[Dusk Tower] The First Commission

by **Alses** on August 22nd, 2012, 10:41 pm

Timestamp: 82nd Day of Summer, 512 A.V.

Had it not been made almost completely of skyglass, that wondrous material that glowed softly and constantly and was unique to the celestial city of the stars, the Dusk Tower might have looked...well...intimidating. It soared to the starry skies, an earthbound spire of light reaching for the heavens, standing tall and proud atop its mountain peak, immovable and seemingly eternal. Every scrap of it was carved and decorated in some way, from elaborate statues of past luminaries from the Dusk family to the ornate parapets and fanciful turrets that branched off the main spire, as though the great Tower itself was birthing smaller copies of itself that might, one day, given care and time, match their stately parent.

But the Tower was made of that most beautiful of building materials, coaxed into shape and sinuous, curving form by the priesthood of Zintila, and so it glowed with all the myriad shades and hues of the most perfect of dusks – burnished bronzes melting into rich burnt oranges and merging with subtle gilded radiance dancing at the edge of the masonry, all overlaid onto a darkling canvas that gleamed softly, the complex and elusive colour of black pearls. In a city of towering heights and vertiginous drops, the Dusk Tower soared supreme above the lesser profusion of domes and minarets all around, a visible symbol of wealth and power only enhanced by the grounds around it; space was at a premium atop the mountain peaks of Lhavit, and to afford private gardens at ground-level was a real mark of wealth and prestige. However, in testament to the unique culture of Lhavit, the Tower was not sealed and private, locked away behind walls and private guards, but open - at least to an extent - to those who wished to learn from the family who owned it, masters of the Auristic discipline of personal magic and much else besides.

Alses' approach was, as ever, slightly tinged with nerves – here in Lhavit, she was in truth not much better than an itinerant, with little in the way of funds to her name and still less of a reputation, and yet nonetheless here she was, walking assuredly up to the gates of one of the three finest families in the city, a student under their care. 'I must be completely mad,' she thought to herself, not for the first time, quite unable to believe her good fortune. 'Either that, or my honoured patrons are.' Nonetheless, the die had been cast some time ago and her path – at least in the short term - set. She was a magecrafter – at least, by desire, anyway, and that was, first and foremost, what she considered herself in the privacy of her own head – but such a magus was useless without their laboratories and reagents, and at the moment, she possessed neither, and so had had to fall back on other skills – of which she had precious few. Auristics was perhaps the most developed of her other arts – still far from any form of mastery, true, but the aesthete in her had always delighted in the world drenched in ever-shifting, ever-changing colour and sound that the Sight revealed to her, and that had been as good a reason as any to pursue it under the tutelage of House Dusk.

That, at least, had been her reasoning under Syna's light, filled with confidence when her skin was gilded with buttery radiance, her idle mind buffeted hither and yon by bursts of memory and desire from past lives, when the sense of being a compound creature - a patchwork scrapbook made of discarded pieces of other lives, all without any real link to one another - was at its strongest. Later, the softer, more introspective light of Leth had brought logic and reason to the impulsive decision – bound in her mortal seeming, not drifting along the webwork of past lives and experiences quite so much, she'd begun to see the other advantages. 'Tathis always maintained I should grow my understanding of auristics with my magecrafting,' she'd allowed, whilst that wild part of her that wanted nothing more than to dance under the sun and lose itself amid old memories raged and railed inside. 'Which, admittedly, I haven't done. Without a laboratory, and without all the ingredients that I practically salivate over in the Azure Market whenever my steps take me that way, I can be as accomplished in magecrafting as I like and it won't make a blind bit of difference.' That thought was a common one, and always tinged with rueful resignation – she'd left her old master's tower in Zeltiva blithely assuming that wizards, and by extension all their apparatus and appurtenances, were a great deal more common than was actually the case. Travel had been a rude awakening indeed.

Careful enquiry, both in the Shooting Star Inn and of the curiously helpful city bureaucracy at the Cosmos Centre, had revealed that not only was Auristics a highly-regarded discipline in Lhavit, which was a stroke of luck in and of itself – possibly something to do with the city being built from skyglass – but that one of the oldest and most respected families in the city were not only masters of the art but were willing to teach students, provided they had the ability and will. It had all sounded far too good to be true, but with her supplies of kina steadily dwindling – even though she mostly went without food, preferring sunlight after a rather unfortunate incident before she came to Lhavit – something had needed to be done, and being an aurist's apprentice or general dogsbody (she wasn't quite sure where that term came from, or why a dog's body was considered a good general assistant) was far and away one of the most palatable things on offer.

At the time, however, she hadn't envisaged it involving so much running about – all over the city, in fact, delivering messages of one sort or another for her lordly patrons, and it was this never-ending task which had brought her to the Dusk Tower yet again, to collect the latest run of messages – terse orders and missives to suppliers and dependents of one flavour or another, in the main, but there were also occasionally heavy, ornate cherrywood boxes, inlaid with gold and warded with shielding spells and blasting glyphery alike, the bane of Alses' life, given their weight.

The doorhandles were watching her.

This suspicion was enough to jerk Alses out of one of her – admittedly rather frequent – introspections, and she carefully examined the old wood as though seeing it for the first time, the timber darkened and hardened by time and weather into something more closely resembling stone with a grain than any form of once-living tissue. The doors were ornately-carved, continuing some high-minded allegorical story - which, unsurprisingly, completely passed Alses by, though she did take the time to admire the artistry and made a mental note to ask about its subject matter - carved in bas-reliefs all around the lowest level of the Tower. Despite the profusion of carvery – the work of months, if not years, for a master carpenter, surely – there was nothing which screamed – or even whispered – of magic, although she was quite prepared to believe that there was a great deal going on beyond her ability to see or even recognize.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Alses turned the eyes – with a murmured "Excuse me,"; she hadn't been able to rid herself of the constant feeling of being watched, and it seemed the polite thing to do in any case – and made her way into the Tower.

Inside was cool and dim to an Ethaefal, even though to most the interior was bathed in plentiful light pouring in through the many mullioned windows. The discreetly helpful signs that were artfully worked into the Tower's decoration were always a godsend, pointing the way to various destinations through the labyrinthine structure, guiding a new(ish) student so she didn't, for example, end up wandering around Yuo'ta Dusk's bedroom whilst trying to find her way to the reception desk, something for which Alses was very thankful indeed, having seen the size of the spears the Dusks favoured, and the worrying skill they all seemed to have with them.

Now standing in front of the marble reception desk, she gazed down at the secretary for a moment and was struck by how little she knew about the dapper and scrupulously polite man, someone who was never less than immaculate, as fresh as a daisy whether it be just after dawn or just before dusk.

He seemed to feel the pressure of her gaze, for he laid aside his quill and inclined his head graciously to her. “Ah, courier, good. I've a batch of correspondences ready to go.” His hands moved towards a pile of documents, then stopped. Fine black eyebrows quirked above startlingly direct pale gray eyes. “It's Alses, isn't it?” At her slightly confused nod, he continued. “I thought so, but I wasn't sure.” A knife-like smile. “And in my line of work, one must be sure at all times.” Slender fingers riffled through lustrous envelopes, the parchment rich and whispering quality, before plucking one out and proffering it with a flourish to her.

“A letter for you, miss. It was fortuitous you arrived when you did; another five chimes and I'd have sent this off with one of the other messengers.” He nodded at the letter as Alses turned it over in wondering hands. “Take your time.”

The seal on the envelope – a rich purple wax impressed with an intricate crest – was that of the Dusk Tower, at least on first examination. On closer inspection, however, there were more quarterings of the crest and some differentiation in the flourishes. Had it been handed to her by anyone other than the Tower secretary, she would have doubted its veracity, but it had come straight from his ink-stained hands. So...if not the Tower as an organization, then perhaps a member of House Dusk? 'What could one of the Dusks want with me?' she thought, mildly apprehensive. 'I haven't really met very many of them, either, so which one could it possibly be? If this even is a personal seal, although I suspect that's correct.' Taking a deep breath, Alses grasped the proverbial bull by its horns and cracked the letter open, eyes rapidly scanning the fine cursive script.

by **Tabarnac** on September 9th, 2012, 5:34 pm

The eighty-second day of Summer
The five hundred and twelfth year after the Valterrian

Apprentice Alses,

We are aware of your skills and would like to award you a commission. A laboratory has been set up within the Dusk Tower for these purposes, the details of which are as follows:

While our Tower prides itself on its powers of observation, magical and otherwise, we are not invulnerable. In the laboratory, you will find a dagger of skyglass. We require that it be enhanced slightly in durability, and more so in speed and an innate understanding of its own use. In all frankness, an esteemed, yet elderly person should be able to use it to fend off an assassin far beyond their skill.

All necessary reagents within reason will be provided. Simply speak to the Master of the Exchequer. We estimate this should take you no more than thirty days, and you will be paid commensurate with your skills and success after the deduction of the costs of materials.

