Solo Shadows of the Craft

[Alses]

Timestamp: 23rd Day of Winter, 513 A.V.
Location: The Overflowing Phial

The weapon gleamed smugly in the dim light of a snow-dusted dawn, smug perfection glittering from every frosty winter-blue facet of it, a suggestion of moonlight dancing like the crest of a wave along the curve of the wicked blade.

It seemed to hum under her sensitive fingertips, divinely self-satisfied, content to be what it was and never change or alter. Which was a shame, because that was exactly what she was commissioned to do – improve on divinity.

It didn’t fill her with as much trepidation as it once might have; she’d worked out the method of getting skyglass to bow down to her will when she made Saving Grace for Ald’gare Dusk; this would just be another practice of that. Delicate and finicky, she wouldn’t deny it, but still somewhat familiar; half the battle, more often than not, was simply knowing whether or not something was possible. Thank Syna.

Alses cast her eyes heavenwards to the puffy sky, the barges of cloud jostling for pole position to dump more snow on the fairytale city and the Unforgiving all around. The sun was there somewhere, just peeking over the horizon – a few of the far peaks glittered with cold fire, she could see, but most of the landscape was full of silently-falling snow and the diffuse light of an overcast Winter day.

Shaking her head and turning her attention from the glass dome overhead, Alses contemplated her artifact-to-be and the laboratory in general.

It was…comfortable, Alses supposed – at least for normal people. But she was an Ethaefal and a Synaborn at that, a creature of air and fire, of burning deserts and lush tropical lands where Her regard was near-constant and the heat concomitantly enormous. The cold of Lhavit’s winters was never a welcome thing; fires in her grate burned constantly, forever well-stoked and stocked with wood or coal and always with an overflowing fuel-basket close at hand, just in case it looked like it was dimming a little. The result was a very snug little room indeed, the sort of place where a Synaborn could exist in relative comfort through the coldest of seasons.

Whilst the braziers – thoughtfully lit by one of Elena Lariat’s innumerable servants – took the edge off the chill, they were inadequate for her comfort, and so a good half-bell or so would be devoted to the fine art of setting a fire in the ornate stove there for just that purpose. Kindling, fortunately – tinder-dry punkwood – was close at hand, as were more substantial logs and Alses swiftly built a wigwam of kindling and progressively-larger bits of wood, hands moving with the ease of long practice. Philtering needed fires and she’d made so many that by now the procedure was almost second nature.

Plus, with the braziers smouldering merrily away, there was a nice shortcut she could take, carefully transferring with the aid of the fire tongs some of the red-hot embers. The kindling caught quickly, with a little encouragement, and soon the flames were spreading and strengthening and bringing with them a welcome wave of warmth to keep the insidious cold at bay.

Alses turned her attention, environment made rather more pleasant, to her commission.

The haft of the weapon – the Shinya had called it a glaive when he (slightly reluctantly) handed it over – was elaborately chased with carvings – or rather, the suggestion of carvings, glimmering in the dim light from overhead and seeming to shift and subtly, liquidly move in the rising glow from the fire, even before she turned it over and over, running her fingers over the ridges and dimples of it and taking great care to avoid the wickedly-sharp blade.

She’d seen them being used before, the Dusk Tower’s House Guard were quite proficient with them, deadly slivers of skyglass honed to razor-sharpness, whispering through the air, vicious and deadly and so very, very efficient at their purpose.

Experimentally, standing in the middle of the laboratory so as not to hit anything expensive – which was to say, so as not to hit anything – Alses hefted the weapon and gave it an experimental swish.

It was heavier than she’d expected, an action entirely different to the Morningstaff as the blade whipped through the air, her motion enhanced and extended by the length of the haft into a sweeping slash. Something about the essential motion reminded her of her scythe, even though the blade shape was entirely different, the grip substantially altered.

Hmm.

Carefully setting the glaive down – not on the pedestal, no, just leaning up against the wall nearby – Alses turned her attention to the matter at hand in earnest, taking a seat at the desk and cradling her head on her hands, idly watching the gentle snowfall outside.

It was peaceful and calm, quiet apart from her own thoughts and the occasional snap of burning wood from the grate, the whole world wrapped in cotton wool and sleeping – or so it seemed, anyway.

The external quiet calmed the internal tumult, and in short order Alses felt able to pick up quill and ink, turn to a fresh page in her bulging journal and begin to write, in her best hand:

Quickened Skyglass Glaive

General Purpose: To increase the quickness of strikes executed by a skyglass glaive, to complement the combat style of the commissioner.

Requirement: Quickening to the second degree of the whole material construct of the glaive.

Well, that laid down her instructions in black and white. Her commissioner – one of the twins who’d commissioned her services for their weapons, a Master in the Shinya, given his robes, if she wasn’t entirely mistaken, anyway – had been soft-spoken and calm and utterly certain of what he wanted. Which was nice; strong guidance in this sort of intensely personal artifact was good, to ensure the end product was what was actually wanted.

The twins had been slightly unnerving, though, all the same – they’d completed one another’s sentences in quicktime fusillades, swapping rapidly and constantly between one and the other. It had been as though she was talking to one person but with two bodies; her neck had quickly begun to ache from the continual to-ing and fro-ing, and only Tanroa’s perfect Blessing had saved her.

Now, how to achieve the grand goal set down?

[Alses]

A slick swiftness, the twin of what she’d managed to induce in Saving Grace, that was the eventual goal. Something that could slice smoothly through the air, the whole of it preternaturally speedy, faster than would be usual, cutting quick as a flash to the meat of the matter – an unfortunate turn of phrase, perhaps…or maybe simply apt.

Weapons did, after all, kill: they were employed for that purpose, forged for the nasty business of death and slaughter. It was no good being squeamish about the things, especially since a good one might save your life one day. They added a certain weight to any argument, too.

No point in thinking about that; the Shinya kept everyone safe, after all, and she’d never been on the wrong side of them. Never had any plans to put herself on their bad side, either – a state of affairs she was very happy to see continue indefinitely.

So.

Speed.

Absently, Alses dropped into her chair – the cushioning giving way obediently – and brought out her thick journal, dripping with additions and bookmarks of various kinds. She regarded it with a kind of fond despair – trying to find anything in it was getting quite difficult. Alses had long had plans to copy it out coherently, but always put them off in favour of something more exiting, immediate, diverting or constructive. Hence all the bookmarks.

Carefully, she began to page through the volume, a fond smile on her face at all the memories evoked from it, pressed invisibly between its crackling pages and brought back to life with the force of her regard, her prodigious power. Her acceptance into the Dusk Tower’s ranks…her first couriering job…her impressions of madam instructor – less than flattering – and her thoughts, musings and sometimes fulminations against the growth of her own power and skill.

