Nym found himself a nice mountain peak far away from any sort of civilization, settled into a shallow cave on the west side perhaps thirty feet deep, and took the cube out of his bag. It was just as he remembered it, the same as the ones he’d seen in Research Lab Six. But this one was full of his memories, not random information and arcana prints.
He settled down on the ground, made himself comfortable, and set the cube in his lap. Then Nym placed his hands on the side of it, took a deep breath, and opened up a conduit to the fifth layer. It was a smoother process than his first solo attempt, but still rougher than when Ferro hijacked his conduit and showed him how to do it.
The conduit finished forming, and arcana poured through into his soul well, all heavy and smothering, almost too much to bear as it filled him up. He’d expected that would be enough to trigger the cube, but he’d been wrong. Nym slowly expelled the arcana out, letting it permeate into an aura around him, one that overlapped the cube.
And everything went white.
* * *
Exarch Niramyn stood in front of Nym, looking as insufferably smug as ever. “You’ve reached the threshold between a mortal existence and an ascendant one,” Niramyn said. “You’ll need to move quickly for this next part. I am going to show you where to find a sanctuary to protect yourself, and how to break the spell sealing away all of our memories. Once that’s done, you’ll have moments at best before an ascendant finds you.”
Nym didn’t bother replying. It was obvious that the memory was another of the non-interactive kinds, just a recollection of an illusion his past self had conjured up. Exarch Niramyn gestured, and the endless white around them was replaced by a barren, wind-swept wasteland of cracked and baked earth. The sun burned in the sky, and there was nothing for miles and miles around.
“A place like this is the hardest to teleport to, but of course that’s the point. You should have no trouble with it. Feel the environment here, what makes this one specific patch of dirt different from all the rest.”
Nym certainly couldn’t see a difference. Everywhere he looked, it was all the same. There were no landmarks in sight, no patches of grass or lone twisted trees. There were no distant mountains off on the horizon, no ridges or ravines. It was just an endless rolling expanse of dead earth being mercilessly scorched under a cloudless sky.
The illusion was so complete that he could feel the heat beating down on him. Unfortunately, there was no arcana here to put up a barrier, nothing to cool him down. He couldn’t leave, and he couldn’t protect himself. Nym had no choice but to stand there and endure.
“This is a place I chose specifically because of what it lacks. You must define it by what’s not there instead of what is. There are no landmarks here, no people, no anything. All of this must be incorporated into your mental image of the place. Take your time, study this illusory world well. Know its every facet.”
The earth crumbled and broke apart in a wave, revealing an empty hole beneath it. “Below is the entrance to my sanctuary, our sanctuary. Once you’ve reached the gates, it will be time to break the curse that seals away your memories,” Niramyn said.
At the bottom of the hole was a circle of steel and stone. Nym didn’t recognize a single one of the runes etched on its surface, but for the purposes of trying to craft a teleport that took him near it, that was alright. He didn’t need every exact detail to be perfect. It went into the mental image he was slowly forming, a welcome anchor to contrast a location that was mostly framed by what it wasn’t.
“Stand upon the gate, and you will cast this spell to break the curse,” Niramyn said.
The spell formed in the air in real time, fifth layer arcana pouring into forms faster than Nym thought he could do himself, and in a staggering amount. It would push him to the limits to channel that much arcana so quickly, but he thought that he could do it with a soul well full to bursting and at least three conduits feeding more in all at once.
It wasn’t too terribly complicated, though it did look to be uniquely suited for this one specific task. That actually helped, since it didn’t need a bunch of extra stuff in it that covered other scenarios. Nym couldn’t even imagine how complicated a generalized pinnacle curse breaker spell would be. Though he supposed Niramyn wouldn’t consider it a pinnacle spell.
“And though I’m sure this example is more than enough, it is too important to risk you forgetting this spell.”
A wave of vertigo washed over Nym, and then he had a memory of him floating in the water while his magic propelled him towards land. It was only a sliver of a memory, barely two seconds long, of him casting six different spells at once. Five of them faded into the background, but the last one was the focus of the memory, of him casting the initial curse that would lock away his memories.
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It was the last spell he’d cast before he’d lost consciousness. Nym snapped out of the memory, and suddenly he knew how to cast the curse breaker he’d devised on the spot for this one particular curse. It was an utterly unique spell, cast only once before as a precaution to confirm it would work, destined to be used only once more when it came time to wake himself back up.