The courier will show you to your laboratory.

May Zintila light your way,

Ald'gare Dusk

Assuming no sane student of the Dusk Tower would defy the wishes of its master, the courier led her to the laboratory. It was not overly large, but it had all that she needed, most of it neatly tucked into cabinets set into the wall.

The most important feature, of course, was the circular table in the center of the room. There lay three things on squares of dove grey silk: two warm phials of blood marked in glyphs and the ornate skyglass dagger, its haft wrapped in finespun silver wire.

The first phial contained the blood of a powerful magus charged with Flux; the other contained the blood of Shinya warrior, a master at the dagger.

The rest, of course, was up to Alses.

The OOC Details :

by **Alses** on September 11th, 2012, 5:13 pm

Alses' hands shook slightly as she read the formal missive; butterflies of delight danced in her stomach and a broad, beaming smile spread across her features. 'A commission!' she exulted. 'We can practice our craft again! My own laboratory to work in, all the ingredients I might require - within reason, of course – and the prospect of being paid for it too! Radiant Lady, Starry Queen, whichever deity is watching over us, my thanks for this!'

“Good news?” Mr. Secretary had a slight, knowing grin on his face, not even pretending to continue his work, his fine quill laid down, unheeded, besides a stack of correspondence.

“We have a commission, Mr. Secretary!” Alses' voice was thick with joy and unalloyed delight; it was as though a sunbeam rayed out from her. The dapper fellow smiled, slightly wryly, at her exuberance. “The Patriarch did mention something to the effect that you'd be taking temporary possession of the laboratory on the seventh floor, Alses. I'll have one of the staff escort you up.”

A

The door clicked respectfully shut behind the servant and, for the first time since receiving the news of her commission, Alses was alone. Hands on hips, a pose she'd copied from Tahala, the Ethaefal surveyed her new domain with a practised eye, familiarising herself with the layout. The essential shape of the room was circular, but nooks and alcoves broke up the smooth, sweeping lines of the skyglass. Deep cabinets of a dark and battle-scarred old wood, the same sort as formed the Tower doors, were ranged in serried ranks across the walls, and simple but sturdy bookshelves in one of the alcoves held a small library of the more common arcane texts, for ease of reference. There was the usual barrel of water for emergencies – Alses often thought of it as the universal douser, for its efficacy in containing and damping down all sorts of runaway magical reactions – as well as a shallow trough that shimmered with complex glyphic sigils, for when the time came to finish off Ald'gare Dusk's dagger.

It was generally a basic setup, yes, at least in terms of the actual materials present – but then, clutter and distractions could be fatal in magic, and fine furniture was wasted in a space that experienced djed experimentation on a grand scale, where the threat of explosion, implosion, unplanned transmutation or simple splattering with all sorts of unpleasant substances was ever-present.

The most interesting items, of course, were waiting for her on the laboratory table, which, for some reason, had been given pride of place in the middle of the room, eclipsing the actual working area itself. Perhaps it was to ensure she noticed the key ingredients – but if the Dusks had such a low opinion of her intelligence, then why would they have given her such a commission?

Alses shook her head; no use getting bogged down in irrelevant details. In any case, the laboratory had probably been prepared by servants – and why would they be versed in the intricacies of magecraft? Every magesmith kept their secrets close to their chest; nobody wanted a horde of crafters flooding Mizahar, after all. Carefully, she inspected each of the items laid out for her, noting the preservation enchantment neatly woven around the two phials of blood, each one clearly labelled with precise, neat glyphs, and the pristine dagger that was to be the focal point of her endeavours. The blood was red, something which always gave her pause; her own tended towards the bronze, and it always took a few seconds to remember that blood could be – and most often was – other colours.

The cabinet directly over her desk provided a useful place to store them, at least temporarily, the vials of blood securely held in an ingenious clasp arrangement until they were needed, and the blade itself wrapped up and deposited carefully on the desk that the uncomplaining Tower servants must have hauled in from Zintila-knew-where. Today – and, likely as not, another day or two as well – was going to be given over to preparation. In magic generally, and in magecrafting specifically, the most difficult and demanding of all the disciplines of craft and lore, preparedness was the first part of practice. A cliché, perhaps – but then again, clichés only became clichés because people found them useful; they were, in essence, the spanners and pliers in the toolbox of communication.

The chair creaked under Alses' slight weight as she sat down, then protested some more as she moved about, taking papers and quill and ink from various drawers and cubbyholes, organizing them with fastidious exactitude and exactly to her liking on the sloping wood, before beginning in earnest.

Looking at the letter she'd received once more, Alses dipped her quill in a fresh pot of ink and began to write her own lists. 'Ald'gare Dusk's Dagger,' she wrote, in a careful, clear hand. 'General Purpose: …' It was always a good idea to understand exactly what the client wanted done, after all. She consulted the commissioning letter again, just to be sure, mentally ticking off every condition as she noted it down.

Ald'gare Dusk's Dagger

General Purpose: Last-chance saving grace dagger, for use against assassins and other such undesirables.

Requirements:

Minor increase in durability.

Moderate increase in speed.

Moderate innate skill.

'That seems to cover the basics,' Alses thought with a satisfied nod, pinning the simple list in pride of place. It would serve admirably as a reminder not to get distracted or sidetracked from the requirements. 'Now, let me see...durability is, comparatively speaking, easy enough. Skyglass is strong already; I shan't be altering the fundamental nature of the stuff, just reinforcing and building on what's already there. Skill shouldn't be too difficult, either – knife-wielding isn't a magical discipline, so I won't have to worry about antithetical – or, for that matter, synergistic - djed reactions there. If I craft a reasonable intelligence into the fabric of the dagger, I can task it to understanding how to use its 'body', for want of a better word, to best effect. Increasing its speed, though...that will be interesting, to say the least. I know how I'd usually do it, but the Dusks provided me with this second lot of blood to use, so there must be something there to help...' She cast a glance towards the small arcane library in one of the handy alcoves, hands already itching to crack open the books there and eagerly devour any knowledge she didn't already possess.

'Keep on target, Alses!' she admonished herself. 'You can pore over the books later, once you have your basic set-up.' She took some deep, steadying breaths, hoping to calm her squirrelcaging thoughts that leapt, unconnected, from one thread of cogitation to the next, filling her brain with a useless fog of delight. It really had been too long since she'd properly practiced her craft.

The next thing to do, and the only thing she trusted herself with in her present state, was simply taking stock: finding out exactly what the laboratory had been supplied with, and in what quantities, since there didn't seem to be a master list anywhere that she could find, which was frustrating. Sheaf of papers in hand, quill freshly charged with fine black ink and a long stick of chalk in her pocket, she opened the closest cabinet, to be greeted by serried ranks of shelves carefully stuffed with all manner of ingredients and reagents, from powdered alchemilla to a carefully-sized array of auralite stones.

'This could take a while,' she thought, ruefully, steadying her papers and laboriously writing:

'Cabinet One, Shelf One: Banded Agate (x10), Blood Agate (x10), Amber (x4)...'

by **Alses** on September 18th, 2012, 10:04 pm

The next day, she was in a rather better state of mind to really make inroads on her commission set-up; she had a much better idea of the materials she had to work with and a better sense of the laboratory in which she was performing her craft. She hadn't had much sleep, admittedly, fizzing with the anticipatory energy, but she'd managed to channel that into producing pages upon pages of painstaking diagrams and steps that she wanted to take to achieve the final enchantments.

By the time she was finished, the little corner of the laboratory that centred on the desk would look as though a storm of paper had hit it – belying the actual organization which made sense of it all. Usually, anyway; sometimes things did just get lost, go missing, get smudged from having her fingerprints all over them for so long, accidentally got tipped into the bin...there were a hundred and one reasons why something could go astray.

Alses settled into the creaky chair – which, true to form, protested loudly – and took out a sheet of fresh, crisp paper. An idea – or perhaps simply a recognition of an oversight – had occurred to her last night.

The eighty-third day of Summer
The five hundred and twelfth year after the Valterrian

His Excellency Ald'gare Dusk, Patriarch of House Dusk, Master of the Dusk Tower and Member of the Council of Towers of Lhavit,

My lord, having examined your requirements for the commission you awarded to me, I wish to present a minor amendment for your consideration. As I understand your requirements, the commissioned dagger is to be a last-chance saving-grace weapon, for use by one person in a surprise situation, against assassins and other such undesirable characters.

I feel that a useful and practical addition would be the binding of the weapon to either the gentleman in question or to the bloodline in general. This would have the effect of rendering the weapon all-but useless to anyone but the intended wielder and his family, depriving the assassin of a potential weapon whilst retaining long-term use for the dagger.

In order to do this, I would require some of the gentleman's blood for a singular binding, or at least three samples of familial blood to bind the dagger to a bloodline. I await your aye or nay on my suggestion, and am completely at your disposal to discuss such matters, should you feel it necessary.

May Syna's light guide you in all things.

