Solo Sturm und Drang Part II

[Alses]

Timestamp: 2nd Day of Summer, 515 A.V.
Location: Elysium Hall

Time had rather run away with Alses and Lheili both, if the truth were known.

The groundwork for this particular commission had been laid far back in winter, when the snows were thick on the ground and the city girded itself for battle against the cold and the dark.

All through the hammer of that most inimical of seasons, Alses had been laying the groundwork, painstakingly examining the ring and charting its expected progress, theoretically drawing out the manifold stages it would need to pass through prior to completion, buying in the reagents and catalyst, charting glyphic shields and baffles and all the other safety paraphernalia that any magesmith worth her salt – and still alive – always, always included.

Working with fundamental forces generally meant that a misstep without appropriate precautions equalled enormous explosions. Alses would be very happy indeed if she got through her life without blowing up her home, thank you so very much.

In any case, preparations had gone off without a hitch, and Alses had then attempted a little bit of...subterfuge, call it.

'Really,' she justified it to herself, 'It's nothing more than a bit of insurance. Nothing for anyone to worry about. It's for when Chiona passes on and the ring goes to someone else. Someone who might not be quite so...friendly. Nothing for anyone to get concerned over.'

In the event, it had taken, and taken well, the rose-gold ring opening like a flower before her meticulous genius, letting her weave a blood-red and bronze snake into the warp and weft of the thing, a coruscant flash that glittered and danced in the very heart of it, garlanded around by the fundamental djed of the ring, near-hidden by the bright blaze of it.

It was practically built into the ring, now, a directive as deep and immutable as the rose-gold itself: 'Recognize me. Know me. Taste the burn of my djed in you, feel the resonance. Do no harm to me.'

Alses hid a secret little smile at that; the artistry of it, the internal latticework weave she'd created with consummate skill was something of which she was quietly proud, the mantling wash of the ring's own djed bleeding into her own, masking it from view and yet ensuring that her blood, her magic danced at the very heart of it all, secret and hidden and yet in control.

That was perhaps enough of congratulating herself; after that accomplishment, the ring had rather languished in her laboratory, as first Lheili and then Alses herself, and then the pair of them had been too busy with their other commitments to even have a shadow of a hope of finding the time to deal with it properly.

Winter had slipped into Spring without either of them having noticed, and the flow of notes between them had been a litany of 'I'm sorry, but...'

Now that Summer was here, and with it the encroachment of Chiona's birthday, things had taken on a rather more urgent cast, and Arrangements had – finally – been made.


A


“Now, do you remember the rules, Lheili?” Alses asked in her best stern voice, just before setting her hands to the doors and pushing them gently, reverently open, revealing the domed room and its racks of magesmithing paraphernalia, and in the centre of it all, the ring, glowing and gleaming in the centre of a sprawling labyrinth of glyphs, wavering and shimmering like a mirage under the weight of the djed that swirled around it.

“Yes, Alses,” Lheili singsonged. “No touching, no magic without permission, no scuffing the runes, no overgiving. Oh, and obey instructions.” She gave a mock-salute at that last, a conscious parody of the Shinya guards.

Alses frowned, although there was no malice or anger in it, and put her hands on her hips. “Very good, very good. Now, in we go. You remember where you need to stand?”

“Yes, Alses,” Lheili repeated, a little more demurely this time, sweeping across the tiled floor with a graceful tread and carefully – almost theatrically high-stepping over the curving lines that marked out her place in the grand pattern, stopping with a click of her heels and an expectant look at Alses herself.

“Shall we?” she asked, with an impish little grin, the sunlight glinting of her teeth.

[Alses]

“So...what exactly do you need me to do, Alse?” Lheili asked, slightly apprehensive despite her outward bravado. Here, she wasn't in control, as helpless as a babe in arms, and the sight of Alses' wide smile and fond caresses of her tools wasn't exactly helping the young Lady Dawn's mental equipoise.

“Hmm?” Alses had become distracted, admiring the play of Syna's light along the golden head of her hammer, on the glimmering wash of radiance that were the highly-polished handles. “Oh...nothing too taxing to start with. Um, the first step in reimancy is to make your magic manifest, right?”

Lheili smiled. “To generate res, you mean? Yes, I can do that. Is that what you need me to do? Just that?”

Alses suppressed a patronising smile. She knew well enough that, soon, Lheili would in all probability be cursing her name. “For the moment, Lheili. We'd savour it, were I you – soon enough we'll be putting you through your paces and then some!”

She could feel the shivering prickle of doubt, the cold touch of it on the underside of her arms, washing out from Lheili. Not that it mattered; the girl would learn soon enough, when she was in the grip of Alses' own particular madness.

