A Vicious Surprise

by **Alses** on January 13th, 2014, 9:52 pm

Timestamp: 9th Day of Winter, 513 A.V.
Location: Maeki's Studio of Animation

“Well, there it is, Alses!” Maeki exclaimed, jubilant, placing an unusual construction of metal and wood onto the kitchen table for her student’s diligent perusal.

Alses blinked at the thing between them, attempting to understand what could possibly have gotten her mentor so excited. It certainly wasn’t much to look at; a flat plank of wood to which a coiled spring and bar arrangement had been secured, along with some sort of metal lever with a flat platform attached.

Had she been forced to take part in more of the Respite’s cleaning duties, instead of serving as the gardener and jobbing philterer when circumstances demanded it, Alses would have recognized it instantly as a mousetrap. As it was, however, she had no idea, investigating the thing with all of her augmented senses, fingers hovering hesitantly over the object, ghosting around its contours as she explored.

Maeki watched, tolerant and increasingly amused, as Alses conducted her tentative examination, the drinks and sweets forgotten between them at the presentation of a new challenge.

“What’s it for?” Alses asked, finally, the function of it having escaped her. “We know it has something to do with blood and cheese, two things we don’t normally put together.” The blood was on the metal bar and the cheese – or rather, she realised, on closer inspection, the anticipation of cheese - on the platform attached to the lever, but she didn’t see how any of that, how anything she’d been able to glean from meticulous inspection might inform her of its function. Her best guess was a disquieting one; some form of torture device.

Maeki’s laugh rolled out, sudden and fierce and delightful, and Alses basked in the champagne glow for a moment, phantom bubbles bursting on her skin as her magic took hold of the emotion and made it tangible. “Do you really not know?” she asked – rhetorically, as it turned out, for she continued without much of a pause. “It’s a mousetrap. Vermin, Alses,” came the clarification, along with a raised eyebrow.

Alses snapped her fingers, neurons firing in her brain as a conclusion arrived at the speed of thought. “Ah!” Maeki covered a blazing smile with one hand – it shone through loud and clear to Alses’ sight, though, rendering the gesture, although sweet, useless.

“So it traps mice, which I presume need to eat like most mortal things. And given the…” she paused, trying to frame things delicately “…difficulty with the harvest of late, I’d imagine people want to better protect their food?”

Maeki blinked. “Forgot you don’t eat,” she murmured, pink-peony embarrassment flushing through the outer reaches of her impression on the world, a faint and tremulous rush of heat glissading over Alses’ skin for a moment or two before it – and the momentary chagrin – faded. “Basically, you’re right. These things-” she waved it in the air for emphasis “-are petching dangerous to use, under normal circs. Catholicon tells me they’ve been seeing no end of smashed fingers from people not used to using traps, and I’ve been getting more and more orders from sensible people asking about these.”

Alses blinked; if they were so dangerous, why even bother with them? She knew that cats liked to eat mice, after all; perhaps bulk acquisition was the way forward. “So-”

“So Animation can make them much safer,” Maeki grinned happily. “We can make them self-cocking, and specific too, so they don’t go off when a human – or other sentient,” she added hurriedly, an apologetic smile flashed to Alses in recognition of her inhumanity “-touches them. Safety and all that.”

Maeki clapped her hands happily together, excited. “So, do you know how they work?”

In reply, Alses picked up the contraption, or tried to. As soon as she did, Mizahar faded and a memory, a powerful one, rose up from the throng and claimed her senses. A plush room, rich as only something from pre-Valterrian times could be, swam before her eyes. A scent nipped and tingled at her nose, maddeningly escaping identification, as shadowy figures shifted and moved. The perspective was…strange, some things diminished and small, as though unimportant, others over-magnified, exaggerated, the strobe of over-saturated colour and washed-out shades hadean.

A monstrous thing – she only realised, much later, that it was a mouse, so grossly over-proportioned its head and paws – suddenly drained all attention, all perspective; a shriek split her ears and she jolted back to reality with a start.

Maeki was looking at her with concern. “Are you all right? You were…” she tailed off, unsure.

“We…I…we think I’m fine. Just a memory. A strong one. I think we might have been afraid of these, once.” Alses shook her head to clear it of any lingering nostalgia, and looked at the mousetrap, carefully examining it once more and with greater confidence. A few ticks of observation was enough to tell her that it had been discharged, or uncocked or whatever the phrase actually was, making it safe to handle. There was no pent-up force thrumming in the metal bar, no vibration of metal under stress or an iridescent aura redolent with energies just waiting to be released; she picked it up without fear, scrutinising it closely.

There was a large, heavy iron bar on two arms that twisted into springs, a lever-platform whose distant end made contact with a small hooped bit of metal, and that was all. ‘A very simple machine,’ Alses told herself in the cacophony of her brain. ‘We should be able to work this out from first principles. So…’

Inquistive fingers caught around the iron bar and, carefully bracing the wooden base against the table with the palm of her other hand, she began to lift it free of its prone position, pulling it up and then bending it backward as hand and metal passed the zenith and continued smoothly on, downwards this time, with nary a scringeing note of protest from the tightening springs.

She moved her palm out of the way and let go – with stunning suddenness and vicious force the metal bar snapped forwards and down, hurled there by the action of the uncoiling springs, crashing into the base with a heavy and final thud. The whole of the trap jerked and jack-knifed up from the force and then lay still once more, discharged and innocuous.

Hmm. Alses made the noise deep in her throat as she picked it up once more, this time her sensitive fingers touching to the lever-plate, seeing what the pressure did to the simple mechanism. To her surprise, she saw that even the faintest of pressures on the plate caused a much larger response down the line – a sliver of metal rose out of the wooden base, dislodging the hooped metal rod, although to no apparent purpose.

Hmm. Evidently that was involved somehow – but how? She turned her attention to the hoop and its attachments, noting the over-engineered securing pins and loops bored deep into the base. It was designed to hold against a lot of force, which meant…

Quick fingers worked once more, pulling back the metal to its full tension. The springs groaned, this time, as she forced them to the wood and then, experimentally, pulled the rod over so that its hooped part rested on and – theoretically, anyway – anchored down the snappy part of the trap. Alses had no idea what it was called – snappy bit would do for now.

Carefully, expecting the whole thing to snap back at any moment, Alses let go. There was the clink of metal on metal as one met the other and the opposing forces cancelled one another out, but that was all.

Letting out a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding, back slick with sweat, Alses relaxed back in her chair, secure in the knowledge of something else explained. The mouse would presumably step upon or otherwise trigger the lever-plate on its way to some cheese, which would release the restraining arm, allowing the metal bar to snap forward and down and crush the mouse’s skull or spine or…something.

Either way, it would probably be immediately lethal.

“Is that how it works?” Alses asked. “We pull back the bar, it gets held by the rod here until something triggers the lever, which releases the bar and kills whatever it is?”

