Solo An Adamant Portal: Part Two

[Alses]

e

Timestamp: 7th Day of Summer, 514 A.V.
Location: Elysium Hall, Magecrafting Laboratory

A few days later, and the door had healed from the thousand injuries her initial assault had caused. No longer did painful violet light bleed from her laboratory with a sullen glare every five ticks, no – instead, the cool glow of skyglass had replaced the baleful light. The itching rush of djed acting against djed had faded, too, all of it now contained and corralled by her glyphs.

Some had evaporated under the strain, the paint and the meaning behind the paint sublimating under the strain of the craft, but that was all right, that was expected, even. Alses’ circles were always overdesigned for just such an eventuality – or rather, for just such a certainty. Even stone or metal, the most durable glyphing substances, couldn’t be expected to hold for a long time against the titanic forces unleashed by a magesmith, still less paint – even philtered paint, formulated to withstand djedic insults.

Thus, redundancy piled on redundancy, or else a continual programme of redrawing, was the order of the day for any magesmith who valued their life, their property, and their sanity.

The day was warm – golden sunlight pouring through the many windows of Elysium Hall – and likely to get warmer still, Alses thought with a wry smile, contemplating the labours that lay ahead. A tight little shiver of anticipation thrilled up her spine and a curious buoyant lightness rose in her stomach as she set her hands to the ornate brass handles of the laboratory doors and pushed them wide.

A wave of pungent air rushed out and over her, her sensitive nose burning from the sudden melange to which it was subjected. The rest of her senses, too, got a reflected version of the shock as her greedy auristics fed every scrap of information straight into her brain. There was the sharp tang of metal from her tools, for instance, bitingly metallic on the tongue, the cold brightness of diamonds glittering from her reagent circles, and much else besides. Over – or perhaps under – it all there came the utterly alien sick-sweetness of the sword, writhing with unknown magics she barely understood.

Unfortunately, Bharani had been of little help in understanding the higher reaches of the craft; Lhavit had never had a very strong magecrafting tradition, and nor, it seemed, had much survived from the Suvan Empire which had once held sway over the region. She was flying blind, in a sense, trusting to her own skill and intelligence and a certain amount of exploratory intuition (always tempered with planning, or so Alses told herself) to see her through.

Somehow, whatever her misgivings before she began, it all seemed to melt away when she grasped her hammers and her vices, set the clamps and the lenses and lost herself in the sheer joy of creation.

All of which meant she had to be extra-vigilant in the carving of her glyphs, in the planning and execution of the circles that would protect her and the wider world and – in some cases – protect the nascent artifact from itself, from the instabilities an open djed matrix induced. Much like a wounded animal, it could lash out, a blast of undirected toxic magic that could wreck months of painstaking work in a single stroke.

Or take a life, or make it a life not worth living.

‘Technique and finesse, Alses, technique and finesse,’ she repeated in the melee of her mind, the old mantra of the Dusk Tower – and memories of those simpler times – bringing a smile to her face as she stepped from the short corridor and into the laboratory proper, admiring the door sparkling in the light from the dome overhead – perhaps one of the few times in its life that natural sunlight would gild its silvery surface.

Which was a shame; it really was a work of art in and of itself. Nothing but the best for House Twilight.

With a sigh, Alses settled herself into a chair, thoughtfully positioned to gaze directly at the magecrafting enclosure and the artifact now glowing within it, enjoying the warmth of the polished wood and the yielding smoothness of the upholstery as she relaxed back into it. Inside, her magic woke at the merest of suggestions, rising in a golden tide from the nova-like core of her being that was her compound soul, all of it powerful and subtle and totally under her control.

The world exploded into a million colours, a thousand melting hues, a brilliant soaring crescendo symphony that showcased the obscured secrets of the world in a brilliant firework panoply. Wherever she looked, the whole world shifted on its axis, opening like the most complicated and perfect flower imaginable to reveal still more secrets, strung like pearls on a glittering potential filigree.

All the things people and time tried to hide, here they were, glimmering opalescent collections of impressions, just waiting for the caress of her magic to give up their treasure, low-hanging fruit for a master to pluck and savour, richer than wine.

Now…Alses turned her attention resolutely to the artifact, bringing herself into focus, letting the rest of the beauty that was Mizahar fade into the background as she pulled out the obscured nature of the artifact-to-be and let it shine in the light of her regard.

