Solo Reflected Glory

[Alses]

Timestamp: 5th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.
Location: The Overflowing Phial

The seneschal was, fortunately an easy man to keep pace with, walking with a steady and assured gait through the palatial estate, a chatelaine clanking, muffled, beneath his perfectly pressed gilet as he glided across the acres of marble and wood, Alses following close behind.

“What did you think of my lady?” he asked as they moved through the mansion and swept up the stately curve of the main staircase – or one of the main staircases; Alses wasn't at all familiar with the estate's layout - very much making conversation.

Alses pressed her lips together in mild irritation, resisting the blush that was beginning to make a return to her cheeks. “She's impossible,” she replied shortly. “And she takes too many liberties.”

“She likes to test people,” the seneschal replied mildly. “And she has a sense of humour.”

Alses laughed, rather mirthlessly. “A 'sense of humour'. We've heard that before – everyone said that to me about Chiona Dusk, too. It means capricious and childish.”

The seneschal smothered a smile with a hand. “Lady Lariat, childish? That's a new one to me,” he observed, eyes twinkling knowingly. For her part, Alses returned a dark scowl.

“Very well, we concede the point. But I maintain the capricious.”

He nodded. “And well you should.” A considered pause, and then he added, in the spirit of fairness: “She's not really one to go back on her word, once given, though. And here we are,” he pronounced, gesturing to the small doors that led into the magesmith's heaven of the Overflowing Phial and producing, magician-like, a small and delicate silver key, its elaborate head an artwork of chased filigree that made it immediately stand out from any of its more mundane compatriots.

The lock clicked smoothly, and with all due ceremony the seneschal turned to the burdened Alses and presented her with the key on a red ribbon expertly looped through the filigree-work. “Take good care of it, hmm? And be sure to turn it in to me whenever you leave the estate, for whatever reason – don't want to call Lady Lariat's defences down on you for simple forgetfulness, after all.”

Alses, feeling the weight of the mirror on her back rather more than she'd expected to, blanched. “Understandable,” she managed – this thing, courtesy of Chiona Dusk, was heavy. “Thank you,” she added, walking crabwise inside the laboratory as quickly as she could, the sooner to be rid of the ridged weight pressing on her.

Carefully, carefully – she'd been walking on eggshells ever since setting out, which was exhausting - Alses let it down with a sigh of relief that echoed slightly from the dome high overhead and stepped back, to survey laboratory and her nascent artifact both. Standing free on an ornately-carved and scrollworked stand, the mirror that was to be at the centre of her endeavours reflected everything but itself in a broad expanse of clear silver-backed glass, the reason for its expense far more than the golden ornamentation that clasped the reflective surface itself in filigree fingers. Glass – and enough silver to back it to produce that perfect reflection – was expensive, and mirrors like this were the exclusive preserve of the Wind Reach glassmasters in their distant...city? Mountain?

Alses remembered vaguely hearing that they lived inside some sort of enormous mountain. This was difficult to reconcile with the soaring Wind Eagles that occasionally visited the city on trading trips, and so she maintained a healthy degree of skepticism towards anyone asserting that the Inarta lived underground. After all, if they did, where would the birds go?

The air tasted of magic – an odd, half-there sensation of faded light and caramel on the cusp of burning, and Alses turned on the spot in the middle of the laboratory and all its paraphernalia, a broad smile on her features and her heart and head singing, for once, in perfect and sweet unison, inhaling deeply the phantom scent of past magic, wrought again and again on one spot, the elusive aroma of a mage's laboratory, not found anywhere else.

It evoked memories, of practice and diligence and confusion, frustration and fear and sudden, glorious, victorious triumph, until an unwelcome thought – that of the prospect of Lady Lariat barging in to observe proceedings and unnerve Alses further – disturbed her joyful reverie. It also saw her cross to the door in three swift strides, key gleaming as it flashed into the lock and turned, firmly. Alses had no intention of being interrupted or otherwise watched, and it didn't occur to her that there might be a master key for all the locks in the mansion that would have allowed her ladyship to saunter in anyway.

So. First things first; the mirror had to be completely ignored for a while, as Alses sorted out her procedure and exactly what she wanted to achieve. As this was the most minor sort of artifact, that was very easy; she was only adding in one thing, changing one aspect of the mirror's fundamental makeup, but it was still good practice to document everything about an artifact's progress from mundanity to the final, preternatural state, both in a temporary way - on the blackboards around the room - and in a more permanent fashion in her journal.

She settled herself at the desk, shifting to be perfectly comfortable on the chair – a decidedly more plush affair than the ones at the Dusk Tower, showing Elena Lariat's influence clear as day. Alses couldn't imagine the woman had ever experienced a hard chair; comfort and softness reigned supreme in all her furniture without exception, from the chaises in the seneschal's office and waiting room to her ladyship's divans to the chairs in the lab that she was now perched comfortably on.

A careful hand drew a single, pristine piece of paper from a mahogany-and-brass trayful of it - thoughtfully positioned within easy reach of a questing hand on the desk - and into the centre of the writing area, the desk's surface smooth and slightly inclined, for optimum posture of the scribe, had Alses but known. A pot of black ink nestled comfortably in the inkwell, and a quill shone with soft flame in the abundant sunlight as it was flourished and dipped, drawing ink darker than midnight, a rent into the Void, across the page, obedient to Alses' light and gentle touch. 'An Aurist's Mirror, she wrote, taking pains to ensure it was neat, legible, and large enough to be read easily from a distance. She didn't want to have to squint and keep crossing to the desk to consult it, after all.

An Aurist's Mirror

General Purpose: The addition of an aurist's passive Sight to the reflective quality of the mirror, in order to provide a view of the world a Dusk Tower sorcerer or sorceress sees. To be used at the Tower Open Day on the 24th of Summer, 513 A.V.

Requirement:

Addition of novice-level auristic skill to the mirror, bound to its reflective surface.

Alses sat back in the plush chair and considered what she'd written, glancing from paper to mirror and back again. 'That covers our aims well enough,' she thought happily, pinning the brief list in pride of place over the desk, where it could easily be seen. It would serve as a reminder, keeping her on-brief and not continually getting side-tracked, intrigued by the manifold possibilities the craft unfurled before the inquisitive magesmith.

[Alses]

Alses stalked slowly around the mirror, a wide circle that saw her examining the nascent artifact minutely from all angles – although her gaze was abstracted, distracted, concerned with some internal process than the views her searching eyes afforded her.

'How to do this, how to do this...' she mused, the calm rhythm of her pacing helping to calm and focus her, to dispel the irrational butterflies hatching in her stomach and to get control of the leaping, surging euphoria and anticipation that always accompanied a chance to ply her principal craft.

'Auristics is the only magic we could do this with,' she thought. 'It's the only discipline I know of with a passive effect that we can leverage. We need to make sure the strands of magic we weave bind tight to the reflection, otherwise it won't work at all.' A decisive nod, as Alses reached the front of the mirror once more, its silver eye winking at her as she passed. 'The mirror itself, then, that's our focus, more than its stand or frame.' This wasn't much of a revelation or brilliant leap of intuition, but it was a part of the logical process that informed her craft, told her how and where to strike for the greatest effect with the maximum possible economy. Any dilettante could achieve greatness with sufficient outlay; the real skill lay in making the most of any reagents and catalysts, the elegant efficiency of an experienced magesmith was ever the goal. Over time, perhaps the logical process of analysing the challenge, breaking it down into its component parts and deciding which parts of an object would benefit most from the imposition of change would become second-nature, something so ingrained on her mind as to be almost instinctual, but for now she had to consciously attend to the matter, laboriously puzzling it out.