Somewhere in there – between the caricatures, the wandering prose, the philtering recipes and the occasional fragmented devotary passage to Syna – were her notes on every magecrafted artifact she’d ever made, Saving Grace amongst them. It had been a long time; she needed to refresh her memory on the precise glyphic circles she’d used to help the whole process along.

Having a basic design to work from, to refine and improve upon, would speed the whole affair up nicely. Efficiency, that was what she was striving for – no point in expending valuable cognition on problems she’d already considered and solved, after all. Like the buttressing mechanism to keep the whirling djed contained, constrained, corralled and directed to its proper purpose rather than bursting out all over the place.

Yes, she remembered, that had been the most difficult part of Saving Grace, the speed, and the way it had made the djed almost explode out of the artifact, powerful coruscant spikes she’d had to fight every inch of the way to get rid of, to retrain the untrammelled and rebellious djed back to good order and proper purpose.

Ah, yes! There it was!

She’d drawn a diagram of what had happened, all those spiking spires of wayward magic threatening to undo days upon days of hard graft in a few instants – and how hard she’d had to work to split the spikes into fine filaments and weave them back into the dangerously-thinned main flow.

Now, what lessons had she learned, what glyphs could she apply to ensure the same didn’t happen again? Or, at the very least, not to the same extent.

Shouldn’t be too hard – speed was all she had to worry about this time. Of course, down that primrose path lay explosions and irate Elena Lariats. Ugh.

No. Time to plan.

Fresh sheet of paper onto the writing desk, quills laid out and inkwells charged with rich black ink, darker than midnight and with a seductive, inviting scent. Alses savoured the moment, a little wavering bubble of perfection in the tumult of the world as the snow fell gently outside and the new-built fire roared along its fuel and announced its greedy pleasure in the eating to all and sundry.

It wouldn’t last, of course, couldn’t last, but for now the chimes and bells melted away as the outside world faded, all attentions focused on her journal – propped open at the right page – and the paper before her.

‘Nice, broad outlines,’ she thought, working busily through her plan as it wrote itself in brilliant flame inside her mind and then again in darkest ink on the page. Elena Lariat’s laboratory became Alses’ atelier – or as close to one as it was possible to get with her influence everywhere, poisonous and creeping.

The runic structure shimmered and danced in her brain, uncurling free and clear from her brain, tangled skeins of complex glyphs – dala and yaq and their combinations and permutations. Stability and security she wanted from this circle – speed was dangerous to glyph, especially when coupled with the swiftness and power of the strikes she’d need.

Now, how best to achieve that?

An alteration to the general structure might be in order, she mused, casting her mind back through years of diligent Glyphing practice, to all the different ways that a glyphic setup could be arranged. Circles were the most usual, of course – for ease of management, mostly, since that meant there was a natural focus to the magic – but there were other methods, other ways for those with the patience and skill to weave longer glyphic routes and incorporate the varied unstable geometries of other shapes into their tapestry.

‘Ah!’ Alses’ burning brain cautioned her, ‘But we want more stability, not less!’

Taking that butterfly thought to its logical conclusion, more circles – of the right runes, that went without saying – were surely an answer, would almost certainly be a help – if harmonically scribed, anyway. Geometry, that odd discipline of mathematics, would perhaps help her there – there seemed to be an odd resonance between it and her runic placements, chiming the sweeter and more permanent for obeying the rules of symmetry and similarity at the least, and probably some more esoteric ones too.

So, more than one circle, and in the concentric form, that would help, to be sure – but that was just the skeleton. There was so much that could go on inside a circle, after all - enough, Alses knew very well, to make the overall shape and structure all-but irrelevant. If that was the Glypher’s desire or they weren’t meticulous, naturally.

[Alses]

It…wasn’t working.

Oh, the glyphs and the complex runic structure she’d envisaged burned bright in her brain, but there was something lacking in the translation, in the conversion of her sketched designs into full-scale reality, some intrusion that destroyed her concentration, her equilibrium, sent her auristics spiralling wildly and damaged that all-important equipoise.

It was so frustrating; the floor gleamed smugly, emptily at her as she rocked, indecisive and conflicted, on the edge of the crafting area, trying her hardest to settle into the usual high-concentration state that let her achieve the miracles inherent in magecraft.

Every time she extended her power to examine the potential space of her craft, other auras tugged and pulled at her attention, demanding attention and sending queasy chills down the back of her spine until she stopped.

Damn Elena Lariat. It was all her fault! After that…well, whatever it was…whilst she was trying to curry favour for the Councillorship.

Ugh.

Even though it had been…oddly enjoyable.

At times.

The memory of…stickiness…intruded, and she blushed hotly, blood dinning in her ears as it surged from, well, everywhere. ‘No!’ she raged, face fairly radiating heat and kinked into a heavy, contorted frown at the effort of putting those images, those memories, out of her mind.

Fresh air, yes, that was the answer. Fresh, cold air, away from the horribly suggestive auras that clung to Elena Lariat’s divan inside the Overflowing Phial, away from all the overblown hedonism of the entire estate.

The cold hit her full in the chest as she almost fled from the laboratory, stealing her breath and her warmth and making her bend double from the force of it. Winter slid his icy knives skilfully down her throat and into her stomach, chilling the very core of her with every billowing burst of dragonsbreath gouting from her mouth and nose as she tried to get her breath back.

Alses was, at the end of it, a Synaborn Ethaefal, something greater than mortal. She quickly adapted to the chill, the breath and warmth-stealing assault of General Winter, and after a few chimes of walking in the snow-covered gardens – with the fountains still defiantly spurting, in defiance of the temperature – the red glow in her cheeks, furiously radiant, was perhaps more to do with the cold shock than her embarrassment.

Of course, thinking about that brought a whole host of unwelcome memories crashing down on her head and she collapsed bonelessly onto a sub-zero construction of wrought iron rather than the more usual skyglass, hissing as the chill penetrated even her robes in the elaborate twining-leaf pattern of the bench.

It was in this position, staring blankly skywards into the softly-falling snow that was mounding up on the curves of her horns and the folds of her robes, that Lady Lariat’s secretary, bundled up against the cold and walking with measured step through the glittering snow, found her.

“Ma’am? Ma’am? What are you doing out here? Are you ill?” he called, hurrying closer as soon as he caught sight of her, slumped.

He came closer quickly, a slight figure bulked massively outwards by layer upon layer of clothing overlaid with a hefty greatcoat. “Miss Alses? Is everything all right? You’ll catch your death of cold out here!” A pause. “You hate the cold, don’t you?”