It was the most perfect, most complex thing to behold, a masterpiece in four dimensions, steel-blue essences reaching forward and back through Tanroa’s river when she looked at the door’s complex internal matrix, throbbing and humming and crackling with power.

With an expert’s eye, she could see exactly where her hammers would have the desired effect, how to shape and mould and flay the magic that was brimming over inside it all. Her fingers itched to pick the tools up and get started, to lose herself in the dance of djed and to ring in the changes with forces that could blast her to oblivion in a tick if she let them get out of control.

Then, too, there was the seductive, alien wrongness of the reagent, the first time in forever she’d been able to use one; what a challenge that would be!

Time, and past it, to enjoy herself.
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[Alses]

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Stars glimmered overhead, their light drowned by the abundant skyglass glow, as Alses set to work in earnest. Electrum was her choice of hammer this time, the elegant suzerain amalgamation of gold and silver that was her own favoured material, its fundamental matrix structure calling to something deep inside, a synergistic resonance that always brought a smile to her face and a certain surety to her crafting.

And surety was something she needed – or rather, something she craved. A day of working as the laurelled Councillor Radiant and spending all her time amongst the rarefied heights of the Radiant Tower and the city bureaucracy, where trying to make changes to or even sense of the documents she was presented with was like punching fog, meant she craved certainty like almost nothing else in the world.

Corpse-pale skin and opalescent scales flashed and flared as Alses stretched out one hand, almost lazily, drawing the gleaming head of her hammer, polished to a mirror-shine and looking unsettlingly liquid-like in its glit and shimmy, up the side of the door, a skittering and diffuse strike – if strike was even the right word for the glancing, lingering caress.

It set complicated patterns in motion, fractal swirls and eddies, chaotic floods and withdrawals sparked into motion from that gentle touch, a whisper of magic, a shadow of djed compared to the titanic forces she’d unleashed in the first session.

Then again, massive force wasn’t needed or called for, even if some magesmiths would still work with vast powers at this stage. Alses championed a more elegant style; it meant less waste of reagents and less chance of getting blasted into her own shadow with haywire djed, always a key concern.

For anyone sane, anyway.

Watching the quicksilver, destabilised djed waves go raying out across the whole of the door’s fundamental structure, Alses missed nothing, every fibre of her being focused on the information that her enhanced senses were drinking in greedily. She watched the reverberating interactions, the clash and synergistic merging of glittering skeins of power, the muddying intermingling as everything was stirred and jolted from its precarious balance, the knife-edge equilibrium into which it had uneasily settled under the influence of her glyphs and Tanroa’s ever-reliable river.

Limes and sugar ghosted over her tongue and caramel-cinnamon assailed her nose as Alses turned and bent and struck at the reagents that were all around, leeching off vast skeins of loosened and purified djed from their slowly-decaying surfaces, accelerating their fall towards the worthless, drained greypoint even as she charged her hammer until it glowed with the baleful, searing scream of every overloaded sense crying out at once.

Alses was resolutely ignoring the madness-inducing maelstrom that was her hammer-head, charged to the brim with the forces she’d need for the shaping and crafting, the moulding and melding, all the arcane procedures that were by now second-nature to her, the twisting of the tonal djed-loops and the curious reverberating resonances of djed-on-djed interactions, all the things of which she was past master.

Power at a point, that was what it was all about – and with a golden hammer charged to bursting with purposed djed, with a focused spirit and a determined mind, there she was at the pinnacle.

Alses’ eyes narrowed even as she let her skill and intuition both mingle and merge to select the impact point, her muscles bunching and contracting in an instinctual ballet to twist and divert the downward stroke into exactly the right area, her brain calculating forces and trajectories and numbers too fast for her to consciously follow.

Not that it mattered; results were what Alses craved – and needed. The backlash from the impact – glowing bright in her sight – made her augmented senses ring like a bell, and provoked a split-second roar of purple light from the optic ring overhead as the mirrors caught the rising maelstrom of magic and ruthlessly forced it back down, some of it burning off as violet waste.

More importantly, the fragile djed conduits convulsed with the fresh insult, writhing and snapping like blazing tentacles, eerily alive as they coiled in shock and disgust inside the confines of the door.

‘Not this time,’ Alses thought, bringing the hammer round for another powerful blow. The time had passed when she’d let the conduits settle and shy away from her strikes; the underlying framework was now strong enough, in terms of the sheer amount of djed contained therein, to withstand correction and augmentation, and so now she – and it – had to truly work.