That was the major strain of magecraft, in a way – the major strain of any similar discipline in the field. World magic was the sorcery of craft and lore; it needed deep reserves of patience, an incisive intellect and a ruthlessly logical mindset to achieve the best and most consistent results, and it took its toll mentally. Overgiving, the usual bane of the practicing sorceress, might not have been a problem with any world magic, but mental burnout from the intellectual strain was a threat not to be underestimated.

Fortunately, this was the most minor of artifacts, and its production would be laughably simple when compared to Saving Grace, the vastly more complex – at the edge of what she could achieve, actually – dagger she'd made for Ald'gare Dusk last Autumn. Planning and provision, therefore, didn't have to be so extensive, but still, some was always necessary. It didn't do to get sloppy, and in magecraft, widely acknowledged as 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 so because people found them useful, mantras that echoed helpfully down the generations.

The first step in preparation was the consideration of the tools, selecting the implements most likely to be useful and used. A small thrill of delight danced through Alses' body and mind as she beheld the racks of pristine tools laid out before her, each one with its own particular peg and labelled space, from the enormous clamps that cradled large artifacts and aided in djed targeting to vices, for medium-sized work or to sublocate djed in a larger artifact, to jeweller's tongs for the very smallest, most delicate of objects. There were racks of hammers, gleaming with all the colours of precious metals – small wonder the laboratory was heavily-defended, with thousands of mizas of equipment such as this inside – from the usual copper, silver and gold to the more esoteric electrum and the odd, liverish colour of a hepatizon hammer, a rarity and something only found in a truly well-equipped magecrafter's laboratory. Alses hadn't seen one since leaving Zeltiva, and the sight of it brought a smile to her face. Next to the principal tool-racks was a small line of velvet bags, each one containing a slightly different type of aurist's lens, she found, when curious fingers inched the sparkling glass-and-metal contraptions out of their soft containers, turning them over and over in the light as she divined their specific function with her own, superior Sight.

Not much point to using the lenses, not now her auristic skills had grown so great. That thought was cargoed with no small amount of smugness – for all his skill, her old master had always relied on lenses and prisms to monitor his artifacts, and in that area at least she'd surely surpassed him.

'Now...' Alses mused, running covetous fingers over hafts and handles, over metalwork and wood. 'Which ones might I use?'

Clamps – large metal securing plates on adjustable vertical and horizontal poles, heavily inscribed and worked to the singular purpose of serving to identify the target of a magesmith's endeavours, aiding in the redirection of transferred djed that might try and escape, might poison the environs with toxic, undirected energy - were the obvious choice, the only targeting tools large enough to encompass, steady and hold the mirror she was working with.

They were easy enough to position, hauled into place with brute strength – their size made them durable, they'd been engineered with the fact that they'd be dragged all over a laboratory in mind – and then carefully, carefully tightened – the metal making an awful scringeing noise that set Alses' teeth on edge as the slightly curved clamp-plates scraped along the pole – until they rested against the edges of the mirror itself, pressing only very lightly against it.

That was the part Alses worried somewhat about; she didn't want to crush the elaborate, delicate decoration that formed the mirror frame, but nor did she want to risk toxic djed emissions from a carelessly-directed, weakly targeted strike. For all her longevity, for all the perfect healing and stupefying beauty, she only had the one body, and letting it get twisted and ruined by djed run amok, spiritual insults manifesting as physical damage that no healer could remedy, was decidedly not on her agenda.

Still, she'd tightened the clamps – both a vertical and horizontal set, to provide pinpoint targeting – as much as she dared.

Stepping back from the mirror, now positioned in the centre of the rough-tile area that had been designed as the principal crafting site, Alses contemplated her work so far. The mirror was cradled in a metal grasp, now, the magic running perpetually through the clamps serving as a beacon to the tools, an enormous and attractive target that minimized the chances of extraneous djed leakage and all the manifold problems that caused.

'That's good,' she thought, satisfied. 'But it's very general...' A dissatisfied frown creased her forehead as she stopped her prowl and stood, hands on hips, in front of the mirror, heedless of her own radiant reflection.

The joy of a proper magesmith's tools was that they were all tuned, for want of a better word, to one another. New sets of tools were, as far as possible, cast from the same metal block, mined in the same area and melted at the same time. Thus, all the gold tools shared a sympathetic link at the very deepest of levels, the same with the silver and copper, something that successive enchantments built on to create the specialised effects necessary for the craft. Wooden handles, too, they were all sourced from the same tree, again strengthening that linkage. When a new tool was added to a magesmith's stock, it was common practice to shave a sliver off one of the existing set and use it as a reagent in order to maintain that link; the synergy between similar tools as opposed to dissimilar sets was remarkable.

An idea struck her, and she moved quickly, selecting a quartet of hinged vices to space evenly between the plates of her clamps, securing them onto the perfectly reflective surface with infinite care, taking every precaution so as not to scratch or mar the glass. A painstaking procedure, bent over a vice as her fingers slowly, slowly tightened the wingnut and inched it shut around the artifact, but one that would hopefully pay off, strengthening the attraction of the actual reflective surface to the djed she would transfer, rather than the mirror as a whole – which encompassed the ornate frame and stand as well as the reflecting glass itself.

[Alses]

Tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth as she worked, resolutely ignoring the complaints of her back as she bent at odd angles for the best view of her vices and clamps, Alses finished the delicate work of attaching the last of her vices, happy in the knowledge of a fiddly job well done. She'd not scratched the glass or the back of the mirror with the roughened metal of vice-pads and clamps, and now she could relax, at least a little.

Djed targeting devices now securely in place on the artifact, Alses took a step back to admire her handiwork. It was essential to continually step back, to critically assess what had been done thus far at every possible stage – magecraft was a demanding discipline that was supremely unforgiving of mistakes, and an error caught early enough could be rectified with minimal damage and disruption to the schedule. That had been drilled into her from the very earliest days of experimentation with the discipline, and it was a mantra that had served her very well down the years. Some might have called it pedantic or overly-fussy, checking and re-checking every step of the work, even before she took the plunge and actually began the crafting – but to Alses, it was simply good practice.

Obedient to her own methods of work, Alses settled back into the desk chair – thankful for the plush upholstery that cradled her body in comfort, quite a difference from the more spartan character of the Dusk Tower's laboratory – and began to meditate in earnest.

The laboratory was a world unto itself, separate from the mansion of the Lariat estate and linked only by a graceful skyglass bridge, and the estate as a whole was shrouded in parkland and splendid gardens that provided a green and verdant buffer from the noise and bustle of the celestial city. Even the bells, when they chimed all over the city, were muted by distance and foliage. The loudest sound in the Overflowing Phial, then, was the whispering susurrus of air passing into and out of Alses' lungs, and the steady beat of her own heart pounding beneath her fire-opal skin.

Loud in the silence – less so in the cacophony of memories and recollected voices that thronged the vaults of her mind – that heartbeat provided the primal rhythm and comforting background noise to which she could attune herself. In this wise, Alses achieved calmness and serenity through the near-silencing of her memorial choir and the unaccustomed quietitude – similar to her experiences in her mortal chain – it brought.

The rhythm of life, the pulsing beat marking the passage from one slice of time to the next, had always been Alses' meditation method of choice. There were no elaborate metaphors or similes or descriptions for her fertile mind to get caught up in, no over-embellished mental images of still lakes or snowfields to become distracted by, just the steady hammering pulse of her own existence, thrumming in her mind until all other thoughts, all other considerations simply faded into distant irrelevance and she was left, gloriously centred, as close to a singular creature as she ever felt and free to work her magics in internal peace.

