August 4th, 5AC
The noon sun was beating down on the stone roof overhead before Timothy finally managed to find a few free moments. Not that he'd wasted the morning. He’d managed to polish off a few enchanting contracts for a significant bit of coin.
Speaking of contracts… He stood, walking over to activate the drop box and retrieved a quick note from Da. “Hello Son, blah blah blah. Received the box of charms, blah blah blah. Will commission… Your loving and exceedingly patient father.”
Timothy grinned wryly, patient his ass. That was what he was there for. What use was authority if you couldn't pawn off boring assignments to minions?
And it hadn’t even taken much of his time or effort to throw that box together. He'd pulled out the original demo pieces for the threshold wards and tossed in a few simple tunneling enchantments. None of them were great examples of the art, of course. The demos were made from simple materials and had abysmal mana efficiency. But they didn’t need to be more than that to check the basic viability. Or lack thereof.
And if they weren’t enough, then they were shit out of luck. He didn’t have an extra set of real Threshold wards just lying about. Funny that. Nor would he waste the time or resources invested in such a set by using them in a temporary location.
He wrote down a reminder at the base of the wooden plaque. He'd need to check on them later and probably run the enchants himself at least once. Just because delegation worked, didn't mean he trusted the results without doing his own checks.
With a satisfied sigh, he tossed the plaque into his 'in work' basket and strode out of the room. The busy work wasn't over, it never really was. But at least he'd fed it enough for one day. It was time to do something much more interesting.
It was a project he'd been working at, on again, off again, for quite some time. With the enthusiastic support of a circle of Origins, and the not-so-enthusiastic support of Oscar, or Spirit Father as most called him now. He snickered a bit remembering that conversation…
“Come on Oscar, just call it a spirit journey for their coming of age!”
“Timothy, first it's called a vision quest. Second, what tribe do you think I’m from?”
“...ah, no idea.”
“Exactly. While we may all look alike to you, I assure you, we don't all do the same wacky medicine dances. Nor do we all go on drug-fueled dream quests!”
“Come on Oscar, I didn't mean it that way.” Timothy protested. “Nor am I trying to pretend I know shit about native tribes. If you don't want to call it that, then don’t. Vision quest, spirit journey or just plain final exam. I don't care what we call it. What I do care about is having my students survive the first year on their own!”
“They need to experience exactly how bad it can be, how quickly things can go wrong. And they need to do it now before it costs them more than they can pay.”
“Then go do it. Why do you need me?”
“Because you're very good at what you do! I need a very special spirit to make this work and while I might be able to find another way, it won't be nearly as good without your help. Also... well I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but I do want to borrow your culture as cover. If you're involved, most people should make the connection with a ‘vision quest.’ That's considerably more palatable than the reality.”
“Not selling it with that lead-in. I have no desire to be your token redskin!”
He stomped off while Timothy held his breath. Had the bait been tasty enough? His steps slowed, then at last stopped. Timothy fought the urge to crow in victory. Oscar let out an exasperated sigh and looked back over his shoulder. Almost regretfully he asked. “What alternative?”
“That I picked the idea up from Bullshit Bensen.”
He stared blankly at Timothy for a time, then finally his eyes widened in understanding. “....The Dream? You want to use the heroine of your time, the opiate of our masses, on our best and brightest? What the fuck Timothy?! Why not set up a graduation crack party while you're at it? Do you even know how many hopeless idiots willingly squander their lives dreaming of the past? And you want to make it worse?” He turned and stalked back to loom over Timothy, practically spitting out his words.
“Now you're exaggerating. Yes, his Dream isn't anything admirable. Druggies meet the lotus eaters with a side of 'I-went-to-school-walking-uphill-5-miles-in-a-snowstorm-both-ways.'” Timothy practically sang the refrain. “I get it, it's scummy. But that's a reflection of its owner, not of the concept itself. It’s a tool, and just because he misused it doesn’t make it evil. Or that we can't make something good out of it. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that. Or perhaps you prefer ♪Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be abused by you♪” Oscar stared him down, unblinking. “Not quite your jam hmm? Never mind then. You still get the point don’t you?”
“Is cocaine a tool to you as well?”
“Didn't the Incans use it to fuel a messenger service? Sort of a super-powered coffee? How about peyote if we’re talking about vision quests.”
“Again, what tribe do you think I am?”
“Alright, alright! Tar me and feather me oh cultural police. But do it later. The issue here is more important. Letting these kids experience life-threatening situations without, I hope, permanently dying. I can't pull a tutorial out of my ass, this is the next best thing.”
“...wait, you hope?”
Timothy sighed, “Magic isn’t real big on blank checks my friend. Just because It’s in their heads doesn’t mean it’s not real. It's just a different reality. Getting gored by a hog should hurt to all hell, but in a dream as long as they keep dreaming, it shouldn’t take as the final end. They should be safe and I've put in a number of protections to twist those odds heavily in our favor.”
“What I'm more worried about is spell backlash. To make this useful I'm going to drive them to the brink. That's all well and good if they fall off. But what if they go all noble and toss off a deathstrike? Backlash scares me, I don't mind admitting it. The Dream I plan for us to create won’t kill them, but I'll have a much harder time stopping them from killing themselves.”
