Everything felt weird now, but Nym couldn’t quite figure out exactly how. It obviously had something to do with ascending, but it was indescribable, and he found it annoyingly distracting. “It’s like I’m breathing air that’s not quite right,” he told Rizin, “or, I don’t know, like the sun is the wrong color, nothing is the temperature I think it should be, and the corners don’t fit together quite right, even for things that don’t have corners!”
“That will clear up some after you fully acclimate to your new form of existence, and you’ll become used to what doesn’t go back to how it was before.”
“Okay, but why is this happening?”
“Because your body died, Nym. That meat suit you were trapped in is gone. You’re nothing but a projection of yourself, cast across multiple realities to walk around and influence this world.”
Nym’s eyes widened. “I didn’t die!”
“Of course you did. No mortal can cross that threshold. It burns them out and reduces them to nothingness. Only the mind and the magic survive the ordeal. And when you reached the other side, you built a new body out of your magic, only it’s not quite like the old one.”
Nym thought back to the ordeal he’d undergone. He had lost his body at the beginning, but he’d thought he’d rebuilt it using the other parts of his being. Technically, that might count as dying, but the difference seemed largely academic. He was Nym before, and he was Nym now. Why did anything have to be different?
It was different though, undeniably so. He was looking at the same world, but from a slightly different angle. All of the familiar pieces were still there, but they were skewed enough that they didn’t feel right. It was very disconcerting, like looking at a bad replica of something he was intimately familiar with and trying to catalog all the things that were wrong with it.
“It’s like dipping your finger into a fishbowl,” Rizin said suddenly. “Before you were a fish, but now you’re this entity that exists outside the water. You can stick a hand in and poke around, but you’re too big for this world. All you have here is this avatar, this physical manifestation of yourself that is only a fragment of the whole of your being.”
“That’s why you just look like a big fox here,” Nym realized. “All of you is too much for the world?”
“I could look bigger if I wanted, but what’s the point? It would just draw attention.” Rizin shifted from fox to human form. “I can look like anything I want. Whatever is convenient is how I appear.” He shifted again, this time into a copy of Nym, then into a snow wolf, then back to a fox. “Whatever I want. It’s not an illusion, it’s just… me, altered to my will.”
Nym blinked at the copy of himself, then shook his head and laughed. “There’s really no reason to even limit myself to being in one place, is there?”
“There are plenty of reasons,” Rizin said. “The biggest one for you is that you’re still hiding. Speaking of that, you’re a real ascendant now, which means it’s time to stop living off my charity. Are you ready to make the pact?”
“Yes, let’s go over it and make it official.”
The pair sat there in Rizin’s den for an hour, going over the specifics of what he wanted Nym to make Lab Six produce. They talked about everything from fur color to litter size to digestive needs. There were a remarkable number of decisions to make when producing a completely new species, but Rizin had been thinking about this project for a while now.
In exchange for Nym’s help, Rizin was going to teach him to use sixth layer arcana in the core reality. It was a little tricky, since unlike other forms of arcana, it wasn’t supposed to exist in mortal realities. That made it less about casting spells and more about enforcing a change in reality through sheer will, with the arcana being burnt away to fuel the change.
“In this case, what we’re going to do is tell reality that it doesn’t know that you exist. You’ll be something akin to a ghost, albeit one that can walk and talk. If you want to change something, like if you need a door to be open instead of closed, you don’t do it. You just tell reality that the door was always open. Understand?”
“No.”
Rizin rolled his eyes. “We’ll work on it. Anyway, that’s the pact. I’ll show you the ropes of being an immortal living in the land of mortals and how to hide your presence from other immortals. In exchange, you’ll return to the ascendant research facility and fabricate a new species with me as the template.”
“What if I can’t get in? Last time, I was Niramyn, just in a younger body. Now we’re separate people.”
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“Then we’ll figure out a new way to do it. I don’t care how it gets done, just that it does. This seems like the easiest way to me, but if you can’t do it, then we’ll find a different way forward.”
“Alright. I think we have a deal. You will teach me to control the arcana of the sixth layer and how to hide and disguise myself from other ascendants, and I will assist you in creating a new species of magical sapient foxes for you to watch over and guide.”
Rizen spoke, his voice resonating with arcana. “This I do agree to abide by. This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to.”
“This I do agree to abide by. This I do so swear to honor. This I am bound and held to,” Nym echoed, arcana flowing through him as well.
Rizin settled into a sitting position and smirked. “Let’s get started.”
“Maybe wait until everything stops feeling not-quite-right with the world first.”