Internal commands, the use of shadowy mental hands to command and direct her reserves to her will were hardly necessary at all, now – she was so habituated to her auristic skills that her reserves of expendable djed, that part of herself she could burn, manipulate, change and direct without ill effect, rose to her subconscious desires and will without any harsh intervention. They were always present when she looked for them, shimmering smugly golden beneath her skin and there, ready and waiting when she reached out, weaving and dancing eagerly through the complex tracework that fed into all of her senses. Not for Alses the use of only one sense, a primitive and restrictive method of working: for her, the full panoply of auristic experience.

In the laboratories, at least, Alses was pleased to note, there seemed to be no impression of carnal delight – in fact, there were precious few impressions to be gleaned at all from even the most porous and accepting of materials – wood, silk; anything organic in origin had a tremendous capacity for auristic memory, in general, but here there were only very few glittering skeins and shimmering, complex coronae – almost everything was the cool simplicity of an aura unfettered and unchanged by external events, as though the entire laboratory was new, or had never been used.

The seneschal had said that few people ever gained the privilege of using Elena Lariat's laboratories, true, but Alses had expected at least a little impression, some evidence of other mages – of Elena herself – here.

The answer, the reason for the lack of character, came embarrassingly slowly. 'Idiot,' she admonished herself. 'The Dusk Tower uses a saltwater purge after every use of the lab, but they look after their money, hoard it against some unimaginable rainy day. We shouldn't be surprised Elena Lariat uses a more expensive purgative philtre instead, since it has better results.'

Mystery solved, Alses turned her auristic attention resolutely towards the nascent artifact. It was a constellation of stars, a set of pinpoint bright lights underlaid with a choral hum that was quite distracting – those were the vices and clamps cinched tight around its as-yet mundane form, its impression a drab whisper against the more exuberant auras of the magically-enhanced tools that would soon set to work on it.

'Wasted potential surrounds us. Give us a trinket, and let me see what it can be made to be,' she thought, rather whimsically, as she worked, a faint smile of satisfaction, perfect and pure, on her face.

Most of those starry auras – each one so very nearly identical to the next, the consequence of their material makeup and crafting both – sung sweetly in the vaults of her mind, their auras chiming and meshing in the best of ways, a stable and synchronizing synergy that flashed and pulsed in her aurist's senses, underlaid with rich chords that sounded remarkably like the pipe organ's sonorous tones at the Ethereal Opera.

The thought broadened the smile at her lips; new auras continually surprised even the most experienced of aurists, and for some reason the integration of the Opera's organ into her work amused her.

One quarter, though, seemed not to sing as sweetly; the greater harmonies hid a subtle dissonance in the cadence, the light they shed on the deeper planes of the world was perhaps not as pure and the motion of the enmeshed auras not so synchronized.

Alses rose, and stepped closer, more out of habit than anything, face turned to the upper-right of the mirror and eyes distant and blank, face serenely distant as only someone whose whole being was focused elsewhere could be.

Puzzled – the other three vices interacted perfectly well with the clamps on either side of them – Alses contemplated that subtle shimmer of wrongness, still detached and calm. Caution – the ever-present spectre which sat in the back of her mind with two beady eyes on her reserves and one finger on a button marked 'Panic', hotwired straight into her spine – warred with the desire to have such an anomaly explained, and lost. Her reserves were plentiful, Syna's rays overhead provided a continual trickle of replenishing power, an energizing tingle across her skin, and thanks to Elena's purgatives there was precious little to distract her on even the deepest of dives.

A long, shuddering breath, before Alses gathered herself physically and mentally, winnowing the disparate threading strands of her auristic power, the golden conduits which led all the way back to the bright nova-blaze of her soul, together into something with a more singular purpose, a lance to cut through the shallowness of Mizahar and into the obscured depths where secrets lay and people's hearts were laid bare for those with the eyes to see it.

Chiona Dusk had been right about auristics having a dark heart, in more ways than one. As synchrony increased, the purely physical aspect of a sense decreased – at full synchrony, at the greatest depth, she was almost entirely blind to physical forms, brain full of colour and light from complex auras laid bare and barely registering Syna's radiance at all.

[Alses]

Down here, this deep, the cause was clear – the vice was ever so slightly out of position, not quite in the equilibrium state between the two, an imperfect alignment which resulted in the dissonances, auras attempting to overpower one another on the fringes rather than meshing as they should, connections forever forming and breaking instead of staying and building up the synergy evident in the other parts of her setup.

Rising from the depths – she couldn't maintain such complete and total focus and still have control of her body to any real degree just yet, certainly not enough to walk and adjust – she took several slow, careful, ponderous steps forward and then, fingers moving with glacial slowness, operating more on touch and feel than sight as she sank herself once more into the rainbowed panoply of the aurist's world at full and unfettered synchrony, she began to alter the offending tool.

Another careful operation, loosening the vice until she could fit a finger as a cushion for the glass under its jaws and slide it carefully across the smooth surface, took several chimes – although it was doubtless chimes well spent, since small errors could build up into huge mistakes over the course of a craft. When she was done, all four of the aura complexes – vice and clamps – chimed sweetly together, their auras synergising beautifully, representing that sympathetic linkage enhanced and directed by the magic used in the tools' creation, and Alses was able to step back, to catapult herself back to normality with a sigh of relief, having resolved the first – admittedly minor – problem of this particular challenge.

Her eyes watered slightly at the sudden return of normal sight, and her skin was beaded with fine droplets of perspiration from the effort: long dives to the full depths of her power were still taxing, hence why she practiced them whenever possible and prudent. A few breaths, to centre herself in the shallows once more, a satisfied nod at the mirror, now perfectly bracketed to accept djed from her tools, and Alses felt herself ready to move onto the next stage, now the mirror was in place and the heavy clamps and vices secured.

Back to the desk and her papers, then.

Glyphing, a most useful support discipline, found myriads of uses in magecraft, its superior cousin. Even for accomplished magesmiths of power and skill, magecrafted wards for a laboratory were ruinously expensive; most made do with Glyphed protections instead. Indeed, glyphing, for all its impermanence, had positive advantages over artifacts in that sort of work; they could be adapted and modified with relative ease, tailored to specific requirements to capture and channel and order and dissipate djed, producing the isolated, stabilised environment in which magecraft functioned best whilst also being able to deal with any chaotic, unintended byproducts of the process.

Happily, Alses had grown rather more confident of her Glyphing skills, had expanded her runic repertoire, since last she'd taken up the magesmith's tools – but nothing was served by getting over-confident. 'Planning, planning, planning,' chimed the thoughts in her head, directing her to select another piece of paper and, with careful and frequent reference to the artifact in repose, to draw.

Her private notebook was open at the page with the reference diagram of her glyphic setup for Saving Grace, for ease of consultation, and she planned to use much the same array as before. However, since the artifact was so much more minor, lesser in every way to the knife, some of the more robust shielding could be omitted, as could much of the reagents' focus circle.

That was no excuse to get sloppy, though – a simple circle still had to work flawlessly, and flawlessness was something Alses still had to pursue, still had to devote bells of time to ensuring each glyph was perfect, hale and whole and would play its part in the greater whole as she intended it to.

Before she could glyph a full-scale circle, however, she needed to know the choice of reagents, which would in turn inform the shape and function of their specialised circle. Under ideal circumstances, this would be very simple; if Elena Lariat's cupboards and jars and lockboxes contained an aura diamond, a whole plethora of other, lesser reagents could be done away with altogether, the naturally-expressed djed in such a gem being highly conducive to the effect Alses was aiming for. Aside from the diamond, all that would then be necessary were a few stabilising, binding and purifying reagents, to shore up the new webwork of conduits established inside the mirror and seal them into eternity.

Of course, there was the very real possibility that an aura diamond was not available, in which case the reagent circle would grow exponentially more complex as a whole host of lesser reagents had to be conducted together in perfect concert to achieve the same effect.