Maeki nodded, pleased. “That’s about the size of it,” she agreed. “So what do you think we’ll have to do to turn them into halfway decent Animated traps? Worth people’s hard-earned kina?”

by **Alses** on January 18th, 2014, 4:04 pm

Alses pursed her lips. “Well, we could make them self-resetting,” she said, considering. “And, as you said, make them selective.”

Maeki flapped an impatient, dissatisfied hand, dropping with a sigh into her seat opposite and lolling bonelessly on the battle-scarred table surface. “Yes, yes, yes, I told you all that. Put that vaunted brain of yours to work, student-mine, and tell me how we might go about those things.”

She sighed, and the silence stretched as Alses’ mind raced and squirrelled. She waited too long, it seemed – Maeki spoke again. “You need to start thinking about this stuff, Alses. It’s all right to follow the forms and devices I’ve shown you for these small-scale creations, but you’re getting better and better – quickly – and so I’m trying to introduce you to some of the more advanced ideas and concepts. It’s all very well for the simple things just to slap a few bits of shaped djed around the place, but for something more complex you have to think about systems.”

Maeki cast around for another way to put it. “You’ve access to Bharani, haven’t you? I suggest you look at some of the anatomy books – Kalvale Twilight’s done some good work in the field, as I recall. Some of the complicated automata need the same sort of organisation as the human body does in order to work effectively. ‘Synergism’ is the technical term, crosstalk, all that sort of thing, so the Animation can draw on much more than simple brute force to accomplish whatever the task is.” The diminutive Animator shook her head and shrugged herself deeper into her habitual furred overrobe, snuggling into the softly yielding fur with a contented smile.

“Read up on it for next time, if you can, and we’ll see about a proper automaton. If I know you – and I do – that’s a good incentive, no?”

Alses nodded with an anticipatory grin of her own. “Very,” she agreed, turning her attention to a rather crude diagram that Maeki unfurled with a flourish before her. They were getting used to one another, now, Maeki understanding a little more about how Alses learned best.

Diagrams and notes, they were fuel to her racing brain, imprinting readily and organzing her subsequent actions. It was – at least partly – why her notebooks bulged with meticulous pages of notes and plans, a perfect aide memoire and crucial, in her own head at least, for her own organization and her own lack of getting blown up thus far.

As a world mage, she’d never done anything without a plan. It’d kept Alses safe where others had blown themselves to kingdom come, and that was a state of affairs she was keen to maintain.

Alses sighed and scrubbed her eyes distractedly with the back of a hand as she considered Maeki’s rather amateurish diagram.

Mousetrap, Animated tension arm, anchoring point, Cream Crescent – a type of Lhavitian cheese, mouse, whiskers, lever, food…Maeki seemed to have labelled all the important things and then anything else that had taken her fancy. Despite the plethora of irrelevancies, the diagram still showed her exactly what she needed to know, exactly what she had to do in order to successfully Animate the mousetrap in front of her.

Always providing she didn’t muck up some other step aside from the creation of the astral body, an occurrence still depressingly common and irritatingly frequent, despite all her planning. There were – as with anything – just so many details to keep straight, and whilst there were many fundamental similarities and synergies with magecraft, the differences were just enough to trip her up time and again.

Obediently – there were no titles and social positions here, after all, just a master and a student – Alses followed Maeki through the cosy clutter of her home to the Animation laboratory, the heart of the house and the lynchpin on which their interactions tended to turn.

The two of them forged a weaving, jinking path through the accumulated detritus of the Animator’s life – Yoichi hadn’t been by for a little while, Alses noted, given the alpine nature of some of the piles – until they reached the blessedly orderly threshold of the laboratory.

Inside, all was clean and clear, meticulously swept and bright. Good lighting and clear surrounds was essential for any world magic, and Animation was no exception. There were a great many things stored around the edges of the space, that much was definitely true, but the bulk of the place was devoid of obstacles, the only room in the house, by Maeki’s own admission, that she could manage to keep clean on her own.

As ever, the circles gleamed smugly, intricately, under the abundant light flooding down from light-wells and the glowing skyglass expanse of the roof, exposed here and unsupported, just a clear arc of rainbow light curving overhead.

“Ah ah!” Maeki cautioned, as, operating on automatic, Alses moved to take her customary place inside the more experienced practitioner’s circles.

“Have we done something wrong already?” Alses asked, heart sinking at the thought of it.

Maeki grinned. “Nope! Not yet! Early days and all that, though.” Her finger pointed past Alses; the shining Ethaefal turned, confused. “Your circles,” the Animator prompted. “Kept my word and had a look at them while you were off doing whatever it is you actually have to do to earn your kina and I can’t see you’ll have a problem with them. I want you using your own from now on, all right? Should make the process a bit easier for you, as I understand the magic of it.”

Alses beamed – a bright and true beam, one of the rare ones that seemed to send sunlight reflecting through the room – and crossed to her own intricate, ornate construction. As soon as she stepped across the threshold, even with the glyphs all still sleeping, she could feel the difference in the air, in the djed of the world that ran around and over, under and through her. It knew her, welcomed her; she’d laid down the lines and whorls of potential force here, after all; this was her space and as much as she owned it, a little part of her own soul, her own perspective and way of doing things had become invested in the paint of her glyphs.

Placing the little mousetrap into the Destination circle, Alses sank down into a comfortable position at the centre of the Source, mentally preparing herself for the task at head. Maeki’s impromptu version of a briefing, along with the dubiously-helpful, cluttered diagram, had sort of prepared her for the job in hand, but she felt the need – as was so often the case – for a few chimes of reflection and internal ordering of the whole affair before she committed herself.

‘Let me think…’ she thought, sinking into a quasi-meditative state as she focused on the problems in hand to the exclusion of all else. The heat of the room – oppressive for some, delightful for an Ethaefal – faded into oblivion as she focused, dropping away from Mizahar and into her own head where memories sang their perpetual bel-canto chorus. With the ease of long practice, she ignored the choir and bent her mind around the task at hand.

‘Shaped djed wrapped in layers around the metal core,’ Alses thought, planning out what would be needed – muscles and sinews around bone, or rather, their magical equivalent, had she but known, a magical tracery to mimic a mundane structure. ‘A tight-run knot of filigree fibres to hold and inform the nature of the mind we’ll bind into the trap, and a little extra something so it takes pleasure in a job well done and finds quiet satisfaction in all parts of its – grisly, I’ll admit – duty.’

That was her own twist, letting her creations find some sort of joy in their duty and a quiet and contented patience until they were called upon to do it. She’d found herself thinking about what her creations did in their idle bells, when whatever it was they were called on to do wasn’t required. It had come to her in one of her own scant breaks when her brain was aimlessly freewheeling, along with the slightly unwelcome realisation that for many of the Animations that had left her hands functional, much of their existence would probably be very boring.

Time to change that.

by **Alses** on January 25th, 2014, 9:37 pm

It was warm and cosy in the laboratory, nice and conducive to thinking, and Alses breathed in the smell of old stone and honey-varnished floorboards, basking in the warm light. With glacial slowness and absolute precision, Alses pricked her finger with the razor-sharp point of her dagger, nostrils thinned against the offensive smell of sweetness on the turn that her blood always brought with it, pushing the vital fluid down her finger until it welled rich and thick from the tiny wound.

