Nym promptly abandoned the sanctuary he’d constructed for himself. He also abandoned the front he’d built, a sort of decoy sanctuary that he gave out as the place to go in order to see him. The copy that manned that returned to him, as well as all of his other copies. Nym washed his hands of everything he’d begun to build in ascendant society and disappeared deep into the empty void that was the sixth layer.

Empty wasn’t really the right word for it. There was plenty of arcana there, but it wasn’t a physical thing and it was still hard to adjust to the idea of looping arcana currents replacing an actual landscape. Considering how many ascendants wove their portions of the shared reality into grand vistas or improbably luxurious palaces, Nym thought that was probably a common sentiment.

There was nothing to gather up or store away in either location. In the sixth layer, matter was more a manifestation of will than something that existed on its own. Anything he wanted to reproduce, he could. Anything he took with him might be a liability in the end. Besides, he’d built his own sanctuary from nothing once already. He could do it again.

“But still,” he said to himself, “here I am, running away from my problems again. Some things never change.”

Then again, fleeing from problems that could crush him without any noticeable effort was always a winning strategy for him. He was hard-pressed to think of a time it had backfired on him, but could easily think of a few instances where being stubborn and sticking around had caused him problems.

“Oh, right, the abduction squad. Couldn’t outrun that one.”

But then again, he couldn’t have defeated them either, so running had still been the best option. He just hadn’t been prepared enough and they’d gotten the drop on him, which he’d learned from and was taking appropriate actions right now, before new enemies tracked him down.

Hidden presence was going at all times, and anything he did in the inner layers got an obscure timeline spell thrown on it, not that he’d done much there since he’d visited his mortal friends. Idly, he wondered how that was coming along. He could scry out their future if he wanted; the years were well within the range of his own temporal anchors, but he had some security concerns about the scry being traced back to him from the other end.

Truthfully, it probably hadn’t been a good move to save Analia, from a selfish perspective. He’d left himself vulnerable to retaliation, but abandoning his base of operations and scrubbing any lingering trace of his presence should solve that issue.

Both his decoy sanctuary and his true one collapsed into nothingness, the process sped up not just by withdrawing his will from the construct, but by actively working to assist the natural entropy of the sixth layer that tried to return everything to arcana. Once they were both gone, Nym willed himself away to random locations several times. It cost him little enough to do and it would help slow down anyone who might be following after him if they had to figure out each destination he willed himself to in order to follow the chain.

After a few hours of random travel, he settled on an unremarkable location and began constructing his new home. By necessity, he started small so that he could rebuild his defenses as quickly as possible. The sanctuary was little more than a bare box fortified with every ward, obfuscation, and active defense he could think to layer on it.

In the interest of keeping it as secure as possible, it had no scrying port, and no exit. He literally sealed himself inside it, in essence creating his own tomb. Safely ensconced in a shell formed of his own magic, Nym finally allowed himself a chance to relax. If anything approached, his magic would tell him, but as long as hidden presence held, it should be impossible for anything to detect him. Theoretically, the only way to find his sanctum was to physically bump into it while traveling through null space.

Nym wasn’t content to rely on invisibility and nothing but an early warning that something had crossed his wards to protect him. As soon as he’d recovered, he set to work creating something new. The main problem with wards was that other than the part actively scanning for a trigger, they were dormant. That was great under normal circumstances, when mages were trying to save arcana. A ward running at full strength would run itself dry so often that it was almost useless. A ward that only came to life when it was needed could last for years without maintenance.

But he wanted to see through his wards. Scrying out from his sanctum introduced a vulnerability he was not willing to deal with. If he could make the wards themselves function as a sort of local area scry, he figured he could get sensory feedback on anything that came close enough. That way, he didn’t need to worry about someone sneaking something over the ward line that he hadn’t thought to include in the trigger conditions.

That meant they were going to take considerably more arcana than standard wards to keep powered, since they would never go dormant. Nym didn’t love that idea, but considering he wasn’t planning on moving any time in the near future, he would be there to provide a constant source of arcana. He didn’t need to sleep, or eat, or use the facilities, so there would never be a time he had to step away and risk something sneaking up on him.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The other problem was something that was unique to ascendants. He could see wards that were currently active, which meant that every other ascendant could see them too. If his wards were always on, it would defeat the purpose of hiding. Any ascendant that happened to come by would immediately see that the wards exist, and naturally assume that since there was no reason to ward empty space, that there must be something in the middle of those wards.