I remain, my lord,

Alses

Magesmith and Apprentice of the Dusk Tower

A flash of true-blue light danced and flickered over the page for a moment, once she was quite certain that she wanted to make no changes, leaving the ink completely dry. A draft, so heavily inked with a mass of corrections that the paper was almost completely black, went with a soggy splash into a handy bin, and Alses considered the various waxes and candles the laboratory's desk was supplied with. Her hands were unsure – it had been a long time since she'd done this, after all, her memories vague and fuzzy, unrecalled for years.

'There must be a better way of remembering things,' she thought idly, hands occupied in carefully, carefully letting some of the red beeswax drip onto the envelope, forming a thick circle of molten wax. Ideally, she'd heat her signet ring, too – but then, her seal was a relatively simple sunburst escutcheon, not a complex family crest like some of the wealthiest merchants had; the cold metal of her ring wouldn't blur the seal enough to matter.

A firm press of gold to red wax, ten measured seconds, and then a careful removal, leaving the perfect stamp of a sun in full glory as her seal. And speaking of seals...

Quickly, surely, now that she'd taken inventory of her laboratory (it was already 'her' laboratory in her mind) she moved over to one of the cabinets and carefully took out a large pot of glypher's paint and a pristine brush. For lesser items, chalk sufficed – or even paper and ink, in a pinch. However, for something that required more of an investment in time and resources, glypher's paint (in actuality more of a thick ink than anything) was the perfect thing; the sigils didn't have to be redrawn daily, as they would with chalk, and the paint could take greater djed fluxes without ablating, too.

Taking a deep breath to quell the fluttering thrill of anticipation that accompanied any project, Alses began in earnest. Tongue sticking out in concentration, she began the tracework, the barest outlines of her circles. Her own preference was to use at least two; a primary circle, 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 brush and paint-pot with furious concentration, Alses meticulously progressed around her circle, pacing out the four cardinal and sixteen ordinal sigils to keep the outer barrier glyphs in perfect alignment. Mistakes would result in a lower and baser djed flow inside the circle, reducing the quality of the magecrafted item and increasing the time it would take – and that was something that, even with all personal pride aside, Alses was not willing to chance. The favour of one of the most powerful men in Lhavit was not something to be taken lightly, especially when she was dependent upon his benevolence to continue in her studies of auristics.

Whippy, thin strokes, an interlocking meshwork of glyphery designed to filter and purify the ambient djed, were slowly taking shape, carefully interwoven with bolder, dramatic runes for anchoring and stability, a filter, of sorts, to scour the ambient djed and prepare it for her later use. Alses preferred to work in a charged environment; the currents and whorls of the ambient djed were much more responsive then, easier to see and faster to work with, hence her secondary circle set - 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 time to damp down. Charging up, so to speak, in an independent circle set obviated the majority of such problems.

After several bells, the essential shape of her primary circle set was laid down in darkly-gleaming paint, alternating exclusion and purification glyphs, the runes of the inner circle bunching thickly around the focus glyphs that would channel the djed of her reagents – blood and gemstones, powdered plants and rare extracts from creatures that roamed the wastes of Mizahar – to productive use. The inky lines and curves would need correcting and adjusting, of course; they always did, much to her private annoyance: what should have been an ordered array of djed channels and conduits instead more resembling a tangled cat's cradle of energy, a snarled webwork that always took painstaking bells to correct and coax back into the right formation. Consulting her notes once more – and squinting at her own cramped and hurried script 'I really must take more time when I write,' she thought ruefully – she considered her options.

'I'm going to have to be careful with this,' she mused, considering all the blood that was, in various ways, going to be involved with the project. Timing was going to be key, at the very least – especially if her suggestion of a bloodline binding was accepted. She couldn't afford to speculate, though: that wasted valuable time. Once again, she contemplated her principal reagents – the phials of blood, still garlanded with glyphs and throbbing with power and knowledge; she would have to extract understanding from the knife master's blood and the slick swiftness she felt pulsing in the mage's, just on the very edge of her senses, a slippery little shiver, in constant motion, flitting from sight to sound to touch to smell and back again.

She had planned the complex network of pathing channels – barriers to the left and right, directional glyphs right down the centre – the night before, near-sleepless despite her dislike of the night and her Konti form both, brain afire with ideas and plans. The crawling switchbacks of runes, all the blocks and gateways for directed djed, the extraction sigils and exclusion glyphs, the runic designs had written themselves in fire inside her brain and again on whatever paper had come under her racing quill. Practice and experience guided her in their placement; she had seen enough laboriously-planned glyphic setups fizzle and flash into ephemera thanks to unplanned interactions of the djed coursing along their pathways. As such, she had at the least a rough idea of what would pass unaffected, what positions would synergise djed currents and what would produce antithetical flows instead. She wasn't always right, of course, far from it; this was the old-fashioned trial and error method of learning, after all, and whilst she knew a few of the basic tenets, her understanding of some of the more esoteric interactions was, to be blunt, woeful.

Alses had had no formal training in mathematics or geometry: nonetheless, some of the core principles were evident in her work. Symmetry and order had its place, true – but only up to a point.

Time passed, a whirl of painstaking brushwork, tracing in glyphs the principal pathways for the djed until the floor was covered in an intricate lacework of ink. Quite aside from the outermost circle, the purifying barrier which would prevent djed escaping and would aid in the refinement of the ambient djed already present, the foci had their own, smaller circle, linked with the raying network of glyphic relays coupled to a final channelling circle that would take all the disparate djed flows, fresh from their transformations, and focus them onto the item, where Alses would break them to productive harness with tonal hammer and brush.

None of it was activated yet, of course, not charged with magic and directed to purpose, but still, it was a good start. To be on the safe side, and for ease of testing, Alses had left gaps at strategic points, omitting glyphs so that there was no chance of an accidental activation producing unwanted – and, as always, with magic, potentially dangerous – results.

A fusillade of sharp cracks accompanied her straightening up, quickly followed by a second volley as she rolled her neck, unsuccessfully fighting off a yawn. Her head felt as though it had been stuffed with wool – this part of magecrafting wasn't actually taxing in terms of the arcane, but it did require concentration and focus. Precision, that was the key – you could be as powerful as you liked, but if your circles were a mess of conflicting glyphic instructions – or not even there at all – then likely as not everything would short. Anything could happen then, from the item working, but perhaps in a somewhat muddled way, unpredictable, to simple ruination to spectacular explosion, seemingly at random.

The plans were swimming in front of her eyes; time to stop, definitely. Perhaps she'd use the last of the light to do something utterly menial. The paths back at the Respite could probably do with a raking, to keep them in their soothing scallop-shapes, and there was certain to be something mindless she could do with a hoe in some corner of the gardens.

by **Alses** on September 26th, 2012, 4:13 pm

Timestamp: 84th Day of Summer, 512 A.V.

Alses took a moment to appreciate the artistry that had gone into the creation of the lens she now held, one of the principal tools of a magesmith. To the mundane eye, it looked quite unprepossessing, a simple circle of etched coppery metal bounding a glass lens, but to a wizard, every scrap of it was covered in glyphs and it glowed with auristic power. A powerful tool indeed, to discern all the myriad djed flows that were at the heart of magecrafting, to augment the Sight of the magesmith and so to aid in the crafting of artifacts nonpareil.

Raising the glass to her eye, she surveyed her circles of glyphs with a sinking heart. She knew, of course, that it wouldn't be perfect – nowhere near, actually, given her general skill with glyphing, but even though she'd planned for it, the results were still rather disheartening. What should have been an intricate engine of creation, just waiting to be awoken, was instead a snarled and tangled mess of bottlenecks and gaping apertures, lazily skirling djed patterns catching in one another, tangling and twisting, becoming confused and forming a diffuse mess that, if activated, would – at best – short out, rendering the dagger expensively useless, and probably reduce all the reagents to dust in the process .

Alses – always on the lookout for ways to improve her own understanding of magic in all its guises – used her own auristic skills to complement the clear Sight afforded by the lens, but where it revealed the shimmering layers of the auras around every object and the lazy procession of djed in half-structured flows, her own, unaugmented Sight was barely able to discern the general shape of the conduits she'd painstakingly painted, seeing the tangled snarls her amateurish glyphs had produced merely as brighter knots of colour in the tapestry. She suppressed a sigh – there was no way she'd be able to do without the lens any time soon. It was a useful teaching tool, though – even if all it did was show her exactly how much she was missing.

With another sigh and a wince, she knelt by the closest set of glyphs, bringing her own powers and concentration to bear on the runes. After half a bell, though, they had only served to bring the most basic of information back to her, the merest glimmerings of djed flows tied in gordian knots, of dams and gaping holes where there should have been smooth conduits. The barrier glyphs, mostly quiescent, were perhaps the best of the lot, but even they were too thick and harsh in one area, thin and wavering in another, a setup that would produce a patchy barrier that would probably tear itself apart in short order if she left it just as it was. Admitting partial defeat, Alses let her shoulders drop and raised the lens, squinting at the bright flares of power that surged across her vision as soon as she looked through the glass, bright whorls and whirlpools of djed that left her blinking rainbowed lines away from her sight.

