It took half the day to complete Talia’s redesigned ash lance. The time saved was mindboggling. Similar designs that the Last Legion had commissioned from Reggie had taken weeks of work and multiple skilled hands. Talia had expected even her revised version to take at least that amount of time. Osra had done it all in three, three-hour sessions.

And that wasn’t all.

The original schema Talia possessed made necessary concessions to the practicality of inscribing runework. Spaces left for potential error, larger gaps between channels that could arguably be narrowed if sapient hands could be trusted with that kind of precision. With physical labour out of the equation… The capacitors alone could be compressed to a degree that the young arcanist would have once thought unthinkable.

But after seeing Osra’s work with the wands, Talia had resolved to do away with the bloat and refine the schema to be as sleek and compact as possible. The design work on its own had taken a quarter of the total time of the construction process.

It’d been an…interesting puzzle. Talia had been forced to go against much of her technical training, and revising her final draft had been gruelling, mostly due to how compact she’d been able to make the whole thing. The arcanist was lucky she hadn’t been starting from scratch; ash lances were a known quantity, and there was only so much she could change. In the end, however, all her—their— work had been worth it.

It was such an improvement over the original that Talia had considered renaming it, but after Osra had heard about the Infiniwand, the mage apprentice had firmly vetoed the idea.

The completed weapon now sat imposingly in the middle of wagon seven.

The barrel was just under a metre long, which combined with the back chassis meant to contain the ash and triggers, made the entire thing a bit shorter than Talia herself. It gleamed under the manalamps of the wagon, coated in flowing runes and spiralling channels. It was mostly steel under the bare silverite and mithril, though the chassis had been hungry for the arcanic metals.

With an eye for practicality, Talia had asked Osra to form a mount to bolt the weapon to out of their remaining steel. The tripod would have to be affixed to the roof of whatever wagon Torval deemed appropriate, but that was a job for the expedition’s trio of engineers, not her. It had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc, wherever they chose to place it, but the ability to point more than a handful of degrees downward was iffy and meant almost lifting the lance out of its socket. Whatever operator she trained in its use would have to stand—a chair had seemed excessive— but given the ash lance’s destructive power, she doubted that the obvious target would be in any actual risk.

If anything, the person standing behind this thing will probably be the safest person in the whole wagon train. This. This is my masterpiece.

“It’s…”

Talia interrupted Osra.

“Beautiful.”

The other girl opened an eye and glanced at the arcanist from where she was cycling to recover some mana.

“I was going to say, a little terrifying. If it does what you said…”

Talia tittered a giggle tinged with mania.

“Oh, it does more than that. With the space you helped me save, I added some intensifier runes on most of the sub-arrays. They’re usually considered too inefficient, but with the denser channels and your precision, I couldn’t help myself,” Talia crooned, examining and re-examining the lance with delight.

“Right…I understood most of the words you used, but not the order you used them in,” Osra replied, unimpressed.

Probably just exhausted. Must have taken more out of her than I thought.

The mage apprentice’s good cheer had faded away the longer the pair worked. She’d returned to the dour and silent Osra that Talia had first met. The arcanist had brushed the oddity away as a worker’s trance. It wasn’t too uncommon for arcanists to…forget themselves in their tasks, after all, and spellwork was mentally taxing to begin with, no matter the mana expenditure.

“Talia?” Osra called.

The young woman raised her head from where she was inspecting the heating arrays on the lance’s barrel; she frowned as she saw the expression on Osra’s face.

“Hmmm? Is something the matter?”

Osra twisted her hands uncomfortably in her lap, unable to meet Talia’s gaze.

“I’ve been thinking—”

“Always a dangerous pastime,” Talia quipped, aping her master.

Osra remained unamused, staring at a spot on the wall that held nothing particularly interesting.

“I mean about what you said. About the uh— the Enigma?” Osra said hesitantly.

Talia sobered and went to grab a chair, finally noticing that something was wrong. Osra continued, still unable to meet the other girl’s eyes.

“It’s just, I mean, why would the gods allow that to happen? If we can’t fix their works, because we lack the knowledge of their holy script, then why did they allow it to be lost in the first place?”

Talia was taken aback by the line of questioning, seemingly out of nowhere. Just hours prior, she’d assumed that the Enigma, while not common knowledge, was still a fairly widespread fact. Clearly, she’d been wrong, if the mere mention was enough to provoke a crisis of faith.

The whole situation made the young woman distinctly uncomfortable. The closest she’d ever gotten to organized religion was swearing by the Ancients’ names on occasion. Or perhaps visiting the Angrim Stonecrypt when she was still a girl—if that even counted.

I am not the person to be asking about theology. Gods—argh no, not gods. Ugh, dammit.

Talia held in a frustrated sigh and wracked her brain for some kind of reply.