The conduits bent and shivered under her assault, twisting and cracking under the impact of her hammer, shimmering fissures glittering up their convulsing lengths as her tools danced a fandango up their serpentine lengths, pressing her will and her magic into the matrix of the coalescing artifact.

Alses took a quick half-step back after the latest assault, reassessing her plan of attack. The matrix of the forming artifact was convulsing, shivering, casting off great skeins of djed as overstuffed conduits shimmered and fractured, blasting glimmering magic up in great billows for her beautiful, perfect glyphs to deal with.

Scintillating light glimmered along her runes, casting strong shadows wherever their painful glow fell, catching the escaping djed and spinning it back out of the air, rendering it back into the recursive complexities of the arcane machinery. Protective, efficient...there were few more elegant ways of conducting magecraft than that achieved by the synergy of auristics and glyphing together, all if it working together in harmony.
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[Alses]

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Another few days, or rather, nights, and the matrix of the door was no longer such a tortured and twisted thing, no longer spitting out furious jabs of toxic magic to probe and splinter against her defences. The mirrors of the optic ring overhead no longer flared so furiously, burning off excess djed with long plumes of painful purple light, and the whole of it seemed to have settled enough to manage a few more strikes, a little more of the necessary adjustments. This was all groundwork, preparing the door for its real test, the real challenge that would come when she unleashed the magic of the otherworld sword as a catalyst to catapult the artifact to the rarefied heights of the truly miraculous.

The process, for all its documentation, was nonetheless still guessing game, really, intuition tempered by experience – the artifact conduits she was so intently regarding were still fragile, were still overstuffed with a crackling abundance of magic, liable to erupt at a moment's notice if she was careless, or over-eager with her strikes, if she channelled too much of the still-volatile magic through any one of those corridors.

Right now, things were in precarious balance, the essential nature of the door glowing like a star to Alses' augmented vision, the occasional lazy coruscating flash as djed shifted and moved – still unstable – leaving brilliant contrails across her sight, showing her areas of strength and weakness, depending.

She was getting quite good at that, now, an experienced eye cast over a putative artifact was often enough to set her own particular genius to work, the savant inside her soul instantly setting to work, producing at least the outline of a plan of action in mere ticks, something that wrote itself in seductive silver fire on the inside of her brain, urging her to flesh it out, to work at it until she could see the whole glittering edifice in potential space, just waiting for her to bring it into reality.

It was a very strong urge, at times – fortunate, then, that she loved her craft, and that it paid so very, very well. She did it for the arcane reward, for the heady rush of delight and the sure and certain knowledge of a difficult and demanding job, one that only she in the entire city could do, but it had to be said that the chests of gold didn't hurt.

Not that Alses thought herself particularly greedy, even given the princely sums she charged for her skill – money was only ever really a means to an end, a way of getting the things she wanted to do done. The (relatively) small amounts that went into maintaining her in a style to which she'd become accustomed with a rapidity that suggested some familiarity in past lives, were just that – small.

Or at least, so she justified it to herself, at any rate.

The banked power of the golden hammer in her hand hummed and snapped in anticipation as she hefted the enchanted tool, purpose in her movements and the goal clear in her head.

'Two steps left, Alse,' her genius directed, body already moving even as the ideas arrived in her conscious mind. 'Then strike the diamond and draw up its strength into our hammer-head. Let's charge the voids to the full with its adamant nature and press it all into the door.'

There was a bunching of muscles, a liquid shimmer of opalescent scales as she stepped and turned and crouched, bringing the golden hammer down with the speed only someone supremely confident in their craft could manage, knowing in the bones that the impact wouldn't fracture or ruin the valuable gemstone glittering serenely in the middle of a powerful glyph.

Magic erupted in a reactive flurry from the stone's faceted surface at the very instant of impact, the destabilising djed from her hammer discohering the diamond's otherwise perfect geometries, unleashing a wave of scintillating light and coldness into the world, a burst that was caught by the perfect machinery of the glyph under and around it, even as further embedded enchantments in the head of the hammer activated with a soft and plangent note inside Alses' mind, put there by the glow of her auristics.