As she perused the little black book that was the ultimate repository of information about the Overflowing Phial – listing equipment and furniture and ingredients, right down to the exact composition of the glypher's paint, luck was on Alses' side. Not one or two, but five aura diamonds were listed, and sure enough, when she unlocked the strongbox with slightly-trembling fingers there they were, glittering with a rainbowed plethora of shifting colours on the black velvet.

That simplified things enormously – and so it was with a broad smile that Alses contemplated full-scale glyphery. She paused, for a moment, before one of the supply cupboards, debating internally with herself.

If she was honest, this really required no more than chalk; the djed flux was in truth rather minor and not likely to squirrelcage, escape or otherwise avoid her tools and her skill; chalk would be more than sufficient to handle the flow and would surely last three days without too much degradation.

On the other hand, the glyphing supplies were provided by the Phial as a courtesy, and so she was leaning towards using glypher's paint instead. Although the energies that would be unleashed and manipulated during the artifact's crafting were relatively tame, glypher's paint was much more hard-wearing and resilient than chalk; she'd not have to pussyfoot around the place worrying about smudging the lines and arcs of her circles.

After some debate on their relative merits, Alses erred on the side of caution and pulled out the pot of glypher's paint. Really more of a very thick ink than anything, this particular batch was a blue so dark as to be almost black. With appropriate ceremony and as much dignity as she could muster, savouring the shivering thrill of commencement, Alses dipped a brush into its smooth silkiness and began the first outline of her circles, crawling on hands and knees around the lab.

When Lhavitians thought of magecraft – if they considered it at all – they saw the attending magesmith as a great sorcerer surrounded by discharging energies, manipulating the flows with consummate ease whilst glyphs glowed with painful fire on the floor and the air was full of the snap and thwack of thrumming power. They never seemed to consider, or even comprehend, all the preparation that went into achieving that stage, all the crawling around on the floor and getting dusty, hot and bothered and supremely undignified. Still less did they consider the cleanup afterwards, the furious scrubbing at Glyphed circles and half-dissolved runes with sharp saltwater or a cleaning philtre, hot and menial labour completely at odds with the image of world mages as scholars and academics.

But it had to be done, it was an integral part of the craft, caring for the workspace – for without a workspace, without a laboratory and reagents, a magesmith was nothing more than an ordinary person, quite unable to work the wonders of their discipline.

[Alses]

The first glyph circle to be inscribed was, unsurprisingly, the most important of the three in Alses' triple-circle design. Drawn first because it was the primary, the all-encompassing shield and filter that would protect the artifact, the reagents and travelling djed from interference and chaotic elements, being a line through the djed of the world that purified and channelled any ambient djed that crossed it and maintained a positive-pressure barrier, isolating the charged ambient that would develop inside its circumference from the more disordered state of the world in general.

On hands and knees, wielding her new brush and its cargo of darkly-gleaming glypher's paint with absolute concentration, brow furrowed in thought as she moved, Alses slowly and methodically progressed around the curve of her circle, pacing out the four cardinal and sixteen ordinal sigils to keep the outer barrier glyphs in perfect alignment.

The harmonic form of a perfect circle in glyphery was a powerful one, a stable base onto which further forms could be developed and overlaid. Mistakes at this most basic level 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 to be avoided by every competent magesmith, quite aside from any thought of personal pride.

The outermost circle was a filter and shield – to do that it had to be strong and resilient, yet not a solid affair. Meshwork, that was the answer – whippy, thin lines of glyphs and sigils criss-crossing one another time and again. Of course, a simple mesh was wobbly, for want of a better word, easily pushed hither and yon by the tides of the ambient, and the outer circle also had to stand strong and firm in the face of these arcane pressures.

Thus, bold and dramatic glyphs of delineation and separation – 'Daeq' in the ancient tongue that named the glyphs, strung like pearls onto a backbone, a curved spine of 'Djed' runes. Djed in its original meaning – a strengthening and unifying form, rather than 'magic' as it had come to be understood by the majority of people.

In many ways, that spine was the most important single aspect of the circle, the binding and unifying chain that fused the disparate glyphs into a cohesive, purposed whole – and it was for this reason that Alses had left gaps, purposeful holes. A prematurely-activating glyphic circle could have disastrous consequences for a potential artifact, or indeed the inscribing mage, so gaps and plenty of scrutiny was the way forward. The slow, painstaking, methodical way forward.

If the personal magics were arts, then world magic was most definitely a science. Logic, patience and caution ruled supreme and instinct had little place.

After several bells, the essential shape of her primary circle set was laid down in darkly-gleaming paint, a helix of exclusion, purification, boundary and backbone glyphs, with the leeching and focusing runes of the inner circle bunching thickly around the sigils that would channel the djed of her reagents – an aura diamond and a selection of lesser gemstones – to productive use.

The inky lines and curves would need correction and alteration to a degree, of course; they always did, much to her private annoyance, although given her greater skill she was no longer faced with a tangled cat's-cradle of energy, a snarled webwork of conflicting djed that saw the heart sink low in the breast at the mere sight of it.

This time around, she was faced, rather gratifyingly, with a mostly orderly and smoothly glowing array of channels and barriers with just a few errors, omissions or antagonistic reactions that could much more easily be rectified than the complex snarlwork she'd had to deal with last time, something that had taxed her reserves of intelligence and patience to their limits.

Time passed, a whirl of painstaking brushwork as she traced in further glyphs, fleshing out the bare bones of the principal pathways for the djed until the floor was covered in an intricate regressional lacework of glypher's paint, each intersection meticulously calculated, each rune placed with exacting precision, her aurist's Sight permitting a much more immediate, much more instinctual knowledge of the djedic interactions and the impact her glyphs would have on the ambient than she'd ever known before. It was exhilerating, in a way, her talents synergising to the wonderful thrum of synchronising djed and the hissing susurrus of her brush across rough tile.

She put the final touches with a flourish to the smaller reagents' circle, one linked with a raying network of glyphic relays she'd drawn in fever-dreams last time around - complex arrangements of barrier glyphs to either side with a directional sigil laid temptingly down the middle, coercing extracted djed to flow in the direction she willed, no other - 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 an excellent start, and one achieved surprisingly quickly at that. She straightened up with a fusillade of furious cracks from her spine, knees and ankles, gunshot-sharp reports firing off in quick array, chased by a second volley as she rolled her neck to relieve it of the pressure and tension the complex glyphery had put on it.

Her head felt as though it had been stuffed with wool – this part of magecrafting wasn't actually taxing, since auristics used only a small amount of power much of the time, but the work was demanding and exacting, unforgiving of errors – and every magesmith was acutely aware of the ruinous cost of a failure. Precision, that was the key; power was all very well, but if the circles were a chaotic smorgasbord of conflicting instructions – or not even present – then it was almost certain everything would collapse and short, with unpredictably-disastrous consequences.

Chaotic djed was capricious and unpredictable by its very nature; anything could happen then, from the item working, but perhaps in a somewhat muddled way, to simple ruination to spectacular explosion, seemingly at random and totally without rhyme or reason to the onlooking – and dismayed – magesmith.

Straightening up slowly, placing her feet with care between the slowly-drying arcs and whorls of runes, Alses looked around, surprised at the level of light – it was only mid-afternoon, Syna still comfortably high in the sky and beaming down torrents of warm golden light. Before, this sort of work – even simplified as it had been for a more minor artifact – would have taken her the better part of a day to complete, but now...

Skill really did make a difference, she was gratified to note. As a consequence of the still-abundant light, too, she felt less tired, less drained by her activities, which meant that yet more could be done in a day, more correction and augmentation.

