[Flashback] Magecrafting Like Butter (Azilis)

[Hadrian]

"Until tomorrow, then," he said, still marveling through the lens at what they had done. The power didn't excite him for the reasons that power did most men; he wasn't thinking about how he could put other people down, but he did rejoice quietly upon his ability to effect the world around him, to turn a piece of metal into a specific tool, more efficient, more capable of fulfilling its purpose with ease and elegance. When they returned on the morrow, he walked into the student laboratory with his auristic vision engaged and looking at his -- their -- creation as soon as he could lay his augmented eyes upon it. The djed pathways had crystallized, and the energies upon the pavilion looked like a real kaleidoscope of patterns and colors to his half-trained eye. He looked to Azilis for any clues that there was an error with their work, and pulled the lens out of his pocket to double-check with that. "Another three triple-rings to seal the deal and then we just have to let it soak in the charged water... which I'll show you how to make." By this time tomorrow we'll be done and it'll hopefully work. Do you see anything suspicious?"

[Azilis Theroulde]

When Azilis returned the next morning to the student laboratory, she noticed immediately that significant changes had been wrought in the entire room's aura during her absence. Although it would have looked no different to anyone who couldn't See auristically, her eyes began to perceive the difference as she focused her vision. Inside the circle of glyphs, Djed stretched, ropelike, from the runes themselves to the butter knife, creating a geometric pattern taut with energy. It was beautiful in a different way than human auras; whereas a sentient being's aura was always rolling and undulating with changes in emotion and thought, this one was exact, the lines connecting at precise angles like a cut gem. The butter knife atop the pedestal, at the epicenter of the figure formed inside the circle, glowed as if from within. “I've never seen anything quite like this,” she said, pacing the perimeter of the circle as she continued to concentrate upon it. “The synchronization of all the difference forces of Djed within the circle...it's incredible.” She marveled at the fact that this was the result of only minor magecraft; at higher levels, keeping track of all the elements that comprised the magecrafted item must be nigh-on impossible. “But to answer your question...no, I don't think there's anything off about it. At least, in my Vision it doesn't look like there is.” She gestured towards the pedestal. “Shall we?”

[Hadrian]

Hadrian could barely contain the bursting of his pride. Azilis was a friend and, though younger and less experienced in some disciplines, he respected her opinion. She was the master of Auristics of the pair, and her approval made him happy. When he Looked at the most important parts of the energetic flows, those around and within the circle of glyphs, he saw similar things, but less distinctly and he imagined she would understand what she saw better than he would, though they could both work it out from his notes and drawings. It also just felt good to be able to set up something complicated and precise and have the world's energies bend to one's will, like he was carving a place out for himself in creation, a fellow creator and not just another creation. He took her hand and led her carefully over the circle of glyphs and up to the pedestal. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising, his skin prickling slightly as if with gooseflesh. The body recognized the heightened concentration of djed. He grinned and pulled out a little silver hammer. One, two, three, he chimed, then handed it over to Azilis. "The same as that. Twice. Then we let the pathways realign to the higher vibration while we prepare the charged water for the sealing." In the future, he might just delegate that to her while he prepared the water, but for now they were both learning and he wanted to watch the djed while she repeated his action.

[Azilis Theroulde]

Azilis had to suppress a grin as she saw a bright burst of delight bloom in Hadrian's aura after she spoke. It was exciting to work with someone who was just as eager about the gaining of knowledge as she was; after all, outside of the University itself, most people looked at her as if she had sprouted horns when she mentioned her aspirations to learn magic. But that same desire to simply know clearly burned in Hadrian as well, and she was glad both of his company and that he had allowed her to assist him in a subject he held so dear. When Hadrian lead her over the boundary of the magic circle, Azilis breathed in sharply as she felt the Djed brushing up against her skin. More than her skin, she supposed; it was really her astral body that was peceiving the effects of the circle rather than her physical one. She observed Hadrian tap the knife again with a hammer – today's was silver – and shivered as she both Saw and felt the Djed field shift around her. Gossamer strands of silvered Djed entwined themselves around the structure of the circle's aura, and she blinked several times, determined to focus her eyes fast enough so that she might See as much of the transformation as she could. She nodded when Hadrian handed the hammer over to her, surer of herself than yesterday. Stepping up to the pedestal, she struck the butter knife three times, as he had instructed. After a long pause while she waited for the metamorphosis of the knife's aura to slow, she tapped it again: one, two, three. Once she had completed the third triple-strike, lines within the circle's aura began to shift; redefining its magical properties, she supposed. Her mouth fell open at the sheer implausibility that such small physical actions could cause such detailed reactions in the Djed forces. After several moments, she came back to herself and snapped her mouth shut so that Hadrian wouldn't see her looking like a slack-jawed idiot. “Right, so that's done,” she told him. Her voice was somewhat faraway, as half her attention was still devoted to watching the aura shift. “What's our next move?”