Oscar sighed, his eyes suddenly bleak. “We’ve lost too many that way already, you and I.”
Timothy grimaced bitterly. “Eighteen children that I taught. Would you like to hear their names?”
“NO! No thank you. I've too many of my own already. I don't need to bear yours as well. But are you willing to add to that number? This is risky.”
“I don't want to lose anymore. I really don’t. But the truth sucks. The harder I hold onto them, shelter them, the more I will lose later. So yes, I'm willing to risk it. I have some ideas here. Enough to hopefully save them from themselves. None of us will be able to say the same when they're off protecting some threshold and the shit really hits the fan.”
“...There is that.”
The laughter faded as he followed the memory through. It may have started with comedy, but it ended in film noir. He stood up and briskly walked over to a sideboard, trying to shake off the melancholy. He poured and rapidly downed a glass of water, staring off into space.
Life was like that, funny one moment, heartbreaking the next. He walked back to his work table and thumbed his way through a stack of wooden plaques. Stopping about a quarter of the way down he found what he was looking for.
Taking a trip to the other side of the room, he brushed a few old projects off a side table and fished out the alchemy slab from beneath a pile of enchanted slabs. The solid oval of compacted essence slate was a quarter of a foot thick and four feet by two feet wide. It wasn't exactly travel-sized. But then that was what magic was for.
He levitated it over to the central work table and carefully brushed the surface clean beneath it before setting it down. He took a few minutes to clean the board itself as well. Carefully running a rag dipped in alcohol over the shiny surface, before folding it over a finger to get into the sunken stone pits.
There were a number of those pits. From the large, sunken cavity at the center of the piece to the four smaller mixing chambers that radiated outward from it, then again out from them to the 12 ingredient input cavities. He polished each of them in turn, before moving on to the permanent runes carved throughout the piece.
It was a bit over the top honestly. A relic of a time when he wasn't really sure what was an active participant in the process and what was pointless chaff. Without more info, he'd been unwilling to take any risks and simply thrown the book at the problem. Rings of isolation and purification fought for place with thermal regulators and kinetic enchantments meant to physically mix the materials. The edges of the board held a larger circle, inlaid with leaded glass interrupted by two dozen symbols that stood for the more common mana types. Finely, the entire piece had several cleaning enchantments designed to purge the leftover materials after each run.
Unfortunately, he'd oversized everything but that cleaning enchantment! It was great at removing the last little pieces of a burnt herb or sticky residue but a decent coating of dust would strain it to its limits.
Timothy worked calmly, if not with any particular speed, checking each spell and connection as he cleaned it. That was one reason he hadn't fixed the problem. Doing this manually was a nice excuse to double-check the health of the enchantments.
The other reason was a standard enchanting byword. History. This was his first working prototype and much like a cast iron pan, the more you used it, the better it got. Breaking in a new, more carefully designed model would take a great deal of time. Time where he'd produce inferior results.
Finishing the cleaning, Timothy snapped his fingers, igniting the remaining alcohol in a surge of purging fire. It burnt out nearly as fast, its fuel gone and Timothy switched out his cleaning rage for a piece of alchemical chalk.
Sketching in labels for what ingredient should go where. Followed by a number of aspect symbols to resonate with each ingredient and emphasize the parts of them he actually wanted to use. He glanced frequently at his notes as he went, carefully double-checking the aspects, particle sizes and required temperatures.
The ingredient pits covered, he moved on. This time focusing on what he wanted the herbs and minerals to do. Some could be directly combined and he sketched in a connection. A straight, wide chalk line from the pit to the central chamber. Others had to be pre-mixed and he connected them to their respective sub-chambers. Then the sub chambers in turn to the center.
He sketched in another series of runes to meter the flow of materials. Both in quantity and time. It wasn't something that could be rushed and he took a full 20 minutes to get it just the way he wanted. Then another five to double-check his line work and make sure there were no errors.
When even that persnickety task was at last completed. he knelt down and opened a stone cupboard that filled most of the space beneath the table. He had to spend several minutes just unsealing the doors, a necessity considering the cost of the materials he kept within. General protections, masking enchantments to keep others from realizing there was anything valuable here in the first place and a few outright anti-theft enchantments that would instill crippling guilt in anyone who opened the doors without going through the proper forms.
Tedious. But it was only paranoia if they really weren't out to get you.
He opened the doors and paused a moment, considering the 72 small wooden pull-out drawers within. Each was considerably longer than it was wide and had a picture of the ingredient it contained on its lid. There was a considerable variety to dig through.
One drawer glowed, visible through the wood. Filled with a still living leaf that he'd purchased over three weeks earlier. Another had dried and crumbled herbs that could have been potpourri. A very pungent, cloying scent that made Timothy want to wretch. A line of drawers to the right side were filled with different powdered metals while the next column had the same consistency but was dedicated to bones from a variety of different species. The right side wasn't filled with drawers, but about two dozen clearly labeled stone bottles.
