Solo Shadows of the Craft Redux

[Alses]

Timestamp: 15th Day of Spring, 514 A.V.

It had been some time since Alses had last worked on a weapon, although this particular commission had been agreed for quite a while. It was just that life in all its complexities had seemed to conspire to throw up a series of obstacles on the path to its timely completion. First of all, the commissioner had asked for his weapon back for a time; something about an important operation, as far as she could remember, something he’d not wanted to be without his primary armament for, and then she’d had to postpone it further whilst she worked to prepare for her official coronation as Councillor Radiant…they’d met and mutually agreed to put off the commission until both of them had the time.

And now, that time had arrived.

Unlike his brother’s weapon, all cool blue and green, this glaive gleamed prism-white and red down the length of its tortured crystal matrix, the curved blade blazing painfully in the plentiful light pouring down from the dome overhead. The haft of the glaive, too, a long spire of crimson-stained skyglass, was different; notched and grooved with places for fingers to get a better, more secure hold – the better to apply more force, she’d been told proudly – and with sparkling channels for the blood, too.

The twins fought together, more often than not; one used a flurry of quick, slashing strikes to knock – and keep – their opponent off guard, not giving them time to recover and reset their defences, whilst the other, whose weapon was currently in her hands, set up devastating – but slow – cuts that crunched through armour and bone.

It had sounded – when the method was explained – remarkably brutal and remarkably efficient.

Which was probably the idea; the quicker the enemy was dispatched, the quicker the foe would fall and the fewer comrades would be lost. It was the cold, dispassionate algebra of conflict, with a certain deathly inevitability to it.

Idly, Alses found herself wondering precisely how many lives the weapon in her grasp had taken, how often had the thirsting blade drunk its fill of flesh and blood, citizen, denizen or monster alike? An uneasy line of questioning, and a useless one, unless she wanted to expend considerable power teasing the information out of the normally-incommunicative skyglass. That was always a laborious and tiring procedure, one of the many arcane side-effects of its divine origin, and decidedly not worth it in this instance.

She had a job to do; best to focus on that, first and foremost.

Having worked with a glaive before, and having a successful experiment with a six-mirror, rather than three, configuration under her belt made her more confident about this one, more sure of how to proceed and what she could expect as the crafting process went on.

It wouldn’t be without risk, of course – nothing was – but with experience and planning she could reduce that perfidious chance of catastrophe down to almost nothing. It was a philosophy and method of work that had served her well thus far, and she saw no reason to change it.

So.

Comfortable desk chair, writing desk with the paper and quill and ink aligned just so, brazier smouldering calmly nearby, throwing out a gentle wave of warmth…everything was just right, all of it arranged perfectly and exactly to her liking.

Like a concert virtuoso about to begin a grand performance, Alses stretched, her lithe body arching even as she stretched her fingers to the sky, interlaced them, and fired off a bony ten-finger salute, a fusillade of loud cracks accompanying the fluid motion.

Sharpened Glaive

General Purpose: To provide a preternaturally-sharp weapon for the commissioner, capable of cleaving through armour with relative ease, to complement both the combat style of the commissioner and his twin.

Requirements: Sharpening to the second degree of the bladed edge of the glaive; two enhancements in Falkenhayn's structural field.

Nice and simple, stark almost in its instruction, just what she needed to keep herself on-track, to corral her notoriously wandering, busy mind onto a single straight road until the magic and majesty of the physical act of magecraft could take over and channel every erg of cogitation towards the completion of the grand goal.

The question – as ever – was what precise glyphic setup to use, and what ingredients to charge the focus circles with, the better to effect the miracle she was striving for. Economy and elegance in one, a very pleasing fusion to be sure, but damnably hard to actually attain. Alas, alas.

Tipping back in her chair, Alses pondered the issue at hand, idly gazing blankly out across the rolling lawns and, beyond that, the city in all its prismatic glory, glittering in the sunshine, basking under Syna’s regard. A busy, productive, prosperous, safe city, the very paragon of culture and advancement in the harsh environment of Kalea.

But – and it was important to remember – it only remained so because of the vigilance of the Shinya and the wise oversight of the Day Lady and Night Lord. And, now, Alses herself – although how ‘wise’ she was…well, that was most definitely up for vigorous debate.

Shaking her head – this was magecraft, entirely different and gloriously separate from her public duties as Councillor Radiant, Alses forcibly realigned her brain back to the matter in hand and began to pace around the lab, pensive, considering, letting herself absorb the surroundings, the working space, assessing in the choral roar of her compound brain everything that she would need to execute the commission.

[Alses]

An aegis of ink, that was what she was making, a layered defensive network on the floor that would spring to glorious life when she began her craft and her passion. She was focused and calmed, the ache from kneeling on the rough tile floor pushed back into irrelevancy, all her attention directed inwards and to the smooth sable-hair brush she clasped loosely in one hand, dripping with midnight liquid.

She was Glyphing, enhancing her safety net and her efficiency in crafting, forging an arcane machine with every line, swirl and dot. When finished, it would channel and direct the magic she evoked in the process of her magecraft, funnelling every erg of it from her ingredients into the proto-artifact, and also, when it came to breaking it to harness, containing, controlling and corralling the evoked djed.

Every time, her designs changed slightly, accommodating the different requirements of each artifact, each expectation. There were constants, of course, in the maelstrom of different glyphs and geometries that she sweated and swore over – the modified focus glyph that every magecrafter knew, for example – but there was so much more that glyphing could do in the craft if only permitted to do so.

Alses had always made extensive use of the discipline in the execution of her passion, the one fuelling the other, a beautiful synergy that had never steered her wrong yet. Where other magesmiths might be exposed to the thrum and thwack of discharging djed, of toxic emanations and all the fragmentary bursts that were par for the course in the craft, no matter how careful, collateral damage from the sheer power of the djed forces being arrayed against one another, she was not.

Oh no – her glyphs, her beautiful, wonderful glyphs, taking shape under her racing brush in sinuous geometries that tugged at the eye and the mind, bending the ambient djed of the world, they stopped all of that. They imposed inviting conduits on the ambient matrix of Mizahar itself, making themselves so seductively attractive to wayward magic that it was all drawn in and away, rather than floating freely or attaching to her.