Once she'd managed to get used to the lens and its far superior auristic enchantments, she began to work in earnest. It was careful, painstaking work, slowly peeling away layers of glypher's paint, smoothing out the sinuous, weaving curves and sharpening the occasional dramatic angle, removing every last splotch and slightly fuzzy patch, adding in definition and reinforcement with the finest brush she could find, scrutinizing every change minutely through the lens and her own auristic skills both, watching with quiet satisfaction as the ambient djed bent to her will and modified glyphs, smoothing from jagged, disrupted tangles out into gently-glimmering rivers of pearly light, moving with purpose.

Fortunately, the barrier glyphs were a fairly simple repeating sequence; once she'd got her eye in, so to speak, it became easier to see what the right glyphic flow was, in which areas the djed surged too freely, or, conversely, was constricted. In many ways, that was the heart of the work; once one had found the problem, it was easy to fix, just a few careful strokes of the brush and perhaps a wet rag to blot away some of the excesses. A quick touch of Tanroa's Blessing, and the modified glyph was as perfectly dry and solidly there – in terms of djed – as though it had been there for a day instead of just a few moments.

By the time the city bells chimed high noon, Alses' stomach was growling and clenching; telltale symptoms of that awful sensation of hunger. The thoughts of eating that her rebellious brain was throwing up were causing her stomach to churn an entirely unwelcome manner, too, which made matters even worse. Fortunately, by this point she had repaired and primed her outer barrier circle, a shimmering weavework of gently-shining djed, so she was on-track according to her own plans, at least.

She left her laboratory and moved – at a pace that, in anyone less stately, would have best been described as a run – towards one of the Dusk Tower's many balconies, jutting out from the central mass of its many spires and generally flooded with abundant sunlight. Turning gently in the clear mountain air, revelling in the soft warmth of the sun, Alses feasted, eyes bright and drinking in every photon that poured down from Syna's infinite brightness.

It was an instinctive process, thankfully, automatically transmuting the sunlight into the djed her body needed to keep functioning, a process much more amenable than – she gulped down some reflexive bile – eating, flooding her brain with contentment and joy, a continual reminder of the continuance of Syna's love for her children, even the wayward souls that had fallen from grace. To any onlookers, she must have looked quite unusual, to say the least, glowing like an earthbound star with reflected light, laughing involuntarily as every square centimetre of her skin greedily drank in the sunshine.

Sated and glowing with the sort of self-contentment that came only with pleasure, Alses returned to her laboratory in the depths of the Dusk Tower to find a courier havering over whether to disregard the notice she'd pinned to the door or not, a heavy box in hand.

“What's going on here?” she asked, softly so as not to surprise the man. She had a bit of a soft spot for the couriers, since she generally numbered herself amongst their ranks, and he looked so nervous that giving him another shock probably wasn't the best of ideas.

He turned, swiftly – a rangy man whose face sloped into his neck with no visible chin, and bowed, deeply. His voice had a bit of a quaver to it when he spoke; whether from fear of magic (unlikely, in the Dusk Tower) or something to do with the close presence of an Ethaefal. It was a fairly common reaction, and one which Alses could ignore by dint of long practice. “Are you the lady magesmith, ma'am?”

She preened. “I don't know of any other magesmiths in the Dusk Tower's employ, so yes. Alses, courier. A pleasure, I'm sure.”

“Package for you,” he announced, proffering the box. “They said as I was to be careful, and be sure to tell you it was fragile.” He sniffed. “As if I'd be anythin' less with something from the Patriarch himself!”

Alses took it with interest and vanished into her laboratory with an absent bow to the courier – most of her attention was focused on the message: the box was heavy, and, as the courier had mentioned, set with Ald'gare Dusk's seal.

Sparing only half a glance for her circles – just enough to make sure that there wasn't going to be a catastrophic failure in the next five chimes – she set the box on her desk and opened its clasps.

'No gift,' she noted – but then again, there simply wasn't space, since most of the velvet-lined interior was taken up with three further flasks of blood and a neatly-folded letter.

The eighty-fourth day of Summer,
The five hundred and twelfth year after the Valterrian,

Apprentice Alses,

I have given thought to your suggestion and after some deliberation I find I agree with your assessment and proposed addition to the requirements. I have enclosed the vials of blood for you to use, as per your request, and I look forward to the finished artifact in due time.

May Zintila guide your way,

Ald'gare Dusk

A short missive, but to the point. She closed her eyes in brief thanks to Syna for an intelligent employer, and then got on with repairing (and to some small extent, redesigning) her circle sets.

A headache throbbed meanly behind her left eye by the time the last of the glyphs were corrected. Alses dunked her head under the icy water in the basin – that was the other benefit of having an emergency barrel in the laboratory, cooling off overheated brains and squelching burgeoning headaches.

'Carnelians one and two, agates one, two, three and four, wanamu leaf clump, sky pilot extract...' she murmured to herself as she placed all the various ingredients into the focus glyphs at various points throughout the matrix.

Despite having done this sort of thing before, Alses felt the familiar frisson of anxiety – this was a commission at the edge of the envelope of her current ability, after all, and – more to the point - she couldn't afford mistakes.

Everything was in place at last – all the vials of blood placed appropriately and all the other ingredients in their proper places, the glyphic apparatus glowing serenely, a quiescent engine of creation, albeit one without a final focus as yet.

With mildly clammy fingers, Alses picked up the beautiful dagger and placed it carefully in the centre of the whole setup before sweeping a djed-charged fingertip over the master trigger glyph.

Nothing happened – at least, to the uninitiated eye, but to someone attuned to the djed of the world, many things had been set in motion, the flows and whorls and lazy currents of ambient djed being processed; twisted and changed and fundamentally altered by the complex glyphic arrangements around the dagger.

by **Alses** on October 1st, 2012, 9:17 pm

Timestamp: 86th Day of Summer, 512 A.V.

Two days later, and the laboratory stank of magic. Not literally, of course – magic had no smell to a non-wizard, and in any case Alses' auristics didn't let her perceive magic as a scent – but the complex glyphic setup and the rare ingredients positively shouted 'magic at work' to all and sundry.

A quick consultation of her notes refreshed exactly what she needed to accomplish today, in order to have Saving Grace on track – 'The dagger, that is,' Alses reminded herself, slightly ruefully – she couldn't seem to help getting somewhat attached to all her artifacts; since this was destined for someone else, it wasn't really her place to name it, but calling it 'Ald'gare Dusk's dagger' all the time was just...silly.

The very foundation of the artifact – perhaps that was a better way to refer to it – would, out of necessity and preference both, be the bloodline binding, spilling commingled djed from House Dusk (the dagger was fairly obviously meant for the Patriarch's personal use, so that was far and away the most likely bloodline) and weaving it into every facet of the dagger. On top of that primal connection, Alses would then begin the process of reinforcing the skyglass fabric of the weapon, forging fresh djed pathways to buttress the existing resilience of the divine material, just enough to give it a bit of an edge over comparable weapons. That would suffice for the day; patience was necessary in the craft, after all, and djed needed to be coaxed and corralled to flow anew rather than surging uncontrolled, ruining the dagger from the inside out. Besides which, she'd doubtless be tired by the time she finished those two tasks – neither of them easy.

No time like the present. Alses settled herself inside the secondary circle set, breathing deep and slow, clearing her mind of racing thoughts and her face of frown lines. There was a mantra she'd heard, somewhere, the words resounding in the vaulting halls of her mind, quietly beating out all the fragments of other lives: 'The ocean is eternal. Sun gilds the sea-foam gold, storms roll in and lash the waves to frenzy. Cloudburst passes, and, reflecting everything but itself, the sea glimmers on. The sea and I are much alike on some days.'

Peace and quiet was nice. Calming, one could say; Alses breathed, slow and sure, letting the djed of the world caress her skin with its ephemeral, reassuring touch even as she worked with the warp and weft of her own personal magic, flushing it out into the intricate traceries that defined her body and then beyond, painting the world in all the colours of the rainbow, enhancing her senses to perceive more – of everything.

She permitted herself a small, satisfied smile at the sight of her magecrafting setup, the complex engine of augmentation that blazed like an earthbound star – although much more intricate – around the dagger she was crafting for Ald'gare Dusk. The bells of painstaking corrective work had paid off and now the area inside her sigils was isolated and full to brimming with purified, directed djed, just waiting for the final chimes and strokes of a magesmith's tools to put it all to productive use. Ah, glory.

Against all experience, Alses always expected some sort of static crackle, or perhaps a spark or shiver when she entered a charged-djed environment. It had never happened, but nonetheless, some deep-buried instinct always suggested that it should be there. Regardless, stepping lightly and carefully between her paths and relays - the quasi-geometrical webwork of glyphery that made her craft, if not possible in and of itself, then massively easier - Alses collected the mixed blood that she needed, having blended each together in equal parts, ready for the first stage of the bloodline binding.

