Solo Locks and Lockboxes

[Alses]

Timestamp: 8th Day of Autumn, 513 A.V.

Location: Maeki's Studio of Animation

Maeki’s humble abode was welcoming, now, rather than strange, and as Alses turned onto the quiet boulevard that housed it, the sight of the plain door and homemade sign (she’d checked, and it was indeed the fruit of Maeki’s own personal labours) brought a gentle smile to her face.

She was already thinking happily of the warm kitchen – raindrops were drumming incessantly on her crystal crown-of-horns, a gentle patter that looked set in for the duration of the day - and immersing herself into the cozy snugness of Maeki’s home.

After having dodged around the latest piles of…stuff…anyway. Maeki was truly spectacularly untidy, an earnest disciple of the First Available Surface method of filing and storage, a peccadillo that was amusing from a distance and downright irritating close up. Trying to navigate through her house was forever a nightmare; the only reliably clear spots to be found were in the laboratory, the only room, by Maeki’s own admission, that she managed to keep tidy without help.

Alses’ respect for Yoichi Dawn had risen considerably after only a few lessons with the diminutive Animator; she had a truly monumental and never-ending task in front of her, keeping Maeki’s abode at least acceptably untidy rather than an utter and total jumbled mess.

Alses’ shining, water-beaded fingers curled into a fist and rapped smartly on the unassuming door, resulting in the usual cacophony of thuds and muffled curses as the Animator danced around the junk that littered her home, trying to reach the door in a relatively timely manner.

It opened quickly, hauled back by a bundle of energy. Maeki’s tones were bright and sunny, undimmed by the louring clouds and the soft swish of rain as she carolled: “Come in, come in!”

Shaking water from her overrobe and sending drops dancing from her crown-of-horns, Alses stepped into Maeki’s hallway, blinking in the warm, buttery glow of the lamps and hearing the comforting crackle of the kitchen fires, wafting down the hallway.

Small hands helped her off with the heavy overrobe, leaving it to dry over an ornate hook even as she was pulled congenially further into the house. In short order, Alses and Maeki were both comfortably ensconced at the Animator’s kitchen table. A kettle, filled with fresh, cold water was hanging over the fire, warming quickly in the heat of the blaze, and all the ingredients for a really good cup of tea – leaves, teapot, lemons from the Sharai and much else besides – were carefully laid out on the battle-scarred wood, the Animated chains overhead clinking and chinking in mild curiosity at the now-familiar ritual playing out beneath them.

Comfortable silence ruled as the fire licked at the kettle and clouds of steam began to billow from it, producing a sputtering whistle that grew to a shrill piping before Maeki casually unhooked it and poured into an enormous tea-pot, full of fragrant leaves – the finest spiced chai from the Sharai, Alses knew, the perfect pick-me-up for an autumn or winter’s day – although Maeki had once confided that when winter truly began to bite, she added her own twist to cope with the morning chill. Brandy and cinnamon were intimately involved; beyond that, she’d not elaborate, bestowing a blazing, secretive smile that shut down further probing.

Strange Animator.

Still, if her only peccadillo was a slight secretiveness in beverage recipes, Alses would embrace it, and gladly.

With her loving-cup brimming with fresh-made tea, whorls and curls and curlicues of steam unfurling from its surface, unwinding up to the rafters and filling the air with the indefinable smell of the drink, Maeki was at last ready to talk.

Alses relaxed bonelessly into her chair, relying on the twin supports of its back and the heavy table to keep her more-or-less upright. At this point, they weren’t teacher and student, just two people enjoying a little time together.

“So,” Maeki murmured, as a beginning, eyes half-lidded in pleasure as she drank deeply from her cup, hands almost comically small compared to its great circumference. “How did the exams go?” Her eyes twinkled. “Though you probably had a better time of it, whatever happened, than the poor apprentices did.”

Alses snorted inelegantly. “You say that, Maeki, but we’d never examined anyone before! Syna above, we were just as nervous as some of our examinees!” She calmed with a rueful smile. “Ah, but we managed, and well enough at that. Our power lets us recover quite well from any small mishaps without incident, and without alerting the other examiners, more often than not. Certainly we hid a few panicked moments from my students; there’s no way they noticed our momentary fear.”

Maeki grinned at her, inhaling tea for a long, long moment. “You’re getting better at the whole serenity lark,” she observed. “Even if on the inside you’re a bag of nerves, I can’t tell.” A laissez-faire shrug. “Then again, I never was any great shakes at that. Not really necessary for an Animator.”

Alses laughed, lightly. “What about you?” she asked. Maeki took her sweet time answering; she was debating something internally, that much was certain, but whatever it was lost the silent argument, for all Alses received for her question’s trouble was a blinding solar smile, a casual wave and an off-hand murmur of: “A few commissions. More spyeyes for the Dusk Tower – your people are insatiable in that regard – a sealed door for the Bharani Library, with the promise of more to come if this one held – and a few others I can’t talk about right now. Client confidentiality and all.”

Another long, languorous, lingering draught of life-giving liquid, and Maeki’s cheeks dimpled as she smiled and swallowed, reverentially setting aside the loving-cup and steepling her hands in front of her face, lips pensively kissing the very tips as she thought, brow furrowed.

“That’s enough wittering, I think. How do you feel about trying your hand at a lockbox? Nice and simple and nothing we’ve not covered already.”

Alses blinked. “D’you think we’re ready?”

Maeki seesawed a hand a few times, before replying brightly: “Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Either way, a lockbox isn’t exactly expensive, or difficult.” A thought struck her, and the solar beam grew even wider – if such a thing were even possible. “It’ll give you a chance to practice with your circles, too. You being a glypher and all. I’ll still check your work,” she reassured her student, “And if I think you’re better off using my circles then that’s exactly what you’ll do, but it’s high time you started to put the real basics down off your own bat.”

A pause, and then a mischievous grin. “What are you waiting for, Alse?” she asked. “The lab’s all yours. I,” she stressed, with a wink, “Have some more tea to finish. And maybe a cake or two. Be with you in a bit; don’t start Animating until I get there, although y’can glyph to your precious little heart’s content.”

[Alses]

Alses shivered as she stepped over the threshold and into the sanctum of Maeki Cho’s animation lab. Not from awe or trepidation, no, nothing of that nature – just that the place was cold.

Without the insulating layer of clutter and the cheery flames of a merry blaze crackling in a grate, the laboratory was always chilly, and grew ever more so as they lurched inexolerably towards Winter and the snows that forever surged in from the Unforgiving during the iciest of seasons.

Not the best of things, but also something that Alses and Maeki could do very little about, aside from lighting a few braziers and hoping for the best; the lab wasn’t so large that they could afford to sacrifice valuable working space to the generation of heat.

Coats and scarves it was, then, at least until all the crawling around on the floor warmed her up – but that wouldn’t be for a while; Animation was world magic, her passion and her genius, and part of what made her so good at her chosen fields was her precision, her obsessive and perfectionist attention to detail in the planning and conception stages of, well, everything.

So.

Over to the desk, in three brisk strides, absently rubbing at her arms and pressing her fingers together, enjoying the resistance and the fusillade of bony cracks that erupted from deliciously protesting joints. Paper, ink, and treasured quill pen, the slender feather tickling her forearm as she grasped it, ready to write, to draw, to lay down in physical form the results of her cogitation.