“Oh, if you wouldn't mind...” Alses said, handing her knife over hilt first. Lheili blinked at it in confusion for several ticks, eyes wide as she looked up at her friend.

“What's this for?” she asked, in tones of someone who's rather regretting asking, and is rather fearful that they really won't like the answer.

“A small cut,” Alses reassured, her voice pitched for soothing. “Nothing more. It'll just give me a stronger connection to your magic, if I use it aright. It goes on the hammer – here – so we'll find it easier to pull the djed and the djed constructs from you.”

Lheili looked at her doubtfully for a long moment, eyes troubled and yet also calculating. Alses took a decision, then, not to try and tip the scales one way or another. It would have been so easy to prompt her friend, to turn her one way, but some rare imp of perversity wanted to see exactly how much trust was vested in her.

Blood was old magic, after all, old and potent – most mages knew something of its properties and what a discerning, skilled and sometimes ruthless practitioner could do with a drop, if they were of a mind.

Biting her lip, Alses' burning companion made up her mind and in a sharp, jerky motion slashed her hand, unconsciously echoing the faint scars that marked her palms – the initiation scars from years ago, when she'd been but a novice in the destructive art of reimancy.

Red blood welled up, to Alses' eyes thinner than her own, and with an odd coppery tang that was quite different to hers.

No time to marvel at it, at the so-different fluid of life – there was work to do!

“You can start,” Alses murmured, baptizing her electrum hammer with infinite care in the rising redness, absently twirling the tool in her hand, ready for a strike. “You might find it helps if you close your eyes,” she added. “The sight is apparently quite disconcerting.”

“All right,” breathed Lheili, disbelieving but eyes sliding obediently closed nonetheless, her breathing dropping into something slightly deeper, more measured and even than the usual, a light trance.

Alses was watching like a hawk, every sense straining and tuned to its finest, the very pinnacle of precision, where the world was made of coruscating diamonds and the tiniest motion sent a hurtling kaleidoscope of colours and sounds and touches and smells and impressions rampaging through her brain.

Lheili was a familiar hot-tempered blaze to her, a roaring furnace of pent-up passions, delicious scandal and sheer destructive potential, all locked inside a pretty mortal skin. Alses had known that changeable aura for some time; she'd seen it sink and gutter in disappointment and anxiety, and known it spike to coruscating heights, a climax felt as a shudder in the aether even through skyglass walls and a securely-locked door.

Not that she'd ever admitted such to the woman, of course – that would have been cripplingly embarrassing for at least one of them.

Now, though, Alses was watching for the first glimmering signs of magic on the move, looking to strike and capture those first elusive hints of it, to see firsthand exactly how a reimancer evoked the raw materials with which they wrought their wonders.

[Alses]

Alses just watched in rapt fascination as Lheili began, the actual physical contours of the girl fading into beshadowed insignificance as magic began to wake inside her. Alses' own power was clustered close about Lheili, the air drenched in reaching golden tendrils that fed off even the tiniest and most ephemeral of radiations from the reimancer's soul, processing and winnowing the djed thrown off into impressions and information, secrets for Alses to peruse at her leisure.

This was a long dive down to the depths of her power, a major undertaking that – ever watchful and wary of overgiving – Alses did but rarely. It was necessary, though; this was an opportunity of the sort that didn't come along that often, and she fully intended to make the most of it.

Glittering filigree sparkled and shimmered like Zintila's jewellery-box as Alses plunged fearlessly deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Mizahar, a golden nova that dove through air suddenly as thick and coloured as molasses.

There were shoals of madness, breathing from the walls, a high and piercing laugh with a worrying undertone of more sinister chuckles, a voice that Alses recognized as her own. Off to one side, fading supernovae that were the auristic impressions of past triumphs of creation here in the lab, the powerful forces involved in each and every one having burnt themselves into even the skyglass.

Behind her, the air – and the auras it carried – swirled and eddied, cargoed with subtler, decaying impressions of the other rooms in Elysium Hall, distractions from the main event that was unfolding in front of her, teasing and tickling her back with shifting impressions, filling her nose with the scent of cinnamon.

Alses' main focus, though, was on Lheili. She was a bonfire in Alses' auristic vision, a brilliant crimson star that threw off great flares and arcs and prominences, painting her path and broadcasting her emotions to all and sundry.

Alses was well-used to that view of her friend, to the manifold furies and occasional calm of the star that was her volatile soul, but now there was something entirely new happening, the internal layers of that star shifting and contorting – smoothly, an obviously-practiced change – and sending echoing ripples through the immediate environs, shimmering shockwaves that brought tears to Alses' eyes at the coruscating brilliance of each one.

