Timestamp: 7th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
The last day; Alses could feel it in her bones and humming in her mind when she looked at the mirror in the middle of its intricate setting. The lacework of glyphery on the floor was raggedy, now, lines thinned to half their thickness or even less by the flux of djed through them as they tirelessly, mechanically processed every erg of it that crossed their swooping, curving, organically-beautiful lines. They were holding in all the essential areas, however, and that was the main thing – the only thing, really.
The morning would be devoted to checking over the artifact, exploring the growth overnight as it fed on the charged atmosphere and correcting where necessary, and then it would be slid carefully into the very largest of the charged-water troughs, to cool and seal the sorcerous potential once and for all into the mirror.
Whilst the crystallisation process occurred, Alses would not be resting on her laurels, oh no – the place needed a scrub from top to bottom, a saltwater or purgative philtre wash to erase the glypher's paint and to obliterate the complex auras and lingering djed traces of her work, in order that the next user would have a quiescent and simplistic tabula rasa, auristically and physically speaking, with which to work.
Mind you, since the next user was still her, it was perhaps less important, but pride and good habits would refuse to let her leave the Phial, even for a day, in a condition less than pristine. This was cleaning with a purpose, the only sort she would ever normally countenance doing cheerfully and off her own bat – cleaning duty at the Respite was an endless and thankless task and something Alses avoided like the plague wherever possible, preferring to serve as a philterer and gardener if she could possibly get away with it.
She normally did, especially since it had been her practice to copy out stray notes and then burn them rather than handing them into reception, in an effort to make the untidiest of students a little better and a little more careful about what they left lying around all over the place.
“You're beautiful,” she breathed at her artifact, shining brightly in the morning sun. Dew still beaded the skyglass overhead, flashing to rainbowed aura diamonds in the abundant light, and the mirror reflected the beautiful panoply of colour perfectly, a shining facsimile of what it would – hopefully – achieve by the end of the day, gods and magesmiths willing.
Alses approached it with all due reverence, breathing slow and deep as she thrilled conduits of brilliant djed up through the dark tracework of her body, energizing every last inch of it until she hummed with pent-up, synchronising force, examining the gently-shining complexity with an expert's eye. She was supposed to be hunting for untoward growth in the auristic matrix, for disjuncting interactions that might weaken the close bonds between reflecting structure and magic, but continually and gloriously found herself sidetracked by the gently shining weave, enjoying and admiring the elegance her hard work had brought to fruition from what had been a very basic, mundane object.
Yesterday had been a day of trials and tribulations, of weaving recalcitrant, jinking and twisting djed in and out of itself until a reinforcing harmonic pattern built up inside the older matrix, of continually tying and retying slippery and ephemeral, barely-there djed connections until they habituated together and fused, seamlessly melding one into the other with the slightest direction from a magecrafting tool. Today was a time for celebration, to rest and relax from mental effort whilst Glyphed troughs worked their magic.
It was a painstaking and time-consuming procedure, removing an artifact from its support cradles and glyphic arrays, even if, as with the mirror, the actual process was complete and all that was required was the crystallising, sealing effect of charged water to produce the final result.
The clamps had to be loosened gently and teased off, being careful not to knock or damage the elaborate filigree-work of the frame or the dark wood of the stand itself, and the vices, too, they all needed removing from the reflecting surface.
After a few chimes of indecision, though, Alses decided to leave them attached until after the water had done its job. In its current state, the artifact was still very receptive to stray djed and she didn't want to contaminate it with any stray currents from herself, inadvertently released as she struggled with a vice. There was always the danger of cutting herself on a vice's jaws, and to introduce blood to the artifact at this late stage would be nothing short of disastrous.
She'd considered adding in a little of her own to the mirror at the very earliest stages, a sort of fail-safe mechanism that would stop it from working on her, but she'd dismissed the idea fairly quickly. It was a mirror, designed to reflect pretty auras and nothing more – it had no offensive value whatsoever and was therefore no threat to her, not worth the extra expense and effort it would have taken to engineer in that purposeful failure.
A sigh of relief echoed and re-echoed from the high dome of the Phial laboratory as the mirror, stand and all, slid below the perfectly still surface of one of the charging troughs and came to rest with a gentle, muffled thump on the bottom.