“Of course it goes without saying that the cube needs to be brought with you,” Niramyn said, “But we’ll only have one chance at this. I cannot stress enough that those few seconds between unlocking our memories and entering my sanctuary will be the most perilous of our entire existence. Our enemies will know, and they will react. There will be no time for hesitation. Be sure that you are standing on the gate.”
* * *
Nym came back to himself and felt a shudder run down his spine. Unlike the previous message, his past self was terse this time, with a lot less ego and a lot more worry barely hidden below the surface. What he was about to do next was something so dangerous, an Exarch at the peak of ascendant hierarchy was repeatedly stressing the possibility of catastrophic consequences.
A large part of Nym wanted to abandon the plan. He was sort of safe as long as he didn’t break the curse that locked away his memories and personalities. He could get Ferro to help him progress, perhaps. It might be smarter to spend twenty or thirty years regaining his power the hard way. But then, if an ascendant who was hostile to him found him even once, or if Ferro decided he was better off without his old master, Nym would be dead.
He knew he was trying to talk himself out of taking this risk, but he couldn’t picture another path that was any better. No matter what he did, it was just a matter of time until one of Exarch Niramyn’s enemies found him. He didn’t think they’d care that Nym wasn’t that same person anymore. Why take a risk on him coming back when they could just disintegrate him on the spot?
So his only real options were to hope that he could gain the strength to defend himself from ascendant-level threats on his own before those threats materialized, or take back the power he used to have and hope he didn’t lose himself completely in the process. If it had been just him, he thought he might have risked it. But then he wondered how many of them would be more than willing to go after Ciana. She was already in danger. Was she supposed to spend the rest of her life in hiding, just hoping that a god didn’t take notice of her and crush her like a bug?
No, there wasn’t really a choice at all.
The teleportation spell was difficult both because he was relying on an illusion of a memory to guide him and because of the nature of the location itself. There were details there, but very little to differentiate it from the rest of the barren desert. He held onto the feeling of heat pounding down on him, shaped the thought of his destination with the despondent vista of a never-ending plane devoid of life, and anchored it to the idea of the cool darkness below that earth.
Strangely, the image of the gate wouldn’t come back to him. He’d studied it in depth, and even if he couldn’t draw the runes from memory, he still knew the general shape, but when he tried to incorporate it into the spell, the image kept slipping away from him. It was probably something to do with them being ascendant runes.
When he thought he’d rebuilt the scene in his head, Nym pulled arcana into his soul well and cast the spell. The cave around him vanished, and when he could see again, he was standing in the middle of the wasteland he’d envisioned. Whether he was in the right spot was still up for debate, but a simple scry would confirm it.
Before that though, he crafted a thermal barrier to protect him from the blistering heat. Perhaps it would have been better to wait a few hours for nightfall, but he didn’t know if he had that kind of time. His only ally in all of this was Ferro, and Nym didn’t really have much reason to trust him.
His scrying anchor couldn’t find the gate into Niramyn’s sanctuary, but Nym was experienced enough now to realize when it was skipping over something. He’d run into that effect quite often and, even though it was more subtle here than he’d ever seen, and covering a greater area too, he still caught it. With a bit of terrakinesis, he ripped open a hole in the cracked earth and fell down into the darkness.
The gate was just like he’d seen it in the illusion, a round portal perhaps five feet wide. Its frame was steel, with two lines intersecting it through the middle, and the interior filled with some sort of smooth, polished stone. The runes on its surface were barely visible, unlike in his vision. In fact, if he hadn’t seen them in full detail, he might not have noticed them at all.
He doubted it would make a difference against an ascendant, but every second he could buy himself was priceless, so he took the time to use terrakinesis again to seal up the hole overhead. That left him in complete darkness, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see for what would come next.
One at a time, he opened up conduits to the fifth layer. The first one was easy now, but opening a second took an active effort of focused concentration. A third would have been beyond him if not for the mind partition letting him run parallel thought processes. He wouldn’t have been able to open all three at once, but he could do one at a time while maintaining the other two.
Nym suspected he could do four if he pushed, but he wasn’t sure if he’d have any spare willpower left over to actually shape anything into a spell. If he was right in his calculations though, he wouldn’t need a fourth conduit. He just needed to form the framework for the curse breaker.
Unlike the invisibility spell Ferro had taught him, Nym knew how to break the memory curse. His past self had made sure of that. It was easy to form the framework and pour the arcana into it. The spell flashed into existence, and the dam gave way. Memories poured into him.
And Nym ceased to exist.