Alses closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair, absently tipping it back to rock gently with the rhythmic contraction and relaxation of her leg, most of her mind elsewhere as she cast back into the realm of memory, bringing the manifold concepts of an Animation circle into sharp focus in her mind’s eye.

‘So, Alse…’ she thought, in the ringing cathedral-vault of her mind, serenaded by the bel-canto opera of a thousand fading lives, a beating susurrus that forever dinned on the defences of her mind, always ready and always searching for an opening through which to pour and overwhelm the patchwork creature that asserted tenuous dominance over the most current incarnation of the collective. ‘What do we need to do?’

Out of the mists of memory there rose the recollection she was after, and the accompanying information pouring into her brain at the speed of thought, putting a faint smile on her face as she contemplated the spiralling, shifting glyphs, the long skeins of runes and sigils adapted almost beyond recognition by the specialised requirements of Animation.

Black ink caressed paper as she drew, careful and precise, the fine arc of her hand and the flickering dance of her quill nicely positioned to avoid ink-splatter or smudging as she worked. Rings, concentric rings – no! – her mind suddenly cried, racing down a new track, causing her to discard the whole of what she’d just drawn in a sudden burst of inspiration, fingers scrabbling for a new sheet of paper, more ink, new runes.

Intertwining, interleaving, interlinking skeins of runes, powerful conduits that wove and danced around one another, maintaining their cohesion and separation from the rest of the world by that potent weave, a dissonant warp to the weft of the world and yet one with its own, intrinsic stability…

Alses sighed in academic pleasure, the light of comprehension blazing in her eyes, at the elegance of the idea. No need for arbitrary, arrogant delineating runes, harsh barriers, no – the internal stability of her snaking Yggdrasil-root circle would see to that – at least theoretically.

Alses stood abruptly, rising with a smile and rolling her neck, enjoying the satisfying fusillade fired by her vertebrae, walking around the laboratory and breathing deep, looking out of the window at the less-than-inspiring view, taking a break from cogitation.

It was good to step back, to breathe, to let the world filter in and intrude, a mundane interlude in a world of arcane magic and deep, torturous thought. It helped to keep her centred, localised and sane, an anchor to the addictive ball of mud that was Mizahar.

That was the point, really; too many mages lost themselves in their magic, in the arcane wonders, and forgot about the simpler pleasures of life. Alses, as an Ethaefal with her head permanently half-amongst the stars and ringing with the cadenced hosannas of a language private to the Gods and their Chosen, was – she knew – particularly at risk, forever yearning for things known and lost, a shimmering shadow of which she found again in magic.

Siren-sweet seduction, whenever she dipped into the numinous realm, whispers of power unmatched that could burn across the sky of the world and pierce through to the realm of the gods themselves.

Foolish blandishments, without form or substance, yes, but still…sometimes…they could be very persuasive. She’d always remained strong, however – if she hadn’t, then the Synaborn Ethaefal Alses, Lhavit’s city-blessed lady magesmith and master instructor at the Dusk Tower, would no longer exist.

Or at least, not in a form any of her nearest and dearest – such as they were – would recognize.

Shaking her head to clear it of the introspection – another curse of the Ethaefal – Alses took her diagram in hand and sized up her selected working area, an expanse of roughened creamy tiles a little way away from the primary, usual Animation circles. They gleamed, reassuringly inky, a backup that Alses knew was safe and efficient, having been painstakingly inscribed by Maeki.

No matter how untidy she was in the rest of her life, when it came to Animation the woman was as precise as anyone could wish for – when it mattered, in other words.

‘Now,’ Alses thought, having dug out a pot of glypher’s paint and a brush from one of the cupboards lining the laboratory space itself, admiring the darkly liquid shine on the fibres before setting it, resolutely, to the floor.

Curls and curlicues wrote themselves in fire inside her brain – and then again in rather more mundane glypher’s paint – as she focused and centred herself, drawing out the ever-elusive forms, the shapes, the angles that bent and kinked and coerced the djed of the world to flow as she willed it, as her ideas dictated.

Twisting curls and spires of ink whirled around one another in a richly, dizzyingly complicated dance, sub-arcs and internal twists darting in and out of the overall pattern building up from her flash of inspiration, several intertwining djed rune spines garlanded about with daraq sigils, wrapped in gentle propitiation and quiet repulsion, systems that coerced rather than forced and yet were no less effective for all of that.

A paradigm shift, brought about by Alses’ broader knowledge of glyphery to synergise with the specialised, adapted forms used for Animation, a method that fitted more organically with her own ideas about magic and its essential nature.

[Alses]

Where Maeki’s circles were stark and simple, carefully shorn of whimsy and the untidiness that normally characterised, well, everything about her, Alses’ were decidedly more ornate. Aestheticism and a certain regard for the more baroque pieces of art that Lhavit produced lent themselves better to circles – the artworks specific to a glypher and, in this case, the fusion of an animator and a glypher both.

Alses had a little theory that her circles would work all the better for that essential similarity; her djed would flow more readily, she hypothesised, to a similar place, a similar home that was imprinted with her own ideas and standards, than it would for even Maeki’s more skilled iterations. Given, then, that there was a possibility she could test her putative, shaping creation out, instead of having to rely on Maeki’s work and her expertise, Alses poured herself into the curving arcs of the circles, striving for perfection.

It was a hard-fought war, translating the burning images in her head that flowed down her arm to her fandango-dancing brush into something coherent, something that would work. She was getting better at it, yes, slowly and surely, but there was always some more that could be done – the curve of a line could be more sharply delineated, the curling curlicues could more tightly spiral around one another, that sort of thing, all of it contributing minute amounts to the overall stability and smoothness of the putative circle.

Small individually, of course, almost not worth bothering with, but en masse…well, that was a different story altogether. Glyphing was all about precision and care; there was no sweeter synergy than the complex arcane machinery of a circle all moving in glorious synchrony to the dance steps of Animation, whirling through time and spinning magic in a brilliant contrail, but the price for that, the corollary and the darker side of the curve, was the effect of even one mistake in the shining runic latticework that the discipline could weave.

Weakness spread by its mere existence, even in quietitude, a canker that could lie dormant and undetected, rotting away in the centre of a rising glory of light, flawlessness all around only serving to mask the growing malignancy – until the time came when the setup was relied upon absolutely, tested to the edges of endurance and then…then it would falter and fail, sickly brown disjunction spiralling up to wreak merry hell amongst the failing apparatus, leaving the operator shocked, stunned, injured or worse.

Always depending on the circumstance, of course.

Thus, perfection was the only acceptable counter, and Alses had spent many a long bell, many a tiresome day, learning and relearning the brush strokes of her principal runes and sigils, just so that she could draw them reliably and well, the precise and finicky sequence of movements ingrained deep into her muscular subconscious, so much so that now she barely had to focus on her glyphs – the simple ones used all the time, anyway. The more complex ones, now there she still had difficulty, darkening her cleaning rag to blackness as she refined and modified and changed again and again, in search of elusive perfection that was – she knew – attainable.