In an instant, a slice of time no clock could hope to measure, eruption became implosion: the blazing star of radiant coldness on her skin twisted and convulsed, turning in on itself in its rush to sluice into the arcane voids of the hammer-head, rushing in to fill it with phantom weight, brightening its presence in the colour-drenched world of Alses' perception.

A shimmering fandango of strikes followed the first, drawing more and more magic up into the greedy voids, filling and mixing and mingling the disparate strands of djed, purposed by Alses' indomitable will. She was dancing, dancing to the tune of miracles in the making, her feet flashing and hitting their marks as perfectly as a dancer at the Ethereal Opera, trusting herself absolutely not to smudge or damage the complex interplay of glyphs and sigils, of paths and barriers and relays that made up the complex shielding and feeding mechanism she used to protect herself and strengthen her artifacts.

Glee was evident on her face and singing its chuckling, infectious song in her many-splendoured aura as she worked, feeling her tool begin to strain under the weight of the magic it held, its surface outlined in a wavering and unstable glow, faint wisps of violet light breathing from its surface, only there if one was looking with a trained and discerning eye.

Time to put the weight of stored djed to use, then, to unleash it to purpose and to break the door to harness. It would be her shuttle, of sorts, as she wove the strengthening network that would pave the way for greater changes, and so it was with considerable care that she selected the first impact point, poised on the cusp of a perfect moment as she thought.

It had to be strong, to withstand the blast of new forces entering the fray. It had to be suitable, too, near enough the core that she could easily work a multitude of conduits from a single point. The fewer artificial breaks, the better – although patching was a simple enough task for any magesmith worth the name, Alses had realised that elegance mattered in the delicate and demanding art; things worked better, flowed more freely, were more forgiving if she was able to maintain much of the original superstructure, the initial architecture.

It was important to remember – and she hadn't, for a while – that magecraft improved, rather than entirely transformed; there would always, always be some shadow of the original there, under the layers of change, and it was better to work with the warp and weft of that original soul rather than to smash it to spiteful smithereens. A synergy was better than a domination – that was how Alses phrased it in her head, anyway.
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[Alses]

e‘Turn, damn you,’ Alses cursed at a particularly recalcitrant conduit, bright and flush with power and rebellious on the newfound heady djed that had glutted it, resisting dementedly every push and change she tried to make. It had become a queenpin, a point of resistance around which other conduits accreted, pushed there by other aspects of the craft, collecting into a diamond-hard region of stasis that would have to be broken.

Alses had been hard at work for bells of time, whilst Lhavit all around her shucked its more sober daytime character and hit the streets, intent on a good time for one and all. The bars were humming, the squares full of dancing revellers spilling good-naturedly out of the clubs, whilst restaurants perfumed the air with all the scents of romance and fine cuisine. The parks, too, they were quietly busy in their own way, full of courting couples or just people drenched in alcohol and too many hormones, with the obligatory Shinya presence just to keep a lid on things.

Elysium Hall, though, was a bastion and oasis of quiet and calm in the gem-bright night-time city, guarded by several Shinya patrols and separated by the dark distance of its park from the rest of the Diamond, and in her laboratory, surrounded by the glow of magecraft and the softer lambent shimmy of the world in general, Alses spared not a thought for the leisure pursuits of the other citizens.

Her hair was wet with perspiration, her robes not much better, and her face had been graven with temporary lines of worry and stress as she worked and worked, forever striving with every strike and ringing clash of hammer on obdurate metal towards the organic latticework that her plans called for.

The door was resisting her advances dementedly; each time she sallied and pushed, broke through to weave the subtler, stronger intermixed matrix into its essential character, then elsewhere her defensive lines broke, the half-there changes reverting with a kind of perverse glee that had part of her turning the air blue with swearwords even as another - more detached and rational - section of her mind enjoyed the puzzle and even admired the tenacity, the ingenuity of the matrix, forever trying to return to what it once was rather than what she desired it to be.

It was an odd match of wills, immortal sentience versus inanimate obstinacy – characteristics that later on would be superb, would be enhanced and channelled into the useful strengthening paradigm she was imparting, but for now...they were obstacles, they had to be broken to harness and bent to her will.

Quiet strikes had gone out of the window some time ago; the very djed she'd needed to work her magic, to start the process of her craft, it was now working against her, strengthening the original character of the matrix against her changes, giving it the raw, unbridled force if not the elegant subtlety to smash through her improvements and revert it.

