Ascendant

Nym’s personal library grew faster than his ability to read it. Just about every single book was a hand-me-down from Analia, but he wasn’t going to complain about that. He focused heavily on books he could learn from without actually doing magic, and so the majority of his time was spent reading about medical anatomy and diagnostics interpretation, rune magic sequences, ritual magic, and conduit theory.

Healing and rune magic had a lot of prerequisite knowledge to be mastered before ever casting a spell, so Nym felt like he was building a good foundation for once he was able to cast magic again. Ritual magic also had a lot of ground to cover in terms of generally accepted standards when combining magic with others. There were practical portions he couldn’t work on at the moment, but there was still a wealth of knowledge waiting there.

Finally, conduit theory was an unexpected gem. It turned out that while he wasn’t able to pull arcana into his soul well, he could make a conduit just fine. Analia had somehow procured a rare and likely ruinously expensive book that provided philosophies and exercises regarding the creation of better, stronger, faster conduits, as well as a fair bit of musing about reaching the third layer.

It was the closest Nym could get to casting actual magic, even if it was a pale substitute. Without the ability to practice conduits, he would have gone crazy within days. In a society where a significant minority had access to at least first circle magic, it was impossible to go anywhere without being reminded of it.

They had no luck finding a healer capable of casting third circle spells. Nym was not surprised by that, especially not considering how many of the regular healers were currently working military contracts to keep soldiers on the front lines in fighting shape. That did unfortunately mean that Nym had no real choice but to keep fixing his matrix the slow way.

He did find a passage in one of the books Analia gave him that detailed the condition. Unfortunately, it confirmed everything he’d already been told, including that the only way for it to heal naturally was to hold the matrix nodes in a malleable state so that they could slowly revert back to their default condition. He did find that the year average assumed about two to three hours a day of treatment time, and since he was able to do almost double that, he figured he could cut his estimate down to six months instead.

The book told him it was best to do it in cycles of twenty minutes malleable, twenty minutes static, as there was only so much reshaping the node could retain as it switched back and forth. There were some complicated charts he could follow to optimize his up time even further, but which required him to see a healer for some diagnostic spells to confirm which path worked best for him personally. Nym didn’t understand half of what they were saying, but he hoped to figure it out as he studied more.

There were only so many hours in a row he could stuff his brain with new information. Between that and working on repairing his matrix, Nym used up probably half of his day. The rest was spent looking for work. Without his magic, options were severely limited, but he found a job at a bakery helping stock stands for the day’s goods. It required him to be awake well before the sun came up, but without the ability to create his own light on his own, he’d been going to sleep earlier and earlier anyway.

The work didn’t pay much, but it helped to offset the cost to stay at the inn by six shims a week. Any little bit helped, considering he was living on Analia’s charity. She’d gotten a response from Ophelia saying they’d be in town soon, and he was eagerly awaiting the visit, both because he wanted to see the rest of his friends and because he wanted to recover the funds stowed away in his pack.

It was late afternoon when the anticipated knock at his door finally came. Nym scrambled to open it, nearly tripping over a small stack of books on the floor. On the other side, Ophelia was looking at him with amusement. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Nomick shoulder checked her out of the way. He and his brother shoved their way into the room and grabbed hold of Nym’s shoulders.

“You’re alive!” they said in unison.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Monick added in a high-pitched tone.

“Had us worried half to death,” Nomick said with the same pitch.

Ophelia reached out from behind and grabbed both of them by their ears. She dragged them back and pitched them out into the hall. “Don’t mind those two idiots. They’ve been making fun of me ever since Analia’s message reached us.”

She leveled a glare at them, which they ignored as they pushed their way back in. “It’s been so terrible,” one of them said, still in his Ophelia-impression voice.

“Just awful!”

“Shut it, you idiots,” Ophelia snapped. “Come on, let’s go get lunch.”

“Where’s Bildar?” Nym asked.

“Waiting for us downstairs.”

“Let’s get going then?” Nym asked.

“In a minute. First, I think you’ve been missing this,” Ophelia said. She pulled out Nym’s pack form behind her back.

His eyes lit up when he saw it. “Yes! It has literally everything I own in it.”

Monick made a show of looking around the room. “Seems to be a lot of stuff here,” he said.

Nym waved him off. “This stuff isn’t mine. All the books are Analia’s. She’s been raiding every book store she can find and doesn’t have enough room for her library.”

He pulled the money pouch out of the bag, separated three shields from it, and put the rest away. The pack was slid under his bed and hidden behind another pile of books.

“Maybe you should consider opening a bank account,” Ophelia suggested.