[Hadrian]

He grinned at her reaction, both the slack-jawedness and the quick attempt to hide it. In fact, he knew exactly how she felt. He only hoped that their childlike delight in magic remained so innocent, that they never succumbed to the dreaded sweet whispers the elder mages were always talking about. Perhaps the study of magic was hubris, but if it was, then the gods should never have granted them the ability and the desire. "Right, so..." Peeking once more at their creation, he noted how the blur of color had shifted and tried not to envy her the skill she had acquired nor chomp at the bit trying to become a master aurist overnight. One day, he too would be able to see as the greater mages saw. Like unto the gods. "There are many different formulae for charging water. Some of the simplest ones rely mostly on cleverly placed magnets... You've seen how magnets affect the djed around them, right? Some of the more delicate ones..." He paused, getting that pole-axed ox look that by now Azilis must know well. He was having a stroke of genius or, perhaps, foolishness. He shut his mouth, blinked, then looked at her. "We have to learn voiding," he announced. "Someday. If we could set up a magecrafting laboratory within the Void, we could have near absolute control of the djed within it, so the truly delicate works could be more easily managed. Without, you know, too many outside influences to cock things up. But... anyway... charged water. Yes. So... I have this idea to philter it that I want to try. Stonemiller assures me it's possible, so... I dug up an old recipe and made some modifications on it. Clove, chimney soot, dried cinquefoil, dried mugwort, dried thistle, dried vervain, cochineal, gentian root... but it'll probably take me a few tries to get the amounts just right." He pulled the herbal concoction out in a little sachet like he was making tea and dunked it into the metal pail of water he had brought. All the grinding and other preparation had been done at home so he wouldn't bore Azilis with the details. If she cared, he would show her next time. "It might even be more efficient with the knife in here... it will warm up the water and the herb mixture will steep better... Here." He passed her a pair of tongs out of his satchel. "Take the knife and put it in the water and I'll start cleaning up after us." He got out a soft rag to wipe up the chalked glyphs. "If you happen to become favored by Semele, you could charge the water with a simple crystal or gemstone. Not to mention placing charged gems at key points in your circle would make for a much more interesting enchantment. It would be nice to be the favorite of several gods and goddesses... Then you'd have their help with these things. I'll bet if you got a champion of Rak'keli to bless your work, it could keep you alive and young forever... assuming you didn't do anything stupid to get killed. And you wouldn't even have to decay like a Nuit." He laughed, his mind going a mile a minute as he cleaned up after the experiment.

[Azilis Theroulde]

Azilis nodded as Hadrian described the formulae for the charged water, stowing away the information about magnets in her mind. She had indeed heard of using magnetized materials to change the essence of Djed, but had never seen it done before. Her brother had mentioned it to her several times when he was still a University student and taking classes in simple magecrafting, arching his eyebrow at her and speaking in tones that implied she was too hopelessly simple to ever understand what he was talking about. Sylvair had been right, though – she hadn't really understood, not truly, until now. When Hadrian trailed off, staring vacantly into space, she giggled and crossed her arms over her chest, waiting for the thunderbolt of inspiration that had struck him like so many bricks to clear so that he could articulate himself. “Voiding...?” she murmured, confused, as she tried to make sense of Hadrian's disorganized speech while his mind jumped from one topic to another. “Can you...do that? Have enough command over the Void to set up an entire magecrafting station inside it, I mean?” She marveled at the sheer skill one would have to have at the discipline to assemble all the necessary items inside the Void in the first place. “And you would have to find a source of air, and light...gods, it would be so strange to work inside the Void. It'd scare the shyke out of me.” She paused. “But I see what you mean, at least I think I do. There's less margin for error, right? Less room for things to...get cocked up, as you said,” Azilis mused. She stared at him, her face blank, as he rattled off a list of herbs, recognizing their names but not their properties. “Oh,” she said intelligently, making a mental note to start learning philtering sometime soon. It made her feel slightly hopeless that Hadrian possessed so much more knowledge in a much broader range of subjects than she did. She took the tongs from him when prompted and clasped the butter knife in their grip, careful not to make any contact with the enchanted object. When she released it into the bucket of charged water, the blade's aura quivered as it reacted with that of the water, its intricate workings undulating and changing shape. Azilis kept her gaze trained on it in case she Saw something that seemed off about it, listening to Hadrian's discourse in the background. “With so many gods and goddesses there's almost an infinite variety of things you could do with their favor,” she said, catching his intellectual fire. “I mean, Izurdin could make the magecrafted object sturdier and of better quality...look at the Isur, they're supposed to have some of the best magecrafted work around, aren't they? And Qalaya could bless the object with a memory, a way to learn from the past...although I suppose you'd be touching more on Animation there...” She frowned, the wheels in her mind turning as she tried to work out the specifics.

[Hadrian]

"I suppose we should probably wait for a true teacher before tackling Voiding," he mused, for once letting wisdom get the better of him. In his Auristic vision, the djed of the butter knife seemed to cool down and crystallize, though that wasn't exactly right. There was, however, some quality of the energy that became less active and dynamic, more settled and set. It would take the next day to set completely, though. He had heard of certain techniques whereby the exposure to charged water needn't take quite so long, and some magecrafters were so skilled at making the charged water that some were more efficient than others, but again, it was an art as much as it was a science and there were many paths from point A to point B. "I figure if I get the opportunity to go to Sultros, I would go... Then I could learn to craft the item as well as lay the enchantment. If you made a pedestal out of a forge, for example, you could change the shape of the metal as you were changing its djed. I'm not sure if I'm destined to be a magesmith, but it's something to consider. I'd have to grow muscles first, though." That thought made him laugh at his own expense. "Shall we go, then? When we get back tomorrow, it should be done. And then we just have to clean up after ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for a magecrafting well done." He grinned.

