The cage didn’t work. Despite everything he’d done to reinforce it, it seemed to lack the weight needed to withstand the arcana. As soon as the first fissure opened, it got blasted around every bit as easily as Nym himself. It wasn’t a physical weight either. It didn’t matter how dense the cage was, every iteration met with the same result. Some attempts had actually ruptured it completely, forcing Nym to build a new one from nothing.

He was about to try a different tactic. Instead of a physical object he’d created and weighed down with arcana, he was going to form a sort of bubble around himself, a perfect sphere packed as densely as he could make it with sixth layer arcana. Even if it wasn’t as strong as seventh layer, he was hoping the quantity would counteract that.

The Nyms gathered into formation and opened the rift. The inky black arcana surged out, struck the bubble, and… sheared right through it, once again tossing Nym into the ceiling of his sanctum before it cut out.

“That didn’t work,” Nym grumbled, climbing back to his feet after he fell down. “Thoughts?”

“Still not dense enough,” several Nyms said immediately.

“Yes, obviously. Thoughts on why?”

There were a lot of thoughts, but none of them were original or new, and eventually the Nyms all broke back apart to their individual roles. The god killer spell was coming along, at least so far as to say he’d identified five distinct parts that he had no idea how to recreate. The rest of it was doable, though not fast enough to make it actually work without somehow increasing the number of parallel processes his mind could run.

Those projects were all in the works though, each one slowly advancing into what he hoped would eventually become a unified and coherent whole. The problem was that the whole hermit thing was a lot harder than he’d expected it to be. He’d figured that after his stint in Niramyn’s library, he could handle it. Inarguably, he’d spent far more time there.

As it turned out, making constant progress helped a lot. The knowledge had been there; all he needed to do was absorb it. Now, it was endless days that turned into weeks and then into months of research, of trying and failing and trying again in an endless cycle. There were no breaks to talk to somebody besides himself. He didn’t leave to attend to some task or other.

Nym was starting to crack. He could feel it. If something didn’t change soon, his mind was going to break. The idea that there were somehow hundreds of ascendants floating out in the void, slowly chipping away at advancing to the next layer, always advancing, never doing anything else, was so unreal to him now that he didn’t know how he’d ever not found it laughable.

There had to be some way to insulate his mind from the isolation, some spell that he just didn’t know about that altered how he thought or felt. He was half tempted to put a Nym copy on researching that, but he was already approaching his limits.

It was dangerous, but he had to get out of the box he’d stuffed himself into. He needed to see something, hear other people’s voices. It would probably be fine, just for a little while. Hidden presence had always worked for him before. As long as someone didn’t directly stumble across him, he had no reason to believe it would fail him now.

For the first time in he didn’t know how long, Nym stepped outside of his sanctuary.

* * *

“I will admit, I am surprised to see you again,” Rizin said.

“Would you believe that I’m just checking in?”

“No.”

“How about that I haven’t spoken to another living being in what I am sure is at least six months and I’m slowly losing my mind?”

“That one I believe.”

Nym paced back and forth in front of the fox’s massive cushion. “How do you do it? You’ve been here for years, decades maybe. How do you handle the solitude?”

“Perhaps it’s just that I enjoy it,” Rizin said. “Or, perhaps, it is that I am not trapped here. I can leave whenever I want, and I frequently do. I am not so isolated as you seem to think, and the thought of walking among the mortals in various disguises does not disturb me in the slightest. It is in my nature to deceive, after all.”

“Is that what I should do? Just take a vacation every few weeks?” Nym asked.

“You seem agitated.”

Nym forced himself to stop pacing and took a deep breath. “I am. I just… sometimes I don’t think I can do this. Nothing I do ever feels like it’s enough.”

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“That is probably because you have set yourself against forces that are inconceivably powerful, even for an immortal. It is a fool’s errand, and you will never find peace until you give it up.”

“That’s your advice?” Nym demanded. “Just give up and let them do whatever they want. Take whatever they decide to dish out because they’re stronger?”

“Do you have a choice? You may one day be strong enough to dictate your own terms, but today is not that day.”

Nym thought about telling Rizin about the god killer spell. If there was anyone who was good at plotting and scheming, it was the mystic fox. But no, Nym didn’t trust him that much. He didn’t trust anyone that much.

“Well let me ask you this,” Nym said. “I’ve been trying to break into the seventh layer, and I am so close, but every time I manage to get through the membrane, the arcana is uncontrollable.”

He described his process to Rizin, who listened with sleepy indifference. When he was done, the fox said, “If you think you need more arcana density, why are you splitting yourself into a dozen separate bodies?”

“Because… I can’t split open the membrane without them?”

“Hmm. Seems like that’s your problem then.”

