Solo An Adamant Portal: Part Three

[Alses]

Timestamp: 9th Day of Summer, 514 A.V.
Location: Elysium Hall

It was almost three days since Alses had been struck by wayward magic pouring out of her artifact, her crafting gone wrong for the first time in, oh, ages. Gallon upon gallon of quenching water had thundered down over the burgeoning djedstorm and her artifact, exploding into steam as it met the erupting toxic magic, two antithetical forces meeting and cancelling in a hot and humid blast that painted instant condensation on every available surface.

All her defences, her glyphs and runes and her flaring optic ring – all of it designed to control any wayward magic that was evolved from her craft – had failed, one after the other, unable to cope with the flood of undirected magic that had poured – blasted – out of one of the over-glutted and dangerously unstable conduits, wrecking the surroundings and starting to corrupt the internal matrix of the artifact itself – at least, until prompt action had put a stop to the whole of it.

She'd caught a wayward skein; it had bubbled her skin and corroded her lungs and wrought its havoc all through her perfect body; by the time she'd arrived at the Catholicon (carried, in point of fact, like a babe in arms, although she did her best to forget that slightly humiliating episode in her existence) blood had been bubbling up with every breath and dripping out of almost every orifice.

Thank Rak'keli – one of the few times Alses had reached for any other deity than Syna – for the Catholicon and its teams of experienced doctors and healers of various stripes, including divine, who knew exactly what to do in the case of a djedstrike.

They'd set to work with their potions and powders, lotions and unguents and strange vaporized fumes, with their burning divine magic and so much else besides that it made Alses' head spin even to remember back to that time.

Her memories were...fuzzed...that was perhaps the best word for it, for the shimmering veil of remembered pain and confusion that lay over those events inside her mind. The next clear recollection Alses had was of lying between freshly-laundered sheets, gazing blankly up at pale marble vaulting and billowing hospital curtains, idly contemplating the meaning of existence.

She'd spent a few days convalescing with the Catholicon, mindlessly complying with the doctors and nurses, her mind freewheeling as she relived every tick of the accident, worrying and wondering if there was anything she could possibly have done to avoid the almost-catastrophe.

Of course there were things she could have done; greater glyphic baffles and circles, perhaps some last-chance glyphs cast in metal or carved on stone...and, of course, less eagerness, more planning. More planning was always a good thing; she'd just become a little overconfident in her own genius. Alses had forgotten, as she soared towards the lofty heights of her chosen craft, that there should always be room for pure bad luck.

And now, she'd paid for it – first in fear, and then in pain, and finally in pocket – when the bills from the Catholicon came in.


A


Freshly attired in a robe of the very palest silks and with gold embroidery whispering seductively through it all, Alses rocked, indecisive, in front of the doors to her laboratory, suddenly seized by a nebulous fear that she'd never, ever experienced before.

Certainly never when it came to the prospect of magecraft.

Screwing up her courage, she turned the handles and pushed the doors open, letting herself into the airy and spacious laboratory. It was much the same as it had been when she'd stumbled out of the place, djedstruck and hallucinating vigorously, although the steam had condensed back into water and, along with the rest of it, drained silently into the cunning grilles cut into the floor, carried away and out of the city like most of the rest of Lhavit's liquid effluents.

Out of sight, out of mind.

The door, the source of her troubles and her pain, still glowered, rebellious and massive, in the central space under the dome, its elaborate etchings and reliefs catching the light, gleaming smugly, sure in its triumph.

The detritus of that day still lay all around it – the sad debris of her reagents, washed from their rightful places and half-destroyed by magic and water, and her hammer, fallen unheeded from her hands, discarded on the floor.

She picked it up, quick as a flash, cradling the shimmering electrum tool in her hands like a long-forgotten but cherished toy, running her fingers from the slick coolness of the metal to the polished curve of the mahogany handle, reacquainting herself with it, soothing it – and her – as though it were a scared animal.

Something about its comforting and familiar weight in her hand helped to centre her, solidify her. Magecraft was her particular skill, the most beautiful and worthwhile thing in Mizahar; she could do it. The accident was just that – an accident – and even the greatest of magesmiths had the occasional mishap.

It was the way of the world, and it was a reminder – to Alses, anyway – that the Ethaefal weren't quite so perfect as the rest of Lhavit believed them to be. It seemed to get rid of most of the fear, enough that she could move into the lab proper and begin the laborious business of tidying up and making ready for the second attempt.

Which would be successful.

[Alses]

Alses was pacing distractedly around her laboratory, not really looking at what was in front of her. Instead, her gaze was turned inwards, her attention almost wholly elsewhere as she thought about her options, the nagging fear and anxiety pushed off to one side, utterly marginalised by the problems that the craft presented to her, and by the enchanting solutions that danced headily across her mind's eye.

Her first thought, of glyphs wrought in metal – the better to withstand djed fluxes the likes of which had torn through her defences last time – was straight out of Grummen's Lexicon, one of the standard greater precautions and a very workable and worthy one, but for one thing: Alses hadn't the faintest clue how to shape and mould or otherwise work metal. Since glyphs were so intensely personal, that had to be thrown out; she didn't have the time or, it had to be said, the inclination to busy herself with the art of molten metal.

So, no metal-cast glyphs.