It had to be, otherwise the synergy wouldn’t chime as sweetly as it did when all was hale and hearty, invisible mechanisms taking the ambient djed of the world to task, breaking it to harness and directing it to a higher purpose.

Biting her lip, Alses traced out the last few degrees of the last arc, black glypher’s paint dribbling carefully from her brush as she worked, filling in the tracework filigree with stronger, more permanent conduits and pools and sinks and fountains, eddies and curls and mazes and suckling, hungry specialist Animation glyphs that would draw out the essentials of the craft from her and then hurl them into the second of her circles, the magical and mysterious Destination where mirror-images prevailed and unravelled the purposeful flow, discohering and confusing before allowing the djed to slow down, to slowly, slowly integrate and layer itself under gentle pressure into whatever item was to receive the Animation.

This time, that was a lockbox.

Just a simple, ordinary lockbox, the type one could find all over the place in Lhavit, all sturdy wood and recessed hinges, with steel banding for extra strength and a smugly gleaming lock, about to be made that bit more secure by the addition of an admittedly-rudimentary Animation.

The temptation, as ever, was to rush ahead, to throw herself headlong into the heady delight of world magic, of craft and mental effort – Alses had learned, though, slowly and carefully, to suppress that, in favour of meticulous planning and organization.

Magecraft was too expensive an undertaking to squander any opportunity to practise it, to get better – perhaps when she had enough kina to afford the occasional mistake, she’d experiment to see what raw, unbridled enthusiasm and bright, untempered inspiration could bring, but for now…caution had to rule the day.

The same applied for Animation, even if mistakes in its execution didn’t quite approach the sickening costs of a disaster in magecrafting. Regardless, Alses wasn’t about to cost her mentor too much in wasted materials and time, thank you very much.

Her solution?

Glyphery.

Not much, true, just a few glyphs of focus and calming, of perception and serenity, all the things she’d need in spades when the actual turmoil of the craft arose to consume her. The runes, the sigils, the dancing threads of Pathing and Relay, concepts writ large on fire-opal skin, they were dark black marks that, whilst beautiful, were temporary – had to be temporary.

And difficult to do, too – especially since she had to glyph herself. Using a silver-backed mirror and a steady hand to paint the intricate curls and filigree networks of her runic sigils was no mean task especially since she had to hold the essential ideas implicit in each rune at the forefront of her brain whilst she was working, lest it degenerate into pretty but worthless temporary tattoos, an artwork mundane, rather than arcane, spiralling across her face and spilling down her arms.

‘Focus, Alse,’ she thought, breathing deeply and evenly, filling her nostrils with the sharp, biting scent of the paint, glistening wetly on the end of her brush as it neared her face. She had to fight, as ever, to keep from flinching and shrinking away at its touch, its glutinous, fibre-shot touch that always sent goosebumps racing across her flesh, shivers up and down her spine, no matter the temperature of the day.

It was always easier after that first shock, and so again it proved this time, a pause to get over the alien feeling of viscous liquid and sable-hair brushes on her shining skin and then she was able to focus, truly focus, on the task at hand, the creation of supporting and helping glyphs that would assist in the clarity of the mind, the steadiness of thought and the singularity of purpose that was so essential for this sort of work.

Perhaps the glyphs were a little bit of a crutch, on occasion, but Alses defended herself in the echoing, murmuring susurrus that was her head by the defence of starting with a handicap to serenity; the senseless whispering of a thousand lives past and gone that forever sang in the vaults of her brain.

[Alses]

What was serenity to her?

That was the question, something to be wrestled with – and quickly, before her swirling brush caught up with her racing thoughts, before that tickling, dancing demon finished the final curl of the Yaq runes that formed the near-ouroboros skeleton framework of the sigils that would soon dance on her cheeks.

It was all very well knowing the curving structure of the runes to come, but without that essential conceptual understanding of exactly what she was painting onto her own skin, it was all just so much mundane ink, without any flash or flare or taste of cinnamon on the tongue, nothing that would whisper magic into her skin or sing her djed, her mind, into gentle obedience.

Her mind’s eye skipped over several – to call them images would be doing their rich complexity a disservice; call them impressions instead, yes, that was a better term, memories and concepts fused together and frozen in the amber of her conscious mind, ready to be called upon in a moment, should she have need of calmness and quietude in the maelstrom that was Mizahar.

She often needed it, in truth, a quiet space in the middle of the tumult that always raged inside her head – few people could grasp just how hard it was, sometimes, to stay as one person, to focus on the present and the immediate future, rather than to allow herself to get lost amongst a tide of memories, other times, other places.

Other lives.

Alses focused, grim and determined as only an Ethaefal in full possession of her faculties could be, on the calm, the quiet oases in her mind, scented with books and jasmine, lit by dying embers or cocooned in infinite light, letting those selfsame impressions, all that they stood for to her, all that they meant, roll away down her hand and into the developing glyphs that careful application of glypher’s paint was creating all over her face.

One last flourishing curl, a final sinkhole-dot of ink in her flesh, subtly altering the ambient djed all around her head, easily visible in a calmed master aurist’s sight – just like Maeki’s aura, come to think of it, bright sunshine, honeysuckles and butter, for some reason, approaching stealthily along the corridor.

Or what the diminutive Animator thought was stealthy, anyway; she’d never quite got comfortable with just how much Alses, with surpassing mastery over her magic, could sense; it was laughably easy to penetrate the walls of Maeki’s abode – even had they been skyglass, she’d have pierced the smugly static, obfuscating veils with but a flicker of irritated thought, and that was the secret and hidden power of the master aurist.

It had to be applied intelligently, though, which was what Alses strove for. It was all very well and good to be a master aurist, to read everyone and everything, but better by far to keep the true depths of power and skill under wraps, the more impressive the occasional reveal.

One should never reveal all of one’s cards, after all. ‘Especially if one of them gives us great insight into people,’ she added, in the humming privacy of her mind.

Thus, she let Maeki sneak up on her, revelled in the secret pleasure of the feel of her mischievous grin even before it formed, and was careful not to let her lack of surprise show.

“Got your face on?” the Animator quipped, craning to see around Alses’ hunched-forward form.

Alses turned as quickly as she dared – not too soon, or Maeki might suspect something was amiss. She arched an eyebrow at her mentor. “You nearly scared us out of our skin,” she intoned, voice calm and detached – the glyphs taking hold, doubtless, gently helping to mute and attenuate emotion – at least for a time.

Not for very long, never for very long, the nova charivari of her soul not standing for such external impositions, rallying its forces of Disquiet and Discord to assail whatever bounds she might erect to constrain them.

Yes, soon enough glypher’s paint would ablate from her skin, the fine designs would grow simpler and simpler, losing effectiveness and subtlety as they went until at the end they gave up altogether, leaving her free and unblemished and a cacophonous patchwork person once again, the default state to which she always returned, sooner or later.

For now, though, she had the diamond-hard serenity of an Ethaefal who had accepted their lot on Mizahar, the outer shield of Aysel and Talora and the other old guard of the city. It helped in the magic, especially in Animation, a discipline with which she was still notoriously bad.

Well, no. Not quite bad, exactly…just inexperienced.