Burnished bronze, it sparkled as she planted it firmly onto the start-point (such as could be discerned in the swirling curlicues of her circles, anyway) and settled herself back even as the entirety of her painstaking setup began to wake from deep quiescence, rising slow and controlled to full puissance.

Alses laughed, brief and involuntary, as the twirling and twining strands of djed wrapped around her like an amorous lover, a hundred times more responsive, more immediate, more explicable as more and more djed evolved itself from the curling curlicues and regressive spirals that made up her complex Source circle. The twining and twisting and half-contradictory pathways, the physical representation of at least a shadow of her patchwork self, they welcomed her like an old friend – no, closer than that; it was as though a part of her had been separated and they were now blissfully reunited.

A flash of spiky sea-foam and piercing, hawkish features barrelled across her consciousness, an unintended bit of mischievous rogue djed flashing out from her control and dancing gleefully amid the shimmering whirls and curls of her evolved djed. Alses shook her head – Cassandra Southwind had been in her thoughts at odd moments far too much as of late – and bent her mind more powerfully to the task in hand.

In her augmented Sight, the glimmer of bronze-blood djed, still spangled and garlanded with all sorts of extraneity, burst into nova-like light as she exerted more of her magic to perceive, to understand, collate, organise and disseminate. She was the centre of a storm of magic only barely under control, a burning glow of humming, wailing djed, a barely-visible statue in the rising glory of obscured light hurling curling and twisting slugs of magic out from her core trailing comet-trails of djed that were caught and twisted, ripped and ravelled until the conduits fed smoothly, seamlessly, beautifully into the apparatus.

Painstakingly constructed and resonating beautifully with the essential nature of her patchwork soul, it was all so much easier than it had been using Maeki’s. The differences had crippled her, hobbled her, kept her from achieving so much, making her work and sweat and beg for things that, with this new setup, should be so easy as to be almost unconscious.

Whilst the thoughts of magic and mastery in all their heady glory roared across her brain, battering at her anchors and threatening to set her all adrift in the world, the ablation of djed unnecessary to the task at hand continued apace, the venting glyphs blazing bright violet as they wove the magic through a thousand thousand baffles and confusions, eventually colliding two streams together to produce the uncontrolled fan of undirected djed that the glyph released into the world at large, where Mizahar’s prevailing djed currents would sweep and bind the stray magic with nary a whisper or ripple.

Ingenious, clever…elegant, that was the word most beloved of academia, the highest praise for any practical technique or theoretical reasoning. Elegant.

Bleeding djed from a thousand points on her skin, sprouting Yggdrasil-esque tendrils of glittering essential energy, mind awash on a sea of pleasure and delight – such a sweet synchrony, a heady drug, better than anything mere botany could offer – enough of her remained, lucid, to slowly and painstakingly begin to direct and prune and corral the disparate flow. As the bright violet light of toxic djed giving itself up to the atmosphere dimmed to plummy shades and then richer, deeper tyrian hues, dropping lower and lower as less and less excess and unwanted djed was evolved from the raying kaleidoscope-piece that was to be the heart of the Animation, Alses began to gather the remaining, purified and purposed magic closer to her bosom, whirling it tighter and tighter around the inner boundary of the circle.

Further impurities, imperfections and distractions began to bubble to the surface as she worked with deft and nimble fingers, correcting the rumpling and corruption, the red crinkling of the fire-opal glow that signalled a stress or a fault, smoothing and damping it out, using the force of the acceleration to strip more and more away until only the bright and shining core, everything that screamed LIFE without any of its attendant baggage, was left, blazing sun-bright and spinning so fast it hummed and blurred to Alses’ auristic Sight.

The glyphs thrummed and throbbed with power and purpose, pushing the collected djed to ever greater feats of speed and ever greater grades of purity, sharpening and refining with every bleeding pass until no more could be shaved off, nothing else could be changed or altered or shifted into a more pleasing form – this was the pure quill of Life dancing in front of her, brilliant prismatic near-white, painful to look at for too long and singing a sweet and half-remembered symphony straight into her head without bothering with anything so mundane as ears.

‘Is this the world Rak’keli weaves?’ came a stray thought, a rainbow of unusual colours across the highly purified and yet unstable gathered magic; a silent snarl and a few extra, vengeful turns around the circle, hurling the magic at breakneck pace around the whole of its circumference, twisting and ravelling it until it broke and returned to prism-like whiteness, saw that corrected, saw her ready.

The floodgates, prompted by a gross physical trigger, of the sort Alses was most comfortable with, saw that beautiful serpentine ouroboros of blazing magic curl back in almost-living surprise and then lash like a striking cobra down the new pathway, the conduit of least resistance that offered an avenue and an outlet for the pent-up magic.

Its loss, the shock of its passage in the numinous plane, was like a punch to the chest for Alses, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the suddenly-empty and desolate Source circle. Well, almost empty; a fine meshwork net still shimmered from her body, through the glyphs and down the Pathway to where the vast main body of her magic was even now swirling, slowing infinitesimally with every rotation by the gentle braking glyphs, but compared to the flood of moonlight that had danced through her sigils before…empty.

She rocked and swayed, concentration wavered, the whole of it shimmered like a soap bubble about to pop, fine strands of magic fraying and wavering towards full collapse, but she managed, she perservered, focusing grimly on the task in hand until all other considerations were beaten out of the way by sheer determination.

These were her circles, painstakingly assembled. This was her magic, a part of her soul. Mixed and amplified by world djed broken to harness, yes, but still hers, and therefore answerable and beholden.

Pearly sweat beaded her forehead as she worked, careful and methodical, monitoring and assessing, pruning and correcting, an eye for detail and a passion for precision aiding her in paring off long strands of unwelcome djed with a mental scalpel, elegantly excising corruption and watching it spool into the aether and be swept up, destroyed in the currents.

by **Alses** on January 26th, 2014, 12:35 pm

And now…reversion. The unfurling and unfolding of the long ouroboros, the slowing down and dissolution of the one into the many, branching a single, thick trunk into many dividing and sub-dividing strands that could be laid open and pressed inwards onto the mousetrap, making the ersatz soul that was at the core of all Animation.

The teasing process was a slow and finicky one – but not this time, no! This animation was anything but normal, anything but usual, and all of it was thanks to her beautiful, perfect glyphery, the arcane machinery built in shimmering towers of cogitation layered atop mundane strokes on tilework that was ticking and thrumming all around her. Buoyed and supported by her beguiling and enticing circle-work, the perfectly chiming glyphic counterpart to her mental effort, separation and diminution was occurring even without her input.

Before her gratified eyes, glyphs fired in rippling succession, serried ranks of them taking soft djedic fire as the conditions for their activation wrote themselves into existence, a fusilladed eruption of lambent light that bent and twisted and never broke, no, not now, not with something so delicate and so pure, the thick cable of life-rich djed pouring their way.

