There were only a handful of ascendants at the twelfth layer, powerful enough to be called Exarchs. Of those, there were only two who would be actively hostile towards Ferro and Valicin. One of them had a blanket hatred towards everyone and would attack anyone who got too close to him on sight. But his attitude and the locations he frequented were well known, well documented, and thoroughly avoided by anybody with a lick of sense. Even Nym, who’d been an ascendant for a bare handful of years, knew that much.
The other one was Myzalik. Nym hadn’t ever met the man, but he’d gotten descriptions, and unless someone else was imitating an Exarch, it looked like he’d come calling.
Except, he hadn’t. Not really. Myzalik wasn’t there for Nym. He might not even know Nym was there. He was confronting two of Niramyn’s followers, and given his status as the only known ascendant-killer, Nym did not think this meeting was going to end well for them.
“You know why I’m here?” Myzalik asked.
“To weaken my master’s support. You know of course that your actions are having the opposite effect,” Ferro said.
“You think so?”
“It is fact. For every ascendant you consign to oblivion, ten more join Exarch Niramyn’s cause to stop you.”
“Indeed.” Myzalik flashed his teeth at Ferro. It reminded Nym of the shark that used to follow him around every time he went to the cove. “That’s good. None of you can stop me, and I would like to remove anyone who thinks to try in one swoop. When I’m done purging this society of anyone who would oppose me, I’ll be free to rebuild it to my designs.”
“A madman’s ambition,” Ferro scoffed.
Myzalik ignored him and said to Valicin, “Do you have anything to say on the subject?”
She was considerably less confident than Ferro, and Nym noticed the casual arrogance she’d displayed when she’d overpowered his copy was absent as well. He supposed she was a bit of a bully, full of swagger when facing someone weaker than her. Though he didn’t blame her for cowering in front of Myzalik. Nym was practically sweating from his hiding spot, metaphorically speaking. He didn’t actually do that anymore.
“Nothing?” Myzalik prodded. “Come on now, you must have some sort of opinion on the matter.” Valicin jerked her head back and forth, just once. Myzalik snorted and said, “Well, you’re smart enough to know when to keep your opinions to yourself at least. However, I know you’re working for the idiot, which makes you an idiot too. I already beat him once. I’m going to do it again, only this time he won’t slip the trap at the last instant.”
“What do you want?” Ferro said flatly, shifting to put himself between Myzalik and Valicin.
“Well it’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m cutting away Niramyn’s support.”
Nym could see the exact moment they both tried to flee. They knew it was futile, but they also knew they had no chance of victory. As expected, it didn’t work. Myzalik blocked the arcana from forming around them, trapped them in place. For their sakes, Nym hoped the two ascendants were copy bodies, but he suspected if that was the case, Myzalik would know.
Ferro must have agreed, because his body became insubstantial and arcana burst forth from him in a burning aurora that stretched out for miles. Nym had never seen an ascendant fully cut loose, and he knew Ferro was at least two steps away from Exarch level. If his own magic poured off from him in such large quantities that it could blanket mortal cities, how much worse was Myzalik’s?
The arcana aura washed over the Exarch, but failed to touch him. Like smoke billowing against a glass window, it roiled around him, but Myzalik was safe inside whatever defenses he’d devised. And then, so abruptly that Nym almost missed it, his own aura extended out in a smooth, straight plane that bisected the ferocious power Ferro was emitting cleanly.
“You can’t have believed that would do anything,” Myzalik said dryly.
“No, it was just to distract you, to force you to focus on me.”
“Why, did you think your friend was going to get away?”
Nym blinked and looked around, trying to figure out where Valicin had gone. Wherever she was, she was out of the range of his scrying ward, but Myzalik just lifted a hand and plucked something out of the air, something that wasn’t there, except that all of the sudden Valicin was there, her arm caught in Myzalik’s grasp.
“Just a little temporal stutter when she tried to flee,” the Exarch explained. “You’ve made your valiant attempt to escape, tried to sacrifice yourself for it, really. It got you nowhere. Your choices are simple at this point, surrender, or perish.”
Gravity didn’t exist in the sixth layer. Something like that required land and sky, sea and stars, and the endless void had none of those things. Ascendants made their own gravity when they constructed their palaces and fortresses. Or when they tried to crush their opponents with it.
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Exarch Myzalik’s whole body seemed to fold up on itself, reduced in an instant to a pinprick of color as Ferro’s spell crushed him. Vacilin jerked herself clear of the effect, though she lost her arm in the process. Then an instant later, the pinprick flowed back out into the Exarch’s human form again. He smirked and shook his head. “Perish it is.”
Arcana surged out of Myzalik and slammed into Vacilin. Her body locked into place, her expression frozen, and Nym had the strangest feeling that she’d stopped existing. All that was left was the illusion of a person, a sort of placeholder in space and time of what she had been. Myzalik treated her like a distraction, something to shoo away so he could work in peace.