The perfect geometries of the radiating aura were suddenly shifted, twisted and kinked and pulled by something Lheili did, by a subtle change in her, long streamers of burning djed funnelling away from the main body, like a star caught by a black hole.

In the unaugmented world, Alses blinked rapidly, staring at Lheili a few feet away as the woman lifted one hand and allowed a glowing, brilliant-crimson liquid to run and dance sluggishly between her fingers.

It was a beautiful sight, one that took her breath away, for all the nonchalance with which Lheili had actually done it, and Alses felt the familiar stab of acquisitive desire light its fire in her belly, even though she knew all about the dangers inherent in reimancy.

It took an effort of will for Alses to shake herself out of her reverie, still more to swing her hammer coolly at Lheili's oblivious head, a djedic shock that rippled through her aura like a tsunami, greedily suckling at the magic pouring from the reimancer and making the glowing pool of res – for it could be nothing else – gutter and fail.

No time to watch, no time to reassure – words hanging in the air that she paid no attention to, turning with the grace of a dancer to eye the artifact-to-be with an expert's discerning eye, powerful and blood-baptised golden hammer glowing like a supernova in her left hand.

Magic curled away from the head of it as she brought the tool round in a fast and deadly arc, her body flexing and swaying to keep it under control, and it met on the ring with a dazzling burst of djed-light, a rippling explosion of suddenly-flaring glyphs limned in pearlescent flame, taking the violet eruption of toxic and unpurposed djed and spinning it, ravelling and winnowing the corrupting energies through baffles and mazes and purposeful, kinking glyphs until the painful violet blaze was dimmed and dissipated, cool blue replacing hadean purple.

There was little need for vast forces to break open the ring this time; it knew the stroke of the hammer and the complex roar of Alses' own djed signature, and Alses had put considerable power behind her first strike in any case.

To her sight, the artifact wavered and wobbled, outer conduits shivering and warping under the pressure as the sleeting deluge of released djed tumbled into and through and over them, drowning the impossible geometries of ordered magic for a moment.

It stabilised quickly, but there was a certain fuzziness to the outer reaches, now, a touch of uncertainty to the motion of the tertiary conduits that rayed out from the central ouroboros – the one that hid her blood binding behind an impenetrable curtain of glowing magic.

With a dancer's half-step, almost unconsciously avoiding a glittering chain of glyphs, Alses made the turn to keep both her forming artifact and Lheili in her sight.

“What did you do?” came Lheili's voice, at first as though from a great distance, but becoming clearer as Alses' mind came down from the high-flying place it inhabited when she crafted. Her friend's voice was high and fast, unsettled and confused and perhaps a little afraid – though, of course, Lheili would deny that last until her dying day.

“We crafted, Lheili.” Alses' voice was filled with a deep and abiding contentment; forget politics and power-play, here was where she came truly alive. “We pulled some shadow of your knowledge and skill out of you whilst you conjured your res, and thrust it into the artifact. At this stage, that's at the very core of what we need to do.”

A pause, and then she continued, thinking that perhaps a little more explanation was in order: “Later on we'll be relying more on glyphs, but for now we need a bit of brute force. You get used to the sensation after a bit, I promise,” she tried.

Lheili shivered, but at least she didn't move from her position in the great machine that was even now quieting down again, the pearly shimmering light of the glyphs dying away to a mere glimmer, restful and quiescent once more. “And what was that flare? I've never seen anything like it!”

Alses shrugged. “The transfer is never perfect,” she remarked. “The artifact always tries to resist, at least at first; most things are perfectly happy, djedically-speaking, as they are. Rings are also always more difficult; as you might have guessed from looking around here, circles are a very stable form, and they need a bit of extra encouragement to break and change. All that needs energy, and produces waste – in the form of toxic, unpurposed magic. Dealing with that stuff before it can damage me or you or the rest of the world is mostly what all these glyphs are for – they spin and winnow and attenuate the magic until it can be safely contained and dissipated.” She shrugged, careful to keep her tone light – scaring away her reimancer and her expensive commission wasn't on the cards at all.

“It's not perfect; after a few bells I'll need a break to repair the damage, but that's just one of the risks of being a magesmith. You're further from the epicentre than me, and you're not wielding the hammers and tongs and all the rest of it; there should be no fallout to reach you, at least. All right?”