A thousand thousand reaching hands, tendrils of gentle magic, catching almost ineffectually at first, the changes almost indiscernable to even the most discriminating eye – but Alses knew, from the subtlest of frictions on her sensitive skin, the faintest of pulls on the myriad webwork that tied it all together, the mystic connection of blood sacrifice, that it was, nonetheless, happening.

Over chimes, those tiny pulls, those brief djedic interactions and frictions, they’d slow and calm the whirling ouroboros of life-saturated magic, allowing the glyphs to shift and change and tease out the webwork that had once formed the great snake, making it weaker and more…susceptible to suggestion.

Much as it had been when she’d woven it into the ouroboros in the first place.

Unravelling proceeded apace, and with barely any conscious direction from Alses; the djed wanted to discohere, to split and split and split and divide itself amongst the thousand inviting glyphic tributaries that demanded its attention, ached to be filled with prismatic colour.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, Alses realised with a jolt that threatened the whole operation. Now that she wasn’t focused so wholly on controlling the flows of djed through the clumsy medium of someone else’s handiwork, she could take a half-step back and appreciate the essential beauty of the flowing, shifting, dancing world magic as it churned and shifted against the warp and weft of the world, spinning miracles out of that countercurrent discord.

Alses let herself be swept up, carried along by the curling and jinking flow, her consciousness riding the djed lightly, curled and coiled around it and carefully steering it where she wished it to go. She was reinforcing the actions of the glyphic circles, the Destination circle as a whole, turning the thick cable into fine filigree-work that would respond the best to gentle inward pressure from the world as a whole, a gentle plating process that would saturate the mousetrap with the essentials of life.

Taking an ephemeral step back, she contemplated the work of her glyphs, the Animation circles running at full spate. Veils of rainbowed light detached themselves slowly from the innermost surface of the circle, runic sigils blazing brightly in the aether, drifting to accrete onto the mousetrap itself.

They seemed to have a particular affinity for the wood – only natural, since it was a once-living material, and therefore retained some essential memory of life – and also, curiously, the curled metal of the springs, following the coils closely and becoming denser and denser in that region, sending tentative tendrils creeping up the armature, shimmering brighter and brighter as the whole of it became stronger and stronger.

It was close now, the bitter spark of a soul that would natively resist and know itself as different from everything else, that essential kink in the djed that characterised anything sentient, and Alses felt her own anticipation rise.

That was the most dangerous time, when the end was in sight and the anticipation of being able to move, to relieve cramped muscles and take a change of scenery, drink in the sunshine and other living things and all in all take a break from mental exertion of the highest degree, was at its height. Maeki had told her many stories of fabulous creations ruined because of inattention during these final, critical moments and Alses had no intention of joining their ranks, fiercely focusing on the task in front of her, trying mightily to ignore the fact that as soon as the prismatic flash – the representation of a Life Principle and Soulcore taking hold, at least to her vision – appeared, she could break safely.

‘Come on, come on…’ she thought, impatience flashing a fin in the humming ocean of her mind, watching the thin and sickly ouroboros unfurl agonizingly slowly, wanting desperately just to give it a good metaphysical shove and watch the whole of it disintegrate satisfyingly, but knowing that all that would accomplish, in the long run, was disaster.

Lazy, unhurried, the final bit of magic carried on uncurling, wafting gently from circle to object and being bound in by a million reaching tendrils of djed, locked and twisted, pounded and pummelled into the homogenous melange that would, later, take all the impressions and directives and commands she could manage to funnel through the obstacle course of her glyphic circles.

‘Just a little more…’ There was no denying the anticipation now; her eyes tracked every flash and miniscule flare of djed, waiting for that telltale rainbow blaze, the roof of her mouth was dry and the whole of her body sang with tension even as she fought on the numinous pain to keep her control light, subtle, suitable for the delicate work she was engaged in.

Maeki had, of course, been right; being formulaic might bring short-term benefits but it precluded advancement in the long run. Alses was experimenting, carefully, applying ideas and techniques she’d observed from the more experienced Animator, trying to put them into practice as delicately as possible, seeing what worked for her and what caused imminent failure.

Tricky, yes – very tricky, in point of fact, finicky to the point of madness and at the edge of the envelope of what she could achieve, but that was where progress happened! It was no use doing the same old thing time and again; innovation was the driving force behind advancement, experimentation its bosom friend. Both had to be embraced – and then tempered with caution and logic – and intelligently applied, and that was what marked out a scholar from a dilettante, a world mage savant from a dabbler.

One last effort, a twisting corkscrew instability induced across the length of the remaining, gossamer-thin ouroboros, saw the long-awaited prism flare herald Alses’ release, plates and plates of faintly rainbowed djed shifting and fusing and melting together into something new, something other, something with that essential mote of mutation and difference that set the Animate apart from the inanimate.

It was, to be blunt, a hugely welcome sight, and Alses seized the opportunity with glee, breaking her fierce concentration and escaping from the circle, back to the kitchen and to Maeki’s warm cups of tea.

by **Alses** on January 28th, 2014, 9:01 am

“That was quick,” came the startled observation, Maeki turning quickly from where she’d been engrossed in the machinations of the kettle.

Alses blinked; it’d felt like an age. “Quick? Really?”

Maeki nodded, arms akimbo and kettle swinging absently in one hand. “Ten chimes at most; the kettle’s not even reboiled yet, see?” She waved the copper vessel theatrically, as emphasis; as if in sympathetic concert, the Animated chains overhead rattled agreement. “There a problem, Alse?”

Dropping bonelessly into a chair – it certainly felt like a lot longer than ten chimes, all the muscles of her body subtly aching – Alses shook her shining head in the negative. “We made a Soulcore,” she replied, mingling the melodious answer with a long sigh. “Thought we should take a break.”

“Always a shiny idea,” Maeki nodded, “But you’ve only done ten chimes’ work.”

“Feels like a lot more,” Alses grumbled. “Even though it was so easy with our own circles! Why didn’t we work on bringing my Animation circles up to snuff first, before doing lockboxes and jumping-jacks and the like?”

Maeki shrugged. “Well, it was easier for me,” she admitted, even as Alses bridled and tried not to. “But it taught you how to work without a crutch, didn’t it? All that finicky precision, those difficult attachments…if you can do it using someone else’s circles, you can do it anywhere. Under stress, in difficult conditions…gets you into good habits because it’s a much less forgiving environment. I’m no great shakes at teaching, but getting you into bad habits from the off doesn’t sound to me like a shiny way of going about thing.” She brightened, turning the subject slightly away from the issue. “Besides, if we collaborate later on you’ll have an idea of my style, how I work. Makes things easier in the long run; I’ve got no intention of letting you stop at being merely competent at this, after all.”

“Hmm.” Alses wasn’t, it had to be said, entirely mollified by this, but she just had to smile and accept it. Harmony was a good thing – revenge, of a suitably lighthearted nature, could be plotted later.