With a groan, sensing she wouldn’t be let well enough alone, Alses pulled herself into a more respectable sitting position. Tiny cataracts of powdered snow fell down from her crown-of-horns and cascaded down from her robes as she shifted to look at the unwelcome intruder.

He was right, though – cold was murder, and it was settling into her bones uncomfortably quickly, making her muscles sieze and seeding a creeping lethargy into her usually-bright core. Damn him.

“We’re fine,” she replied shortly, preventing with an effort of will her teeth from chattering.

In reply, the infuriating man raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. “You’re freezing,” he noted, deadpan. “And you’re out here without your overrobes and coats. Has something gone wrong in the lab?” he asked delicately.

In reply, Alses shook her head sharply in the negative. “No!” she exclaimed, a rolling billow of dragonsbreath accompany the sharp – sharper than intended – bark.

He swayed backwards. “Then…something has to be bothering you,” he ventured.

“Bloody Elena Lariat,” Alses replied at length, with a disgruntled huff. “We can’t focus with her in the background all the time!”

The secretary blinked in confusion. “But m’lady is teaching her Companions on the other side of the estate,” he murmured, tailing off in perplexity. Alses very nearly snarled.

“In the background we said!” she snapped, and then took a deep breath and continued more calmly. “I didn’t mean to…well. Elena Lariat’s presence has us on edge. She’s soaked into that divan in the lab and we can feel her grating on our nerves!”

Lady Lariat’s efficient secretary settled back a little more comfortably. “Still…sore…about the last time you were here?” he asked, hesitantly. “Ladyship won’t apologise, you know – that’s not her way.” He shrugged, rueful. “Sorry, but there you have it. She’ll do everything else but say the word.” A pause, during which Alses had some thinking to do.

Not wanting to say sorry…well, that at least she understood. Alses herself hated the word – well, in its employment for anything beyond the most minor and meaningless forms of apology, anyway.

But why in all the starless hells you cared to name had she done…that? Something about the whole business made her flesh crawl.

“Would…would it help if we got rid of the furniture?” she’d obviously thought too long, and the secretary had offered something to fill the gap.

“Ye-es…yes, yes it would!” she exclaimed. “And a bucket or two of purging philtre, just to be on the safe side.”

[Alses]

Alses and Lady Lariat’s secretary stood in the snow watching a bevy of burly footmen muscle the offending divan out through the laboratory’s doorway and along the bridge that linked the Overflowing Phial to the main bulk of the estate.

Alses’ jaw was clenched tight with the effort of not shivering. Despite her best efforts, the secretary noticed. “Perhaps we should go in,” he suggested, gesturing invitingly back towards the main bulk of the house and the cheery fires that doubtless burned bright within.

Pleasant to him, perhaps, blind to all the auras that had soaked and spilt into the furnishings and even the very stones of the place, but to Alses…almost as bad as that horrific cavern she’d gone into – for the good of Lhavit – in Autumn.

An experience she never, ever, wanted to repeat.

The near-madness of being so far from free air and light and space, breathing stale must full of the dead, walking halls that hadn’t felt footsteps in five centuries or more and forever being conscious of a million tons of earth between her and her natural habitat had been…well. Best not to dwell on it.

Even so, Alses bit back the initial, scathing reply – the secretary had put himself out for her, after all; he didn’t have to get the servants to remove the offensive divan or mop the place down with purging philtre.

Instead, she shook her head, tight-lipped. “Not for me,” was her reply, slightly strained from the effort of stopping her teeth chattering. “I pray to Syna we can work in that laboratory now – time and money are ticking away, and we for one don’t want to risk the ire of the Shinya if we’re not done when expected.”

Two eyebrows rose at that, but the secretary quickly regained his equipoise. “If you’re sure, miss…” he tailed off uncertainly. “First stop, the fire, if I were you,” he remarked, shrugging deeper into his greatcoat as he made to follow the servants who’d now vanished into the recesses of the main mansion. “Certainly will be for me, followed by a glass of something hot and wicked,” he added, by way of farewell.

Alses was left alone with her thoughts – still disturbed – and the falling snow, and the latter she happily abandoned in favour of the cheery roar of the laboratory fire.


A


Having dripped meltwater everywhere and then evaporated even that from her clothes and her surroundings, Alses felt able to face the task of magecrafting again. She longed – how she longed! – for her own laboratory, a sanctum sanctorum where she and she alone would hold sway, but for now she simply had to be patient.

‘One season, Alse,’ she told herself fiercely, time and again. ‘We can do that. I’ve waited years for this; a handful of days more isn’t going to make much difference.’ Of course, the irritatingly rational part of her hit back with the rebuttal that, in the long run, almost nothing did. Not that that helped.

Steadfastly ignoring this as part of the internal debate every Ethaefal either learned to deal with or die, Alses once more approached the epicentre of the lab, the metal and glass crown of the optic ring that surmounted the stone pedestal, once more bending her mind to the task in hand and resolutely ignoring the butterflies hatching in her stomach.

It was, admittedly, easier this time around. Elena Lariat’s brandy-wine aura had been expunged; the laboratory was no longer reeking – to Alses’ preternaturally-honed senses - of fine spirits, sex and just a touch of death, that unsettling combination that told her rather too much about the woman’s life.

Death might have been far down in the layered auras, but spirits and sex blazed right through them all. The woman was a hedonist to the core, profligate and wanton and prone to excess. She lay foursquare across the usual for a citizen of Lhavit rather than aligning herself nicely to the predominant flow. Then again, she was a transplant, although Alses for the life of her couldn’t remember from what far-flung corner of the world the woman had been ejected before she arrived in Lhavit and set about building her monument to frivolity.

Not that frivolity or hedonism or excess were particularly bad things, in and of themselves; with anyone else, she’d hardly have batted an eyelit, but Alses’ view was just a little coloured by her own experiences with Lady Lariat and her uncertainty on how to deal with it.

Glyphs.

Resolutely pushing all thoughts of Elena Lariat to the back of her mind, tossing them into a mental box, locking it securely and gleefully throwing away the key – a flight of whimsy that put a brief smile on her face – Alses cleared her mind, slowly letting everything but the task filter away, whirling away and into unimportance as she began to focus, to concentrate.

Djed uncurled from her in a rising wave, a shimmering spangled dance of magic waking from sleep as she cast it out, perfectly controlled, absolutely obedient, the artist unseen slavish to her whims, painting the world in the wonders that were only for an aurist’s perception, teasing out the secrets of, well, everything and splashing them liberally for her senses to drink in, to delight in.

