The modifications went well. They weren’t terribly dangerous, but mistakes could have unacceptable delays, so Nym was glad to have performed them all properly in the first attempt. More accurately, he was glad to have not made any irreversible mistakes. It took him more time than he wanted, but when he was done, everything worked right and he was one step closer to being able to handle each part of the god killer spell simultaneously.
There was less progress on the front of actually casting the spell, but he was still advancing steadily towards the goal. Of the framework that Myzalik had used, Nym had no hopes whatsoever that he could replicate that, but since Niramyn always maintained a presence in the core reality, Nym hoped that meant the inevitable confrontation would also take place there.
That was where Nym ran into his first real problem. He’d deliberately isolated himself, which was great for working in peace, but it made it very, very difficult to know what was going on with the rest of the ascendants. If he didn’t know what they were doing, it was hard to find the opportunity to strike. He’d done some scrying, but that was risky and he’d strictly limited the amount of spying he did. It didn’t matter if he had the perfect opportunity tomorrow since he couldn’t actually use the god killer spell yet.
Still, it was prudent to start laying out the foundations of his plan now, so Nym reluctantly broke his ban on speaking with other ascendants. Eriam would have been his preferred contact, as Nym felt the most connection with him and bore some good will towards the ascendant. Unfortunately, he was still gone, or at least had hidden himself away well enough that his location wasn’t freely available.
Working on the theory that members high up in the Ascendant Council would be less likely to sell him out to either of the warring factions, Nym decided to approach Baracia again. Of the few ascendants he’d worked with, she’d been the most vocally outspoken against the fighting. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t want to get rid of Myzalik, just that she didn’t support Niramyn.
She was also something of a public figure and made no effort to hide her home. There were a few other ascendants who operated in a similar manner, but Nym didn’t know them personally, and he wasn’t willing to take the risk of speaking to someone with unknown alliances.
He was barely willing to risk talking to Baracia, and took every precaution to protect himself. He sent in a copy, of course, but only after he created a brand new sanctum in a random location for his copy to use as a base. The copy then willed himself around a few dozen times to make the trail as hard to follow as possible, then finally sent a request for a meeting as a letter he willed into existence and sent her way.
The copy was, by necessity, vulnerable to attack, but rather than keep an active scry link, Nym just waited for his double to return. He didn’t want to take a chance with someone tracing the scry back to him, and if his copy didn’t return to the decoy sanctum in the expected time frame, Nym would take that for an answer.
And then something went right. The copy did show back up, whole and unharmed. Nym met with him, still somewhat uneasy about the idea of being ambushed, but with no better ideas to secure himself than what he’d already done.
“You met with her?” he asked his copy.
“Everything went smoothly. She was more than happy to gossip, as she calls it, and apologized for introducing us to Hozim.”
“That’s good. What did we learn?”
“The ascendants are still fighting in that block of time right after we ascended, but there’s a bit of a hitch. I’m not sure if they’ve been blocked from it, or already used that time, but it seems like neither Exarch has taken to the field, so to speak. They’re both sitting back in the outer layers and letting their minions duke it out.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
“For Niramyn, who knows? For Myzalik…”
There was no real explanation required there. Myzalik could kill ascendants just as easily in the outer layer as he could in the core reality, and since ascendants only had to exist in the outer layer, he didn’t actually need to go to the core reality. On the other hand, it was markedly easier to find another person in reality prime than it was in the sixth layer.
There was nothing to say that rumor was fact though. Just because no one was talking about spotting him in reality prime didn’t mean Myzalik never went there. He could step in, kill an immortal, and be gone again in minutes, with no one else the wiser. Or, maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he’d used all the time in those years already.
Maybe it didn’t actually matter. Now that he thought of it, it wasn’t really relevant when he killed Myzalik, just that he did. He could just pick a different time when the Exarch was in reality prime and attack him then. That actually might be better. He could find out exactly what had happened and plan around that. It would give him time to figure out exactly what defenses the Exarch had and how to breach them.
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More likely, Nym would find out that he couldn’t get close, at least not if he picked some time when Myzalik was safe in his own fortress. There had to be times when he wasn’t though, when he clashed with Niramyn. From what Nym understood of their whole history, they’d been at each other’s throats for millennia.
Thank God for timeline splits and corrections, because he couldn’t even begin to trace the waves of changes killing Myzalik like that would cause. It might even be enough to cause a deviation of the prime timeline, but if so, Nym was happy to leap into that alternate future. What he was really concerned about was that the timeline itself would resist the change, and he would be working against fate, for lack of a better term.