Best served cold, and all that.

“Oh, don’t sound so glum. This is bread and butter to you! Don’t have to be an aurist to see that; I’ve looked in a mirror when I’ve been crafting, and I see myself reflected in you.”

Alses looked away, a smile touching the corners of her mouth. “World magic is interesting,” she pointed out. “Finicky and difficult and expensive, but interesting all the same.”

Maeki flapped a hand at her, the other one occupied with carefully pouring tea into her loving-cup. “Go on, Alses, get! No time to waste; you’ve had your break, now back to the mousetraps whilst I have my tea.”

Grumbling good-naturedly about taskmasters and practicing what was preached, Alses rose and turned on her heel, hopping nimbly through the untidy corridor to the pristine environment of the Animation lab and her mousetrap, waiting as inertly as any other mechanism of wood and metal. Hers, though, had the glit and shimmy of life about it, just waiting for her to finish.

Which she would, as soon as she knew what she’d be doing, exactly.
Alses paced carefully around the circumference of her circles, carefully eyeing the mousetrap lying innocuously in the centre of the whole thing. The strain was beginning to show, she noticed; the inked lines were thinner and weaker, especially around the venting runes where they’d been exposed to the toxic releases of unwanted djed, and the glypher’s paint was peeling gently around the edges of her setup. As soon as she finished, the circles would need a touch-up, a clarifying touch to guard against fuzziness and prevent dangerous weaknesses corroding the arcane machinery that Animation relied on utterly.

Yet more work – but there was something awfully satisfying about making and repairing glyphic circles, especially since she could track the effects of her efforts with her power, see the fruits of her labours sparkle like the finest gems in the aether.

‘Mousetraps, Alse,’ she thought, trying to bring her rambling attention back to the matter in hand. There was plenty of time, of course, her circles having made everything so much easier – anf faster – but there was always so much to do in a short Winter day that anything she could complete in jig time was a blessing richly to be desired.

‘Best get cracking then,’ came the gleeful thought, even as she pulled out Maeki’s crude diagram for further perusal and consideration. Her rough plan earlier had been sufficient for the initial Soulcore, but now she was into the fine detail.

Directives, and the Persona layer of the forming soul, that was what concerned her now. Loyalty she discounted after a brief internal debate; there was simply no point in expending time and effort on that, not with something so simple. She’d probably never even see it again once it left the laboratory, so loyalty to her would be a waste of concentration and magic.

‘Always use the minimum number of directives necessary,’ Alses repeated the mantra obediently in her head. It was sensible; directives were absolute law, inviolate and unchangeable – too many could set up dangerous logic loops that would render an Animation insane or expensively useless, and there was simply no leeway in what she laid down at this stage, no interpretation or bending of the rules was possible.

Not that the mousetrap would have the intelligence to do such a thing, in any case, but Alses – obedient to Maeki’s wishes – was thinking further ahead, to future projects and more advanced techniques. Best to get good habits down now.

More chimes passed as she considered and debated with herself, pacing idly, unconsciously around the circumference of her apparatus, until at the last she was happy – or at least contented – with her decisions, the plan unfurling in her head that would hopefully lead to success.

Out came her glittering dagger, a swift motion and a brief flower of pain – too quick and sudden to register as anything other than a fading memory – saw bronze blood welling slowly at the tip of a finger, the essential ingredient to sacrifice at the altar of Animation and gain mastery over her work.

High-stepping over the circles so as not to smudge them and ruin bells of hard work in a single careless, regretted instant, Alses settled herself into the clear space at the centre of the Source and delicately pressed her blood-cargoed finger to the glyphic sigils around her, exhaling and relaxing as the circles came to life under the influence of her attention and magic.

by **Alses** on January 29th, 2014, 5:56 pm

Concept and memory thrummed and danced inside the confines of Alses’ head as she worked on the next stage of the Animation. Information about mice – what little she knew – was a major part of what she would gently introduce into the forming creation, along with some basic gross anatomy – what hands, fingers, feet and legs looked like, for instance, so that her vicious little mousetrap, once properly informed of its role and goal, wouldn’t cause the Catholicon any more grief.

That was certainly a part of what she needed to do, and the rational part of herself hauled on the reins and brought the rest of her racing brain to heel even as patient thoughts spooled over the eager charivari of undirected enthusiasm.

‘Directives first, Alse, directives. I can’t race ahead of myself! Not yet, anyway,’ came the slightly envious addition – Alses had seen Maeki rearrange the whole of her Animation sequence, slapping different and often confusing parts together in a mishmash that somehow, through some artifice and guile she was not privy to, still managed to work. And work well.

Ah well; such was the privilege of skill.

‘Mouse,’ she thought, filling her brain with such experiences of the shyly retiring creatures she’d had, the scurrying skitter of claws on skyglass or the rustle of a nest filling her ears as she thought – but wait! Even as the filigree fantasia around her began to glow and brighten, greedily sucking in the evolved djed and concept together, a meal for the hungry circles, another train of thought derailed the primary, leaving her concerned and thinking hard.

Mousetraps didn’t just trap mice, after all – they went after…after rats and the like too, no? What use would her trap be if it killed mice by the bushel and let all the rats in the bowels of the city pass merrily by, unsplattered?

That would be, in Alses’ eyes, a failure, and failure was, of course, entirely unacceptable.

So. If not mice – and as her thoughts turned away from Animation, the flare of magic in her circle, the arcane motion of the ephemeral machinery, dimmed to its resting standby state, eager to be called on but under the finest of control, calmed flash – then what?

What was the catch-all category for rodents and other animals that got where they weren’t wanted and munched merrily on precious supplies? There was one, of that she was certain – Maeki had even used it earlier, something beginning with ‘V’…

‘Vermin!’ She might have laughed out loud when at last the word, and the welcome flood of associations and thoughts, burst fully-formed into the foggy murk of her brain, a cresting tidal-wave of small bodies that squeaked and cracked their bald tails and ate and ate and ate.

‘Vermin bad’ she thought, and the immature phrasing brought a faint smile to Alses’ face. Sometimes it was the little things that tickled her for no real reason.

A sigh, a long, long exhalation of breath cargoed with quicksilver djed, and she bent her considerable energies towards the task in hand. This part – and the crafting of the astral body – were what took all the time, but it would be time well spent.
Alses started small, and she started with the anatomy. Feet and fingers and hands she was confident with, felt sure she could transfer an accurate and true representation of each, a perfect image for the developing soul, and so it was that she deftly tugged and drew down the floating, wispy strands of awakened Animation magic around her, letting their inquisitive, blind-seeking tendrils wrap around her legs, feet, toes, hands, fingers, quicksilver and gold dancing a curious and probing tango around her even as she opened her mind, trying to feel from two different perspectives – inside and outside – exactly what constituted a limb, a digit, the structure and djedic feel of it that a dumb mousetrap could use, could interpret and learn to avoid.