Nym just laughed and replied, “I don’t think I’ve got quite that much money. Come on, let’s go.”

They found the last two members of their group down by the door, waiting for them. Bildar gave Nym a once over when he saw him and nodded. “How are you feeling?” he asked once they were all together.

“I’m trying to make the best of it,” Nym told him. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading on stuff that doesn’t require magic to learn, trying to set myself up with a good foundation.”

“Very motivated, huh? You’ve got time now, I guess,” Bildar told him. He blew out a frustrated sigh. “The army really screwed you over there. From what I heard, that outpost would have been wiped out without your help. The least they could do is get a healer to help speed up your recovery.”

“They did have a mage there teach me how to manipulate my matrix,” Nym said. “That saved me a lot of money not having to pay for lessons.”

“Did they? I don’t think that made it into the official reports.”

“I guess maybe it wasn’t something official? The captain just said he was assigning a mage to help me who’d had the same thing happen to her once. She was really helpful. I never would have even thought to try some of the stuff she told me about.”

Analia guided them to a restaurant that probably cost more than Nym wanted to spend, but just once as a special treat to himself, he went with it. He hadn’t seen his friends in close to three weeks. Lucky for the group, they were between the lunch and dinner rushes and the place was mostly empty. They got two tables pushed together and started putting in orders.

“How bad is it, really?” Ophelia asked after the waiter walked away.

“Pretty bad,” Nym admitted. “They said a year to fix it, but I think I can do it in under six months. I guess if you can learn to manipulate individual nodes instead of having to shift the entire matrix, it makes it a lot quicker. I’m working on it, but it’s a process, you know?”

“I don’t, actually,” she said. “This is a problem most mages never have to worry about. You have to have a significantly larger than average sized soul well for this to happen. Normal mages like me just get arcana poisoning and stop using magic long before we hit the point of matrix destabilization.”

“Okay, well… pretend like you know anyway and feel bad for me,” Nym said severely.

She laughed. “I do feel bad for you. I just don’t know the process. Still, six months is a lot better than a year, if you’re right. And you’re smart… most of the time… you’ll figure out how to shave more time off that. By the time you’re ready to go again, summer will barely be over. We can finally take the time to teach you earth magic right.”

That estimate seemed overly optimistic to Nym, but he hoped she was right. “I’ll do my best to meet that deadline,” he told her. “I kind of want to learn healing magic too. There’s a lot to learn, but it’s so useful.”

“Oh? Healing is a very profitable calling for any mage. What sparked the interest?” she asked.

“Mostly searching for a way to fix myself,” he admitted. “It can be overwhelming, but I have the time right now to learn the base knowledge before I get into the spell work.”

“What’s this?” Bildar said. “You’re betraying the Earth shapers and becoming a healer instead? For shame! Shame I say. But, uh, we’d get a discount if we needed to get patched up, right?”

Nym snorted. “I’d charge you double.”

Jokes flew around the table while they ate. Nomick caught Nym up on their progress constructing the wall, which they were expecting to last another month just to meet up with the other segments and fully encircle the center of the forest. After that, the plan was to start cutting it in a grid pattern and clear out the undead one section at a time.

“But what about the thing in the middle that caused all of it?” Nym asked.

“I guess that’s Analia’s father’s special project. It’s all still pretty secret, but it’s supposed to be the thing that ends all of this. Everything the army is doing now is containment and clean up. They’re just trying to keep the whole thing from escalating out of control. Either way, lots of walls and new outposts means lots of work for us.”

“Guess I should have stayed with the crew instead of going for those high-risk jobs,” Nym said.

“You’re young. You’ll recover and you have lots of time,” Bildar told him. It probably would have sounded a lot wiser if he didn’t immediately start choking on his wine. “Ack! That went down wrong.”

The Earth Shapers did their best to cheer him up, so Nym smiled and played along. They eagerly predicted his swift return to action, decried the army for abandoning him, and promised to lavish him with training in the field of elemental earth magic to entice him away from becoming a healer instead. He honestly wasn’t sure how much they were joking about that last one, but everyone laughed, so he went along.

As the afternoon wore on, they had to part ways. The Earth Shapers had supplies to pick up, and then they had a long, flightless trip back to the sixteenth outpost, where they were now stationed. Analia decided that she had more shopping to do, but Nym was ready to head back to the Silver Gilder. He walked back alone, and once he was back in his room, he locked his door and slid down to sit on the floor with a sigh.

It had been a fun visit in a lot of ways. He’d truly missed his friends. It also served to remind him that for the time being, he was no longer a mage. He spent a few minutes sitting with his back to the door feeling sorry for himself, then he climbed to his feet and got back to work.