Timestamp: 14th Day of Summer, 514 A.V.
The slow accretion process, coupled with her own more urgent additions, all of it buffered and softened by the sprawling glyphic machine, had changed and solidified the insulted matrix of the vault door over the past few days.
It had evolved and changed in response to those unnatural circumstances Alses’ craft had caused; the high-djed environment, the destabilised conduits, the continual beating influx of djed from the reagents in their sparkling focus-circle, all the rest of it, and now her expert eye judged it about ready for the next step.
Indeed, it was perhaps more than ready; she’d wanted to be sure.
Not that it mattered. The glyphic lance which led from her otherworld sword right into the heart of the craft, its point resting – quiescent, for now – on the very edge of the centrepiece, was more than adequate, more than powerful enough, directed enough, for the job in hand.
In many ways, it had been the most difficult part of the whole glyphic assemblage, although in truth that could be attributed to a simple lack of practice. Lances such as the one she was using came by but rarely in the lower levels of the craft, hardly ever needed or used, and it had been a long time since she’d had the opportunity to reach the upper echelons of magesmithing.
Put bluntly, she’d been a little rusty.
But it was done now, shining and perfect and glowing, itching to work and yet perfectly controlled by the Triggers she’d carefully coded in, to release at her word and no other’s, when she was ready and not one tick before.
Alses could feel its coiled purpose as a sharp blade of ice and fire in her mind, a razored caress over her skin that left goosebumps in its dangerous wake, glowing bright and complex whenever she looked at it. It was a radiant highway, beautifully tuned and focused to one goal, one purpose: the channelling and direction of alien magic down to a single point, with no waste and no delay.
With a whisper of silk, Alses bent down to inspect the otherworld sword, her breath condensing on the blade as she scrutinized it. In and of itself, it wasn’t an impressive object. Silvery metal folded and beaten into shape, and then polished and sharpened at the edges. A bit of wire wrapped around the hilt in an interesting pattern was the only thing that outwardly could distinguish it from a thousand other swords, but in the sight of the aurist…
It burned in all the shades of impossibility, the wrongness of it screaming like a wound in the world, utterly alien impressions and feelings bursting off it in aberrant waves before they were beaten to conformity by the pressure of the rest of the world.
Wrong, in every sense of the word, for the world it was currently in. The sword was a thing entirely not of Mizahar; the ore had been mined on another world, smelted and then cast under an alien sky and wielded by someone who’d never set foot on Mizahar.
Utterly different, and yet the same. Strange how shapes carried over.
Snap.
There it went, condition fulfilled with a full-force smash of her hammer, the floodgates opened and the glyphs firing in glorious, complicated sequence, drawing out the alien magic and accelerating it towards its date with destiny even as Alses stepped quickly towards the artifact and brought her charged hammer, groaning under the weight of alien djed, round in a sweeping strike right at the tortured heart of the vault door, a pulsing burst of magic that was as much a catalyst as it was a beacon.
Sparkling veils of the totally-unknown djed rippled and jagged through the essential structure of the door, a glimmering tsunami that sparked off an immediate and vigorous response from the door’s matrix.
Where once the diamond light of the djed conduits there had glowed, now it burned with a fury Alses had seen but a handful of times before. With impossible speed, new conduits wrote themselves into existence and exploded outwards, glowing bars of light slicing through the alien magic pouring in, a desperate and furious counterattack that would, in all probability, utterly annihilate the door and the sword, if allowed to continue unchecked.
There were several techniques that the old grimoires – and old masters – favoured for the next step, an array of procedures developed over the centuries and millennia since the gift of magecraft had first been bestowed upon primitive humanity, and Alses favoured the oldest –perhaps the most finicky and difficult.
Not that any magesmith could really help their own preferences; different souls and different personalities responded to different things. There was something to be said for the slapdash fluidity of Raganne’s recursive style, but there was something about the mirrored intricacy of the oldest methods that resonated with Alses, and so that was what she’d always used.
Well, on the very few occasions when she’d got to use a catalyst, anyway.