Four fingers and a thumb, sparkling in her mind’s eye, unique and different for everyone – but not too much, no – a complex system of movements dancing through her brain as she imagined all the daily tasks of her hands – support, gestures, balance, writing…the list was endless, and complex, thinking of all the situations in which a careless hand might stray too close, might trigger off the vicious surprise of the trap.

Her Source circle was glittering with transferred djed, heavily-cargoed with meaning and – she hoped fervently, understanding. This was one of the more delicate stages of Animation; brute force and quantity of djed were much less important here than quality and clarity.

Quality she might have in buckets, but clarity, ah, that was the ever-elusive nymph, forever dancing out of her reaching grasp. It meant she spent chimes and bells chasing after her own djed, cutting and paring and splitting and chasing everything down, purifying the strands to the barest essentials that she wanted.

Maeki had assured her that, for the more advanced projects, that fluttering spray of differential thoughts was desirable, nay, essential for crafting any reasonable sort of intelligence, any humanesque sentience. For this sort of simple, binary work, though, all of that extraneous information had to go, leaving the rock-hard simplicities and certainties shorn of any doubt or other considerations.

An essential novice’s technique, she’d called it, and one that apparently retained its usefulness right up to mastery of the craft.

An inward sigh, and Alses picked up her metaphorical, metaphysical tools and bent her mind to the task in hand, gently setting the spangled galaxy of djed around her into motion, scrutinizing the whole of it for deviations, imperfections, for alterations of any kind that would need to be made to keep the Animation – even in this early stage – true to her vision. True to Maeki’s brief.

As the constellation of concept swirled and danced around her, casting shimmering half-there lights onto her radiant skin, Alses focused her mind to a razor-point and began to scrutinize her work thus far, scanning methodically and carefully along each accretion of evoked djed that was ready to be spun back out into a long snake of djed to be absorbed by the hungry Soulcore.

Soulcores were hungry, Alses had realised – bereft of anything but the essential spark of life, something in them, some essential property, hungered for purpose and for information of any kind; they wanted to become. Become something, anything; it didn’t matter.

As her mind ghosted over the tendrils, lightly skimming over it all, her head filled with images of limbs and digits, just as she’d wanted, just as she’d hoped, fossilised and preserved in evoked djed and copied by the magic siphoned from the world by past Animators’ genius, ready to be unleashed – and that thought caused the fragile and unstable glyph separating Source from Destination to snap fully open once more and allow the sucking pressure of a hungry Soulcore and augmented glyphs both to exert their full, unbridled force on her concepts.

by **Alses** on January 29th, 2014, 10:58 pm

Bright streamers of djed had gone whirling down through to the Destination circle, set upon by her own glyphs that industriously pulled apart the stranded magic into thinner and thinner lines until they split and spilt vaporous billows of ideas and convictions down onto the grasping Soulcore, strengthening the rainbow glimmer with a shimmering flare of synergistic interaction.

Before the last of the limb-purposed djed could leave her Source circle, an idea occurred to Alses and quickly she began to evolve yet more magic, focusing her brain on the next part of the task; mice and vermin and all such good things.

A fresh wave of djed excited the glyphs lining the inner ring of her circle, energizing their prime functions and causing relays to light up all across the whole sigil, burning with fresh information, sucking in the abundant djed of the world all around, bending and breaking it to fresh harness with every pass through the sieves and baffles and reconfiguration conduits that she’d painstakingly inscribed.

A thrill of gratitude danced across her brain as Alses was buoyed and supported still further by her careful work, taking a cerebral delight at the correct operation of every glyph firing in perfect synchrony, easing and smoothing her path, eagerly taking her modifications and directions and amplifying them into absolute law that was copied onto pale strands of world djed, utterly repurposed and overwhelmed by her circles.

So strong was her impression of vermin, gathered at the surface of her mind and thrust into personal djed just below the glittering surface of her skin, that the glyphic sigils pulled it out from her core in silvery surges of ghostly half-rodents, emerging in cresting waves from the shimmering coils of magic under her skin to run and play around the circle of runes, corralled and directed by her careful mind.

Sending her mind whirling around with the fresh cargo of djedic impressions, dovetailed onto the last dregs of the last lot as inspiration struck, Alses’ mind was in full flight, correcting and trimming and fighting, fighting with the recalcitrant parts of the impressions evoked from her body and copied perfectly by the circles, locked in silent argument, debate and conflict.

Beads of perspiration rolled down her perfect forehead and sent a dark stain seeping insidiously through her clothes as she worked and strained, pressing the squirrelling, rebellious djed-shapes into line again and again, trying to make them fuse and subsume into the greater whole, the rainbowed glimmer of the accreting Animation that, far from subduing her latest batch of magic, positively encouraged it to greater and greater feats of escapology. She had to be everywhere, omniscient and omnipotent both to keep control, to make sure everything happened as it should. All the while, the glyphs were obediently, blindly feeding in magic – an uncaught mistake could get imprinted all too easily, a subtle flaw that might ruin the whole Animation at some distant time.

Her skin felt hot and tight, stretched and inflamed as a side-effect result of djed torrents passing through it, leaving her soul and her body – but not her control, oh no - through every pore and orifice that it could, forced out in great waves by Alses’ mental exertions and all too quickly caught up by the hungry, suckling tendrils of world djed that the Animation circles commanded.

She took a step back, then, mentally speaking, evaluating her work thus far, taking hold of her reserves and gently coaxing more than passive auristics from them.

The world exploded into colour and light and sound and touch, all of her senses ballooning outward on a wave of djed, seeking the truth of things courtesy of the inquisitive artist unseen whose subject was ever the obscured secrets forever whispered into the world by the souls of everything.

Beauty, beauty.

A corkscrewing twist and another surging burst of cerebral djed, idea-laden and dripping with the weight of thought, saw negativity introduced, the general concept; later work, interwoven with the astral body that was her next task, looming large and formidable in the near future, would help her integrate that with the other concepts of the constellation now layered close and familiar about the Soulcore itself, and further pressure from the outer strata to be stacked atop what was already there would only further enhance the effect.

Good.

Alses permitted herself a brief moment of excitement and pleasure at a job well done, and then, flying on the wings of djed, turned her attention to the next task in hand. Now she had to link those concepts together to actions – the idea of activation and the snapping forward of the armature, or to the sudden staying of the trap’s mechanism when a hand, foot, anything a sentient creature might inadvertently get caught in the snap range. That was something she’d encoded earlier into the accreting Animation; it held the primacy over ‘Kill the vermin!’.

Which was as it should be, a valuable and inviolable safety device.

So.

The djed surround the Soulcore was marvellously responsive still; not enough time had elapsed to solidify it and habituate it to its new tasks, its new forms – which was all to the good in this sort of work. Buoyed and helped by the glyphic commands inscribed everywhere throughout her apparatus, Alses propitiated the magic with gentle, tentative tendrils of thought.