Time for a little break, though – Alses unhooked the silver key on its chain and let herself out onto the graceful arc of the bridge linking the Phial with the rest of the mansion house, making sure to carefully lock the doors behind her – any disturbance of her work could, if not be disastrous at this early stage, then at least annoying, and a setback. Best not to think about it now – a leisurely walk in the gardens with the sun at her back would be just the thing to soothe away the gray poisons of mental fatigue from her mind and leave her hale, refreshed and whole, raring to get back to grips with the artifact and the complex process of its creation.

[Alses]

Timestamp: 6th Day of Summer, 513 A.V.

The next day brought rain, a summer squall that, by the ninth bell of the morning, looked as though it had received meteorological reinforcements from the Misty Peaks and was squatting soggily and stubbornly over the city, the rain making the skyglass shimmer bounce and refract around the million million tumbling drops, producing a sort of diffuse halo that shrouded buildings and confused the eye.

Alses, though, was a longtime resident of Lhavit, well-used to the mountain city and the occasionally-wild moods of its weather. Then, too, she had been a courier, obliged to go out in almost all weathers carrying the business and communications of House Dusk. She'd seen the city in light and night and half-light, in mist and weeping rain, in djed-wracked fury and storm-drenched rage, in oppressive dead calm and all the other changing faces of the heavens.

Navigating its broad avenues and courtyards in a bit of falling rain was second nature to her now, simple and easy and done without thought, subconsciously triangulating the positions of minarets and towers and domes visible through the diffuse glow with her own mental map of the city and making her way unerringly to the gates of the Lariat estate, still festooned with damp bunting and forlorn lanterns from last night's celebrations – whatever those had been.

A cheery greeting came from the gatewarden, cosily warm and dry in his little lodge-house, one that Alses returned after a moment of surprise, shocked out of her vague and contemplative reverie, mind already having raced ahead to the artifact waiting to be crafted today. All preparations had been completed – final checks and adjustments aside – and it was now time to pick up the hammers and get to the heart of the discipline, the delicate and powerful work that was like a drug, singing in her blood and her bones with the thrill of the challenge and the triumph of the victory.

The laboratory welcomed her with open arms as she unlocked its doors, still blushing from the frankly appraising gaze of the seneschal at her soaked form – the rain had plastered her robes close to her, emphasising the voluptuous figure that was the pre – and to some, post-Valterrian ideal of physical beauty. He'd certainly been appreciative, of that even Alses was certain, accepting the silver key from him as quickly as courtesy allowed and making good her escape to the realm of magic and mastery, which she felt she understood rather more than the whole sticky situation of human interaction. Conversation was liberally salted with traps and deadfalls for the unwary or the untrained – Alses was both of these, alas, and frequently found herself run in dizzying rings by more eloquent and more worldly-wise individuals.

It was a failing, yes, and one she was addressing only gradually and slowly, as a side-effect of Chiona Dusk's rather unusual teaching, but for now she was happy to be as she was, more or less. A favoured child of Lhavit, the citizens tended to give her some leeway in any case – there was no vital pressure to change or adapt, and that suited her just fine.

Breathing deep of the rarefied air of the Overflowing Phial, richly cargoed with the scent of books and metal and the indefinable tang of surging djed, overlaid with a newer, fading scent – her own attar of roses – Alses smiled, gentle and warmly serene. This was where she was centred, where all the skill at her command and all the tumultuous multitude born from the memories of past lives inside her narrowed together to a single razor-point of purpose, changing a little bit of the world and making it dance to her tune.

The mirror – and the now-completed glyphic array around it, sinuous curving weaves of glypher's paint sparkling with djed conduits to her aurist's passive Sight, shone in the dull light, the reflections winking and flashing at her with every motion. Alses frowned; the low light occasioned by the unsettled weather – the low drumming thrum of raindrops on the dome overhead a comforting background sound – and the gentle glow of the skyglass itself, breathing warmth from the walls, was not sufficient for her purposes.

Fortunately, some thoughtful soul had considered the rain's chilling effect on a summery city, and whilst the fireplace at the far end of the laboratory remained dark and cold, an ornate brazier full of red-hot coals glowed, throwing out prodigious amounts of heat.

Alses, still sodden from the walk, gravitated towards it at speed, careful to skirt her circles and not to smudge them with a careless foot or with water flicked from her wet-through robes. The heat was truly welcome, sinking into her core from the surface down, warming and drying as it went. Steam rose in gentle wisps from her front as she hunched as close as she dared to the glowing rocks, sleeves almost trailing in the ash, skin tightened from the effects of the heat so close. A glorious frisson ran up and down her back and sending shivers across her body, stippling her skin with gooseflesh as the rising heat and stubborn cold warred over her.

There were tapers in one cupboard, she knew, along with a solid silver candle-snuffer – a sort of conical hat on a long stick – for just such an occasion, and so a rather less wet and cold Alses selected a spire of wax-wrapped cable and applied it, gingerly, to the brazier. It caught rapidly, a bright yellow flame glowing at the end, and she quickly moved around the laboratory, touching flame to waiting, receptive wicks. Beeswax candles in tall holders – some further ensconced in water-glass, some not – glowed into life, and a steady, even illumination was achieved in short order, brightening things sufficiently that Alses could get a good look at her work.

With the dull thrum of the rain overhead, the even glow of the candles and the brazier warming the lab nicely, it was peaceful, a little bubble of warmth and contentment quite separate, cut off and distant, from the rain-lashed estate outside the securely-locked doors.

Peace and quiet was nice. Calming and tranquil, one could say; Alses took a chime or two to sit down in her chair and simply breathe, inhaling and exhaling with singleminded determination as she let the djed of the world caress her skin with its ephemeral, half-shadowed fingers. Slowly and surely, with a delicate and feather-light mental touch, preserving the soap-bubble focus and contentment that had lulled her choir of voices and the dynamo of her mind into complacent quietude, 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 at the behest of the artist unseen.

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 mirror. No sense in getting complacent, though – mistakes, errors or slips in craft weren't always obvious or immediately rectifiable, and the sooner they were caught the sooner they could be dealt with and the crafting could go on. Alses paced smoothly around the circles, unhurried and yet ruthlessly self-critical, inspecting, examining studying every line and curve and arc and rune of her work. Even the mirror that rested in a cradle of metal at the epicentre of her setup was not immune to her gaze, re-examining and re-evaluating the usefulness and positioning of the clamps and vices she'd secured in position yesterday. Her eyes rarely rested, darting from one glyph, one sigil to the other, metal to paint and back again, hunting for any flaw or weakness on her part that might cause problems down the line.

Nothing. Every glyph in its assigned place, every conduit smooth and stable, every relay gleaming softly, and at the centre of it all the mirror, a shimmering star garlanded about with a metal prison, as pristine and serenely reflecting as it had been when she'd first set it atop the master focus.

Those bells of painstaking work and continual self-correction – her rags hadn't quite been black by the time she'd finished, but they were close to it - had paid their dividends in the night and now the area inside her workspace was isolated from the rest of Mizahar and full to pearly 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.

Once again, against all experience, Alses tensed for a static crackle, or perhaps a spark or shiver that something deep down inside her insisted should occur when she entered a charged-djed environment. It had never happened, but nonetheless, she still anticipated it, forever surprised at its non-emergence. 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 took stock and made her way to the rack upon rack of tools for her use.

[Alses]

So many, so many – which to choose, which to experiment with! Which to use first and which to use second, what combinations of chimes to strike, what tones would flay the djed into insensibility and which would cohere it back into something malleable and easy to mould and reshape? She laughed, quietly, at the possibilities unfurling before her, breath stolen by the sheer scope laid bare before her mind's eye.

What power a magesmith commanded, to take supple and yielding leather and to render it as tough and unyielding as steel or even diamond – given power and time, of course, and reagents in abundance! What greater wonders could be wrought by those with the skill and wealth to cause them?