Lheili didn't look – or feel – terribly reassured, her aura shivering and dancing and jinking, never remaining still for an instant, phantom tendrils of it sending prickling shivers down Alses' spine as she focused on her friend. “Trust me, Lheili,” Alses murmured, trying to tip the balance. “I'm not a novice.”

[Alses]

Magic met magic in half-there explosions of violet light as Alses' hammer danced and whirled. The air rang with whispers, and overhead the optic ring was in full spitting fury, six coruscating spikes of painful purple radiance burning like the sun as they flared off inimical magic in great gouts.

All around Alses – and to a lesser extent, Lheili - the great glyphic machine was roaring in full spate, ablaze with actinic fire as djed thundered down its pathways. Some split and split and split, hurling toxic and unpurposed power into shimmering webworks of dissipation and repurposing sigils, whilst others suckled greedily at reagents in their focus circles, drawing on their most fundamental energies to power the transformations underway in the very centre of the laboratory.

The air was rich with the snap and hum of djed meeting djed; there seemed to be more dimensions than usual clustering thickly about the laboratory where the usually-immutable physical laws were being put through the wringer by the magesmith who ruled supreme at the heart of it all.

“Again!” came the imperious command, and obedient to the call, crimson djed rose like the sunrise from Lheili's form, only to be tugged and pulled and drunk greedily down by the flashing maw of the bright-gold hammer Alses wielded.

She'd been on the receiving end of such treatment before, but at her own hands, at least. The feeling was very unusual, that Alses couldn't deny; the continual sucking pressure, as though something had stuck a straw into the brain and was enjoying a long, long drink of all the memories. Lheili – after the initial hiccup – was bearing up well, though, freeing Alses up to focus on the delicate task of transference, on drawing out the particular kinks and quirks that the magic had put in Lheili's soul to let her produce the raw materials of reimancy.

The djed whispered as it sluiced over her skin and through the air, long snakes of it curling and coiling in the head of her hammer, unleashed with a half-there razor scream as they dashed themselves against the stubborn ring and, now, began to weave little splinters of themselves into the circular structure of it all, the outer layers fraying and fuzzing and making subsequent entry easier and easier as Alses went on, relentlessly pressing Lheili's knowledge and skill and the fundamental shape of a reimancer's magic into the matrix of the artifact.

Painstakingly, she used the golden hammer's djed-charged roar to twist and break and redirect the self-satisfied, self-centred djed conduits, watching them shiver and bend and rebel against the corrosive touch of alien djed, and in that very rebellion sowing the seeds of eventual assimilation, of a subtle fundamental alteration in the makeup of the object itself, an alteration that would grow ever more profound as Alses worked and sweated and slaved and devoted her self, whole and entire, to the pinnacle of the craft.

Half-there heat cracked and warped the skin on Alses' hands as she struck and struck again. Her head was full of silver fire, her mind flying on its wings, but around the edges it was fraying, there were inchoate whispers teasing and pulling at the fringes of her consciousness as she worked and worked and strove and sweated for the final goal.

But – this craft was different. She couldn't work herself to the point of collapse, as was her wont; there was another to consider. It was a strange thought, an almost alien concept – her crafting processed had always been intensely personal, an open window into her soul and her motivations as she danced the deadly dance of intellect and fundamental force, and now there was someone else present, to witness the waltzes and the cracking, bleeding skin, the slightly-insane laughter and the manic energy that filled her whenever she had the chance to practice her beloved magecraft.

A free-diver near the limit of her depth, Alses struck up towards normality, determinedly swimming for the shallow mundanity of Mizahar, tearing her brain free from the deep place where she conducted djed and purpose like a virtuoso conductor in charge of the most powerful orchestra in the world.

It would be so easy to just fall back, to let the reaching arms of her craft enfold her in their beauty once more, to strike and strike and strike again, to make the air hot with reverberating magic and to see her body riddled with poison djed, but she had a duty to Lheili.

Shaking her head to clear it of the last lingering traces of the crafting trance – if trance was the right word – she made her way over to Lheili's portion of the apparatus, carefully uncurling her cramped fingers from the polished mahogany handle and gingerly putting the tool back through its loop on her belt, trying to avoid smearing blood all over her robes.

It wouldn't be the first time they'd had to be laundered nigh unto oblivion to get the stains out; Alses was nothing if not prone to at least minor injuries during her crafting, but she was nonetheless conscious of the extra effort and tried to avoid the telltale brownish-red streaks that tended to result after a long session at the altar of magecraft.

“How are you holding up?” she asked, voice a hoarse croak and tongue as dry as a bone. It took several swallows and unusual facial expressions before she returned to anything approximating normal.

