cast a spell. He needed to open his soul well to the reality he was in, not the realities beyond. Since he was already in this reality, the conduit didn’t need any dimensions. It was literally just a hole in the vessel they called a soul well that granted access to it.

Then she flexed… something, he wasn’t sure exactly what. It almost looked like she was pulling in arcana, only without actually having a conduit to do so. The nodes were quivering in place while the threads that connected them started fading. Instead of a wall studded with nodes, it became a shimmering net, each line connecting the nodes to the ones around it.

“The matrix is a single entity. What happens to one, happens to all. They are resistant to arcana by their very nature. When one becomes damaged, all must become vulnerable so that it may be repaired. This is done by gaining control of the matrix.”

Yura’s voice droned on as she explained each step of what she was doing, but Nym was hardly listening. There before his eyes were depths he’d never even thought to wonder if they existed. So much of what he thought he understood about magic was called into question in those moments. Tons of stuff he had read but hadn’t understood in Jaspar Feldstal’s journal suddenly made sense to him.

A soul well’s wall held arcana by default, but it was permeable. This was what the books had meant when they talked about adding to it. It was possible to graft onto the soul well and hold more arcana without it poisoning the body, and learning how to selectively alter specific nodes in the matrix was the crucial first step.

This was no longer an exercise to regain lost ground. If Nym was right, what he learned here would set him up to become far stronger than he was a week ago. He might even be able to hold arcana indefinitely outside his soul well, depending on exactly what made the framework for the extra vessels holding it.

Nym forced his mind back to the present. He was getting what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime live demonstration of the technique he needed to master in order to heal the damaged nodes in his own matrix. Having ideas for how to further enhance his abilities down the road wouldn’t do him any good if he couldn’t get back to baseline.

Yura demonstrated the technique from front to finish, and even though her descriptions of what she was doing were as confusing as ever, watching it happen gave him plenty of insights into how to replicate it. “Thank you,” he said after she opened her eyes. “I feel like that helped.”

“It’s more uncomfortable than I remembered. I do not envy you having to hold your matrix in that state so that it can heal.” She shook her head while she talked, then clapped her hands. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start again.”

This time, Nym had a much better idea of what to do. Expelling arcana from his soul well to power a spell wasn’t something he’d ever consciously thought about before, but it wasn’t hard to do. It felt kind of like the metaphysical equivalent of dry heaving since there was no arcana, except it was one long, continuous heave. To say it was uncomfortable was a gross understatement.

He was pretty sure he’d managed it, but just in case he was wrong, it didn’t hurt to ask for clarification. “I did it,” Nym said. “I think. How do I tell?”

“You’ll know when you’ve managed it,” Yura told him dryly. “It’s the weirdest sensation, like there’s a gaping wound in you, and all your blood should be pouring out, but nothing is there.”

“Oh. Uh, maybe I didn’t do it then. To me if feels more like I’m throwing up, but there’s nothing there. And I just keep throwing up. At least there’s no nausea.”

Yura thought about it while Nym continued to hold the hole open. He didn’t want to call it a conduit, but he didn’t have a name for it. It was no wonder people got so confused trying to learn to do this. Conduits were superficially the same, but for a fundamentally different purpose. He shuddered to think how long it would have taken him to figure out what Yura was trying to explain if he didn’t have the ability to watch her demonstrate.

He wondered if he could develop some sort of divination that allowed others to see what he saw. He already knew a spell to show auras that allowed mages to see when another mage was leaking arcana from their soul well. He’d seen all sorts of diagnostic spells that helped mages determine the extent of physical injuries. The spells that Professor Langdon had used went beyond that and looked at his timeline and memories. There had to be a way to replicate what he did naturally.

“I don’t really know how to confirm if you’ve done it right, other than to start working on the next step and see if you can do it,” Yura said finally. “I didn’t really expect to get past this point. Your description of what you feel is similar to mine, but not exactly the same.”

“And the next step is learning to feel the matrix itself so I can… turn it off, I guess?”

“More like suppress it so that it can be changed. In this case, changed means repaired. You’ll need to be able to open a conduit into the soul well and also suppress the essential function of your matrix, and hold it that way for as long as possible so it can start to heal naturally, or so that a healer with the ability to cast third circle spells can help speed it up.”

Nym winced. “I didn’t know I needed a master healer.”

“That’s why this takes so long to recover from. Unless your family is filthy rich, good luck even finding a master healer, let alone one who’s willing to work on you for months until you’re fully recovered.

It sounded like Nym had saved himself at most a few weeks with his short cut. Then again, he’d need to see the rest of the process before he knew for sure. Everyone told him it was impossible to work on this himself, but he could actually see what he was doing. He might be able to use that to recover in some other way.

Or maybe he was just grasping at straws, hoping for an easy solution that didn’t result in a year spent with his magic crippled. He didn’t have enough money to afford treatments back when he thought any old healer could help. Now that he knew he needed a rare and powerful healer to fix him, there was no chance of getting back on feet quickly using the standard treatment.

For now though, he was getting help for free. If he was lucky, he’d get to the point where he could naturally regenerate over the next few days and skip the expensive lessons. If he was frugal with his remaining funds, he could last quite a while. Perhaps he’d use the times to study runes more seriously. That was a skill that didn’t require arcana to craft, only to empower.

Yura started speaking again, drawing his attention back to the present. “Now, nodes really only have two states. There’s the default one, where they repel arcana and keep it contained to your soul well, and there’s the one you’re trying to achieve, where they are soft and malleable so that the damaged ones can be reformed properly. Switching between them is like flexing a muscle you don’t have, so it’s going to be a challenge to learn to do that.”

The headache hadn’t gone away. If anything, it was worse.