Completed Potential Philters

[Eanos]

85 Fall, 513AV The variety of books in the Magecrafters library rarely ceased to amaze Eanos, though he was beginning to appreciate why that would be, and now he realised that he would need to start expanding his own very small library, which in turn would mean some visits to the little shop where he had bought his last books. It might well be time to probe the other secrets in that shop again as well now that he had some status in the city and the owner might have heard of him. It might be that he would be more open this time and the fact was that Eanos had mizas to spend if he wanted and this would be a worthy use of them. This time though he had merely borrowed a book and now sat at his workbench and started to ready it. He expected from what he had heard that much of it would seem not relevant in the slightest to his work or his interests, but there were a few areas which did strike him as potentially fruitful and it was those that he concentrated on. He had understood that philtering was of benefit in two ways for it allowed the preparation of the polishes that he used on blades, especially the final ones and in addition it was possible to include magical or gnosis effects in a philter. The latter he didn’t understand how that might work but equally it was interesting in it’s own right. He recalled in addition that philters could be used to clarify the waxes used in lost wax castings so it seemed to him that there were a number of ways that the skill could be of use to him. Equally it was clear that there would be no quick fixes. Having worked his way through the preamble it quickly became clear that he would need to invest in the equipment necessary equipment before he would actually be able to take this any further which meant that for now his studies would be purely theoretical. With that in mind he turned to the next section in the book which seemed to deal with the processes which were used in the skill. These he read quickly and paused only on those that seemed to hold potential interest to him, though he was aware that as his knowledge grew so the other things might become more interesting. It would be useful to use a philterer for this and to learn from, but if he knew it himself then he could always fall back on this own knowledge. Calcination was the first one to leap off the page at him, for it seemed to be a way of reducing stone materials to a form where it would be suitable as an abrasive. Chromatography also seemed to hold some potential promise for a question that had long been in his mind with regards to the possibilities of new alloys was in how to know what elements could be added. As he paused and pondered he wondered if this might be an example of where he needed one of the other processes in order to be able to use this particular process. Then too there was the question of how well this tied in with his own Auristic abilities.

[Eanos]

Eanos paused in his reading to reflect on where he was now. It was clear that there was much to learn and that learning would take a long time before he had learnt enough to be of much use. It would certainly be more beneficial to work with a philterer on this and use their expertise whilst his own gradually grew. However, even if he didn’t decide to pursue this skill the exercies had already been useful as he now was aware of possibilities that he hadn’t known of before and would know the right questions to ask of a philterer.

The next processes that he read about were potentially interesting but at that point they seemed to hold little meaning. He could however see parallels with smelting as a method of extracting metal from ore and realised that in this part there was again a new connection which made the skill of use. Now more than ever he regretted the lack of magma forges here in Sylira but it was something that he was just going to have to work around.

With smelting in mind he looked again at the processes, this time reading a little more closely and now he realised that indeed this was a very close tie in with the smelting side of metalsmithing, but here it was a little more aimed at the precious metals rather than that of iron and steel. This was very much more interesting to him and he turned to the chapter which discussed Cupellation as this was something that was completely new to him.

Whilst he knew much about the working of metals and their properties in the sense of how to work them, how to heat treat to obtain certain effects, which could be cold worked and which could not and so forth, he knew very little about the ores and the processes by which the metals were extracted. If he was ever to be successful in his quest to create new alloys here then that would become a vital skill and he didn’t know if anyone in the Sylira region other then him had any interest in such things.

Silver he read was not often found in a natural form and that surprised him for such a common metal, but instead it seemed that much of it was produced by the sorts of processes described here and especially by the process of cupellation. He read closer about how silver could be extracted from some forms of lead ore and about how the lead melted before the silver and so by careful heating the two metals could be separated.

It interested him to discover that the noble metals could be separated out with the cupel, though he would like to get his hands on one before he was sure exactly how that device might work, There were mentions of other processes too that resulted from it such as Parting to separate out the noble metals from each other. It was something of a diversion to investigate precious metals as he used them little, but that was likely to change now he was investigating decoration more for the weapons he made which was likely to mean that they would transition from purely functional to attractively finished and to him that made sense. It would not be long before he was making blades that might cost their owners thousands of miza and they would be right to expect it to not only perform well but also to be expertly finished.

[Eanos]

It was very clear that whilst there were some things that he might be able to attempt with just the resources of the forge at his hand, he would need to obtain a proper lab if he was going to learn anything of this craft. That gave him pause for thought as he wondered where he might be able to buy such things and no sooner than he had framed the thought did he guess the answer and that also gave him the idea that he could kill two birds with one stone for it was time that he started to create his own pool of resources and start his own library, even if it was just the one book at a time.

Of course there was more to philtering than just the applications that he had in mind for it, though he now wondered too about such things as acids and the like for etching. All of these things were so far things that he had bought in, but some of them would be better if he could control the quality of them himself. But that aside, the book he had was clearly not written for a smith nor for anyone whose primary interest lay in the smelting and polishing of metals, no indeed the book was rather more written to the audience of healers and the like, as well as to those who were involved in the preparation and storage of foods. He had no knowledge of healing and less interest in learning of it, but of course everyone had some interest in the preparation and storage of food. Even Eanos enjoyed cooking sometimes at least, though he had little expertise in it. So far he not managed to poisen himself and that was a good thing. With the skills he was reading about here then it might well be possible to take it a stage further and actually improve his cooking skills to where he actually enjoyed the food that he prepared.

