Nym had known that, intellectually, he’d be stronger without the curse. He understood that they worked by setting down roots in the victim’s body that drained arcana away whenever any was pulled in, and they were impossible to starve out. They stuffed themselves with massive reservoirs that, if sufficiently drained, would force a conduit to open so they could refill, regardless of how much damage it might do to a victim.
He hadn’t known it at the time, but he’d probably come perilously close to having his soul well damaged even further by the curses he suffered from when he hadn’t cast any spells for a few months. When he’d been studying up on curses in preparation for his job, he’d been appalled to find out just how much damage a curse could do to a soul well if it forcibly hijacked it to feed itself. None of the healers he’d talked to had ever even mentioned it.
Nym had experienced a version of curse removal when he’d had a geas dissolved, but it hadn’t really had a noticeable impact, though at least he now understood exactly why he’d felt a bit lighter with it gone. He’d attributed it to eliminating some stress from his life. He knew better after reading up on curses. It was literally the removal of something weighing down his magic.
He had expected something similar when he finally managed to break the aging curse, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. The speed at which arcana flowed through his conduits now, and the amount that he could hold, had both increased dramatically. Nym wasn’t sure if the quantity of arcana he could channel without resting had risen to match, but even if it hadn’t, he’d still just been handed a massive increase in his explosive power.
It made him wonder exactly how much of his strength was still tied up in the memory curses affecting him. If they were anything like the aging curse, he could actually be twice as powerful as he thought he was. That was kind of scary when he thought about it. He was already far stronger than almost anyone he’d ever met. If he was only half as powerful as an ascendant who hadn’t yet reached the fifth layer should be, how unreal would a full ascendant be?
Then he shuddered. If his foxy new friend wasn’t afraid of an ascendant, how powerful was he? Why did he even need Nym’s help? This should be something he could clear up with a flick of his ear. It didn’t matter at this point, really. Nym had already said he would do it, but it was something worth considering for the future.
Nym could have teleported over to the Garden of Winter, but he wanted to push his flight spell and see how fast he could get it going now. After a few minutes, he was happy to say the answer was very, very fast. He felt he’d hit the limits to what the spell could offer him in terms of speed at this point. He’d shoved so much arcana into it that it had started to break apart under the strain.
The Garden was as he remembered, though maybe with another fifteen or twenty feet of expansion at the edges. The miasma of the curse still coated the place, though it shifted about a lot less. The number of pixies who’d lived there had thinned considerably, probably from both his own attack on the place, and from the curse just generally draining them until they had nothing left.
Nym flew to the flower that the cursed arcana originated from and unceremoniously burnt it to a crisp. Arcana burst out of it at random, great gushing geysers that shot off in different directions, sometimes even at him. He smoothly deflected it away and let it disperse into the air. It would break down naturally with time now that he’d cut off the source, and he hoped to do the same with the rest of the Garden.
The flower was a major hub of cursed arcana, but not the only one. The scarabs themselves were little curse generators, crawling around and infecting everything they touched. Killing them would be the hard part of the task.
With the pixies all dead or dying, it seemed reasonable to assume that the Garden of Winter would soon follow it. That having been said, if he could manage to preserve the area as it was while still killing the infection, he was all for that. Maybe more pixies would show up and carry on with their work, and there’d still be a Garden for the next class of Academy students to visit.
When he’d discussed it with Archmage Veran, they’d discussed two spells. The first was a simple bomb. It was a massive ball of arcana, hugely inefficient, that exploded and wiped out all life within the radius of the blast. It had the advantage of only targeting living things, so it wouldn’t destroy the land itself, but that didn’t differentiate between animal living things and plant living things.
If he used it here, it would completely annihilate the Garden of Winter. Or, well, more realistically, if he used it ten or twelve times, it would cover most of the Garden. The radius was only about a hundred feet, after all. Full coverage over such a large area would be an effort in and of itself. It would also be complete overkill.
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The second spell was something infinitely more targeted, but also much more taxing and slower. It was one part scrying, one part telekinetic force, and would seek out each individual scarab, destroy it, and move on. By Nym’s estimates, it would take days, possibly even as long as a week, of just sitting there channeling it before it finished.
That process would be sped up considerably with parallel processing allowing him to run multiple instances of the same spell at a time, but it still promised to be a long and boring campaign. He was hoping there weren’t more than four or five hubs to crush, and that he could use the bomb spell on the other ones.