Lheili, for her part, looked rather the worse for wear. Sweat ran in rivulets down her face, which was pinched and drawn and pale, as though she'd been on a starvation diet for some time, and her brilliant crimson clothes had darkened to the colour of clotted blood and clung, damply, to her figure.

Her eyes were glassy and distant, the stare of a mage under heavy exertion, and her lips had the too-red, too-swollen look that suggested she'd been worrying and biting them in an effort to ground herself, to keep herself from drifting down the primrose path of overgiving.

“Not too bad,” Lheili managed, after several false starts and a wan, wobbly smile. On her feet, she gingerly stretched, every joint cracking in a rippling fusillade that sent a succession of winces dancing merrily across her face.

“I don't believe a word of it,” Alses replied with a sleepy sigh, just as exhausted. True-blue light flashed and flared over her hands, closing up the worst of the cracks as it faded. She held out one hand in inquiry to Lheili, to be met with a glassy-eyed stare of incomprehension.

“Hmm? 'm not an invalid, Alse...”

“No,” Alses replied patiently – she was a little more used to the rigours of magecraft. “Do you want me to take some of the pains away? A little something from Tanroa.”

“What?”

Clearly, Lheili wasn't entirely all there yet.

“Best we wait a bit. Come on, Lheili. Bathtime and food; you'll feel much better afterwards, we promise.”

[Alses]

Timestamp: 3rd Day of Summer, 515 A.V.

The break had been sorely needed, if she was honest, a small collection of chimes and bells without the snap and flare of enormous amounts of magic breaking and bending in front of her nose. Time in the steam-wreathed haven of the baths had exerted their usual calming and soothing effect on Alses and Lheili both, and the two of them had talked late into the night, first drifting in the dark, warm water and then lounging by its sides, swaddled in towels and listening to the faint slap of wavelet against marble.

It had been...pleasant, in a fuzzy sort of way usually associated with extreme tiredness – although that might also have had something to do with the alcohol that Silver had plied them with as they relaxed and unwound, giggling together at everything and nothing.

With the memories of the night just passed still clear and bright in her head, Alses attended to the business of the morning with more than the usual spring in her step, plunging into the baths and then drying herself off with considerable vigour, every motion full of purpose.

As Syna's dawn rays bathed the Diamond of Kalea in the first, tentative lemon-yellow light, shafts of it lancing between the towering mountains and filling the valleys with a buttery glow, Alses threw open the doors to her laboratory with a confident crash of doorhandles against brass doorplates, striding in and studying the state of the forming artifact – and, crucially, the glyphic machine which surrounded and delineated the working area, keeping the artifact insulated by depth and weight of purified djed.

Intricate and beautiful, the curls and swirls and curlicues of the glyphic arts sprawled across the carefully-roughened tilework, crawling up the pillars and gleaming smugly even from overhead, thanks to a long paintbrush and a stepladder.

Alses' slow, admiring procession around her handiwork wasn't just self-congratulatory, however; it served a vital purpose as she skated her eyes along the swooping and curling lines of glypher's paint, her sharply-honed observing gaze picking out the flaws, the changes, the angles, the ablation and damage that was the result of titanic djed forces being captured, channelled, winnowed and ravelled and redirected into harmlessness.

The damage was all minor, it was true, but minor things so easily became majors, and since she had another person to look after this time, dear Lheili – who would be arriving soon, more than likely – it was best not to take any chances.

Tongue sticking out in concentration, she began to repair the tracework, the barest outlines of her circles. True to her own paradigm, her own favoured method of working, there were two; a primary circle – well, more of an oval, really, given the elongated bulge that accommodated Lheili's working area, possible only through copious amounts of reinforcing glyphs and secondary conduits - encompassing the actual work area itself, with principal foci worked into its design matrix, and a secondary one, much smaller, just large enough for one person, touching the primary as an entry point of sorts.

On hands and knees, wielding the brush and paint-pot with infinite care and considerable finesse, Alses meticulously progressed around her glyphic engine, pacing out the four cardinal and sixteen ordinal sigils with measured tread in order to keep the barrier sigils in perfect alignment. Mistakes would result in a sputtering and a scattering flow, disrupting the delicate equilibrium the specialised environment evoked, causing decreased flow inside the circle, reducing the quality of the magecrafted item and increasing the time it would take.

Which was not really something Alses was keen to do, even if Lheili would have been understanding about the whole thing.

Whippy brushstrokes, done with the very finest of her brushes for the intricacy the repairs demanded, were the mainstays of her work. Alses was carefully touching up an interlocking meshwork of glyphery designed to filter and purify the ambient djed, carefully interwoven with the bolder, much more angular and sharply-defined runes that were built up heavily against the tiles, serving as stgubborn anchor points for the rest of the glyphic engine.