All in all, a knotty problem, and one that was causing her patience to fray and her stress to soar like an eagle.

‘Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn!’ It was definitely a snarl, an animalistic growl of spite and rage and spittle flying in the air, lips skinned back from teeth clenched tight and bared in a feral grimace. If she could just get this conduit, this recalcitrant queenpin of the resistance, to kink and bend, to curve away and into the organic latticework she was slowly threading through the core, a strengthening weave that would leave it better than before in every way, then her problems – at least in this little part of the artifact, would be over. The holdout would waver, shiver and collapse, as sure as Tanroa's river ran forwards, and sweet order would then reign in the place of stubborn chaos, a citadel testament to the magesmith's art.

Alses struck too hard, too fast, tried to achieve too great a deflection: with an awful, scringeing shriek of metal pushed beyond endurance, the conduit she was working on twisted, convulsed, bent impossibly in upon itself, kinking into the sort of regressive geometries only achievable through magic, and shattered, erupting in a blizzard-burst of djed-fired splinters.

Bright white shattered segments scythed through the local matrix, wrecking smaller conduits in their entirety and leaving weeping wounds on the larger pathways before erupting through the surface actual and emerging vengefully out into the world at large, cutting like buzzsaws through the air as they went.

Glyphs evaporated under the focused assault, ablating into nothingness and violet fire as stray djed lances ripped through them, the snap and whine of uncontrolled magic accelerating up through the decibels to a razor scream in Alses’ head even as she staggered back, beating a barely-tactical retreat and trying to protect herself with depth and the weight of redundant runes.

It was a firestorm in a circle, a battle of sorts reflecting uneasily from the window-glass all around, fireflies flickering and dancing madly as maddened magic flashed out from the door and hurled itself into oblivion on her wilting glyphs, each shard of djed giving all of itself up and, in return, seeing a line of paint fuzz and corrupt, a swirling dot ablate into nothingness, a full sigil explode spectacularly into nothingness, the defences crumbling one by one.
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[Alses]

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Alses’ eyes were wide and dark as the magic continued to pour from the wound in the door, the unhealthy bloom of violet light, actinic and harsh in a way it had seldom been before, telling her of the severity of the situation.

Line after line, curl after curl, whorl after whorl of defensive glyphery thinned, blackened and peeled away into nothingness, each stroke and rune flaring brightly against the onslaught before giving up.

Alses backed away from the burgeoning blaze, her heart battering against her ribcage, mind whirling fruitlessly as she cast around for what to do, how to contain the rising and unstable rage, the maelstrom of magic that was tearing away at her protection.

‘Run!’ whispered part of her mind, before the greater chorus sang it into oblivion. Running wouldn’t help, even though the split-tick stray thought had bunched her muscles and primed her to flee. Her dancing eyes alighted on the tilting platform, and the enormous vat of water it held, ready to be released at the touch of a rope.

It would be a cleansing flood, a rushing wave of mindless consumption that would wash away toxic magic and defences both, that would cool the raging unstable artifact and let her start again. It would also make a terrible mess of her laboratory and ruin some of her reagents – but that was a price Alses would happily pay a hundredfold to protect herself and Elysium Hall.

She backed away towards the tilting platform, high-stepping over her remaining glyphs, knowing that each one would buy her a little more time. Her auristics was narrowed to a point, dialled down as much as she dared to protect herself from the wailing madness of undirected, unfocused, unpotentiated magic that wanted desperately to become something, anything, a lance rather than mantling wings that gave her pinpoint snapshots rather than omniscience.

Even so, what it brought her set her senses to reeling and her stomach to churning, the clashing nonsensicality of it bringing sickness with even a breath of its antithetical nature, a wound in the world that was the consequence of botched – but powerful, nonetheless - world magic.

Her back hit the sturdy wooden supports of the platform with a solid, jarring thump; she stumbled at the sudden arrest and nearly fell – as it was, she wobbled and caught hold of it in a white-knuckled grip to keep her from a sudden meeting with the rough tiles of the floor.

Quick as a flash, regret surging through her whole body, she wrapped the heavy cord through her fingers and round her arm, muscles tensed and shrieking to pull – but she held back. Just for a little while, just to see. Just to catch her breath, too – the wrongness of the leaking magic was ripping the breath from her body, burning her skin and churning her stomach and inner ear to queasy froth, all the classic signs of a djedic insult were making themselves manifest in her.