Already, just two bells into the morning of work, Alses felt as though she'd gone five rounds with Chiona in the sparring ring at the Dusk Tower – pummelled, bruised and aching all over, head fuzzy and ringing. All of that – the dizziness, light-headedness, euphoria and worry, all of that was thanks to the artifact being out of her hands, now. It either worked, when it came out of the trough this evening, or it didn't, and that was that. She could now do nothing more to ensure her success other than pray – and prayer would be rising in a steady stream from her today as she worked. Her mind had little else to do, after all; cleaning wasn't exactly taxing on the brain, and paeans of praise to Syna were an excellent distraction from the what-if scenarios that tended to plague her brain at times like this.
Elena's purgative philtre smelt very strongly of limes, for some reason, the fumes making Alses even more lightheaded than usual as she tipped a single dose into the largest bucket of water she could find, as per instructions, and then manhandling the hefty container as best she was able across the floor to where it was most needed.
Muscles corded and bunched beneath supple fire-opal skin as she upended it with a satisfied grin; a wave of green-tinged water ran in a great, foamy rush over the tattered remnants of her glyphic array, hissing violently where it made contact with the glypher's paint and eroding it before her astonished – and gratified – eyes. Soon, the sharp lines had been blurred into drifting insensibility, a blue-black liquid perfusing the green, a fluid residue that was so very easily dealt with by application of a long-handled scrubbing brush – whose rough bristles shushed through the foamy liquid with ease, scraping up any last, stubborn pockets of resistance to the philtre – followed by a cleansing, purifying rinse that would scour the floor completely clear of glyphic array, dirt, impurities and philtre alike, leaving the area fresh and clean and scrubbed clear of any higher djedic complexity – just as a laboratory should be.
The floor wasn't the only area of the lab needing organization and tidying, however: the desk, as was par for the course whenever she crafted something, was covered in pieces of paper detailing her work – her plans, how she'd adapted them to changing situations and new problems, what worked very well and what failed utterly and what had fallen somewhere between the two extremes, a brief djed profile of an electrum hammer (with special, emphatic notes devoted to its prodigious capacity for djed) and much else besides.
Most of it had been copied into her notebook journal during the quiet periods, those bells where there had been little enough to do but the occasional interventionist strike, keeping the artifact developing slowly along the desired track, the straight-and-narrow as defined by her, but there were still a few, final notes to copy in.
When that was done, there was the slow process of incineration, burning each and every page of said notes individually in the brazier, making sure they reduced down to completely unintelligible, unrecoverable ash so as to avoid inadvertently spilling any jealously-guarded secrets of the craft to uneducated laypersons or Elena Lariat.
It was pleasingly mindless, the scribing and subsequently the burning, watching with detached fascination the flames licking higher and higher up the pages, browning and blackening them even as they curled in on themselves and burst into bright fire, sending up thin spires of smoke that soon vanished. One by one, that was the most sensible and safest way to dispose of sensitive materials – a thick wodge might be saved from the flames, might not burn completely and so someone could reconstruct what she'd done, and perhaps attempt it themselves.
The attempt would probably end in disaster, true – magecraft required formal training for safe usage – but it was the principle that was important – and besides, there was nothing to say that someone with sufficient wit and resources might not learn from her, another magesmith, perhaps, and that was something she wouldn't countenance.
Not yet, anyway – she wanted any passage of knowledge to be on her terms, and in return for something equally valuable, not left lying around carelessly and picked up for free, as though such specialised magical knowledge was commonplace.
Even in Lhavit, magesmiths were vanishingly rare – she was the only permanent resident practitioner that she knew of, the others known to the city were transients washing through every now and then, bringing with them a fresh cargo of artifacts, reagents and scars to delight scholars, citizens and seekers after power alike.
Happily and mindlessly absorbed in the menial work of tidying and preparing the workspace – making a note of the supplies she'd used against the black book master-list for the seneschal, so he could bill her appropriately and so forth – it was late afternoon by the time she looked in once more at her mirror, finding its aura settled and sedate, ready to be carefully lifted out.
The moment of truth came sooner than she'd have liked, as the water sluiced off it in sheets and puddled on the smooth tile, running away in long rivulets to drains set in the far corners of the room for just such occasions as this. Alses put it off for a while, using soft cloths to dry and buff the mirror's stand and ornamentation to a high shine, getting minutely absorbed in the task of polishing every little gilt curlicue to perfect dryness and maximum radiance. It was displacement activity, putting off a difficult and potentially unpleasant experience as long as possible – she'd done it with her crown-of-horns when first taking up teaching, too, spending an inordinate length of time getting it perfectly clean and dry and polished in the vague and nebulous hope that some catastrophe might befall the city and excuse her standing up and discharging her responsibilities.
Taking a deep breath, Alses screwed up her courage and stepped boldly in front of her finished artifact, anxiously watching her reflection.
