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This shining population center is considered the jewel of The Sylira Region. Home of the vast majority of Mizahar's population, Syliras is nestled in a quiet, sprawling valley on the shores of the Suvan Sea. [Lore]
Eanos surveyed the inside of the Magecrafters laboratory with fresh eyes for it had been some time since he last worked in here. He’d preferred to work outside of here in the past but now he had come to realise that he had limitations and had started to come to terms with the need to lay aside his own ego in order to move forward in the most effective and efficient manner which in this case meant using the safely warded laboratory with it supply of tools and equipment.
He had assumed that he would be able to replicate many of the things here quite simply, but it had turned out not to be that simple in practice for there were many complications each of which needed to be addressed in turn. He still wanted to create his own laboratory, but it seemed that it would need to wait until he had more expertise in at least two different magical disciplines and likely enough there would be more once he started on that path. Even producing the tools had proved to be more complicated than he’d expected but he was adapting his expectations now to reality and would get there in due course.
His objective for this visit was to remind himself of the facilities so that he did not forget anything when he came back the following day to start work. Nodding to himself he closed the doors carefully and returned to the forge.
The project that he had set himself was to create a hammer that hit harder than the mass of the hammer warranted. He had two reasons for this, aside from further experimentation into magecraft, which were to make lighter work of some of the heavy forging, and should he ever find the need to be smelting certain ores then this would be essential and secondly and perhaps more importantly he thought that it would be an interesting effect to place into a weapon. Many of the effects he had considered for the enhancing of weapons seemed only suitable for inexperienced fighters and that wasn’t something he was especially interested in, for all that there would be considerable demand for it. This effect he hoped would go some way to compensating for the fact that many of the Knights seemed to fight with a one handed grip which meant that they sacrificed the ability to hit hard enough to smash a shield or cut through armour. There were some additional issues around that as many swords would not survive that sort of impact either, but at this level of experimentation he did not expect the effect to be dramatic, and likely enough not even noticeable to the one being attacked, but over the course of a battle as the fighters fatigued, then it would start to come into play more effectively.
The hammer would be the test piece then and would allow him to see how such an effect might be applied and how much effect it would have.
The first thing he needed though was a hammer head, and his teachers in the past had cautioned him that magecraft worked best on newly created items which were in themselves as perfect as they could be.
A hammer would never remain perfect, indeed a part of its function was to be somewhat sacrificial at times. It needed to be hard enough to forge with and yet soft enough not to mark hardened steel overly. The latter should be something less of an issue with this hammer as it was intended to replace a sledge that most smiths needed two hands to use effectively. Eanos could use it with one, but not for long at a time, which had so far always served to compromise his smithing for as he tired so he slowed and that meant the piece going back into the fire to reheat and soften, allowing him a rest. But every time the work went back into the fire so did the fire do more damage to the metal.
The magecrafting would be limited on this hammer for he was limited to how much of an effect he could apply to it. That in itself was not so much of an issue and it was something that he wished to experiment with himself before he applied it to a weapon; assuming that the test went well enough to apply it. As it was he would need to adjust to some degree the force with which he hit until he got used to the effect of the hammer and if that proved too hard then fighters would experience the same problems. If it proved possible to adapt then over time and when he had the experience to do so, then he might try increased force but that would limit the effect to just his use. That posed interesting possibilities for weapons for it meant that once magecrafted the weapon would only have that effect for the one and only first user. It could never be adjusted to the use of another which was good in battle, but not good for heritage blades handed down from father to son. But that was a problem for another time.
Now he put steel in the forge and brought it to working heat, mixing steels as much out of habit as out of necessity. There was no need for a hammer to have steel that was attractive to look at, but he saw no reason not to. A good smith was expected to have good tools and whilst plain tools were the mark of a modest smith, good but subtle were the preference of this smith.
The steels he mixed in various patterns, folding the steel into layers then twisting them and hammering them back into a new layer to which he added more. Now would be when he could have used a heavier hammer for this was exactly the sort of forging for which he needed it in order to weld the layers together. If it worked then he would look forward to it as even his Isurian arm ached from the work by the time he was done. With the head forged with the hole for the handle defined, he needed only to file it to the final shape and heat treat it. A rough polish to the striking heads and a finer polish to the sides with an acid etch to bring out the shapes in the steel and it was done and ready for the magecrafting.
Eanos sat in the Magecrafter laboratory with his tools and equipment neatly laid out around him. He knew what he wanted to do, he knew the effect that he wanted and he knew the steps that it involved. The Magecrafter had confirmed them for him, though that was always a difficult conversation and was another factor in why Eanos wanted his own laboratory though he couldn’t quite see the Knights paying to provide him with one when this one sat partly unused, nor in allowing him to have his own which they did not control.
He mused on that one and wondered if it was not time to have discussion about that with them. Certainly it was not convenient to be traipsing across the castle every time he needed to do a new step on the magecrafting of an item. Nor was it efficient for him to be blocking the Magecrafters use of his own laboratory every time he wished to do some more crafting and he knew that there were sometimes other students. When the season turned it would be a conversation worth having, or perhaps even before if Eanos could find the time.
For now though he sat and cleared his mind in preparation for the work that came next. The walls of the laboratory were warded to a higher level of skill than any that Eanos possessed so he had no concerns about that side of things, but still he needed to ensure that there was a clear demarcation around the pedestal which would keep the work he was doing where it was supposed to be done and preventing any random side effects from finding their way in. This would be achieved as it always was by the use of glyphs. In theory the wards around him negated the need to create shielding glyphs but Eanos would rather be sure than not and certainly did not want to have to start again with a newly crafted hammer head just because he had skimped on a relatively trivial stage.
