Ascendant a progression.., p.1
Ascendant: A Progression Fantasy, page 1
ASCENDANT
BOOK 1
EmergencyComplaints
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by David Sherman
Cover design by Iromonik
ISBN: 978-1-0394-4528-4
Published in 2024 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumaudio.com
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Exarch Niramyn reclined on a cushion of air, basking in the bright light of the rising sun that bathed his home isle of Vislarg. Clouds drifted through the sky below the floating island, which gave his alabaster palace a brilliant glow from the unobstructed sunlight. The glow was a deliberate choice, one made to set his palace sparkling like a beacon when it absorbed the power of light and charged the hundreds of arcana batteries embedded in the walls. They would have been more efficient without the glow, but he wanted everyone to know that they were approaching the palace of an exarch.
He enjoyed the warmth of the sun on his skin, though of course the temperature was regulated by his magic. It would be exactly as warm or cold as he desired, all with barely an effort from him. He’d long ago infused the essence of his will into his home, and it was no more work than to think it for it to become warm or cold, bright or dark. Today, he wanted warmth and light.
A decanter hovered in the air next to him, full of a sparkling blue liquid. Niramyn wasn’t sure what it was exactly, other than it was tribute from a lesser-ranked ascendant who owed fealty to him, and that it tasted divine. Arcana had been infused into the drink itself, an uncommon practice due to the layer of complexity it added to actually consuming the beverage. It was all too easy to poison oneself with arcana, but Niramyn wasn’t an exarch for nothing, and the task was childishly easy for him.
The decanter was about halfway empty when Niramyn felt the stirring of arcana he’d been waiting for. A visage appeared in the air in front of him, hazy and mirage-like. His fellow exarch and rival, Myzalik, stood before him in projection, fresh from his latest defeat. This was the only room in the palace that would allow projections without being keyed to his warding, and so the only place someone like Myzalik could project into. Considering Niramyn’s latest victory had taken place last night, the other exarch has no doubt been checking regularly for his chance to confront his rival. Niramyn smirked at the visage and opened his mouth to gloat, only to pause and cock his head to one side.
He’d been sparring with the other immortal for over a thousand years. They’d met on every battlefield imaginable, from literal duels to political maneuverings to economic clashes. Niramyn had consistently come out the victor, and he knew his opponent’s reactions well. Right now, Myzalik wasn’t wearing the expression he should have had for someone who’d just been beaten. Suddenly, the all-too-easy victory seemed suspiciously like a trap.
Perhaps it was the arcana-infused wine. Maybe Niramyn had just grown careless, secure in his supremacy. Whatever the cause, he had only a split second to register the sneer on his fellow exarch’s face as a mask of contempt, not the cold anger he’d come to know when Niramyn had secured yet another victory. Then Myzalik’s magic washed over him.
At first, he was confused. The rival exarch appeared to have cast the immortality spell that kept all ascendants’ mortal avatars young and hale, which was an utterly ridiculous course of action. There was a twist in the spell though, and Niramyn sobered up instantly as he realized it. Somehow, Myzalik had modified its spellform, defied all known rules of magic, and spun it around to anchor on Niramyn instead of himself.
The spell took hold, and Niramyn felt the familiar twinge in his muscles as it refreshed his vitality and started to reverse his aging. Normally, that would have been fine, except that without any control over the source of the magic, he couldn’t stop it! His reversion was wild and uncontrolled, the many, many precise adaptions he’d made to his physiology over millennia coming unraveled. He appeared as a man in his early thirties, then late twenties. Then the unthinkable: he was pushed past the boundaries of immortality and back into the reaches of mere humans.
Whatever Myzalik had done, there was no time to break it, so Niramyn did the only thing he could think of. He reached into the arcana, already sitting in his soul well from the wine. It was a calculated maneuver. Even with an exarch’s knowledge, it could take a full second that he didn’t have to penetrate the Bulwark and pull greater arcana from the Echoing Vastness. His options were limited by his response time and the weak arcana of the Astral Sea, mere third-layer power. Rather than try something more complicated, he launched himself into flight. The wind whipped around him and shredded his clothes as he burst out into open air.