‘It would be logical to reply to Maeki’s remark,’ the dispassionate part of her brain – quite large, now, under the influence of her glyphs – prompted; she opened her mouth and replied, obedient to the dictates of logic, the sovereign paradigm of interaction.

“As you can see, we have,” she settled on; it seemed to satisfy – and amuse – Maeki, who reached out one close-trimmed fingernail to lightly trace the filigree fantasia in the air, nail just brushing the very edge of Alses’ skin, drawing goosebumps and suppressed shivers in its wake.

“Zintila above, I swear they get more complicated each time you do this. Let’s have a look, hmm?”

Obediently, Alses rose and exposed the circles she’d been working on, eager – in a distant sort of way – for Maeki’s verdict, her assessment of its strengths and flaws.

“It’s not an art installation, you know,” Maeki observed, pensive, absently biting her lower lip as her eyes danced around the intricate inked lines. “But-”

This annoyed Alses; she registered it dully, the full impact blunted. “Why can it not be both?” she asked, some of the usual courtesy also lost – she simply didn’t care, not at the moment. She was Ethaefal, unchanging and eternal; it made no logical sense to care about flicker-lives who were here in an instant and gone in the blink of an eye.

Maeki blinked, perhaps not expecting the blunt riposte, or perhaps simply surprised at Alses’ sudden defence. Either way, she cleared her throat and acquiesced the validity of the point. “No reason. As I was going to say, inky-features, the…the style, the execution…it fits you. I look at that and I know you did it. No-one else would be able to make serenity and calm and all the other things you need for a good Animation circle look so…” she cast around for a word in vain for a few moments before settling, slightly exasperatedly, on: “…twiddly.”

The word – and her instructor’s expression – brought an involuntary smile to Alses’ face, and one bloomed in reciprocity on Maeki’s, a sweet little harmony in the middle of the Animation laboratory.

[Alses]

“Do you think they’ll work?” Alses asked, the crucial question.

In reply, Maeki pursed her lips, fingers idly drumming as her mind worked. “I think so, from a first look.” She didn’t sound convinced though, squinting down at the intricate swirls of glypher’s paint laid out before her.

“Hmm.”

Still more scrutiny followed, Maeki’s sharp intellect probing and pushing at the glyphs sprawled out in miles of ink on the floor. “If I didn’t like you as much as I do, I’d say go for it,” she pronounced, at length. “It’ll probably be okay, after all, I’m just being paranoid, likely as not, but I’d prefer it if you used my circles this time round.”

Perhaps she saw the mounting disappointment in Alses’ eyes – she’d worked so hard to make them perfect – because Maeki quickly offered:

“I’ll make time to go over your effort with a fine tooth-comb in the next few days, all right? If I don’t find anything awful then the next Animation you do for me will be with your own fancy circles.” A pause, and then further: “I know it’s a bugger,” came the quiet observation. “I just want to be sure. I’m no great shakes at cleaning,” she laughed, lightening the tone with some slightly macabre humour, “And scraping bits of you off my walls isn’t something I plan to do, or to make Yoichi do, for that matter.”

“Delightful,” Alses murmured, still rather miffed – but she accepted the judgement of the more experienced Animator. Best not to rock the boat, or to ruin herself through whatever antithetical reactions a runaway Animation circle could unleash. A few moments’ thought conjured up a whole host of inventively appalling ways of death and/or dismemberment and, through those visions, considerably cooled her ardour for her own circles.

When Maeki agreed her circles were acceptable, then she could practice to her heart’s content – her mind was full of ideas, concepts, things to try – but all of it needing just that little bit more experience, a touch more skill.

For now, lockboxes, using her mentor’s circles as a crutch.

With a sigh, Alses lowered herself down onto the rough tile, limber and graceful as only an Ethaefal could be, making sure the tyrian silk of her robes didn’t catch or snag or obscure any of the clean, simple lines of Maeki’s creations.

It was a source of perennial wonder to her that her mentor’s Animations were so clean, so neat, so precise and so efficient, everything they were directed with a wonderful and flowing economy of activity to the achievement of a goal. It was natural and unforced, not like the magic of Alses’ first instructor in auristics, no: this had been achieved through endless practice and gentle refinement of a particular personal style until it reached the pinnacle of achievement. All the care and attention, all the meticulous method that world magic needed were expressed in Maeki’s works, though – Alses privately suspected – at the cost of more mundane tidiness.

No matter, no matter.

Maeki’s solar aura, butter and honeysuckle-sweetness on the tongue, wrapped her, enveloped her in its warm and waiting embrace as she began to relax inside the circles, the reactive glyphs recognizing her presence – insofar as such things did, anyway, the prickling hum of their djed against her own a welcoming and familiar feeling.

Well-used to Maeki’s circles now, it was the work of but a few chimes to synchronise herself with their intricacies, to match the subtlest vibrations of both strains of djed, self and non-self, until they mixed and commingled free and untrammelled.

Deep breaths, in and out, smooth and sure, cargoed with fading cinnamon from the old magics writ large all around the place, all the subtle, pervasive cues and tells from her auristics, forever feeding more knowledge about the world straight into her ever-hungry brain. Maeki was somewhere behind her, a tighter whorl in the warp and weft of the numinous world in which Alses forever swum, a glowing star that sang its own sweet melody to senses with the capacity to listen, an uncertain warmth washing against her skin like the tide. There was conflict and grief somewhere in Maeki, buried deep, and Alses had yet to ferret the secret out. She was going carefully; no need to shatter a budding friendship or a fine arrangement with blunt questions, no matter how well-intentioned.

Best that Maeki thought she had her secret, that Alses didn’t see below the sunny outer layers she wore like armour.

‘Focus, Alse!’ her mind snapped, bringing her back to the task at hand from the easy, easy distraction of contemplation, rumination and conjecture, all things that came so very, very naturally to an Ethaefal.

The circles began to glow slightly around her as she began to loose her hold on her own djed; the enchantments graven into the shapes helped, vampiric almost, suckling greedily at the energy radiating off her still form as she worked and struggled to control the flow and the essential information carried along with the djed itself.

It was hard work – the pulling tug, insistent and undeniable, of Maeki’s circles was destabilising her djed as she tried to twist and braid it into more stable conduits, breaking them up with over-eager reaching fingers into splintering fibres and filaments that rotted even as they grew towards the glyphs that would properly stabilise and spin them out. It didn’t help that her mental state wasn’t as calm as it could have been, either – Maeki noticed quickly, when the glow of radiating, toxic djed began to make itself known as an unhealthy violet shimmer on the edges of sight, and said something.

Unfortunately, Alses was too deep to decipher what, precisely, was said, too engrossed in the constant tug-of-war with the greedy Animation circles to hear. That said, she could guess the diminutive Animator’s advice: ‘Calm down.’

She tried, but the calming influence of whatever she attempted was more often than not stymied by the frustration of it all not working, of the too-greedy circles pulling at her magic before she had time to build up anything stable, anything lasting, anything that she could work with, manipulate, control and adjust to match the demands of the specialised glyphs.

