“Now for a directive,” Maeki instructed from close by, watching carefully. After a short break under the reinvigorating light of Syna, beaming merrily down from on high, Alses had returned to the circles, much refreshed: full of vim and vigour and almost crackling with freshly-internalised djed.
“By imprinting it this early, it becomes absolute law for the construct. It's impossible for the Animation to disobey something in the directives, unless – and this is the important bit – it's commanded to do so by a higher, by which I mean earlier, directive.”
Alses nodded. “So how do we go about it?” she asked, eager to get on with it even as she was mentally starting to prepare herself for the next complex task that would build towards a complete Animation.
“Focus and concentration again,” Maeki murmured cheerfully. “Blood, too, will guide you – you'll need another drop to re-establish the connection. Once you've got it back – remember that sucking sensation? Once you have it in your grasp, you'll need to really think hard about what you want to do. This time, you want a kill-word, something that'll arrest and disperse the Life Principle itself, so your Animation dies. With a temporary kill-word, it forces sleep on the Life Principle and cuts ties to the astral body, but we'll get to that later. Better to use the permanent method at first, trust me. Good for practice, too.”
“I'm sure,” Alses murmured, already sinking into the dreaming realm of meditation, the focused state illuminated by her passive Sight and where everything was crystal-clear and bright, only the silver thread of her thoughts unspooling gloriously in the firmament. Every fragment and facet of her disparate lives, all her memories, they faded away in that beautiful state, leaving her hale and whole and able to direct the full force of her intellect against a problem, a process, a procedure or technique.
The exalted state seemed only to come when every erg of her brain was directed at something – most usually magecraft, but it was gratifying to find Animation inspired the same depth of focus and concentration. A welling drop of blood shimmered forth from Alses' skin and caught ephemeral flame in the Animation circles, a rising snake of djed unspooling from her symbolic sacrifice and being strengthened, rewoven and reformed by influxes of ambient djed, whirling around in a brilliant lightshow that spangled glorious radiances across the backs of her eyes.
'Now, focus, Alse...' She thought, bending her brain around the new theories and concepts as best she could, integrating the percolating knowledge into what she could observe, what she could infer and extrapolate from the shimmering panorama laid out before her. It was a technique that had served her well when learning magecraft, so perhaps it would work with Animation, too.
'Yomi-canoch, yomi-canoch, yomi-canoch,' she thought fiercely, focusing on it like a mantra, the sensation of extraction coming strong and focused now, directed by the circles and her own, fumbling attempts to split her mind and send the relevant part of it to impart the information to the waiting, naïve Animation growing in the Destination circle – which was ablaze with replicating, incorporating djed as she continued the delicate, fiddly process.
'Death and endings, a disjunction of djed,' was the next thought, although whereas her first thought had been cargoed with meaning and context, this was simply empty words. Eternal and perfect, death was a distant and wavering spectre, not the silent companion of every mortal; she didn't have the same, instinctive understanding of it, of what would happen.
Her thoughts, though, then took a more morbid turn; she remembered Hayani, the departure of the soul as a razor-sharp sword snicked head from shoulders, the rapid exhalation of life and the deadness as something of the essential essence of an eternal Ethaefal tore free from the body that had contained it, leaving dead and accusing eyes and a face that, even in the slackness of death, looked affronted and accusing, as though everything had been her fault.
Poisoned memories and concepts rushed down the connection, greedily drawn out by the indiscriminate circles, death and endings well and truly forced into the little toy, plated close around its bright and shining core.
“Alses? Alses!” That was Maeki, voice sharper than she'd heard before, the sound cutting through the lights and the momentary introspection.
“Mm?” she began, still swimming up from the depths of concentration, distracted and abstracted. “Yes? Did we do something wrong?”
The sense of a shaking head, a shivering ripple in the aura. “You were shaking and covered in sweat,” Maeki replied, concern ringing through every word. “I got worried. What happened?”
Alses blinked. “Just memories,” she replied with a slightly brittle laugh. “We were focusing on death and endings as a way to help us build in the disjunction for the kill-word.”
“Ah,” Maeki replied quietly. “Yes. Not the nicest of things, as it goes. Did it work?” she asked quickly – she wasn't a person to linger on the sad or morbid, determinedly cheerful. Almost desperately so, in fact, as though she herself had bad memories on the subject.
Squinting dubiously at the Animation in its circle, Alses assessed the forming construct as best she could, still somewhat unfamiliar with the appearance of half-done creations. “I think so,” she replied, after several chimes of fierce squinting – she'd managed to encode some form of disjunction, it looked rather similar to a glyphing trigger, to her auristic sight, that same intentional corruption and spiky nastiness, all locked up, sealed away, bound about by shimmering walls of a single concept – Yomi-canoch – to be released and to fail at the utterance of that word.
The hope was that the antithetical djed, held in a separate little shell next to the kernel of copied life itself, would be strong enough to completely disrupt and corrupt the Life Principle, destroying the Animation that would otherwise have kept it moving.
