Present Nym had ample evidence to prove his theory that the games the ascendants played were motivated by equal parts boredom and spite. There was no reason that Exarch Niramyn needed a silk worm colony. He could have conjured up all the silk he ever wanted with ease. He certainly hadn’t established the colony to assist a middling merchant house.
Nym was pretty sure the only reason Niramyn cared was that Myzalik was backing a rival merchant house, and either Exarch would happily put the screws to the other if the opportunity presented itself. The silk worms provided product, which turned into capital, and the merchant house he was helping overpowered its rival.
Maybe that would have some far-flung effect in the future that Niramyn was angling for, but Nym was inclined to believe the Exarch didn’t care. He’d checked Myzalik’s play just because he could, because stopping his rival from achieving any of his goals was reason enough. Nym could scarcely believe the pettiness he saw in two immortal god-like beings.
It gave him a measure of hope though. They weren’t infallible. They weren’t above base emotions. They could be tricked, or surprised, or outwitted. They were, for all their power, still human at their cores. Thousands of years of experience had not altered that.
That did not mean it was going to be easy, but Nym didn’t feel like his goals were impossible to achieve. He hid away, watching the two Exarchs maneuver around each other from their palaces, sending emissaries out into the world, manipulating events, feeding misinformation to the other side, and cheating outrageously when they thought they could get away with it.
Thankfully, the bulk of their effort was put into thwarting each other, so much so that neither bothered to look at anyone else. Other ascendants did whatever things they did, and knew to stay away from time slots that the Exarchs fought in. Nym kept himself hidden and watched it all.
Now that he knew how the spell itself worked, and knowing what he did about what had happened in that fateful clash, Nym could make a few guesses about what was going to happen. Myzalik needed an assistant to help him. He was going to be so focused on the spell itself that some other ascendant was handling literally everything else. If Nym could use that as an opening, he could get close.
He could prepare his own spell ahead of time and ambush the Exarch with it when he was distracted. It wouldn’t allow him to hit Niramyn, but then, it would also prevent Niramyn from seeing what had happened. Thank God that Exarch Niramyn was the one ascendant who never left the core reality. That would make it easier to predict things, since Nym was going to need to do some guesswork. The timeline was thick with obscuring magic around the event. Myzalik had taken no chances with anyone reverse engineering his spell once he’d unveiled it.
So, Nym needed to backtrack and figure out who Myzalik’s assistant was, then find a way to get rid of him or otherwise exploit him to gain access to the Exarch during his moment of vulnerability. Otherwise he didn’t see a way this was going to work.
He had enough information for now, and didn’t want to burn too much of his time here. Nym pushed himself out of reality prime and returned to the original to give his report.
* * *
He had two possibilities, neither of them great. If he did it right, he’d have a significantly wider window in the present time than the future, and the past was just out of the question. The only way that one worked is if he decided he was fine with Niramyn capturing him and forcefully taking the god killer spell.
Since Nym wasn’t fine with that, he had two possibilities left: present or future. Present worked better for killing Myzalik, but future gave him the opportunity to take out both Exarchs. It would just be far more difficult. At least if he used the future conflict as his staging point for the attack, Nym himself had better odds of not being shunted into an alternate timeline when the prime started fixing itself.
He’d focus on the future, he decided. In order to do that, he was going to need to break through some extremely potent defenses, which meant he needed to figure out a lot of stuff before he was ready to make his attempt. Nym did his best to hold back a groan; he was sick of the hermit life already.
Perhaps Abarach could introduce him to a trustworthy ascendant who wouldn’t try to sell him out. Nym could disguise his interest as a fascination with building stronger and better defenses instead of breaking into them, which wouldn’t even be a stretch. He was interested in that, after all. He was just also interested in all the ways they could fail or be broken.
He already had a thorough grounding in the field as far as mortal magic went, but ascendant magic teetered back and forth between being the exact same, only more so, and being so wildly different as to being unrecognizable. That wasn’t even looking at all the spells that were only possible using outer layer arcana, things like jumping around in the timeline or resurrecting the dead, or creating something from nothing. Reality didn’t like that last one though, and it was ironically harder to make conjured up items continue to exist than to time travel or bring back someone who’d died, at least as long as he still had the body.
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Nym conjured up a message for Abarach, sent his copy out with it, and then settled in to wait. He busied himself by constructing wards using seventh layer arcana and testing them to see how they compared to the sixth layer versions he was more familiar with. He found that most of his designs didn’t function very well, or at all, due to the amount of arcana bleed over from the physical runes being so close together.