The last day; Alses could feel it in her bones and humming in her mind when she looked at the mirror in the middle of its intricate setting. The lacework of glyphery on the floor was raggedy, now, lines thinned to half their thickness or even less by the flux of djed through them as they tirelessly, mechanically processed every erg of it that crossed their swooping, curving, organically-beautiful lines. They were holding in all the essential areas, however, and that was the main thing – the only thing, really.
The morning would be devoted to checking over the artifact, exploring the growth overnight as it fed on the charged atmosphere and correcting where necessary, and then it would be slid carefully into the very largest of the charged-water troughs, to cool and seal the sorcerous potential once and for all into the mirror.
Whilst the crystallisation process occurred, Alses would not be resting on her laurels, oh no – the place needed a scrub from top to bottom, a saltwater or purgative philtre wash to erase the glypher's paint and to obliterate the complex auras and lingering djed traces of her work, in order that the next user would have a quiescent and simplistic tabula rasa, auristically and physically speaking, with which to work.
Mind you, since the next user was still her, it was perhaps less important, but pride and good habits would refuse to let her leave the Phial, even for a day, in a condition less than pristine. This was cleaning with a purpose, the only sort she would ever normally countenance doing cheerfully and off her own bat – cleaning duty at the Respite was an endless and thankless task and something Alses avoided like the plague wherever possible, preferring to serve as a philterer and gardener if she could possibly get away with it.
She normally did, especially since it had been her practice to copy out stray notes and then burn them rather than handing them into reception, in an effort to make the untidiest of students a little better and a little more careful about what they left lying around all over the place.
“You're beautiful,” she breathed at her artifact, shining brightly in the morning sun. Dew still beaded the skyglass overhead, flashing to rainbowed aura diamonds in the abundant light, and the mirror reflected the beautiful panoply of colour perfectly, a shining facsimile of what it would – hopefully – achieve by the end of the day, gods and magesmiths willing.
Alses approached it with all due reverence, breathing slow and deep as she thrilled conduits of brilliant djed up through the dark tracework of her body, energizing every last inch of it until she hummed with pent-up, synchronising force, examining the gently-shining complexity with an expert's eye. She was supposed to be hunting for untoward growth in the auristic matrix, for disjuncting interactions that might weaken the close bonds between reflecting structure and magic, but continually and gloriously found herself sidetracked by the gently shining weave, enjoying and admiring the elegance her hard work had brought to fruition from what had been a very basic, mundane object.
Yesterday had been a day of trials and tribulations, of weaving recalcitrant, jinking and twisting djed in and out of itself until a reinforcing harmonic pattern built up inside the older matrix, of continually tying and retying slippery and ephemeral, barely-there djed connections until they habituated together and fused, seamlessly melding one into the other with the slightest direction from a magecrafting tool. Today was a time for celebration, to rest and relax from mental effort whilst Glyphed troughs worked their magic.
It was a painstaking and time-consuming procedure, removing an artifact from its support cradles and glyphic arrays, even if, as with the mirror, the actual process was complete and all that was required was the crystallising, sealing effect of charged water to produce the final result.
The clamps had to be loosened gently and teased off, being careful not to knock or damage the elaborate filigree-work of the frame or the dark wood of the stand itself, and the vices, too, they all needed removing from the reflecting surface.
After a few chimes of indecision, though, Alses decided to leave them attached until after the water had done its job. In its current state, the artifact was still very receptive to stray djed and she didn't want to contaminate it with any stray currents from herself, inadvertently released as she struggled with a vice. There was always the danger of cutting herself on a vice's jaws, and to introduce blood to the artifact at this late stage would be nothing short of disastrous.
She'd considered adding in a little of her own to the mirror at the very earliest stages, a sort of fail-safe mechanism that would stop it from working on her, but she'd dismissed the idea fairly quickly. It was a mirror, designed to reflect pretty auras and nothing more – it had no offensive value whatsoever and was therefore no threat to her, not worth the extra expense and effort it would have taken to engineer in that purposeful failure.
A sigh of relief echoed and re-echoed from the high dome of the Phial laboratory as the mirror, stand and all, slid below the perfectly still surface of one of the charging troughs and came to rest with a gentle, muffled thump on the bottom.