New arcana poured into existence around Myzalik, dark and hungry and infinitely deep. It jumped from the Exarch to his victim, but served to do nothing but establish a framework. Ferro was locked in it, his expression pained, his body unable to struggle. “I had to develop this adaption to make it work from the other direction,” Myzalik said. “The original spell was designed with your master in mind, of course. But as we all know, he is always in reality prime.” He stopped and snorted. “Almost always.”
“Other ascendants aren’t, but of course if just hiding out here in the outer layers was all it took to defend against me, then the spell wouldn’t be worth knowing. Fortunately, that was easily remedied, easily for me, I mean. You’re not a hidden Exarch, are you? No. Don’t bother trying to answer.”
A new spell bloomed inside the framework, one that looked remarkably similar to the age reversal spell Nym had learned when he first arrived. As he watched it grow, he realized the similarities were surface-level only. Many of the pieces were familiar, sometimes even identical, but the arrangement, the order of composition, the emphasis given to them, all different. The connections were wrong too, sometimes backwards, other times unlike any part of the spell he knew.
Nym didn’t understand even half of what he was seeing, but one of the great things about being an ascendant was having utterly perfect memory. The spell Myzalik was casting was a combination of at least twenty-two other spells, and that wasn’t even including the framework made of what Nym could only assume was twelfth layer arcana. He didn’t understand it, but he could replicate it. Much like speaking a foreign word phonetically, Nym could reproduce individual pieces, and the ones he didn’t know how to make, he at least knew what they’d look like when they were completed.
The spell took minutes to cast, but then it was ready, held in place and checked by Myzalik’s will. “Do you see?” he said, laughing again. “So simple, right? How did none of us ever figure this out? I couldn’t believe it when I put the pieces together.”
Then he unleashed the spell, directly into Ferro. The framework caught it, sped it through the ascendant’s entire essence, and stretched it down to the core reality. Ferro melted away, his body broken apart into raw arcana as the connections he’d formed were severed. Nym wasn’t about to scry other layers of reality to see what was happening there, not with Myzalik so close. But he could guess.
He was witnessing the death of an immortal.
The ending was anticlimactic. The spell collapsed on itself in the space where Ferro used to be and disappeared. There was nothing there, had never been anything there. Ferro didn’t exist, because the mortal who’d forged an existence that spanned multiple realities didn’t exist, had in fact never existed in reality prime’s timeline.
As far as any ascendant was concerned, he was dead. With that completed, Myzalik turned to Valicin and unfroze her. She jerked forward, then blinked and looked around. “What did you do?” she asked quietly. “Killed him?”
“Yes. He fought to the end to give you time to run. Obviously, he was not successful. So now I’ll offer you the same choice. Surrender, or perish.”
“What does surrender mean to you?”
“Servitude. But life. It’s really no different than your current life. You’ll just be trading one master for another. Of course, I’ll have to be a bit stricter than your old one, if only to ensure your new loyalties don’t waver.”
Valicin looked around again, like she expected Ferro to pop up any moment and tell her that it was all a joke. When he didn’t, her shoulders sloped down and she nodded. “I will serve.”
“I knew you were more sensible than that stodgy old man. Come then, I have much work to do on you, and you have many, many secrets to whisper into my ear.”
The two of them disappeared, and Nym held his breath. He was almost expecting Myzalik to come back, to laugh at the foolish little ascendant who thought to hide from a god. But nothing happened. Myzalik didn’t return. Eventually, Nym ran out of arcana for the scrying ward, and he was left alone in his invisible box.
He spent a long time just thinking about what he’d witnessed. Two ascendants had been sent to hunt him down, but had been intercepted. One had been killed, the other subverted. That could theoretically mean that no one knew where he was now, that no one was following his trail. Just to be safe, he would need to relocate again, as soon as he was sure it was safe to do so. He didn’t plan on setting one foot outside the box until he knew Myzalik hadn’t left any sort of trap behind.
But then, when he ran out of other things to think about and plans to make, his mind turned back to the immortal killing spell. If he discounted the framework, which was clearly beyond his ability to mimic, everything else had been simple sixth layer arcana. The spell forms were eerily familiar. He could learn to weave those together. With enough practice, he could cast that spell too.
That then was the reason that nobody ever saw Myzalik do it. There were probably dozens of ascendants who could duplicate that spell with practically no effort, if only they knew how. He had to kill anyone who saw it, or else he was risking his greatest weapon getting into the hands of his enemies.
That was valuable knowledge. If Nym could figure out how to leverage that, he might just have a way out of this mess once and for all. He would need to keep it quiet though. If anyone learned that he had the god killer spell, he’d be the next target, and he wasn’t nearly as well defended as Myzalik. It would be easy for someone to capture him and take the spell from his mind.
Secrecy was the key. Secrecy, and opportunity. He just needed to be patient. As soon as he figured out how to put the puzzle together, all he would need was the right set of circumstances.