emergencycomplaints

Chapter 51

Nym hadn’t felt that cold numbness descend on him once since he’d reached Abilanth. He’d thought he’d finally put it behind him, and he’d welcomed that for two reasons. First, it only ever seemed to happen when his life was in danger, which was never a position he wanted to be in. Second, it scared the hell out of him afterwards.

But in that moment, with the specter of death looming over him, Nym embraced the change. The fear drained away, and with it the indecision and the he...

Chapter 50

The reaction was immediate. The cook started bellowing in surprise and all six guards looked towards the stairs. Nym watched the man grab hold of a fireplace poker and try to flick the logs back into the hearth. While he was doing that, Nym used a cushion of air to push the contents of the stove onto the floor and stoked the fire inside with an influx of air. Flames started shooting up through the seams in the metal, causing the cook to yell again.

“The hell is going on up there?” o...

Chapter 49

Nym came to in a dark room with his arms tied behind his back and the bag still over his head. Every part of him tingled painfully, especially his hands. He could hear the sound of people talking nearby, but it was muffled, as though in another room.

For all Nym knew, Valgo could be standing right next to him, and he needed every advantage he could get. So he didn’t move. He didn’t groan. He didn’t do anything to give away the fact that he was awake. Instead, he forged a conduit a...

Chapter 48

Nym flew them around the wall instead of over it, despite Analia’s insistence that it didn’t make a difference. “They’ll be looking for us now. We’ve already failed at getting away without anyone noticing. At least we can make some effort to not walk past every guard in the city.”

In truth, all he wanted to do was crawl into a warm bed and go to sleep. His ribs were bruised from the kick; every breath was painful. His whole body ached from the all-over pummeling Malk had giv...

Chapter 47

“What are we going to do?” Analia asked.

“Leave the trunk behind! Obviously!”

“But… my stuff.”

“We’re not going on vacation,” he snarled. “Ditch everything but the money. You can buy new stuff somewhere else.”

He was really curious how she managed to sneak an entire trunk full of stuff past the guards. Admittedly, her air cushions had gotten much more stable, though not to the point where she could support herself for long distance flights. The ...

Chapter 46

There was a lot of hushed whispering going on to make sure Malk didn’t overhear them. He was on the far side of the room by the door, but it was better to be safe. He could bring the whole plan down before it even got started. Fortunately, the man had to sleep just as much as anyone else, and he commonly slept on the same schedule Analia did.

Their basic plan was simple. They would leave more or less the same way Nym had gotten in, by sneaking by the guards using his scrying spell and...

Chapter 45

Nym flipped through a few more of the journal entries, but there was very little that was meaningful to him. It seemed that Jaspar wasn’t entirely happy with the results of the experiment, as he often lamented that he hadn’t managed to push the bounds of human possibility. The journal showed a man swinging between erratic and depressed as time stole away the chance he had to continue experimenting on his daughter.

“How much of this have you gone through already?” Nym asked her.<...

Chapter 44

The next morning, Nym met Analia for practice. Instead of the garden they’d been using, she led him back to the library. “Are we working on something else today?” he asked.

“Sort of,” she hedged.

She sat down at a table and gestured for him to take the seat opposite of her. “This is… delicate. Promise me you won’t repeat anything I tell you here.”

“I promise,” he said. He wasn’t even sure who he could tell.

“I know that you’re self-taught, b...

Chapter 43

That night, Nym managed to slip an actual spellbook into his stack of reading to take to bed with him. He also scribed a new rune sequence to prevent scrying, but delayed activating it until he returned to the guest room he’d been given. Even then, he studied the Bardin-approved books for several hours until it was well after midnight.

The guard outside his door stayed there all night, but Nym wasn’t worried about him. He doubted the man knew any magic at all, not even first circle ...

Chapter 42

The testing continued for another hour, though Professor Langdon didn’t feel the need to explain much of what they were doing for Nym’s benefit. He followed instructions to the letter and did his best to keep control of his fears and his temper. It did not help that the professor often chatted with Bardin about him, both of them acting as if he wasn’t even in the room.

He grit his teeth and forced himself to play along. Even for just the chance of recovering his missing memories, ...