Thinking of mice and vermin brought reciprocal shapes and concepts up out of the Soulcore, wavering representations of them sculpted in half-there flame and shimmering liquid, and with fingers made deft and quick from a thousand bells of auristics Alses’ mind snapped forward and began to weave purpose into those sensations, those systems of recognition she’d painstakingly sculpted into the polished metal of the trap.

Speed, that was essential, and power – and stamina, too, to hold the securing arm firm against both the force of the armature straining to be free and against perfidious chance knocking it free.

Alses recalled – still so fresh and sweet in her head – the quick slickness of Saving Grace when she’d finished with it, the accelerated djed sliding up and down and through the artifact with such ease and grace and with such an impression of speed and power that it whispered and sang in the vaults of her mind even now. Some echo of that, she wanted in the armature and the springs, and to her gratified astonishment the quicksilver-speed impression of it rolled out from her body, spun itself sleekly into gossamer skeins and spread its lightning-quick reactions, its dynamic and speedy stability across the whole of the Animation.

In a matter of chimes, under her control and yet seeming as though it had a life of its own, that unexpected impression was weaving a beautiful webwork over the work she’d already done, seamlessly interdigitating into the lower layers of djed until it became a beautiful and integral part of the whole, shimmering with a slick swiftness and an eagerness to act that filled her with pride – she felt, in some obscure way, that she’d regained her world magic crown.

by **Alses** on February 4th, 2014, 12:10 pm

“Going well?”

That was Maeki’s voice, calm and bringing with it a gold-cargoed wave of honeysuckles to Alses’ perpetual Sight. Swimming up out of the numinous depths of her magic, fighting against the current and making her way determinedly from depths to shallows, Alses rose like the sun and cast her solar smile at her instructor.

Maeki probably wasn’t expecting a response; Alses had been taught well enough about the stages of interruption and concentration, when she could leave the forming Animation and when it needed every erg of mental energy she possessed. Even given the boost of her own circles – all hers! – the Animation was proceeding at a blistering pace; when she’d started out on this mousetrap task she’d not expected to be so far along after perhaps a bell, at the outside.

With a convulsive shiver, the prickle of working djed dancing a fandango across her skin, Alses dragged herself up out of the Animator’s trance, turning slowly to look up at her mentor from her cross-legged position. “Very well, thanks,” she replied calmly.

“We’re about ready to start crafting the astral body,” came the serene continuation. “D’you have any advice?”

Maeki blinked. “You’re going freakishly fast,” she observed, slightly uneasily. “Are you sure everything’s settling?”

Alses nodded, equably enough – world magic was the preserve of the cautious and the methodical, after all. “As sure as we can be,” she replied, touching her fingertips to the sides of her eyes; a common gesture to mean auristics and its applications.

Maeki relaxed slightly at that; Alses’ prowess with the insightful magic was well-known, after all. “So long as you’re sure…” she knelt down in a swish of furred overrobe, careful to keep it from touching any of the painstaking runes of the circle.

“So…tell me, student of mine, where will the greatest stress be on your pretty trap? You’ve held it, figured out how it works, this should be an easy one for you.”

Alses frowned, joining her mentor in scrutinizing the innocuous device. After several chimes of deep cogitation, she pointed at the coiling springs and then, after just a tick or two more thought, swung her arm to point instead at the restraining arm. “Actually, this bit’s under the most stress, since it has to hold against all that force in the cocked trap, yes?”

Maeki, for her part, having valiantly held her tongue whilst Alses puzzled it out, nodded emphatically. “Yep! But the springs get put under a fair old bit of stress too. No harm in giving them a bit of a fillip too. Remember to coil the djed nice and tightly, give it a bit of a spin for some extra strength as it’s going in, too.”

Alses nodded.

“And you’ll have to watch out for reversions, eversions, eruptions and subductions – oh, you know all that, just as well as me I’d wager.” The Ethaefal couldn’t stop a little smile at that – it was probably true in any case, since this part of the procedure was very akin to her first love of magecrafting.

Maeki clapped her hands together briskly. “Well, no time like the present, hmm? Lots more mousetraps to get through once you’ve finished that one. I’ll watch and then get started myself, all right?”

There wasn’t any acceptable answer other than: “Yes,” so Alses uttered it and resettled herself back into the circles, mentally and physically preparing herself to declare mastery over the mousetrap in all its forms.

Dagger – finger – bursting rose of pain, swiftly a memory – welling drop of blood, true-blue flash of Tanroa’s Blessing and a surging whoomph of burning djed pouring up from her sacrifice, making the glyphs burn and opening her mind to the manifold possibilities.

Unfortunately, at her current level of skill, most of them danced tantalisingly beyond her reach, teasing her with greater wonders that might, one day, be possible.

With a mental wrench, Alses brought her attention down to earth, back to the immediate. ‘Focus on what I can do,’ she admonished herself. ‘On what I need to do, too.’

The rainbowed Soulcore – garlanded about with directives and information, concepts that would let it do its eventual job – gleamed smugly to her Sight as she settled and calmed, getting used to the odd feeling of the blood connection, the humming, singing rhythm of it dancing in her head even as the ambient magic of the world bent and kinked to dance to her tune, beginning the slow process of conversion into something useful.

Fingers and glyphs danced a beautiful synergy as her brain burned with knowledge and understanding, chiming sweetly with her own glyphic handiwork to a common goal. Silver world magic whorled in, stripped from the ambient currents of Mizahar, eager and ready to receive impressions as it whirled around her circles, twisted and ravelled, split apart and then spliced together again along the painstaking runic lines and paths until it took on a shadow, a shimmer, an inkling of the golden shade Alses associated with her own magic that made it malleable, manipulatable, open to direction.

Without the glyph blocking the way into the Destination circle, though, Alses found it difficult to keep the momentum of the Source going long enough to habituate the fresh world djed, to maintain the anonymising labyrinth inside the spiral whorl of the circle. A headache began to pound meanly behind her eyes as she strove to maintain the whole intricate mechanism of which she was the centrepiece and queenpin, gritting her teeth against the forces of lassitude and laziness.

Glyphs flared and burned more brightly as, by virtue of the blood sacrifice, she forced them into full spate, making them as powerful as she dared. Glypher’s paint began to peel and ablate at the sheer flux of magic pounding through the intricate machinery webwork, some of the lesser glyphs vanishing entirely as the bright golden glimmer of magic under her control, copied from her own emanations and cargoed with a malleable purpose, gained the ascendancy over world-djed silver. Patchily at first, a shoal of glittering fish in a quicksilver ocean, and then faster and faster, spreading in a broad wave over the captive djed until the whole of it recognized her primacy and bent to her will.

Inwardly, Alses exulted, tired and strained and still with a headache driven into her temples yet knowing that the home straight was in sight and that one last effort would see her through.

Besides, it wasn’t about raw power, the fashioning of an astral body, no. The djed was never her own, just repurposed world magic made malleable and pliable by a temporary application of her own magic; what mattered was finesse in the spinning of it, the careful layering of djed into a shimmering network of muscles, tendons and ligaments.

