Abarach was noticeably annoyed to see Nym again so soon, but he maintained a polite tone. “I really am quite busy,” he said. “Surely there must be someone with less on their plate you can turn to for help?

“Well, I thought so, but you see, Pyoka sent me out to do something for her, and while I was working, one of Myzalik’s men found me. So now I’m concerned about whether or not I can trust Pyoka to deal fairly with me. And since you recommended her to me, and I’ve already been burned by a Council recommended ascendant once, I thought you’d be the best person to talk to about it.”

“And what makes you so sure it’s not just a coincidence?” Abarach said, still stiff.

“I take great pains to obscure my activities as best I can. You may notice that even now, I’m maintaining various effects to make it difficult to find or track me.”

The old ascendant took a moment to study Nym, then shook his head. “Your attempts are admirable, such as they are, but such workings can be countered. You are hardly as invisible as you seem to think.”

“Duly noted,” Nym said. “So you will vouch for Pyoka?”

“Absolutely,” Abarach told him immediately. “You would be hard-pressed to find any ascendant who cares less about our politics and drama.”

Nym wondered exactly what she did care about then, and whether or not it was something that other ascendants could use to buy information from her. Just because she wasn’t likely to go out and fight another ascendant didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell him out to someone else who would.

“It’s still suspicious that someone found me,” Nym said, more to himself than to Abarach.

“Is it? It is well known that new ascendants have a tendency to visit the same places over and over again during the time periods they would have lived as mortals. Eventually, they use all that time up and become much less predictable since they don’t tend to develop new bonds in other time periods, but until that happens, an excellent way to find an ascendant who is taking steps to ensure that they are well hidden is to watch the timeline for them physically appearing in a place you know they like to go to.”

“Oh, so you’re saying because I’ve visited that place repeatedly, he knew to look for me there,” Nym said. “But why wait so long?”

“Perhaps this other ascendant had already used his time in the core reality during your other visits,” Abarach said.

That made sense to Nym. He knew that Abdun had been beaten soundly and lost a big chunk of time for the current conflict. Perhaps Nym had just gotten lucky and all of his previous visits to Lab Six had taken place inside that block of time. That did mean that in the future, he would have to be wary of ever visiting the lab again, now that Abdun knew he could find Nym there.

“That is an excellent point,” Nym said. “Thank you for taking some time to help reassure me.”

“You are quite welcome,” Abarach said, but in a way that made Nym feel very much like he was not welcome at all. “Now, if that’s all, I really do have many other matters requiring my attention.”

Considering that splitting off a copy was a spell that even a mortal mage could cast, and that new ascendants could make ten or twelve copies that acted simultaneously, Nym didn’t feel too guilty about wasting a few minutes of the councilman’s time. He’d raised a few good points Nym hadn’t considered, and perhaps shaken his confidence in his ability to hide.

Then again, if Abarach was right, the only reason Abdun had found him was because he was getting predictable. Baracia had found him in the same place, too. The real lesson was to stay far away from Research Lab Six before it got him in trouble. He’d gotten lucky that Baracia wasn’t aligned with either of the two warring factions, and then lucky again that the hostile ascendant who had found him was somehow still stuck as an Initiate.

Next time, it might be Myzalik himself tearing him out of the lab. Nym didn’t see any reason for it, since he was no longer Niramyn, but that hadn’t stopped Abdun. The safe move was to just stay away, and to send a copy of himself to everything he could reasonably send a copy too. They weren’t as good as going himself in a lot of ways, mainly that for the more complicated spells, they were almost completely incapable of performing them. Anything that started requiring he run pieces in parallel processes in order to cast a single coherent spell was unlikely to be replicated by a Nym copy.

For basic fact-finding and exploration though, copies were fine. More importantly, they were disposable. As long as they made it back to him, he’d get all the knowledge as if he’d done it himself. He could even see through them, though after Ferro had shown up at his sanctuary, he was hesitant to use a scry link anymore. It was too easy to trace back to him.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

That was precisely why he went through the laborious process of teleporting all over the place, dozens of times, before he returned to where the original Nym was waiting for him. The two merged back together, Nym took a few minutes to process the conversation and his copy’s thoughts on it, and then, finding that he agreed with himself, spun off a new copy to go talk to Pyoka.

He wasn’t looking forward to absorbing those memories back in. The instruction would no doubt be useful, but Pyoka herself continued to give him headaches every time he saw her. While he waited for that Nym to come back, he occupied himself by creating an illusion of Myzalik’s core reality palace. There were a lot of gaps in the layout, places he hadn’t been able to scry into.