Stone-carved glyphs had, at first, been just as much of an impossibility; Alses didn't know one end of a chisel from another, and once again had neither the time nor really the desire to find out more. Then she'd had an idea; etching was a possibility, and not only for stone; metal could be etched and cut, surely? That had meant a trip to Tian J'net, her philterer friend, she of the foghorn-voice and piercing intellect, which had then led to a useful – if arcane, at times – discussion about erosion and corrosion rates, spread and deviance and, of course, timescales.

The upshot, alas, had been that whilst it was certainly possible to etch metal and erode stone via the method she'd mentioned, the sort of precision Alses needed meant that the common corrosive philtres – the sort Tian stocked as a matter of course; everyone needed something hideously caustic now and then, even if it was for nothing more interesting than unblocking the drains or scouring out the ovens – simply wouldn't do.

The philterer had promised to experiment, to network and liaise and hunt through her books and boil up anything that sounded likely in an effort to produce what was needed – but, yet again, that would take time, something Alses, for all her immortality, had in short supply.

It looked, therefore, as though her defences would have to be caution and depth – far greater depth, in fact, than she'd ever used before – more reservoir glyphs- Alses stopped that thought a-borning, examining it afresh with a more critical eye.

Reservoir glyphs? Well, they were good for delaying tactics, perhaps, but they'd added to the problem when the djedstorm had whipped like a hawser across them; they'd drunk their fill until they were bursting at the seams with wild djed, and then when the storm rampaged over their curves and whorls and hypnotic swirls of sinking ink and ripped them to shreds, all that stored magic burst up and out and added to the hideous chaos.

Alses stopped in the curving track she was slowly wearing in the laboratory floor to contemplate this little revelation; why had she so unquestioningly accepted the need for reservoir glyphs, why had she worked so many of them into her designs over the years? She had a nasty feeling that, in all her crafts, she'd increased the number of those instead of ramping up dissipation matrices and the venting systems that were the key to really keeping wayward djed down.

Probably because she couldn't abide the painful purple glow they produced.

Alses shook her head in dismay at her own arrogance. There were surely ways to change how a glyph gave up its magic, how to affect the transformation from eye-searing purple to something more...comforting. More mundane, easier on the eye. That needed work, experimentation, trial-and-error, time – and there was never enough time. So, instead, subconsciously, she'd taken the easier route, rather than the safer one – something that, a long time ago, she'd sworn she'd never do.

Bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger!

'Still,' Alses thought ruefully, calming down slightly, 'We got off fairly lightly, this time.' Even if her vision did still sometimes strobe in all the colours of an hallucination and the world dissolved in liquid light.

Minor side-effects, she'd been assured breezily, things that would pass as her body completed its perfect healing, returning to the exalted state she was used to. There were advantages to being an Ethaefal – even if serious overgiving would still wreck her soul and leave her a mutated abomination, then at least minor overgiving's travails could be overcome, even without a healer's attentions.

So, Alses decided, returning her mind to the problems at hand and trying to ignore the transient, irregular sensation of vertigo, no reservoir glyphs then – or at least, only the bare minimum necessary to execute her craft.

In their stead, to make up for the lack, there would have to be more, far more venting glyphs, runes that would convert toxic or simply wayward djed into harmless light, where it couldn't do any harm. Well, apart from giving her a headache, of course.

[Alses]

Seated at her desk – with a bit of a watermark around its legs, but never mind that – Alses rifled through her journal, hunting for the section on magecraft. More specifically, for the design she'd used to contain the door the first time round.

To the uninitiated, it was a dizzying concatenation of spirals and circles and every manner of arc and parabola – there was barely a straight line in the entire thing. Something about Alses' mind, everything moving in curves, everything affecting everything else in a vast intermeshed network, caused that; she'd seen examples of other glypher's work where not a single curve existed, an orderly gridded network with everything in its place, perfectly predictable.

Rigid, unchanging, unable to bend and flex and shift with the times and circumstances – or at least, that was how Alses thought of it in the relative privacy of her own head, where such views were acceptable. Naturally, those whose glyphs tended to order and latticework geometries would think her own curving regressions and spiralling labyrinths and infinity-woven walls that reflected and reflected magic until it was neither coming nor going nor even purposed, a tabula rasa to be flared off or fed back into the productive machinery of gossamer thought and djed.

Of course, she knew intellectually that the overall arrangement of glyphs didn't matter, not between wizards of similar skill, but that didn't stop her heart and the more primitive parts of her patchwork consciousness passing judgement nonetheless.

Ah well; she was very good at hiding her reactions and her instinctive responses, these days.

Copying the design wasn't difficult, exactly – once something had been done, it was really rote-work to recall it back to the forefront of her brain and to transfer the silver-flame blueprint into the black reality of ink on paper, but that still took time and materials.

Out came the fresh, crisp paper, the surface beautifully smooth and perfect, positively aching for the touch of her quill. The inkbottle was next, full of ink so black it was like a rip into the Void, only the faint shine of its liquid surface belying that effect.

The rest of the world receded into insignificance as her attention was drawn into the task at hand, the faithful reproduction of her setup, her quill dancing a complex routine in the air as the nib skated gracefully over the page, leaving an elegant black line in its wake.