Nym spent a few days tinkering with the ward scheme before he figured out a solution. It was a hybrid of hidden presence and an upscaled version of camouflage mixed together into the rune sequences that formed the wards. Functionally, they were still visible, but with hidden presence keeping ascendants from noticing them from afar, and camouflage blending them into the eddies and swirls of background arcana, he thought he’d achieved his goal.

The problem then became arcana intensity. Powering normal wards was trivially easy. Powering his special always-on wards was difficult, but manageable. Powering the new hybrid wards that also had to run two other active effects was just too much. The arcana draw was more than he could channel, which meant he could only get a few hours at most from them before he needed to rest.

It wasn’t an ideal solution, but Nym managed to come up with something he felt was workable. By his reasoning, the sixth layer wasn’t like the core reality. It was a vast empty space, nothing but arcana suffusing it. If he didn’t want to be bothered by anybody, then a ward with a trigger of literally anything that came by would be sufficient to give him early warning, as long as it was far enough out and, more importantly, he made it prophetic.

That was a whole new headache to work out the details on, since he wasn’t all that great at scrying on inner layer timelines yet, and the outer layer was a whole different beast, but he thought he had it right. Unfortunately, without anyone showing up to actually trigger the wards, it was hard to test them.

If he’d done it right, and he was reasonably certain he had, the prophetic ward would trigger when something was going to enter its radius, but hadn’t yet. That would send feedback to let him know he had incoming guests, and the ward itself would collapse and vanish before anyone arrived. There should be no risk of anyone finding him via his wards that way.

At that point, he could activate his limited use invisible scrying ward to get a more accurate assessment of just who exactly had shown up and decide if he needed to relocate again. He had a strong suspicion that he would be running for it if anyone managed to find the box he’d sealed himself in. It was a tough shell, too strong for a mortal to crack, but there were no mortals in the sixth layer.

In the meantime, his new stronghold gave him a place to practice and improve his magic in relative peace. There were still a lot of sixth layer skills to pick up, but he decided to focus his efforts into figuring out how to breach the reality membrane and reach the seventh. Being able to travel to a deeper outer layer was a far, far better escape plan than anything he could construct now. If he was lucky, everybody who was looking for him wouldn’t even realize they were in the wrong reality.

Nym spent the next month working on the problem. In some ways, he thought it was easier to reach the seventh layer than it was the fifth, at least from his position. Once he’d stepped across the chasm, he’d formed a new existence in the sixth layer, which meant it was a single step over to the next one. Simple.

Except it wasn’t, not at all. He could feel a membrane that encircled the reality he was currently stuck in, but conduits worked differently in the outer layers. Every trick he knew, every rule he thought should apply, those were worthless. The membrane was solid. It had no wiggle, no give. It didn’t flex when he prodded it. If he had to compare it to something else, he would have said it was like boring through the fourth layer, except a thousand times more difficult.

Brute force obviously wasn’t the answer. He was never going to puncture that membrane, and it would take decades to dig his way through it. He supposed he had the time, but there had to be a better way. Or maybe there wasn’t, and every ascendant had their own channel they’d dug open. If that was the case, it was no wonder they were so secretive about it. Of course, if that was the case, that meant that once it was opened, they would have to maintain that connection forever. It would be a constant fight to keep the membrane from closing again.

His contemplations into that mystery were interrupted by his prophetic ward. Two beings would appear very soon, and he could only hope that they wouldn’t find him. The ward collapsed and was washed away even as Nym realized this fact, and he hurried to deploy the invisible scrying ward in its place.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to see Valicin, though he wasn’t pleased. He hadn’t been expecting her to give up, but he also thought he’d covered his trail well enough after his copy had met her to get away. She’d found him anyway, or rather, he assumed the other ascendant with her had. Ferro looked exactly the same as Nym remembered him, and he remained one of the most powerful ascendants Nym had ever met.

He was a lot less confident about escaping Ferro than he would have been if it had only been Valicin. Nym waited with bated breath while the two looked around. If he had any luck at all, they would assume they’d lost his trail and backtrack to try again, giving him enough time to flee and get ahead of them.

That didn’t happen. Instead, a third ascendant appeared. Nym didn’t recognize this one, though from the sudden stiffening he saw in Ferro and Valicin, they did. Curious, he focused on them and tried to pick up the conversation.

“Exarch,” Ferro said, his voice almost, but not quite steady.

“Exarch,” Valicin echoed, her own voice quavering.

“Well, well, what is this? Two of Niramyn’s stooges, out in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to run and no way to fight back. How lucky for me.”