[Azilis Theroulde]

“That's probably for the best,” agreed Azilis. “My brother used to scare me with this awful story about a mage he knew who wasn't paying attention and got himself caught in the Void. Pretty embarrassing for him, you know. Dunno about you, but being turned into a frozen Void mummy isn't exactly the way I intended to go.” Involuntarily, she made a slight moue of distaste as she recalled the unpleasant memory. “But if you're set on it, I can ask my father and he might be able to get the name of someone who knows a little Voiding...” She got up off her haunches from where she had been crouched next to the bucket, sparing one last glance at its contents. It was almost as if the knife had just been plunged from a forge into cool water; the colors of its aura, which had been spasmodically fluctuating with the Djed reverberations from the silver hammer, were beginning to take on more uniform hues of warm red and orange. “It looks perfect,” she murmured, a foolish grin tugging at her face. “I'll see you tomorrow, then, Hadrian,” she told him, slinging her satchel over her shoulder. The sheer pleasure of knowing the butter knife looked to be turning out fine, and that they had made it so, put a spring in her step. She could hardly wait to get home and talk her father's ear off about the minutiae of what they had accomplished that day. When they returned to the student laboratory the next morning, the aura of the butter knife was once again constant, although in a different way than it had been the previous morning. A thin veneer of red Djed seemed to pulse around the blade like a second skin. She spread her hand over the surface of the water, not wanting to touch it in case there were other steps involving the water she didn't know about. Heat spread out against her flattened palm; it was a little bit like holding her fingers directly over a candle. “Is this it, then?” she asked Hadrian, entranced. “Is it done?”

[Hadrian]

And on the third day, they returned and all was complete. He grinned at her as they held their hands over the bucket of charged water to feel the heat emanating from it. He nodded and took out the tongs and some cloth. Reaching into the water with the tongs -- not because he feared harm to himself, but because he was a perfectionist and wanted the knife to emerge from the last phase of its enchantment without his own aura interfering at all. Dropping the knife into his cloth, he put the tongs away and started carefully drying it. That done, he Looked at it carefully, noted the way it smoldered like the ember of a hearth fire to his Sight, how the heat of its aura had become a constant thing, a crystallized pattern within its preexisting djed. It was more than metal now, even if its function was nothing fancy. He held it out to her so she could feel the dull blade. "It looks right to me," he said, and seems to be putting out warmth. "Feel it. When I give it to Stonemiller, I'm sure he'll be able to spot some minute aberrations that we aren't sophisticated enough to spot yet, but... we did it." He grinned. "Sort of monotonous at parts, but this is so basic. Imagine what we can do with more resources and more practice!" This truly was his bailiwick. Though he was diligent in studying other disciplines as Azilis could attest, being his co-conspirator, it was all geared toward the fashioning of these small wonders. One day, perhaps, he would create true wonders to match Areesa Tallshade, or even surpass her. Only time would tell on that. "Thanks so much for the help," he said. "It really made me think things through over and over again to make sure I was explaining them right and not messing up in front of you." He grinned. "We just have to clean up and then we can take it to Stonemiller!"

[Azilis Theroulde]

Azilis took the blade from Hadrian's hands, turning it over and over and running her fingers down its smooth metal surface. A pleasant heat warmed her palms as she touched it, confirming what she could already See with her auristic vision: the fire enchantment they had spent the last three days carefully building, paying minute attention to the tiniest details, was working. The aura of the butter knife seemed filled with heat, the crisscross patterns of Djed that wreathed it giving off waves of red and orange. “Who cares if it's got some infintesimally small flaws in it? The University cooks won't care about that, so long as it works okay and doesn't set anyone on fire.” She handed the butter knife back to Hadrian. Unlike many academic types, Azilis wasn't bothered by slight mistakes in her work; as long as the general theory behind the end result ended up being sound, it was a success, at least in her mind. Her sporadic attention to detail would probably hobble her at some point if she went into an academic career like Hadrian's, but for now sheer avidity would get her by, for the most part. “And yes, it was monotonous at points, but look what good came of it...maybe next time we can actually make a flaming sword, it's not such a big jump from a warm butter knife to that.” She paused. “Although I'm not sure we have the muscle between the two of us to lift a sword. It'd look impressive, though.” She began cleaning up the materials that were left over from their experiment, as Hadrian had directed. “Don't thank me, I should be thanking you,” she told him truthfully. “For teaching me the basic principles of magecrafting. After all, it's not every day that someone offers to show you that." Azilis gave him a heartfelt smile of gratitude. "Shall we go show the fruits of our labor to Professor Stonemiller, then?"