Once upon a time, Alses would have done all of this simply in her mind; she'd once been a very impecunious student, after all, and paper had been precious and in short supply; she'd had to ration every page of her book, every leaf of precious writing substrate. Now, though, she had the luxury of whole reams of paper, stacks of notebooks, courtesy of a pouch-full of kina at the Good Book, and they were luxuries she indulged in copiously.

Just because it would have been possible for her to make the adjustments in her head didn't mean it was fun, or even the best way to go about things; Alses liked to have records of everything she'd tried and done, for just such an eventuality as this one (amongst other things).

As she copied it out, curve for swirling curve, sigil for sinuous sigil, she thought, analysed, examined and reflected, refreshing the complex matrix in her brain whilst the sullen bonfire of the door burned resentfully behind her, ignored for now.

Crafting would come soon enough, but for now Alses was absolutely focused on securing her own safety, on bolstering her defences and altering her protective designs to take into account the lessons that the conduit rupture and the ensuing djedstorm had taught her. One of them, one of the more vivid, stinging and therefore most remembered ones, was the sudden and overwhelming feeling of visceral fear from something she'd thought totally under control and bent to her will; there should always be contingency on contingency, just in case Lhex and Lady Luck had both rolled their dice and stacked the deck against her.

Alses was of the belief, subconsciously, that sufficient planning and contingency measures could outfox even the gods themselves.

Regarding her design-work with a harshly critical eye, with the benefit of hindsight and a new perspective into the dangers, Alses could see several areas that desperately needed improvement or were simply out-and-out wrong for dealing with the djed fluxes of such magnitudes as would be evolved from her work with House Twilight's door.

For instance, between the contra-flowing circles – a useful technique, to build up resistance and momentum both around the artifact, keeping the djed pressure differential high – there were a chain of reservoir glyphs, strung like a pearl necklace between the two. The intention had certainly been to capture and store stray djed until it could be safely bled into the system, but the fundamental arrangement was a flawed one – subtly flawed, yes, but flawed nonetheless; there were issues with the inlet and outlet glyphs, as well as the buttressing lines that demarcated one reservoir from another; it was possible, when large fluxes of djed rampaged through the area, that the reservoirs could overtop, for want of a better word, and the destruction would propagate exponentially down the chain as stress leapt like lightning through the relays and baffles than in normal operation simply carried trickles of magic to discharge and dissipation.

Sucking absently on her quill, a habit she'd subconsciously picked up in Zeltiva and then never been able to subsequently drop during moments of intense cogitation, Alses contemplated the complicated machinery of rune and sigil, agile mind leaping restlessly from one possibility to another, forever calculating, discarding, changing and recalculating.

[Alses]

Wielding her quill like a rapier, Alses was glyphing furiously, the needlepoint of her nib thrusting and slicing and dicing and sliding almost faster than the eye could follow, utterly obedient to the lash of her muscles and her patchwork mind, all focused on the one task.

Combinations and alternative configurations flickered and danced through her brain as the sweetest synergy of body and mind unfurled, modifying, shifting, changing, reassessing, the whole of it on the move.

Arrows and dashed lines and different colours of ink splashed on the page, the liquid soaking into the page and blurring the overall design, obliterating it under the weight, almost making the paper split and curl under the pressure.

Alses sighed and leaned back in her chair, propping her face up on one ink-stained hand – leaving a vivid streak of bright red on her fire-opal cheek, not that she noticed until bells later, on glancing tiredly in a mirror.

Trying to amend the design on paper wasn't working. Idly, she cast about for a fresh source of inspiration, a new method.

It took an embarrassingly long time before her gaze both alighted on the wheeled blackboards and her brain engaged – they were simply so much a part of the background furniture of her laboratory, like the gambolling and vaulting figures from Lhavitian legend that formed a decorative border around the whole room, or the vine-carved pillars which held up the optical ring and the dome overhead, that she simply didn't see them, not properly, for much of the time.

Energized by the sudden realisation of their usefulness, Alses rose and bounded over in one fluidly graceful movement, dragging the blackboard over and into the light, fingers trembling with excitement as they picked up chalk and ghosted over the perfect black slate.

Bold strokes, the outline for everything that would come later, the foundations in fact, those were unchanging, exactly the same as when she'd first laid them out. Broad white strokes, then, marking the perfect surface with sure and certain delineation. In her glypher's eye, seeing through that certain state of mind necessary for the discipline, they were towering white buttresses, driven deep into the djedic landscape of Mizahar as immovable anchors, secure against any harm or scathe, able to withstand the worst of shrieking djedstorms and long, lingering, protracted sieges that were the more normal state of affairs in magecraft.

Insofar as anything involving the sovereign discipline could be considered 'normal', at any rate.

Having finished the final arcs that would form the very basis of her circles, Alses took a step back to critically assess her work, every bit the perfectionist, scrutinizing her chalk-mark runes with an unflinching, harsh eye.

This was no time to smooth over any little errors – although thankfully those had grown very few and far between, a far cry from her first stumbling steps in the discipline where even the simplest sigil arrangements had needed bells of time to get right, to make flawless in order that they might work as she willed.

Alses, by dint of long practice, had got her eye in now, and where once runes had issued grudgingly and with many a mistake from the nib of her pen, now they flowed easily, almost like a river, with only the occasional rock to ripple the otherwise-untrammelled gush.