That was the secret vanity, the ability and the power to splash the life of a person in technicolour brilliance out on the world, every scrap of it investigatable, scrutinizable, explicable. The whys and wherefores of the most secret and obscured motives laid bare – if she worked at it enough.

For now, though, all she needed was oversight, the ability to see the changes her brush-strokes and focus wrought on the world, the construction of the arcane machinery that would inform the creation of the artifact.

Tabula rasa, that was the phrase she’d seen in the older books – a fancy way of saying blank slate, essentially. Stripped of everything but the essentials by the purgative philtres employed for just that job, Alses’ work area was perfect in that regard. Nothing to trouble or confuse her, nothing to interfere with the delicate and expensive crafting process, just the silver thread of her thoughts and the waiting world on which to paint them.

That was the privilege of the magesmith, turning desire and want into solid reality, and it was glorious.

[Alses]

Alses had debated the merits and drawbacks of chalking her designs first, before overlaying them with more permanent, inked runes, and had eventually come down on the side of ‘against’. It was useful as an aid for making sure everything was perfect, oh yes, but the problem, the nub, crux and kingpin of it was that the chalk fuzzed and confused the subsequent glyphic overlay, damaged the otherwise-pristine arcs and curls that would result from the paint.

That meant it was less effective, less useful, more prone to error and disjunct – and if there was one thing Alses didn’t tolerate in her crafting, and certainly not when money and reputation were at stake, then it was error.

Chaos and disorder had to be torn out, root and branch, cast out to wither in the broad and sunny uplands of order and serenity; nothing could be permitted to jam or obscure the delicate workings of her painstakingly-crafted containment machinery, for one, and for another it all had to be able to withstand the harsh forces unleashed as she worked with powerful djed, fusing and forcing, splitting and weaving, pounding and pummelling until it bent to her will, no other.

For that, it all had to work in harmony; there could be no disharmony or dissension amongst the glyphs or the shining conduits they built in the magic of the world. Hence all the planning, all the precision. She was getting better, admittedly – the curve of every rune didn’t need to be checked and rechecked any more, for instance.

That said, there were still problems, still issues – combining individual runes into the elaborate sprawling sigils and relays that marked the more advanced applications of the discipline still needed rigorous, repetitive planning. Planning that she’d written out again and again in her journal, forever tweaking and modifying, moving one step closer each time to the elusive perfect harmony she heard chiming in her head.

Thank Syna for auristics, for the guiding star that steered her pen – or in this case, her brush - towards that elusive pinnacle.

Senses gaped wide to the secret depths of the world, Alses took the plunge, elegant fingers reaching out and twining around the brush set close-at-hand for just this purpose. It was the work of a moment to break open the glypher’s paint, and another tick or so to prime it with a cargo of midnight.

Poised at the instant of inscription, a tiny part of Alses savoured the perfect moment, and then down went the brush, trailing darkness in its wake. Bold strokes, initially, first and most powerful, setting down the fundamental boundaries: this far, and no further.

Taken by itself, it was just a line in the sand, a meaningless bit of defiance against the prevailing world, but once Alses had enriched its inner surfaces with glyph upon sigil upon rune upon mark, it would become so much more, a pearly interface that would gently redirect, not harshly command, the ambient world djed to split and travel neatly around it, rather than create turbulence and disturbance in the djedic map of the world with the disruption.

That, she was learning, was so often the key with magic; gentle propitiation and subtle, beneficial, easy change, rather than imperious command – it had applied to auristics, it applied to most of magecraft and she was now seeing that, with Glyphing as everything else, finesse had its uses.

Carefully and with measured tread, mentally overlaying her sketched plan onto the world in front of her eyes, Alses paced out the distance to the inner focus ring that would hold the ingredients she’d need to turn the mundane into the extraordinary.

Pearl-edged circles – or at least, that was how Alses thought of them, small shimmering runes joining and running and flowing together to create the greater containing, constraining shape – they were what her design called for here. Spheres were some of the most stable shapes in all of magic, and this sort of setup absolutely needed every scrap of stability Alses could cadge, scrounge or outright steal.

Hence, her plan called for circles within circles, the better to withstand the massive djed fluxes that would evolve from her hammer-strikes – but stability and resistance weren’t the only things required in a magecrafter’s wards, oh no. There had to be purification, too, the ability to grab and twist and ravel stray bursts of djed, to run toxic magic through a webwork filigree of runic baffles, repurposements and obfuscations, through a litany of hard-to-pronounce (and harder to draw) Nader-canoch runes until it was rendered harmless and radiant, released as beautiful light or channelled back into useful work, depending on her skill.

Most of it ended up as light, pure and radiant, but in recent crafts she’d been getting better – slowly and painstakingly, admittedly, but progress was progress no matter how one looked at it – at passive redirection, making use of the rainbow of glypher’s paints Elena stocked her laboratory with, along with a greater understanding of Pathing and relay-work, to reuse that escaped magic.

Waste not, want not – and anything that cut down on the number of ingredients she’d need was always a good thing. Keeping down costs and maximising profits, Alses was sure she’d heard that as an axiom of business somewhere.

Tongue subconsciously sticking out a little as she worked, Alses’ brush danced a fandango as it swirled and dotted the slightly-roughened tile floor with torrents of glypher’s paint. There were defensive runes, spheres and half-spheres and three-quarter spheres, full of intricate reflecting brushwork, a filigree net that filled the mind with images of defence and protection, the crystal towers of Lhavit reflected back in her working brain as it touched the mirrors her runes made in the world.

Defence and protection – as well as purification, those enormously complex sequences of runes that drank in the magic of the world and split and whorled it around, almost miniatures of Animation circles, now that she thought about it – were integral, yes, but they could only ever be a part of the whole; there were other forces, other designs, other requirements at work here.

For one, there had to be some potential outlet for the magic, otherwise her hammers would get no purchase at all on the wonders locked inside the ingredients, and the whole thing would become a rather expensive write-off – and that would never do.

Paths and Relays, then, were her friends and boon companions, providing the crucial structure for outflow whilst maintaining that all-important stability and purity, the fundamental mechanism that would ensure a high-djed environment in which she could work.

Perspiration beaded her brow as she drew and drew, cramp took hold and was quickly banished by true-blue light, Tanroa’s Blessing proving its usefulness yet again, in a thousand little ways as the bells slipped towards evening and Alses lost herself in the glyphic demands of the craft.

All this, and she was still only on the main circle, and even then only its outline – there were the connections with the optic ring – a new innovation – to secure, for one, and then the subsidiary charging circle that Alses preferred to work with, to minimise the disruption to her craft of moving from a low-djed ambient area to a highly stable configuration.

