The Blood-Compass

[Hadrian]

45th Spring, 510 A.V. Day One Stonemiller had assigned him Laboratory Number Four, and now he was finally ready to set it up to his purposes. Standing in the doorway with his satchel overstuffed and cutting into his shoulder, he looked around the room in the dim glow of the ghost light. Most of the morning had been spent in fruitless meditation in an attempt to pull himself together. Crafting in djed was neither easy nor simple. Closing his eyes, he willed his vision to shift, and when he opened them, he could see the djed. The room was fairly clean. Whoever had used it previously had been good enough to clear the energy signatures, but the heavy warding on the room had made the energies sluggish and stale. Hadrian took a deep breath, formed a prayer to Eyris in his mind, and stepped across the warding and into the room. Pulling large, ten-day candles out of his bag one at a time, he placed them in sconces around the room. White for energy, black for binding, purple for hidden knowledge, red for blood. He lit a taper from the ghost light and lit the larger candles one by one. As the white candle caught fire, he saw how the djed responded, and it followed him around the room, attracted to the fire, increased by the fire. The next step was to lay out sheets of parchment covered in glyphs with all his notes. There was a circle of white marble around the pedestal, a physical anchor for another level of warding, and there he began to mark with grease pencil the blankness with various runes and sigils, the required geometry of which he had already calculated and notated on those papers. Gebo and Othila, Partnership and Separation. Ehwaz and Raido, Movement and Journey. Each rune was set in key places in the circle, linked and modified by more refined glyphs. When he was done, there was order, but he felt a growing headache coming on and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. But he shot his enhanced gaze up at the pedestal and saw with satisfaction that the djed there was moving in an ordered fashion, that movement dictated by nature, but guided by him. He stood up, pulled a little stand out of his satchel and placed it on the pedestal. Then, a black velvet pouch. Untying the silk ribbon, he pulled forth what would become Hrair's blood-compass. It was as he had described to Hrair and to Professor Stonemiller and even to a few others: a small sphere of quartz crystal shot through with one rutile. This was placed upon the stand. As he watched, the djed began to explore this new focus. The circle of glyphs altered the djed within it, and all that remained for him that day was to alter the focus stone. For the most part, the djed would do the rest. Hadrian took out a small silver hammer and tapped the sphere three times. Tap. Tap. Tap. It would have looked like nothing at all to onlookers, perhaps even silly. But the djed within the circle shuddered with each tap, and then slowly swirled in upon the focus stone. The young enchanter watched, smiling and pleased, as the beginning was made correctly. "Until tomorrow, then," he said, collecting his things and leaving the crystal sphere and the djed to get to know one another while he sought food before taking notes, and then getting some sleep. It was going to be a long, delicate ten days.

[Hadrian]

46th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Two As soon as he opened the door to Laboratory Number Four, his vision was prepared to incorporate the djed fields to the normal visual spectrum. He was relieved to find things much as he had left them. The ten day candles had burned down one tenth of the way, but still they burned. Not a single rabid monkey had broken in and smudged his carefully laid glyph-circle. The quartz sphere remained where he had placed it in its stand on the pedestal, the focus of the entire room. Now it truly glowed to his magesight. This was no blazing sun of captured djed, but it was being caressed by the living energy, and responding in kind. If his glyphs were laid out correctly, then it was beginning to phase slightly out of sync with the material world, which would help him imbue it with the necessary reagent--Hrair's blood--and teach it the tricks it needed to know. In truth, his mastery of auristics was yet that of a novice and so he could only see and understand limited things. The greater his skill in crafting grew, the more he realized that he would need auristics to gauge his own works in progress. He wondered for a moment how his reactions to recent acquaintances would have been different if he had been a master at reading auras: Koh, Isikais, even Hrair. Sighing, Hadrian shook off the random thoughts. Yesterday, he had barely made it home. The extended use of his sight had worn him out, and he was going to have to keep on task if he didn't want to risk overgiving. But he smiled as he looked over the runes and glyphs marking the marble circle around the pedestal. It seemed like the djed was following the lines he had drawn, crystallizing his intentions, altering reality. Satisfied that things were progressing properly, he took out the silver hammer from the previous day and rang the crystal sphere with it, watching the djed ripple in response once, twice, thrice. Next, he pulled out an equally delicate electrum hammer and rang the sphere three times. No longer did it sound quite like metal on crystal, but resonated differently. Though he had bought himself a flute and begun to read heavily in the arena of music theory, he was not sure if the tones were 'right' for what he wanted. But one thing was certain: the quartz orb was changing moment by moment from what it was toward what he wanted it to be. The quality of the djed within the gylph-circle seemed to change, though he could not have fully described that change. Suffice it to say he would journal about it; Stonemiller was a stickler for journaling. It did help to put ideas down on paper, Hadrian would be the first to admit. "Well, that's it for now," he decided, putting the second hammer away. Relaxing his eyes, his vision came back to normal, blink by blink, and the blinking continued as he cursed softly, wondering at how quickly the intense use of magesight wearied him. With any luck, all this use would increase his skill and stamina with personal magics like that. With luck. He turned to leave his nascent creation, back to the real world.