It looked rather like the layout of a fortress, a citadel, to her eye, with rings of walls and defensive bastions, knotworks of baffling ravelins and redoubts, spiralling towers that would draw in djed and send it to violet oblivion, the sketched outlines of guarded corridors and overspill systems winding organically through the greater body of the arcane stronghold made manifest in a few boldly-drawn curves.

The rest of it was all there in her mind's eye, written in silver fire on her retinas, and – humming something from the Canticles of Syna – Alses set to work with a will, turning silvery cogitation into more solid chalk lines.

Happily, they were so easy to adjust, to change and alter and shift things around, to see how the interactions might play out if she moved this particular djas rune to there, or replaced that particular swirling drain glyph with a spiking venting rune that hurled magic high into the air to be caught and spun into harmlessness by the optic ring...she could see exactly what would happen where, which glyphs would catch fire at the touch of djed and which would remain cool and dark.

She might have laughed at the unfurling beauty only she could see; Alses was never sure on that point, but did it really matter? People took joy in many different things; if she saw it in the perfect curve of a glyph or the crucible of magecraft as well as in fine sculpture and tea and all the other more mundane delights, then what concern of anyone's was that, apart from her?

Fingers thick with chalk-dust in all the colours of the rainbow, Alses moved close in once more, to refine and experiment and change, to pull and shift and alter her inifinity-symbol walls and the raying latticeworks that fed them, tributaries to the mighty potential river that could perhaps, one day, roar through there, vaulting headlong towards a date with a dense network of spiking venting glyphs that would spit magic up to the heavens and split it into impotent light.

Glory, glory.

[Alses]

The sun was well past its zenith by the time Alses was happy with her new, revised design.

It was an even bigger undertaking than the initial setup had been, protecting her with even more infinity recursion walls, a mirror-maze labyrinth carefully designed never to reflect the same erg of djed back on itself – which would have unpredictably disastrous consequences – triple the amount of venting glyphs, an emergency backup drain system that led to a distant cluster of reservoir glyphs – safely far enough away that they could unleash the stored magic with minimal damage – and, above all, sheer depth and weight.

When all else failed, Alses knew that volume and numbers could erode away even the most ferocious of assaults – and with that in mind, she'd done her level best to make every millimetre of ground between the door and her, and the outside world, an exercise in pain and frustration for any wayward djed.

It was the arcane equivalent – or so she hoped, at any rate – of a field of thorns, a bundle of barbed razor wire, an obstacle course that would make even the stoutest of souls quail and reconsider their assault, or else to bleed them white before they even got close to the edge.

Before any real damage could be done.

She hadn't managed to alter the releasing glyphs to change the painful violet nature of the light they gave off; that was a delicate and time-consuming experimental task best left for another day's tinkering, decidedly not something that a supremely cautious Alses should engage in when also involved in the highly delicate task of magecrafting.

No matter, no matter. Alses could cope with a little visual discomfort if it saved her from far worse.

Speaking of, she wasn't feeling particularly good; something still sometimes felt as though it were trying to gnaw its way out of her belly, and the occasional strobing flare of out-of-control auristics didn't help her balance or her mental acuity. She'd been told to drink rugberry tea – a much harder proposition, for her, than the attending doctor likely realised – and she'd dutifully rested for the prescribed period, having not felt like doing anything else in any case, but there were still the occasional indications that something wasn't quite right inside.

Still, Alses had faith. Faith in Syna, and faith in the perfect celestial body, with its complete healing, that her patchwork soul currently inhabited. It would just be a matter of that most precious of resources – time – before everything was hale and hearty and whole once again.

Yes, she'd not attempt the actual magecrafting itself until she was fully healed. Glyphing, on the other hand, and the whole train of planning and execution...that she could, at least, do. And – she added, in the echoing chorus of her head – order in replacements for the ruined reagents she'd been using.

That would be expensive, of course – but far less expensive than replacing a fully-stocked laboratory, and most definitely worth her life.

Pushing those considerations to one side for a while - she'd worry about those things later, and perhaps go out to the Azure Market to secure fresh supplies – Alses turned her attention resolutely back to glyphic design, and the problems of how to fit everything into the available space.

When the lab had been designed, it had been made very large and very airy, in part because the architecture of the rest of Elysium Hall demanded it, and in part because of the simple, unalterable requirements of the craft she engaged in. Even so, however, with the new and revised system Alses was contemplating, it was looking depressingly as though there wasn't going to be enough floor space.

In her mind's eye, glyphs were already lapping at the bases of the walls and had wrapped themselves around the support pillars, and she still didn't feel as though the defences so inscribed were really robust enough, especially as she was having to work with glypher's paint rather than stone or metal.

Hmm.

Another stab of residual magic narrowed her vision and made her feel queasily light-headed, dragging her out of the deep, exalted state of cogitation in which she flew on silver wings through towers of thought, dreaming her plans into reality.

Blinking blearily, and wondering whether an extra day of lazing in bed and feeling sorry for herself would not be such a bad idea after all, Alses felt the beautiful little shock of an idea's genesis ripple through her mind as she really saw the laboratory's structure, as if for the first time.

Why use just the floor, when there were acres of wall and even, possibly, ceiling as well?

