Chapter 12: Chapter 11

The forest was cold, and surprisingly wet. The only climate Nym knew was that of the coastal village, which wasn’t even that far away. There had been a lot of sand and bare ground and few trees over there though, and apparently that made a difference.

It wasn’t so bad during the day, but as night fell, the temperature plummeted and became keenly aware of the holes in his pants and the lack of sleeves on his shirt. His first instinct was to turn to magic to fix the problem, but he’d spend most of his time working on elemental air manipulation with a splash of water. Earth was barely a footnote and he’d never done anything with fire.

Not keen on the idea of accidentally cooking himself from the inside out, he decided to forego any experimentation with magical heating for now. Instead, he found a semi-sheltered spot where a trio of trees had grown close together and were tangled overhead, scooped himself out a circle of pine needles and dirt to make a fire pit, and started breaking branches to throw in it.

That was when he learned the difference between green wood fresh off the tree and drift wood that had been left out to dry for weeks. After trying and failing to ignite the green wood for an hour, he gave up and scavenged some fallen branches instead. Then, with a deep breath, he forged a new conduit to the second layer and tried to condense heat into a single point to spark the wood.

“Air was so much easier than this,” he grumbled as he failed to ignite the wood again. He was doing something wrong, but he had no clue what it was.

The memory he’d recovered and shown him how to reach into the second layer, what his maybe-mother had called the Edge of the Horizon, and funnel arcana into his soul well. Creating a basic elemental effect involved altering the arcana from pure potential reality into a physical state to form a connection with earth, air, or water. Creating fire was a bit different, and apparently that meant he didn’t have a clue what he was doing.

Forget about cooking himself from the inside out, he was liable to freeze to death if he couldn’t manage to even magic up a single spark. He probably wouldn’t freeze tonight, but it was only going to get colder as summer turned to fall, and even now it was too cold to not have a fire.

It was amazing how a bare thirty or so miles of travel and a canopy of branches overhead had drastically reduced the temperature. The sea wasn’t even that warm, so why was it so much warmer by the coast? Nym tried to channel some of that warm breeze to use as inspiration for his own fire, but just wanting it wasn’t enough to make the magic work.

It was fully dark before he finally figured out the trick of it. He’d been trying to light the branches directly, and it wasn’t until he started experimenting with other material that he got the concept of tinder. As soon as that clicked, he felt incredibly stupid. He’d watched Ciana start a dozen fires to cook, and he’d never really stopped to think about the process.

Things got a bit easier after that, though the green wood he’d piled into the hole never really caught. It blackened a bit and looked singed, but the next morning, it was still there and he woke up shivering since the fire had gone out in the middle of the night.

“I am not very good at this,” he said, looking at the blackened sticks in his make-shift fire pit.

With a heavy sigh and a shake of his head, he dumped all the dirt he’d scooped out last night back into the hole, burying the ash and some of the smaller sticks. Then, because he had no idea where he was, he flew straight up over the tree tops.

One advantage of flying was that it became a lot harder to get lost. If he flew up high enough, he could still see Palmara off in the distance. It wasn’t much more than a collection of brown dots on the lighter brown canvas that was the coast, but it was there. He could head straight to it if he wanted.

More importantly, he could see the road going northeast, skirting the forest and heading to the town of Zoskan. That was Nym’s destination. A single night in the woods had convinced him he was meant for civilization, even if he didn’t know how he was going to survive when he got there. He had magic; he’d think of something. Lathia had said that third circle mages were rich. He was only one step away from that.

Zoskan was not in sight, unlike Palmara. Nym figured if he followed the road, he’d find it eventually, but he didn’t want to risk running into anyone who would try to capture him there, so he decided to fly over the forest and walk through it when he had to rest.

“I hate the forest,” he said to no one half-way through his third walking segment. He’d gotten tangled up in a bush he’d been trying to squeeze past. There were thorn scratches on his arms and he was bleeding in three different spots from where they’d dug deeper. “You are lucky I can’t just turn you to ash, you stupid bush. Because I would. Oh yes, I would.”

Day turned into night, and this time Nym was smart enough to gather dead wood. He broke some down into tinder and ignited it, then sat down and felt sorry for himself. He was hungry, and there had been very little in the way of foraging available to him. He’d found one berry bush that he’d gorged himself on and then promptly felt sick. Water at least was plentiful.

The next day wasn’t any better, and it seemed like the deeper into the woods he got, the colder it got. Everything was older, wilder, scarier. The darkness was deeper, the trails more overgrown when they existed at all. He stopped seeing small game or birds halfway through the day. Everything was silent, unnervingly so.