On the other hand, Myzalik had killed a few dozen of the supposedly immortal ascendants already, so it couldn’t have been that much of an issue. Whatever impact it had, it wasn’t enough to split the timeline that hard. That was good news, since it meant he likely wasn’t working against the inertia of history.
“Did you want to hear about the rest of the meeting, or are we done?” the other Nym asked.
“Hmm? Oh, sorry. I had an idea for how to target Myzalik and got distracted.”
“Targeting him during one of his past confrontations with Niramyn, right? I had the exact same thought as soon as I found out he wasn’t participating in the current block of years’ conflict.”
“Pretty much. I take it you asked Baracia for information about that.”
“I did, yes. I got a list of over forty encounters they’ve had in the core reality, but there are only three which take place inside our current range. One of them actually caused our birth.”
“We’ll have to confirm and see if we can find out more details. I think I’d feel a bit more comfortable if we chose a different one, just on the off chance that we wipe ourselves out of existence by interrupting that one.”
“Agreed.”
“I don’t suppose Eriam has shown his face, has he?”
“No such luck,” the other Nym said.
“Too much to hope for, I guess.”
“Valicin is out on the front lines, fighting for Myzalik now. There was lots of chatter about her switching sides, and more than a few have correctly speculated why she did it.”
Nym shrugged. “Is anyone from Myzalik’s side looking for us? I imagine she probably told him everything she knows.”
“If they are, they’re keeping it quiet. Then again, Niramyn’s side is also keeping it quiet and we know he’s still looking for us. Maybe we got lucky and dropped down far enough on his priorities that he didn’t assign anyone new to take Valicin’s spot, especially after he lost Ferro.”
“We’ll still have to be cautious, but I think we can start trying to look into those three incidents of the two Exarchs fighting and figure out which ones suit us best.”
“Maybe, but those are probably the two worst people we could possibly spy on. There’s some real risk of getting caught, and if Niramyn is the one who does it, then we’re likely to immediately jump back to the top of his priorities.”
“I know. I wish we could just trust him not to screw us over, but there’s no other ascendant I know better than him, and he absolutely would sacrifice us to Myzalik if he thought it meant getting a clear shot at him.”
“Same reason we can’t trust him with the god killer spell,” the other Nym said.
“Yeah. How long did the meeting with Baracia end up being?”
“I don’t know. A month or so I think. She keeps track of things in a weird way. I don’t really understand it.”
“Is that the highlights then? I don’t want to be going through this and find out something important we forgot to talk about next week after we’ve already started making plans.”
“Pretty much everything important. Baracia recommended a few of the stronger neutral ascendants we could try to work with. One of them is actually part of the senior membership of the Council. He might be a good bet. Goes by Abarach. I’m pretty leery about any of the other ones, and it seemed more important to get started on figuring out the plan of attack than to take on additional work or get in favor-debt with some ascendants we’ve never met.”
“No reason we can’t do both,” Nym muttered, not that he disagreed.
The two Nyms merged back together soon after that. Nym broke down his decoy sanctum, willed himself away a few dozen times, and eventually arrived back at his original sanctum. It was, as far as he could tell, still undisturbed.
Scrying into the past in the core reality wasn’t terribly difficult, but scrying on an ascendant’s business was a bit trickier. For one thing, if he wasn’t careful, they might realize someone was looking at them, and for another, he was hardly the only person to employ various blocking spells. Nym had a sinking feeling that he was about to embark on developing a whole new skill set just to be able to get a clear look at the potential battlefields he could use for his plan.
The problem with learning things now was that there were no more libraries to raid. His only options were to figure it out on his own, which took a lot of time and effort, or to talk someone else into teaching him. Most ascendants were very willing to teach, especially because Nym was still learning some pretty basic stuff, despite his recent breakthrough to the seventh layer. That had practically been an accident anyway.
But they weren’t willing to teach for free, and a lot of them wanted open-ended favors to be specified at a later date. Nym was leery of committing himself to doing something without knowing exactly what it was, and it didn’t help that his pool of ascendants to draw knowledge from was sharply limited by the ongoing feud between two Exarchs and their followers. Even the neutral ascendants kept getting dragged into it in various ways.
Maybe that senior Councilman would be able to help Nym out, if he could figure out a way to get the information he wanted without giving away exactly why he needed it. It could be tricky, but if the Ascendant Council was truly committed to ending the fight and, more importantly, ending Myzalik, it might be worth exploring.