He pulled a wooden ladle, lightly plated with silver, from a pocket on the door. Then another that was carved and polished piece of white marble. Stepping through his list he removed a bit of this and a bit of that. One at a time to its prepared cavity. Each ingredient had its own proper handling, its own scoop of a complementary material and no intermixing was tolerated.
Letting out a breath, Timothy spent a few more minutes double-checking his work. Then, with a pleased nod, placed his hands in two hand-shaped indents on the extended oblong’s sides, outside the inactive mana control circle and pulsed the slab to life. Red and blue lights glimmered into existence above his ingredients, working ever so slowly over the materials contained within. This continued for a time, then a few icy gray grains the size of sand levitated out of one input pocket and followed the chalk line to a mixing chamber. Then another material followed suit. Each to its assigned locations while temperature and kinetics mixed and released the properties within each of them. Then the process repeated toward the central cavity. All at a slow, set pace that saw only a few grains of material mixing at any given time.
Timothy kept a laser-like focus on the proceedings. Speeding up or slowing down the process in tune with the twisting lines of mana, the scents and even colors as he fought to keep the reactions stable. Not because he'd made any mistakes in the setup, but because materials were never exactly the same.
Anything living had some variations in potency or content. Metals were a bit more reliable, but only if they'd been smelted properly, which was by no means something he could count on. Another damn thing they just couldn’t pull off as reliably. Mana interfered with everything! Thankfully this wasn't a particularly complicated mix.
It was excruciatingly slow, but Timothy didn't so much as twitch. He didn't ignore the sweat beading on his forehead, but only because dripping it into the mixing chambers would cause a very unpleasant reaction. But since he couldn't stop or free a hand either, he had to be satisfied with leaning backward and letting the streaming sweat fall on his chest instead.
Finally, the last grains were mixed into the center cavity and the shifting lights dimmed, then disappeared entirely. One of the piles was empty, and the process could not continue without it.
Timothy removed his hands from the prints and let out a relieved breath. Wiping off his forehead and grabbing a quick drink before he came back to the table and removed one of the labeled stone bottles from below the table.
It was stoppered with a large chunk of runed balsa wood, a difficult task for a wood so weak, but cork wasn’t available. The contents would be destroyed before the seal or the bottle that held it broke. You had to have the correct key. Which he did. He applied it, then carefully removed the stopper to pour a large viscous dollop of purified, condensed Tier 2 beast blood into the mixing chamber.
He quickly re-stoppered the bottle and reactivated the seal. Blood could be so temperamental. Even the purified forms. Going off if left exposed to the air, if the temperature varied too much or for any number of other reasons. Known and unknown. The seal mostly kept that sort of thing from happening. But it couldn't do that when the bottle was open.
He gazed down at the now bloody central cavity with a wry expression. It was ironic really, after all his careful measuring for the base ingredients, the blood just was poured in by eye. He didn’t have a choice. There was a wild component to powerful blood, even this kind and even after processing, that would react poorly to symbols like 'careful' or 'measured.'
He picked up a thin twig of Ayahuasca, still green and living but with the bark removed, and deftly folded the messy mixture into a paste, holding his breath the entire time.
Chalk as a base, then dried chamomile, live mugwort leaves, a tiny portion of powdered silver with sloth blood as a fixative. The chalk symbolized definition and control, Sloth blood for sleep and violence, chamomile for sleep and mental clarity, mugwort for vivid dreams. There were a number of lesser ingredients, but those were the keynotes.
And other than the chamomile they were all nasty. Some fully toxic, others could contaminate an aura or had wretched smells that lingered far longer than they should. Mixing them just made it worse. It wasn't wise to touch any mixture, even if it wouldn't harm him, sweat and dead skin definitely weren't intended ingredients. But in this case, it would do harm. Even breathing the dust could cause serious health problems.
With the initial mix completed, sticking it all together with the blood, he pulled back, pulsing a material removal spell to strip any particulates from the air before taking several deep gasping breaths. A few moments later, still breathing deeply, but now no longer quite so serious, he continued to work the paste into a more homogeneous whole.
Judging it to be well mixed and the texture to be about right he used the same twig to ladle the red paste onto another flat piece of essence slate, this one with several half cylinders about a half a foot long carved into its surface. He filled each of them, plus a good bit mounded up before placing an identical piece of slate on top and securing the two pieces together with stone pins. He had to apply a good bit of force, keeping his hands well back from the split between the slabs. Eventually, a thin line of red paste began to squeeze out, forced to fill, and overfill the molds and work its way out the sides.
Timothy applied a small stone wand to seal the two pieces of stone together, wiped the extra mess away and placed the now seemingly solid block into a waiting furnace. He began to gesture and chant, a Hawaiian invective this time, filled with stories of volcanoes and new life.
A few minutes later, he brought the chant to a close, and with a gesture of negation removed the mana from the heating elements, snuffing out the fire instantly.
Leaving the mold in the furnace to cool down slowly, he took a moment to wash up. Thoroughly scrubbing himself down first, then using magic, both on himself and to remove the leftovers, no matter how valuable, from the alchemy slate for disposal.
