[Sanctuary] Soul of Stone

[Kavala]

Early Fall 511, AV
Continued from Heart Of Stone

The next day she was back and all reports were favorable that the tunnel ramp was finished. It was her job, now, to do the apprentice work. Lars Varkas was working on clearing out the space for her suite, common room and kitchen. He’d talked to her about tactics there, and it seems he was simply going to change stone to air in those areas, so they should go faster. That meant less workers were needed and the endless amount of sand they’d made carving out the tunnel wouldn’t be produced anymore. That was fine with Kavala, since her sea cave had its nice thick sand floor now due to that tunnel material being removed. That had been the primary reason sand was generated, and not rock transmuted. She estimated that was the entire reason Lars had tackled the project like he had. But now it was her turn. She needed to add a bit of texture, ridges to be exact, to the smooth floor of the tunnel to give horse hooves purchase and grip on the ramp as they traveled from the surface to the seafloor and back again.

By their very nature, horses weren’t underground creatures. But the Drykas had managed to see the Striders through the Valterrian keeping them alive underground. If it ever happened again, there was no guarantee that Riverfall would even exist any longer. But if it did, Kavala fully intended to have underground shelters just to protect against wild djed and unstable conditions magic could bring about – especially magic the gods through around carelessly.

So… Kavala knelt at the base of the ramp and looked at the structure. It was basically a huge corridor from the surface of Sanctuary deep down gently sloping in a serpentine manner to the Sea Cave at the beach level beneath the facility. Right now the stone was smooth, but what Kavala needed to do was rough it up and give it ridges, perhaps a half inch high, just enough to catch sliding hooves and give them a place to grip as they climbed or descended.

At first she thought she’d have the ridges go straight across on the floor level. But once she’d gotten down on her hands and knees and realized that the corridor was not straight but rather curved following the lay of the rock, she knew straight ridges would look so artificial and harsh. So instead she stretched her hands out, began generating then extruding res, and changed it to stone identical the the type the floor was made of. It was like molding clay, dragging the res across the floor, painting it on, and forming the stone. Each ridge gently followed the contours of the walls and the slope of the ramp so that once she’d gotten several dozen done, they reminded her of watermarks where the tide had washed the shore leaving lines of foam in a retreat down to the water as the tide went out. Kavala spaced them approximately a foot apart, each following the other in a contoured fashion. Once she had about twenty feet of these ridges done, she ran up and down the length of the tunnel ramp checking her own footing and making sure there was a good grip on the stone beneath her feet.

There was traction when she got done testing it, and that fact made Kavala proud.

As simple as it was to craft the ridges with magic, the length of time it took was brutal. Kavala soon appreciated how much effort went into carving out the tunnel ramp itself once she got ten feet up the thing forming ridges. Ten ridges, extruded by her own hands and willed into like stone turned into a hundred, and soon enough into a thousand. A thousand ridges equaled a thousand feet, and still she kept going, forming the inch high ridges that were three inches thick. She got better at judging too, making the ridges further apart on the less sloping aspects and closer together where the tunnel ramp became steeper. There wasn’t much variation, but Kavala knew realistically that the slightest amount of slope could impact footing, even for the smaller animals like dogs. Savan accompanied Kavala up and down the ramp more than once, checking his footing from a dogs perspective. Ink and Incense too followed suite, testing for the larger breeds. Once Kavala was happy with the plan, the ridges where smooth enough not to hurt when stepped on but angular enough to catch hooves and toes, she was happy. A thousand ridges became two thousand and that’s when Kavala realized just how big the ramp was.

When she was finally done, working in the portion that was lit by sunlight filtering in from above, Kavala could barely walk. It wasn’t exhaustion that got her. She didn’t overgive or have issues with too much magic. Really what she was doing was simple enough a child could do it. What she had trouble with was the stooping, bending, and being on her knees. Such things were not comfortable in the best of conditions on well stuffed or cushioned rugs. But on stone, the bruising to her knees was all but brutal. She stood finally, as the sun went down, hoped beyond hope that Aweston had fed the animals in her absence, and limped comfortably over to where they’d set up a makeshift veranda, wishing not for the first time that the bath was finished. It was not, but she could dream. Relaxing just enough to unknot her muscles, Kavala quickly hit the ocean for a quick swim (finding that taking the tunnel ramp to the beach level and exiting the Sanctuary out the sea cave gates was a lot faster) before she went to bed.

Tomorrow, she could start all over again with a new project.

[Kavala]

The next morning, Kavala was so sore she took a break from the geomancy and went about her regular chores, trying to restrain herself from checking on Lars’ progress before she’d given him a decent time to get things done. Horses were fed, stalls cleaned, yearlings worked, two year olds worked, and then the dogs were all taken out for a run before it was time to check. She headed down the tunnel ramp, split off where she knew the main chamber was going to be, and gasped. Lars had completely gotten the main common area of The Sanctuary done. He worked fast when he was transmuting stone to air rather than removing debris to make his client incredibly fine sand to line cave floors with. Gone were the sheer rock walls and deep stone of The Within. In its place were high vaulted stone ceilings that arched overhead, some square and some curved in a dome that mimicked Akalak architecture. The room was huge and centralized with a hearth already carved out and roughly left for her minute attentions with the finished work.