‘Technique and finesse, technique and finesse…’ the mantra of the Dusk Tower echoed in her head as she set to work in earnest.

by **Alses** on February 20th, 2014, 11:17 pm

With a nimbus of golden magic responsive and willing to bend to her slightest whim surrounded her, Alses was in the bones of the craft. All around her, the glyphic apparatus of the circles hummed and whispered, the arcane machinery gathered close about her physical body but every fibre of it nonetheless focused entirely on the forming Animation.

She bent fingers – no, not physical fingers, but ones shaped from thought and wrought from iron purpose, hammered and beaten on the anvil of her circles until they meekly obeyed her every command – to the task in hand with a vengeance. Winnowing and working the magic all around, that was their purpose, threading it through the eye of her power, kinking it and changing its shape, its essential form, all according to her designs, her vision.

‘Now, what are you going to be?’ Alses asked herself happily as she threaded her metaphysical needle with a filigree fleshwork of golden magic, holding the whole of it in the back of her mind as she focused the greater part of her attention like a flaying lance on the djed between her pincers.

A split-tick flicked glance at the forming Animation, layers of Persona and Soulcore gleaming to her perfect Sight, helped inform her next step. Coarse motion, that was all that was necessary – there was no delicacy there, just a binary snap from one state to the next, and an only marginally more gentle action was necessary for the recocking, the ratcheting back of the armature to readiness, for the next mouse or rat to crush.

Coarse fibre, then – strong and unsubtle, but quick because of the sheer force in their striated, bundled cables – like ropes twisted together, Maeki had said, trying to explain it with many an expansive gesture and physical aid.

Simple in conception and principle, of course, vastly more difficult in execution, with the stranded filigree of her repurposed magic forever tangling in itself, breaking apart into the resting melange and only partially reforming, despite all her efforts.

‘Come on, come on…’ Alses thought, a stray lash of silver independence in her brain, dancing between the straining towers of thought. Golden threads coalesced under her direction, twined and braided themselves together into thicker ropes, dancing between her flashing fingers, and then, just as she attempted to wrap one around the other, providing further thickening, further reinforcement of the function and greater power to their actions, they failed, splitting and bursting apart.

Hugely infuriating – but in came her glyphs, her wonderful, beautiful glyphs, stabilising and helping her. Calming and quieting, stabilising the fluctuations of the golden melange, returning them with mindless efficiency back to the fuzzy, undifferentiated mass that was her working substrate.

‘Hang on…’ whispered the silver thread of treacherous thoughts, the little detached part of her brain parsing and channelling that new information, that greater understanding of what her glyphs were actually doing to the nimbus cloud of purposeless magic. ‘Is that our problem, right there?’

If the glyphs were themselves working against her, trying to undo her works and return all to the ‘normal’ state – that could account for the sheer difficulty she was having.

Now, if that were the case – and Alses had no other hypotheses ready at-hand – how to obviate or obliterate the obstacle?

The method she settled on, in the end, was a fairly brutal one – by squeezing and accelerating the djed-nimbus, the golden aura that flooded the Animation circles, by twisting it into nonsensical forms and forcing the glyphs to time and again impose their misguided order on the world within their ambit, they would weaken and ablate enough to allow her to work the magic into the astral body she needed, the final bit of the Animation she’d been working on for…who knew how long?

Alses’ world had narrowed to that continual motion, the eternal mental effort that pulsed djed crazily, angrily, into unusual shapes and forms and churned up current and countercurrent until the glyphic constructs blazed angry and fighting purple to her Sight, the engines of shaped maybe and magic she’d built from ink and rock-hard certainty straining against the unnatural stresses she was coldly, deliberately inducing.

Purple flare after purple flare, as her glyphs fought and shunted djed back and forth through filigree baffles and their sinuous, calming curves – but weakening! Gloriously weakening!

When at last enough of the glyphs gave way, it also introduced instability into the whole of it, meaning Alses had to work as fast as she was able, fumbling the slippery magic with a stream of singing curses until she managed to snatch it up again from the dissoluting undercurrents that threatened to wreck her work and unravel the gleaming golden ropes.

With a vicious surge of triumph – as the first of many coiled and cabled djed ropes lengthened beautifully to her command – Alses cast it forward, watching it strike the surface of the Soulcore and – more mundanely – the physical shell of the Animation, one end seeking blindly until she took it up with infinite care and began to weave it into the beginnings of a cohesive astral body, laying down the musculature that the Animation would use to achieve its impossibilities.

It took time – Alses’ own internal clock was racing and whirling as she worked and sweated over it, over the positioning and anchorage of her muscles, over the careful filigree-work infiltration of the underlying Soulcore that would serve to provide the innervation, the functional link between mental and physical that was at the heart of the arcane construction in many ways – certainly at the heart of any external physical action.

Aches and pains began to intrude on her concentration – radiating fury from the joints of her fingers, the arch of her back and the curve of her neck, all of them protesting viciously at their treatment, at the magic that had locked her in place for Syna knew how long. Alses gritted her teeth for the final exertion – the raying strands of corded djed that would stop the trap jumping and jack-knifing when it snapped closed, anchoring many filaments all around the mousetrap until there was equal coverage, essential to make sure it didn’t skitter away from maldirected force.

The fusillade of bony cracks as she rose – like an old woman, at least until she got into the full flood of untrammelled sunlight from on high, Syna’s benediction that stripped away all weakness and fatigue during the daylight hours – was hideously loud, enough that it got Maeki’s attention and the Animator hurried over.

“Done?” she asked quickly, voice full of concern and anticipation in equal measure.

“Yes,” Alses replied – or tried to. What came out was a silent puff of air, her throat dry as a bone and unused for too long. She licked her lips and tried again – and then Maeki’s hand came into view bringing such temptation – a glass of cool water with condensation beading on its sides and dripping slowly down the Animator’s fingers.

Instincts older than either of Alses’ bodies screamed in her head – she jerked forward before reason and fear both caught her and she shook her head in the emphatic negative. “Yes, I’m done.” This time, she managed to get it out, with a wobbly smile at her mentor. “Hope it works.”

Maeki grinned, unconcerned. “I expect it will. Most of your stuff does. Have any trouble? There was a lot of venting going on in that last bit…” she tailed off, expectantly.

For her part, Alses’ eyes slid stubbornly shut – she felt as though she’d run up and down the path from Port Tranquil to the Amaranthine Gates a few times in rapid succession.

“Made a mistake with our circles,” she admitted with a half-stifled yawn. “Too stable; wouldn’t let me work the djed enough to make an astral body. We had to flux it until some of the glyphs evaporated.”

Maeki snorted. “Well, that explains why you’re so knackered after just one,” she observed. “You’ll know better for next time, hmm? Now, go and stand in the sunshine or whatever for a few chimes until you feel better, then come back here. Lots to do!”

Alses groaned in reply, but allowed herself to be chivvied up and out. It would be good for her, and all this Animation could only be to her benefit.

END

by **Catastrophe** on April 22nd, 2014, 3:26 pm

Alses :

Notes :

Solo A Vicious Surprise