‘We were hit,’ she thought numbly, oddly detached. ‘There’s a bit of stray magic gone through us. Djedstruck, again…’ Alses had been djedstruck – properly djedstruck – once before, when Syna had made Herself manifest in all Her glory, and the unintentional, delayed backlash had left her nauseous and weak for several days. This was lesser in every respect, but still dangerous, and still highly unpleasant.

The violet glow came closer, chewing through serpentine baffles and recursive djed-sinks – but that sapped its power, as did the shrieking, roaring, pulsating, coruscating crown of painful flame that was the optic ring, its full quota of six mirrors all blazing away, dumping vast quantities of unleashed magic as harmless light and less-harmless heat, reducing the size of the blowout with every tick that passed.

Alses bit her lip – her teeth sliced through and she didn’t notice, bronze blood sliding thickly down her chin and dripping, unheeded, onto the floor. Her fingers were white on the emergency cord, its rough hemp biting into the flesh of her arm – she’d have bruises on the morrow, for sure – and every fibre of her being but one screamed at her to pull the cord and pick up the pieces later.

But through it all there came that stubborn voice of dissent. Was that not a reddening of the outer edges of the glow? Was it not flaring less often? Were the ephemeral winds that were gusting off it, not there to anyone who wasn’t a mage, lessening, falling off? Was there not a diminishment in the pitch of the eldritch squeal of a tortured matrix that suggested recovery, a staunching of the flow and a falling-off of the escaping magic?

All this flashed through Alses’ mind at the speed of thought. Opinions formed, then shattered, consensus was achieved and then just as quickly disrupted, all of her working at maximal cogitation.

No.

And that was it, a split-second expenditure of energy, a crackle of electricity and purposed djed as physical and astral bodies worked together, followed by a bunching of muscles and then an inevitable mechanical sequence of events. Counterweights dropped on chains from their usual hiding places, and in accordance with the fundamental laws of the world, the platform and its enormous water-barrel rose precipitously and dumped gallon upon gallon of quenching water on the burgeoning djedstorm.
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[Alses]

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When it was over, her laboratory was full of drifting steam. Quite a lot of the water had been boiled away by the fury of the unleashed djed, it was true, but enough had remained to cool the door, to staunch the haemorrhaging flow and to calm the maelstrom before it truly got going.

For that was all that had been, a precursor – Alses knew, with rock-hard certainty only reinforced by the perfect vision of hindsight, that had she listened to that persuasive little murmur of dissent, the sly little whisper that tried to persuade her that everything was all right, that her defences and precautions would hold, if only she waited…well. Elysium Hall and most of the surrounding tier would have been a smoking crater.

The djedstorm that her glyphs had failed, in the end, to adequately contain was just the result of a single-conduit blowout. Yes, a conduit that had been purposely glutted with excess power until its existence balanced on a knife-edge and then rendered open and unstable by design and the demands of her art, but still just one, albeit major, conduit.

If she’d allowed it to continue unabated, the draining wound would have started to feed on the entire matrix, a destabilising cascade chain-reaction that, once started, could only end in one thing: an explosion. As it was, catastrophe had been averted; experience and what scraps of auristics Alses dared to use was telling her that.

It had been fortunate she’d listened to the singing voice of intuition and experience, rather than the shrill cry of the ‘it’ll-be-okay’ part of her brain, or else she’d have far worse to deal with than a lot of water and some soggy reagents; she’d be looking at an utterly ruined artifact and a sizeable crater, at best.

At worst, she’d be on her way to a meeting with Lhex.

Shaking herself - and still shaking like a leaf, even after her conscious instruction to do so had ceased - Alses took stock. Her glyphic defences were utterly gone, vaporized by the chaotic djed or else erased by the tide of water that had met burgeoning magical mayhem and calmed it, most of her reagents washed out of place or else disintegrating slowly into piles of ooze, and the door itself still flickering sullenly, tiny crackles of djed snaking along the engravings and earthing in little flashes of actinic light in the moisture-wreathed air.

Fortunately, by dint of its sheer obdurate mass it hadn’t been moved by the watery onslaught, and so had protected the single, crucial glyph that maintained its malleable state; she could still work with it. The realisation, the affirmation, the recognition that all was not lost, that she could salvage her artifact and her pride, all of it came with a swift surge of euphoria, swiftly followed by the hammer-blow of fatigue and a sharp stab of sickness that saw her jack-knife and attempt to empty an already-empty stomach all over the rough tiles of the laboratory floor.

