Ascendant 2 a progressio.., p.1
Ascendant 2: A Progression Fantasy, page 1
ASCENDANT
BOOK 2
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: 978-1-0394-4526-0
Published in 2024 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumaudio.com
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE
Nym stood in silence while his friends all stared at Ophelia. She’d said she’d triple-checked her math, but the answer she’d gotten was impossible, wasn’t it?
“How sure are you that you didn’t make a mistake?” Bildar, the leader of the troupe of earth mages he was traveling with, asked.
“Obviously something is messed up here,” Ophelia said. “But I cannot for the life of me figure out what I did wrong on these calculations. I expected it to be high just because it took four of us to hold the spell, but more in line with Analia’s. She’s already enough of an outlier as it is.”
What had started as a fun little activity, just to see what his results would be on a standard Academy test, had gotten blown way out of proportion. For a normal person, ten or eleven was a fine result, nothing unexpected. Analia had already floored the group with her score of twenty-six, more than twice anyone else’s.
Nym’s test had been … irregular. It shouldn’t have taken more than two of the other mages to administer it. The test was essentially a bubble of arcana that he pushed against with his own magic and that was sensitive enough to give the caster feedback. Then there was some math that converted that feedback to an easy-to-understand number, which might be at low as seven or as high as fifteen without anyone looking twice at it.
It had taken all four of the adult mages in their group working together to reinforce the bubble so that it was strong enough that Nym couldn’t break through. If he was being honest, he’d stopped pushing when he felt it about to break again. There was no reason to mention that part though. The others were already freaked out about his score.
“Seventy-four is too far outside of human capabilities. It’s obvious that Ermy, sorry, Nym is strong,” Bildar said, accidentally calling him by the alias Nym had been going by when he’d first met the earth mages. “But nobody is that strong. Regardless of his strength, he lacks a thorough education. However, we were hoping you’d want to come, and I may have picked up something to help you out that I couldn’t give you earlier on account of how buried it was in the wagon.”
Bildar revealed a book he’d been holding behind his back and handed it to Nym. “I had Nomick pick it up for me just to make sure it was a recent edition. There’s no telling what stuff was true back when I took the licensing exam but isn’t today. This is a primer that goes over relevant laws for different parts of the world in relation to mage craft. It should tell you everything you need to know to pass that portion of the written exam.”
“And I,” Monick added, “will be tutoring you while we travel on the various spells we had to know to pass the practical portion a few years ago when I took it.”
“He means we will be tutoring you,” Nomick said. “There’s not a lot to do on the road, so it’s easy enough to lecture and walk.”
The twins were the youngest of the adult mages in the group he and Analia had joined and had most recently passed their own licensing exam, something Nym had been quite eager to do once upon a time. With the use of magic strictly regulated in towns and cities, and the fines for violating those laws ruinously expensive, his ability to use magic had been sharply restricted. Now though, they were on the open road, and he could use magic whenever he wanted. It felt less important, but he was sure he’d change his mind in the next city when he had to start worrying about who was watching him do magic again.
“Wow, uh … thanks, guys. That’s really kind of you. You don’t have to do this,” Nym said.
“It’s fine. You need to get a license so you’re not hobbled every time we go into a town. Plus, they give you one of these,” Bildar said, displaying a leather band on his wrist. On the inside was a small disc with three concentric circles inscribed into it surrounding a solid core. A line started in the center and reached out through two of them but didn’t quite touch the third.
“This looks familiar,” Nym said. “I’ve seen it somewhere before.”
“It’s a common mage symbol. Anyone who’s proven they can pull arcana from the Edge of the Horizon is legally allowed to use it, whether they can just barely do it or they’re on the verge of pushing past that layer to the next,” Bildar told him.
“Oh! Right. The magister in my old village had this on a plaque next to his door.” He’d been a no-talent hack too, though Nym hadn’t realized it at the time.
“That’s … kind of tacky. It’s generally considered to be in poor taste to use it for anything that’s not identification purposes, but technically there’s no rule against having it made into a plaque.”
“He was that kind of person,” Nym said, remembering the abrasive old man’s accusations that Nym must be lying simply because he couldn’t figure out what was causing Nym’s memory loss.
“Anyway, like I said, once you get a license, you can commission something with the symbol on it showing you have it. It’s not unusual to see rings or amulets. I think for a little while, there was a fad where women were getting the design on earrings?” Bildar looked to Ophelia for confirmation.
“Among other piercings. Not all of them were visible upon casual inspection.”
“So that’s kind of our group goal over the next few weeks. Get you, and Analia if she needs help, trained up as much as possible. Nobody’s expecting you to be able to pass the exam with only a month or two of dedicated prep time, but if we can get you that much closer, we’ll consider it a win. Plus since neither of you are technically our apprentices, there’s really no better time than now, while we’re traveling far away from towns and cities, to practice.”
“That all sounds great,” Nym said. “When do we start?”
“Tomorrow,” Monick said. “I’m still writing down all the spells I can remember needing and trying to remember how to cast them. A few are quite worthless on their own and really only serve to easily prove that you’ve mastered some concept or another, so they’re a bit hazy in my memory.”
The conversation died down as dinner neared its completion, and everyone started settling down for the night. There was a brief flurry of postmeal activity as the earth mages worked together to raise a circular wall around their campsite, including a separate pen for the oxen. Ophelia and Nym scribed rune sequences to strengthen them, though she said it was very unlikely they’d need them. There was some debat e about putting up a roof, but as the weather was clear, they opted to skip it.