From there, the corruption was either spun out into nothing as the djed was rewoven into something useful, something valuable, and fed back into the artifact from whence it had come, or else channelled and directed away, to the venting sigils that sent it out into the world as bright violet light.

Painful to the eyes, maybe, but less damaging than the runaway mutation that could otherwise result from free and unpurposed magic just floating around. Alses had one body to last her the duration of eternity, and she wasn’t about to see her perfect form maimed or otherwise permanently damaged by the forces she mastered.

Perhaps one day she’d learn to attenuate that harsh purple-pink glare, the one that forever seemed as though it were on the verge of burning out the eyeballs, to something more pleasant and more manageable, but for now, whenever there was a lot of unpurposed djed floating around, her lot was painful squinting as the venting glyphs did their work and filled the laboratory with an actinic violet glow.

In appreciation of the kinds of purposed djed she would be pulling from her ingredients and forcing into the artifact, Alses had altered her more-or-less standard model design. The inner components had only a raft of minor changes – fewer sharp angles that a scything burst of djed could exploit, altered concepts that would still function as intended but would be able to soften and cushion the blow, to take the impact of great forces, yield and allow them to expend their vengeful energy before counterattacking, sucking the wayward magic into her coiling network of weaving runes. Serpentine and beautiful, they shimmered with stored promise, her signature writ large upon the world and just waiting for the final component of activation until they could surge into joyous, fulfilling life.

The inner rings still needed work, though, and as the bells passed Alses gritted her teeth and kept on at it, sending tendrils of true-blue light dancing down her arm, limning every finger in a split-tick corona of azure flame and scattering unsettling reflections and splintered radiance from the skyglass all around.

Tanroa be praised for her Blessing.

With renewed strength and energy surging through her from that brief revitalising shock, banishing the grey poisons of cramp and stiffness from so many shifts and alterations with the brush and erasing rag, she set to with a will, refining and refining with ruthless single-mindedness the sinuous looping strands of her reprocessing and repurposing glyphs, following the rune-marked pathways with singular determination, hunting out any flaw in the network, any fuzzed angle or blotched curve and straightening each and every one out until the magic ran smooth and sweet and clear to her Sight.

When it worked, it was glorious – but there were always so many mistakes, so many. It wasn’t really difficult to pare them out, not with her Sight singing so softly into her brain all the time, not when she could flay the world to lay bare its secrets with a harsh demand or whisper and massage it to do the same with a fraction of the djed expenditure, but it was still time-consuming and a blow to her pride every time she had to correct a failed glyph.

It was all worth it, though, when the arcane machine she’d so painstakingly constructed worked, every part of it moving in grand symphony, glittering brighter than the finest fireworks the reimancers and alchemists both could concoct.

Glory, glory.

Alas, this particular one was far from completion, far from that final, exalted state. Quite aside from the inner ring of repurposements, a coiling whorl of relay and path unfurling from the focus circle she used for the ingredients that would drive the craft, there was also the external rings that would provide protection to her and the wider world.

These were her latest revision, the latest brainwave that had come to her when considering the problem idly in the dark haven of the baths, floating aimlessly in hot water and breathing in hot, moisture-wreathed air, admiring the coronae of the skyglass and the lamps in the steam.

She’d often found that ideas came whilst her brain freewheeled in the comforting warmth and dimness, far removed from the hustle and bustle of the bright daylight, but not nearly so disquieting, silent and melancholy as the night. A nice middle ground, a perfect twilight conducive to contemplation and thought.

Others might have thought her mad to keep notebooks, quills and ink down in the baths, but for her it was only sensible, a way to capture her butterfly thoughts before they managed to fly away for good.

[Alses]

The bright white glypher’s paint followed her brush faithfully as she began to work, carefully pacing the steps out from the central sharp subglyph focused on the pedestal itself, marking the cardinal points for her own reference. It was quite a contrast to the midnight colour she’d used earlier – the better for differentiation, for contrast; that fundamental property would make it all the more difficult for wayward djed to subvert the black roiling boil of her reprocessing and focus matrix and use it to try and burrow through the barriers that were the focus of her efforts now.

She wasn’t exactly expecting that to happen, but it was one of several remote possibilities that should still be warded against, just in case. No-one – least of all her – wanted an out-of-control djed reaction to destroy her hard work and damage her beautiful house.

Best not to think about it.

Sitting back on her haunches for a chime or two, brush upraised threateningly in one hand, the sword of Damocles to the defenceless floor, she considered how to proceed. As ever, the temptations was for feathery, light strokes, to be hesitant when what was needed, what was required – no, demanded! – by the magic was decisiveness, a single and uninterrupted flow that would be mirrored on the numinous plane of djed.

The black tendrils of her previous glyphery, gleaming slickly both physically and metaphorically, they dragged at her eye and her auristics both, pulling and pulling at her attention – she had to find the opposite, the contradiction, something on which they would find no purchase.

Hence, the white paint, all reflection, and the smooth nature of the lines and rune paths she would be glyphing, the arcing curve of a circle – no, several circles, for if the first was overtopped and overwhelmed then the second would be there, waiting, waiting, smug and containing. And then a third, outside that, just for completeness.

Perhaps…yes, why not? Perhaps she could glyph in connective lines, allow the second circle to help the first take some of the load, expand the area over which stray djed would have to overcome her binding runes and increase the resilience of the whole network…yes…

It could work – but first, she’d need her outlines, the keystones, queenpins and anchoring sigils that would hold the whole of it together, the foundations on which she could work miracles. Given time and djed enough, of course.

It took time – everything did – to align her mind and her glyphs into one, cohesive whole; a few practice runs on scrap paper did an admirable job of helping her plan the sequence that would soon be writ large on the floor. There were anchoring runes, spiky things with hooks on every curve and jag of their surface and curling tendrils entwining amorously with the long, long lines of runes curving off around her work area. A nice, big area was encompassed inside; working in cramped conditions was worse than uncomfortable, with magecraft; it was downright dangerous.