The thought amused him even though his ability to follow up on that at the moment was constrained quite badly by his lack of equipment. It amused him still more to have an assumption that the ability to refine and define would somehow improve his ability to cook, though perhaps he could use the burnt parts in the charcoal filters that he’d read about in one of the processes.

He grew a little more serious as he turned the pages and dipped into the knowledge which was contained within. It was soon clear to him that of course it would not improve his cooking but what it would enable him to do was to store and preserve foods so that he was less reliant upon whatever happened to be in the market on a particular day and also he could buy and dry herbs and the like which would improve the flavours, although that all still assumed he’d be able to incorporate all of that in a way which made his food palatable.

[Eanos]

As he was clearing his workbench at the end of his working day he had a moment of clarity and realised that he’d missed something obvious and it made him shake his head as he came to fully appreciate that especially during this last season he had been obsessed with his work and had hardly left the forge for more than the time it took to find the nearest stall in the Bazaar for food.

Yet of course the Bazaar sold more than food, it sold many things and had many hidden corners where unusual things could be found. He cocked an ear and heard the sounds of voices coming down the corridor and through the open door of the shop and judged that with the city coming to life it was likely that the Bazaar was too and would be worth a visit.

His prediction was proved true enough though it wasn’t the easiest of searches for he overlooked the small stall at first since the owner had not as yet unpacked any of the fragile glasswork but as Eanos had turned around and was heading back he caught a glint of light as the owner unpacked and that was all that he needed.

Now he sat at his bench with the contents of the lab carefully unpacked around him, most of it was completely unfamiliar to him and he had brought the book out and was leafing through the pages and looking at both diagrams and descriptions so that he could put names to the various things. Some were obvious even to him, even if their exact use was not yet. Some tools required no explanation such as the brazier and the scales with its weights. That latter interested him for it reminded him of what he’d read about the cupellation of silver. That thought quickly led him to the cupels themselves of which there were several in different sizes and he examined them curiously for they would certainly see use before he put them carefully to one side.

The next to be pulled from the packaging was a pear shaped object and that took him a while to find in the book, though it turned out in the end to be the first entry where it was described as an Alembic, for the distillation and separation of liquids. It was a mysterious device and he put it aside, placing the corks and pipettes next to it before. The largest item was the kiln which he’d set on the floor and which had required a return trip to collect though he had left the stall owner bemused by simply carrying it off the back of the hand cart it had been sitting on.

Much of it was delicate and he’d need to find somewhere safe to store it and he could imagine just how easily something like the glass coil could be broken. Fortunately if anything did break, he could have it made again by the glassblowers. That was another shop that he had never visited and perhaps he should while he was of the mind of expanding his horizons though as yet he could not think of an obvious link into his smithing.

[Eanos]

It seemed that this end of the season was one where Eanos was to learn many things that he had not known before or more to the point had not thought to ask about. It had never seemed the right time or place to ask Ros why he was here in the city and not in Sultros or how he had managed to take control of both mine and forge and become a linchpin in the business of the Knights. It was something that Eanos had often wondered about and now he knew, and after all the wondering about whether Ros might be sensitive about the information, the truth had come out as an aside during a conversation about ores. Ros had never spoken before about his mother and Eanos had not known about the survey of Sylira by her, but now he was very interested to learn that the province had been surveyed for it meant that something of what he needed to know was out there if he could get hold of a copy. Ros had taken possession of the largest iron ore mine, but Eanos was less interested in possession of a mine than he was in finding mines whose ores he could test. In this respect his needs were very different to those of Ros for he would never need much ore, just ore of the very highest quality.

But that was speculation for another time, for the fact was that Ros not only mined the ore, he also smelted it and that meant he had access to other ores too and whilst it meant that his processes for the extraction of silver for example were on a much greater scale than Eanos was interested in, he had been able to supply some ore for Eanos to work with. He had, fortunately for Eanos done the initial processing of the ore so that the crystalline Galena had been crushed and washed to remove some of the rock and debris that it had been encased in. That crushed ore had then been put into a furnace to remove the iron ore and other minerals and the molten metal run off into pigs.

On his workbench now Eanos had one of those pigs and his task was to separate out the silver from the lead. He sorted through the materials that he’d bought and chose a cupela which he judged should be of the right size. It was an odd material, made from bone of some sort and which he knew in some way assisted in the process though quite how he was not clear about. The book had shown the process to be quite straightforward so now he placed the cupela into the heart of the forge, ignoring for now the oven that he’d purchased and waited for the metal block to start melting. As it started so he used a hand bellow to blow across the surface of the heating metal because according to the book the lead would form on the surface as a whitish powder which seemed to make sense from his knowledge of working the metal. The lead would melt out first and he scooped it out as it did so and set it into a pan for it could be melted once he was done with the silver and formed into new blocks. The process was slow and hard work for he needed to keep up the air flow with the bellows but it wasn’t anything that he wasn’t able to deal with. By the end of the process when the silver had melted and there was no more lead oxide to be removed, Eanos poured out the silver from the cupela and left it to cool. He doubted that his first attempt had created very pure silver or lead, but it was a start and he was happy with that.

[Radiant]

Eanos :

Experience

Skill	XP Earned
Observation	+1 XP
Reading	+2 XP
Philtering	+3 XP

Lores

Lore Earned

Philtering: Useful In Weaponsmithing

Philtering: Separating Minerals From Base Elements

Various Tools Used In Philtering

Ros: Isurian Head Of The Lykolav Mine and The Ironworks

Loots

Notes :

Your posts are detailed and a pleasure to read, Eanos!

My radiance is not bright enough?

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, beam me a PM and we can work it out.