[Alses]

Her circles half-completed, Alses took a step back to contemplate the optical ring, a circle of cold iron, copper and reaching clamps suspended in midair on corded steel cables. It was intricate, exquisitely made, adding another layer of precision and safety – although also complexity – into the uneasy mix of magecraft, and for Alses at least it needed a little adjustment in order to reach its true potential.

The usual configuration of such a ring was three lenses and three mirrors, giving the magesmith greater control over the evoked djed of their craft whilst also allowing them to see what was going on directly, but Alses had no need of the sights.

Greater control, on the other hand, that was always useful – and so she spent several chimes carefully fiddling with the wing-nuts that controlled the lens clamps, delicately freeing each and every one, carefully sliding the expensive glass out of position and into their own, individual velvet pouches.

A few more chimes of hunting – and whatever else her other faults, Elena at least maintained an orderly laboratory – saw Alses return to the ring with a backup set of mirrors, normally for use when one of the others was cracked or otherwise damaged by poor practice, experimentation or both. This time, though, Alses would make use of it with the primary set, six glowing mirrors in the air that would catch and spin and reflect any ascending stray magic back down to the circles and the artifact-to-be.

Tongue sticking out with concentration, Alses slid the bright-shining mirrors into place one by one, carefully tightening the little wingnuts so that obdurate metal gripped silvered glass, securely but not so tight the glass broke, flexed or fractured. That was the first step; next, she had to roughly tune them, angling the mirrors so that their reflective properties were focused properly, for want of a better term, to synergise with her glyphs and the whole arcane construct taking shape below.

Happily, auristics was a great help in the whole delicate operation of positioning; Alses was able to assess, even with the low-powered ambient currents and the only half-completed glyphic apparatus below, where would perhaps benefit most from the mirrors’ redirecting capabilities. She examined, with the ever-present help of the artist unseen, drenching the world in a million shades of melting colour and hue, the shivering knots of whorled magic that crawled and writhed and broke down under the influence of their djed-charged glare; where would need reinforcement to be able to deal with the extra djed from on high and where already had sufficient stability, sufficient flexibility, enough resilience to cope.

Then, once that had been established – bright points of light and swelling sound to her Sight, all other, more distracting senses cut off with a master’s ruthless, consummate control – she could get back to the meat of the work, fleshing out the solid glyphic bones she’d laid down with all the accoutrements she’d need, things that would make the magic flow with her, go where she wanted it to and nowhere else.

Recursive curls and regressive mazes, those were the forms her absorbing sigils took as she let the impressions and core concepts roll away from her brain, down her arm and out through her sizzling brush, striving to follow the patterns that blossomed in her mind. They were the reason every wizard and sorceress’ runes were different; concepts and meanings were subtly different to each and every person, after all, and that took physical form when it came to runes.

On hands and knees once more, carefully dancing between slowly-drying lines of glypher’s paint, Alses crawled and sweated and focused until her eyes stung from the djed flux moving through them – and the salt of her perspiration, blinked away time and again as she strove for inhuman perfection in the complex array of circles – outer protective and purifiying, inner containing and directing, and finally her own personal ancillary charging one, to ease the transition.

A bone-deep ache that Tanroa’s Blessing couldn’t remove had settled into Alses fingers and hands and forearms by the time she was satisfied with the complex glyphic machinery now glowing in the depths of the world, just waiting for the final activation surge that would bring it to full reality.

Indeed, she was nearly ready for that step – but there were still a few crucial things that needed to be added to the mix, a few final adjustments that had to be made.

Ingredients, ingredients…Alses flitted about the laboratory and its antechambers, hands dipping with practiced ease into cabinet after cabinet, jar after jar, drawing out all manner of things with properties quick and evocative.

In one hand, a bunch of ingredients dangling from her fingers, in the other, the little black book that was the master list of the laboratory’s contents. A frown danced across Alses’ face as she saw that there was no quicksilver left – the odd metal was quick and changeable, much prized by magecrafters in imparting morphing and speed, therefore, but thankfully not essential, since there were several others that could substitute for it.

Besides, the protections for dealing with mercury were…cumbersome. Yes, on reflection perhaps it was a good thing that Elena had run out.

So…no mercury…but heliotrope, bamboo from the tumbling falls of the Amaranthine, glittering quartz and a few other glimmering treasures of the earth, all arrayed around that empty central pedestal, each one the heart of a complicated focus glyph, draining and constraining in one, all of it just waiting for her to place the glaive and get started.

It still felt preternaturally light in her hand as she hefted the weapon – the skyglass again, surely – and deadly. And powerful – although that might have been her imagination talking, as she gave it a few more guilty swings around the lab.

She’d never really been much of a one for weapons – a gardener’s scythe being the closest thing she’d handled to a real one – but there was certainly something to be said for personal protection…

Shaking her head – she was in Lhavit, with all the Shinya guard to protect her – Alses regretfully placed the glaive onto – and into – the pedestal at the centre of her intricate setup, slotting it into the hole drilled into the centre of it, the focal point of the glyphs and, by extension, the entire process.

One last step, before she could leave it all to purify and strengthen, ready for the next day’s crafting. Her first thought had been clamps – but the heavy and cumbersome constructs would have been difficult to work around, and despite its length the glaive was only very thin, a sliver of deadly purpose.

Bulk, the sort of thing that clamps were for, simply didn’t apply. Vices, then, they might be a better choice, especially since the djed flux wouldn’t be too great.

Yes, two – no, make it three, for better triangulation (if Alses had known what the word meant) on the precise target.

[Alses]

The glaive glittered like the heart of winter under the icy light from on high. Three dull metal vices, wound tight against its blue-spangled prism, were jarring tones in the glittering littoral of light, but they were necessary. Even if the black metal offended Alses’ aesthetic sensibilities, their utility outweighed their ugliness.

‘When I have my own laboratory,’ Alses thought, ‘Everything will be beautiful.’ Indeed, it was quite strange that Elena should have such heavy, graceless, chunky things in a room that otherwise reflected her good taste in a hundred subtle ways.

The mirrors of the optic ring overhead were carefully adjusted with the minutest of precision she’d been able to muster and the legendary patience of the Ethaefal – well, more bloody-mindedness in Alses’ case, but from a distance the two could be confused – as well, as a side-effect sending spotlights of painful white-ice light down to her intricate glyphic apparatus below.

With the glaive in place, able to physically see its effect rather than simply guessing and extrapolating, Alses was able to fine-tune the mirrors that would help her to contain more of the djed the crafting would evoke, and as she carefully twisted the knurled nuts that controlled the finest anglings of the mirrors their bright spots of light swirled and danced minutely on the floor, their laser eyes churning up the djed even when quiescent, sleeping.