It was possible he could streamline that process and find a way to minimize it, but it was also possible that he’d just need more physical space to accomplish the same thing. Part of Nym hoped that wasn’t the case, since it would make it harder to construct wards with stronger arcana while simultaneously making them easier to break.
The other part of Nym hoped for the exact opposite, since his real goal was to get through any defenses Myzalik had set up. If wards became more and more impractical at higher layers of arcana, that might mean the defenses were within his range of skills already. Unfortunately, he hadn’t had much opportunity to study how other ascendants did their set ups while he was a guest in their homes.
Another open avenue of experimentation was trying to figure out what he needed to do to reach the eighth layer, but having just barely cracked the membrane to the seventh, Nym thought that might not be the best use of his time. If he had to go that route, it meant he was in for a long, long fight. The feud would probably be over long before he got close to that goal, which might actually be a good thing depending on who won.
He wasn’t under any illusions that it was likely anyone besides Myzalik would win. Even without the ability to kill his opponents, something the other team sorely lacked, he was an Exarch with a powerful following. If and when Myzalik won, Nym would have no choice but to sever any and all connection to ascendant society.
At that point, he thought his best bet would be to cycle back to his original plan after building out more anchors if none of the three conflict points he had access to now would work. Hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary, but he’d have to see if his ward-breaking skills could compete with an Exarch.
While he was experimenting, his copy returned with the answer. “I guess you could consider this good news,” he said. “We already know the ascendant he’s recommending we speak to.”
“Who is it?”
“Pyoka.”
Nym blinked. “The one with the weird shapes for a home. I suppose that makes sense. I hope those aren’t an example of high-level ascendant wards though.”
“Either way, she turned us away last time. What do we have to offer her now that we didn’t then?”
“She was willing to take a favor later to assist us,” Nym said. “We just rejected it at the time because we didn’t want to get dragged into things.”
“That’s still true,” his copy argued.
“If we’re really lucky, she’ll have something she needs done now. Otherwise we won’t have much of a choice. I’m less concerned about owing her a favor if she can show us what we need to know to end the conflict.”
“So we’ll see her?”
“Well, you will. I’m staying here.”
The copy snorted. “Why am I not surprised? You’re kind of risk-averse, you know? How are you expecting to pull this off if you won’t take risks?”
“There’s a difference between a necessary risk and a pointless one,” Nym said.
“That’s true. Still, we shouldn’t let opportunities pass us by because we’re afraid to act on them.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m sending you to go learn about ascendant-style warding.”
“Right. Anything else before I go then?”
“Nothing I can think of. Actually, let’s merge here so you can pick up everything I’ve experimented on while you were gone. I’ll spin out a new copy.”
* * *
Pyoka’s physical form was every bit as eye-searing as he remembered, or rather, her new physical form was just as hard to look at as her old one. It was some sort of upside-down pyramid with glowing lines going through it. Pieces of the pyramid kept breaking off the bottom side, rotating around to the top, and reassembling themselves.
“I admit, I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon,” she said. Her voice was weirdly modulated, sounding like it came from far away, and with no discernable source in her anatomy. Nym tried not to focus on it too much; he didn’t need the distractions right now.
“I’m a little bit surprised myself.”
“Nothing has changed, I’m afraid,” she told him.
“On your end. I am after more specific and important knowledge now, something I’m willing to owe a favor or two to gain.”
“Oh? Interesting. What are you looking to find out?”
“I have been told that you are the ascendant to talk to if I’m interested in wards and defensive rune sequences.”
“Ah, true. That is my specialty. I could provide you with access to my knowledge of Initiate spell forms and… hmm. You managed to break through already? That was fast.”
“Er, yeah, I guess so?” He wasn’t about to admit how much of an accident it had been.
“Very well, if you are capable of stealing arcana from the Crushing Void, perhaps I do have a few tasks you could undertake on my behalf.”
That was theoretically better than a favor to be named later, though Nym wasn’t entirely sure he liked the idea. For one thing, it would take precious time that he might need later, and for another, if it wasn’t a task he was able or willing to do, that could halt the whole agreement right there.
“What are you looking to have done?”
“You are aware of our research labs, yes? Do you have access to any of them yet?”
“Lab Six,” he said. “Why?”
“Perfect. Somebody needs to go charge the batteries in that one at around 1492 from the fourth cataclysm.”
Nym did some mental calculations in his head. That would be about seven years after he’d ascended, six years or so after he and Rizin had drained the batteries. And they said they’d just leave it for the next guy to clean up.
“I think I can help with that.”
“Good. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two of your time.”
“Yeah. I’m familiar with the process.”