Before he sat down and started working on the Garden, he sent his scry anchor out to follow the root network back to its source. Following it was the force crush spell, which killed hundreds and hundreds of scarabs crawling along the roots. Nym followed it straight north for perhaps twenty or so miles and found another infestation that had broken ground.
This one was an empty grotto filled with nothing but scarabs and snow. He dropped three overlapping bombs on the area to clear it out. Each one detonated with explosive force, killing ninety percent of the scarabs above ground. Nym followed it up with an hour of targeted extermination to make sure he wiped out the survivors before he resumed the hunt.
The plan was to go from node to node until he found the curse. He would perform damage control along the way, but anywhere that took more than an hour or two to clean up would be bypassed for the time being. It was more important to cut the scarabs off at their source so they couldn’t keep spreading than it was to clean up each individual location.
Things did not go as planned. Nym found another hub, and another, and another. And each hub he went to had at least two or three connections leading to new hubs. By that evening, he’d given up on doing any sort of cleansing and was grimly mapping out the whole spread of corruption. It was significantly worse than he’d expected.
For one thing, it went hundreds of miles in every direction. How it had gone on unchecked for so long was easy enough to see: nothing with what could be called an advanced civilization lived up in the frozen white north.
That wasn’t to say there was nothing alive. He saw plenty of things. He even got excited for a minute when he found a pack of snow wolves, thinking he’d run into his old friends. They weren’t the same pack, of course. The odds of that were astronomical. But for a few seconds, he’d hoped.
He also saw a hive of ice worms wrapped up tight around an open pit. They were ironically one of the only areas completely clear of corrupted scarabs. The worms must have attacked them on sight, but the scarabs could apparently fight back and had the whole hive penned in. They were holding their territory, but not expanding it.
Somehow, Nym didn’t have it in him to feel sorry for them.
There were other things too, lone predators and small packs of prey animals. They were few and far between though, and there wasn’t much of anything he’d consider intelligent enough to have a conversation, snow wolves aside. Nym worked through the night, ignoring the cold and darkness to keep mapping out the infestation.
By the time the sun came up, he thought he’d determined more or less how wide-spread it was. If he assumed the corruption stemmed up from a central point and spread in every direction at the same speed, he’d narrowed his search down to maybe fifty to a hundred square miles. That was still a lot, but far, far better than the alternative.
It would be the work of a lifetime to clear out every little spot with scarabs infesting it by himself. He would need to approach that with a different strategy, but for now he had a goal in sight. He picked a good spot, a mountain with a sharply sloping peak, to use as his teleportation point, spent some time making sure he knew it well enough to come back, and teleported back to the sanctum to get some rest.
“Out working late,” Archmage Veran commented when Nym appeared. “Did you find it?”
“Not yet. It’s bigger than we expected. A lot bigger.”
Nym outlined how far he’d flown looking for the edges of the infestation and his logic in pinpointing where the center might be. Archmage Veran produced a map out of nowhere and laid it out across the table, which he promptly marked up with a grease pencil under Nym’s direction. “Incredible,” he said. “That may be the biggest infestation in all of recorded history. You do know how to find things that will make the history books, don’t you?”
“Not on purpose,” Nym said with a scowl. “Clearing this out one site at a time isn’t a viable strategy, not for one person at least. Got any thoughts on something that can match this kind of scale?”
“I’m afraid I don’t, not off-hand, but I’ll do a bit of research while you rest. This will be a problem for after you’ve gone after the source of the curse, anyway, if it turns out they don’t die on their own. We have some time to come up with a solution still.”
Nym did have time, now that he thought about it. He had probably an extra eighty or ninety years of time now. Actually, that was probably a low estimate. If he managed to break through the fourth layer and learn pinnacle spells, he would likely have even more years. And that wasn’t much of an if. It was going to happen, and soon. Now that he was no longer laboring under the aging curse, he was eager to try his hand at forging that conduit again.
That would be a project for later. For now, he needed food and then sleep. And when he woke back up, the hunt would continue. After that was done though, who knew what he’d accomplish? He would certainly need the extra power if he was going to cover thousands of miles of land on a genocidal extermination campaign.
He wondered if his new fox friend had any ideas. Nym made a mental note to ask when he woke up, just before he fell into his bed and passed out.