With an irritated, discombobulated harrumph of displaced air, a disgruntled Ethaefal rose out of the circle, putting herself beyond the grasping and greedy tendrils of magic that the apparatus wove. The half-there violet shimmer of decaying toxic djed, giving up its energy and purpose in undirected fans of glowing light and random mutation – thankfully not strong enough to cause much beyond fine, superficial pitting of the stonework – faltered, flared and then finally died away to nothing, leaving Alses and Maeki looking ruefully on at a now quiet, calm set of sigils.

‘World magic is our forte,’ Alses thought moodily. ‘I should not be having such difficulty with it!’

[Alses]

That, of course, was part of the problem; the more she fretted, the worse it became, the more she failed the more she fretted, the worse it became…a vicious cycle, a positive feedback loop that was destructive rather than constructive.

Thus it was that Maeki orchestrated a short break, commanded her student to go forth and take her mind off the initial failure, to go and clear her head in one of the city’s many small parks or – in Maeki’s words: “Wherever it is you go to get your horned head put on a bit straighter.”

That was the baths, but anything approximating a proper soak would have swallowed most of the remaining daylight bells. The Sun Temple, her other refuge within the larger sanctuary that was Lhavit in general, was too far away, as was the Temple of Time – which in any case was more likely than not to leave her confused and bewildered and disoriented, the consequences of powerful auristics and a patchwork soul in a place where time was, for want of a better word, unstuck.

A walk in the park it had been, then, dragonsbreath rolling out in clouds as she strode along paths of crushed skyglass and stone, between tall stands of evergreen rhododendrons and other plants whose names still escaped her. It hadn’t done much for her mood, in truth – only stoked the fires burning beneath her skin and made her more determined than ever to succeed. Especially since this was something she instinctively felt she should be good at.

It irked her, rankled, sat poorly with her that she was still a novice in the craft, that even the simplest of things that Maeki could accomplish with a brief stint in the circle and no forward planning at all took her…considerably longer, and only tended to work when she had copious notes to work from.

It was uncomfortably like being a novice aurist again, bumbling through the magic with all the subtlety of an angry Okomo in a china shop.

Still, at least her auristics was of some use, tracking the djed by her own senses rather than having to infer its progress and use educated guesswork. Precision, that was key in world magic, and estimation could ruin a piece of work in an instant.

Back to the circles.

A fingerprick later, a swipe of thick bronze blood over the connection glyph, waking the circle from quiescence once more as she settled herself inside its confines, and she was trying again. Opposite her, in the Destination circle, the lockbox gleamed, smugly inert.

For now.

This time, she was a little more ready for the sucking pull of the circle as it awoke. She’d divined the location of the extraction runes, knew exactly where the strongest suction would come from and had prepared accordingly, building up greater reservoirs of her djed reserves just below the surface in those regions, ready to twist the rising golden conduits with deft mental fingers so the fine filaments spun together into stronger thread and then ropes of magic. Braided rope would be stronger – Alses hoped – than the filigree filaments her auristics worked with, in the main, better able to resist the pull of the circles as they drew something of her essential self out and into the pattern, a pale copy of her soul to grant to the lockbox and so give it a shadow of life.

A long way from making intricate Animated toys or clanking, imposing war-golems, a few stories of which Maeki had shared in a few of their kitchen-table sessions, but it was still - to her as a novice - exacting and demanding and interesting work, a stepping stone to greater things, in the fullness of time.

Bright-burning djedic fire, sparkling in her Sight, snapped and raced and danced between the linked sigils of the circles, her own essential nature drawn up out of the blood she’d sacrificed for the connection to the circles, niggling away in the back of her brain. The beautiful, prismatic flame, glowing with the rainbowed shadow of a thousand fading lives and her own patchwork complexity, spun and whirled in midair to her auristic Sight, dancing a perpetual toccata between the specialised runes of the circles, becoming more and more purified with every pass: the venting runes that were Yovinkus Wotch’s genius peeling off more and more of the extraneous djed until only the bright and perfect core was left.

The joy of Maeki’s circles – and by extension, Alses’ own, if she ever actually got to work with them – was that they also drew on the Animator themselves, capturing the radiant aura that boiled off the soul inside the Source circle and incorporating it into the weave, strengthening the essential character of the extracted djed and making it easier and easier, as time wore on and more self-djed was added into the whirling ring, for the venting glyphs to ablate away all traces of the blood that had provided the initial impetus, the source djed from which magic and mastery could be coaxed.

With time and skill, of course, as with everything else.

The basics, Alses knew; those were, as with most disciplines of world magic, static and unchanging once learnt. It was their application, the elegance of their implementation and the efficiency with which the effects could be coaxed, cajoled and in some cases imposed upon the object of enchantment that separated the masters from the apprentices.

With practice came experience, came familiarity, came complexity.

Came confidence and experimentation, too, the irrepressible urge to dabble that seemed common to almost all world mages the world over, the striving desire to better a technique, a process, a discipline.

There was, after all, nothing sweeter than the sight and sound of arcane machinery moving and working in perfect, ordered harmony, absolute synchrony and synergy, elegant and efficient as nothing else in all of Mizahar could be, the engineering all made of ephemeral djed and only lightly kissing the mundane world – but ah, where it touched then and there were miracles made.

Animations of surpassing skill and complexity, Magecrafted artifacts of vast power and might, others, all beautiful to behold, all possible with sufficient dedication, time and resources.

But.

All that was in the future, numinous and obscured. For now, something simpler: a lockbox, for the burgeoning middle classes of the city who wanted to keep their valuables a little more secure than what could be offered by a stout key and strong box alone.

Alses had turned and turned the box over and over in her hands before even starting, getting a feel for its construction, its size and weight and purpose. Thick hardwood was banded with steel strips for extra strength, the hinges were sturdy tempered steel, recessed deep into the wood to make it harder to destroy them, and the lock was a hefty thing set dead-centre, smugly self-assured and broadcasting: ‘Don’t even think about it’ to the world.

Now to make it even better.

[Alses]

Rainbowed light and magic – the same thing, in Alses’ augmented eyes – whirled and danced in sweet harmony around her, every scrap of the mundane and the leaden earth purged from the scintillating shimmer.

Djed curled amorously around the circle, building up speed and purity, resonating and ringing like a carillon of Temple bells as like called to like, the essential radiation of her own soul, the aura she made dance to her tune from tick to tick interacting, synergising with the extracted ring.

The two djed streams wanted to sing and dance together, Alses realised – all the circles were now doing was giving them a bit of a push, a touch of encouragement, lowering the incorporation threshold so it happened without any further conscious thought, freeing the Animator up to remain calm or direct the flow once the final glyphic barrier dissolved, to do whatever was needed to further the Animation’s progress.

Almost as if the circles had been waiting for that realisation, the characteristic snap of a glyphic rune breaking tore through the otherwise-static, serene milieu that were the runic arrays carefully carved into the floor. A convulsant change ripped across the whole assemblage, a pulse of power evoked from the Source circle that accelerated the djed within its grasp – under Alses’ direction, always under her direction, holding onto the reins and controlling the reaction with grim determination, absolutely focused on keeping every scrap of her self-djed together and cohesive.

