Niramyn was forging a conduit to the Transcendence layer even before he opened his eyes and spinning out the wild, thrumming arcana into four separate spells at once. A second passed, and the first spell coalesced into existence. Below him, the gate runes flared to life, primed and ready for the next spell to give them instructions. That spell washed over the runes the instant they activated.

Two seconds had passed now, and he could feel the turbulence in the timeline as another ascendant took notice. The third spell finished, this one designed to sync his current body to the gate’s rune matrix and prevent the safety measures from shredding it down to individual cells. Niramyn started two more spells in the first partition of his mind, though they shouldn’t be needed.

The third second finished, and the world started to warp around him. That was not his magic, but instead that of another ascendant trying to lock him down in time and space. If that spell finished before he was whisked himself away to the safety of his sanctuary, then all would be lost. But he knew that spell, recognized its caster, and knew down to the fraction of a second how long it would take to close around him.

He had time for the fourth of his original spells to trigger, this one aligning his mind to the gate. The new experiences he’d gained in this Nym persona were at odds with his previous existence, but the spell was smart enough to recognize that the core of personality below it was still Niramyn. The gate began to open.

The fourth second passed, and the enemy ascendant’s temporal and spatial lock snapped closed around the gate with Niramyn still inside it. His fifth spell finished, not that he’d needed it. As expected, the gate held against the attempted trap, but he blew a hole in the arcana matrix and destabilized it anyway. It was best not to let those who were lesser than him think that they had any kind of advantage.

The gate was fully primed now, and Niramyn began to pass through it. Just before he was completely subsumed, he released his final spell, an arcana pulse that wiped away his presence in the timeline. Only those who’d actively witnessed his return would ever know he’d been here, and he’d deal with them later.

Niramyn appeared inside his sanctuary. It would not have been his first choice, but it was the only one he could currently access. This new body hadn’t been prepared properly, through no fault of his own. Nym, as he’d called himself, had been a bumbling fool with plenty of energy, but no foresight or drive. He hadn’t taken proper advantage of the resources at his disposal and instead wasted an inordinate amount of time on his ‘friends,’ as if those were good for anything.

He would review those memories in depth later, just to see if the Nym persona had actually figured out anything worth knowing, but considering how he’d wasted his time playing instead of working, Niramyn doubted there would be even a single memory that justified the time going through them.

For now, he had many, many preparations to occupy his time. This body was perhaps capable of channeling seventh layer arcana, but that would be a stretch. Thanks to Myzalik’s impossible immortality spell, he’d been regressed haphazardly, with none of the prep work needed for such a delicate procedure. The damage would take weeks to repair.

It was ridiculous. This body still needed to eat! It could actually die without mortal food. Adjusting it to be able to subsist on nothing but arcana was at the top of Niramyn’s priority list, followed shortly by restructuring its mind so that its thought processes could continue without a brain limiting it. The fact that Nym had only managed to create one partition the entire time he was in control was disgraceful. He should have reached at least four, even limited to the meat of his body.

Niramyn broke the remaining curses embedded in his mind, one at a time, and in doing so more than tripled his current body’s ability to hold arcana. That was good; he didn’t have time to go slowly. A sanctuary wasn’t impregnable, even if he’d erased his passing into it from history. He’d bought himself time, but there was so much work to do. If he couldn’t increase his soul well’s size by at least ten times its current maximum in the next week, he didn’t deserve to call himself an Exarch.

The sanctuary was nothing but a void of empty space, and endless darkness hidden inside the sixth layer of reality. It was impervious to mortal detection, and he’d taken pains when he created it to hide it from other ascendants, but Niramyn knew that time wasn’t on his side yet. He began his work.

First, he needed a body that had grown to its full capacity. Nym had foolishly broken the aging curse too early, not that it made much difference. He’d unwittingly done his best to starve it anyway, and hadn’t aged half as fast as he should have. Niramyn didn’t need the curse to modify his age though. He simply cast the spell and fed it pure arcana until he’d reached his peak form, that of a man in his mid to late twenties.

That doubled his soul well’s capacity, which allowed him to start casting some of the heavier spells. First he replaced the troublesome mortal digestive system with one modeled after creatures that survived in the outer layers of reality, the ones that did so on nothing but arcana. He crafted a reservoir to hold the life-sustaining arcana and teleported it into his body, then immediately filled it.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With that completed, Niramyn allowed himself a moment to relax. The amount of arcana he’d stored would keep him alive for several years without food or water, barring injuries that might tax the magic’s ability to keep him in peak condition. Starvation had been his greatest risk inside the sanctuary, where no other physical matter existed.