Stability, that was the key, helping to anchor and preserve the filter of finer glyphery that scoured the ambient djed and prepared it for her later use. Alses' preferred method of work was in a highly-charged environment; everything was much more responsive then, easier to see and faster to work with, hence her ancillary circle array - moving straight from the uncharged environment into a charged one introduced chaotic elements which could disrupt some of the more delicate enchantments, or at the least take precious time to calm. Charging up, so to speak, in a separate and yet linked construction was the elegant answer Alses had come up with.

After a bell, or thereabouts, of painstaking work, of correction and reassessment and reconsideration, Alses was satisfied with the nature and robustness of her repairs, the darkly-gleaming paint drying quickly in the warmth of the laboratory, ready once more to take the djedic fury that would spout from her working and dissipate it into harmlessness and, at the same time, to preserve and channel the djed of her reagents to productive use.


A


Lheili's nose twitched as soon as she entered the laboratory, shepherded in by an attentive Silver before, duty discharged, he shimmered out again with barely a noise, leaving the two of them alone to get on with it.

“You've been painting,” she observed. “I remember the smell from when we had the decorators in last. Odd time to do some decorating, Alse...” Was that a smile, or was it a serious question? Alses decided to play it safe.

“We've been touching up some of the glyphic defences,” she explained earnestly. “I like to be careful about such things, since they're all that stands between us and djedic destruction.” Too late to wonder if that was perhaps the most...tactful...of ways to say it; the words were out now.

“How...comforting,” Lheili murmured uneasily.

“We're very careful,” Alses promised. “We're as well-defended as we could possibly be in here. Trust us; if we weren't we'd have blown ourselves up long ago.”

Lheili grinned, the chance to get one up on her friend momentarily overwhelming the nervousness. “I do seem to remember hearing something about an explosion here a while back, and you were in the Catholicon for a bit with 'a minor ailment'.” She arched her eyebrows, a wicked little grin curving her lips. “This despite the fact that you don't get sick.”

Alses had a response ready for that, though, and she returned fire with a smile of her own. “We may be immune to sickness, as far as I can tell, but there is still poison. I fell on some kuhari, once. Not our finest hour, I have to admit; we were well out of it and hallucinating vividly, by all accounts.”

“You were poisoned?! By whom? Why didn't you tell us?”

Alses looked away. “Ah, well...that is, in point of fact I do have to admit that that trip to the Catholicon was because we suffered an unfortunate episode of expanding djedic backlash, but only a minor one! We corrected the oversight as soon as we were out of the Catholicon's hands, and neither Elysium Hall, the artifact in question, or Tenten Peak suffered any damage as a result of it!”

[Alses]

Today was a more intricate part of the working, quite different from the grand forces which had burst and spilt sparkling magic over the artifact-to-be in the days before now. That had been the intial insult, the powerful hammer to break resistance and grant Alses access, proper access, to the Gordian knot of curling djed conduits that told the ring it was a ring, and not a fish, say.

Now that that had been accomplished, and the ring dipped in the very beginnings of reimantic power thanks to Lheili's tireless exertions, the perennial conjuring and re-conjuring of res which was still a source of delight and wonder to Alses, every time she followed the flash and flare of internal magic becoming external.

But now that the ring had had its first sips of power, now that that ability was accreting inside it, gathering shape and definition and puissance with every tick it leeched djed from the reagents and with every caress of Alses' djed-charged hammer, there was a need to pair it with control.

Having great power was all very well, but knowing when to use it, how to use it, and – critically, with magic – when not to use it was just as valuable. One without the other was useless – no, worse, dangerous.

Cities had been flattened by dangerous magical things gone out of control, so leashes and shackles and enough nous to know why there were leashes and shackles and that burning the world was not a good thing was de rigeur amongst the surviving practitioners.

So, intelligence.

Brash and sovereign gold had left her toolbelt this time; there was no call for its strident roar in this sort of delicate and painstaking work, the essential method of crafting that would ignite some shadow of the bitter spark of a soul deep within her accreting artifact, something that would wend ghostly tendrils of control into every facet and feature as it grew and matured under her tender – and not-so-tender – ministrations.

Even electrum, Alses' favourite, the uneasy mix of silver and gold that fused aspects of each pure metal together, the hammer which sang easiest in her hand and resonated true with her compound soul, took a back seat here; sometimes, power was a bad thing, and one of those times was in the careful propitiation of intellect and the weaving of a whisper-thin control matrix.