Nothing was placed back in the box. The active mixing spells would build up on the materials, and it just wasn't worth ruining an entire batch of ingredients to save a few coins. Finishing up, he went back and did it all over again. Soap and water in spades, followed by spells and even a few moments of solid introspection to check his aura for stray contaminants or signs of poisoning.
Necrosis was no joke, and the magical variants of it were both persistent and disgusting. Not to mention heavily resistant to healing. Despite all the risks, these ingredients were the best he could find. The ones that perfectly fit the task at hand.
Now he just had to take advantage of those properties. This wasn't his first attempt. Though attempt wasn't really the right word. He'd run a few experiments to check reaction speeds and how the mana would flow. Then worked up from there to try out different portions, or sub portions really, of the final spell individually. Then walked through how they all fit together. Stress testing the narrative schema that would tie the spell together and give it purpose.
Hell, he'd tested dozens of alchemical mixes not much different from the one cooking away, just to find the most effective. Now it was time to put it all together into something far more than the sum of its parts.
This was his solution to the problem he'd told Oscar about, so many months before. A small-scale Kobayashi Maru of his very own. A final test to the breaking point before he set his poor young lambs loose on the world. Or young wolves, he allowed. The test should separate the two.
And no way in hell was he letting some schlep hack it for an easy win.
Then again, it might be amusing to watch them try. He snickered a bit, going through his notes again while he waited for the chalk sticks to cure.
The last bits of sand fell from a nearby hourglass, or rather a five-minute glass and he levitated the stone mold out of the furnace. The same stone rod made the solid seeming stone into two once more and he opened it next to a window, magicking up a breeze to blow any fumes away. Six sticks of blood-red chalk stared up at him. Albeit sticks he'd have to wrap securely if he didn't want his hands to rot off. Between tongues and some expensive woven hemp, he quickly fixed that problem and was ready to move on.
Then it was only a short walk down the inner hallway to the door to the ritual room. Removing the locks, traps and wards from the door took far longer than the walk, Timothy reflected as he chanted and gestured his way through. Finally, the door softened, pulsing like a lake, inviting and waiting. Timothy snickered. He was rather proud of that trap. Liquid stone 'doors' were pretty common. When it liquefied this way most would step in. They would not, however, step out.
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He waited another 30 seconds and the liquid swirled before separating in the middle. When it opened enough he stepped through. Then had to spend several more minutes repeating the process in reverse to reseal the room. Not to mention activating a number of additional defensive enchantments. He really couldn't afford to be interrupted mid-ritual.
Finally ready he let out a sigh. Stretched his arms out and popped his neck, then got down to business. Minutes changed to hours as, on his hands and knees, Timothy first checked over his previous work for errors or irregularities, then began to expand upon it. Deftly, if not quickly, sketching out clusters of linked runes, indicators for the eventual enchantment. The chalk would prep the stone, but he would be going over every line to carve it into the floor and resonate it with the magic field later.
But that was not going to be today. Nor tomorrow or the day after. Powerful ritual magic wasn't quick or easy. It was, however, quite engrossing.
The large, round ritual room was already over half filled with chalked shapes, timing notes, quantities and directional indicators. All the extra bits required to control how the many separate enchantments would work together to make a greater whole.
A great deal of the work in front of him was just to make the spell as efficient as possible. Something a human, if he could still be called that, could accomplish. Pre-preparing the correct mana types so he wouldn't have to convert on the fly, removing antithetical symbols and aspects to prevent destabilization and smooth out the flows. Even partitioning the quantities to leave as much of his attention free as possible.
His soul was a raging bonfire compared to the spark of five years ago, but he still had limits. Five runes in a single rune word was something he could manage. More than manage he could do a couple in a single day. Six he could pull off if he was willing to spend the next day in bed recovering. Seven would take a serious sacrifice. Several fingers at the least. More depending on how much time he was willing to be out and how difficult the surrounding portions of the enchantment were.
That didn't matter much for most reactionary combat casts. Do X to Y was fairly simple. Even do X to Y while penetrating Z defenses wasn't too bad. If one cast couldn't do it, then just link several in a row. It was only with heavy ritual work that the limits on runic chains became an issue. For spells of this magnitude, he couldn't just cast a few spells, wait a half hour, rinse and repeat.
It had to be a contiguous whole. Even if that whole was stretched out over several hours. That meant that he had to design the various component spells to interact with one another as well as to carefully account for the many directions he'd have to split his willpower in.
Timothy snorted, mocking himself for arrogance. There was no way he could 'account' for everything. He was a one-eyed man in the land of the blind here. And he just hoped that his one eye didn't have cataracts.
He looked back at his notes. For all that it wasn’t possible, that didn’t mean he didn’t have to try. Account for everything he could, and trust his backups to handle the rest.
And with that in mind, he wasn't willing to offer up the sacrifices required for the longer runic sentences. Not without a damn good reason. And he didn’t need to. Even a seven rune sequence, no matter how potent it was, wouldn't have the complexity of meaning he would need for this. It wasn't just about power. A properly linked cascade of shorter runic chains building off one another to a crescendo was the only viable path he'd found after considerable experimentation and study.