Powerful magic – but then everything about magecraft was.

Stepping back from her handiwork, Alses regarded the whole of it carefully, stalking the circumference with the infinite care of a predator coming in for the kill – and not just looking with her magic. Eyes, pure, physical, mundane eyes were sometimes useful in spotting the out of place, the out-of-the-ordinary, the just plain wrong, and they were less tiring to use for long periods than her magic.

Which wasn’t to say that auristics didn’t have its prominent place in her examination, oh no. There was so much, after all, that could be hidden from the shallow physical world that the magic laid bare down in the depths; she couldn’t imagine magecraft without it.

And as for relying on such crutches as lenses…When the world was so eager, so willing to dance for her, a performance that put the grandest matinees of the Ethereal Opera to shame, well, it was a shame not to sit back an enjoy the overblown, gloriously extravagant spectacle unfurling for her secret Sight, hijacking every sense until she was nearly swept along in the tidal wave, forever skating and surfing on its cresting, curling lip, her free-flying mind and soul being splashed and soaked in the colour and the light and the sound.

An ecstatic grin, the colour of honey-wine and bursting with a million bubbles like Riverfall champagne, swept her up and carried her triumphantly back to her body, back to mundanity even as the rainbow tide rampaged on, at the sight that her machinery was perfect, whole and entire, the intricate flows and whorls and curls mapped with exquisite precision, precisely where they needed to go and without a single deviation to mar the grander, greater whole.

Now, to let it sit, and charge, and steep, ready for the real work to begin on the morrow.


A


Timestamp: 24th Day of Winter, 513 A.V.

Bright and clear, the day was a perfect one for the craft.

Then again, every day was perfect for the execution of magecraft in Alses’ eyes. It was the sovereign skill, the thing which made Mizahar worthwhile – at least, historically. Alses was having a few…well, to call them doubts would be to disparage the primacy of magecraft in her life, call them…addendums instead, to that once-solitary glittering jewel in the mud of Mizahar.

Spiky aura, shining eyes, salt-streaked skin.

Hmm.

Pushing all thoughts that weren’t of magic and mastery over the world aside, as resolute as only a true fanatic, a true savant of the craft could be, Alses stalked inside the lab proper, breathing deep of the heady half-there scent of djed, underlaid with the potent potpourri of ingredients and glypher’s paint arrayed out for her delight.

And it was her delight, no doubt about it. Difficult, demanding, supremely unforgiving of a mistake…but the thrill of getting it right, of seeing mundanity change to become something truly extraordinary, that was where she truly lived, in the burning sun at the heart of the craft where miracles were hammered out of the world and sent forth to make their mark.

Long fingers ghosted gently over the racks of hammers, each one heavy and bright with precious-metal promise, their auras powerful and eager, their polished mahogany handles smooth as silk beneath her flitting touch.

Gold, powerful and sure, the brassy herald and harbinger of change.

Silver, siren-sweet and elegant, cultured courtesan and subtle vicereine of variation.

Copper, the oddball child, loud and discordant, breaker of bonds and the king of chaos.

Ah, but those weren’t the only choices either, not in Elena’s lab – Alses’ hands skipped from the common tool-rack to another shelf, where indistinct shapes hung in their own, individual velvet bags, carefully protected against undue wear and prying eyes.

Alses’ eyes, though, they weren’t hindered much by mere velvet, and in any case were quite allowed to covet and feast on the contents within:

Electrum, rare and imperious, empress of the hammers, brash herald and elegant vicereine in one.

Hepatizon, an even more unlikely alliance of all three, copper and gold in the ascendancy though, with just the sweet suggestion of silver to give any semblance of control to this unruly hammer.

What a delight! Now, which to use first, which to use first…

[Alses]

Alses’ hand hesitated, hovered, as her brain raced to try and decide.

Gold, maybe? Powerful and brassy, strong and bold and just what might be needed to break the deadly weapon to harness?

No; breaking it to harness wasn’t the goal.

Speed, quicksilver-quickness, fluidity, grace and elegance – so silver, then? Perhaps – but silver was for fine work, detail-work, for the intricacies of intelligence and the razor-edge polish on rougher changes. Doable, undoubtedly, but harder work than it needed to be.

Copper? Well…copper would always be necessary, the sovereign king of breaking and dissolution – unless one counted the liverish hepatizon glowering through its velvet cloak – but would she want to start with it?

Hmm. Then – joy of joys – the thought struck her and she grinned. Here, at last, was an artifact she could use one of the alloys for! But which one? Which one would grace her hand and sing out to the world?

The answer turned and turned in her head with all the inevitability of Lhex: electrum.

She laid hands on it eagerly, but reverent – expensive and rare, getting to use it was a privilege. It felt…odd…in her hands, as she tested its heft and sent it whispering through the still air, once, twice, thrice, getting an idea of its feel, its ideas and its motions through the air.

Alses could feel those hungry voids inside, aching to be full, could feel the brash flame of gold and its roaring impatience – but all of it was calmed and melded together with silver’s lighter touch, the two combining together into something disparate and wonderful, a mixture of opposites that somehow managed to synergise and become greater than either of their separate identities, fusing and melting and merging into this wondrous, imperious hammer whose call was a clarion bell and a summons to war, a gentle reminder and a death knell, a sweet entreaty and a harsh demand, all rolled into one.

What a glorious tool it was, what a perspicacious smith who’d first thought to melt the two sovereigns together, what a pinnacle of achievement it must have been!

To have been alive in a time when such wonders were commonplace and being turned out of the great forges of the twin empires in droves! To remember such a time, Alses quickly amended that to – it was highly probable she had been around in those golden times, but the memories were lost and jumbled and muddled with thousands of other fading lives.

Ah well; we play the hand we’re dealt.

Copper and a backup silver – singing in her off-hand – both went into her belt, just in case, backups if electrum proved too new, too strange. Not that Alses thought it would; there was a strange synergy, an odd harmony, an understanding she rarely felt with the other hammers, some essential reverberation between magesmith and implement – calling it a tool felt oddly disrespectful to the cool enchantments humming in its body.

Taking a deep breath, Alses squared up to her circles. The bright star of magic rayed out from the complex machinery glowed bright in her eyes as she steeled herself – against all reason, as usual – and stepped across the border and into her ancillary circle.