For now he meditated, clearing his mind of other thoughts and bringing his focus down to the glyphs that were to be used, each of which would have a specific form and many of them would be complex. All fortunately would be familiar as they were ones that he had used before. Many of them were likely to need to be redone during the course of the work, though if he worked it well then it should be just the activation ones that might need it.
With his mind calmed and with the glyphs floating in the edge of his mind he started with the outer ring which would be a single large glyph which when activated would have the sole purpose of capturing any djed that attempted to pass through the barrier and redirect it down a path and into a larger collection focus which would store it. He wondered on the risk of the focus not being large enough but decided that there was little risk of it in this working.
With the protection glyphs in place such that they created an inner seal on the room he then started on the inner glyphs whose paths served to once more direct the flow of djed but this time on a much finer scale so that they ran into the object to be worked and then others caught any that might escape, storing it before it reached the outer protection glyphs.
For once he used the lenses available in the lab to check the auras of the glyphs rather than using his own skills since it required only a low level check which these could do well enough.
With all of the preparations done it was time to start the main work on the hammer. It occurred to him as he worked that he was exceptionally lucky to be working for the Knights as they financed all of this work, and without that he likely would find it difficult. Without a Master magesmith to produce the various tools and supplies that the work used he would be forced to attempt to purchase them and that would be fiercely expensive.
Now that he was back into the magecrafting mindset he realised that he should use the opportunity to attempt to create some of the tools, though once more he realised, his mind locked into a loop, that he would probably need more experience before he was able to. One step at a time then, he reaffirmed the decision to himself to avoid the irritation at the delays from breaking down the carefully cultivated meditative state in which he currently viewed the situation.
Carefully he placed the hammer head on the pedestal which was the focus point of all the activities. He needed to create a suitable djed pathway inside of the head so that it would reinforce the behavioural trait that he wanted to enhance. It had not and never had been a particularly clear process for him, to understand exactly how changing the pathways worked to create this effect and not another, and it had been especially difficult to see how multiple effects could be created. He had however come to realise as his abilities to read auras had progressed that the djed in an item was very complicated and the changes did not as he’d first assumed necessarily change all of it, merely those aspects which were associated with the change.
Now, though he certainly did not pretend to understand how magecrafting worked exactly, he did understand that in this case a certain attribute of the djed told the hammer head how much it weighed, while another aspect turned that into the force it would hit something else. Normally that latter aspect was fixed but magecraft allowed for the djed to be convinced into changing the ratio. In this way he could if he wanted change two attributes independently without ever worrying that he would change all of them in one step or might accidentally change the wrong one.
Once he had decided what he needed to change the next tricky part was identifying the aspects of the aura which dictated that reaction and here it was that he was pleased that he had spent so much time working with auras. If he were less proficient in the reading of auras then it would have been very difficult indeed to decide exactly which parts of the djed flows would need to be changed. As it was he had a certain difficulty with the available lenses as they were not as advanced as he would have liked, but with some concentration and knowing what to look for he was eventually able to see the attribute he wanted and then it was a matter of aligning everything properly.
Alignment of the hammer head was reasonably critical but mostly to ensure that any residual djed was properly controlled and in large part so that the aura could be seen clearly though the lenses in just the right way that the critical part of the aura was clear.
Taking one of the small hammers he paused and judged just where he needed to apply force to have the effect that he needed. In truth this part was somewhat hit and miss at this point in his experience level and whilst it was good theory that it was possible to only change the aspect that was intended, the truth was that the wrong application of force in the wrong place could be disastrous and he didn’t even want to think what the potential consequences might be.
Whilst he now knew that he’d been wrong to defer his studies of magecraft he was not unhappy that he had done so for his studies of other forms of djed working had given him a much greater insight into djed and how it worked than he’d had before and as a result he could now use that knowledge so that the next step was not entirely a strike in the dark.
When he worked with his own djed there was a process of manipulation where he formed the djed in certain ways and having done so in different disciplines he had some understanding of how each manipulated different aspects of the djed just as he now proposed to do here. The difference was that here he did not work with his mind directly on the djed but with tools that emulated that process.
It meant that he knew what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, but now he had to do that with the tools in hand. When he used his mind then there was a process of weaving the djed, shifting it around so that he could change the parts that he needed to change and then weave it back together again and so he needed to do the same here.
With the tools he could see and feel the forces that they projected, some sharp like knives, others hooked and others blunt in their application. His previous experience when he didn’t properly understand this and his teachings told him that the price for using tools was time. With his mind he could manipulate djed within chimes, whilst here it was going to take days to tease it and then make sure that the patterns had stabilised so that he could make the next change. Taking a deep breath he made the first pass over the hammer with a hammer that was never intended to strike in anger and watched as it shifted the djed patterns but not exactly as he’d intended nor as much as he’d intended, so he wiped it across the surface again, this time more positively and with a more sure hand.
Over the course of the next days he came back on a regular basis, checking that the glyphs were still in place and renewing as necessary to ensure that the delicate operation on the pedestal was undisturbed by any stray djed that might have entered when he opened the doors, checking the aura of the hammer using the lenses and then making the next change.
Eventually he was satisfied that the change was made as well as he could make it and he shifted the djed flows back into place where he had disturbed them to get into the heart of the piece and nudged them until they appeared stable. Again he left the hammer head for a day to ensure that they remained stable and then he took the piece up and plunged it into the bucket of charged water which would leach off any residual forces that remained. It would lock the changes that he’d made into place and also prevent him from making any more changes. If he wanted to make the hammer head hit harder than it did, he would have to start with a new head and repeat this process, then repeat it again to strengthen the effect, but that would be the limit of his ability for the time being to make such changes.
by Eanos on November 26th, 2013, 10:36 am 
I love it.