It was also, unfortunately, very complex to set up. A recurring truth. If you were Superman, you could do it easily in one go. If not, then you had to spend a great deal more time and planning to make up for the difference in capabilities.
Like here. Timothy grimaced. He would need to redesign several smaller sections in the lower left quadrant. He’d hoped the simplified form he’d sketched out would handle the flow, but already he could see mild burning on the channels.
That took him another hour. The forms were familiar at least. It just took time and effort. He backed off, looking at the re-chalked section and tracing the lines through it.
Perfect!
He stepped back carefully, dodging the chalk lines on his way towards the back wall.
The cascade would start here. He gave the many triple runed triangles inscribed into the outer cylindrical wall a quick check. Aspect filters he called them and as their name suggested, they could block or meter a single aspect each. Like spigots on an infinitely large tank. These were permanent enchantments carved into the walls of the ritual room and inlaid with precious materials that mimicked the aspects they controlled. Expensive, but worth it already with how many times he'd used them.
He'd been doing this long enough to have a great deal of what he needed for the ritual was already pre-made. Plugs he just needed to find the right socket for.
Just.
He traced the first of those links inward, several feet from the walls to a series of quad-rune extractor enchants. Each a small portable altar, two feet in diameter by half a foot tall. They could be activated ahead of time, destroying the sacrificial items to release the non-native mana types he’d need. And also contribute some of the complex meaning you could only get from sacrificing an ingredient.
Many were concepts he either didn't fully comprehend or were far enough away from his base affinities that they were difficult for him to synthesize.
They were expensive little bastards and limited to a single aspect each. Permanently limited. Thankfully they were also portable and reusable. He'd also gone through this process enough with other rituals to have an entire room filled with them. A web spread wide for the more common aspects. And if that wasn't enough, he kept several blanks around, ready to enchant.
Each was made from a chunk of a forest giant's tap root. One where the tree above had died and fallen over, but some life still lingered below. He was careful who he sourced this particular material from. He didn't want the karma of harming one of the great trees on his hands. Aside from the morality, it just struck Timothy as dangerous. He couldn't really say why, but he wasn't ready to ignore the feeling either.
The- Timothy winced at the label but couldn't find a better one -ethically sourced tap root was perfect for the purpose. A tap root extracted nutrients and water from deep underground, pumping them up and delivering them to the tree above. Its primary attributes may be of wood, but the extractive nature was nearly as powerful and when enchanted correctly would take the driver's seat. Add in an array of containment circles, lead, silver and lapis, and material designation (specific to the aspect you wanted) and the cost was significant.
Again, with the time saved and their reusable nature, they were well worth the cost. That didn't mean the sticker shock wasn’t real.
Besides, what was the alternative? To have a separate ritual room in every exotic environment. Even then, he didn't know if there was a specific environment that would have all he needed. Not to mention that some of those aspects were less than friendly or very rare. An active volcano wasn't exactly easy to come by or to approach.
Even if he had one handy, and could safely approach it, some aspects were only available from man-made sources. If you couldn't produce them yourself were you just out of luck? No, the solution was the age-old method of man. Money.
Just buy the damn things! So he did, and the altars would extract what he needed from them.
Materials like cinnabar, acquired at truly ruinous expense from Mountainhold. Once processed into mercury, a highly unsafe task, it could be used as a backing on glass to make a mirror and in turn the aspects of mirror, reflection and truth could be extracted from it. A less potent version could be acquired from silver, or even still water if he was desperate.
Or he could manufacture it by converting similar aspects by hand, or rather mind. If he was extremely bored and willing to sit around for a few days doing nothing else. Newsflash, he wasn't. Besides, there was a kind of ranking on aspects that he didn’t fully have his mental fingers on. A qualitative difference between simple and profound connections. There was a complexity of meaning there that wasn't easy to reproduce. He couldn't really define how much it helped to have, but it did help. He'd tried using a still pond for a simpler introspection enchantment versus a mercury and silver mirror. There was no comparison. Money talked, and the bullshit walked.
Thankfully, he had sufficient coin and a willingness to spend it. He didn’t have to suffer through the cheaper options. He saw a show once that said if money can solve a problem, it wasn't really a problem in the first place. Seemed a bit extreme but throwing money at this problem was certainly the simplest and least problematic solution.
Of course, least problematic didn't mean perfect. Cinnabar had several other aspects to it as well. Metal, toxic, malleable, flow and many others. It wasn’t just reflections and truth. Everything had more aspects than just what he needed.
And there lay the second use of the altars. They were carefully enchanted to extract only the chosen aspect, trapping and containing the. And that containment was necessary. Striping out a single aspect left mutated materials.
Often they were just curiosities.
But not always.
He’d made a deadly poison that way once. It killed every plant in a quarter mile of his disposal site (out in the plains thankfully). Cleaning up and replanting after that mess had taken him weeks, not to mention dealing with a very angry sister screaming ‘I told you so...’ and not being able to disagree. That hurt. It hurt a lot.