Taking the auristic lens from its fleece-lined case at her belt, Alses scrutinized the dagger from every angle, getting a feel for the djed conduits that ran through the weapon, defining it and giving it its purpose in many ways, the immanent vital force that kept the knife as a knife – as opposed to, say, a fish. Seen like that, to Alses' mind, at least, the dagger was a beautiful thing, all tight and sharpened rivers of djed in a perfectly symmetrical pattern, looking almost as though even the magic could shear through flesh and bone.

She closed her eyes, forced her body to relax as she stood in front of the unassuming weapon. Her shoulders came down, faint lines erased themselves from around her eyes and mouth, her whole stance became more relaxed, more assured. Slender fingers – encased in white leather gloves, as always – closed, suddenly decisive, around the golden hammer thrust through her sash.

“To the fire we come at last,” she murmured to herself. “Let's pray we haven't lost the knack. Syna guide my strikes,” she added, sotto voce – but no less sincere a prayer for all of that. It would have been better – or at least, Alses would have felt better about the whole thing – if the lab had had direct access to the sky and sunshine, but this wasn't her Tower, and allowances had to be made.

The muscles of her left arm bunched, bringing the hammer round and down in a precise arc, striking a note that resonated with the dagger's djed, fuzzing its boundaries and starting the opening procedure, forcing a state of flux onto the existing conduits and preparing them to receive further djed connections. That was the beauty of a magesmith's tools: no matter how hard they were struck against an artifact, there was no physical force; every erg of expended energy was transmuted, at the very instant of contact, into djed. Small consolation to wealthy merchants watching a magesmith pound away at their priceless statue for the very first time, but still.

The conduits wavered in her senses, bent and deflected the hammer of djed, dispersed the sorcerous forces arrayed against them and returned to normal. Alses scowled, flourished the hammer once more and struck down, once, twice, thrice, twisting the djed of the world to violence, glowing filaments clashing and sparking into nothingness – but again and again the skyglass dagger resisted, reflecting the forces arrayed against it along the length of its curling djed channels, dissipating it harmlessly and leaving virtually no impression on the overall structure.

Hands on hips, Alses frowned at the dagger. By now, she'd have been expecting at least the first signs of splitting, the visible hint of discoherency that allowed her to work her craft, but the skyglass dagger simply gleamed, smug and untouched. She tried another strike, followed up by a double ring from silver and gold both – a powerful harmonic combination that was more generally used to undo mistakes by obliterating a cohesive djed connection, but the stubborn divine material refused to yield.

Annoyance flicked a fin in the lake of her mind as she began to ring triples and a straight six; to her sight, the djed inside the circles fuzzed and flashed in disordered confusion, sloshing like a storm-tossed lake with the purifying barrier pulsating under the onslaught. Breathing heavily from her exertions and with her ears ringing to discordant chimes, Alses took a few moments to reassess the situation, and to calm the worry that was now snaking up through her body, uncoiling lazily and dispensing the gray fog of doubt liberally as it went.

'Forgotten something, have you?' the wicked little voice cackled inside. 'His Excellency will be so pleased when we tell him we ruined his pretty little dagger! Can't take it off the pedestal now! Hehehehehe, poor us, panicked and worried and useless little collection of past memories, a patchwork soul that should never have left the Goldenlands. We should drown ourselves, return back to Our Lady's embrace. Nice and painless and easy. We can-' Alses shook her head, vigorously, to get rid of the voice that she knew was her own, a manifestation of her own fears and insecurities. The dagger wasn't ruined: it hadn't even been touched by her first attempt. There was a silver lining to every cloud, if you looked hard enough.

With a sigh, the Ethaefal stepped out of the circle – again expecting the 'pop' of change that never came – and collapsed into the creaky chair amid a fusillade of wooden protests. Vertebrae fired a volley in rebuttal as she rolled her neck and cracked her spine, eyes closed and seeing the complicated circle setup dancing on her retinas. Gloomily, she stared at Ald'gare Dusk's latest missive, the elegant ink-lines blurring hazily. What to do, what to do...Failure simply wasn't an option, but it was staring her in the face. Cold and hard and implacable. If she couldn't even prepare the dagger to receive more djed connections, then how was she to achieve the more complex effects that the commission demanded? Her thoughts were spiralling deeper into doubt – she was about to crumple the fine parchment between her fingers when a single line caught her eye: 'May Zintila guide your way.'

Alses sat quite still for several minutes as her brain read, re-read, and processed that simple little sentence. A ritual farewell, almost, but it had sparked a kernel of thought in Alses' mind. 'Skyglass! The divine foundation of the city, a gift from the Starry Queen herself! Immune to djed – under normal circumstances – strong and light and as beautiful as the heavens, of course it would be difficult to work. How do I proceed, now...' There was always the brute-force approach, painting her hands with the strongest support glyphs that she knew and hoping that their weight behind her skill would be enough to overcome the inherent resistance of the skyglass. Quite aside from Alses' distaste at that method, she harboured a sneaking suspicion that the material would still resist her, and she would have wasted yet more time. No, that wouldn't do.

Perhaps...perhaps divinity would call out to divinity – if she worked a mantra of praise and prayer into her strokes, well...it was worth a try, surely? Either way though, her spirits were low and her strength flagging – arms aching from the force she'd put into her strikes and from the complex patterns she'd rung in an effort to get the blasted dagger to yield. 'Time for a break,' she allowed herself to think, trying to remain positive even though her face was set in a mild frown of anxiety and nebulous gray dread lurked just below the surface of her thoughts. 'Besides, surely Zintila's power will be at its zenith during...during the night.' The calm little voice of her thoughts grew even quieter at that thought – the hours of darkness were decidedly not her favourite, although she didn't harbour the absolute loathing of yesteryear towards them. 'Though it seems a fearsome foe, the darkness of night grants a trillion suns,' the adage skipped through her brain, suddenly. When she'd first heard it, she'd thought that proverb (if indeed it was a proverb) trite, another part of the Midsummer Festival celebrations and nothing more, but more and more she'd found herself repeating it in odd, forgotten moments, drawing strength from it as the daylight waned and the trillion twinkling stars peeped out from between the clouds.

She cast a slightly rueful glance at her circles, the djed still disorganized and agitated. A few hours to let her glyphs do their work and return everything to charged tranquillity would do her project only good.

by **Alses** on October 10th, 2012, 5:45 pm

Alses flitted like a ghost through the drowsing halls of the Dusk Tower. The place never truly slept in any case, but to the Ethaefal it always felt emptier and indefinably more somnolent during the hours of darkness. Perhaps that was to do with the masters taking their apprentices all over Lhavit to their preferred meditation and teaching spots, or maybe it was simply to do with the more muted tones of the skyglass, the lack of a sense of Syna at her back and Alses' own tiredness (and, possibly, irritability, a trait which, had she been consciously aware of it, might have gone some way to explaining the wide berth most people gave her at night).

Butterflies skirled in her stomach as she eased open the heavy doors to her laboratory and slipped inside, eyes troubled and mouth anxiously twisted. Carefully, methodically, trying not to think about how it had all gone wrong earlier that day, she thrust gold, silver and copper hammers through her sash and took up the heavy glass lens, its haft feeling comfortable and familiar in her palm after several days of heavy use. Even without the powers of the lens, Alses could tell that her circles had returned the djed contained within them to a purified and yet stable state, a tabula rasa of sorts on which to try again.

Admittedly, the glyphs were starting to look a bit thin, the paint ablating under the strain of purifying and stabilising the disrupted djed from her earlier attempts, but they were still whole and functioning. Regardless, tomorrow would have to be devoted to repairing them, in order to keep everything going properly. 'Always providing that this works,' she added, gloomily, in the privacy of her own head.

She had taken advice from one of the lay priests of Zintila at Koten Temple, all about how to ask for Zintila's favour in an endeavour: his response had been less than helpful and irritatingly serene, smug, too – as though he knew something she didn't. In fairness, that was probably true – six years of life on Mizahar was far too short to assimilate everything, after all, but still, he could have been a little more helpful than “Pray for her guidance. It is the intent, not the tone of your words or the incantation of a prayer, that will touch Zintila's heart if you truly believe.”

The skyglass all around glowed gently, reassuringly, an ever-present beacon against the terrors of the all-pervading darkness beyond the walls. Alses shivered; it was warm, true, but she was still used to the heat of summer and her clothes were fast becoming unsuitable for the cooler temperatures of a waning season that were sweeping over the starry city.

She paced, like some sort of caged beast, around the circles, studying them – and the dagger that rested at the centre of it all – minutely, eyes darting from one connection to the other, hunting for any flaw or weakness on her part that might have accounted for the stubborn resistance.