In fact, most of the layout was extrapolation from the few places he had been able to look at. More than that, the scrying wasn’t based in the same time that he planned on entering. Changes happened by the minute, and it was almost certain there had been some fundamental shifts in the decades between Nym’s various scrying probes. His options were limited, and he was working with as light a touch as he could, only at times when he could confirm Myzalik wasn’t actually present in his palace.

And he was still concerned that, for all the delicacy he was putting into the operation, that the Exarch had seen him and knew about his intentions. Every single time one of his copies worked a spell designed to poke at Myzalik’s palace, they wondered if this was the time the Exarch would come storming out and obliterate them. If they did, Nym would never even know what they’d done to tip him off. If that happened, he might never find another window where his target was vulnerable.

The back up plan at that point was to join forces with Niramyn. It would certainly be easier, but Nym suspected the first thing his progenitor would demand of him was the spellform for the god killer spell. He could easily see Niramyn deciding to test it out on Nym to dispose of him, then using it on Myzalik himself.

It wasn’t an ideal solution, as far as Nym was concerned. Sure, it was possible Niramyn would play it straight with him, but he didn’t expect it. Taking that risk would be beyond foolish. Besides, his ultimate goal was to get rid of both Exarchs, though failing that, Myzalik was his priority target. As long as nobody figured out it was him who had done them in, he might finally be able to get a little peace.

The pessimistic voice in the back of his head laughed at him for thinking that. Even if he pulled it off, there would always be another problem. Every time he’d tried to just have a life, something had come up. The undead invasion from the tear in the Veil had just been the first disaster. The ice worm queen, the Collective kidnapping him, the chance meeting with Rizin, Ferro finding him, his life was just him lurching from one problem to the next.

Nym was tired of that. Even with all the subjective years he’d lived after ascending, he still felt mentally and emotionally exhausted. The long periods of enforced isolation hadn’t helped either. He really just needed it all to be over with so he could finally unwind and relax.

A week or so after he’d sent a copy to Pyoka, that copy returned. He met it at the dummy safehouse he’d constructed, absorbed its memories, and then returned to his real, somewhat more secure sanctuary. The Nym copy had a ton of new insights into warding, both setting and breaking them on a level that ascendants were accustomed to working at.

Whether it would be enough was another matter, but that was all he was going to get from Pyoka unless he wanted to run more errands, and she didn’t have anything else available at the moment. So Nym settled in, started scrying through the future of the core reality, and ever so slowly teased his way through the defenses embedded in Myzalik’s home. He spied on the guests, the servants, and the minions. He mapped the layout and its changes over hundreds of years.

Nym plotted, and he planned, all with the singular goal of finding a way through the twisted labyrinth of defenses so that he could take one single shot at the Exarch, just one surprise attack that Myzalik wouldn’t see coming.

He thought he could do it, if he was bold and smart and lucky. Time would tell if he was correct.

* * *

Myzalik was annoyed, more than anything. He’d kept about half of what he’d stolen from Niramyn during the two years or so when the other Exarch had been rendered powerless, but none of his people had actually been able to find his rival when he was trapped in a mortal body. If only they had, his victory would have been complete.

Now Niramyn was back, and almost as strong as the day Myzalik had tried to kill him. What’s more, he’d even inadvertently created some sort of sapient duplicate as a side effect of the temporal breaking spell. That had been completely unforeseen, despite all of Myzalik’s testing.

So there was a new ascendant running around now, but thankfully Niramyn had treated him like he did everyone else, and his little doppelganger had enough of Niramyn’s personality that he hadn’t taken it graciously. The fact that an Exarch had somehow lost track of what had been at the time a mortal archmage, and failed to find him before he ascended, and now still didn’t know where this ‘Nym’ was, well, Myzalik would have laughed if he wasn’t so annoyed about Niramyn managing to claw his way back into power.

More than that, it seemed like everybody was trying to spy on him now. Fifty times a day, his wards pinged another attempt and activated his misdirection enchantments. Sometimes it was better to provide false information than to flat out deny the intrusion. It was helpful to catch someone trying to act on their divinations after he’d twisted them to give him an advantage. The problem with that was if they managed to slip through, even once, it would tip them off that their information wasn’t trustworthy.

But he wasn’t an Exarch for nothing. In fact, he was the most powerful Exarch of them all, despite what Niramyn liked to think. His flying fortress island was impenetrable to mortals and immortals alike, and he dared any of them to be foolish enough to try assaulting him. He’d happily scatter their arcana across the infinite realities, an abject lesson to all who thought to test him.