That was the problem with peepholes. It was impossible to look out without making himself vulnerable to others looking in. Whoever had sent him the letter was likely an ascendant, which meant it was probably set to appear at the first opportunity. If he’d waited a week to scry, it would have appeared then instead.

Other than the spell holding it aloft, there was nothing magical about it. With some trepidation, Nym snatched it out of the air and started reading.

To Our Newest Ascendant,

First, allow me to apologize for intruding. Rest assured that I have no information about where or when you are or what defenses you’ve employed to protect yourself. The spell merely finds the earliest point in your personal timeline where the letter would be able to reach you and delivers it.

Hopefully, that assuages any concerns you might have about this showing up unannounced in your life. If we hadn’t met in person at Research Lab Six, I would not even have been able to send this letter. For a new ascendant, your skills at obfuscation are remarkable. I am curious where you picked them up.

It is obvious from your appearance, if nothing else, that you have ties to Exarch Niramyn, perhaps some descendent of his that he took a special interest in. Fear not, I shall not pry. It is also obvious that you are trying to remain apart from the recent struggles plaguing our society, which I can wholeheartedly support. The squabbles between Exarchs Niramyn and Myzalik have cost us many irreplaceable treasures and it is the will of the Ascendant Council that it be ended as soon as possible.

To that end, I would like to invite you to review some public records of Council business which you may not have had access to, given your penchant for remaining apart from our society. I shall detail a location for you to retrieve them if you have an interest. I highly recommend you do so, as it will help update you on the politics of it all so that you can find a place for yourself.

Further, several of my colleagues and myself would like to meet with you as a new ascendant and do what we can to help steer you away from being embroiled in this conflict. While I recognize that you may be justifiably skittish, given your apparent connection to one of the factions, I can assure you that I am requesting this meeting as a representative of the Council itself, what you might consider a third neutral faction that desires nothing more than the end to wholesale conflict between the two Exarchs.

Please, feel free to take any and all precautions you deem appropriate when reviewing the provided records and deciding if you would like to discuss these issues further.

Ascendant Council Senior Research Lead,

Baracia

Listed below that was a long code of reference words and symbols favored by mortal cartographers which gave Nym a broad idea of where to find the promised records. If they were tagged with any kind of arcana signal, it would be easy enough to pick them up, but he decided to hold off on that.

Before he did anything else, he spent some time layering even more defenses across his scrying room, to the point where it felt like a ridiculous amount of overkill and it actually became a hassle to even scry out. He wasn’t sure if it would be enough, but it was absolutely everything he could stack up to fortify that weak point in his sanctum.

The fact that he needed to suppress four active defenses and use six different keyed spells to so much as look out his front door was more than a little annoying, but he wanted nothing getting in that way again. Despite the reassurances the letter offered, he was considering relocating the entire sanctum as an additional defense, or at least setting up a second one and abandoning his current home. It could collapse on its own from lack of maintenance.

As far as good news went, at least the part of him that existed in the sixth layer was still whole and undetected. He’d stayed far, far away from anything that might interest an ascendant, had in fact done very little exploration at all. He supposed he’d been given a good opportunity to leave the core reality behind and explore beyond the mortal layers, but only if he trusted Baracia.

On the one hand, she hadn’t done anything to hinder him once she’d determined that his own projects weren’t going to disrupt or endanger hers. On the other, just because she hadn’t done anything there didn’t guarantee she was extending a sincere offer of friendship and collaboration to him. He wasn’t particularly interested in getting dragged into politics, and her letter sounded like exactly that.

There was the one part there, where she mentioned ending the conflict. That part was of immense interest to Nym, since Niramyn and Myzalik’s spat was the reason he had to live under a constant hidden presence spell, that he wasn’t free to see his mortal friends and might not be before they died of old age, and why he’d spent hours fortifying a sanctuary that he was not at all confident would protect him from even the weakest ascendant should anyone find its physical location.

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Even without that location, Baracia could have just as easily sent some sort of hostile magic through instead of a simple piece of paper. The fact that she hadn’t only proved that she thought he was more valuable as a resource to exploit than an enemy to be dispatched. He shook that thought away. It was still hard for him to remember that he wasn’t vulnerable the way a human mage was anymore. Destroying his physical body would be a nuisance, but not the end of him. He could always rebuild it, given enough time and the right magic.