Nothing. Every glyph in its assigned place, every conduit smooth and stable, every relay gleaming softly, and at the centre of it all the skyglass dagger, a shimmering star, untouched and pristine as when she'd first set it atop the master focus. It mocked her with its sinuous, curving djed pathways; she felt a surge of irrational irritation and anger at the inanimate object, such a stupid reaction as to cause her to laugh out loud, a short bark of sound that was quickly swallowed up by the listening walls. Looking about nervously – just in case anyone had heard her outburst and came to investigate - she stepped into the circles, settling down to try and clear her mind as much as possible. Flawless focus was ever the goal, something to strive for.

It always surprised her how much easier it was to clear her mind of distractions at night: the choir of past lives and scattershot memories was almost silent, the massed voices muted. Never entirely gone – Alses harboured a sneaking suspicion that if ever all her memories actually shut up, she'd go insane from the silence in her own head – but nothing compared to the full bel-canto opera that sounded in her mind through the daylight hours. Make that several operas, on a bad day, complete with divas and cast-of-thousands.

Snowfield...heartbeat...still lake...her mind flitted between calming mantras, seemingly unable to settle for a while, and then the whirling morass of images and states calmed, grew still and placid as her breathing calmed and her body stilled. Even her gills stopped fluttering minutely, the urge to yawn faded and all the myriad twitches and spasms of a normal body slowed to a crawl. There was no sense of the passage of time behind her closed lids; Syna was far from the world and Alses' connection to her was extremely tenuous – she couldn't sense the position of the sun, nor when it would return to the skies. It meant some of the urgency vanished, there was no clock constantly ticking in the back of her head, which helped her focus.

After perhaps a bell and a half, she judged herself as calmed and prepared as she could be – someone formally trained in meditation would doubtless have been able to achieve a state of complete serenity rather than the on-a-slightly-more-even-keel that Alses had attained. As was often the case with this sort of thing, as soon as she stepped over the final glyphed threshold and into the main working area itself, the nervousness melted away – the die, as a scholar might say, was cast.

The skyglass dagger gleamed, softly, in the even light, a sliver of twilight bound about with silver wire and glittering with smug djed. “Zintila, Lady of Stars and Matriarch of Lhavit, hear my prayer. I crave your guidance working the material Your grace saw fit to bestow upon my home.”

Alses' fingers twitched; whether through a response to her prayer or simply due to her calmer, more reflective state of mind and a close examination of the djed patterns of the dagger, her hands went for the silver hammer rather than her instinctual choice of gold. She liked gold, for its colour, its malleability and power in magecrafting, but the silver called instead, a subtler, plangent tone that rippled into change, the lance to gold's hammer. Strike one – the dagger's djed shivered and rippled, then firmed, slowly. “Zintila, give me the strength to work my craft,” she breathed, altering positions and bringing the silver up once more, an underarm swing that almost left an arc of glittering djed in its wake, ringing in the changes on a staircase of discordant notes, her hands swift and sure, now, always striking just to the left or right, over or under of where she'd ordinarily have struck, focusing on just one area of the dagger, near its hilt, where connections clustered thick and bright, watching them fuzz and distort, sending ripples all across the dagger as mounting instability in one small area rolled out across the rest of the weapon too. “...the skill to do Your skyglass justice...” she murmured, mind full of space and stars as copper now added its song to the symphony, “...and the will to see my work through to the finish!” she gasped quietly at the end, arms aching and head fuzzed from the half-there sounds and the sight of djed roaring across her vision.

Whether as a result of her prayer, or the increased focus and calmer state of mind that the night had brought, the dagger had yielded to her, its djed conduits fuzzing and slightly discohered, just enough to let her work with it. 'Gentle propitiation,' she reminded herself, slightly ruefully. 'Skyglass is evidently choosy. Not everything appreciates the authority of gold.' Worth remembering, for the future.

No matter. “My thanks, Starry Queen,” she breathed fervently – no time for stopping - cracking the wax seal on her mixed bottle of blood and splattering a generous measure of the rich red liquid over the shimmering skyglass, obscuring its glow for several long moments, letting the fluid of life seep into every facet of the dagger, something of the combined character being taken into the djed conduits, establishing a rudimentary connection that would form the basis for the bloodline binding at the base of the entire dagger, tied into every part of its purpose.

What followed was a careful dance to the half-there tune of the hammers, copper's discordancy fracturing the fragile, building connection, flaying off extraneous parts of the djed until all that remained was the common denominator, so to speak, the shared thread which linked a family together down the generations. It was painstaking and tough work, a balancing act between disruption and the healing chimes of silver and gold, maintaining the connection as tenuous and fluid enough to work without weakening it so much that it snapped, wasting entire bells of work in an instant.

'This would have gone so much better with a knife,' Alses grumbled internally, wrestling for the umpteenth time with a particularly recalcitrant part of the blood link, juggling hammers and auristic lens, her mood growing steadily fouler as even the lightest-seeming touch of magecraft tool to the tendril of djed made the whole thing totter threateningly towards total collapse. It glowed, smugly scarlet, through the lens, a gordian knot of djed that had been lashed into almost every other part of the burgeoning connection – at least, before Alses had assailed it. Now, only the final piece of the puzzle remained, the final root that, once severed, would cause the unwanted djed to disperse harmlessly, leaving her with a fully-functional general binding that could easily, easily be strengthened.

It was long past merely 'late', and heading fast towards 'too early' by the time Alses wrestled that recalcitrant snake of stubborn, tenacious djed into submission – she was drenched in sweat and her voice was hoarse from various swearwords and half-shouted paeans to Syna, Zintila and any other deity that she could think of who might be even remotely helpful. With a smile that was really more of an unholy cross between a rigor-mortis rictus and a pained grimace she scythed the connection with a double slash of gold and copper - one from either side - the djed crackling and lashing about for a moment before, finally, blessedly, dying away to nothing, its substance dissipating harmlessly into the ambient djed all around, quickly caught by the glyphs spread all around.

Half of the battle was through – the dagger now had a basic connection to the bloodline. What Alses had to do now was build that up, strengthen its link into the very fabric of the weapon and set it in motion, to the time of a heartbeat. That, at least, was easy enough – the binding was already pulsing faintly, and as she reinforced its substance and purpose that beat would only get stronger, a thrum of life that would last down the generations until the last living member of the bloodline perished. Pain prickled her left eye – cursing inventively and blinking rapidly, swiping a hand over her forehead, she attempted to rub away the salty sweat, wincing as the needling pain flared and then receded.

“Right,” she said, hands on hips, before raising the lens back to her eyes and squinting furiously until they watered profusely, straining to see the dagger's full pattern, now that her first major alteration had been made. She grinned, catlike, seeing every djed conduit, every filament of every pathway riddled with a faint scarlet-and-brown tracework, pulsing very faintly. Inside, she exulted – she was still a magesmith. The knack hadn't left her, she wouldn't have to report, shamefaced, to Ald'gare Dusk and whatever dire punishment he could dream up, no. This commission...well, she could now, tentatively, class it as 'in hand.'

And that was good. Very good.

by **Alses** on October 12th, 2012, 7:24 am

Timestamp: 88th Day of Summer, 512 A.V.

Ah. There it was, the interweaving strands of djed along the edges of the dagger and a broad column piercing the centre, running from pommel to point and blazing brightly, what she thought of as the main structural nodes of the dagger's djed. There weren't enough of them, not to fulfil the commission, but she'd soon sort that out. Squinting through the lens – she was quite sure that her face would stick in that contorted expression if she had to keep using it – she committed the original pattern to memory, sketching rough approximations on scraps of paper as an aid to recollection. Structural enhancements were some of the first things she'd learned, so the procedure was quite familiar to her and, now that she understood how to manipulate the djed of skyglass (a method she'd carefully noted down in her personal notebook, for future reference) this would be a nice, relatively easy day.

Sitting back on her haunches and ignoring the mild tide of complaints rising from her shins and knees, she contemplated the dagger. There were several methods – that she knew of, at any rate – for increasing the number of djed connections in an item. There was the rather scattershot procedure of just striking open the djed conduits and coercing them to flow along new pathways, rather arbitrarily placed – which could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how Kelwyn's dice landed. Another method was to enrich the already-existing djed conduits, breaking the djed of the world and feeding it into the magecrafted artifact until every pathway blazed with a glut of power. Keeping that up for several days would – for want of a better phrase – make the dagger greedy, habituate it to the reinforced djed channels and, in this case, seal in strength and resilience. That was a perfectly serviceable method, to be sure – and one that Alses would normally have had no compunction in using, but the dagger seemed to call for something a little more elegant.

New connections could – under the right conditions – arise, sui generis, and this could be taken advantage of fairly easily, since the issue of placement, always a thorny question, was already taken care of. The conditions necessary for such an endeavour were slightly more difficult to achieve than for other methods, but the extra effort was generally worth it in terms of the finished artifact.