In addition to those sharply delineated anchoring runes, there were the long, long strands of interwoven defensive glyphs, shielding and reflective, strong and flexible in one, able to bend and ripple with the magic, capable of taking a sorcerous insult, of bending it and reflecting it along the curving circumference of the whole circle so that its violence was lessened, its force diminished into insignificance.

The runes themselves weren’t the problem; she’d drawn and drawn and drawn them, down the years; they were as much a part of her magecrafting repertoire as the physical sequence of actions themselves. No, it was simply the interweaving process, the delicate art of lacing, with ink and auristics, a branching and rebranching path that danced and jinked between them all without getting caught or tangled in antithetic djed reactions of any sort, that was the problem.

That was where the technique and the finesse paid off, where practice made perfect

Cracking her knuckles in preparation for the work that was to come, she inched her fingers further down the shaft of her brush. Fine control was needed now, not the broad strokes that had so characterised the earlier portion of her efforts.

Perhaps even…shading.

Tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth as she thought and painted, balancing her hand for additional steadiness on her thigh as she worked, the outer circles began to take shape. Slowly and reluctantly at first, almost, each rune crawling down the quill at a snail’s pace, making her pick up the wet rag time and again to get rid of mistakes before they were set in stone, with time and repetition came confidence.

And with confidence, completion.

[Alses]

Her hands had been splattered with the white paint she’d been using and her joints had been screaming blue murder at her by the time she’d finished, three concentric rings of intricate glyphing runes all linked together, all coordinated to create a layered shield that would bend and ripple and transmit any insult along a hundred different links, refracting the force and the djed across a vast area and commuting any wrathful energy into harmless inconsequentiality.

And people thought Glyphing a weak, oddball discipline, only fit as an adjunct to other crafts. If only they knew what wonders could be wrought with careful work and a little creative thought! Which wasn’t to say that runes and sigils didn’t have their place in other disciplines, of course – far from it.

It was, however, a difficult and exacting discipline; everything had to be exactly right or the whole of it would totter disastrously towards collapse. That meant bell upon bell carefully drawing and redrawing the glyphs, sharpening the angles, smoothing the curves, refining the concepts behind every arc and line until the whole of it shone almost painfully bright on the numinous plane of auristics in which Alses dwelled, using her powers to augment her glyphing skill. Now, thankfully, after all that work, it was coming together beautifully.

Alses couldn’t stop a satisfied smile unfurling on her face at the sight of the machinery of it all, those intricate interweaving strands that would protect her and the world from the forces her skill would evoke, gleamed smugly quiescent on the floor, just waiting for her blood to wake them to furious light and action.

The pedestal was thickly daubed with runes, and the soul and centre of the whole apparatus gleamed painfully bright. The modified rune that all magecrafters knew, it blazed like a nascent star atop the spire of stone, spirals of linking and pathing glyphs dancing a fandango around it, all of them slaves to its quiescent force.

All it needed was the artifact itself, a slender lance of skyglass topped with that wicked curved blade, slotted into the little notch drilled for that very purpose into the rock. Maybe a few vices to redirect all the djed into the glaive precisely – fortunately, with her auristic Sight she’d not have to perform the laborious calculations that usually informed their placement; she could do the whole thing in situ, without having to labour and pore over her books and mathematics.

The sweetest harmonies sounded clearest, shone brightest, meshed the best with the lazy whorl of potential magic, and that coruscant flare of perfection was what she extended every sense in search of as she moved vice and clamp into position, fine-tuning everything with a savant’s obsessive pursuit of perfection.

Any doctors watching would have diagnosed it as such in an instant, watching the sheer care implicit in every step – but then again, it was perhaps only fair; magecraft was a dangerous discipline and mistakes were often measured in terms of ‘blast radius’ and ‘body count’. Thus, extreme care and obsessive attention to detail in every step – that was how magecrafters climbed the gold-slathered pinnacles of their craft.

The glaive hummed in her hands, warm and smooth on her skin, as she hefted it with infinite care and lifted it into position, guiding the butt of the weapon into the slot cut just for that purpose, letting the obdurate stone support and stabilise it.

A shaft of light, glowing in Syna’s abundant rays pouring down from on high, that was what it looked like, all colour wiped away under the photon bombardment. Not that Alses needed light to see what it was, what it looked like; its impression in the auristic landscape told her all she needed to know and more.

It had drunk richly and well of blood in its time; it knew its purpose and its reason, an absolute certainty that had bled into the skyglass, giving her a nice and stable platform from which to work her miracles.

Now…

Absently, Alses rifled through the papers and notes on her laboratory desk, paging through her designs for the original document she’d written as a reminder of, in the most simple of terms, what she had to do.

Sharpness, that was it, a preternatural property to hone the already razor-sharp edge to some pure quill of keenness that could never be found in nature or crafted by a mere blacksmith, something that would cause even the obdurate skyglass of the starry city to splinter and crack with uneasy facility under the strike of the augmented weapon.

It would be fun, a fine challenge to her skills, the corollary of the earlier quickened glaive, a worthy match for the Shinya master from whom she’d accepted the commission.

The glyphic apparatus sprawled in its smug multitude of colours and shapes all around, tugging and teasing at her eyes, whispering a symphony to her senses in all the impressions of magic, taking her auristics-enhanced perception and dancing with it, a seductive tango that enticed her to forever explore just a bit more, just a bit deeper.

And down that road madness – and glory – lay.

Tempting.

But there was magecraft to be done! The thought dragged her treacherously-wandering mind back to the task at hand, banished the shimmering towers of secrets and cogitation to the half-there glimmers that they were under her normal Sight, hauling herself back up to the shallows of Mizahar, the sunlit numinous that most moved through, all unawares of the sparkle underneath, the quill of magic moving through the world.

Magecraft, magecraft, magecraft!

There were ingredients to choose, techniques to plan, the whole elaborate motion of crafting to establish. So much to do, so many unconsidered variables to…well…consider, so much mental effort to expend before the final achievement gleamed and glittered before her.

Best to make a start, then.