Expecting against expectation a shiver at the high-djed environment, this time Alses received one, courtesy of her auristics, a delicious little tingling thrill that saw her flesh goosepimple and her body convulse, just once, at the unexpected sensation, before she settled into a quasi-meditative state, eyes half-lidded until the glyphic apparatus laid out before her swam lazily, drifting in and out of incandescence as her playful magic gambolled and danced.

It calmed as she did, keeping an ever-watchful eye on the turbulent local currents, disturbed by her chaotic entry into the circle. Her glyphs were the hard, screaming whiteness of every overloaded sense shrieking at once as they worked furiously to cleanse and purify, to obliterate the disorder her entry into the ancillary circle had brought.

This was the last passive bit of preparation she’d need to do, and her muscles fizzed and jumped with the effort of not moving, of remaining calm and serene when all she wanted to do was jump in and start, to hear the electrum empress sing with power and purpose in her hand, to get to the bones of the craft where she was truly alive.

All things in time, and time she had an infinite supply of. Patience, on the other hand…

Slowly, oh-so-slowly, the rainbowed flowers of disturbed magic began to lessen, to diminish, their colours to her eyes bleeding away into the light-blue ambient even as the overall disturbance, the turbulent flow was calmed by the infinitely patient engines of her glyphs.

Soon – and intellectually Alses knew it hadn’t taken long, even though subjectively it had felt like a positive age – all was calm, quiet, and highly-charged; she was no longer going to be a disturbing factor in her main craft.

She tripped lightly over the boundary between the two, taking instinctive care not to step on the lines and whorls – and that was another reason for having big laboratories, so you were never perpetually dancing on tiptoes, afraid of brushing into something vital and rendering the whole craft expensively useless.

The glaive gleamed, smugly self-satisfied, at her from its lofty perch. That was the skyglass, of course, singing its perennial song of divine contentment out into the obscured depths of the world. Working it was the very devil – but Alses had the secret and knack of it now, the art of being unpredictable, of shaking the skyglass to its core, breaking that self-satisfaction to allow her art to glut the item with magic and mastery.

Standing in the middle of the complex maze of runes sprawled out acrss the floor, Alses turned her gaze fully on the glaive, just waiting, spooling magic up through practiced fingers to lay bare the djedic structure she was about to work with, seeing where the conduits ran and clustered thick and bright, where they wove together time and again into an impenetrable network, where they were stringy and sparse, stretched almost to breaking point.

Knowing that meant she would know exactly where to strike to induce discord and chaos, to see it ripple out and render the djed conduits fuzzed and open for magic injection, ready to be shaped and moulded by her iron will and more hammer strikes, every erg of djed localised by the vices and the reflecting mirrors and her tireless, perfect glyphs.

Heart singing as she assessed the situation and raised the glimmering hammer high, Alses began to craft in earnest.

[Alses]

The first strike, with all the might of Alses’ arm behind it and heavily-cargoed with as much djed as she’d been able to cram into the sorcerous voids, sent ripples of phantom flame exploding through the aether as she brought it squarely down in the centre of the glaive, watching as the djed currents, kinked to sudden violence by the crash of an electrum hammer against the skyglass, worked and strained to re-establish normality.

It was really more of a measuring, ranging shot, verifying where the areas of resistance and capitulation were, where she could disjunct and open most easily, where would need the full force of the hammer to lay it open.

The matrix of the glaive was an interesting one, a spiral whorl of conduits that wove together at the wickedly-sharp blade and split into a branching weavework to make up the long staff portion of the weapon. ‘Interesting’ was always fun. Difficult, usually, too, but always fun to work with.

Drawing the electrum hammer low across the ground and then upwards in a sweeping strike, Alses dealt a second blow to the glaive. Coruscating fire crackled and danced up and down it, spiking and jumping wildly, all the djed skewed to unpredictable violence in the wake of her strike.

Ah, now she was getting her eye in, following the glittering tracks of magic, seeing how they responded, how disjuncting forces were bent and crackled along the length of the conduits, dissipated and reflected and at the last absorbed without a trace.

Electrum was beautiful and glorious, responsive and quick and versatile; the empress of hammers danced in her hands and the djed bowed down before it. Long streamers of silver magic rushed in torrents from the ingredients arrayed in the focus circle, every erg of it pouring, sluicing greedily into the sorcerous voids in the hammer-head. They were bound, controlled, contained with consummate ease, bent and broken to her will.

Each impact point blazed brightly, matched by three brief stars from the black metal vices as their buried magics raged to the surface, capturing and targeting every erg of djed in glorious concert with the glimmering eyes of the mirrors overhead.

Redirection, targeting, reflection…whatever one wanted to call it, the current iteration was flawless, taking the crazed and unspooling strands of magic evoked by the strike and forcing every erg into the artifact, destabilising it.

Which was exactly what was needed, at that point, something to make the djed fuzz and discohere, just a little, just enough to let her work her – a smile curved up her lips at the unbidden word – magic.

Almost unconsciously, the copper hammer crept into her right hand as she readied herself in earnest for the business in hand. Having got the measure of the resistance she’d encounter, now was the time for the consuming charge, the vanguard smash that would lay the item’s innards open to alteration and improvement.

Of course, it was never as simple as one, powerful swing, oh no – it was a whole carillon of building strikes, ringing in the changes on a cadenced staircase of chiming notes edged in magic.


A


Alses was flying on silver wings of magic and glyphery, moving with liquid grace around the whole circumference of the artifact-to-be, trailing a cloak of sound and djed as she worked, arms rising and falling in an unpredictable toccata rhythm, sending crackling waves of magic racing across the body of the glaive and crashing into one another, burning bright as they snarled and fought and weakened the djedic structure, opened it up for further work.

The chimes built and built into a roaring crescendo as Alses worked furiously, pearls of perspiration becoming rivulets and pouring down her face as it all built to a tottering, unstable climax, building that final tidal-wave of sweeping magic that would crash through divine self-contentment and wake the glaive to the new, brighter, better world that awaited at the end of her craft.

With the final trembling note, the scissor-like hard impact of copper and electrum ringing out in defiant chorus, the whole tottering edifice snapped like a twig and a wave of discohering djed swept over it all, plucking and tearing and teasing at the established conduits with a million million probing, chaotic fingers.

Close-knit networks, the prime site of the djedic assault, wavered under the onslaught – redirected and focused by the vices and mirrors on high – their interconnections tearing and snapping under her influence, leaving them in battered tatters even as it rampaged down the shaft of the glaive, spreading and mellowing as it went before rebounding from the crystal butt of the shaft and surging one final time up to the very tip of the blade, breaking open the close-knit, tightly-honed conduits there before bursting freely out into the open air and being ruthlessly recycled by her meticulously-planned setup.