[Hadrian]

47th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Three It had already begun, the slow burning terror of overgiving that had plagued him with previous works. Normally he would practice his auristics here and there in short bursts to see how people were different from each other, and occasionally fixating on one person for longer in order to deepen his understanding of what the patterns of energy were telling him. In a process of enchantment such as this, however, his Sight was invoked from the moment he walked in almost until he left the room each day. Though his Sight was not refined, he needed to use whatever gauge he had to be sure that everything was running along smoothly. As today, he looked curiously at the ten-day candles, burning ever lower. Normally in a room with this much djed hard at work, the candles would burn down faster, but these had glyphs etched into them to maintain their burn. "Eyris, guide my works," he murmured, the closest thing to a true prayer he ever got. Upon closer examination, the energies within the gylph-circle were 'heating up'. To the sensitive eye, much was visible. He saw the general shape of the djed within the crystal sphere changing into a new order as prescribed by the pattern of glyphs and the process of increased resonance that he was here today to continue. Its frequency was rising at his command, and phasing partly into some other plane of existence, its boundaries blurring that he might penetrate it with his will and bind it to his purpose. Out came his hammers again, this time the first two joined by a third. He tapped thrice with the silver hammer, thrice with the hammer of electrum, and then, when the orb's energy sang audibly in tune with his ministrations, he rapped it three times with a small golden hammer. The song's voice trebled with a new harmonic and the djed within the glyph-circle began to shine with a new sort of light to his altered Sight. He watched everything, noted everything. His journal at home was already filling up with minutiae that he would study before writing his term paper, and study again before attempting more ambitious works. So each day he tried to memorize as much as his mind could hold before he codified his impressions and little epiphanies in parchment and ink. Once satisfied that he wasn't going to remember anything else without making room for new memories by letting go of others, he began to put his hammers away. Silver, electrum, gold. As the metals climbed the alchemical scale, so too did the resonance of his crystal ball. Readjusting the strap of his satchel, he gave the room another once-over before retreating for the door. Maintaining his Sight, he watched the slight shifts the djed made in his passing, his own presence and that of his djed affecting everything around him just as the old wizard Schrödinger had written. As he passed out of the room, the wards diminished the effects of his djed upon that within the room, though the wards were semi-permeable as containing djed completely took it out of the local djed-ecology, which could lead to problems. Like monsters. When he closed the door behind him, the wards pulsed and formed an unbroken barrier. With the door open, they were not banished, but the open doorway became a thinner spot through which one could pass without harm. Blinking away his Sight, he rubbed his eyes, which felt sandy. His shoulders slumped a bit and he started the long shuffle home. Notes must be taken before rest. And miles to go before he slept.

[Hadrian]