It was a good night for Nym in a lot of ways. The earth mages reminded him a lot of Ciana, whom he found himself thinking about and missing more every day. Now that he had the magic to defend himself against a group of adults, he was a lot less anxious about the idea of going back to Palmara. He still had no plans to go into the town itself, but the thought of being near it no longer scared him.
Analia opened up her trunk while they were winding down and pulled a foldout screen made of some thin paper from it. She set it up and invited Ophelia to join her, and the two of them bid the rest of the group good night before disappearing behind it.
The screen started glowing in Nym’s sight. Both silhouettes disappeared, and all sound from behind it cut off. Once Nym knew to look, he saw a tiny line of runes inscribed around the framework, which he was interested in reading but decided it would be in bad taste to do so after it had been activated. He made a mental note to ask Analia for a look in the morning.
One by one, other auras popped up around various items. Bildar had a sleeping bag that was enchanted in some way, and the twins each had pillows and blankets. Nym suspected there were probably other mundane items enchanted to be more effective hidden behind Analia’s privacy screen but couldn’t tell with it active.
Only he had nothing of the sort, but that was fine by Nym. He’d spent plenty of time sleeping outside with nothing over his head. Compared to the recent week of traveling to reach Thrakus, it was downright pleasant with both the fire and the relatively warm night air. Nym curled up in his cloak, the hood bunched up to act as his pillow, and went to sleep.
The next few days were a blur as Nym and Analia passed the little book of mage laws back and forth, discussing it and quizzing each other on the more esoteric rules of some regions. Some of them made no sense at all, but when Nym asked about the reasoning, nobody could give him a good answer. The important part was knowing the laws though, not why they were that way, so Nym studied diligently.
Practical training was a different matter. Monick scribbled down schematics for spell constructs to do things like create different colored lights or make phantom sounds that mimicked everything from bird cries to creaking timber to metal clanging against metal. There were spells to clean things, spells to mend small tears, spells to foretell cards being drawn, spells to hide the smell of things.
The problem was that while Monick knew the spells and could demonstrate them easily, his scribblings were not very accurate, and if Nym had to base his own casting on the scrawled diagrams of how the constructs were supposed to look, they would fail. This usually meant he had to cast the spell a dozen times the wrong way before he could convince Monick to demonstrate so he could “see what the outcome was supposed to look like” but in actuality to study a real construct.
The fact that he could see arcana when no one else seemed to be able to remained his greatest asset and his biggest secret. He’d told no one, ever, not even his closest friends. He’d actually gone to great lengths to keep that ability hidden, on the basis that if no one knew, no one would think to guard themselves from it. He’d picked up a great many tricks simply by observing other people’s magics with them none the wiser.
It was worse in some ways for Analia. She already knew many of the spells Monick was trying to show them, but the ones she didn’t, she struggled with. Nym took to noting down which spells she was having the most problems with and, after he’d reverse engineered them from Monick’s demonstrations, made his own schematics. He was by no means a professional, but his drawings were far, far more accurate. She had little trouble casting the spell using his notes, which were structured similarly to the spells that had been stored in her family’s library.
Oddly, many of the spells weren’t even second circle. Nym found himself drawing from the first layer, Phase Shift, more during those few days of training than he ever had during his normal activities. There was a lot of depth there that he’d missed out on when he was scrambling to increase his strength. The spells weren’t necessarily powerful, but being able to mend tears with magic would have saved him a lot of headaches.
He also found that other than it being marginally easier to stop his conduit in the first layer, the spells weren’t necessarily any less complex. When he mentioned it, Monick said, “Yeah, that’s probably because you’re using the same mental construct for your conduit for both. A first-circle spell just needs a needle that can pierce reality to bring in arcana. You can do it basically instantly. Second-circle spells need a pipe that can hold against the pressure of pushing through the membrane between two levels of reality.”
“So what about third-circle spells then? It can’t just be bigger and stronger, or there’d be a lot more third-circle mages,” Nym said.
“Ah, well … that’s complicated. You know how the conduit goes so far into the second layer and then it just kind of hits a wall?”
“Yes.”
“Right, well, that’s not really a wall. Here, let me show you.”
Monick cast a quick spell, and a patch of the road turned to sand. He drew a circle in it, then two more circles around it. “Here in the center is us, reality as we know it. To reach the first layer, we just have to poke through this membrane surrounding our reality. Easy enough. To reach the second layer, it’s the same thing, except our reach has to be a little bit longer.”
Then he scattered a handful of rocks inside the ring that represented the second layer. “These things are hard points in the arcana. We can’t just power through them. We have to go around them. But since we can’t see into the arcana, we’re going in blind. So now the conduit doesn’t just need to be strong, it needs to be flexible. We need to avoid obstacles.”
Monick squatted down and drew a line out from the center, bisecting the first circle in a straight shot and then weaving back and forth through all the rocks he’d dumped in the sand. “And once we get to the end, then we can pierce this membrane and get to the third layer, what we call the Astral Sea. That arcana is far enough removed from reality to do all sorts of crazy stuff. But it’s not easy to reach.”
“Huh … So all I need to change to reach the third layer is make the conduit flexible enough to go around the rocks?”
“Easier said than done, my friend. There are a few points where people fail. The first is simply making a flexible conduit. It’s not as easy as you might think. Most mages do eventually figure that part out, but then they just can’t hold the conduit long enough to make it all the way through the second layer. And for the ones that do that, the hard fail at the end comes when they’ve got a conduit that wriggles like a streetwalker doing a lap around the docks, but it’s not strong enough to pierce the membrane.”