The next few modifications were going to be riskier. They weren’t something someone should just play around with, because there were no do-overs. Detaching his mind from his brain could have catastrophic consequences if done incorrectly, and it was best to have someone else on hand to reverse the process if anything went wrong.

Niramyn would, of course, be doing it by himself. He’d already done it a thousand times without issue, and had every confidence that the next one wouldn’t be the time he screwed it up. At the same time, it wouldn’t do to be reckless, so his version of the augmentation included the reversal spells already primed to activate on a timer. If something went wrong, they’d go off automatically and restore him. If everything was successful, he’d manually deactivate them.

It was easier to anchor spells like that in a physical object, but the sanctuary didn’t have any matter in it besides himself. While he could use his own body as the anchor, that would interfere with his other spells and add an additional layer of complication to an already sensitive and intricate procedure. Unfortunately, he couldn’t summon matter from the core layer of reality without breaking the spells that kept the sanctuary hidden.

The solution then was simple. He held up one hand, killed the nerve endings in it, and sliced off four of his fingers. They grew back a moment later and the arcana reserves in his reservoir dipped lower to accommodate the regeneration. Niramyn anchored his contingency spells to the four fingers and spread them around himself, then started creating the complicated web of magic that would disconnect his mind from his brain.

Normally, the spells would be done sequentially and in two parallel processes. The timing was sensitive, but it was well within his capabilities to channel the arcana needed at the needed speed. That only worked when done on another person though. Once he started, there would be a point where his mind disconnected from his body but hadn’t yet formed the new links of arcana needed to continue controlling it.

These spells he could also prepare ahead of time and set to trigger in order. Essentially, he created them two at a time, in the correct order, at the correct tempo. Each one was set to go off after ten minutes, which was more than enough time to complete the full set. Niramyn gave himself two extra minutes of leeway to prepare his body for the transfer. He would technically be braindead for four minutes in the middle of the procedure, and he needed to make sure his body didn’t die before he could reconnect to it.

The first two spells activated simultaneously, then the next set, and the next. Two minutes into the procedure, his brain stopped functioning, and four minutes after that, he regained awareness of himself. The final spells forged the new connections to his body, and Niramyn became a creature unbound by flesh once again.

Body and mind powered by nothing but pure, unfiltered arcana now, he was ready to begin the true modifications that differentiated an ascendant from a mortal mage. Permanent pathways had to be blazed through his mind, pathways that would become connections to the deeper layers where true power could be found.

It was no longer enough to be able to cast two spells at once, either. Niramyn set one partition to creating new ones, and once those were created, they each repeated the process. Soon, his mind had fractured into twenty-two pieces, each one as capable as the original had been. They were connected through an arcana core lodged in his brain like a tumor, a hive mind directed by his original personality.

The work proceeded significantly faster from that point, though it was still days that bled into weeks before he was fully satisfied. It wasn’t perfect by any means. He wasn’t an Exarch again, yet. But he was out of danger. There were ascendants who might dislodge him from the timestream, force him to drift through months or years before reattaching himself, but his existence was no longer in jeopardy.

He couldn’t proceed any further without a single resource outside his magic. The ninth layer would be his stopping point, for now. There were other sanctuaries though, ones that were both more secure and better equipped. Getting to them would be a fight. He would need to be both clever and quick.

A rift of light appeared in the darkness, a gaping maw that took a chunk out of the reality around him and ruptured the sanctuary. Niramyn smirked. It had taken exactly as long as he’d expected for them to find a way in, which was more than enough time to reclaim a significant portion of his power. A being appeared in the rift, the physical manifestation of an ascendant, but before he could act, Niramyn trapped it in a cube of paradoxical brilliant darkness.

The ascendant’s magic fractured against the paradox’s physical form and Niramyn cast him out of the timestream. With the way clear and his work now finished, he abandoned his sanctuary and willed himself back into existence on the core layer of reality. His power would be less overt here, but so would Mizalyk’s. The gap between them wouldn’t be so hard to bridge, if it came down to it.

Immediately, an ascendant appeared next to him, one he recognized. “Ah, Ferro. Good,” he said. “What has happened in my absence?”

“The Ascendant Council has fractured following the wake of Myzalik’s attack. Many of those previously loyal to your name have changed their colors, and those that were neutral have fortified their positions or gone into hiding, afraid to be the next to face this new magic. There are thirty-two ascendants unaccounted for, possibly victims of Myzalik.”

“And my holdings?”

“In shambles. I saved what I could for you, but the others descended upon them like vultures to cart off what treasures they could steal.”

“I see,” Niramyn said. “They shall be punished for that. But first, we have guests. Tell me, how wide-spread is this new ascendant killing spell? Can anyone besides Myzalik use it?”