Since he’d had the time anyway while he waited for his copy to absorb the information Baracia had sent him and confirm it wasn’t trapped in some way, Nym went ahead and set up four more sanctuaries in random locations. He also delivered a pouch of money to Ciana, mostly shields with a few crests, that would keep her for another year or two. He included a letter with it letting her know he was still alive and dealing with stuff, but didn’t go into specifics.

It was very possible that she could return back to her old home now, but until he knew for sure, he wasn’t going to take that risk. Any ascendant working for Myzalik might still come snooping around there and find her. Hopefully if she wasn’t physically there, they wouldn’t be inclined to chase her down. Sometimes that seemed like a thin hope, but he didn’t have the ability to obscure his timeline and prevent people from finding out about the beach.

The only other piece of business he felt he really needed to address in the core reality was Analia’s geas, but that wasn’t something he could take care of without visiting her in person, so to speak. He could send out a copy to break it if he wanted, but his hidden presence spell would keep anyone from following him, even if they were watching the timestream for his activities. What it might not protect him from was anyone who was watching Analia to see if he made contact.

Sometimes being an ascendant sucked. Their politics were awful, and no matter how strong he got, it seemed like he couldn’t ever overpower his problems. It would barely take a few minutes out of his day to find her, remove the geas, and get her somewhere safe to recover, but he hesitated to do it. He could keep himself safe, but if anyone found her and decided she was a target to get at him, he wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it. It would put him in a position where he was forced to rely on someone else to solve his problems, again.

The other option was to let her keep going while under the effects of the geas, which was definitely bad for her. The longer it was left on her, the worse it was going to be when it broke. He supposed he could transport her to one of his new sanctuaries and work on her there. She’d be as protected as he was, that way. Leaving would be another matter, but she’d need time to recover anyway, weeks at least, possibly longer.

Nym wasn’t sure what the best course of action was. The geas needed to be broken, but he didn’t necessarily have time to take care of her afterwards, and if he was the one who did it, it brought some risk on them both. On the other hand, the only mortal person he knew and trusted who could break a geas was Archmage Veran.

The archmage was already connected to Niramyn in some way, though Nym had never gotten the details on that. He suspected the ascendant had helped him reach the fifth layer, possibly as a move in one of their weird games. If so, either Archmage Veran didn’t know or didn’t care. Nym wanted to say that set a precedent for assisting mortals, but the truth of the matter was he wasn’t an Exarch. Other ascendants that wouldn’t dare to touch a mortal Niramyn had helped wouldn’t think twice about killing one that a measly sixth layer ascendant was fond of.

So no, as much as he wanted to help Analia, he couldn’t find a way to do it that didn’t leave both of them open to an unacceptable amount of risk. For the time being, the best thing he could do was stay far, far away from his mortal friends. The only solution he had at the moment was to spirit her away to one of his sanctuaries, break the geas, and then keep her safe inside what would become her prison for an indeterminable length of time. She could end up dying there, never able to see the outside world again.

Living her life under the burden of that geas would still be better than having no life at all.

Reluctantly, Nym set aside the idea of helping Analia. Once he learned more about where he fit into everything and had a better idea, he’d revisit it. Hopefully it would be safe to make contact with her then. In the meantime, he needed to consider how best to approach Baracia, or even if that was the right way to go about it.

Thanks in part to the memories she’d given him, Nym had the names of at least three other councilmen he could approach, although he didn’t see much to recommend one over the other. He was sure there were differences, but whatever personal agendas they had weren’t part of the memories he’d been given to review. All of them were opposed to the Myzalik-Niramyn conflict, and all of them agreed that Myzalik needed to be controlled or restrained in some way.

He suspected the memories had been carefully curated to present a specific impression. If he wanted to know who he could trust and who he couldn’t, he was going to have to find out for himself. Every last ascendant had some sort of personal agenda, some sort of goal they were working towards that didn’t necessarily include Nym’s well-being.

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No matter which way he moved, it was going to be a risk. The only way to stay safe was to never move at all, and who wanted an eternity of that? He might as well just die now if that’s all he was good for. He had all the information he was going to get. It was time to make a decision.

* * *

Ascendants had a strange relationship with the core reality. They dipped in and out of it at will, aging while they were there, and existing eternally otherwise. When Nym decided to exist on the sixth layer, he stopped existing in reality prime. His physical body just vanished, pulled across the layers of reality to rejoin that part of him that existed outside time.