The accumulated magic whiplashed around the ring one final time before the runes took decisive fire, a sharp snap that cinched tight around the whirling snake and hurled it, like a javelin, down the Pathway freshly opened and into the open, receptive, enticing arms of the specialised Destination circle. Destination circles took the incoming high-powered djed and slowly span it down over chimes and bells, bleeding off just enough energy and magic with each pass through sifting and sorting and injecting Animation rune states to cause a gentle perfusion of the currently-inAnimate object.

This, then, was the process by which life came to lifelessness, the generation of a bitter spark that could – with care, attention and planning – germinate into the copied mote of a soul that was a Life Principle, the starting point from which all Animation built upon.

The trick was to regulate the flow, to squeeze and massage and manipulate the surging power uncoiling from Source to Destination so that it span a littoral latticework of light – and thus djed – around the object of enchantment. Frail filigreework, it had to be, in order to prevent any stabilisation of the djed filaments that would interfere with the absorption process.

Ah!

There it was, the frailest first wisp of what could become life, drifting out from her filigree network as the whole of it decayed, curling down and in under the influence of the runic circles, collecting and coalescing in the ambient and pooling in the deeper reaches of the lockbox, settling into the very core of it all.

It was easier than she’d expected, at least initially, and the reason why evaded and puzzled her for long chimes as magic whorled and danced around the accreting proto-soul blazing in her mind’s eye. Eventually, though, the cause came to her, a bolt of illuminating light that threatened to disrupt her concentration. The majority of the lockbox’s components were organic; they’d once been alive, they somehow knew - at the most fundamental of levels - something of life, a residual memory of the djed moving inside them that made it that much easier to start the flow again.

Magic hummed and snapped in the air, making the atmosphere thick and heavy, tingling with a charge that crackled with every motion. Alses was in the epicentre, shielded by the circles and the barriers their deep-graven lines carved through the djedic map of the room. Maeki, on the other hand, sitting at her desk opposite, was exposed to the force of her apprentice’s efforts.

Even with a novice – especially with a novice, in fact, uncomfortable with the mechanisms of action of the runic circles and with poor control of the extraneous djed – it couldn’t be comfortable for her, but she bore it – and the boredom – with equanimity.

Which was nice.

With a sigh, Alses slipped back into deep concentration, returning her attention to the accreting nucleus of the Life Principle. Wielding the djed in the Destination circle as best she could – an odd feeling, using the link obtained by blood sacrifice, uncomfortable and strange to her brain still – she painted more and more layers around the shimmering, dancing, still unstable core, strengthening it with pressure and weight and delicate, lacy interconnections that would eventually fuse to become stronger and stronger.

It was rather like how Tian J’net made her philtered sweeties, painting a solid core with layer after layer of concentrated sugar and philtre, letting each one crystallise and settle before painting another.

Gritting her teeth, Alses took fresh hold of the djed in her circles and bore down with it, willing the crystallisation to occur faster, for the layers of her djed to adhere more strongly, the accumulations building rapidly – in tune with her own racing heart – towards a critical mass and that telltale rainbowed shimmer that signalled the stabilisation of the Life Principle – and a welcome break for Alses.

Had that been it? Just there? A flashing burst of broad-spectrum light, just on the edge of sight? A rippling wave of sparkling radiance?

No, too brief, too unstable – she needed something more sustained. It was a start, though – it gave the straining, scrambling Ethaefal something to cling to, a hint that she was on the right track with her interventions.

She applied herself with new vigour to the task in hand, bearing down, the lance and hammer of the djed under her control applied to the coalescing ball of magic, stabilising it and forcing it into the lockbox proper, seeding it into the very core of the object, where it would serve out its purpose to the end of days.

No kill-word for this Animation; only its wholesale destruction would suffice to eliminate her work, once it was completed.

[Alses]

At the last, at least half a bell after she’d seen the first glimmerings of coalescence, the Soulcore and Life Principle stabilised, its weight and pull on the world exerting enough force to keep it fed and satiated, differentiated from the rest of the planet.

Magic danced after magic, twisting and jinking and curling around the now-stable core as Alses pushed onwards with her craft, laying the groundwork for further, higher cogitation – such as it was, with such a minor creation, anyway. Around that central core, she had to build up the Persona layer, powerful directives encoded there in every erg of djed, absolutely inviolable commands that, for a novice Animator, were the most complex part of the whole affair.

Much of the issue, in truth, came from the sheer amount of planning necessary. Maeki never seemed to need it, so habituated to her work and the discipline, knowing exactly what would be needed to effect the Animation required, but Alses found it incredibly difficult. So much to keep track of, so many variables to account for – and that was before she’d even crafted the astral body that would allow the Animation to do something useful.

For the lockbox, she needed some method of letting it recognize the key – which she had close at hand, binding a tight skein of djed close around its simple form, a tight and kinking whorl of magic that would ring and resonate with the lockbox itself at the deepest of levels. That was what would isolate and lock the Animation to respond to that key, no other – not even if someone made a perfect copy.

As well as simply how to recognize the tingling burr of the proper key, the exact shape of it and the way it would fit in the lock, a simple little addition to the Animation would let it snap lockpicks in its inorganic maw; teaching it about such tools – a selection of which Maeki had shown Alses several days ago, a collection of interestingly-twisted bits of metal, all hooks and odd springs and kinked-in spires that, with ingenuity and patience and a criminal mind, someone could coax and cajole normal locks into opening – would be next on the agenda. How to respond to the invasion, the intrusion, too, that was important – how far to let the probing metal in before hurling the lock-tumblers down to trap and shatter the pick, then how to rotate and shuffle the rings to further confuse any subsequent probing and to get rid of any metal shards still inside.

Maeki had mentioned, too, that some of the lockboxes had a shrieker attached; long strings in a tension assembly – much like the ones used to give golems voices – behind a reinforced grille that would scream piercingly whenever there was any tampering, loud enough to rouse guards and/or owners to investigate the sound. This particular one, though, was a simpler creation without said device, and therefore within Alses’ own meagre skills, suitable – in Maeki’s estimation, anyway – for her to produce without making a complete hash of it.

‘First things first, Alse,’ her thoughts murmured quietly, the cacophony in her head silenced by glyphs and concentration. ‘What a lockbox is.’ Yes, that was critical; no sense in making an Animation if it had no clue what it was, what its body was for and what its purpose was to be. Basic and fundamental, yes, but often quite complex – to convey security, for instance, there had to be an understanding of insecurity, for the concept of ownership and thievery, there had to be stealing and honour, the balances of each with the forming Animation firmly and rigidly placed in a category, with a raying exemplar of responses pouring out from each node point.

A vast and branching tree, that was how Alses thought of it, many inputs converging and commingling, cancelling and synergising in a subconscious sort of way until a conscious course of action was indicated – snapping picks or jamming the lock or opening soft and sweet as a sigh.

Her mind’s eye ghosted over the contours of the lockbox, tasting the grain of the wood and the hard coldness of the iron hinges and banding, familiarising herself with every facet of it. The iron had a harsh tang in her mouth, the wood rough against her skin, all of it now imbued with a faint, rich shimmer of potential life.