48th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Four Hadrian's jaw cracked as he yawned in front of the door to Laboratory Number Four. He had been sleeping and following the prescribed regimen of food and drink to support his body and mind during this process. There were supposedly magecrafters who worked without any personal magics at all, and Hadrian had completed several smaller works without any magical aid in order to determine logically where he was making errors rather than intuitively or based on more profound observation, but now he was operating at a level where his expertise didn't require taking the long route for everything. He blinked until his eyes included the auristic spectrum, and then opened the door to his laboratory, walking in and grinning immediately upon seeing the steadily pulsing glow of his prototype. Forcing himself to go through the motions, he checked the candles, the energy of the glyph-ring and worked inward toward the actual object undergoing change. He peeled each layer away like onionskins, and found that the quartz sphere was ready for the reagent. Today his satchel was all odd angles with metal rods poking out. He took them out and gradually constructed a stand set up outside the glyph-ring, but reaching over the quartz sphere. Last, he took a bundle of fabric out of his satchel and unwrapped it, revealing a small flask covered in glyphs. This he upended and placed into the stand. Concentrating, he rubbed his finger over a mesh disc beneath the flask until res began collecting. When there was what he deemed enough, he stopped and unscrewed the cap of the flask. Nothing happened, but he was unperturbed. The fabric was folded, then rolled, and stowed in his satchel again along with the cap of the flask. He traced his finger along the glyphs on the flask, remembering their names and what they meant, and how they would keep the fluid from coagulating, and how they would prepare the fluid for combination with the res. Kneeling outside the glyph-circle, he began to meditate on the contraption in front of him, bringing his breathing and his thoughts into control, trying to reach a sort of contemplative equilibrium where his continued magesight wouldn't wear him down completely as he waited. Time passed. Finally, the viscous redness gathered critical mass from the mouth of the flask and a drop of blood dropped. When it landed on the res, it began to interact, to react, to change. The res, gel-like in texture, allowed the blood to finally seep through it and after the minutes stretched out, the drop gathered at the bottom of the mesh disc and finally dropped again. When it hit, the drop passed through the edge of the quartz as if it weren't there, but it didn't fall out the other side. It was absorbed. The pulse of the djed within took on the faintest of pink tinges. Hadrian smiled. He stood up and walked out, blinking away his augmented sight as soon as the door was closed. Despite the sudden wave of exhaustion, he smiled. It was working! Now he just had to keep himself together long enough to journal and eat. Then and only then could he pass out.

[Hadrian]

49th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Five Upon waking, Hadrian repeated his morning ritual for the ten-day enchantment ritual. He squeezed the juice of a lemon into hot water and drank it down as if it were his morning tea, then poured the extra hot water into some cold lentils cooked the night before, mashing them up for ease of digestion. His system didn't need to be working too hard on the regular things, but rather to conserve energy for the demands of his work. Of course, he cheated and stirred some honey into the lentils because one liked a touch of sweetness in the morning. It would wake him up long enough for the long-term energy of the lentils to kick in. His needs taken care of, he hurried to the College of Magic and to his dear Laboratory Number Four for yet another day of fun with enchantment. At the door, as usual, he blinked until he called up this auristic vision. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed to come more easily each day. Though he was a bit worn out by excessive use, he thought he picked up on more nuances and details, but time would tell on that. Though the entire ward around the laboratory was semi-permeable, the open door was, of course, the most permeable part. Still, he could feel its energies tingling along his nerves, especially with his senses augmented. He was pleased to note that the orb was glowing a deeper shade of pink to his eyes than it had the day before with that first drop of Hrair's blood infused within it. Only then and only incidentally did he check the candles, almost halfway burned down. The stand with the flask was as h had left it, but he hurried forward to check the res level on the mesh disc. There was no danger of it running out yet, but he would have to replenish the res each day of this phase of the enchantment or else the blood would merely spatter across the sphere, or those bits of it still in phase with the world. He rubbed his fingers together, calling the res into being with slightly more ease than the day previous. This endeavor was good practice in many disciplines: reimancy for the res; mathematics and glyphing for the preparation of the flask and the candles and the glyph-circle; auristics to keep an eye on things. Waiting for the latest drop of blood to run the gauntlet of accumulated res, he then applied the gelatinous djed to the disc of mesh to help phase the blood into something the resonating sphere could encompass within itself. That done, he really had nothing to do until the next day, but he stayed to watch a few more drops of blood fall from the glyph-riddled flask to the mesh disc slathered with res and thence into the glowing orb of crystal and djed. But he finally tore his gaze away, reminding himself that he wouldn't appreciate his dallying when the cost of maintaining his auristic sight caught up with him on the other side of the door. And so he gave the room another critique before leaving it again for the day. The door closed, his sight returned to more mundane vision, he suddenly felt the weight of his work again. Still, there was the threat of ebullience beneath that, too. It was working. It was really working. After five more days of work and most likely a fully day of sleep, he would be able to present Hrair with the working blood-compass and the man would be that much closer to finding his sister. For the time being, however, he started back for home. He wasn't going to get anything done on campus for the next few days. But at home he could enjoy the regimen to keep up his strength: meat, legumes, nuts, and dark red berries. As if to underline the need, his stomach began to growl fiercely. Nodding to himself -- or to his stomach -- with a faint smile, he continued on in earnest. He might even get some reading done tonight, or copying for Professor Stonemiller. Ah, the student's life.