The hungry, anticipating smile ran off her lips like water soon enough, however, as she resolutely turned her attention back to the minor artifact, the mirror that would be her stepping stone to greatness.

'One step at a time, Alse,' she reminded herself fiercely. Living in the future was just as counterproductive as dwelling on the past, especially when there was important work to do. 'We need a solid footing before I can build a castle in the sky.'

Now, how best to approach it? The great expanse of the mirror winked at her, all ashimmer with reflected light, and her fingers itched to pick up the hammers and set to work at once. Such a rush, however, would not serve her – there had to be a plan, so that changes from one stage to another were quick and painless, all the thinking already done so her entire intellect and all her ability was focused on producing a successful artifact, one that fulfilled her brief and did all she asked of it.

Her fingers danced and caressed the hammers with a loving touch as she thought, making brief notes on a scrap of paper. She itched to try out the hepatizon hammer, even going so far as to unhook the liver-coloured tool from its resting-place and trying its heft in her hand – reassuringly weighty, but not overly so. Enough to give satisfaction on a strike, not enough to make each impact a chore and a trial, and well-balanced – whoever had made it had been a master of their craft, she concluded.

Hepatizon, though, was an alloy of gold, silver and copper, a subtle mixing blend of all three common magecrafting metals, but with copper in the ascendancy. Hepatizon hammers were used as powerful flaying tools, much stronger than copper alone in terms of disjunction and the breaking open of djed conduits, but with silver's moderating influence counteracting some of gold's brash authority, ensuring nothing was outright broken or damaged by the strike.

Even so...it was a minor addition she was aiming for, not a great change, and one localised to a particular area of an artifact; hepatizon, for all her desire to try it herself, having only heard descriptions of its use from others and the occasional note in a rare book, was perhaps too strong, and the weaker copper hammer would be, regretfully, the better choice for this sort of work.

It rankled, slightly – she was annoyed not to have the chance to try it out – but practicality triumphed over all in this instance; it had to. Perhaps when she was secure enough in her funds to risk destroying an artifact and not having the resulting financial fallout ruin her life, she'd experiment, but not now.

A selection of copper hammers went into her belt, therefore, falling within easy reach of her left hand, for the first part of the crafting process: striking open the conduits of the artifact and making them ready and able to receive directed djed, both in trickle form from the focus circle around the reagents (useful for filling in the tiny tertiary djed channels that danced and wove through the periphery of a nascent artifact) and from the far more massive and weighty transfers occasioned by hammer-strikes. Their weight was comforting at her side as she turned her attention to stage two, the most concerning of stages for Alses herself, edging into new territory.

Stage two, then, was the actual transfer of power, of the latent knowledge and skill necessary to grant the mirror auristic reflection, and a slightly frightening one for her because, as well as being the attending magesmith and needing to concentrate on keeping the forming artifact under control, she would also be providing the power and knowledge of auristics, in itself a demanding and difficult job requiring unbroken concentration and commitment. It was perfectly possible to do so, of course, examples of it as a common practice being well-documented, but this would be a test of Alses' skills nonetheless.

The first question, then, was: Which hammer to use, which implement would be best suited to draw out the powers deep inside her and direct them to the artifact?

Simple and inescapable logic told her that the gold hammer would undoubtedly be the best. Had Alses not been the attending magesmith also, she'd have used it without hesitation to wring auristic knowledge and power from the sorcerer providing it, but as it was...Gold, whilst powerful and authoritative, an excellent conductor of djed from reagent to artifact and her favourite tool of them all, was not the most subtle or gentle in its extraction or release, which could disrupt that all-important concentration so necessary for magecraft, and indeed for the steady and uninterrupted transfer necessary to imbue the mirror with an aurist's passive Sight.

Lips pursed in consternation, Alses stood with hands on hips in front of the rack, precious metals gleaming smugly at her from their hooks. Enlightenment stole in slowly, a butterfly thought Alses didn't dare to focus on too much, at first, in case her own mind took fright and cast the forming idea off into the aether where she had no chance of recapturing it.

'Electrum, perhaps?' was the thought that shyly signalled her conscious brain, dragging her eyes down to look closely at the palely-gleaming tool. It would have the properties of both gold and silver – the brash hammer and the calm, precise lance – but muted and moderated, a middle-ground between the two that might very well be the perfect compromise, able to hold and draw out enough djed that the process wouldn't take forever and with a light enough, gentle enough, precise enough touch that her concentration on auristics and magecraft both wasn't disrupted.

'Electrum it is, then,' she decided, perhaps more readily than usual – but she was determined to try out at least one of this lavishly-equipped laboratory's specialised tools.

The last hammer into her belt was simple silver, light and delicate, for manipulation and integration of the djed conduits. Lightness of touch was essential; the auristic energies she was thrusting into the artifact had to be kept close to the surface, commingled with the shallowest of djed conduits and not driven deep into the heart as with a normal artifact in order to produce the desired – required – effect.

One deep breath, to calm and centre herself.

Two deep breaths for luck, and a chance to catch any last-minute omissions.

A third deep breath, for readiness.

[Alses]

The first strike was always the hardest, in a way, the sensation of no going back, the anxiety of having forgotten something vital making it far more difficult than anything that followed – even recovering from near-disastrous mistakes. The only solution was to grit your teeth, take your pride in one hand and your worry in the other and jump over the precipice.

Copper sang in Alses' hand as she steeled herself and made that first, all-important swing, a strong strike against the very centre of the mirror. Anyone watching would have been in no doubt that the mirror would break in an instant, but that was the joy of a magesmith's tools, the reason why a normal hammer wouldn't work; the complex enchantments that went into their production saw that every erg of physical force flashed into free djed on the instant of contact. In the case of copper, that came in the form of a discohering burst, sending ripples of instability across the symmetrical pattern of conduits that framed, identified, incorporated and delineated the reflecting surface, shaking them and blurring their boundaries, trying to open them up for further modification.

The conduits shivered in Alses' Sight, undecided and battered by surging waves of chaotic djed, and then firmed in the face of the onslaught, reflecting it outwards where it was instantly caught and torn apart, spun into long skeins and ordered with ruthless, mindless efficiency by her circles, the glyphs flaring brightly for a long moment before settling into quiescence.

That was fine, that was expected – it was only the first strike, against a masterfully-crafted mirror; resistance was anticipated. Problems would set in if it continued to resist – although Alses found herself half-praying that a resistance challenge would occur, that she could then break out the heavier hepatizon hammer and really lay into the artifact, break it to productive harness on a staircase of chiming notes heavily-cargoed with djed.

Such was not to be, however – three more strikes in quick succession, widely-spaced so as to induce instability right across the symmetrical djed-print of the mirror rather than focusing it one place where the inherent stability of the rest of the pattern could work against her, saw the conduits fuzzed in her auristic Sight, discohered just enough to allow her to begin to work them.

No time to stop and admire her work, to follow the rippling waves of chaotic djed as they spread and commingled from each epicentre – there was only a relatively narrow window of opportunity to begin the work before higher-order patterns reasserted themselves and re-secured the nascent artifact against external djed influences.

There was only a split-tick of hesitation before Alses plunged the copper hammer back into her belt and plucked unerringly from it the electrum tool, its shimmering head catching the light as she turned it over and over, getting a feel for the hammer, its weight and auristic impression on the world. With her other hand, she drew out her knife – rarely used and therefore still razor-sharp, jabbing it with a quick motion (before she could change her mind) into the pad of her thumb and daubing the thick bronze blood that welled up onto the head of the hammer.

A sacrifice, a symbolic one but nevertheless powerful, forging a link between hammer and wielder for as long as the bloodstain remained, making it much easier to transfer knowledge and djed into the hammer to be conveyed to the artifact with a strike and bound unerringly to the target by the continual, passive presence of the clamps and vices, forever exerting their controlling pressure on the djed that passed through their spheres of influence.