Physical destruction wasn’t the game now, which meant that assuming goodwill just because she hadn’t tried to attack him was not a good idea. At the same time, assuming every single person he met was going to try to use him or kill him was a pretty awful way to live. He was going to have to take risks eventually, unless he wanted to spend a literal eternity as a hermit who actively avoided contact with anyone and everyone.

Since Nym did not want that to be his future, he needed to decide how and when he was going to participate in ascendant society. This gave him an option and, perhaps more importantly, information. Rizin knew a bit about what was going on as well, though he’d never admitted how exactly he’d obtained that knowledge.

There were a few reasonable precautions he could take, the first of which was not retrieving the records himself. Magic could find it and grab it, and then take it to a new location of his choice, where he would determine the best way to access it without exposing himself to potential traps. With a great deal of annoyance, he went through the lengthy process of opening up his scrying peephole and consulted his memory for the cartographer’s notes at the bottom of the letter, which he’d destroyed as soon as he’d finished reading it.

Considering where they’d met, it was not surprising to Nym that Baracia chose a place in the frozen northlands to store the information. He quickly located a memory cube lodged in the ice on the side of a mountain, not so far from the troll tribe that had tried to bury him and a bunch of academy students in an avalanche. The cube was sufficiently well shielded that the trolls hadn’t noticed it, and Nym teleported it a thousand miles away to a stretch of forest he’d flown over a few times.

While he was locating it, another part of his mind constructed a copy of his body and sent him out into the world. His copy armed himself with as many protections, shields, wards, and barriers as he could and approached the cube. He was fully disconnected from the original and operating on a limited life of about a week before he ran out of arcana and broke down.

His only purpose was to absorb the contents of the cube and determine if it was safe for the original Nym to let into his mind, or to act as a decoy if anyone showed up to try to do anything to him after he took possession of the knowledge. The copy absorbed the cube’s contents after a cursory examination, then waited to see if anyone would go wrong.

After three days with no noticeable side effects, and having had plenty of time to review everything the cube had contained, the copy returned to the sanctum. Nym absorbed him back into the whole of his being and began reviewing the new knowledge.

Mostly it was boring meetings where people he didn’t know discussed events and places he’d never heard of. The big thing Nym took away from it was that the council members were equal parts terrified and enraged that Myzalik had figured out a way to permanently remove an immortal from all timelines. Promises and favors were a huge part of how their society functioned, always with the implicit understanding that an ascendant might sit on a favor for a thousand years of mortal time before calling it in, but that the person who owed them that favor would still be around.

So they were losing political capital, not to mention fully a fifth of all known ascendants had disappeared. That had caused a massive split where ascendants who were afraid they’d be targeted next tried to ingratiate themselves to Myzalik to protect themselves or flocked to Niramyn’s side to fight back. The neutral faction was still numerous enough to hold some sway over things, but it was far, far too late to stop the fight now.

Myzalik needed to go. Everyone on the Ascendant Council agreed about that. His new form of magic was too dangerous to be allowed to exist. What they couldn’t agree on was the best way to do it. Imprisoning an ascendant was next to impossible, though with the Exarch apparently killing them now, they might need to redefine what was and wasn’t possible.

For the moment, the councilmen wanted to undermine Myzalik’s position by pulling back all the ascendants who’d joined him out of fear, and they also wanted to curb Niramyn’s influence before he returned to his original strength. He wasn’t technically an Exarch anymore, but everyone knew it was a matter of time and resources before he corrected that. Ideally, they’d pull most of the weaker ascendants out of both camps, find some way to contain Myzalik, and prevent Niramyn from regaining his position as the most powerful of the five current Exarchs.

Nym could get behind the goals, since getting rid of Niramyn and Myzalik would make his life immeasurably easier, but none of them seemed to have a clue how to go about doing that. If they couldn’t figure it out, he wasn’t sure how he could help. He was the least experienced ascendant there was. It had been impossible to keep track, but he figured that he was subjectively somewhere between five and ten years old now. Pitting him against ascendants that had subjective life spans measuring in centuries or more was a fool’s errand.

So either Baracia knew something he didn’t, or she was making some assumptions about him that were completely wrong. He supposed the simplest explanation was that she wasn’t expecting him to help the Ascendant Council stop either Exarch, but just that they wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to start helping them. That was a legitimate concern, because if Niramyn ever got ahold of Nym again, he would likely be forced to cooperate with whatever scheme the Exarch had cooked up.

Nym wondered what measures the Ascendant Council could take to prevent something like that happening. It might just be worth it to talk to them and find out.