[Hadrian]

50th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Six It took longer than usual to initiate his auristic senses than normal. He had seen himself in a glass earlier and noticed that his pupils were a bit dilated, and so he was going to be as expedient as possible with his duties, and then he was going to meditate, try to shore up his reserves of djed, welcome more of it into his own personal pool. Some might scoff at these signs of minor overgiving, but his meager personal magics were hard won. He was no natural at it. World magic was where he shone. Everything else required effort and repetition, and the degree of sophistication to which he was trying to push himself was, truly, beyond him at this point. To make up for a lack of skill, he poured more of himself into maintaining his senses so he could look longer and harder. The wards of the laboratory glimmered in a faint patina overlaying physical reality. He opened the door and walked in. The deeper red glow coming from the pedestal made him smile, only slightly careworn. The price in this case was worth the effort. His term project. Hrair's hope. His sister's rescue, even. He liked to think Caelum would approve, because there was a good soul buried in the grumpiness. They all did the best work they could with the tools they were given. Shaking off the wandering of his thoughts, he closed the door behind him, resealing the wards, and looked around. The candles were burning steadily, their glyphs preventing the high-charged djed from burning them down too fast. The djed around the glyph-circle maintained that order he had imposed on it, and now, after days of observance, he began to see more clearly how the glyphs he had drawn were affected, how the geometry of his placement balanced the system. He watched a drop of blood form from the mouth of the flask and drop to the disc of mesh and res, then watched the blood react with the res and form into a new drop on the other side to drop and disappear into the pulsing sphere of quartz and blood. As soon as it did so, he rubbed his forefinger and thumb together, willing undifferentiated res to manifest there and then resupplying the mesh disc with it. By tomorrow, the blood would have been used up, the glyphs maintaining its temperature and viscosity allowed to rest. Retreating from the glyph-circle, he knelt to observe, to meditate upon the miracle of magic existing and evolving before his very eyes. The blood-compass, he noted, had taken to pulsing with the beat of the distant heart from which it had come. It was a strange sort of intimacy to meditate in that room, glowing with candlelight and blood magic, Hrair's heartbeat made visible. It was like meditating in his chest cavity, and the lull of the pulse nearly put Hadrian to sleep like a fetus dreaming to the beat of its mother's drum. "Tomorrow, then," he said as he came out of his trance, a quiet smile on his face as he stood up. "Tomorrow, something new." A new phase in the project, and they were in the home stretch. Backing his way toward the door so he could observe as much as possible, he finally felt the door behind him and opened it, watching the faint ripple through the wards surrounding him and then feeling the faint suction along his skin as he passed through. Another ripple shimmered before him as he closed the door, and then he closed his eyes, leaning forward against it to breathe and release his Sight. He wondered if this was some faint glimmer, a raindrop compared to an ocean, of what it felt like to create, how whatever demiurge had fashioned this world out of nothingness felt. It was heady stuff. That too would be noted in his journal when he returned home to update his notes on the blood-compass.

[Hadrian]