They called those parts anchors, and they devoted a considerable amount of their efforts to making more and more of them. A single one was all it took to tether him to immortality, but the more of them they made, the easier it was to pull themselves back and forth through time. If Nym understood the concept properly, he would be limited in his ability to bounce around through the timeline until he established new anchors.

For now at least, he could freely move around the sixth layer of reality. Much like how he exercised its power in the core world, navigating the sixth layer was an act of willpower. Nym existed in an endless nothingness when he arrived, and he wanted to exist somewhere else. He pitted his willpower against reality and overwrote it. Reality conformed to his belief that he was not in a null space, but instead in a receiving hall in a very, very fancy home.

He was no stranger to extravagance now. The Feldstal manor had been just the start, and Archmage Veran’s private sanctum was as luxurious as anywhere. But Nym had scried thousands and thousands of miles, and that included more than a few castles, mansions, and palaces. He’d seen the insides to some pretty amazing places, but none of them compared to the home Baracia had built for herself.

Gold was everywhere. It edged windows that peaked out at fantastical scenery, it framed doorways, and it crawled across marble pillars in imitation of living vines. That gold was in fact alive and growing wild up trellises in the patch of garden that circled around a great crystalline fountain in the center of the foyer.The fountain was ringed with gemstone flowers, cut so delicately that they appeared alive. Perhaps they were. It certainly wouldn’t have surprised Nym.

Statues lined the walls, interspersed with the pillars, and a rich carpet made of some sort of material Nym didn’t recognize led deeper into Baracia’s home. Artwork decorated the walls, a hundred pictures that were so vividly rendered, Nym could actually see into them. The frames were much like windows, with a view that changed when he took a step forward.

That was just the landing room, a place that visitors were redirected to when they arrived. When Nym attempted to will himself into existence inside the palace, he met a contesting force that pushed him to a specific room. He thought he could have overcome it with effort, but it seemed rude when the opposing will wasn’t trying to harm him. It was rather like being chided to enter by the front door instead of climbing in through the nearest open window.

A… thing appeared. Nym wasn’t sure how to describe it. It was almost like an animated arcana construct, except he couldn’t see any arcana in it. Whatever it was, it had no corporeal body, but then again, Nym was in the sixth layer now. Bodies were optional.

“Hello,” he said.

“Greetings, Initiate.” The words weren’t spoken out loud, so much as just willed into existence. Nym knew he had heard them without ever actually having to hear them. “The Mistress bids me invite you to her study, where she’ll join you shortly.”

“Of course. You’ll lead the way?”

“I shall transport you there directly, if you are ready.”

In the mortal world, he might have objected to placing himself in such a vulnerable position without even knowing how to get back out. Here, it made very little difference. If he wanted to leave, and Baracia didn’t want to let him, it would be a contest of wills. He’d already decided to trust her enough to meet with her, so doing it in a different room changed nothing.

“Very well,” he told the manifestation.

Nym was sitting inside a brightly lit room, in a chair that was sinfully comfortable. A cup of tea still steamed on the table next to him. Across from him was a second chair, currently empty. On the far side of the room, framed by the floor to ceiling windows that overlooked a vast city of towering ivory spires poking out of clouds, was a desk so large Nym could have used it as a bed.

It was disorientating to feel reality change around him so rapidly, to have to rebuff its attempts to rewrite his personal history so that he believed this new version had always been true. Baracia must have realized that he would struggle with it, else she would have been seated across from him already.

He hoped it was a coincidence of timing rather than her predicting him that well, but either way, as soon as he’d finished acclimating to the change in reality, she was sitting in her chair, a cup of tea held in her hands. She looked much as he remembered, though her outfit had changed to a black dress accented in silver with a considerable amount of jewelry to match.

“Nym,” she said, perhaps a touch more warmly than she’d spoken during their first meeting. “How nice to see you. Did you get a chance to review the memory cube I sent you?”

“I did, thank you,” he said. “It was… enlightening. Of course, for every question it answered, it raised a dozen more.”

She laughed softly. “Such is the way of knowledge. The more you learn, the more certain you become that you know very little after all.”

“So I’ve learned.”

“Well then, I have set aside some time for this meeting. Let’s get to know one another better, yes? And we’ll see if we can’t get you up to speed.”

“Yeah,” Nym said. “That sounds like a good idea.”