Moving onward and inward from the altars, he traced the connections to an elaborately sketched ritual circle. Another pre-processing and filtering step. Through a set of temporary tri-rune aspect filters. It wasn’t complex or exciting, just another safety buffer to prevent surprises. Sometimes extracting a specific mana type didn’t come as cleanly as he’d hoped.
Then a set of spill-over buffers linked through a flow meter to a set of sub-mixing pools. Each set to mate compatible essences together in a manner where neither would overpower the other. Much like the grains from his alchemy board, mixing aspects wasn't a simple or easy task.
They had a tendency to devour one another instead of mixing.
Tracing past the mixing pools, he traced the linkages as they were heavily consolidated. Directing the flow into three sets of streams. Three distinct lines each leading to their own copper cauldron. These magnificent waist-high fluted copper pots were unfortunately not reusable.
They were runed for this one, specific task. To mix exactly this set of aspected mana inputs at exactly these rates, while containing and embracing the meaning within.
The density of meaning, and mana involved, meant they’d burn out after a single use. A pity considering the time he'd had getting the amount of copper he'd needed and then enchanting them with a penta-rune chain supported by four balanced quad-chains.
He might be able to melt down and reuse the copper. If the massive magic flowing through it didn't mutate the metal into something else. He'd found some awesome materials that way. He'd also found toxic waste.
Enough said.
This was the first point where the incoming mana would be actually claimed. Coloring it with his meaning. Much like making paint. Or paints rather. The various aspects were the pigments. Then several pigments together to get exactly the right shades. Shades of color and of meaning.
For the cinnabar, he wanted a bit of the old 'mirror, mirror on the wall' and show them who the biggest fool of all really was. He would force them to see a true, clear self-reflection. Who they really were when things got hot and the chickens came home to roost.
But he was getting ahead of himself. First mix paints. Then do the painting. By far the most complicated part. It didn't require power or massive amounts of mana. But it did require exceptional control and precise imagery. Enough so that he'd planned out a cascade of 20 runic sub-spells that started at three-rune chains all the way up to a single hexa-rune (and he wasn't looking forward to a day puking his guts out with a head that felt like a well-used smith's anvil) to tie them all together. The full instructions for brush strokes, the paint to supply it and the subject matter, all in one.
Excitement rose in him, but he ruthlessly stomped on it, turning away from the center and rechecking his notes versus the chalked floor. Comparing the two, bit by bit, piece by piece. At first at a distance, then dropping to his knees to get a better view. He went over every line, every rune and every altar placement and connective trace. Any mistakes and he would have to clean up and recreate that entire subsection from scratch. A circle made smoothly in one precise movement was strong, a circle with a couple pieces erased and re-sketched would fail at the worst possible moment. Fucking Murphy. The same theory held for runes or any other geometric shape. They had to be done correctly, in one continuous step.
It had seemed impossible at first. But as with most things in life, if at first you don’t succeed… Years worth of practice stood him well. Only one small subsection of runes and a filter had to be removed, cleansed and recreated.
He stepped back to the beginning, ready to place the consumable components and adjust the aspect filters. Aspects of night, moon, restful water, humanity and some specific scent-based aspects were desired, so night on a full moon, he mused while marking the appropriate spigots. He moved on to the elemental, seasonal and other celestial aspects carefully sealing each filter shut.
The numerous altars, split into three widely spaced, but not equally sized, triangles were next. The first triangle was for lucid dreaming. The night, moon, scents and restful lapping of the river currents were bled into this triangle to mix with an additional supply of mugwort, the eyes, windows to the soul, of a beast that died peacefully in its sleep (rare that!) and a well used enchanted bridle, purchased from one of Tucker’s boar cavalrymen, for control.
The next triangle stood for the antagonists in their little world. Beasts to apply stress, violence and the common tests of life to the students. It was by far the largest of the three triangles, but surprisingly also the cheapest. Tiered beast parts were expensive, but mostly the meat and specific bones. Bones that rarely included the skull. Only the piranha heads were widely used, and they were so common that there wasn't really any increase in price. He carefully placed a different skull on each altar, having to prop them up to fit considering their significant size. Hog, panther, piranha, Earth toads and poison frogs, hovercroc, blood bat, terror bird, compy, dilo and raptor.
He would have loved to have a Rex skull, but even if High Plains Hold had one, no way in hell would Holla sell it. Not for the moon on a platter. Nor would it fit in this room, much less on an altar, but hey, he could dream. Each skull held a few symbols drawn on them in their own blood directly after death. Spirit evocation spells he'd purchased off Holla along with the skulls, and at a very reasonable price.
Just so long as he got to try out the finished product. Only a few non-skulls filled the remaining altars. A cup of three-toed sloth blood for violence and sleep, like the mugwort in the first triangle, it would tie the spell together with the chalk lines and create a common theme that would allow all three streams to merge. And finally some coca leaves. To evoke the rapid heartbeat that heralded high stress, fear and adrenaline.