Doors and locks, safety and sanctuary strongholds – the glittering spires of Lhavit – rolled out of Alses’ aura as she focused, impressing those memories, those feelings, those concepts, crucially, into the hungry Animation circles and the whirling ouroboros of djed evoked from her potent blood. Refinement and channelling followed, carefully paring out any extraneous references, whittling the welter of images and ideas down to the most key components, stripping out stray thoughts or whimsical considerations in order that the Animation be fully focused on its singular purpose.

For more advanced golemry, Maeki had said that a slightly wandering mind was a positive advantage when it came to crafting the driving soul; it helped make things more human, conveyed an organic association network – whatever that was – to the thought processes of the Animation and helped it pass as human. For simpler items, though, it was a decided disadvantage, and so Alses, in the centre of the circles, strove mightily to prune and carve the whirling ring of malleable djed into the perfect likeness for her purposes.

It was difficult and demanding; she was still unused to the strange link that the blood sacrifice granted her, and working with Maeki’s circles, whilst probably safer than using her own – she trusted the expert Animator’s judgement – introduced another, subtler layer of difficulty, an elusive shimmer of discordancy, the inevitable result of a different person than intended using them.

It was unavoidable, but still something of a nuisance as she grappled and fought with the slippery silver fish of djed, always trying to dance out of her tenuous grip and transfer things other than what she wanted to the accreting Animation.

Her head was throbbing and humming, her brain feeling as though it were painfully pressing on the bones of her skull by the time she released the last wave of repurposed djed into the whirling ring. Her skin felt hot and tight, stretched and straining from all the djed passing through it, leaving her body through every pore and orifice that it could, forced out in great torrents by Alses’ cerebral efforts and quickly caught up by the hungry, suckling tendrils of world djed that the circle runes conjured.

She took a step back, then, mentally speaking, evaluating her work thus far, taking hold of her reserves and gently propitiating them into life. The world exploded into colour and light and sound and touch, all of her senses ballooning outward on a wave of magic, seeking the truth of things, the obscured secrets forever whispered into the world by the souls of everything – even ones so mean as to be in stones and dust.

Anything magical stood out like a shout in a cathedral; it was easy to hone her seeking power, to refine it into a lance that pierced everything in its path to illuminate the arcane processes of integration and assimilation going on inside the Soulcore she’d meticulously crafted. Soon, Alses’ power surrounded the budding Animation, a numinous cloak or ephemeral sphere that greedily drank in every impression boiling off its surface, a soul in flux as its genesis unfolded, slowly and painfully, under her guidance.

‘Now,’ her thoughts whispered, drifting on skeins of silver magic around the Animation. ‘Let me see what you’ve absorbed. Let me see what we’ve managed to impress upon you, you beautiful thing…’

[Alses]

It was gratifying in the extreme to read the simple mirror of her soul and see reflected there impressions of bastions and fortresses, vaults and secure doors, chests with locks so good that they could defeat any thief – save perhaps Time – and so on, a weltering roar of impressions that shouted safety and security out into the aether. Behind those, underlying them, giving them weight and substance and meaning, were their antitheses, their opposites that were necessary for the understanding of the binary states the Animation would exist in.

There was no place, and, given Alses’ limited talents, little scope for the grayness of thought processes, the understanding of emotion and moral nuance that characterised more advanced Animations. Then again, for something so simple and binary as a lockbox, with an inside and an outside, a singular action of opening and closing, a binary switch of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ in terms of keys…anything more advanced would be a waste, and perhaps even a hindrance. This Animation wouldn’t be intelligent enough to be fooled – or at least, that was the plan, cooked up over tea and biscuits in Maeki’s kitchen in response to a recent spate of orders.

Perhaps people were getting jittery over their money and their valuables, perhaps they were hoping to protect precious things from the disorganized aftermath of disasters like the earthquake, perhaps – well, it didn’t matter. Orders were pouring in and Maeki’s small, unassuming business was booming quietly. And that meant there was lots of opportunity for Alses to help out in whatever small ways she could manage.

Resettling herself into the embrace of the circles, Alses pricked her finger with a practiced motion and daubed the drop of thick bronze blood onto the runes – feeling as well as seeing the ignition of djed and the sudden snap of a restored connection, one that had decayed whilst she took her ease and explored the djed-nous of the Animation, its footprint in the world and – when it came to more advanced examples of the craft, anyway – something of its dreams.

Silver djed left her body in droves as she exhaled, long and slow, argentine skeins of magic peeling away into the aether, ever-so-slightly tinted with her rich aura’s shades. No time to admire the glitter and shimmy of expired air, though; the construction of an astral body was her task, the last thing before she could regard the Animation as complete.

There were three main points of action on a standard lockbox, according to Maeki – the left and right hinges and the lock, to be precise. The hinges themselves were fairly straightforward; the arcane equivalent of powerful musculature had to be woven and pressed tight around the metal and linked into far-distant points on the lid and box body both, to provide the considerable leverage necessary to hold the lockbox shut against all attempts to rip it open through brute force, whilst the lock had to account for each individual tumbler, ring and spring, letting them work together harmoniously to yield on application of the right key, to lock up on presentation of a copy or to vengefully smash probing lockpicks, depending on circumstance.

So.

What to work on first?

‘The hinges,’ Alses decided, after a few moment’s thought, directing her attention to the unassuming bits of metal that connected lid to body. Heavily recessed into the grain of the wood, the hinges were designed to be strong and to resist great impacts that would ordinarily have shattered them and laid bare the valuable contents. Bulky and hefty, they were also the pivot point essential to allow the lockbox to actually open. Thus, they were vital, and the Animated connections were absolutely necessary to get right if the whole was to actually function.

Back at home, she’d planned out a raying fan of ethereal connections, djedic anchoring points spreading out from the centrepiece of the hinges until the lid was covered by a fine meshwork of numinous muscles, pulley-points that the Animation could use to anchor or open, resisting or giving way as its rigid intelligence instructed.

First things first, then.

It was a complex, multi-stage process; first, by gentle propitiation and a few more forceful mental pushes – each of which hammered a spike of cruel headache into her forebrain – Alses induced a subtle twisting, the beginning of a whirling whirlpool that would, she hoped, draw out a funnel of djed.

From that whirling vortex, the plan and the hope was that she could carve off long strands of djed, spinning and braiding and working the whipping magic into a thousand thousand branching, bundled filaments to use as the basis for her astral body, for the phantom muscles that would allow for the motor functions of the chest.

In the shallows of the real world, perspiration beaded her furrowed brow, and dark stains began to spread imperceptibly on her billowed robes, the physical evidence of the mental struggle ongoing as she wrestled with the still-unfamiliar magic.

Absently, she bit her lip as she struggled, hurling a wedge of djed into the whirling maelstrom erupting from the surface of the Soulcore, splitting the funnel into two parts before ablating away. She had to be quick and sure – several times the developing bifurcation collapsed when she lost control of it, putting her right back to the start, just a little more tired, a little more frazzled and a little less focused than she had been.

Infuriatingly.

Once the whole thing was established, it would become much easier, just a matter of weaving and plaiting the evoked djed strands, weaving them together and reattaching them to a distant part of the developing astral body, the meshwork of rippling djed that matched and followed the physical body itself, but the difficulty lay in actually getting there.