Chapter 41

Nym spent the night reading through the books Bardin had recommended, as well as a few he picked for himself. He skimmed through a lot of it, as all of the books were for beginner mages and most of it overlapped with what he’d already read. There were a lot of competing schools of thought for how a mage’s foundational understanding should be built, which mostly stemmed from argument over which kind of mage was the best.

In Nym’s opinion, each method had its own advantages and draw...

Chapter 40

The lessons went fine, as far as Nym could tell. They agreed to continue tomorrow and Nym was giving access to a few other books. Bardin recommended them to him after telling him that they covered a broad spectrum of basic topics. The goal was to identify holes in Nym’s self-taught skills so they could recommend new books to help catch up on those.

This was the same idea Nym had been using while they waited for Bardin to get home, but it was easier with someone to point out exactly wh...

Chapter 39

“I don’t get it,” Analia said.

“I’ll be honest… me neither.” Bardin gestured to the spell book on the table between the three of them. “This can’t possibly be right.”

“I developed this myself and I didn’t have any spells to study from, so it was a lot of trial and error, but this spell appears to be more or less the same one I use,” Nym said.

They’d gone over it. Nym had demonstrated his telekinesis spell. He’d broken down the movement of the ar...

Chapter 38

The library was more of a mess than Nym was expecting. When they walked in, Analia took one look and said, “We’ll be lucky to get through this today.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have made such a mess,” Nym said.

She at least had the decency to look embarrassed, but Malk turned to snap at him, “She is the lady of the house, if she decides to tear the walls down, your place is to keep your mouth shut and get to work when your betters tell you it’s time to fix it.”

...

Chapter 37

Nym tried to count up how long it had been since his last hot bath, but he had lost track of time while living on the street. His best guess was about two months. It was every bit as enjoyable as he remembered. Unlike the wooden tub that was hauled into his room at the Trough and Saddle and then laboriously filled one bucket at a time, rich nobles had indoor plumbing and a pool-sized marble tub set into the floor.

Somebody poured hot water down a tube, or maybe they used magic to do it....

Chapter 36

Nose-picker and his fellow house guard had been left outside the library, and Nemari had stayed behind in the infirmary. Nym, Analia, and Malk were standing in front of the bookcase that hid a secret room. “This is it,” he told them.

“I’ve been in this library a thousand times and never noticed anything odd. I’ve read four different books off this shelf already,” Analia said. She peered at the shelf from various angles, walking to one side and then the other.

“I don�...

Chapter 35

Maybe it was the concussion he undoubtably had given himself, but Nym was starting to like this strange and naïve girl. Here he was, breaking into her house, and she considered her attempts to capture him a game, and now wanted to provide medical aid when he’d gotten hurt.

“Bad idea,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Not supposed to be here,” he admitted. “I could get in trouble.”

“I hardly think getting a scolding is worth having an untreated head wound....

Chapter 34

She was a girl a year or two older than Nym with long, blonde hair done in loose ringlets wearing a fancy purple nightgown embroidered with what he recognized as runic constructs. They had to be the reason his scry spell hadn’t seen her. She was protected against magical sight in some way.

The girl looked up from her book suddenly, and he realized that his shadow had fallen across the table she was reading at. Nym let the flight spell go and fell a few feet behind the book shelf to hi...

Chapter 33

Nym had waited a week on Valgo’s instructions. The House Patriarch of the Feldstal family had left on some business in the west, something important and complicated, and he was liable to gone for weeks dealing with it. Nym didn’t get the details from Valgo, as they weren’t important to his job. What was important was that a powerful noble mage was not going to be home when his house got burgled.

Getting into the upper ring was as easy as it always was. Getting to the Feldstal fami...

Chapter 32

Nym regretted coming to Abilanth, Academy or no. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he’d thought this was a good idea. It wasn’t like he was going to get into the Academy. He was too young, too dirty, too poor, and too unknown. A part of him had thought it would be easy to waltz right in when he’d found out Amos had been admitted. After all, that twit could barely magic himself out of an empty room with an open door, so Nym should have had no problems.

He ha...

Chapter 31

There are three layers of extra-reality that are wrapped around existence. By forging a conduit out of his will, a mage can pierce the veil that separates our reality from the next. The first layer is known as the Phase Shift, as it is closest to ours. By bringing back arcana, the essence of a layer, a mage is able to perform magic.

Arcana from the Phase Shift is too similar to the essence that suffuses our own reality to perform truly powerful magic. It is made for little ...