Gods, if every workshop had a metal mage, everything would go so much faster.

With Osra’s help, much of the drudge work of arcanistry was sped up to the point of no longer even being an issue. The accelerated pace was astounding. The pair had accomplished in a few hours what would have otherwise taken Talia half the day, if not more. The result was that they were left with just over a dozen identical, mithril-and-silverite-plated wands.

Talia picked one up at random to examine the enchantment on it, finding absolutely no faults, even after a thorough inspection. Osra’s shaper magic granted her unparalleled precision when it came to metal, and it showed. Even master arcanists had to do a second pass of revision to correct tiny errors, unintentional scoring of metal and the like. Inconsistencies that were the consequence of sapient hands and the inherent imprecision of tools. Osra bypassed it all, producing a perfect artefact right from the start.

Even the most efficient artefact designs had to make sacrifices, simply because a sapient being had to engrave or inscribe the work by hand. As it was, the only fault Talia could find with the fireball wands was that there was wasted space because of how precise the metal mage could get. It wasn’t a big deal for a simple enchantment such as this, but the arcanist resolved to keep it in mind for future designs, glancing over at the still untouched length of drearwood.

Do I still need it? If I take into account Osra’s precision, I might be able to condense down the enchantment onto a smaller piece of steel… Or on the inverse, I could make it more powerful. But that’d mean reinforcing the wood somehow. Steel bars maybe…

Talia missed the beginning of Osra’s sentence, caught in her musings as she was.

“…more today?”

Talia shook her head, setting down the wand with its brethren, to be charged later.

“Hmm?”

Osra huffed a tired chuckle.

“I was asking if you planned on doing any more today. Because I don’t think I can take much more. I need some rest, and maybe some cycling. My core is still too small to do so much,” she replied.

The mage apprentice didn’t look all that tired, but there was a tremor in her hands and a weariness in her eyes, beneath a frown.

“Oh—uh, I had planned on doing a little more but if you’d like, you can head off to rest. I’ll just start on some of the diagrams I have in mind. Tomorrow, we can work on the caltrops idea, and if we have time, get started on my big project. I have a plan, but your skillset means I have to review some of the math and do some reorganization of the arrays…” Talia trailed off as she noticed the other girl’s face scrunch up into an ever deeper frown.

“You’re not going to take a break?” Osra asked.

Talia’s brow furrowed, glancing at the timepiece on the wall above the door.

Hmmm. HMMM. Maybe my estimates were… a little off.

While the process had certainly been faster than creating a dozen wands by hand— just the time saved on forge work was immense— her original thought was off by nearly double the time. What had seemed like a couple of hours at the time was closer to four.

Thinking back, the lost time made sense. Some of the geometry for the schema had been off, then there was all the stencilling, ‘shaving’ the mithril and silverite into thin, banded sheets, before finally putting all the components together.

Still pretty fast… I could probably refine the process though, with a little standardization. Osra has also been learning quickly. I only had to stencil the first few sheets before she got it down. Hmmm. Maybe I could publish a paper on the idea once I get home.

Talia pulled her journal to her and scribbled in a few quick notes to remind herself of the thought later.

Clearly, magic has been underutilized in the field of arcanistry, as strange as that sounds. Or maybe it is being properly utilized, and I’m just unaware of it. That’s a troubling thought.

When she thought about it, why did the arcano-sun demand so much mage-power? Everything she knew about the Ancients’ work told her that for the most part, their runework tended toward hyper-efficiency, not the reverse. And yet, from what she’d learned in school, mages were always in demand. Always. Now, she wondered if that was a lie, or at least, a misdirection. Apart from the few jobs that demanded the presence of mages in the city, most were confined to the Upper Reaches, the hive of tunnels that riddled the stone above the arcano-sun. Talia frowned as she considered the idea, turning the page and jotting down a few more notes.

Osra cleared her throat right behind her.

“Talia?”

The arcanist turned to the other girl with bleary eyes, surprised to find her so close.