[Alses]

Swift and sure strokes made a rough representation of the gently-curving walls of the laboratory on Alses' second blackboard – the first being completely covered in revisions and changes to the original defensive design.

Looking at it afresh, with the new idea buzzing in her brain, Alses shook her head, thinking of how limiting it was, to work in just two dimensions. With three...possibilities opened up dizzyingly in front of her – although that could have been the residual magics talking.

Face so close to the blackboard's surface as to be almost touching it, breathing in the faint motes of chalk-dust curling off her chalk as it moved, Alses began to glyph in earnest, imagining the runes and sigils, the pathways and relays and all the other paraphernalia that she would need to coat the walls with.

Freed from the chains of two dimensions, Alses' chalk was racing, the air filled with the staccato bursts of activity as her hand fought to keep up with the speed of her thoughts, leaping from concept to concept to refinement to final form at great – and gratifying, admittedly – speed.

Her arms ached from the continual strain as she worked – but there was a cure for that, something that the Ethaefal had received as paltry compensation for all they'd lost; Tanroa's Blessing.

As the lactic burn from overtensed and overused muscles intensified to unbearable levels, every cell in her arms and shoulders screaming, Alses closed her eyes for a split-tick and reached out, instinctively calling on an erg of divine power that still resided somewhere in the depths of her patchwork soul.

True-blue light, Tanroa's shifting and changing mantle, a split-tick manifestation of the great River, broke and spilt over her shoulders, the radiance lancing through the flesh, the blood and the bone and carrying with it, effortlessly, every grey poison of fatigue and stress. Long skeins of tiredness were whipped away by the sudden manifestation of the river, her body jolted by the sudden passage that left her hale and hearty and as perfect as if she'd rested her arms and hands and shoulders for an entire day.

Tanroa be praised for her Blessing.

Rolling her shoulders and squaring up to the blackboards once more, Alses steeled herself for the task ahead and began to glyph in earnest with her fistful of rainbow chalks, each colour carefully identified in a handy key at the top-right. She'd learned early on the value of organization in this sort of thing; what was crystal-clear at the time of drawing had an upsetting tendency to turn to mud with the passage of time, unless there were helpful annotations, descriptions, captions, legends and other such identifying markers.

She couldn't be expected to remember everything, after all.


A


The sun was low and red in the sky by the time Alses was finished, was satisfied with the progress she'd made. Her blackboards, drawn close together for ease of visualisation, were absolutely covered in chalk-marks of all different colours, looking rather like she'd vomited up a rainbow.

A closer look at the interlaced chaos, however, would elucidate the first seductive glimmerings of order in the static maelstrom. A glance at the key legend would help in the untangling process, would bring comprehension out of confusion, and the whole mess of arcing lines and tight-helixed spirals would resolve itself into the intricate fortress-layout Alses had so carefully and painstakingly imagined.

Time, then, to break out the actual glypher's paint. Taking a look at the walls and the lofty heights of her laboratory, Alses added, ruefully: 'And, perhaps, a stepladder.'

Sometimes, being short wasn't an advantage.

The stepladder, in the event, brought tears to her eyes – mostly by closing unexpectedly on her knuckles, stripping off long ribbons of skin and making her hiss between her teeth with the suppressed gheee sound of someone instinctively attempting not to scream.

When it was finally assembled, having been dragged out of its hiding hole kicking and complaining, Alses stared at it with a sort of weak and helpless loathing, absently rubbing her barked knuckles as she contemplated it, paintbrush in one hand, paintpot in the other, wondering vaguely if the whole affair would fold up like a concertina out of sheer malice when she was balanced precariously on the top of it, reaching for a particularly tricky glyphing arrangement.

If she wanted to make use of all three dimensions, though, the stepladder it would have to be – she didn't have time for remodelling the laboratory, even though the inclination was plenty there.

With a sigh, Alses carefully mounted the wobbling contraption, clinging onto it with a grip so hard it was a wonder she didn’t leave fingerprints in the metal. Knuckles white around its topmost rail, she reached down – carefully, acutely aware in a way that she’d never really been before of just how high she was, and just how unstable her ladder seemed to be – to pick up the paint-pot and brush, to carefully load it all up with thick globs of glypher’s paint and then to reach high above herself to splash the first exuberant daubs of what would become a glyph overhead.

[Alses]

Timestamp: 10th Day of Summer, 514 A.V.

Another day, and Alses felt recovered, well enough to at least attempt a touch of magecraft. The laboratory still inspired in her a faint twinge of fear, a rushing sensation of anxiety in her stomach and all the gloomy train of worry that probably wouldn’t entirely dispel itself for a while; the accident had severely shaken her confidence, after all.

The sight of her vast constellation of glyphs, though, glowing in the light from the dome and the warm skyglass shimmer, that lifted her spirits somewhat. Every curve and arc was perfect, every venting sigil sharp and clearly defined, positively itching to burst into brilliant life, safety system piled on safety system until the air groaned under the force of potential discharge.

Alses had thought she was an expert at this sort of thing; to her eyes, this vast three-dimensional arcane construct would be able to deal with truly vast djed throughput, rendering huge fluxes harmless.