[Alses]

Magic flowed and thrummed and surged around her as she pulled her slightly-bloody thumb back from the master trigger, returning her knife to her belt as she did so. The bronze lifeblood, a few drops of essential fluid from her veins, both woke the circles from quiescence to ordered activity and further gave her an arcane connection to them. She knew, intimately, every curve and twist and jag – partly thanks to her own crafting of the runes and lines, yes, but also due to that very link her blood gave her.

Sacrifice meant something in magic.

In her mind’s eye, she soared as djed along the conduits, testing and probing and touching and feeling – being touched and felt and probed and tested and influenced, crucially, in return.

Everything tasted right to her, no sour foulness clogging her senses or coating her tongue in phantom filth. All this, all these impressions and schematics forged in magic inside her brain, formed in a split-tick, informing her that, yes, all was well with the apparatus that she’d painstakingly constructed.

Good.

It felt so good, so alive in its alien complexity and perfection of form, the codex of magic writ large for any with the wit to see it, all of it bent and directed to the tasks she had chosen.

Now that that was done, active, engaged and engaging with the djed of the world to purify and concentrate the stuff, providing her with an optimal working environment, she could focus on other matters. The tools of her trade, for one, glittering in anticipation in their velvet bags, just waiting for fire-opal hands to call them to glorious action.

Mirrors already shimmered in the optical ring, the circle of steel and skyglass almost painfully bright with the reflections of Syna’s light and – more importantly – with the spangled images of the accreting and concentrating djed focused inward by her glyphic machinery.

So. Sharpness.

Instinctively, in the depths of her soul, Alses felt the call of the silver hammer, of its plangent, elegant notes that hid an obdurate and adamant core; the iron fist in the velvet glove. Weaker than its big brother, the golden hammer of power and authority, but it was power at a point, and power under such fine control…yes, it would be nearly perfect for her purposes.

Sharpness was a delicate thing to work with; it was small-scale, piecework, localised to a very small portion of the overall artifact, and that meant silver to most magesmiths – Alses included. Electrum, whilst the empress of the hammers she’d encountered, would be simply too powerful and stubborn; it had a rebellious core, that one, and had the power and cunning to exploit it. Fitting, for something made of gold and silver both, but annoying – and potentially disastrous.

Disasters couldn’t be tolerated. Thus, silver’s graceful and stylish song, its insidious siren melody. Alses felt her heart quicken in anticipation of the tango they’d soon dance, the clinching clasp between hand and hammer, between mind and magic. How beautiful it would be, how they would sing and fill the laboratory with the music of the spheres!

A smile curving her lips, eyes sparkling with anticipation, Alses lifted the silver hammer, relishing the weight of it in her hand, before touching a drop of still-wet blood to its shining head and then turning and striking with stunning force. Even as her mind expanded with the new connection, wrought in blood as most things were, her swing crashed downwards with all the inevitability of sunset and struck squarely one of her ingredients, already primed by the active hum of the focus circle in which it rested.

Sweeter than a lover’s sigh, it gave up its precious cargo, its essence, a thick bolt of scintillating djed rising up from its core and sluicing into the greedy voids of the hammer-head, swayed by her focus and the silvery siren melody of her hammer strike, the softest of plangent notes belying the sheer force with which she’d hit.

Therein another delight of the magesmith – watching a commissioner sweat and wince at the first impact, fearing for their delicate artwork or prize heirloom, not understanding in their hearts even though their brains might have drunk in the explanation, that every erg of force exerted flashed into magic the instant it contacted the ingredient or the artifact, the enchantments each hammer was imbued with forcing the conversion.

There was no-one here but Alses, though, no-one to watch and wince or whine and otherwise interfere – which was how she liked it. Just her, the artifact, her tools and the Plan, unfurling in her head in silver fire, burning bright as she mentally worked through it, ticking off step and sub-objective in an ordered and methodical fashion.

Slapdashery had no place in serious crafting – not when so much money was at stake, not when her reputation as a magesmith was on the line. She knew well enough that two pleased Shinya Masters meant a lot of ephemeral stock with that institution, and the tantalising possibility of further business from that quarter, something that would only make her own personal treasury glow with further reflected light from all the kina headed her way.

No time to think about that sort of thing now though; there was work to be done, hard work, and it would need every ounce of concentration and focus that she could wring out of her patchwork soul.

Alses struck again at her ingredients, this time a glancing blow to the inoffensive objects, pulling free a long skein of glittering magic and snapping it from its moorings with a theatrical flourish, letting the hungry hammer-head drink its coruscating fill of djed until it almost overflowed with stored power, its argentine surface actinic with dancing sparks of pure essence.

She laughed, involuntary, at the sight her augmented eyes saw; the djed-charged silver leaving bright contrails in the air as she moved, all of it dancing and moving and aching to be put to work.

Time to get started properly.

[Alses]

Hammer glowing like a baleful star in her hand, metaphysically-heavy with brilliant magic, Alses brought it down like the wroth of Syna on the glaive and gloried in the panchromatic eruption of djed that resulted, as though the rainbows that normally swam through the skyglass had suddenly been jolted into the air.

The auras roared and convulsed in her head, startled and rearing from the sudden insult, all-but screaming from the strike.

This was skyglass, though, always striving for an irritating even keel, capable of returning itself to smug rainbowed reflections from near-total collapse – if she was inattentive, if she let its inherent properties get a foothold, that was.

Two hammers – or more, if it could be managed with a trusted assistant, a rare commodity even in Lhavit – were therefore the method of choice. Whilst one hammer was striking, dumping djed onto the obdurate material, the other could be charging, drawing up long skeins of argentine scintillation, beginning to glow with that baleful glare that spelled chaos and confusion for her target.

The continual battering, the incessant pounding by djed-charged hammers, always where the djed of the skyglass, like a living thing, had retreated to the greatest degree, exploiting the inherent weaknesses of its network – difficult to do, yes, and even harder to find, but there for anyone with the skill and experience to expose – to make the whole of it totter deliciously towards full collapse, fuzzed and discohered, changed and altered just enough to break that stubborn divine self-contentment and to give it the possibility, perhaps even the desire, in an inanimate sort of way, for improvement.