51st Spring, 510 A.V. Day Seven Hadrian was suspended. His home was not silent, but the muted noises from the world outside only skittered across the surface of his awareness. He did not reach out for them, but let them rest upon him like trembling butterflies before taking flight and leaving him. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold. Repeat. Repeat. Though his slitted eyes were focused on a candle, it was only a focus, a step toward soft focus, and then letting go of focus. His senses were not shut off, nor shut out, but unremarked upon. He could even sense the flow of djed into and out of his orbit, his reserves filling up again more quickly because he had opened himself to the influx. Then, gently, he came awake again, feeling invigorated rather than drained as he had when last he left the laboratory. He broke his fast with the hot lemon water before moving on to more substantial foods, cleaned and dressed himself properly before going out. The colors seemed more vibrant with his reserves replenished, the air more full of light. He even smiled and whistled as he walked to campus. Of course, he hushed himself before walking inside and finding his old, familiar Laboratory Number Four. Shifting his vision to the higher spectrum was almost effortless now after frequent repetition, and he let himself in to survey his work. The door opened on the steady pulse of a blood red glow. His mind started running ahead of him, noticing the change in the geometry of the light as the ten-day candles burned ever lower. Pausing to notice how that changed the flow of the djed in the room from that first day when the candles helped to energize the torpid lines of djed in the room. "Hm," he grunted, planning to make a note in his journal so he could come back to study those very effects for future fine-tuning. Oil lamps might be more efficient for more delicate enchanting processes. Stepping up closer to the pedestal, he waited and watched for several minutes, but when no further blood dripped out of the flask, he knew that it had all been incorporated into the sphere. The flask was recapped and put into his satchel, then the mesh disc removed from the apparatus. He was pleased to see that no blood and no res remained upon it, all used. So he wrapped it in a bit of silk and put it away. It would still need cleansing. Then the apparatus itself was taken apart and stowed in his satchel, exchanged rather for a prism on a silver chain, which he carefully positioned above the sphere to watch how it reacted to the flows of energy around it. Nodding finally, he put that away and pulled out a little hammer with a crystal head. Once, twice, thrice, he gently tapped the sphere, and the resonance was something completely new, harmonics layered one atop the other. He smiled happily, with a rush of excitement. It was working. No hitches so far. No explosions. No death. No jail. With that smile on his face, he put his hammer away and started for the door to take the apparatus back to storage. Once he passed through the ward and closed the door, he dropped his Sight. He breathed in and breathed out, and for the first time during this project, he didn't leave the laboratory feeling like a wrung out dish towel.

[Hadrian]

52nd Spring, 510 A.V. Day Eight In the home stretch now, Hadrian was almost too excited to meditate before going to the laboratory, but he steeled himself to it. He had chosen a life of discipline; one couldn't reach the heights that Areesa Tallshade did without discipline, and even she didn't create her masterpieces until she was fifty-five or so. Discipline, time, and hard work. His mind reached stillness finally. He knelt in it on the floor of his cottage until his tension released and he was able to allow the ambient djed to well into him, refilling his reserves. Once he was fairly humming with energy, he let his conscious mind take over again. All smiles, he stood up, energized, to break his fast with the healthy foods he had been consuming of late. Then he slung his satchel, filled near to bursting today, over his shoulder and lumbered out the door. When he arrived at his laboratory, his shoulder was aching and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his pale face. Everything looked correct, both on the mundane spectrum and on the energetic level. He took out his crystal hammer and set his satchel down out of the way. What should have been a ping-ping-ping of crystal against crystal emanated almost in bell tones. He wanted to bring the wooden flute in that he had bought while escorting Shakah around town, but he wasn't sure if the vibrations of sound would alter the djed too much and cause problems. So far nothing had gone wrong; his painstaking set up had paid off. That saved him from having to try to fix things while they were happening, or running off to Professor Stonemiller for help. He put his hammer aside and started pulling things out of his satchel: a mortar and pestle, a small burner, a bottle of cooking oil, packets of herbs, and the like. For the first time since this trial began, he let his Sight drop so he could focus on philtering. He wasn't a skilled enough practitioner of the art to philter the specially charged finishing water, but he had a charged lodestone from Stonemiller and a recipe for an herbal mix that would augment it, promising a much lower chance of the blood-compass shattering when it was brought fully back into phase with reality. Adding pinches of things one after the other--clove, chimney soot, dried cinquefoil, dried mugwort, dried thistle, dried vervain, cochineal, gentian root--he ground them all together until they were nearly powdered and set that aside. He then carefully lit the oil stove and held his hands over the small cauldron, pushing liquid res out of his hands that hissed, already real water, when it touched the hot metal. Created water would be purer than anything he would get from a pump in Zeltiva. After pouring in the powdered herbs, he sat and watched it simmer for about a quarter bell, then put out the flame and dropped the lodestone into the cauldron. What he wanted was a nap, but he forced himself to settle in to meditate because he would have to use his auristic vision to be sure that everything was going to plan before he left for the day. He guided his meditation by counting every second until a bell had passed and was surprised to see how easily he had been able to alter his consciousness that way. Perhaps he should constantly have been magecrafting something or other; it forced him to put all his skills to constant testing. The galvanized metal pail that he had carried everything in and then stuffed into his satchel became the next focus of his. He held his hands over it just as he had over the smaller cauldron and conjured clear, pure water, more and more until the pail was half full. Then he carefully fished the lodestone out of the philter and cleaned it off before dropping it into the pail to charge the water. He covered the pail with a wide swatch of silk and gathered his things together. Blinking, he brought his sight up to the correct spectrum and smiled. Everything was still good. His work finished, he left everything to set so he could go do the dishes.