Then again, she’d thought that about her previous design. This one was much larger, it was true, and would certainly be able to cope with a lot more, but Alses was still not happy. It was…wasteful, for want of a better word; to her, every full-firing venting glyph was a failure. She felt, instinctively, that with sufficiently-elegant design, every erg of toxic djed evoked from reagents and artifact both could be effectively repurposed and redirected into the craft.

She just hadn’t quite worked out how to do it yet; experimentation with a few empty circles would be par for the course, if she wanted to work on that side of things.

Shaking her head, Alses turned her attention resolutely back to the task at hand: recommencement of magecrafting. She’d replaced all the reagents that had been ruined in her last attempt – which had ended up as another thousand kina or so down the drain – and now they gleamed reassuringly at her from their positions amid the labyrinth of Path and Relay and Switch.

She’d also made sure that the enormous quenching barrel had been fully refilled from its last little escapade; dark water gleamed faintly, lapping at its lip, and the releasing mechanism had been freshly oiled, just in case there was another little catastrophe. Even though every fibre of her body hoped fervently that this second attempt would go off without a hitch, Alses was at least wise enough to prepare another last-ditch defence.

After all, it had saved her bacon last time.

She checked again on the otherworld sword – none the worse for its immersion, thankfully, and now once more at the pommel of a lance of glyphs champing at the bit to be released, to hurl towards the target. Alses knew she was prevaricating, putting off the moment of commencement for as long as possible.

‘Okay, Alse, stop faffing around,’ she admonished herself internally. The thing was, it was easy to think that and quite another to actually put it into practice. ‘Okay…’

Striding over to the toolboard, screwing up her courage, Alses’ fingers flashed and danced amongst the ranks of hammers and clamps and vices and tongs and all the other paraphernalia of her craft. The optic ring had already been charged with six mirrors, its maximum load – at least, in its current configuration – and glittered like a celestial crown over the door.

All really was in order, and there was nothing for it but to start.


A


The chiming ring of her golden hammer, rich and brassy and beautifully sonorous as it struck the diamond – just like last time; Alses’ head filled with the odd sensation of déjà vu as she worked – chased most thoughts from her head as she worked.

The skittering first strike made the diamond bleed djed from a long gash, skeins of magic leaking out into the world, cold as ice and twice as precise, all fractured angles and impossible geometries pouring out from the inflexible mineral and being sucked into the enchanted head of the hammer, giving it a numinous weight on the colour-drenched plane revealed by her auristics.

It was balletic, almost, the sashaying segue from one reagent to another, the quick-as-a-flash strike and recoil and the long comet-trail of evoked djed, all of it as natural and beautiful as Alses herself.

The sequence of familiar actions, the swelling symphony of magic all around her, singing in her ears and tingling on her skin and blazing like a newborn star in her hammer-head, was like a comforting cocoon to Alses, soothing away the last of her fears and calming the butterflies in her stomach with every strike that sent sympathetic shivers up her arm and down her spine.

‘Two more,’ Alses noted with satisfaction, as the beginning – or end, depending on how one looked at it – of her focus circle came once more into view. Just two more reagents to go, for this first, explosive destabilisation, and by her expert reckoning, enough room in the enchanted voids of her golden hammer to accommodate two more skeins of magic.

Excellent!

[Alses]

It was hard to hold onto the golden hammer in her hand, so great was the weight of stored magic inside it, blazing like a supernova to her augmented vision. The vibrations from reacting djed ricocheting around inside of it jarred her arm to the bone, and she had to focus absolutely to get it right.

Mistakes – as she’d seen – could be deadly.

There was a blinding flash as Alses squared up to the door and swung her hammer with all her strength. The sound of the collision was a cross between ringing metal and an explosion, only half-real, the razored scream of djed meeting djed and cancelling out in a flood of toxic particles slicing through Alses’ brain.

For a split-tick, the entirety of her beautiful and hideously intricate defensive setup ignited in pearly flame, and then just as quickly faded back to calm darkness. The vast array of sigils and glyphs had caught, spun, plaited, rewoven and reformed every scrap of toxic magic that had been emitted and had funnelled it straight back into the craft, without an erg of wastage. The optic ring, hovering like a crown in midair on its steel cables had remained totally dormant.

That was encouraging, but this was early days and that was only the first strike of many.

Alses hummed tunelessly as she regarded the door, facile mind leaping to the possibilities unfolding in front of her as disjuncting djed crackled over the engraved slab of metal, flashing in actinic sparks from the claws of the Morphed chimaeras captured forever in the instant of transformation.

Now…it was yielding nicely to that first tsunami-wave of antithetical magic, half-sealed conduits breaking their shells, showing the pulsing essential nature of the door bright and clear and malleable to Alses’ sight, ready for her to break it to harness.

Properly, this time.

Like a concert pianist preparing for a virtuoso performance at the Ethereal Opera, Alses flexed her fingers, listening to the fusillade crack of joint and bone as her hands strained against one another for a few ticks.

She stepped close to the diamond that was her first reagent, delighting in its sparkle and still battling the swooping sensation of déjà vu in her stomach. Time to really craft it.


A


Phantom ice gripped her forearms as she swung – but the half-there chill vanished as her glyphic systems swung into action yet again, whips of dancing magic lashing at that spectral cold, burning it away to nothingness with ropes of bright pearl fire, her glyphs singing a song of aching sweetness to her auristics, an euphoric caress as they stripped away stray magic and bent and reflected it away, dissipating it into impotence with every passing tick.