In the blink of an eye, he crossed miles of open sky. Still the immortality magic clung to him, and his shredded clothes would have hung loosely off his now-teenage frame if they’d still been whole. Another second passed, and Niramyn was thirty miles away from his home. The magic started to loosen with distance, and the exarch grinned in wild triumph. A spell localized to affect only the caster couldn’t support a long-range connection, despite the impossible modifications.
By the fifth second of Myzalik’s attack, his would-be victim had reached full speed. He was a few hundred miles from home over open water and wearing the body of a preteen boy. His physical body couldn’t support what mere moments before had been a trivial amount of arcana anymore. It buckled under the strain, and Niramyn desperately diverted what resources he could to protecting himself as he hurtled into the ocean.
An explosion of water shot a hundred feet straight up, and Niramyn plunged deep under the surface. The shock of the cold penetrated the kinetic barrier he’d put up, causing him to gasp and swallow a mouthful of seawater. Hacking and coughing, Niramyn breached the surface and skimmed forward. He felt the tether binding him to the reverse-aging magic finally snap at that moment. It didn’t matter. He was too weak to fight back, and Myzalik’s hunters would be coming for him.
His speed greatly reduced, it took another thirty seconds for him to reach the shore. In that time, he analyzed what he needed to do to hide himself away and spent what little arcana he’d held on to to act on that fact. Then, exhausted beyond words, he collapsed onto the sandy beach. His once-splendid clothes, woven from solid strands of arcana, were little more than rags where they hadn’t been ripped away from his body completely. It was only thanks to their superior quality that his skin was still more or less intact.
From the moment the visage appeared to Niramyn’s crash landing into the sand, the entire battle had taken forty-two seconds. In less than a minute, countless millennia of uncompromising superiority had been undone. For the hundreds of victories he’d won over his rival, it had only taken one loss to utterly undo him. At least there was the small consolation that Myzalik had needed to craft an impossible magic to claim victory.
In those forty-two seconds, Niramyn had cast twenty-six spells. Despite everything, he was still an exarch, the uncrowned king of magical knowledge, techniq ue, and raw power. He’d reached into the twelfth layer and claimed its reality-warping powers as his own. Myzalik had won an overwhelming victory today, but Niramyn had already set into motion everything he’d needed to complete his rise back to power.
His mind unraveled, and he fell unconscious. Still the magic worked on him. It broke down who he was and stored it away, somewhere safe from both the prying eyes and searching hunters and from himself until he’d regained enough of his power to reclaim it. In that way, Niramyn gave up who he was to deny his pursuers the chance to find him, a necessary sacrifice, but one he vowed to repay his rival back for a hundredfold.
The magic finished its grim business, and the exarch, now trapped in the body of a child, battered and weary, fell to true sleep. There was an odd sort of paradoxical peace to his slumber. Without his memories, his personality, his sense of his true self, many of his worries and stresses fell away. In that way, Niramyn passed his first night as a child of a new world.
Myzalik’s rage knew no bounds when he was in his own palace. “This close!” he screamed, unleashing a bolt of star-spawned lightning to rake the surface of the scrying pool. Jagged-sharp plasma burst across the liquid obsidian and hurled it into the air, dispelling the image and hardening into a storm of razor-edged needles that peppered the room. None struck the exarch, of course. It was barely even the work of a thought to deflect their trajectories away from him.
“I had him! Another two seconds and he would have been reduced to a child too young to properly hold the smallest sliver of arcana! Even as quickly as he reacted, he shouldn’t have been able to do half of what he did to escape! There was no time for him to pull in arcana. Explain to me how this happened,” he demanded of his servant, who had not been quite so quick to defend himself and had been pierced by several of the shards.