Phantom heat and dark flame seared Alses’ hands as she struck again and again, the force of every impact, of every fusillade jarring up her hands and shaking them to the bone. Panchromatic rainbows skirled and danced as she worked, a richly tapestried fandango lit by invisible light, a whirling dynamo of radiance that burned with a desperate glow as she kept pounding grimly away, ringing in her changes, her disjunctions and confusions, the whole grand strategy of fray and fuzz.

In an odd sort of way, this was far more therapeutic, far more centring and calming than any amount of meditation, something that she’d never been good at. Standing still for too long, emptying her head of all thoughts…yes, meditation was an elusive nymph that was rarely hers. There was so much to do, so much to think about, so many things to plan for…emptying a head that habitually whirled with conjectures and butterfly thoughts was something she was rarely able to do, even with the aid of hot baths and acres of time in which to do…nothing.

Yes, to her, bright and shining and full of ideas and plans for the future – always moving forward, rarely looking back – nothing was…anathema. Nothing could so easily become anything.

Just like the glaive that was the focus of her attentions now, as it happened.

Returning her full concern back to the matter in hand, to the bruised and battered and djedically-trembling weapon, a shaft of light in the centre of her glyphic apparatus that was patiently churning against the flow of Mizahar, building up purified djed and the easy-to-work-in environment that Alses herself preferred.
Patient, implacable – her glyphs held the unshakeable confidence that they would be useful, that there would be a furtherance of her goal thanks to her efforts. They were a bolster, a guide and anchor both, and with them singing magic at her back the world was her oyster and it bent to her will.

Yes, this particular part of it had bent nicely, the strain of it producing beautiful regressing feather patterns of half-broken conduits, djed outgassing lazily from the damage she’d inflicted in languorous curls and whorls, almost liquid-like at the moment, although Alses knew perfectly well that its character could change in an instant, all depending on the environment and the natural – or artificial – energies all around.

A thousand sparkling interactions of the evoked djed made the glaive sparkle like a galaxy, the universe in microcosm to her seeking Sight, and she gloried in it, hands already moving through the silver thread of her plan to create still grander glories. Back into her belt went copper, silver’s companion in the tango they’d been dancing, its head brilliantly radiant with fading wisps of magic, all-but throbbing with the djed that had fluxed and roared at full, destructive spate through it, amplifying the antithetical harmonies that made the basest of the hammers so good at disjunction and discord.

Alses felt a pang of regret as she let go the smooth handle, but that emotion was swiftly swept away as she twirled the argentine blaze of the other hammer, letting it strike her ingredients as they began to tip towards the greypoint, giving up their energy to her hungry glyphs and ravenous hammer-head. It was a chiming carillon written in bright-blazing djed just as much as it was in sound, and the backlash from such powerful forces being evoked in such a short space of time – and in such close confines – sent a phantom charge dancing through her arm, jarring to her very bones as she moved.

The hammer was an extension of her body, djed-heavy, cargoed with purpose and hope – no, not hope, expectation, yes, that was a better word for it. Alses saw in her mind’s eye what would happen next, the unfurling dance of probability made certainty by her skill even as she took breaths of electric air, tasting the jolting burn of powerful djed on her tongue.

A strike, hard and powerful, rising like the mythical phoenix, trailing streamers of rainbow-spangled djed, so richly cargoed with power that it forced a bow-wave of prismatic ripples before it in the colour-drenched world of the aurist, the sheer potential of the magic contained – barely – in the silver head making itself felt.

The explosion was silent as night and unfurled like a bursting firework, a raying flower, sending tsunamis of djed roaring into the weakened, flayed-open network of the glaive, re-energising the battered conduits, sluicing over and through them, a rising fountain of magic that lit up every facet of its internal structure with scintillating brilliance.

Alses drank in the sight eagerly as the six mirrors watched owlishly from overhead, glittering smugly in their ring, not called on just yet.

Yet.

[Alses]

Whilst they hadn’t been used before, now the silvered mirrors of the optic ring were paying for every tick of respite they’d had as Alses worked furiously, hands almost a blur as they struck and struck and struck again, making the glaive ring like a bell and blur in the constraining grasp of the vices – the only still things in the circles, or so it seemed anyway.

Perspiration scattered from Alses’ dervish form as she kept moving, ringing in the changes and alterations she needed, repurposing djed and channelling it to where it would be most needed, building up reservoirs and strength in one place, weakening and drawing it away in others, all to the complex plan she’d worked out for the commission. Results were what would count to the commissioner, of course, but to Alses it was as much about the joy of the journey, the trials and tribulations on the way to the peak of success, as it was the glow of pride in her breast and the feel of a pouch heavy with kina in her hand.

Soon enough – fickle gods permitting – she’d be crafting for herself, no-one else.

No time to dwell on that now, though, not whilst the redirecting mirrors overhead glowed like supernovae, the dissipating runes carved into their backs lit with actinic fire and radiating baleful plumes of searing violet light as they strained and struggled against the accumulated chaos, against the toxic djed weaves that threatened to overwhelm the orderly beauty and prismatic perfection of her circles and machinery.

Even as Alses herself felt the lash of the poisons on her skin, the corruptive touch scrabbling at fire-opal armour, looking for a way in, somewhere it could wriggle inside and wreak havoc on her immortal body, she didn’t worry. She was dreaming instead, flying high and free and clear above such mundane things, seeing the craft as complete in potentia, only needing a simple sequence of physical actions to bring it to beautiful fruition.

She trusted implicitly her own craft, the puissance and persistence of her glyphs sprawled out in shimmering array all around, and in her own preternatural grace as she stepped and side-stepped and twirled and bent and lunged.

She was the glorious Councillor Radiant, city-blessed Alses – more to the point, she was Lhavit’s lady magesmith – and this commission was within her abilities. A delicious challenge to her skills, yes: sharpness was an elusive thing, a subjective assessment, a dancing delicate thing that to grab hold of was dangerous and would leave her circles, enchantments and possibly sanity in flayed shreds should she be incautious in dealing with the forces that embodied it…but even so, within the bounds of what she knew was possible for herself.