“Maybe, yeah. Thanks. I’ll see if I can figure it out from that direction.”

“Then if that’s all?”

“Actually, no. Want to get a bite to eat?” Nym asked.

Rizin cracked open an eye to look at him. “You don’t need to eat anymore.”

“I still like to though. Plus, like you said, you go out whenever you want.”

“Is this just an excuse to try to interrogate me for advice on your various problems?”

“No,” Nym said. “It’s also an excuse to socialize, which I think I need more.”

“Fine.” Rizin rolled his eyes, then climbed to his feet and disappeared. A girl in her early twenties appeared in his place and hopped down from the cushion. “Where to?”

“That’s… uh, that’s what you’re going out as today?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

The girl looked suspiciously like Risa, though. Maybe it was a coincidence. Probably not. Rizin did like to mess with him.

* * *

“How long have you been living in the outer layers?” Rizin asked while he tore into a rack of ribs. It was a bit disconcerting to see him do it in a petite woman’s body, and judging by the looks they were receiving, Nym wasn’t the only one to think so.

“I don’t even know anymore. I’ve been all over the timeline here too. Maybe ten years since our pact?”

Nym wondered if he should take better care to keep track of time, but it seemed largely pointless in a society where nobody ever got older and everyone did whatever they wanted at their own pace. It was only ever in the core reality that they showed any sense of urgency. Their stupid games were the only things they cared about besides gaining more personal power. Sometimes he wondered if ascendants actually served any purpose at all.

“Ten years with almost no contact? No wonder you’re going stir crazy.”

“Well, maybe less. And I did talk to some ascendants at first, but then they tried to sell me out and I had to go into hiding.”

“Are you sure you want to live among them at all then? There’s no reason you couldn’t stay here.”

“If I thought it was safe for me, I’d consider it. But, I tried to visit some of my old friends and it just felt weird. It was like I was playing with little kids.”

“So what?” Rizin asked.

Nym titled his head. “What do you mean?”

“So what if it was like playing with little kids? Is it a bad thing to be stronger than them? Does that make them somehow less than they were before because your power has outgrown theirs?”

“No, but it’s hard to relate to them now.”

“No, it’s not. Not if you let yourself. You will have plenty of centuries to be a prim and proper immortal who is above it all. Let yourself be who you want to be now.”

It was a good thought, but with the looming threat of two Exarchs hanging over his head, he couldn’t see himself ever truly able to relax. Of course, if everything worked like he hoped, maybe that wouldn’t be a forever threat. He could live a life, almost a vacation of sorts, and when it was time to pass on, return to being an immortal instead.

If there was ever a span of years to do that, it was the ones he’d been born into, so to speak. Eriam had even implied Nym had been around in some way when he was still mortal, which he took to mean sometime in the near future. It was comforting, in a way, to know that he had a future to look forward to.

That comfort was tempered by the fact that ascendants spent a lot of their energy manipulating the primary timeline, trying to weave threads of alternate times into it in order to meet their own agendas. He’d even done it himself dozens of times on behalf of Hozim. Though that did raise the question of if a timeline was alterable to make it so someone who would have ascended never did, could Nym in theory stop an ascendant from existing?

Evidence strongly suggested the answer was no. The primary timeline would tolerate small changes easily enough, but something like erasing an ascendant was not a small change. That could be big enough to shift everything over to a new primary. If Myzalik never existed, then Nym wouldn’t exist. Presumably, that meant that those dozens of ascendants he’d executed would continue to exist, and making those kinds of changes on beings operating on that scale would quickly lead to a cascading chain of events that could overwrite the primary.

But then, if it wasn’t possible, if the timeline was self-correcting, then how exactly did Myzalik’s god killer work? Nym had all the pieces, but he didn’t understand what they did. Perhaps it was time to take a closer look at the reverse aging spell and figure out exactly how it did what it did, instead of just taking it for granted.

“You okay over there?” Rizin asked, snapping him out of his thoughts.

“Yeah, why?”

“You stopped eating and have been staring off into space for a few minutes now. I stole half your food off your plate and you didn’t even notice.”

“Wait, what?” Nym glanced down and saw that, indeed, his plate was mostly empty now.

“I’m a predator, and a thief. Come on now. If you’re not going to pay attention, why would you expect any other outcome?”

Nym just sighed and put his fork down. “Listen, I’ve got an important question. You know how ascendants keep their mortal avatars young, right?”

“Right.”

“I can do the spell, but I want to dig into exactly how it works, not just how to do it. I think it could be important.”

“That’s easy enough,” Rizin said. “I could explain it all right now. But what’s in it for me?”

Nym did not like that glint in his eyes, not at all.