The ascendant did his best not to cringe beneath the exarch’s glare. He telekinetically plucked the obsidian back out and returned it to the pool while sealing the wounds. It would not do to let a drop of blood reach the carpets and stain them, never mind that they were made of astral silk and a simple current of arcana would return them to pristine condition.
“We believe this is the cause of the miscalculation,” the servant said, plucking an image from the stream of time and forming it into an illusion in the middle of the room. It showed Exarch Niramyn lounging in the air, drinking from a decanter that radiated magic. “It appears to be some sort of arcana-infused beverage. Our theory is that he burned what he already had in his body to boost his resources and outdistance the spell’s range before it could complete the transformation.”
Of course that self-indulgent prick was drinking wine laced with pure, unfiltered, deadly arcana. Niramyn’s arrogance knew no bounds. “Are you saying,” Myzalik began slowly as he struggled to master a sudden tick in his left eye, “that the plans I have spent close to a century laying, the research and fortunes spent on modifying the immortality spell to weaponize it, all of it was beaten because on the day we chose to strike, he wanted to show off that he could get drunk while giving himself and surviving arcana poisoning?”
“I… Exarch Niramyn was still affected by the spell. He will be weaker than a human mage right now. It’s only a matter of time until we capture him, exarch.”
Myzalik turned to fully face the servant. “You had better hope so, for all your sakes. I want him back here under my control, or I want his body. I’ll drag his soul back to this reality myself if he’s already dead. We will not let all the work that went into this be wasted.”
He dismissed the servant and silently fumed. Unlike his servants, he wasn’t so confident in his rival’s defeat. Myzalik needed to take steps to ensure this was a total victory for him and not merely a setback for Niramyn. This couldn’t be a repeat of the incident at the Castle of Storms.
With a snarl, he reached through Transcendence and into the Crushing Void to wrest arcana from it. He filled his soul well and cast a spell to split his conscious into fourteen separate beings. They teleported away to attend to a variety of tasks, several moving to present the appearance of a normal day, but the majority taking personal command of the units of hunters being sent out to scour the surface of the world below the clouds.
Five minutes had passed from Myzalik’s attack, a bare three hundred seconds. And yet, Niramyn had slipped away completely and utterly. None of the Myzaliks could find a trace of him, nor could any of the ascendants they led.
He’d done the impossible in creating a spell to defeat Niramyn, and somehow the infuriating man had managed to out-impossible him in mere seconds by escaping. After weeks and weeks of searching, he was forced to concede the hunt. His rival had escaped, and there was nothing Myalik could do except consolidate his position and prepare for the inevitable counterstrike.
CHAPTER 1
His whole body ached, a dull but insistent pain. His eyes were crusted shut, and it was almost too much of an effort to pry them open. Even then, the world was a blur of blue-and-white sky. That was strange, but he couldn’t say why, like looking at something familiar from an unusual angle. His mind struggled to catch up, but it took several more seconds for him to register what had woken him.
“Wake up!” a woman’s voice yelled. “You’ll get dragged into the cove with the tide!”
Her voice pierced the fog over his mind, and he struggled to sit up. For something so simple, it felt like a monumental task, and he couldn’t manage anything better than rolling over and climbing to his hands and knees. Then a wave struck him and bowled him over.
He tried to crawl farther up the beach, but his limbs were too weak to drag him. The next wave flattened him again and pulled him away from safety. He kept trying, but it was a losing battle. By the time the woman reached him, the water was up to his chest and he’d been dunked underwater several times. She grabbed his arm and started dragging him back up the beach.
He didn’t remember much after that. The woman helped him to his feet and held him upright. Without her, he would have toppled over, unable to support his own weight. With her assistance, they trudged up the beach and navigated a narrow trail up the bluffs. He blacked out somewhere near the top, and after that, he had only hazy memories of scrub bushes and dusty fields.