Muscles aching and skin tightened, reddened, inflamed from the corrosive caress of toxic magic, the backlash flare of a hundred strikes, Alses longed, in a distant sort of way, for a break, for a chance to mop her brow and air her sweat-sodden robes, but for the moment it was drowned under the excitement of the moment, under the tuning of the music of the celestial spheres, the twisting and ravelling and changing of the merely mundane into the preternatural.

A bit of discomfort, a touch of pain, all the indignities that came with crafting…they were worth it, a thousand times over or more, for the instant of creative success, when dreams were made flesh in the crucible of a magesmith’s laboratory.

And to the crucible had been brought this glaive.

Pausing for just a moment, hair hanging down in perspiration-drenched rattails between the curves and jags of her crown-of-horns, Alses took a mental half-step backwards and assessed her work thus far.

The glaive was trembling in front of her, glowing with the furious light of fresh djed, its conduits glutted and glowing, coruscating spikes of magic dancing up and down along its length. It was unstable, dangerous, a darkly radiant object explosive with coiled power, barely constrained within its glassy surface, unpurposed, untrained.

This was the most dangerous of times, where a single misstep could reduce a laboratory to a smoking ruin and a magesmith to a smear of raspberry jam on a far wall. But Alses was Alses, full of the natural arrogance of the Ethaefal and the skill of a savant, and the daunting task ahead barely made her blink even as she shifted her grip on the silver hammer and readied herself for another assault.

Skyglass rang its chiming protests as she ran the silver hammer like a lover’s caress up the shaft of the weapon, watching as it left a metaphysical contrail, a temporary conduit sparkling in the air.

Linelayer, that was what she called the technique in the privacy of her own head, the art of making temporary extrinsic linkages, transferring more djed than should have been possible – at least, for as long as those glittering potential pathways existed, which wasn’t long, not in the secure, highly-charged and rarefied atmosphere in which she worked. There were disadvantages to her general method of crafting, it was true; nothing was perfect, but Alses felt that what she traded in speed was more than made up for in that most crucial of aspects: safety.

One body to last the ages gave one a different perspective on risk. Redrawing a phantom line in the air a few times, adding maybe a day or two to final completion – if that – was a small enough price to pay compared to a wound that could, potentially, exist until the sun burned out.

The silver hammer softly kissed the very apex of the glaive’s curving blade and then fell away to Alses’ side, every erg of djed spent in the creation of a glittering pathway that was already glowing brighter and brighter to her aurist’s sight as djed, compressed and pounded and trammelled by the baleful glare of the directing mirrors overhead, burst upwards from the base of the weapon towards its tip, to where she would need it.

Sharpness had to be localised to the blade, after all – a weapon that sliced its owner’s hands to ribbons every time they attempted to wield it would be no use to anyone.

Thus, Alses was weaving constricting bands of antithetic djed around the lower portion of the glaive as she worked, using powerful directional bursts of magic stripped from her ingredients to fuel the upwards tumult even as her circles strained and growled and churned under the lash of her headlong craft.

[Alses]

Beginnings were always the hardest.

There was the preparation of the working space to consider, all that complex glyphery that did, at least, keep her from harm or scathe and made her principal craft that much easier. Following on from that, there had to be breaking and dissolution, a herculean task when considered in the context of skyglass, and one that never got any easier.

Breaking divine self-contentment was never a trivial task, nor something lightly attempted – but this was Lhavit, where weapons and armour and buildings and trinkets and a thousand and one other items were constructed from the stuff, and even where it wasn’t an integral element it was still often present as decoration and adornment. Being unable to work with it would have been crippling, to say the least.

Alses had it almost down to a fine art by now, admittedly, but that didn’t ease the strain on her mind and body that the powerful djed fluxes necessary evoked. By the time she’d finished breaking the glaive to harness yesterday, she’d been all-but dead on her feet, and had floated more than walked out of the laboratory and poured bonelessly down the curve of the stairs, discarding sweat-soaked robes as she went until she pooled, all jellied and amorphous, in the steam-wreathed waters of her bathing chamber.

Hot water from the depths of the earth, brought up in controlled effusions by the artifice of Lhavit’s reimancers and gadgeteers; could there be anything that was a greater hallmark of civilisation? Hot baths at the end of a tiring day, a means to a most glorious end: relaxation, perfect and absolute and just the thing for an exhausted Synaborn sliding inexolerably towards imprisonment.

Whilst the bright star of the nascent artifact gathered strength and luminescence – aoristically-speaking, anyway – Alses had been sinking towards her own nadir and the dark ocean of sleep, the pair of them recovering and strengthening in their own ways.


A


Timestamp: 16th Day of Spring, 514 A.V.

A night of rest and recharge had done them both good, Alses saw as she crossed the threshold into her wonderful, beautiful laboratory. Glowing like a star in the abundant sunlight pouring down from on high, the glaive glittered and glimmered. The environment around it, under the auspices of her glyphic circles in grand and sprawling array, it had calmed and settled, brimming with clear-blue djed, just waiting for her to purpose it to a goal, a task.

When she’d left, last night, it had been tattered and battered, raging in hadean shades against the insults dealt to its numinous fabric, bleeding chaotic djed from a thousand points, shuddering from her onslaught.

Now, though, the patient glyphery she’d so painstakingly toiled over had had bells to work their magic. Calming, reinforcing, eternally patient, patching up the holes that her magecraft had punched through the ambient warp and weft of the world, reassembling the weave with delicate tendrils of magic.

All ready for her to attack once more, to strike and strike and strike and strike until the world bled magic from the air and the glaive bent and broke to her will.

Sharpness, that was localised to the blade itself, a wickedly-curved ribbon of skyglass glowing coldly in the abundant light pouring down through the dome. Alses inspected it carefully, seeing how the glut of djed forced up and into it yesterday had thickened and coarsened the critical fibres and filigree networks with which she would work, destroying and subsuming some of the key structure and weakening the overall whole.

It would be hard work, painstaking labour – but whoever had said magecraft would be easy? Nothing worthwhile…

Alses’ face cracked into a smile at that, even as she sashayed forwards, her auristics drinking in every facet of the half-altered glaive, seeing the constriction and glut her work yesterday had endangered, the dangerous instability that powerful forces, in disequilibrium, evoked.