Under normal circumstances, Alses would have had another aurist in attendance, one whose sole purpose would be to provide the power and knowledge necessary. They'd have been isolated from the main working area inside their own circle, linked with copious amounts of glyphic paths and relays and with only one job to do, but Alses was also the magesmith; she had to move about her work area to inspect progress, to administer correction or to bolster a failing, flagging conduit, which made the whole process that much more difficult, especially without the aid of glyphs.

Gazing into the maelstrom that was the disturbed djed pattern of the mirror did not fill her with confidence; it was a complex pattern, and one she would have to weave into very carefully so as not to lose any of the desirable properties of the mirror – there were many things that could still go wrong at this stage, and Alses was taking no chances.

With the blood still shining bronze on her hammer, she reached out and tapped the aura diamond, gently, drawing up a portion of its essential essence with the chiming note, the gentlest of strikes that drew out, enticing and seductive and promising freedom and delight to the hitherto-trapped, unmoving djed of the gem, rather than thrust in. Alses imagined the sorcerous voids and gaps inside the hammer head, forged with enchantments at the time of the tool's making, filling with its precious cargo – but not all the way; her strike had been too gentle for that. Purposefully; she still had to charge the hammer with her own auristic power, using the djedic essence of the aura diamond as a focus and purifier to ensure that auristics, not some other magic, was the power that she cast into the mirror.

She gritted her teeth and struck her skull very gently, skin breaking out into gooseflesh where the cool metal touched her forehead, pulling the hammer away with glacial slowness as thick, thick ropes of djed – her djed, that she had to focus on, to twist and shift and channel it into her habitual auristics – but not through the usual channels, no, it had to surge down her hand and into the haft of the hammer, her own djed conduits ever so slightly discohered, just enough to allow that redirection, that charging of the hammer with the power she wanted – needed to imbue.

It was a supremely odd feeling, a tugging whirlpool drain that suckled greedily at her power, rapacious and seemingly insatiable, drawing down torrents of golden synchronising djed cargoed with the arcane techniques and skill that went into the expression and interpretation of auristics. Alses, though, was prepared – the feeling, the sensation was similar to that endengered by a focus glyph in a scroll being charged; she could recognize and understand what was happening to her, and so could monitor it with detachment and keep herself focused on the tricky balancing act between magesmith and aurist imprinter.

If she focused too much on imprinting, there was the risk that the conduits she was attempting to fuse fresh djed into, to cause the genesis of magic inside the artifact itself, would recohere and recover their old patterns, whereas if she focused too much on magecraft there was every possibility that she would lose her split-discipline focus and all the djed she'd thrust into the hammer-head would be for nothing – or worse, would imbue the mirror with the principles of magecraft, of all things, an outcome which would be an unmitigated and irrecoverable disaster.

Beads of sweat dotted her brow and pearly teeth bit worriedly into her lip as she tried to maintain her concentration on two things at once, the phantom sluicing roar of purposed and tasked djed pouring into the electrum hammer matched with a weather eye on the discohered state of the mirror itself, anxiously glancing between the two and wondering, privately, if the electrum would ever be sated.

Her answer, thankfully, came quickly, the suckling pressure, the sucking drain faltered and sputtered and began to fade, greedy tendrils reaching out feebly from a djed-gorged hammer, a brilliant star in the aurist's impression of the world and almost too bright to look at, so great was the accumulated energy.

A triumphal smile split Alses' face wide as she drew back her arm for the strike that would send pure magic surging through the artifact, rocking it to its core and weaving a white-hot meshwork pattern of conduits through the surface of the mirror itself. Alses would have to use the burning shock of their genesis quickly, twining the new auristic conduits as close as she could to the structural matrix and fusing as many as she dared into the pattern. Technically demanding, yes, but predictable, at least, and something she was practiced with. The second hurdle – successfully extracting her knowledge and power – had been cleared, or so she fervently hoped.

[Alses]

The sympathetic feedback from the brilliant instant of contact, when a blazing supernova of auristically-purposed djed that was commingled with the instinctive expression of an aura diamond met the open, defenceless conduit matrix of the mirror, sent tingling shocks all through Alses' body and numbed her arm with its phantom force. Normality and her own astral body reasserted control soon enough, however – blessedly soon for a concerned Alses – causing her to flex her fingers around the haft of the hammer to check they all still worked and triggering her mouth to turn the air blue with inventive swearwords at the unexpected backlash.

No time for pain and surprise, however – 'Strike whilst the iron is hot' held true as much for magecraft as it did for blacksmithing; she had to close with the artifact and work both its overburdened, insulted structural conduits with the new, nascent, developing pathways of magic together quickly and well before they grew apart, sealed up or fizzled and died, unable to sustain themselves against the pressure of the ambient djed inside the artifact, even with the charged environment.

Silver, the lance of the magesmith, was the hammer of choice here, a rippling cadence of harmonic notes that pressed conduits together or shifted them slightly, according to the speed, positioning and force behind her strike. It caressed the aura diamond and the lesser reagents already bleeding djed into the artifact before every strike, pulling out their essence in long, trailing skeins of rainbowed energy that lit up the containing and focusing glyphs like fireworks. So deep in her Sight, Alses could easily see the effects of the clamps and vice after each hammer impact, the expulsed djed caught and funnelled straight back into the mirror, with nary and erg of the arcane energy wasted or lost. Elegant and efficient – the best way to do anything, as far as Alses was concerned.

Tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth as she concentrated, Alses wove some of the faint and wavering auristic conduits, newly-formed from a single, searing strike that poured power and mastery into the mirror's otherwise-simplistic matrix, forging an entire new webwork that had to be nurtured and coaxed and sometimes pruned, woven like the climbing plants on the Respite's trellises between the older, more established channels and sometimes even fused into them so that eventually, when the artifact was completed, the magic would be as instinctive and essential part of it as the silver which formed its reflective back, or the stand which held it upright.

Fiddly, precise work – time and again conduits slipped away from her, melting into others or simply escaping the dragnet her strikes wove, time and again refusing to bend to her will and evading all attempts at corral or correction. Even gold, the authoritative roar in the aether, fully charged with the last of the aura diamond's essence – which saw the formerly-bright gemstone flare and puff into fine, gray dust as all that it had been was sucked away by the hungry tool and the glyphic circles – couldn't impose more than temporary order.

As a compromise measure, trying to save as much as she could of her own magic and to preserve a core of arcane power in the mirror itself, she took to pressing the pale, wavering auristic conduits together, fusing them with complex djedic polyrhythm strikes that made use of gold and copper hammers in rare synchrony, an expensive and sloppy technique under normal circumstances but perhaps warranted, now, forcing them together and thus increasing their power, making them less ephemeral, less slippery, more permanent and more likely to stand against the pressures of the ambient pushing them hither and yon.

Alses prayed, fervently, that her gamble would pay off, that in a few bells she'd have a plethora of conduits that were just stable enough to work with – reliably – rather than a deep-sunk auristic array that didn't interact with the structural reflective properties of the mirror and was therefore of no use to anyone.

Nonetheless, she kept trying with the few conduits left to her, twisting and ravelling them almost to breaking point on tides of fresh djed, looping the few amenable channels over and under and through the twisting, symmetrical reflecting matrix until it was almost impossible, even to her Sight, to distinguish where one began and the other ended.

That was the effect she wanted – needed – to achieve across the entire surface of the mirror, and which was at the moment patchy, the expression of auristic power in sufficient concentration with the normal matrix underneath a rarity rather than the norm.

Unacceptable, but she was still only about halfway through the crafting procedure – there was plenty of time, and time was what the artifact needed.

Or so she hoped, at any rate.