The last triangle was fairly small but exceedingly expensive. The outer aspect filters bled a wide dose of humane mana types to mix with only four altars. Cinnabar mixed with powdered silver for reflection. A floor tile, well scuffed and used, that previously graced the floor of Paradise’s courtroom, where a truth field sat.
Even if the field was poorly named, sincerity would do just fine here. Then there was Chamomile for sleep, relaxation and mental clarity in the third to tie the triangle into the chalk and make all three have a common point to work from.
Finally, he grimaced as he pulled out his pen-is-mightier and made a small cut on his left palm, blood for self and sacrifice. The cup the blood poured into was something he’d purchased from Bloodhaven, capable of purifying and preventing the blood from rotting or clotting (another promise to let the brothers try the finished product). He quickly bandaged the wound once the cup was an eighth full. The enchantments and connecting runes would not be done today anyway. He would have plenty of time to finish filling the cup.
Until then, dripping blood around would ruin everything so he was careful in his bandaging.
“It’s coming along quite nicely!” he muttered as he glanced at the massive swirls of colors and seemingly random objects with a wide smile. Only one thing was left to add, then it would be time to start carving the actual enchantments into the floor. Nearly the point of no return. Any mistakes now could be easily, if time consumingly, fixed. But moving forward that would no longer be the case.
He wasn't quite ready to take that step. But he could look and enjoy. All the pieces were here of what he hoped would be a masterpiece.
A masterpiece, he mused. It was easier said than done. Many paintings were beautiful, but that wasn't enough to break free from the ocean of talent and become something that stood out. It needed to tell a coherent story, but that also wasn't enough. Many paintings could pull that off as well. No, it needed a little something more. A willingness to reach beyond the tried and true and be willing to experiment with something new.
Timothy hoped that he would achieve that here. But only time will tell. He had all the components, but only in the execution would he see if his vision would fly, or fall flat on its face.
He snorted, refusing to be worried or depressed. This was his area and his dreams. If it didn't work the first time, then he would do it again and again until it did.
Not that doing so would be easy. Even if he ignored the time investment, it wouldn't be easy. Oh, the consumable ingredients weren't the problem either. They were expensive, but he had money and with time he could require them. The problem was with the canvas. It wasn't just any old material that could take the amount of meaning this ritual would generate. That he had it at all was a bit of happenstance, of true luck he couldn't count on happening again.
He walked out of the ritual room on tiptoes, smudging a line now after all his work would be heartbreaking, and with a grunt, picked up the results of his talk with the Spirit Father. A large bag of incense for true dreaming and a harpy eagle feather fan. Intricately carved wood and well-tanned hide interwoven with a single massive feather, it was so large he had to use both hands to lift it.
Harpy Eagles were fairly rare, and that was a damn good thing! They were pure murder on two wings. Royalty of the air. They were patient hunters, circling so high they appeared like a dot for hours on end, only to disappear in a moment. Trading height for speed in a way that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, striking like the wrath of the divine. Then back into the sky to circle in the span of a few blinks. Too fast for human eyes to catch it seemed. So fast that a watcher could be forgiven for thinking it had never left in the first place… Except now it held something raw and bloody in its claws and dinner was served.
It was a bit of a guess considering the danger and difficulty of getting close enough to see, but Timothy figured this bird would have about a 30-foot wingspan. He wasn't an expert, but comparing the primary feathers of a small sample of local jungle birds it was his best guess.
That majestic feather was united with its setting in an art form unique to Paradise. Not merely a recreation of a culture from the old world, but of the new in all its shining, terrifying beauty. Tightly carved and colored figures portrayed a story as old as time. Sleep, dream, learn, grow, awaken and let the dreams fade into concepts and directions, without clear memories. All of it interworked with beads, tanned and painted hide strips and multiple perfectly joined species of woods, all of different colors.
It was a masterpiece of its own, and Timothy spent several minutes going over every piece of it with pleasure. It was funny, even with all the spectacular workmanship, the setting paled in comparison to the feather itself. Perfectly preserved with every thin hair in its appointed spot. It was vibrant with an inner life that seemed to persist even after weeks of being disconnected from its owner. It was beautiful, but also instinctively terrifying. His hindbrain flinched at the size and sharpness of it. Screaming for Timothy to run away. Here lies a predator and you are prey.
Those with a weak will could lose themselves just staring at it. And yet when pulled away they wouldn’t be able to tell you much about the feather. Timothy had the will to resist the hypnotic effect, but he wasn’t any better off when it came to details. Even now he couldn’t really say where one color ended and the next started. Where the quill left off and the hairs shot out like an upside-down arrow.
He wished he knew more about the great bird it came from. All he had were guesses based on size. Unfortunately, it was a discard. A shed feather, he hoped it was used to line a nest. But the savage nature of its previous owner covered up many of the subtle details he could normally read.
And that truly was unfortunate. Aspects came not only from what something was but also from its history. A hero’s weapon, one who died in battle, was a very different affair than a coward's dropped blade. Even if the coward was a king and the hero a peasant. From acts of heroism and the sacrifice of its owner, the peasant's weapon, no matter how meager its start, was likely the superior enchanting base.