The slow accretion process, coupled with her own more urgent additions, all of it buffered and softened by the sprawling glyphic machine, had changed and solidified the insulted matrix of the vault door over the past few days.
It had evolved and changed in response to those unnatural circumstances Alses’ craft had caused; the high-djed environment, the destabilised conduits, the continual beating influx of djed from the reagents in their sparkling focus-circle, all the rest of it, and now her expert eye judged it about ready for the next step.
Indeed, it was perhaps more than ready; she’d wanted to be sure.
Not that it mattered. The glyphic lance which led from her otherworld sword right into the heart of the craft, its point resting – quiescent, for now – on the very edge of the centrepiece, was more than adequate, more than powerful enough, directed enough, for the job in hand.
In many ways, it had been the most difficult part of the whole glyphic assemblage, although in truth that could be attributed to a simple lack of practice. Lances such as the one she was using came by but rarely in the lower levels of the craft, hardly ever needed or used, and it had been a long time since she’d had the opportunity to reach the upper echelons of magesmithing.
Put bluntly, she’d been a little rusty.
But it was done now, shining and perfect and glowing, itching to work and yet perfectly controlled by the Triggers she’d carefully coded in, to release at her word and no other’s, when she was ready and not one tick before.
Alses could feel its coiled purpose as a sharp blade of ice and fire in her mind, a razored caress over her skin that left goosebumps in its dangerous wake, glowing bright and complex whenever she looked at it. It was a radiant highway, beautifully tuned and focused to one goal, one purpose: the channelling and direction of alien magic down to a single point, with no waste and no delay.
With a whisper of silk, Alses bent down to inspect the otherworld sword, her breath condensing on the blade as she scrutinized it. In and of itself, it wasn’t an impressive object. Silvery metal folded and beaten into shape, and then polished and sharpened at the edges. A bit of wire wrapped around the hilt in an interesting pattern was the only thing that outwardly could distinguish it from a thousand other swords, but in the sight of the aurist…
It burned in all the shades of impossibility, the wrongness of it screaming like a wound in the world, utterly alien impressions and feelings bursting off it in aberrant waves before they were beaten to conformity by the pressure of the rest of the world.
Wrong, in every sense of the word, for the world it was currently in. The sword was a thing entirely not of Mizahar; the ore had been mined on another world, smelted and then cast under an alien sky and wielded by someone who’d never set foot on Mizahar.
Utterly different, and yet the same. Strange how shapes carried over.
Snap.
There it went, condition fulfilled with a full-force smash of her hammer, the floodgates opened and the glyphs firing in glorious, complicated sequence, drawing out the alien magic and accelerating it towards its date with destiny even as Alses stepped quickly towards the artifact and brought her charged hammer, groaning under the weight of alien djed, round in a sweeping strike right at the tortured heart of the vault door, a pulsing burst of magic that was as much a catalyst as it was a beacon.
Sparkling veils of the totally-unknown djed rippled and jagged through the essential structure of the door, a glimmering tsunami that sparked off an immediate and vigorous response from the door’s matrix.
Where once the diamond light of the djed conduits there had glowed, now it burned with a fury Alses had seen but a handful of times before. With impossible speed, new conduits wrote themselves into existence and exploded outwards, glowing bars of light slicing through the alien magic pouring in, a desperate and furious counterattack that would, in all probability, utterly annihilate the door and the sword, if allowed to continue unchecked.
There were several techniques that the old grimoires – and old masters – favoured for the next step, an array of procedures developed over the centuries and millennia since the gift of magecraft had first been bestowed upon primitive humanity, and Alses favoured the oldest –perhaps the most finicky and difficult.
Not that any magesmith could really help their own preferences; different souls and different personalities responded to different things. There was something to be said for the slapdash fluidity of Raganne’s recursive style, but there was something about the mirrored intricacy of the oldest methods that resonated with Alses, and so that was what she’d always used.
Well, on the very few occasions when she’d got to use a catalyst, anyway.