[Hadrian]

53rd Spring, 510 A.V. Day Nine Hadrian nearly stumbled over himself in his excitement to get into the laboratory and see that all was still going to plan. He engaged his auristic vision before opening the door, feeling the familiar tug of the warding as he passed through its membrane of djed. Within, the laboratory had the look of a magical womb, the energies turgid and pumping, heavy and sleepy. Everything was seen as if through a fog of blood-red mist. Upon closer examination, the sphere of crystal could have been a pigeon-blood ruby enclosing a tiny sun. It blazed with ordered energy and Hadrian felt a warm glow of satisfaction in his stomach. He had made this. "Are you ready, my darling?" he cooed to the fiery orb. Later, in hindsight, he would probably be glad nobody could hear him talk to his creation. He took the familiar crystal hammer out of his satchel and chimed it thrice against the blood-compass. The complementary sounds reverberated through the room, in his blood and in his bones. The tones rose in what he now understood to be a major chord. He had played it carefully, albeit inexpertly upon the wooden flute he had recently purchased. The crystal on crystal version was perfect. It was complete. The hammer was replaced by a set of silver tongs with which he retrieved the enchanted gem from the pedestal, carefully placing it into the galvanized metal pail full of charged water. It glowed there within the pail, and he could see the lodestone siphon off some of the excess energy that the blood-compass emitted. Hadrian sat back on his heels, letting out a quavering sigh. It was done. He had done it. By tomorrow the enchantment would be set and he could deliver it to Stonemiller for evaluation and then to Hrair for activation. He stood up and turned around. The ten-day candles had burned low, and if he timed it right, they would not expire until he removed the blood-compass from the pail. Knowing that he would not want to do anything on the morrow but exult and celebrate, he carefully removed the glyph-circle with a cloth. The grease-pencil markings erased easily, leaving no trace. He marveled at how powerful and how fleeting they were. Everything was tidied up so that the next day, he could drop the spent candles into a bag, take the pail, and go. Grinning, he bowed to the pail that sat on the floor, red djed emanating. Then he turned to go, blinking away his Sight and walking out the door. He only hoped he would be able to sleep so he could fully enjoy the next day.

[Hadrian]

54th Spring, 510 A.V. Day Ten Hadrian was actually whistling a happy tune when he pushed open the door to Laboratory Number 4. He blinked his eyes once and when he opened them, he could see the energies juxtaposed over the everyday reality. The djed was reality too, but the human eye wasn't built to see it, or it was but the human mind was socialized to dismiss it and so once children got old enough to speak sensibly, most of them no longer saw it. It was no longer red like the inside of an eyelid while gazing blindly toward the sun. Everything had calmed down. A faint white glow emanated from the galvanized pail, and the ten-day candles were guttering fitfully. The glyphs that had protected them from the excited djed had done their jobs, keeping the djed from burning them down too quickly. He crouched down over the pail, smiling down much like a father greeting his firstborn for the first time. His silver tongs reached into the specially charged water and drew forth the finished blood-compass. Dropping it into his other hand, he dried it off with a scrap of raw silk before admiring it in the flickering candlelight. "Hullo, my lovely," he murmured. "Let's show you to Stonemiller and then take you to Hrair so you can get to work, shall we?" The blood-compass, which now looked no different from when he started, a quartz sphere clear save for a single rutile, was dropped into a simple black velvet pouch and tucked into his satchel along with the silk rag and the tongs. He hefted the pail in one hand and began collecting his ten-day candles, blowing each one out and then setting them to float on the spent water of the pail. In the darkness, he saw by magesight, walking to the door. With a last smile, he stepped out through the door and turned to trail a simple glyph upon the paling of the ward. It was taught to all students before they utilized the university laboratories, and before his eyes, the ward began to pulse slighting, much like the breathing of a room-sized beast. The djed flowed in and out as the wards cycled it through, dispersing any of the order Hadrian's work had imposed upon the djed and keeping whatever remained from stagnating. The djed, after all, was life. His work complete, he went to put the equipment away and find Stonemiller, who would be expecting him. END