Already, just two bells into the morning of work, Alses felt as though she'd gone five rounds with Chiona in the sparring ring at the Dusk Tower – pummelled, bruised and aching all over, head fuzzy and ringing. All of that – the dizziness, light-headedness, euphoria and worry, all of that was thanks to the artifact being out of her hands, now. It either worked, when it came out of the trough this evening, or it didn't, and that was that. She could now do nothing more to ensure her success other than pray – and prayer would be rising in a steady stream from her today as she worked. Her mind had little else to do, after all; cleaning wasn't exactly taxing on the brain, and paeans of praise to Syna were an excellent distraction from the what-if scenarios that tended to plague her brain at times like this.
Elena's purgative philtre smelt very strongly of limes, for some reason, the fumes making Alses even more lightheaded than usual as she tipped a single dose into the largest bucket of water she could find, as per instructions, and then manhandling the hefty container as best she was able across the floor to where it was most needed.
Muscles corded and bunched beneath supple fire-opal skin as she upended it with a satisfied grin; a wave of green-tinged water ran in a great, foamy rush over the tattered remnants of her glyphic array, hissing violently where it made contact with the glypher's paint and eroding it before her astonished – and gratified – eyes. Soon, the sharp lines had been blurred into drifting insensibility, a blue-black liquid perfusing the green, a fluid residue that was so very easily dealt with by application of a long-handled scrubbing brush – whose rough bristles shushed through the foamy liquid with ease, scraping up any last, stubborn pockets of resistance to the philtre – followed by a cleansing, purifying rinse that would scour the floor completely clear of glyphic array, dirt, impurities and philtre alike, leaving the area fresh and clean and scrubbed clear of any higher djedic complexity – just as a laboratory should be.
The floor wasn't the only area of the lab needing organization and tidying, however: the desk, as was par for the course whenever she crafted something, was covered in pieces of paper detailing her work – her plans, how she'd adapted them to changing situations and new problems, what worked very well and what failed utterly and what had fallen somewhere between the two extremes, a brief djed profile of an electrum hammer (with special, emphatic notes devoted to its prodigious capacity for djed) and much else besides.
Most of it had been copied into her notebook journal during the quiet periods, those bells where there had been little enough to do but the occasional interventionist strike, keeping the artifact developing slowly along the desired track, the straight-and-narrow as defined by her, but there were still a few, final notes to copy in.
When that was done, there was the slow process of incineration, burning each and every page of said notes individually in the brazier, making sure they reduced down to completely unintelligible, unrecoverable ash so as to avoid inadvertently spilling any jealously-guarded secrets of the craft to uneducated laypersons or Elena Lariat.
It was pleasingly mindless, the scribing and subsequently the burning, watching with detached fascination the flames licking higher and higher up the pages, browning and blackening them even as they curled in on themselves and burst into bright fire, sending up thin spires of smoke that soon vanished. One by one, that was the most sensible and safest way to dispose of sensitive materials – a thick wodge might be saved from the flames, might not burn completely and so someone could reconstruct what she'd done, and perhaps attempt it themselves.
The attempt would probably end in disaster, true – magecraft required formal training for safe usage – but it was the principle that was important – and besides, there was nothing to say that someone with sufficient wit and resources might not learn from her, another magesmith, perhaps, and that was something she wouldn't countenance.
Not yet, anyway – she wanted any passage of knowledge to be on her terms, and in return for something equally valuable, not left lying around carelessly and picked up for free, as though such specialised magical knowledge was commonplace.
Even in Lhavit, magesmiths were vanishingly rare – she was the only permanent resident practitioner that she knew of, the others known to the city were transients washing through every now and then, bringing with them a fresh cargo of artifacts, reagents and scars to delight scholars, citizens and seekers after power alike.
Happily and mindlessly absorbed in the menial work of tidying and preparing the workspace – making a note of the supplies she'd used against the black book master-list for the seneschal, so he could bill her appropriately and so forth – it was late afternoon by the time she looked in once more at her mirror, finding its aura settled and sedate, ready to be carefully lifted out.
The moment of truth came sooner than she'd have liked, as the water sluiced off it in sheets and puddled on the smooth tile, running away in long rivulets to drains set in the far corners of the room for just such occasions as this. Alses put it off for a while, using soft cloths to dry and buff the mirror's stand and ornamentation to a high shine, getting minutely absorbed in the task of polishing every little gilt curlicue to perfect dryness and maximum radiance. It was displacement activity, putting off a difficult and potentially unpleasant experience as long as possible – she'd done it with her crown-of-horns when first taking up teaching, too, spending an inordinate length of time getting it perfectly clean and dry and polished in the vague and nebulous hope that some catastrophe might befall the city and excuse her standing up and discharging her responsibilities.
Taking a deep breath, Alses screwed up her courage and stepped boldly in front of her finished artifact, anxiously watching her reflection.