Alses took a long, measured look at the dagger through the scrutinising lens, examining minutely the now-familiar pattern of djed conduits garlanded with other djed conduits, passing over and under and in some cases through one another, forming a complex and symmetrical pattern that – thanks to her work a few days ago – was now marbled and mottled with a fine tracery of scarlet that pulsed gently, continually, to the rhythm of life. Her eyes throbbed with the effort of examination, her retinas patterned with the flaring auras of her work area, but she was becoming steadily more proficient with the lens and her own powers both. Her auristic skills were nowhere near those of the lens, admittedly, but it had at least pinpointed areas to work upon, and she was getting better at discerning the deeper mysteries of an aura. Still only one at a time, true, but all her instructors had said that greater abilities would come with time and use – which was true about almost anything, when you thought about it.

She rose – carefully – from her squatting position and gazed down at her circle setup with critical eyes, always seeking out flaws and imperfections. All but four of the carnelians and two of the agates had crumbled into fine gray dust, their enhancing properties sucked out, bound to the dagger and its bloodline link by her work thus far. Regardless of their inactivity, she couldn't risk disturbing the focus circle, not until the dagger was plunged into charged water to seal and truly become an artifact that would last forever. Chairlegs squealed across the floor as she dragged the perpetually-protesting seat towards her, sinking into it with a relieved sigh. She still wasn't quite recovered from the late, late night a couple of days ago – still easily tired and eating much more light than usual.

No matter – work had to progress. After a half-bell break, Alses girded her loins and set to with a will, a mix of careful planning and blind intuition guiding her craft, a synergy that worked better – for her, at least – than either method alone.

She laughed – a bright yellow note that flowered in her aura, caught as she turned with lens to her eye – as the secrets of the universe opened up before her, glittering treasures that were more valuable than gold or gems. Helical buttressing, curling djed connections that reinforced the existing pathways, shoring them up against any assault, letting them bend and sway and flex to deflect any force put on them, well, they were just growing, faint lines and whorls and patterns, barely discernible with even the lens – but not for long. They would be fed, gorged by the ringing notes of silver on skyglass, the twisting and breaking of the pure, ambient djed in her work area to productive harness, strengthening those elegantly twining preliminary conduits until they were as strong and present as the original set and all still bound about by the tracery of bloodline bindings.

Her left hand was aching from the shock of myriad impacts by the time she finished, throbbing from phantom forces. Even if, at the very moment of impact, the complex nature of a magecrafter's tools converted physical force into djed, there was still something of a backlash, and her arm felt hot and tender, almost pulsing, from the forces she'd unleashed. Well, not just from that – the nature of her craft was a subtle and elusive one, needing constant precision and care: as a consequence, her muscles had been tensed and bunched for bells. The tertiary connections, tiny filamentous channels that were, even with the lens, difficult to discern from the general background, had to be kept in alignment with the reagents on their focus glyphs, so that, discohered and opened by her careful strikes, they drew in something of the desired characteristics, the fundamental energies of those reagents, and nothing else. Channels that became infused with unwanted djed diminished and weakened the whole, and for this commission, nothing but perfection would do. That meant deviating from the plan whenever a major strike, opening up the major djed channels she wanted to alter and pouring fresh djed into the hungry pathways, pushed the smaller conduits out of alignment.

It had been an important lesson to learn, albeit an expensive one, that even the smallest part of a project could have profound effects on the whole: as an apprentice in Zeltiva, Alses had frequently complained about her master's painstaking approach to even the most minor of items, making sure that even those tiny and – to her eyes, at the time – inconsequential channels were perfectly in accord with the greater pathways. Eventually, he'd tired of her complaints and set her a task, making two rings imbued with auristics, one done her way, and one done his.

To Alses' chagrin, the ring she'd made whilst ignoring the smallest channels was lesser to the one over which she'd taken painstaking care, aligning every channel and flow she could discern to its purpose. In hindsight, an obvious lesson, but at the time...she winced, reflexively. Two thousand mizas was an expensive lesson, however you tried to spin it. Still, she'd never again tried to skip the fiddly bits.

With an explosive sigh, a burst of escaping air, Alses stepped out of her circles, eyes feeling as heavy as lead and feet almost – but not quite, she didn't want to disturb her glyphs – dragging on the floor. Now that she wasn't focusing so exclusively on the project in hand, bits of her body were queuing up to present the bill. Her neck was complaining vociferously from continually looking down, her eyes felt as though the retinas had been stippled with red-hot iron and there was a bone-deep ache in her muscles from the tension. She smiled, sardonic. Anyone, anyone who thought that magic couldn't be a physical endeavour was so sorely mistaken it wasn't even mildly amusing.

by **Alses** on October 18th, 2012, 9:10 pm

Timestamp: 91st Day of Summer, 512 A.V.

Alses really was getting rather intimately acquainted with the skyglass floor of her laboratory – she seemed to spend about half of her time on her hands and knees, crawling around the glyphs with paint-pot, brush and wet rag. Today was a day for change – fitting, really, on the cusp of the turning of the seasons. After a few days of careful work, the dagger had been reinforced, several extra connections buttressing the existing channels and the whole thing charged with a slight glut of power, the two changes just enough, together, to grant the nascent artifact a bit of an edge over other skyglass blades. It wouldn't block the blow from a warhammer, say, but anyone thinking to break it would find rather more resistance than they expected – which, in a life-or-death situation, might well prove fatal for them.

Alses smiled, humourless, at the thought. Most artifacts – that people actually wanted, anyway – seemed to be concerned with killing people or - credit where it was due - things. There seemed to be little call for the more beautiful creations of her craft – but then, the wastes between cities were dangerous, and mizas were probably better-spent on weaponry than ornamentation. Alses sent a brief prayer of thanks skywards that she'd not Fallen decades previously – back then, there'd have been precious little need for her calling, with everyone concerned almost exclusively with simple survival in the immediate aftermath of the Valterrian.

'We'd have cut our throat had we fallen then,' Alses thought, sudden and clear. She shivered, convulsively, and turned her attention fully to the sigils that sprawled out across the floor - dwelling on that sort of thing was probably unhealthy. Broad strokes of black glypher's paint closed relays on spent reagents – no sense in having the vestigial djed poisoning the final artifact and making the magesmith's job that much more difficult. She might not have been able to get rid of it completely, that would have been too much of a disruption to the carefully-laid circles and patterns she was using, but closing off the paths of least resistance was, at least, a relatively simple undertaking. A carefully-dampened rag, wound tight about her fingers, did sterling service as a rubber, sponging up the glypher's paint so she could make her revisions, altering where djed would flow and where it would not, and to what extent.

The next stage of her project was a decidedly more delicate one than a simple structural enhancement – a fine tracework of pluripotent djed conduits, as pure as she could possibly make them, winding through every facet of the dagger and brought to sapience, the controlling mind of the artifact. Forged from thin strands of djed and given some semblance of a purpose by the body it would inhabit and the skills Alses would flay from the bottles of blood still remaining to her, it would be quite rudimentary - but then again, Ald'gare Dusk wanted a protective dagger, not a conversation partner.

As her laboratory was only equipped with the more basic tools – and she couldn't really have expected any more than that – the hammers and lens were all she had to work with. It was no use dreaming of the brushes and prisms that would have made the job much easier – delicate work needed more delicate tools, but they were also expensive and rare. 'Since we don't have the elegant brushes and capture prisms, we'll have to make up for it with the lightness of our touch and the precision of our strikes,' she resolved, mouth set and mind made up – she doubted that the Tower's Master of the Exchequer would consider thousands of mizas for a more elaborate set of magecrafting tools a 'reasonable expense' for one thing, and she had a deadline for another, looming large in her mind. Twenty-two days away, now.

She contemplated her plans, the drawing of the dagger and its principal djed pathways she'd made and added to with each step of the process. The question occupying her brain, appropriately enough, was 'Where to begin?' The perennial problem with anything, really. When one had all the time in the world, it was far too easy to say 'Tomorrow, tomorrow.' Why do today what could be put off until tomorrow? Or the day after? Or the day after...

Come to that, why waste time making things, talking to people, bringing oneself down to the level of the city peasants when it could be better spent in praise to Syna, striving to reach that meditative state of blessed communion once more?

'Because you Fell, and you won't get that glory again on Mizahar,' her mind snapped at her, bringing her down to earth abruptly. She frowned. 'One day at a time,' that was the promise which kept her moving forwards. 'One day at a time, until we fall under Her light again.'

She wrenched her attention back to her drawing, thickly-festooned with additions and notes and the occasional mistake heavily scored-out. She'd forgotten just how much information ended up on a diagram before a project was through – next time, she'd make her drawing much bigger. Squinting to read her own tiny text was annoying and time-consuming.

A distributed intelligence was the goal, as with most things in magecrafting, but the question was where to start that process, what point should be chosen from which to spin out all the threads of reason and intellect, where should be – at least temporarily – the centre of the spider's web?

