Before she started, Emery described each step in excruciating detail, including all sorts of tips on what to do and not do with each tool she was going to use. Serenity was glad he had Aide recording everything; otherwise, he’d have been lost after the first minute, much less the solid half-hour she took to walk him through the process she was going to use.
Talking was definitely something Emery was good at. Serenity listened, but a lot of it simply washed over him. He had no idea what a contradirectional ideated surface was or how that was different from an inverted transmission zone, but that didn’t really matter; Serenity would be able to see what Emery did. That would tell him everything he really needed to know.
First, she set the purified fire-heart on a heavily enchanted rectangular platter; its sides were tall enough that it was almost a bowl, but it was wide enough that the impression was closer to “platter” than “bowl”. The platter created an area of space that reduced the movement of mana that was attuned to an Affinity; the stronger the attunement was, the more the mana was slowed down. It wasn’t a strong restriction, but it was still not hard to figure out what an “inversely restrictive cohesional area” was when he saw the effect it had on ambient mana.
Oddly enough, the fire-attuned essence in the fire-heart didn’t seem to be slowed. It created a strange effect in the fire-heart; before, the mana and essence moved together. Now that they were both in the box created by the platter, the essence moved significantly faster than the mana. They moved through each other, but Serenity could still see places where they interacted, places where the essence moved unexpectedly. As he watched, he saw that the mana also moved in odd directions at those spots; it was simply enough slower that he hadn’t immediately noticed.
The interaction between essence and mana was one of the things he was trying to learn more about; this demonstration alone would be worth a lot when he had time to think about it. Aide was already running models; apparently it had some similarities to both electromagnetism and optics, but Maxwell’s equations didn’t seem to apply. The fact that the enchanted platter (which Emery called an “anticohesional zone establishment stone”) was clearly doing something to the mana didn’t help with the analysis.
Emery waited for a full minute before she did anything. “Now that it’s had a chance to settle into the zone, we can start. The zone serves two purposes; first, for safety, it prevents fast movement of the fire-heart’s mana and essence. With that restricted, I can treat it like the contents are a liquid.”
Serenity wanted to ask what restricted the essence; as far as he could tell, it moved freely. The only thing he could think of was those odd spots where the flow of mana and essence tangled strangely. Before he asked, he decided to watch what happened next. If he remembered her description of what she was going to do correctly, he’d get to see what she meant momentarily.
With that, Emery suited her actions to her earlier words. She pulled a tool out of her bucket and rapped the top of the fire-heart’s shell, followed quickly by a rap on the side. Serenity could see she’d cracked the outer shell; like an egg shell, just a crack didn’t seem to be sufficient to actually cause a leak. She then grabbed something Serenity could only describe as two pairs of enchanted tongs (he’d have to look up what Emery called them later) and used them to carefully pull the cracks open and invert the fire-heart.
The fire-affinity essence poured out of the cracks and into the bowl-like platter. The fire-attuned mana followed it as if it were a piece of cloth that was sewn to the essence at the odd points Serenity had noticed. It slowed the fall of the essence, but most of the effect was limited to the areas near the connection points.
Emery kept the tongs out of the way of the mana, but a good bit of essence spattered across the one in her right hand before she got it out of the way. She jumped as one of the spattered bits was sent out of the area protected by the platter and straight into her shield Skill. “Dammit, I know I kept it out of the way, why does that always happen?”
Serenity blinked. That meant she didn’t know they weren’t both slowed, didn’t it? “It was the fire-essence. It fell faster than the mana did and hit your tongs.”
Emery paused and looked directly at Serenity instead of at her tools, the way she’d done for the past half hour. “You can really see that? I thought it took special equipment to see it, I’ve never heard of a Skill that will let someone actually see essence.”
Serenity shrugged. It was his base Affinity as a dragon, though as he learned more about essence he was beginning to think that it was far more unusual than he’d thought originally, since it was an alternative to mana rather than a normal Affinity. Of course, he’d heard about magic dragons in the past; those must be Arcane-Affinity, so mana rather than his essence. A broad Affinity wasn’t entirely unknown, simply unusual.
His base Affinity couldn’t be the only reason; Russ could also see and use essence, after all. “I’m not the only person who can, but everyone I’ve met who can has a reason or a very very long time practicing with it.”
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Serenity thought he’d already mentioned that he could see essence, but maybe she’d thought he meant that he could see the secondary effects or something? Maybe she’d just forgotten. It was also possible that he’d forgotten to mention it but thought he had; that was something that would require reviewing Aide’s recording to determine, and he didn’t think he cared enough.