Yes, today would have to be devoted, whole and entire, to the taming of such things, unless she wanted to see what explosive exothermics on a grand scale would do to her home. Alses wasn’t stupid; she knew that that would be bad at best and catastrophic at worst; magecraft was an unpredictable and foul monster when it went wrong, more often than not.

Best not to make a mistake, then.

Silver gleamed coldly in the warm light as she withdrew it from its little velvet bag, icy and aloof even in the richness of a spring dawn, all superbly-engineered precision and absolute poise, humming calmly in her hand and just waiting to dart down and exert its dancing will on the artifact in front of her. It was…yes, it was a contented hammer, all in all, unlike all the others.

Copper came next, her insurance against error, the pruning-shears and metaphysical secateurs in the toolbox of the magesmith, able to flay open and prune rogue conduits until the whole of it had been carefully shaped to the requirements. Alses knew it was more elegant – the highest compliment – to do it just with the silver; it demonstrated forward planning and a certain essential grace to the craft that not everyone possessed, but whilst she certainly wanted to attempt the procedure with just the one hammer’s plangent notes to guide its formation, she wasn’t fool enough to risk not having a corrective tool close at hand, just in case.

Thus, the laughing jester, the king of disjunction and ruin, the novice’s boon companion and the master’s loyal retainer, glowing bright and burnished in the sunlight, went through the loop of her belt, just where it would naturally fall to hand should she require its services in a hurry.

After all, magecraft could be volatile, and a quick reflexive response in return might well save her thousands of kina, her laboratory and perhaps even her life.

Yes, better to be safe than sorry.

[Alses]

The sound was grating and incessant, unrelenting and at just the wrong pitch for, well, everything. It cut through the air like a buzzsaw, a shrieking protest from normally-uncomplaining skyglass, whining like a child at full bore as Alses bore down with the silver hammer and all her considerable will.

Framing her head like a halo as she worked, bent over the stubborn glaive, there flashed and flared the optic ring and its six beady mirrors, glowing painfully bright with arcane reflections as they ruthlessly snatched at any stray erg of magic and forced it back into the craft or else radiated it out harmlessly as actinic violet light.

The corona wasn’t as impressive as yesterday; long plumes of purple fire didn’t lance out as though seeking to burn through the cables that held the whole of it aloft, rather there was instead a continual rippling glow, a fire seen through water-glass or from a long way away. The djed fluxes she was working with today were lesser, and most of them had already internalised into the matrix of the glaive; the amount of toxic or potentially-toxic, mutagenic, dangerous djed floating around to be mopped up by the glyphs and the mirrors overhead was simply less.

That didn’t mean that she was safe, though, no – far from it, in fact. The lack of immediately-deadly consequences could have made her complacent – and complacency led to errors, and down that merry primrose path was explosions and, worse in some ways, slow and creeping failure.

Shaking her head to rid it of such thoughts, Alses began her work in earnest, skin dancing with the charge from her glyphic circles, all the hairs stood on end in the djedic flux whipping around her, all controlled and contained by her arcane machinery. It was ablating slightly under the stress, but she’d always made sure to use high-quality ingredients in all of her crafting, and that extended to glypher’s paints – they would cope, and cope well, until the end of her commission, and hopefully wouldn’t need a repaint to boot.

The second strike was a skittering burst of djed and sound both, a battering wave of magic that ran up the shaft and into the blade of the glaive, a punishing strafing run that pushed a bow wave of fleeing djed up through the interlinking conduits that formed the shaft of the weapon, a tsunami of external force that swept all before it, focusing ever more power and ever more potential magic into the thin, wicked ribbon of skyglass that was the blade.

Once was enough, Alses decided, examining her work area with curious senses, tasting the electric fizz of magic on her tongue and the dangerous sharpness as a phantom pressure gliding over her body. It was a useful – although imprecise – measure of how far she’d come from the baseline, or rather, it would be once she actually got to the bones of the craft.

The blade glittered like a fractal flower to her sight, a bright knot of complexity in the charged curls and whorls of the high-djed environment, a radiant star in an already-luminous galaxy. To her reaching senses, her powerful magic, its internal structure was laid bare, clear as day.

There were the principal djed conduits, buried deep, running along the core of the weapon, thick as her forearm and brilliantly prismatic, giving off a branching Yggdrasil-esque profusion of secondary, tertiary, quaternary, quinary conduits that filled the confines of the blade with light and a thirsting hunger.

Some of the quality had been lost in her feeding, she saw – but that was expected, some fuzzing and disjunction, the lesser conduits breaking open and spilling magic, obscuring parts of the whole. Those she could patch up quite well, once the great channels had been purposed and garlanded with new pathways, more to her liking.

More to the brief, anyway.

There was a knack to the work; it wasn’t power and might, more gentle requesting, cajoling, propitiation, infinitely more carrot than stick – although when push came to shove, Alses was right there, unflinching, hand almost touching the silver head of her hammer in order to apply more force as she ground the tool into the skyglass. It was never a pleasant experience, brute force; every use of it saw her gritting her teeth against the scringeing wail of protest from the stubborn material and watching with narrowed eyes as the djed flow from the hammer-head became an auger, a drill that abraded – almost physically – the demented resistance, the Gordian knots that rebellious conduits tied themselves into.

If the rebellious stronghold wavered and collapsed, then all to the good; a merry carillon would then ring out, a rapid toccata of djed-light precision injections, barely whispers compared to the grand forces she’d arrayed against one another in the early days, but no less powerful for all that. Needled, poked, cajoled and prodded into a new conformation, she would be one step closer to completion.

Of course, what more usually happened was that the resistance would stiffen, the djed conduits would tense and flex and sing their own sweet counterpoint, reflecting the incoming magic along their crackling chromatic length and dissipating its power into nothing.

That was part of the reason for glutting the artifact-to-be with djed to start with; so much, with nowhere to go, disrupted the usual smug resistance of skyglass, made it easier to work with, caused its conduits to overlap and interact, weakening the whole even if the prismatic glow remained the same.