Breathing heavily, wiping perspiration from her brow with the back of one hand, feeling the aches and strains of hard, unfamiliar use – she didn’t get to craft anywhere near as often as she’d have liked, after all – and generally feeling quite drained, Alses surveyed her handiwork thus far with a sort of tired, glowing pride.

Once again, she’d mastered the skyglass successfully – and this time, as her glorious celestial self, rather than having to wait for the certain clarity (and, admittedly, melancholy) that her Konti form brought with the night.

Glory, glory.

A cough or two threatened her balance as air rushed in and out of her lungs; Alses danced a kind of crabwise threestep to take her clear of a danger zone and into a place where her glyphs, her delicate, beautiful glyphs, clustered less thickly, where there was more breathing space.

Now…where to next? Where to start, what to do, Stage Two of the plan…so much to accomplish, and scant days to work a miracle! Such was the lot of the magecrafter, though.

Humming happily, if tunelessly, Alses pursed her lips and considered her options.

[Alses]

Alses was dancing, a waltz of magic and mastery, stepping lightly and with unconscious, fluid grace that only the Ethaefal possessed naturally. Two comets of light followed her flashing hands, drawing up long streamers of magic from close about the ingredients and thrusting it, with burning, actnic flashes of light and spangled cataracts of stray djed, into the item.

Her hands were hot and slick on the mahogany handles of the hammers as she struck and turned, struck and drew up and forced down again and again, and through it all conducting the difficult task of keeping concept and idea firm in the forefront of her singing brain, despite the snap and crackle of djed all around and the precise and finicky sequence of movements she needed for smooth djedic transfer.

Slick swiftness, that was the essential idea that had to be tumbled and tossed in with the fast and furious djed she drew up from the ingredients, churned around and imprinted on every facet of it until it became part of its core identity, how it moved, how it shifted, every single action informed to some degree by that essential quickening.

Even at this early stage, though, it was gratifying to see the very first inklings of the speed that so characterised her thoughts, and the djed she was trying to force into the artifact. Indeed, it seemed to leap like wildfire to the artifact's own conduits given only the smallest amount of encouragement, and just like last time it was keeping the djed flows under control that was the difficulty.

Electrum had such an affinity with speed that she was using copper again and again to control the transfer, to moderate and break off great chunks of the magic to make it simply manageable rather than a surging, furious, obliterating wave that would destroy rather than reinforce and build and create – the very antithesis of magecraft, if it was allowed to get out of control.

And not being in control, with something like this, was something Alses could never countenance, never allow.

Quickened djed slid smoothly into the fuzzed conduits of the glaive – no need to make any extra ones, thankfully; it would be enough to accelerate the existing network to achieve the quickening effect. It formed a complex filigree network in the air, arcs and contrails crisscrossing in the pattern of her strikes, the visual counterpart to the aural symphony she was conducting, supported and reflected and made even more complex by the glowing mirrors suspended overhead, their intrinsic magic reacting brightly to the evolved djed streaking up from her ingredients.

More and more of them were beginning to collapse into a drained state; a greasy smear in the centre of the circles or a fine, nondescript gray dust, every shred of djed that had comprised them extracted by the lash of her hammers and repurposed.

The bright sounds of electrum meeting skyglass, at the point of impact every erg of force being flashed into djed, rang and chimed around her as she worked quickly, crackling waves of magic rushing down the glaive, following the reflecting curve of the blade and then shooting to the very base of the weapon and back. Twisted and ravelled by Alses’ subsequent strikes, each one flaying out the unwanted magic and giving the remaining djed a whirl until the conduits began to go faster and faster, she began to streamline the whole affair, painstakingly smoothing down the rough edges of the network, laying the groundwork for even finer work down the line.

That wasn’t the aim for today, though, oh no – speed was the main goal, but Alses had learned, and learned well, from Saving Grace; speed and extra djed without at least a gossamer web of reinforcement resulted in dangerous coruscant spikes of magic, the djed conduits dissecting and extravasating all over the place, magic bursting out in uncoordinated fans, corrupting and degrading the whole, making it less than before, not more.

Rectifying that, rescuing an artifact on its way to grim, total collapse, was a difficult and finicky task and not something that Alses wanted to have to do – or rather, attempt, since she wasn’t at all sure of total success in that field – if it could possibly be avoided.

Overhead, the mirrors blazed like miniature suns, hot and beating down with spires of coruscating redirected djed, making the glyphs at their contact points burn and shimmer, energising them with a racing wave of magic that squirrelled and danced around the constraining cage, testing and probing at the outer defences before being yanked back into the grand weave.

Hammers sizzling in her hands, electrum and copper glowing painfully bright to her auristic sight as they emptied themselves of the last dregs of djed, her fingers flushed unpleasantly with blood and still pulsing to the manifold rhythms of her strikes, phantom impacts still thrumming up her arms and her head still dizzied from the pounding notes, Alses swayed in place, slowing and coming to a blessed stop. Evaluation, that was what she needed, a little step back to assess progress, where to go from there.

Collecting herself took long chimes and many deep breaths, uncurling her fingers one at a time – bright flowers of aching pain and bone-deep throbbing in each – from the hammers, laying them carefully, reverentially down beside her. The fusillade of cracks from her knuckles was louder than bombard-fire in the laboratory, reverberating from the dome and striking down on her ears as she stretched, luxuriating in the break.

Yes, it was definitely time for a break; fully half the ingredients had collapsed or were sliding towards the greypoint, the instant at which all djed had been drained and repurposed, either by Alses’ hammers, or by the gentler, more insidious, slower method of the complex glyphic sprawl that blazed actnic fire on the floor all around the central pedestal.

To mundane sight, and mundane sight only, aside from the gently-deliquescing ingredients in their elaborate focus circles, nothing appeared to have changed, but to an aurist’s enhanced senses…

There was a definite sensation of speed there, djed coursing along the opened conduits with a purpose and a quick, elusive slickness that wasn’t there before. It was patchy, though, incomplete, not all there, slowing and speeding up and slowing again unpredictably as it passed through different parts of the weapon, and whilst that might one day be useful in a different weapon – unpredictability, a useful property – it wasn’t part of the brief and had to be refined out.

To do that though, time was the key. Broken open and brutally charged as they had been, the conduits’ essential structure, the whole edifice of the network that made the glaive what it was, had been weakened even as the individual components had been strengthened and changed with the influx of fresh magic. Time, in the secure, stable and high-djed environment of the glyphic apparatus, that was necessary to allow for everything to stabilise and strengthen enough for her to continue work.

That was a major reason why magecrafting took so long, especially when mortal – or almost-mortal endurance wasn’t infinite.