A very final method, perhaps, but still a worthwhile one to learn, according to Maeki – and Alses was in no position to disagree.
“By imprinting it this early, it becomes absolute law for the construct. It's impossible for the Animation to disobey something in the directives, unless – and this is the important bit – it's commanded to do so by a higher, by which I mean earlier, directive.”
Alses nodded. “So how do we go about it?” she asked, eager to get on with it even as she was mentally starting to prepare herself for the next complex task that would build towards a complete Animation.
“Focus and concentration again,” Maeki murmured cheerfully. “Blood, too, will guide you – you'll need another drop to re-establish the connection. Once you've got it back – remember that sucking sensation? Once you have it in your grasp, you'll need to really think hard about what you want to do. This time, you want a kill-word, something that'll arrest and disperse the Life Principle itself, so your Animation dies. With a temporary kill-word, it forces sleep on the Life Principle and cuts ties to the astral body, but we'll get to that later. Better to use the permanent method at first, trust me. Good for practice, too.”
“I'm sure,” Alses murmured, already sinking into the dreaming realm of meditation, the focused state illuminated by her passive Sight and where everything was crystal-clear and bright, only the silver thread of her thoughts unspooling gloriously in the firmament. Every fragment and facet of her disparate lives, all her memories, they faded away in that beautiful state, leaving her hale and whole and able to direct the full force of her intellect against a problem, a process, a procedure or technique.
The exalted state seemed only to come when every erg of her brain was directed at something – most usually magecraft, but it was gratifying to find Animation inspired the same depth of focus and concentration. A welling drop of blood shimmered forth from Alses' skin and caught ephemeral flame in the Animation circles, a rising snake of djed unspooling from her symbolic sacrifice and being strengthened, rewoven and reformed by influxes of ambient djed, whirling around in a brilliant lightshow that spangled glorious radiances across the backs of her eyes.
'Now, focus, Alse...' She thought, bending her brain around the new theories and concepts as best she could, integrating the percolating knowledge into what she could observe, what she could infer and extrapolate from the shimmering panorama laid out before her. It was a technique that had served her well when learning magecraft, so perhaps it would work with Animation, too.
'Yomi-canoch, yomi-canoch, yomi-canoch,' she thought fiercely, focusing on it like a mantra, the sensation of extraction coming strong and focused now, directed by the circles and her own, fumbling attempts to split her mind and send the relevant part of it to impart the information to the waiting, naïve Animation growing in the Destination circle – which was ablaze with replicating, incorporating djed as she continued the delicate, fiddly process.
'Death and endings, a disjunction of djed,' was the next thought, although whereas her first thought had been cargoed with meaning and context, this was simply empty words. Eternal and perfect, death was a distant and wavering spectre, not the silent companion of every mortal; she didn't have the same, instinctive understanding of it, of what would happen.
Her thoughts, though, then took a more morbid turn; she remembered Hayani, the departure of the soul as a razor-sharp sword snicked head from shoulders, the rapid exhalation of life and the deadness as something of the essential essence of an eternal Ethaefal tore free from the body that had contained it, leaving dead and accusing eyes and a face that, even in the slackness of death, looked affronted and accusing, as though everything had been her fault.
Poisoned memories and concepts rushed down the connection, greedily drawn out by the indiscriminate circles, death and endings well and truly forced into the little toy, plated close around its bright and shining core.
“Alses? Alses!” That was Maeki, voice sharper than she'd heard before, the sound cutting through the lights and the momentary introspection.
“Mm?” she began, still swimming up from the depths of concentration, distracted and abstracted. “Yes? Did we do something wrong?”
The sense of a shaking head, a shivering ripple in the aura. “You were shaking and covered in sweat,” Maeki replied, concern ringing through every word. “I got worried. What happened?”
Alses blinked. “Just memories,” she replied with a slightly brittle laugh. “We were focusing on death and endings as a way to help us build in the disjunction for the kill-word.”
“Ah,” Maeki replied quietly. “Yes. Not the nicest of things, as it goes. Did it work?” she asked quickly – she wasn't a person to linger on the sad or morbid, determinedly cheerful. Almost desperately so, in fact, as though she herself had bad memories on the subject.
Squinting dubiously at the Animation in its circle, Alses assessed the forming construct as best she could, still somewhat unfamiliar with the appearance of half-done creations. “I think so,” she replied, after several chimes of fierce squinting – she'd managed to encode some form of disjunction, it looked rather similar to a glyphing trigger, to her auristic sight, that same intentional corruption and spiky nastiness, all locked up, sealed away, bound about by shimmering walls of a single concept – Yomi-canoch – to be released and to fail at the utterance of that word.
The hope was that the antithetical djed, held in a separate little shell next to the kernel of copied life itself, would be strong enough to completely disrupt and corrupt the Life Principle, destroying the Animation that would otherwise have kept it moving.
A very final method, perhaps, but still a worthwhile one to learn, according to Maeki – and Alses was in no position to disagree.