The door itself, though, that was safe from the automatic attentions of the glyphs, and there the unleashed magic rolled and roared through its matrix, a merry wave of change and alteration that made it twist and convulse like a living thing writhing in the throes of mutation.

She’d been careful, this time – the blast wasn’t the overwhelming hammer that it had been on her previous attempt. Overstressing the conduits she was working with would be a disaster, as she’d seen – it was now a prime consideration to avoid the same incident happening again, something that Alses was resolutely keeping at the forefront of her mind even as the seductive glory of magecraft rose up all around her on wings of silver cogitation and pearly glyphic flame.

It was hard to keep her focus, her poise, in the middle of that passion torrent, that rushing wave that so stimulated her particular genius – but she had to, had to work out how to keep a kernel of her rational self like a rock against the tide, to direct the moonlit flood and not be swept along by its seductive current.

On the outside, Alses was almost stock-still, swaying slightly in place amid a forest of glyphs softly burning, but on the inside, in the vaults of her mind, she was fighting, a golden sphere of patchwork thoughts and regrets and memories that did the Ethaefal for a soul flaring bright amidst a silvery tsunami of her own generation.

Controlling her own motion was a herculean task; almost every cell in her body was screaming to move, to shift and dance and bring the hammer in her hand down and down and down again, a screaming and vengeful toccata on the theme of reprisal. Her perfect record – since arriving in Lhavit, anyway – had been smashed, and the arrogant savant inside her wanted revenge for the slight, for the inconsideration of the world as a whole against the primacy of her craft.

Golden light strained and bent against silver in her head; the conscious plan versus the unconscious reflex in a conflict that seemed, at times, to snap her muscles from her bones. Her teeth ground against one another as she struggled, jawline locked tight and fingers curled bloodlessly around the mahogany haft of her hammer.

The step back was perhaps the hardest single movement she’d ever made.

[Alses]

Make it she did, though, foot resolutely meeting the rough tile as she shifted herself to a greater remove from the artifact, casting an expert’s critical eye over what was happening, tracking the complex fractal regression-within-regressions, the impossible geometries of djedic change that so characterised a magesmith’s work in progress.

Small wonder it needed a certain kind of mind to truly reach the craft’s rarefied upper heights, then.

Happily, she’d managed it, and as proverbs the world over had it – in varying metaphors – the first step was the hardest. Now she had the altered view, the changed sight of the organically-twisting and twining matrix of the door, revolving like a dynamo, evolving as it tried to adapt to the sudden glut of pre-purposed magic, incorporating that into its tertiary structure and seeing the effects ripple down to secondary and even primary, shifting and changing conduits that were far removed from the initial strike-point, changing the game with every passing tick.

It was a beautiful synergy, one that Alses had never really truly been aware of before, something that could only really be seen from a small remove. She’d known, of course, had felt it in her bones that her artifacts shifted and changed and altered themselves to cope with new circumstances, but she’d never seen it so viscerally, never noticed it in such a blatant manner, nor in such an immediate wise.

But there it was, and, chastened, her subconscious drank in the new information greedily, missing nothing as adrenaline charged around her body, dumping energy everywhere it touched. Time seemed to dilate and slow as she focused, absorbing every scrap, new projections unfurling in her brain as she analysed and determined the new architecture that the patterns suggested, that the curve and arc and snap of internal conduits were slowly drifting into.

Alses’ steps were now perhaps a little more staccato as she felt her way in the new style of doing things, still trying to sort the old from the new, the foolhardy from the merely dangerous and a hundred thousand other considerations that thronged her mind as she swayed forward like a striking snake and crashed her hammer onto a many-pointed half-man, half-crab that overlaid a pulsing and throbbing djedic artery that really needed to dive far deeper than it currently did, to nourish a secondary webwork of latticing conduits that would provide flexible strength later on.

A ringing crash as hammer met metal, a sinuous sway backwards as djed erupted, the plangent snap of conduits breaking open and wayward magic going howling into the world catching her listening ear – but her newfound insight knew that would happen and she sidestepped neatly as toxic djed scythed out into the world, only to be leashed and tamed by her glimmering glyphs, a vigorous response from all corners and all dimensions that effortlessly contained the eruption.

A split-tick burst of violet from overhead signalled the optic ring was working well in its synergy with her glyphic defences, and Alses found that even the painful purple blaze was less-intrusive from a small remove, her eyes shielded by the small distance from the worst of the glare.


A


Her new tactics were working well, bedding into the malleable bedrock of her subsconsious and her muscle memory as she worked out the kinks, her feet a little less sure as she moved, still getting accustomed to a different tempo, an altered pattern that was in itself a lot more flexible than her previous paradigm.

It just took some getting used to, that was all.

Step and step and strike and pace back, let the glyphs deal with the blizzard of bad magic – bright pearl flame and a brief violet glow sounding the all-clear – then take advantage of the serpentine confused coils of conduits writhing with the djedic insult to approach again, from a different vector, a second attack, never giving anything time to fully coalesce, to purpose itself contrary to Alses’ requirements.

The air was thick and heavy with the forces gathered and employed, but where before, last time, Alses’ skin had prickled and burned from the djed hanging pregnant fire in the air, but not this time, oh no!