“Huh. I’ll have to look for the Skill; it’d be useful.” Emery didn’t comment beyond that, which was a relief to Serenity. Instead, she shook the pieces that had once formed a shell around the liquefied, purified fire-affinity mana and essence and set them to one side. “The casing is contaminated. There are uses for it, but it has to be in something with a fire-earth combination. There’s no worthwhile purification method for such a small amount of material, but it’s still high enough Tier to be worth saving.”
Serenity nodded to show he understood.
The next step was the thing he’d really wanted to see. It was deceptively simple. Emery pulled out a tool that looked like a circle of wire with a wooden handle and dragged the wire through the liquid at the bottom of the deep platter. Without Serenity’s magesight, he would have seen nothing. With it, he saw as the tool snagged the slowed mana but slipped right through the essence.
Emery made several passes, then pulled out a tool that looked like little more than a dull wooden knife. Despite the enchantments on it, Serenity suspected that cutting wasn’t its purpose; if it had been, the knife wouldn’t have been dull. He didn’t know the first thing about enchanting, but it still involved magic. With magic, Intent was everything. Using a proper tool helped immensely; that was one of the reasons wands worked so well to hold spells. They could be used to point at a target.
Emery set the wire loop on the edge of the platter, just above the level of the liquid, and slowly spun it while passing the dull knife over it. It looked a lot like someone twirling spaghetti onto a fork, trying to get it to all lie flat and not tangle. The mana was pulled out of the mixture slowly and wrapped around the wire loop.
It worked decently until Emery picked up the first knot where the mana and essence were tangled. When she ran the knife over it, she could clearly tell something was different about that spot, but Serenity didn’t think she could tell what it was. She worried at it for a bit until it was clear she’d decided that she wasn’t going to get it to lie flat the way she wanted it; when she made that decision, she pulled a clear glass rod with a large glass ball at one end out of the tool bucket, set it down beside her, then pulled out a real knife.
The knife was made of a silvery alloy of some sort; Serenity could tell it wasn’t steel, but he wasn’t sure what it actually was. Whatever it was, it looked very sharp. Sharpness couldn’t cut mana on its own, but as the knife showed when Emery gestured as if she were cutting the knot, it could be used as a tool to carry the Intent that actually did the cutting.
Serenity had seen tools a lot like the one Emery used in rituals; in fact, he’d used quite a few himself. There were many rituals that included symbolically cutting something, and a knife that never cut anything physical but was still capable of it and designed as a knife was a good choice. He’d also used them to break spells; these days, he could manage that without the need for a physical focus, but he’d needed the help once upon a time.
Emery set the wire loop on the tool holding the spun mana against the bulb on the end of the glass rod. The mana migrated from around the wire into the bulb.
Serenity wasn’t all that interested in that part, so he turned his attention back to the “liquid” in the platter’s depression. It was very obvious now that it was unbalanced, with more essence than mana. He hadn’t yet seen what she actually did with the essence, but it was clear that Emery worked primarily with mana. He was still curious what she’d do with the essence once it was separated, but he’d seen enough of her separation process to have some interesting ideas about ways to work with both in the future.
It wasn’t enough yet to really understand the interaction, but he had a starting point now that he’d lacked before. Maybe if he -
Serenity’s thoughts were interrupted by something moving in the air nearby. Serenity reflexively snatched whatever it was out of the air; it looked more like a magical object than anything else, but that made it more of a threat rather than less of one. Grabbing it certainly had risks, but he knew from long painful experience that they weren’t worse than not dealing with it.
It lay inert in his hand. That definitely wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. One glance at it told him why it was inert: it was an emergency bead and it had been sent to him. If it had been sent to anyone else, it would have immediately started moving again.
Serenity’s mind flashed to the emergency beads he’d handed out to his friends. He’d only handed out a couple dozen of the ones Tirmanak gave him, just in case. They could only reach him, since they were tuned to members of Order’s Guild, but they were still useful as long as the person who used them made certain to tell the bead to find Serenity. He’d told them to try not to use them casually, but everyone knew that they were to be used if it was necessary.
Rissa or Ita could have contacted him if they had an emergency, but all that did was narrow who could have sent it to one of his friends that wasn’t with either of the people who could easily speak telepathically to him. Legion undoubtedly had a body with either Rissa or Ita, so it wouldn’t be her, either. Blaze, Raz, Kerr, or Honoria could potentially need his help.
“I’m sorry, Emery, but I have to run.” Serenity held up the emergency bead so that she could see it. As an enchanter, she ought to recognize what it was without him taking the time for an explanation.