Gritted teeth, sweat pouring down in thin rivulets, spreading dark blotches marring the tyrian silk of her robes, all of them showed the strain she was under to make the whole of it work. With a hoarse, triumphant cry, she slid the wedge of djed into position for the umpteenth time and took firm grasp of the uncurling ribbon of spinning djed dislodged from the main mass, with a flash of inspiration using the pressure of the Destination circle runes to slow it down, to make it less slippery and easier to work with.

Mentally threading her needle with a thousand filaments of magic, she set to with a will, locking strand after strand around distant networks of djed, plunging the gold-glittering threads in and around the steadier, calmer, more static representations of the wood of the lid, tying them around again and again and again until the gossamer-thin fibres twisted together into larger and larger fibres, building up strength and stability with every curling layer, sinking hooks deeper and deeper into the basic astral body.

That was vital; the extra network, the djed fibres that would let the Animation exert force on the lid – in either direction – had to be anchored most securely or otherwise they would weaken over time and then snap, rendering the whole thing expensively useless. Maeki had given her several lectures – and indeed practical demonstrations – on the exact procedure of anchoring, fracturing the end of the filaments into a branching filigree that interwove and interdigitated with the main body, forming an impenetrable mass that would be impossible, under normal circumstances, to dislodge.

Things were, thankfully, now progressing well.

[Alses]

If she’d thought that the hinges were difficult, then the lock itself was absolute murder. ‘How in Syna’s name am I supposed to deal with the springs?’ came the wild thought as she grappled with the device. The complex mechanism of gears and rings and falling tumblers confused her probing perception as she tried to make sense of it all, auristics quirking and twisting amongst the intricate little pieces of metal.

Then, once she’d managed to build up a picture of its confusing interior, the tiny filaments of djed she was attempting to work with either slipped out of her grasp or frayed into uselessness under the slightest extra pressure. And as for the concentric rings of magic that delineated the anchoring discs, the less said the better.

But it had to be done. She had to be able to massage and manipulate the djed of the lock to strengthen it, to give it purpose and a certain amount of justified revenge should someone try and tamper with the thing.

Alses gritted her teeth – tasting metal; she’d bitten through her lip – and set to work, before stopping as a thought struck her.

‘Maybe I’m being a little harsh,’ she thought, a subtle and insidious concern that insistently repeated itself, a lone voice amongst the many that just would not shut up until she gave the matter some serious thought.

Perhaps a gentler, more hands-off approach might be better; the lock knew what it was, after all – maybe increasing the djed flux to it would bulk up that portion of the forming astral body, make it easier for her to work with.

Buoyed by this possible avenue of success – it was worth a try, after all - Alses let the gathered magic, drawn in long skeins from the circling ouroboros that was now much diminished, roll away from her pinpoint control. It wasn’t a vengeful tsunami, no, moderated and calmed by her influence and the Animation runes both into a gentle wave of perfusing djed that rippled and coalesced and chimed with the essential djed of the lockbox itself.

The harmony was sweeter than honey-wine to her watching senses, and to her delight she saw accretion, thickening and strengthening of extraneous fibre and underlying body both, a bulk-up to a level she, as a mere novice, might be able to work with.

Freshly energized by that small success, encouraged and with fresh supplies of determination coursing through her veins, Alses took a deep breath and plunged forward into the delicate and precise world of Animation once more.

She wove curl after curl of plaited djed around the springs that held the tumblers in the second part of the lock, giving them extra strength that the Animation could call on in times of need, enough to give the descending metal the power to smash a slender lockpick to smithereens – or at least to bend it out of all recognition, anyway.

The rotating discs that comprised the first part of the lock, those she coiled more and more magic around, strengthening them, letting the Animation confuse and confound any key – even one cut to specification but without the subtle kink of alteration she’d introduced to the paired key – but the correct one, continually changing and altering the internal configuration so that even the best skeleton key would be useless.

That was the hope, anyway, as the last of the evoked magic from her circling ouroboros fell away into the lockbox and her work, so far as she could tell, was finally, blessedly complete.

Muscles screamed in agony as she moved for the first time in…bells, surely, slowly uncurling with a grimace of pain graven into every line of her face, lips curled back from her teeth in a silent snarl. She staggered slightly, trying to compensate with muscles that had been bunched in one position for far too long.

Maeki, bless every fibre of her being, came forward then, all concern, and tiny hands helped Alses to steady herself. When her muscles stopped shrieking quite so loudly, after a chime or so, she felt herself able to stagger out of the circle and collapse bonelessly into a chair, thoughtfully placed right in the path of sunlight streaming in through the windows.

Her skin tingled gratefully in the photon rain, greedily drinking in every scrap of light, feasting on the djed pouring down from Syna on high until she began to feel a little more…normal. The gentle heat and the magic both served to calm her trembles and unknot the tension in her muscles, and after a few chimes she felt ready, at the last, to observe her Animation with Maeki and discuss the whole thing.

“How is it?” she asked, eyes still closed, almost afraid to look at the whole thing.

There was silence for a while, the clunk of metal and the oiled squeak of hinges, and then Maeki replied: “Well, it works, Alses. You’ve done well; you should be proud of yourself!”

A wide, white smile split Alses’ face from ear to ear, the mirror of the one on Maeki’s. The lockbox – the fully-functional Animated lockbox, her Animated lockbox – sat on a table between them, smugly complete and working, ready to go off to its client and net Maeki a nice profit.

“How are you feeling?” came Maeki’s question. “You looked like week-old bread when you’d finished.”

That brought a chuckle out of her. “Not too bad, actually,” Alses replied, gingerly turning her head and then gaining confidence as the spike of a headache failed to materialise, having been banished by the thunderous roar of the sunshine. She turned to look, critically, at the fruits of her labour.

“Although…”

Maeki cocked her head, quizzical. “Although what? I can’t find fault with this construct, you know.”

Alses frowned. “It’s not that…” she leaned forward in the chair and examined the box more closely. “It’s just…this could be better, couldn’t it?”

Maeki blinked. “What do you mean? Perfectly good lockbox, exactly to standard spec.”

“Yes, but what’s to stop me taking a hammer to the top of it? Or…or…or smashing the lock out?”

The diminutive Animator pursed her lips and hunched forward. “Well, mostly the fact that this is meant to be inside someone’s house, and trying to smash it open would be bloody noisy. Yes?”

“So what’s to stop someone taking the whole box to somewhere safe and breaking it open there?”

Maeki frowned and sighed, dissatisfied suddenly. “Well, do you have any better ideas? I just buy the lockboxes from Edward Lucis, or I Animate the ones the clients bring to me. Tell you what, if you really think you can do any better I’ll write to Lucis and Lucis and see if they have an appointment free. Meanwhile…” the Animator waved a sheaf of papers, hitherto unnoticed, in the air, a wide smile on her face.

“Meanwhile, we’ve got lots more Animation to do! Nice and simple stuff, too, the sort of thing you can help with – this is a big order for Animated mousetraps. Got to protect what’s left of our harvest after that disaster on the Sharai, after all.” A brief pause. “Will you be able to help in a few days?” she asked.

Alses nodded – opportunities such as this didn’t come along every day, after all. “Of course, Maeki,” she replied. “I’ll look forward to it.”

END