“What? Oh shit, sorry! I got a little lost in my head. You have no idea how quickly we got this done. I was just thinking about it and then one thing led to another and…”

Talia shrugged and smiled sheepishly.

Osra seemed unamused, all signs of the usually shy and reserved girl gone from her features.

“Yes, well, you’re right. I don’t have any idea. What I do know is that this morning you were hungover, and that you’ve been working all day. It’s time to rest,” she admonished, “ You’ll have plenty of time to dive into whatever it is you want to work on tomorrow.”

There was a note of steel in the girl’s voice that Talia hadn’t noticed before.

Maybe she’s right… I can’t afford to get lost in another fugue-like the one that started this whole mess. If I hadn’t stayed late that night…If I hadn’t taken a shortcut…

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Talia winced at the memories’ odd timing.

“You’re right. Why don’t we go get some food? We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow when we’re fresh,” Talia said.

Osra’s triumphant smile was blinding.

----------------------------------------

Talia trudged into wagon two with a full belly and sluggish thoughts. She squeezed past a freshly showered Calisto, gracing the chronicler with her best ‘tired face’, to stave off any possible conversation. It wasn’t hard, she really was tired.

After the older woman had climbed into her bunk, Talia pulled open her curtain, ready for nothing more than to slip into her covers and pass out straight away. What greeted her put a dent in her plans.

The young woman sighed as she witnessed the inevitable: the bottom of her duvet had been ripped to shreds, puffy fibres cocooned up into a little nest within which a curled little ball of fluff slept blissfully.

Quickly tugging the curtains shut, Talia sighed.

“Gods dammit,” she muttered.

The damage was…manageable, but the little shit had done a number on her bedding that would have to be patched up. After she’d evicted him from his impromptu nest.

Mindful that the damage done to her stomach could easily be reenacted on her fingers, to more permanent effect, Talia decided that a bribe was probably a better option than physically moving the little menace. She’d been treating the whelpling like a housecat, but he was still very much a beast. Gods only knew why he still hung around.

Probably because I keep feeding him.

She plucked a piece of jerky from her depleting supply and waved it in the little bugger’s face. He didn’t visibly react. In fact, he disappeared from view almost immediately. Talia rolled her eyes.

“Going invisible doesn’t help if I know where you are,” she grumbled.

The young woman pulled back the hand holding the treat before the lynx could get any ideas. She tossed it to the floor instead, ensuring that he saw the movement. The ripple of disturbed fibres and bedding prompted another eye roll from her as he leapt from his spot on the bed.

Satisfied that he would gnaw on the jerky for a while longer, Talia stuffed as much of the fluffy substance of her bedding back into its sheet before grabbing her sewing kit.

Thank you, Orvall, for thinking of everything.

At some point, the godsdamned cat climbed up onto the wood above her and peered down at her work with wide, orange eyes. The bottom of Calisto’s bunk was scored and scratched with the marks of his passing by now.

Ugh. Good enough. Not good as new, but good enough.

Talia tilted her head to glare at the feline eyes staring down at her with curiosity.

“My bed is not to be ripped at, you understand?” she said.

The godsdamned cat only meeped piteously at her before vanishing.

Talia sighed.

She’d been planning on sleeping, but the lynx’s behaviour gave her the perfect excuse to cross another thing off her list of tasks. And, as a bonus, that meant diving into the Weave-Fragment again. Much as she knew she should sleep, a little kernel of giddiness sparked awake at the prospect of diving into that grand trove of knowledge again.

Scooting around to make herself comfortable, Talia propped up her pillow against the backboard and leaned against it, closing her eyes. A thought was all it took for a sliver of mana to sluice through her channels like liquid gold. Under her armour, she knew that the tattoo on her shoulder would be glowing. The tendril of her mindsense was already there, at her fingertips faster and stronger than ever.

Practice pays off.

Without hesitation and with no small amount of glee, Talia plunged it into the Weave-Fragment, gasping as the dark of her eyelids was whisked away, replaced by a tapestry of golden silk.