Now, it rather felt…well, it rather felt like she’d been wrapped in cotton wool, actually, insulated by depth from the cutting edge of her craft, and Alses found herself rather missing the poisoned caress of high-powered djed, the inflammation and heat and tightness that antithetical magic roaring centimetres from her jewel-toned skin left in its wake.

She felt at some odd remove from the crucible of the craft, from the bleeding point at which she achieved her greatest changes – but, at the same time, she knew in her bones that she was right there, amidst the whipping wire of high-power magic. It just all felt distant, all urgency cushioned.

Alses wasn’t at all sure she liked it.

[Alses]

Magic followed magic on silent feet, a continual blasting barrage as djed met metal and the matrix of the door, dumping itself into the tortured soul of the great object. Actinic fire danced and splashed all through the lab, and in answer pearly fire rose in rippling waves from the floor, washed down from the ceiling and breathed in a continual rush from the walls

Alses had found a way around the cotton-wool feeling. The answer, in the end, had been sheer power, seductive and destructive and rich beyond the headiest of spirits. Even godspirit wine paled in comparison to the ecstatic thrill of bending power of such magnitude to her indomitable will, and the burn of passing magic fizzed pleasantly on her skin as she struck and struck and struck again.

Laughter rippled around the laboratory as Alses worked, losing herself in the work and the craft. Magic struck and bent and caromed around the working area, bursting in cold plumes from the door as it was insulted again and again and again, forever being forced to kink and contort and change.

Cold fire chilled her arms, and then searing light flash-burned them, a phenomenon as close to sunburn as a Synaborn Ethaefal could come, the continual to-and-fro of utterly alien powers tightening her skin and leaving it weakened, damaged.

Nothing that Tanroa’s Blessing or a day or so of rest couldn’t cure, of course, but it still served as a reminder of the powerful forces she purported to master, and the thrill of such power so close at hand, answering to her will, her glyphs and her hammers, was something to savour, not squander.

Under the lash of her attentions, and the stifling and omnipresent net that was her glyphic defense system, everything returned to normal with a speed and efficiency she was entirely unused to, Paths and Relays and venting glyphs all lighting up with magic and just as quickly fading away as the power was either refocused back on the burgeoning artifact or else flared off in brilliant purple ribbons of light.

Thanks to her tireless efforts, and the continual mutation her strikes were forcing, strength beyond that of the steel the door had originally been forged from was slowly flowing into its fundamental matrix. Resistance had been drawn principally from diamonds, the hardest natural thing on Mizahar, as far as Alses was aware, stripped from that perfect latticework of carbon by the sovereign enchantments of her hammers, encouraged by her glyphery and then thrust with all her strength like a burning lance into the wounded heart of the Twilight vault door.

It was a slower, surer, more measured and definitely more planned assault than last time; her notebook was full of obsessive diagrams of the consequences – or at least, intended consequences – of every strike, every destabilisation and every redirection, all scribed out in a positive rainbow of inks.

And it seemed to be working, even if it lacked something of the delicious flying-by-the-seat-of-her-pants quality that previous crafts had had. Change was occurring, her strikes catalyst and fuel both, fed and encouraged by the continual leeching of essence from her ring of reagents, and it was a steady progression of bright-burning conduits accreting and shifting into even more stable configurations, plating themselves with djed-forged armour of light and fantasy.

Alses passed the back of her hand over her forehead, feeling it come away wet and dripping with the perspiration that had beaded there, even though her laboratory was not hot. The undeniable spike of a headache pounded its way meanly into her forebrain as she rested aching hands on the mahogany handles of the hammers now thrust through her belt.

They – her knuckles – were beginning to crack, reddened from the stress and strain of the work of the day and the continual swash and backwash of djed, the perennial jarring crack of the strikes. They’d all taken their toll, physically as well as mentally.

She was baked like a lobster all across her front side, as though the artifact was a great furnace of some kind, and every joint ached and throbbed, at once too big and too small for their sockets. Her head felt full of cotton wool and stormclouds, all conflicting and complaining, and she was full of shivers, from exhaustion as the adrenaline and concentration faded, or magic or, more probably, both.

Taking a step back, and then another, turning away as she did so and with boots thumping onto the tilework beyond the outermost of her many circles, it was like plunging into a cool bath at the zenith of a desert's flamethrower noon. Cold air rushed around her, tickling her face with phantom zephyrs, a welcome relief from the hot, half-there sorcerous sirocco that had assaulted her, even with all the glyphs.

The forces employed in her craft were vast almost beyond comprehension; small wonder there was some feedback, bleedover, whatever one wanted to call it.

Sad to be leaving her project, her magesmithing and the heady joy of its execution – even given the occasional mishap – but also delighting in the rest and respite, in the chill which swept over her djed-torn flesh like a soothing balm, Alses turned resolutely away from the artifact now well in hand, looking forward to plunging herself into the baths and giving herself over, whole and entire, to rest and relaxation.

Perhaps she’d curl up in the library, with a good book – fiction, not anything improving or useful; she couldn’t be working all the bells of the day, after all, and sometimes something utterly fantastical, a total escape, was just the thing she needed.

Alses didn’t even look back at the accreting artifact before the laboratory doors clicked shut behind her, so sure in her new methods and new defences was she.