The artist unseen daubed the entire laboratory in a million colours as Alses drew on her power to inspect the developing artifact. The glyphs throbbed with purpose and power both, rich purple shades of magic bound and directed, studded with stars of all colours, every shade and hue leaching, mixing and melting into one another, a beautiful and yet also headache-inducing sight that all funnelled towards the symmetrical pattern-aura atop its pedestal in the very centre. Like this, drowned in the auristic notion of the surrounds, the physical form of the dagger was almost invisible under the incandescence of the conduits weaving through it.

Moving with exaggerated care – her control over her auristic skills was still rather rudimentary, after all, and sudden shocks or jolts could quickly cause her concentration to lapse – she stepped closer, face so close to the djed streams that her nose was almost touching the dagger, squinting ferociously. Had anyone been there to see, her face would have been an absolute picture. The Torment of Kova, perhaps, but a picture nonetheless.

The lens revealed the hidden, deeper beauty of djed conduits almost instantly, peeling away blocks of light and rich colour to show the tapestry mosaicwork beneath. With just her own skill, it was much, much more difficult – there were flashes, the longer she focused, of the mysteries below the surface, of the thousands of smaller channels bundled together that made up the great flows she influenced with her tools, but that was a great strain. The effort saw Alses burning rapidly through her stores of expendable djed to drive the deep synchronicity required - not something that could be kept up for very long.

She staggered, blinking herself out of the deep focus, and almost fell – catching herself at the last moment on the chair nearby, ungainly and breathing heavily from the acrobatics she'd performed in order to try and save herself and, more importantly, the painstaking glyphs below her. Stable once more, heart still hammering in her chest, she gave herself a few chimes of rest, to allow her to become accustomed to the surface world once more. Using the lens – which had a slightly different interpretation of auras than she herself did – so soon after her own powers had a tendency to leave her with a pounding headache and a profound desire to stick her head in the water butt.

When she judged herself steadied and anchored in the world once more – as much as any Ethaefal could be, at any rate – the lens was pressed close to her eye and she scrutinized minutely the area she'd selected, based on her own skills alone. As she'd expected, there were many connections and interactions she'd been all-but blind to, sparkling interactions where oppositional forces spent themselves into nothingness that shocked her – even at her lowly skill level, surely she'd have been able to see that – and a few snarled, tangled areas that might benefit from a corrective nudge or two, just to improve the overall harmony of the artifact.

Even given all that, it was still a reasonably good place at which to begin. 'Deep breaths, Alses,' she thought, happily. This was what she loved doing, after all, and she had such beautiful material to work with. Aesthetics were just as important as function to her – in her view, all things should strive for beauty. Perhaps it was a consequence of her longevity – if she was going to live forever (or at least until ended by sword or spell), then she could at least make her surroundings pleasant – or simply an aspect of her past lives, it didn't matter.

She laid the gold hammer aside – the brash notes and powerful conversion forces contained within its lustrous head were really not suited to the delicate work of intelligence, and certainly not intelligence of the subservient sort she was attempting to create, something that would know its body and how to use it to best effect, but be unwavering in loyalty and unstinting in action. It would see the world in black and white, and either dart quickly into yielding flesh or rest quiet and easy in a scabbard. There was no balancing act there, no need to keep track of wily magic or djed expenditures that might require a more sophisticated, canny sapience driving it. No, gold's authority could be laid aside in favour of silver's sweeter, persuading tones.

The very last thing she did before commencing work was – with a wince and a grimace of distaste – to prick her finger, letting a drop of viscous bronze blood well up. Alses touched it, lightly, to the head of the hammer and the dagger's pommel – nowhere near enough to establish a binding, especially not with one already present. Blood was, however, the stuff of life, and vastly important in sorcery – the symbolic sacrifice of life fluid would grant her a temporary connection to her work and the tool of her artifice both: just what was needed to craft the bitter mote that was the heart of a magecrafted intelligence.

The tiniest of taps, a plangent echo on the edge of hearing, that was the start.

by **Alses** on October 25th, 2012, 6:11 pm

Alses was flying on silver wings; the laboratory was echoing and re-echoing to the ringing argentine notes as she worked on the dagger. Brute force wasn't the goal here – an intellect couldn't be crafted by simply bashing away and hoping for the best – the strands needed to be shaped and tempered, imbued with rhyme and reason, coaxed to interact – beneficially, that was the damnably hard part - with the rest of the artifact before being brought to full sentience.

The djed channels kinked and swirled and doubled back on themselves, stubborn, almost perversely alive in their desire not to bend to her directional charges, spitting and snarling their defiance as she propitiated them with light, almost hesitant touches, pleading and cajoling rather than forcing, making them yield bit by bit, linking each pure strand slowly, painstakingly into another conduit, 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 sacrifice - just enough to establish the connection - Alses could feel the expansion, that odd extension of faculty and the not-quite-pain that her augmenting caused, rather like suddenly becoming aware of an extra part of the body, one growing and expanding rapidly, not-quite comfortable, not quite fitting – not yet, at any rate.

All the colours of magic, sight unseen, swirled in front of her eyes as she stared the dagger into submission, furious concentration teasing apart the problems that the artifact presented, one after another, bending the djed pathways to her will through the medium of the tonal hammers. Not breaking the djed of the world to harness on a grand scale, no, rather making use of precisely-directed bursts of it to shape and mould the nascent connections, and to carry something of her own impressions of the dagger there to the budding intelligence – an notion of its own beauty and grace, tempered with the knowledge of its deadly purpose, cargoed on billows of djed.

Not for the first time, Alses found herself cursing the limitations of the craft, how artifacts-in-the-making couldn't be moved once they'd been laid on the focus area. Delicate work like crafting intelligences, especially in a fairly small object like a dagger, well, Alses at least would have benefited from doing it sat down at a desk, instead of cricking her neck and squatting on her haunches – decidedly not the image of a master magus at work. As the work got finer and finer, moving from the main connections to the branching lacework that defined the outer edges of the dagger, its blade, hilt and pommel, it became more and more difficult, every strike a whisper of metal on skyglass, a sound at the very edge of hearing and yet interspersed with muttered imprecations and bitten-off swearwords whenever the result wasn't as expected – which was frequently.

This really was work at the edge of her current skill – every nerve felt scraped and raw as she strained to calculate her manipulation, pressing as close as she dared to the dagger in an attempt to untangle the finest meshworks along the cutting edges of the blade. 'Wish this blasted lens magnified, as well,' she thought, sparing a moment for a few uncharitable notions about its crafter. As it was, she could barely discern the fronding strands of djed at the edges of the dagger, where they wove into one another to form the cutting edge, just bright smears to her eyes unless she focused ferociously.

'There, there, and there,' she crowed internally, seeing – for one, glorious moment - the structure of the dagger's razor-point laid bare before her eyes. Quick and sure, despite the gray tiredness that sapped strength from her arms and thought from her head, one hand darted down to her belt and brought the burnished copper hammer down with the very faintest of chimes, a tiny flash of djed marking the contact and fraying a reaching connection into a myriad of even weaker strands. She had to work fast, to build up a constructive djed framework that would connect new to old before those fragile, fractured conduits faded into the general background, the surge difference too little to maintain them.

It was an intricate little melody, if one was musically-minded, the interplay of silver chimes dancing on the dagger's surface, a balancing and strengthening force on the crux of the connections, saving them from total collapse and gently threading more and more magic along the developing routes, finishing each with a twist and locking body to nascent mind.

In the coming days, Alses would tie and re-tie those twisting connections. When she woke the intelligence in the dagger (at last), it would instinctively bind those ties tight and keep them locked in place, mind and body melded seamlessly – but the underlying structure just wouldn't support cognition just yet – the new djed had to habituate to its new pathways, new purpose, and more had to be fed in to strengthen and seal the deal before the final piece of the puzzle could be slotted into place and the dagger move one more step towards total completion.

Difficult, laborious and time-consuming, yes – but everything worthwhile tended to be so. Besides, this was an artifact, the product of magecraft that would be cherished down the years by one of the most powerful families in Lhavit, an instant family heirloom. Alses smiled, lopsided, at that. One day, it might become the dagger of someone's great-great grandfather – something that, inconvenient death aside, she might live to see.

Best not to think about it.

The vertebrae in her neck shot off a barrage of cracks as she rolled her head, trying to work some of the accumulated stiffness out of it - the water-butt was looking attractive again. Her face – in fact, the whole front of her body, felt stretched and thin, like her skin had been exposed to a great heat for a long time, as if the dagger had been a roaring fire and she'd been stood almost in the leaping flames.

At the edge of her circles, Alses turned to look once more at her artifact, slowly strengthening its djed connections with every passing second, that ghostly, filamentous filigree that she'd painstakingly woven becoming incrementally brighter, more present, with every slice of time. Tomorrow, she'd continue the work – there were still three or four areas where, despite all her efforts, connections had gone awry or refused to develop, and there was only so much change she could effect in a single sitting, after all. Those recalcitrant zones would yield, she vowed – either to her fresh outlook on the morrow or to the heavier techniques she could bring to bear after the artifact had spent the night drawing down the djed of the world to strengthen the new connections.