Nym stood there, awkwardly waiting for Rizin to say something. The fox didn’t oblige him, having chosen instead to lay on his oversized cushion and pretend to be napping. “I guess… we’re done then?” Nym asked. “Go our separate ways?”

“Indeed,” Rizin said, his eyes still closed. “You know how to get ahold of me if you need something.”

“What if you need something?” Nym asked. “The hidden presence spell will keep you from finding me.”

“It does not block messages if you know the recipient,” Rizin explained. “How else would you be able to contact me?”

“Ah, that’s true. So we could still communicate if we needed to.”

“We could, and we may need to in a few years if the lab doesn’t meet our expectations. For now, our business is concluded. Do not take offense, but you have lived with me for long enough. It’s time for you to leave the nest and fly free.”

Nym felt like he should probably be offended, but the truth of it was that he was just as sick of spending all of his waking time with the fox. He didn’t have any definite plans for where he was going or what he was going to do next, but he thought he might carve out his own little sanctuary somewhere. Then he would have a place in the core reality where he could let his defenses down, at least a little bit.

“Well, see you around then.”

Nym left the den under his own power using sixth layer arcana to tell reality that he was somewhere else. It bypassed any and all wards, at least wards made of fifth layer or below arcana, but he knew that if Rizin had truly wanted to contest his version of reality, he’d have lost. Nym considered it a partial victory, but a victory nonetheless.

With physical distance irrelevant to him and environmental factors basically a non-issue, Nym decided his own sanctuary would be modeled off something similar to the one Exarch Niramyn had guided him to. He needed a place so bland and devoid of identifying features that even someone who’d been there wouldn’t ever be able to find it again.

There were a few options to explore. He could, and probably would, carve out extradimensional space to form the sanctum, enough so that the only part of it that actually existed was the doorway. It would take a lot of extra work to stabilize the space and make it habitable, but he had the time and knowledge. At this point, his resources were infinite. He could literally channel sixth layer arcana and will gold crests into existence if for some reason he needed money, but that would only happen if he wanted to give some to someone else.

Nym supposed he probably should refill Ciana’s purse, if nothing else. He had plucked her from her home, after all. Though with Niramyn’s return made public in the world of ascendants, he didn’t think there would be anyone else coming to look for her. She could probably return to her home if she wanted. Nym would have to take some precautions, but he thought he might be able to reach out to her if he was careful.

It would no doubt be an interesting conversation, but that was a project for another day. He had a sanctuary to build first, and he hadn’t even picked out the location for the gate that would lead to it. His first instinct was to copy Niramyn’s use of the desert, but there were other options as well. Innumerable mountain caves could serve as his entryway, or even a gate deep under the ocean. He supposed it would even be possible to anchor it in the sky and render it invisible.

The most important thing, in his mind, was that he didn’t want to have to worry about anything stumbling across the gate. Natural defenses would help with that, but he could also scribe rune sequences across its surface to repel the curious. Really, unless he was trying to defend against other beings who’d reached the sixth layer, he could put the gate wherever he wanted.

In a fit of sentimentality, he briefly considered placing it at the bottom of Blood Fin Cove. None but the sharks were ever likely to find it there, but he immediately changed his mind. He had too much history, and it would be stupid to be discovered just because someone stumbled across it while they were searching through his timeline. No, it was far better to place the gate somewhere that he had no connection to.

Nym teleported himself to the southern sea, only a few hundred miles away from Shu-Ain, and scried until he found a small, windswept island that jutted up from the water perhaps a hundred feet. There were no trees, just bare rocks haphazardly piled up. Nym selected a pile of particularly flat boulders resting against each other in something of a chair-shaped heap. It was well over thirty feet tall, and he dubbed it the Giant’s Throne.

That was sufficiently memorable to allow for easy teleportation, but the whole island was far, far away from civilization of any kind and there was no reason to ever come to this island at the moment. It would do for his first sanctuary, even if it wasn’t quite as bland as he’d been looking for.

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He was reminded briefly of his days working with the Earth Shapers to dig and build, but other than the fact that he’d have a place to live when he finished, there really wasn’t anything in common between the earth magics he’d employed long ago and what he was using today.

Nym wove pinnacle spells modeled after Archmage Veran’s own sanctum, then infused the whole creation with a heavy dose of sixth layer arcana to make it extra-real, and so heavy that reality couldn’t support it. Gently, he guided its shape as it collapsed through reality, and he caught the pieces to be rewoven together into his sanctum. Other parts of him echoed the process across each of the layers, expanding on his new pocket dimension and stabilizing it.