‘Kill us now,’ gasped the thought in Alses’ humming, buzzing head, pounding nauseatingly in time with her racing heart and the vicious, twisting cramps that were doing their best to wring her stomach dry.

A further spasm of pain took her legs out from under her and only a last-minute reflex smacked her palms rather than her face into the floor.

All that emerged, in the event, after the hideous effort of retching and the cold sweats that plastered her clothes to her body and despite her wishes to expire on the spot, was a few solitary drips of almost-water which quickly vanished amidst the greater wash that was slowly draining away through the various concealed grates and into the hidden spaces of the city.

Alses half-walked, half crawled towards the doors, her vision strobing erratically with a nauseating mixture of auristic impressions and simple physical sight, all of it shaken and doused lightly in shimmering crimson veils and – the icing on a particularly nasty cake – shot through with spikes of pain that drilled into her consciousness, scattering most attempts at thought.

She was djedstruck, she knew that, poisoned by runaway magic, could almost feel it eating away inside of her.

Catholicon.

The word - and what it meant - came to her as though through a mile-thick cloud, hazy and diffuse and drifting aimlessly. Her eyes slid shut and she nearly stopped then and there, but a distant screaming voice kept her from slipping entirely into restful oblivion, shrieking shrilly enough to cut through everything else.

Yes, the Catholicon, they were the answer. Her fuzzy brain seized on the idea of the high tower and its healers, the doctors and Rak’keli marked priests and priestesses who tended to the sick and the injured of the starry city – and right now, she was definitely amongst that group, definitely in need of professional care.

The long, echoing, empty corridors of Elysium Hall were suddenly an almost insurmountable obstacle, an enemy that sapped her strength and warped her perceptions as she staggered down them, robes sodden and trailing behind her, piloting a body that was suddenly only nominally under her control.

The solar rain of Syna, unfettered and unfiltered by glass and skyglass, gave her some strength as she half-fell out of the entrance to the Hall, slithering down the shallow steps in an undignified jumble of limbs and horns before picking herself up with a singleminded determination.

Her vision had narrowed to a tunnel, focusing in on the sinuous pathway that curved into the distance, merging with the public highways of the city at her gates.

Gates.

‘Shinya,’ Alses thought grimly, struggling towards the far-distant glimmer of the gates and the two guardsmen who would be on duty there. ‘They’ll help us get there. They have to…’

END

OOCMmkay, so I've given Alses a few nasty effects here . She was having the whole MC lark going entirely too much her own way! I'll obviously be paying the Catholicon for its overgiving treatments, to minimize the damage and put her on the road to recovery ASAP, but I leave it in your hands how long Alses will need to spend at their tender mercies, and therefore how much the whole misadventure will cost her.
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[Sal Mander]

Alses

XP

• Endurance +1
• Magecrafting +4
• Planning +2

Lores

• Lore - Auristics: Distinguishing Between Scents
• Lore - Auristics: Averting Catastrophe
• Lore - Dusk Tower: A Mantra of Technique and Finesse
• Lore - Magic: When Djed Strikes Back
• Lore - Magecraft: The Art of Weilding Electrum
• Lore - Magecraft: Formulating Plans and Procedures
• Lore - Magecraft: Synergy Over Domination
• Lore - Magecraft: Retreating Effectively, Limbs Intact
• Lore - Magecraft: The Potential Power of Conduits
• Lore - Social: Swearing Like A Sailor

Penalties

• Overgiving Treatment - 10 kina
• Rugberry Tea x6 - 12 kina
• Two days of bed rest at home. Doctor's orders!

Comments
Alses escaped relatively unscathed from her encounter with unruly conduits, though the cleaning bill might provide a headache. The treatment at the Catholicon took care of overgiving effects, while the rugberry tea and bed rest should help to alleviate the discomfort of being djedstruck. The tea should be taken three times a day for two days.

Very descriptive and enjoyable thread. Your use of language in particular enriched the post to no end. More importantly, you captured the intensity of magecrafting at the expert level, while managing to present Alses' approach as both believable and engaging. Looking forward to part three.

FINAL NOTE
As per the grading guide, please wait until your wages and expenses have been updated for the season before adding any XP and lores gained here.

As always, PM me if you have any questions or comments.

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