The floor had been left rough, Lars anticipating what she’d done around the freshwater fall within the sea cave. Kavala explored further, found the secondary hearth – this one for cooking – and was thrilled at the way the main living area was divided into a kitchen area as well. The kitchen had a central work counter, food storage, and the hearth designed to cook upon. It was spacious yet intimate in a way that an Akalak would design it with their lofty ideals and functionality. Kavala would need a shopping spree to flesh out the kitchen, adding wooden cutting boards and fancy things like corianders that Kavala had never owned either as a Drykas (portability was everything) or as a kept breeder of the Akalaks.

She already knew what she wanted to do with the living area, bringing in heavy Akalak style furniture and long low couches with carved feet and stiff curving backs. Rugs would go everywhere, woven as she could afford them, hopefully sooner than later though luxury would wait on coin and success. Kavala wanted to live comfortably and she wanted the Cytali to exist again in a way they could work freely but in secret. All she was building, really, was for the Cytali. She didn’t know it when she purchased those first acres and the run down business. But she knew it now. And that’s all that really mattered. Sanctuary would be a fortress, but it would be a comfortable one.

So she did the one thing that was available to do and started on the hearth. Concentrating, she planned on what she wanted to do with it. Combining her color combinations of Malachite and Lapis Lazuli Kavala came up with a fairly mixed combination that she inlaid the hearth with by creating a soft flowing gel of res over the stone structure of hte fireplace and bringing a pop it it in the form of an extra think entrance and a wide welcoming hearth.

The hearth color married the greens of the kitchen with the blues of the common room and blended the two together beautifully. Kavala was proud of hte overall effect when she got done, glad Lars had urged her to buy the velvet bag full of almost every kind of semi precious decorative stone so she had hundreds of references to choose from when doing her geomancy. With the new hearth freshly inlaid, the room seemed to glow. Kavala only bothered to coat the ceiling with a fresh inlay of onyx and then moved on to give the hallway some attention.

[Kavala]

Mathmatics wasn't Kavala's strong suit, and neither was measuring. She'd gotten better carving out The Sanctuary, but when it came to precise geometrical measurements, Kavala still had a lot to learn. She could picture what she had in mind, for sure, for the Commons floor and the kitchen area. She wanted a striking square pattern, set on edge, lined with deep blue stone and then having grey and flecked stones inserted in between laid on edge and interlocking. It was a pattern she'd seen actually laid out in the cobbled streets of Riverfall - one that she thought would look stunning in the halls of The Sanctuary. But she needed to get some handle on how to create it.

After giving it a great deal of thought, Kavala finally took a large piece of parchment and a wide fat piece of charcoal and took a trip to town. She rubbed out a stone section in the middle of the street catching a pattern from it and then taking it home. She loosely cut out the stones, leaving the lines in the paper for 'grout' and then laid it on the floor. She formed red, undercoated below the rubbing pattern, and began laying her blocks with magic, forming res into shapes, brilliant azure blue in the middle where the dividers were, grey and blue speckled making up the rest.

It was a beautiful pattern, one that Kavala loved immediately. She took her time, moving throughout the commons, crafting the floor in the same tons of color she wished to decorate the room. The blue turned out elegant, and would match perfectly with the Lapis inlaid fireplace she had planned for the Commons.

When she got into the kitchen area, she switched out from blue to green, making the swirling floor pattern resemble malachite instead of lapis, layering swirls of white and green that coated the stone and gave it a pattern unique to everything else laid down. Kavala loved that, the layers of color and the swirling patterns. She kept the floor in the kitchen going, using the same template, moving it and coating res and changing res to stone and then flaking the stone from Malachite to Marble in the middle, roughening it up and speckling it with matching inclusions. It was tedious work, for certain. She kept having to move the pattern, lay more res, move the pattern, and lay more res. Her hands and knees were sore from being on them so much. And she cringed when she got to the boarder of the commons and kitchen. Not sure how to blend the boarder, Kavala ended up mixing the blue and green in a watercolor wash of stone that mad e the kitchen and the commons floor look like it melted together in a beautiful blue green explosion of color.


When the floor in the kitchen and commons was done, Kavala liked the pattern so much she continued the flooring all throughout the main living areas bleeding one color into another. In the library, she picked out a rich red colored stone from her tumbled stone bag called Starfire and with that she copied the pattern form and transferred it into the flooring pattern. The rich red would go well with the bookshelves filled with books, and even the shelves that were still empty due to lack of books or lacking altogether. The blank walls bothered Kavala. Books were expensive, not easy to come by and Riverfall and an in the world in general. Most of them, Kavala suspected, they'd have to write themselves. And that was fine.

While she was in the library though, she took the time to install bookshelves. She built them of stone, of course, rising up attached to the walls she coated with starfire. Black and red. It was imposing, for sure, but soothing none the less. She also added tables, low and made of stone, and round tall ones that would sit next to comfortable wing-backed chairs she'd order in reds and browns and blacks. In her mind she arranged the furniture and took a small journal from her pocket and made some notes. While she was in the library, using the same onyx, she fashioned candle stick holders from reimancy, forming them out of the walls between the bookshelves. She liked them so well she brought one down from the ceiling and made it twist and turn elaborately so that it reached out in all directions, needful, arms open, ready to hold candlesticks by the dozens forming a chandelier.

Then it was time to move on to the hallways and corridors. She didn't want bright colors for the hallway though, so she picked the same neutral onyx she used for the bookshelves and candleholders to lead down to the training areas, temples and living quarters. Black on black just looked fabulous. And the truth was when she made the pattern, instead of leaving the grey inside, she put the hallways at all black, making them dark to traverse.