Once he was done, there appeared to be a large stone chamber carved from the interior of the rock, which was of course impossible. The rock was at best ten feet thick and perhaps thirty feet wide, and the chamber stretched back hundreds of feet and was five times wider than the stone it was anchored to. All that was left was to stabilize his creation, to anchor it across multiple layers of resistance so that it wouldn’t close up when reality tried to exert itself back to its original shape.

With the space itself secured, Nym turned his efforts to defense. Over the next hour, he traced a few thousand runes around the stone, even going so far as to layer sequences on top of each other in order to keep them tight around the gate. That was an art in and of itself, one he was happy to finally have a practical use for.

When he was done, The Giant’s Throne looked exactly as it had before he’d arrived. Anyone unable to see arcana would never be able to tell there was anything at all there. For Nym, it was still a blazing portal, but once he passed through and the gate became passive again, it would be far less noticeable.

Nym spent the rest of the evening inside his new sanctum, humming to himself while he conjured up walls to partition the space and furniture to fill the new rooms. He modelled it off Archmage Veran’s sanctum, though without the alchemy lab. That had never been Nym’s passion, even if he’d spent months and months learning the fundamentals of it. It all sounded so terribly tedious to him, an art that required an immense amount of patience and whose primary value was that it imparted power to others.

Nym could replicate just about anything a potion or elixir could do with his own magic, and he had no need of the money alchemy could bring in. So he left out the lab and replaced it with a kitchen. Unlike alchemy, he was extremely interested in tasty food, and since his recent education had spent precisely zero pages on the discipline, he thought it would be a good distraction when he needed to relax.

Of course, he didn’t need to actually eat the food anymore. Like every other ascendant, he could survive on nothing but pure arcana, but eating was fun. Food tasted good, , at least when it was cooked by someone else, but that was something he could learn too. Maybe someday he’d even be able to share a meal again, if any of his friends were still alive by the time he sorted out the whole ascendant mess.

He could exist outside of time, so now that he thought of it, there was no reason that shouldn’t be possible. He just needed to not waste all the time he had left here in the core reality before they died. It was the only place where the hours and days wasted mattered, just like Baracia had told him.

Suddenly, he felt foolish for spending so much time building a sanctum he didn’t need. That was only slightly mitigated by the fact that one day he might need a bolt hole, so he could reframe it from frivolous waste to wise precaution. That made him feel a bit better about it, but his adventures in interior decorating were unnecessary.

With a heavy sigh, Nym filled the rest of the rooms with utilitarian beds, desks, chairs, tables, armoires, and shelves. They weren’t pretty, but they were solid and sturdy. That was enough. Maybe he’d spend some of his unlimited time outside the core reality refining his designs, then come back and replace it all one day.

Nym was starting to see why the ascendants preferred plain white or black voids for their backdrops. It was kind of sad though, to have the ability to conjure up literally anything, and to be so concerned about every wasted second that they couldn’t be bothered to make even the simplest setting.

Now that his sanctuary was fully functional, if not as aesthetically pleasing as he’d hoped, Nym was ready to move onto his next task. He wanted to check on his friends, resupply Ciana with some gold if she needed it, and otherwise confirm that everything was still proceeding smoothly. He’d even designed the sanctum’s wards with that thought in mind, and created a scrying room where he could see out into the world by opening a sort of peephole.

There were a lot of possible designs, though for some reason everyone seemed to use reflective surfaces. Mirrors and pools were common recommendations, or crystal balls if the user didn’t mind being that close to them. Nym went in a different direction. Rather than use a medium that created a physical image, he’d inscribed a simple circle into the stone. When he stood in it, it allowed him to scry out and receive the divination directly into his mind.

He supposed for a mortal mage, that might have been overwhelming. For him, each scry kept a single one of his parallel processes mildly busy. He found his friends, one after another, and confirmed all were healthy and alive. The Earth Shapers were prospering, and Ciana seemed to have settled into her new life. Analia was by far the worst off of them all, and Nym cursed his past self for not being able to see what was so blindingly obvious now.

She’d been geased, strongly and against her will. It was not hard to come up with a guess as to who’d done it. Breaking it wouldn’t be difficult, but it would be hard on her and should be performed with some amount of delicacy. He moved his visit to her up on his timetable. Ciana would last without a bag of gold for another few days. Analia was already close to breaking from the strain.

Naturally, as soon as he broke the scry, he found a sealed letter floating in the air directly in front of him. His new sanctuary hadn’t lasted even an hour before someone had penetrated its defenses.