So silver it was, then, a small hammer that nestled comfortably in Alses' hand, warmly familiar from long use – she'd had these tools for the longest – and a friendly bell-like hum in the vaults of her mind, ready to be swung and swung and swung to ring in the chimes of irresistible change, so gentle as to be almost unnoticeable in their effect until it was too late, until the raft of minor changes snowballed into the glorious major.

Carefully positioned in a clear area that had a good avenue of attack on the ring on its pedestal, Alses took a few deep breaths of the djed-rich air, eyes half-dazzled by the brilliant richness and complexity of the auras all around; even Lheili's aura, a banked and living volcano grumbling away behind her, faded into beshadowed insignificance when compared to the searing arcs of her glyphic machinery.

Tireless and perfect, artifice made manifest as a complex engine churning against the prevailing tide, a bubble of altered reality braced and buttressed against the pressure of normality.

Alses' lips curved upwards into a simple little smile, that of satisfaction, perfect and pure, as her breath left her body and she moved in one lithe, flowing, rippling motion, striking reagents in sequence and tugging up just the barest of ghosts of them, the thinnest and most diaphanous of skeins, the focus glyphs below them glowing as they fountained up their magic to aid in the extraction.

Tongue creeping out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated – such light bolts of djed were the very devil to work with, responsive to the slightest breath of magic, even to the pressure of a stray thought, desperately wanting to become something, anything – Alses pivoted and rose from the half-crouch she'd used, the magic swirling around her like a thousand rainbowed veils, visible just on the edge of sight as they rippled and coloured the mundane air of Mizahar, setting glyphs alight with pearly light as they shifted.

She paused, for just a tick, at the apex of her swing, letting the trailing tails of djed be pulled into the head of her silver hammer, answerable to the inexolerable pull of its subtle enchantments.

The strike was gentle, a lover's kiss, a gentle breath of magic that insinuated rather than charged ahead, wending its way through shattered djedic defences, drifting sympathetically to commingle and commiserate with the broken-open djed conduits that ran all through the ring.

Long and languorous, there were many ticks that Alses' hammer remained pressed to the red-gold surface, the bell-like chime of its contact rippling away into nothing even as she kept hold of the very ends of the djed skeins unravelling and unwinding into the fundamental makeup of the ring itself.

Weaving at such a metaphysical remove was hard – but that was at the core of igniting the spark of intelligence in any item, one end of the delicate skeins infiltrating, weaving and dancing through the fundamental matrix of the artifact, and the other anchored together, tied and twisted and knotted in all the impossible geometries only seen in the interactions of subtly-different djed, the hungry and grasping shapes so eager to be something that they would even take hold of the abstract concept.

Well, always providing Alses could keep the complex construct in her head and in the artifact for long enough. She might have been skilled, but intelligence was a complicated and poorly-understood field, even after so much time, and there was a certain amount of trial, error and – her lip curled – luck involved.

[Alses]

Alses was flying through the aether on great wings of pure thought; her beautiful lab boomed and reverberated in all sorts of odd ways to the chiming argentine notes as she worked away ferverishly. Brute force never served in the crafting of a mind, no; she needed finesse, adaptability, flexibility – an intellect couldn't be crafted by simply bashing away and hoping for the best. The delicate skeins and strands needed to be shaped and tempered, assessed and twisted and shifted, impressed with the elusive qualities of rhyme and reason, coaxed to interact – beneficially, that was the difficult bit, the part of the craft Alses had least confidence in - with the rest of the artifact and the power beginning to swell in its glittering heart before being brought to full sentience.

Djed hunted djed in scribbles of silver fire as Alses worked and worked, the lazily twisting filigree strands kinking and whorling and doubling back in on themselves, falling into their own impossible shadows on a short path to oblivion. The magic, today, was a stubborn thing, almost perversely animate in its seeming blind desire to ignore her entreaties, snarling actinic defiance with fat rains of toxic purple sparks that flashed into pearly light as her beautiful, wonderful, perfect, obedient glyphs did their job uncomplainingly and unflinchingly.

Alses snarled, lips skinned back from pearly teeth, although none of her frustration showed in her work; she propitiated the obdurate ring in the best way she knew how: with light, almost hesitant touches, a delicate pleading and cajoling set of strokes that sent soft chimes dancing around the room rather than anything firmer, more powerful – misplaced puissance would only break the fragile webwork she had painstakingly interwoven.