Nym stopped walking completely. He flew over the tree tops when he could and rested high up in the branches. His original plan of cutting straight through the woods no longer sounded like a good idea and he resolved to turn north and find the road again. Even if it was just close enough to keep it in sight, he’d feel better.

Darkness caught up to him before he made it, and Nym was left with the difficult decision of descending into the woods to start a fire or shivering in the tree tops, trying to sleep and hoping he didn’t fall out and break his neck. It was incredibly tempting to stay up high, just because being at ground level was really starting to creep him out.

He tried to convince himself that he was just being paranoid. He’d been in the forest for two days and the worst thing that had happened was he’d lost a fight with a bush. Still, he couldn’t shake the fear, and found himself sitting on a branch with his back leaned up against the trunk as the last rays of the sun disappeared into the ocean.

Nym fell asleep, tired and shivering and uncomfortable. He missed that pallet Ciana had helped him make. He missed Ciana too. Everything would have been just fine if Senman would have left them alone.

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Something was tugging at his arm. Nym groaned and tried to pull away, only to be brought up short. “Huh?” he said groggily, peering down at his sleeve to figure out what it was caught on.

Except it wasn’t a sleeve. His shirt didn’t have sleeves. There was something sticky on his arm, thick, grey cables of it that he was being tangled up in. He blinked a few times and followed the cable to its source.

It was anchored to a branch above him, and strong enough that when he pulled, the branch flexed and snapped before the cable broke away. “What is this?” he said out loud.

A nearby clacking caught his attention, which was when he realized his leg was also tangled up in the same stuff, but anchored to a much thicker branch. Seated on the cable was a spider the size of Nym’s chest, covered in dark green chitinous plates and staring at him with eight eyes. He jerked back from it, only to find that he couldn’t really move.

Nym scooped up the branch that was stuck to his arm and swung it at the spider, which nimbly hopped back. It clacked at him again, the sound of its armored body plates rubbing against each other, and advanced. The next swing caught it solidly and, while it might not have actually hurt it, spiders didn’t weigh that much and the force was enough to send it flying away into the darkness.

More clacking came to him. With a sinking feeling in his chest, he realized that he was in the middle of a whole colony. He could see dozens of shapes scurrying around in the darkness. “Nope. No. No way. Not doing this,” he said.

He quickly pulled arcana into his soul well and sent a pulse of hardened air to strike the thicker branch anchoring his leg. It took four shots before it snapped, and only then in conjunction with Nym working it back and forth, and he went straight up as soon as he was free, dragging the broken limb behind him.

“Screw this, I am done with this forest,” he said. Immediately, he started flying straight north with no plans on stopping until he found the road.

That plan lasted about half an hour before he ran out of energy and had to take a break. It was still very dark and he made sure to thoroughly poke around the tree he picked as his perch before finally landing. He spent most of his rest time trying to remove the sticky webbing from him, with minimal success. He was at least able to tear off the branches that had been flapping along behind him, but by the time he was ready to move again, he still had a web sleeve on his arm and leg. The stuff seemed to cling even worse to his pants than it did to bare skin.

Dawn broke a few hours later and it didn’t take Nym much longer to spot the road. He followed it east, staying over the trees when he was flying and walking on the road itself when he couldn’t, despite the potential danger. He couldn’t bring himself to walk through the forest again, not after the spider incident.

The downside of his new travel arrangement was that there was no foraging at all. Noon came and went and his belly rumbled, but he had nothing to put in it. Ciana had told him it was about a four day walk to Zoskan, but Nym had hoped to make it much quicker by a combination of flying being faster and able to move in a straight line. In the end, the slow down of walking half the time probably balanced it out.

Or maybe not. A few hours after that, the town finally came into sight. It was only visible when he was flying, but he could at least see his goal. He altered his direction to head straight to it and, two hours later, walked up to the gates.

There were three guards there, lounging in the shadow of the wall. They wore leather armor and each had a spear leaning up against the wall next to them. When he walked up, they casually scooped the weapons up and placed themselves dead center in the road.

“Hey now, what troubles you been getting into?” the center guard called out.

“No troubles if I can help it,” Nym said back.

“That so? What’s that all over your arm then?”

Nym glanced down at the spider cable still stuck to him. He’d broken most of it free, but it had frayed into smaller bundles rather than come off in one chunk, and the stuff he had pulled off had taken skin with it.

“Long story,” Nym said.

“Best get to talking, boyo. You’re not getting into town looking all suspicious like that.”

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