The most difficult thing to do was to take a break, to leave the deeply-coloured aurist's world and all the paraphernalia of a magesmith hard at work in favour of shallow mundanity, of vegetative contentment and the simple delight of the city – but there was nothing more Alses could do, not until the fresh-formed auristic webwork drew in strength from the reagents and the charged environs provided by the glyphs and became a little more workable.

Fortunately, the Lariat estate had some very fine gardens indeed, and whilst the clouds overhead were menacing and heavy with rain, there was a lull, a break, a respite that she could – and did – take full advantage of, locking the laboratory doors securely behind her as the city bells chimed out their consensus on an unsettled, stormy noon and casting one last, worried look back towards the mirror flashing serenely in the middle of her complex setup.

Alses wandered, distracted and without any aim save her own distraction, along scalloped paths raked to gleaming perfection, not touched by creeping moss, and lingered blankly by fountains that played and chuckled, the falling water almost musical as it splashed on shimmering skyglass. Her nose twitched as a bouquet of exuberant summer perfumes washed over her; led by her nose she turned from unseeing contemplation of the sculpture of a half-naked woman (who, had Alses been more compos mentis, would have noticed bore a striking resemblance to Elena Lariat herself) amid sheets of tumbling water and headed off in a mindless hunt for what turned out to be an enormous sweetpea arbour in full and glorious bloom, a barricade of scent across the pathway that nearly sent her reeling with the surpassing sweetness assailing her nose.

Happily, the rain had driven almost everyone sane inside, and so she had the palatial sprawl of the gardens all to herself, with no-one there to see and be worried by her vacant, abstracted stare and shambling gait. Her mind was still, despite the best efforts of the scenery and the cooling breezes, chock-full of concerns and images from the laboratory she'd left behind, continually puzzling over and analysing what she was going to do, what she might have done differently, how to improve next time.

[Alses]

The artist unseen, her boon companion, muse and aide in the realm of auristics leapt into action at the merest touch of her power, the slightest suggestion of evolution into deeper Sight, daubing the entire laboratory in a million conflicting colours, scents, sounds and phantom touches as Alses drew on her power to inspect the developing artifact, heart in her mouth. The glyphic array on the floor shimmered with the tyrian shades of magic bound and directed to productive, purposeful use, throbbing with purpose and power both.

The closer circles were studded with stars of all colours, every shade and hue shifting and mixing and melting into one another from the reagents, a beautiful and yet also somewhat nauseating vision that all funnelled towards the symmetrical pattern-aura of the mirror in the very centre. Like this, drowned in the auristic notion of the surrounds, the physical form of the artifact was almost invisible under the incandescence of the conduits weaving through it, the perfect sight for a magesmith about to sally forth and do battle once more with the world until it bent its knee in supplication to her might.

Moving with care, Alses squinted out of long habit for a better view as she stepped closer, face so close to the djed streams that her nose was almost touching the mirror and her breath condensed on its cool surface, hunting desperately for signs that she'd done the right thing, that leaving the artifact for a bell or two had paid off and that she now had something that was, if not as pliable as newly-created conduits, then at least strong enough to survive manipulation.

The air left her lungs in one long, relieved breath as she saw her risky technique had paid off – perhaps too well, in point of fact, given the size and greedy nature of some of what she saw, a wildly snarled thicket of auristic djed that would need to be pressed and teased and, when all else failed, forced into its proper place and held there until submission and integration was forthcoming.

Bolstered by the minor triumph, Alses' fingers snatched at her tonal hammers with renewed vigour, raising them high and bringing them down in intricate melodies that were an unintentional side-effect of what she was truly doing; enticing and commanding the djed of the world to bend itself to her will.

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. Silver was her weapon of choice here; there were too many conduits too close together for the blunt thunder of gold; she needed the lance instead, the darting needle to serve as executor of her will and skill.

In many ways, it was like negotiating with a living thing, each whispering, echoing, bell-like touch pleading and cajoling rather than forcing, making the recalcitrant conduits waver and yield bit by painstaking bit, making her fight for every victory, every ordered and integrated patch that would, when the whole thing was finished in charged water, act as she wished rather than as the caprice of undirected magic willed.

The work was hard and delicate, linking each strand slowly and carefully into another conduit, a branching filigree fantasia that divided and divided and grew like some great tree, connecting every facet and interweaving with the more mundane framework of the structural matrix – exactly like climbing plants and trellises, only wrought in the realm of the aurist and magecrafter out of pure djed and bloody-minded perseverance.

It was an eerie sensation; linked by virtue of the bloody offering she'd made to her hammer in order to transfer her power, her knowledge, Alses could feel the shifting integration going on inside the mirror, under its serene surface. That odd extension of faculty and the not-quite-pain that her craft caused was encouraging, though, a feeling rather like suddenly becoming aware of an extra part of the body, a new ability and one that was one growing and expanding rapidly, not quite comfortable and not quite fitting – not yet, at any rate.

Soon, though, she was done, hand aching from the repeated backlash, reagent circle quiet and half-dissolved from the forces fluxing and surging through it over the last two days, each containment glyph where once a gemstone had stood now blasted and obscured by piles of featureless, worthless gray dust, every erg of energy, every speck of djed that had made them beautiful and precious and distinct from everything else sucked out, repurposed and reharnessed to a more useful and productive end.

Syna's light was bloodred, now, the sun a vast red disk low and sinking in the sky. The first stars hadn't begun to twinkle in the great bowl of the heavens, but the moon, the proud and arrogant moon, had already risen, still tinged blue from the sky and yet ready to pounce when true night began, to steal colour and light wherever it could and render things in dramatic monochrome instead.

In concert with the sun, the unavoidable Change would soon be upon her, the unwelcome transition from celestial perfection to mortal inadequacy. Under normal circumstances – and today was no different – the setting of the sun signalled the end of Alses' working day. She clung, stubbornly and proudly, to a different system of waking and sleeping than most other citizens of Lhavit; she stayed awake and productive all day, rather than spacing out several rest periods and giving herself some ease during the day, and in return slept all night, spending as little time as possible awake and conscious in her mortal seeming.

Some people thought it unhealthy – Priestess Sel'ira, Chiona, others – but Alses cared not a jot; it was how she preferred to live her life, thank you very much, and most of the rest of Mizahar had a similar system and rubbed along very nicely in any case, so it couldn't be that damaging to health and well-being.

“Good night, mirror-mine,” she murmured, a smile playing across her features as she relaxed bonelessly on Elena's divan and massaged her aching muscles and bones. True-blue light; blessed, blessed relief burned brilliantly over her form for a tick or two, easing away the gray poisons of fatigue and exertion from her hands – once crabbed with effort and long bells holding tight to tool-hafts – her shoulders, laden down with the burden of expectation and tension at the problems which had cropped up and her feet, the arches and heels radiating aching pain from standing and pacing for so long.

Her eyes rolled back in pleasure as the unreeling bill of aches and pains and niggling complaints that added up to a stressed and over-exerted body faded away, item by item, under Tanroa's gorgeous, invaluable, wonderful Blessing. Now, when she moved, instead of a litany of complaints going off in her head, there was silence, muscles moving smoothly and easily as though they'd lain in perfect repose on cushioned silk for a full day, butter-soft and completely relaxed, not a single hard tension not or other whorl of anxiety to cause her pangs of pain and discomfort.

Sometimes, the Ethaefal truly were blessed – and this was one of them, Alses decided, curled up in the cosy warmth of the Overflowing Phial with a near-completed artifact humming contentedly in front of her with the rain coming down outside.

Oh, at some point she'd have to rouse herself from somnolent repose and venture forth into the rain and the cold, but that was in the future, and for now she contented herself with the feel of silk on skin and the knowledge of a difficult job well in-hand at last.