There she was, as the ticks and chimes and bells ticked past with Tanroa's unstoppable inevitability, face set in a rictus of concentration, shielded by depth and a thousand glyphs from the backlash of her craft, striking and striking and pleading and cajoling and bribing and promising in whispers of djed-charged touches, making the obdurate ring yield bit by bit, teasing out the stuff of cogitation from within her own brain, linking each resonating strand, dripping with the potential stuff of memories, slowly and with infinite care into another conduit that sang a concordant duet, a branching filigree network that split and grew like some great tree, connecting every facet.

It was an eerie feeling; linked by virtue of the blood she used to establish a connection with her work, Alses could feel the unusual extension of faculty and the buzzing, fizzing tingle her attentions were causing, rather like suddenly becoming aware of an extra part of herself, one growing and expanding rapidly, not-quite comfortable and not quite fitting.

She set to with a will, bending the djed pathways to her desires through the medium of her tools, all the hues and shades and whispers of magic breaking in front of her eyes, a technicolour tsunami dashing itself against her as she brought change and renewal to the previously-static ring. For all the auristic pyrotechnics, and the occasional coruscating flare of the optic ring overhead, she was not breaking the djed of the world to harness on a grand scale as the magesmiths in the stories were wont to do.

Instead, she was going down a more difficult and yet rewarding path, effecting her will with precisely-directed bursts of djed to shape and mould and grow the ring as she wanted it to, using billowing, diaphanous – and therefore impressionable – skeins of torn-away djed to carry something of her own impressions, her own indefinable sense of self into the artifact, there serving as the nuclear catalyst to the budding mind.

Even as an expert, confident in her craft and sure of her skill, this was delicate and finicky work, complex and unpredictable. Rather than physical burns and damage, here it was Alses' brain and her nerves that were frazzled, seared and raw as calculations blazed through her brain and a thousand thousand 'what-if' scenarios played themselves out on the insides of her eyelids, changing with every tick as her artifact did.

So close, now – she could taste the coming genesis, a forming inevitability just in the future that, if she worked it all aright, would emerge into the ever-moving present.

A light tap against her forehead drew forth a glimmering serpent of djed, to her eyes bursting with all the colours of her complex aura – burgundy and oxblood, gold and silver, tyrian purple and a hundred other shifting and melting hues – and she laughed to see it, the brilliant shadow of herself that coiled in the head of her hammer, oddly like looking into a mirror.

Her strike was hard, harsh, discordant, almost, that effect exacerbated by a baser clash from copper's disjuncting hand, a second explosion of tiny djed conduits that peeled off from her diving serpent of self and interwove with every facet of the ring as the still-moving snake caught up with itself and, in a flash of poisonous purple light and a backlash that blistered the skin on the back of Alses' hands – making her hiss in pain and reflexively tighten her grip – it became an ouroboros, a fused ribbon of djed extending a thousand filigree fingers into every part of the ring, building on all of her previous work, using the underlying framework to strengthen itself and buy her precious time to secure the new work.

An ouroboros was stable; it was a circle, after all, solitary and self-contented, but the connections her work had engineered to the rest of the artifact were not – at least, not yet. Despite the crutch of her underlying work prolonging the life of those barely-there tertiary conduits, Alses still had to work fast, to beef up that new-formed ephemeral matrix that would connect new to old, power and mastery to the intelligence to use it, before those fragile, fractured djed lines faded into the general background and became useless.

It was an intricate symphony, the dancing carillon of silver chimes dancing on the ring's red-gold surface, a balancing and subtly strengthening force that rescued pale and wavering links from total oblivion and gently threaded and wove more and more magic along the developing connections, finishing each with a twist of the impossible geometries of magecraft and, in so doing, locking magic, and the words to control it that she'd repeated again and again like a mantra, to the burgeoning mind her efforts and plans and swearing had brought into the world.

And under it all, the iron-hard bar of the emergency stop, the dead man's bolt against overgiving and all its travails that would see the artifact simply stop, and recover, rather than burning out into a droplet of molten gold. Or worse.

'Beautiful,' Alses thought, exhausted, as she forced her fingers to let go of the hammer-handles and took a step back, wincing as her blistered hands once again made their complaints known. Time to find some salve and some bandages, perhaps, and to see what Tanroa's Blessing could do.

END

[Brandon Blackwing]

ALSES

XP Award:

• Interrogation +1
• Socialization +2
• Rhetoric +3
• Leadership +2
• Magecraft +4
• Teaching +1
• Glyphing +1
  

Lore:

• Reimancy: step 1 –generate res
• Glyphing: Repairing the glyphic defenses
• Magecraft: Teaching a reimantic ring control

Notes:
Great job once again

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credit goes to Adelaide Sitai