“Feh. You’ll get over that in time. There’s no reason to delay.”
“Fine, fine.” Nym held his hands up in surrender. “What do we do first?”
* * *
It was a good thing Nym was able to alter his physical manifestation’s physiology to subsist off raw arcana instead of food and water now, and to eliminate the need for sleep. Rizin was a merciless teacher, but in Nym’s opinion, not a very good one. He supposed that was an unfair comparison. Rizin’s way of doing things was very different than an ascendant’s, after all.
Now that he understood the laws of the outer realities better, Nym realized that the sanctuary he’d been studying hadn’t just been something Niramyn had dreamed up. Those books were literally his own memories, and as Nym had been born of the Exarch and thought in very similar ways, he couldn’t have asked for something more suited for teaching him.
Many of those books on the top shelf still didn’t make sense to Nym, but now that he’d passed through the other side and could pick Rizin’s brain, some pieces were starting to fall into place. He could still use all of his magic, so he didn’t feel like the time he’d spent locked away outside of time had been a complete waste, but now that he could reach beyond mortal magic, it felt… lacking. His old spells were overly complicated ways to achieve subpar results.
At the same time, a lot of things Rizin taught him weren’t present in any of Niramyn’s memory books. “Is this because of how you do magic?” Nym asked. “It’s different than what ascendants do? Or do you just know things that even Exarchs don’t?”
“Don’t assume you know even a fraction of what your ‘father’ does. I’m sure there are very few surprises left for him after existing for so long. Did you know that other ascendants come in and out of the timeline at their leisure? Sometimes they exist in reality prime for years at a time, but most of them only manifest an avatar when they have a reason to, often only for minutes or days as they accomplish whatever task brought them here.
“Niramyn is different. Not counting the year or so when you were born, the Exarch has existed for practically every second of history for as far back as anyone can go.”
“Why?” Nym asked. “What’s he doing that’s so different than any other ascendant?”
“I don’t know. I doubt anyone does.”
Nym had some of Niramyn’s memories, just a few minutes of the Exarch as a child. He couldn’t have been an ascendant then, not if he was still learning how to use second and third layer arcana. If nothing else, that proved that he’d once been mortal, so there was a time when he didn’t exist as Exarch Niramyn.
“Regardless,” the fox continued, “I can only teach you the ways I know to alter reality without being detected. It’s a delicate art. Now, let’s start over.”
The lessons continued, some easy and some so twisted that they broke Nym’s brain a little bit. They weren’t limited to the core reality either. If Nym was going to exist as one entity across multiple layers of reality, he had to learn how to hide himself across all of them at the same time. For the time being, he continued to shelter behind Rizin’s magics, but as time went on, the fox started to hint that he’d be withdrawing that protection one layer at a time.
Each layer had to be approached with a different mindset to achieve the same results, which essentially meant Nym had to learn to cast a spell, such as they were, six different ways, and to do so at the same time in each layer of reality. Most spells didn’t require that, but the mantle of hidden magic did. It was pointless to obscure his actions in one layer of reality if the goal was to hide from beings that could see in every layer.
One by one, Rizin stopped protecting Nym, until finally he was hiding himself in every layer except one: the sixth. Here he found the rules changed again. In the lower realms, as Rizin called them, what they needed to accomplish could be done through liberal application of the reality-warping arcana of the sixth layer. They didn’t cast a spell. Reality had always been that way.
Sixth layer arcana couldn’t do that to itself, at least not without some work. It became a game of circular logic, a resonance set up to bounce against itself in such a way that caused it to break itself down so that it never existed in the first place. It was not an easy concept to even wrap his head around, let alone pull off. If Nym wasn’t experiencing the reality of the sixth layer first hand, he never would have been able to accomplish it.
But for all Rizin’s faults, he was patient. He pushed Nym to keep improving, but never gave up, no matter how long it took for Nym to get the next concept. Sometimes it was easy, but usually it wasn’t. The scattered factoids he’d pulled out of the last series of books in Niramyn’s memory sanctum were of limited use, but every now and then Rizin taught Nym something that made a piece of information click into place.
By the time they were done, the fox had completed his half of the pact. Nym reached out into reality prime with sixth layer arcana, and through it he funneled his will. He demanded that he existed in the sky above the island they’d picked out for Rizin’s new species instead of inside the fox’s lair. Reality accommodated, and Nym floated in the air where he’d envisioned.
It was raining there, but protecting himself from it was as easy as deciding he didn’t get wet. The rain slid off him like he was made out of oiled sailcloth. Most importantly, he was there alone. For the first time in over a year of mortal days, Nym stood on his own again.