Long, sweeping strokes now, a staircase of rising notes, a whetstone of harmonic tones and a knife-edge of magic, whittling away at the conduits passing under her hammer’s biting head, a precision lance of argentine power, unmatched in focus and poise.

Thin filaments of djed curled away into the aether as she worked, twisting and snapping and coiling back in on themselves like living things in the throes of agony or ecstasy before the phantom hands of her sigils caught them and pulled, stretching those thin tendrils out into gossamer filigree, unravelling the magic into the ambient with only the faintest suggestive shimmer of purple light.

No time to hear their silent screams, though; she had to sharpen her executioner’s axe on hapless djed ripped free from her ingredients – more and more of them collapsing towards the greypoint as she struck and struck and struck again, her argentine lash insatiable.

A twirling flourish in the toccata tango that had been going on for bells, a rising triple note that shimmered, bell-like, in the air even as the spangled snake of power, fighting to escape, was sucked into the greedy voids of the glowing silver hammer, recharging the executioner’s axe for more of its grisly work, of hewing and shaving and carving and lopping until the blade’s arcane structure bled from a thousand cuts and she had to desist in her assault lest the whole of it be lost.

It was so heady, though, the whole process. Stopping was…difficult, even when the grey poison of tiredness filled every inch of Alses’ body. Such was the curse of talent, alas.

[Alses]

Timestamp: 19th Day of Spring, 514 A.V.

Tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, Alses was bent forward over the blade of the glaive, so close as to be almost touching it, hammer upraised in her left hand as she worked with whispering strikes and tiny djed adjustments to slowly correct the environment to her liking.

Sharper and sharper, she refined the glowing lines and whorls of the djed conduits, straightening them so they ran perfectly parallel in total harmony, their effects synergising sweetly with one another to enhance the thirsting edge of the blade, elevating its cutting potential to something preternatural, something far greater than could otherwise be achieved by any mundane means.

Alses was pulling the possibilities, twisting and ravelling the skeins of magic and reshaping them to her will, altering the fundamental properties of the skyglass she was working with through extensive filigree-work, by the power of her own mind and the indomitable impressions forced into the malleable magic by her tools and her will, forcing complicance on the artifact-to-be with every strike and grinding push, with every scintillating scrap of magic wrested from the ingredients and made to dance to her tune.

The blade, after days of her attentions, was now a far cry from what it had been. Rather than a few dense bundles of conduits, glowing brightly, the whole of it now blazed as a solid, singular mass. A closer look, for anyone with the enhanced eyes to see it or else a magecrafter’s lens of sufficient power, would show many tightly-bound bundles, whorled into helixes and then complexed in a difficult parallel arrangement that pulsed lazily in time with itself. The conduits themselves, too, were shaped, almost bevelled to give them a sharp point along one side, all of them slotting together and synergising, synchronising their effects as magic crackled up and down their length, quick and deadly.

To an aurist, especially one of Alses’ skill, the preternatural honing could easily be felt, almost painful in its phantom pressure, the aura angular and coiled tight with power, ready to spring and slice. Skyglass took a razor-edge in any case, much like volcanic glass, but with added strength, and Alses’ double refinement of that already-formidable property would render the weapon truly deadly.

Images – no, not images, impressions, concepts and hopes that were the remnants of the primary magesmith’s will on the crafting process – unfurled in waves from the aura and the djed which generated it; plate armour crumpling and peeling away under the onslaught, grace and ease and elegance in battle, cleaving through metal and cloth and flesh and bone with the same consummate effortlessness.

However bloody the weapon had been before she got her hands on it, after her enhancement it would doubtless become drenched in short order. Such sharpness was a double-edged sword in some respects; wounding strikes would become killing blows as the blade sheared through everything in its path – at least until its proud and (hopefully) satisfied owner learned to cope.

Alses would have bet good kina, had anyone asked, on the Pavilion going through rather more training dummies than usual for a while.

A slight shake of the head, a realigning of thought processes even as Syna’s light shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. The Noon Rest had come and gone all unnoticed and unheeded whilst locked in the throes of the craft, wrestling with recalcitrant djed conduits, slicing through Gordian knots of resistance through the complex interplay of internal djed interactions, channelling great forces into opposition and then tipping the balance with a feather-light touch of extrinsic djed.

The impressions uncurling from the glaive as a whole now were deadly, the singular buzzsaw-purpose of a weapon distilled and concentrated by her efforts into something that was close to the pure quill of killing purpose. No-one could ever mistake the glaive as a civilian tool, nor with a purpose other than the extinguishing of life.

Perhaps Alses, not being particularly interested in conventional weapons, was being simplistic, but to her a sword had one purpose and one purpose only; the ending of another’s life or the infliction of harm. Whereas a fireball, the archetypal bit of offensive magic, could in the right circumstances be the healer and sustainer of life; it could melt snow for water, provide light in the night and ignite campfires, giving heat and light and more numinous things like hope and safety to those sheltering nearby.

No matter, no matter; this wasn’t for her, after all. Hopefully the Shinya could make better use of it than she could.

Even though the glaive was almost complete, it was still unstable, there were still strengthening connections that Alses had to forge, lest principal conduits come unmoored and whiplash around the internal djedic structure of the blade, antithetic djed spraying out in uncontrolled bursts, slicing through itself and destroying all her hard work – and more – in an orgy of mindless destruction.

Alses had seen it happen before, with poorly-constructed artifacts; a few people had brought her malfunctioning items of one flavour or another since she’d settled in Lhavit, and in almost all of those cases the problem had been an inept or careless magesmith. All she’d been able to advise was that they have them destroyed; malfunctioning artifacts, especially if they had a magical bent – and most of them did, in the city of stars – could be hideous in their consequences.

Failure, if the very foundation of an artifact wasn’t as solid as a rock, was only a matter of time, after all.

Alses had determined early on, as a point of professional pride, that none of her creations would ever fail thanks to carelessness on her part; thus it was the meticulous planning and the redundancies she tried to build into any effect, strengthening its working principles far beyond what would be strictly necessary.

Some would have called it lack of confidence or over-cautiousness; Alses thought it prudent, no more.