Though she’d succumbed to temptation, the young woman kept her mind focused on her goal: a glimpse from when she’d first explored this place, of a nest of Crescians long turned to dust who had used their psionic prowess to domesticate and train animals. A flicker of thought and a twang of metallic silk under her fingers was all it took for the knowledge to present itself to her. It appeared as a condensed set of memories stripped of emotion or personality—though Talia could still tell that they were in fact memories.

The threads weren’t at all like a book. There would be no skipping through pages, looking for keywords. Nor was there an index to guide her. She would have to live the experience of those Crescians who had pioneered the process in the sequence they’d been recorded in.

At least Talia knew from prior experimentation that she didn’t have to relive the entire thread. She could stop midway and pick up where she’d left off afterwards. Likewise, either her mind or the Weave-Fragment itself remembered when she’d already explored a thread, allowing her to pinpoint the information that she wanted once she’d experienced it once before.

Setting aside her giddiness again, Talia reached her fingers into the thread and pulled it towards her head.

Her vision went yellow, and she closed her eyes.

When she reopened them, she wasn’t herself.

She wasn’t even in her own body.

Ishmael’s saggy tits this is amazing. It’s like I’m on the Surface. Again. And I can do this whenever I want!

The young woman had to bury her excitement, focusing her attention on what the memory wanted to show her, watching as a group of females brought a thoroughly cocooned being toward her.

The creature was so tightly bound that it couldn’t even struggle or move.

I thought Crescian silk was sharp. Shouldn’t it be bleeding out right now? Can they change the consistency? I wonder— ugh focus. Plenty of time for that later. Goals first, remember? Then idle curiosity.

The beast was hard to analyze, covered as it was in golden silk. Its face was round and flat, a leathery red surrounded by a halo of fur that most likely covered the rest of its body. It was devoid of a nose— unless you could call the two slits in its face a nose— but had a large mouth full of blunt, stout teeth.

A spark from the memories of the ancient matriarch whose body she inhabited told Talia that it was a tree climber with deft hands made for clinging to branches and plucking fruit. The name of the plant didn’t translate well from the arachnid’s consciousness to Talia’s, but the young woman understood that the fruit was delicious and that the beast before her lived in great herds that defended their tree homes religiously. Each fruit clawed from the clutches of the tree dwellers cost the matriarch a score of warrior males, unsuited as they were to navigating the canopy.

Yet still, the matriarch wanted more.

Such was her desire that Talia almost wished the memory had recorded the taste of the fruit for her to sample. Unfortunately, that part of the memory had been erased along with any remnants of personality. The urgent need had only been left as a way to justify the actions of the long-gone nest mother.

Damn. I guess greed is the great motivator.

The matriarch was attempting to train the creature before her through the use of psionics, to convey an impulse not unlike the ones she used to control her drone-like males.

The goal was simple: if she could compel the beast to bring a part of its harvest to her, then there would be no need to war over the delicious resource. Peace and prosperity through domination.

Talia frowned, watching as the matriarch brutalized the tree dweller’s mind, clumsily batting at its instincts until it seized up and died.

This…is not what I need.

But morbid curiosity had her hooked and she kept watching as another test subject was dragged forward, already screeching futilely in its cocoon.

It took over a dozen iterations, but finally, once dead body after dead body had been dragged away to fill the larders, the matriarch succeeded. Talia begrudgingly followed the psionic tendril as it wormed its way through the subjugated creature’s mind, planting impulses like bloody stakes into its head.

Definitely not what I was looking for… I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to do that to another living being…

The young woman tactfully ignored the little voice in her head that whispered that she’d already done so when she’d compelled the blight devils to fall to their deaths.

Luckily, that first memory wasn’t where the thread ended.

Talia braced herself as she was tugged out of one body and thrust into another. She crossed her fingers that the next would be more useful.

Either way, the whole thing was…fascinating. Exhilarating in a way she’d only briefly experienced in her meeting with the Matriarch in the Chasm.

She couldn’t bring herself to stop, answers or no.