The feather likewise, would have been far more potent if Timothy had taken it from a defeated foe. He could even take advantage of the symbolism if the feather was lost in beast-on-beast combat. The cunning theft of the feather from a nest wasn’t a bad connection. A rite of passage even, he could make use of that.
But what he had, probably, was 'Cast-off.' And frankly, that wasn’t just not useful, it was actively harmful. Requiring him to hedge deliberately against it.
Still, needs must. Parts from such strong beasts weren’t exactly easy to come by. If there was a score in eagle hunting then it was definitely, Humans 0 -Eagles cha-cha-cha-ching!
Even a cast-off of such a beast was a potent relic. But it wasn't just the strength. The Paradisian Shamen believed that birds were part real and part spirit. That air was the domain of the imagination and the soul, the route to the heavens. Creatures capable of living in that hallowed space partook of those characteristics. And soul aspects were both critically useful and not terribly common. He wasn’t a big fan of eyeballs.
Its status as maybe royalty wasn’t nearly as useful.
Timothy smiled slightly. Royalty was actually stretching it. They might once have been kings. But there was something considerably scarier that called the sky its own now.
Oscar had really done him right with this piece. It’d taken months to create, delicately incorporating the feather without damaging it, and without allowing its future use to do the same, then it spent another month given pride of place above the central fire. The ritual fire, where Paradisians raised and worshiped their spirits. It was baptized in awakening rituals and empowered in turn by the great dance.
They'd awakened a proto-spirit in the fan. Not quite fully here, but that could change any day now. Timothy sighed, and he wasn't sure how he was going to repay them. The rituals Oscar and Lotsee had held weren't something that could be bought with coin. With several hundred dancers, from norms up through high Tier 2 in strength, guided by the acknowledged experts in their art, it was more than just a favor.
It was a debt.
One he’d have to find a way to pay it back.
He'd had more than a few favors stocked up with the two of them against a rainy day. Unfortunately, this had wiped them out and then some. Haaa. It was a different kind of broke. One that had nothing to do with coin and everything to do with reciprocal obligations.
But he didn't regret it. The fan would be worthless without a mind. It would start as a simple mind and soul but it wouldn’t stay that way. With regular use, proper teaching and care, the spirit would grow in maturity, if not in humanity.
In the meantime, someone would have to augment the spirit and guide it through its new role. Timothy didn’t mind taking up that role, he’d done it often enough before this. It was just the infantile stage that he couldn’t stand to deal with. The one the Paradisian duo had done for him.
Raising a spirit was something and nothing like raising a child. It wasn’t a clean slate on which parents would slowly write their own experiences and expectations in hope of allowing something new and special, though only within the expected boundaries, to step forth.
No, it was an already messy slate filled with fragments of memories, beliefs and expectations generously donated by the participants in the awakening rituals. Like most humans that meant they were self-conflicting, hypocritical and frequently wrong memories. Even so, the load of information would give the spirit a head start.
After it finished digesting that mess at least. Working through to find a consistent narrative in the sea of trivia and idiocy. Picking a few main memory groups to be dominant, then using them to swallow the rest.
From consistency, stability.
Of course, all of that was theoretical at this point. He had to actually succeed first. He tiptoed back across the elaborately chalked lines to the center of the room. Then propped the fan upright in the stand prepared for it.
He stepped back and took it in. An upright 6 feet tall feather fan stood out surrounded by six small three-legged copper braisers (not enchanted yet, still on the list). The outer right and the inner fan were connected together by two rings of copper. The outer had indents for two of the braisers legs while the third leg was connected to a six-pointed starburst pattern that made the base of the fan mount.
Out from there was an elaborate red chalked geometric construct, vibrantly standing out against the black slate of the floor itself and in turn connecting the copper ring to the cauldrons that would supply the mana paint. Which were connected in turn by a larger set of rings, stars, lines and runes to the aspect sources at the outskirts of the room.
He nodded in satisfaction. The outline was finished and it was all coming together. Several weeks still, that should put him at least a week shy of a full moon. A good opportunity.
Depending on the weather, general mood of the hold and any beast waves. Using human-aspected mana made him a bit more vulnerable to the Holds occupants and their state of mind than he'd like, but it couldn't be helped. If it wasn't a good fit, he'd just wait another month.
With graduation in six months or so he had time. And he would need it. Just finishing the enchantment didn't mean the fan would be ready to fulfill its purpose. The spirit still needed to be raised and taught. Not to mention saving enough time for each of his prospective graduates to use it. His current guess was no more than three a night. And that was a guess.
Still, just add a bit more time and that wouldn't be an issue. He carefully placed the leftover chalk, one full stick and the stub of a second, in a sealed cistern by the door. Then from the same cistern, he pulled out a set of polishing materials and his Pen-is-mightier before walking back over to the closest copper cauldron. Sure it was late, but he was too excited to be tired, and even if he had plenty of time, that didn't mean he wanted to waste it. Besides, if he waited till the last minute, some emergency would appear to ruin everything.
The demon Murphy was always waiting after all, and he had no wish to suffer his attention.