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“Look. I’m, uh, not very religious. Like at all. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Temple once,” Talia said, not unkindly, “but the way I see it, if the gods or the ancients or whatever exis—ahem— want us to survive, then the solution will present itself, right? I don’t know, maybe this is some kind of test! Right?”

Osra frowned at Talia’s slip of the tongue, not at all comforted by her words.

“Maybe you’re right, and this is some kind of test, and the answers await us at the end of our journey…” Osra said slowly, “My father says that they have given us all we need, and that we just need the fortitude to reach for it. I guess— I guess I just got caught up in despair.”

The apprentice mage looked up to meet Talia’s worried stare and sighed, curling in on herself ever so slightly.

“It’s a lot, is all. The last delve I was a part of was…well it wasn’t this. It was almost boring really. Now we’re off the Deep Ways, floundering around fighting our way through toxic chasms under the threat of a Migration with the pressure of the whole world on our shoulders and—”

She cut off with a ragged breath.

“It’s terrifying, but I always had faith. Now? It almost feels like the gods have abandoned us,” she whispered, “Am I crazy? You must feel it too, right? How do you deal with it?”

Talia sat rigid in her chair, unsure of what to do and what to say; Osra glared at the floor with tears of what might have been frustration or fear threatening to burst from her eyes.

“I uh…” the arcanist started before trailing off.

Osra sagged, disappointment clear in her posture. It sent a pang of shame and compassion through Talia. She had to hold herself back from reaching over to pat the other girl’s shoulder.

“Usually—my whole life actually—when I felt things I didn’t like, I put them in a box, packed that box away, and told myself I would deal with it later. It was hard sometimes, but it let me move forward when I really needed to.”

Gods, Lazarus is going to hate me for saying that.

She hurried to correct herself.

“But—”

They were interrupted by the snick of the curtain pulling open to allow someone into wagon seven. Osra righted herself immediately, wiping away the streaks on her face and rearranging her flowing robes.

Dammit.

“So, Zaric told me told me you had a surprise for us?” Torval rumbled.

Talia jolted, turning toward the delvemaster where he stood with Calisto and Darkclaw in tow.

“Delvemaster! Um, right, the ash lance. I don’t suppose you remember when you asked me for firepower?” Talia said before chuckling to herself.

Her little pun wrung a quirk from the man’s lips, though Calisto and Darkclaw were far more intrigued with the massive weapon that sat in the middle of the room. Torval looked it over as well and graced Talia with a raised eyebrow, gesturing at it and prompting her to explain.

“So, I figured, even though we aren’t fighting Crescians, it might be in our best interest to arm ourselves a little more…heavily. So I took the liberty of making a few dozen fireball wands to complement our other weaponry,” she said, getting up to bring over the crate she’d stored the battle wands in, “ These should hold a pretty good charge, and allow us to get the most out of our backline fighters. Honestly, training someone on how to use one isn’t even that difficult, so if you wanted to hand the extras out to some of our non-combatants, that would work too—”

Torval nodded and cut her off with a raised hand.

“I’m familiar with the utility of battle wands. They’ll certainly be a boon. I’m far more interested in what this device is, so why don’t you enlighten me? I’ll admit my ignorance as far as most complex arcanic weaponry goes.”

Calisto scoffed and jabbed an elbow into the delvemaster’s ribs.

“Come now, Torval, even I can see that it’s an ash lance, though this one is… much smaller than normal. The Legion uses them on the walls, and in some of the mines,” the chronicler explained, turning to Talia with curiosity in her eyes, “How did you ever manage to get one done so quickly? I was under the impression that these took a not insignificant amount of effort to create…”

Talia beamed, turning to gesture at Osra, who—wasn’t there.

Must’ve slipped out when I wasn’t looking…

After a brief pause, the young woman recovered and walked over to the lance, caressing it like a mother would her child.

“Er— Usually it does. With Osra’s help though, I was able to improve on the original design, and she got it all done almost single-handedly. Today. I didn’t have to inscribe a single rune, just some sketch work. Now it’s smaller, and if I did my job right, much more powerful,” Talia explained, drawing closer to the lance and beginning to point out areas where she’d added modifications before describing how it worked.

By the end of her explanation, Torval looked suitably impressed and Darkclaw looked…hungry. Calisto had returned to her default state of casual diffidence.

The delvemaster turned to his second.

“Why don’t you get the triplets, and we’ll see about having it installed on wagon one—”

Darkclaw interrupted.

“No. Wagon two. Maybe three. One too close, too far. Middle is better.”

Torval shrugged his assent as Darkclaw turned his predatory gaze onto Talia, intent on wringing every specification of the weapon out of her. The delvemaster hid a small grin and shot a look at Calisto, who glided out of the room without a word.

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

Once Darkclaw’s informational appetite had been satiated, he left the room from a spring in his step. If he could whistle a jaunty tune through his muzzle, Talia was sure that he would have.

Phew. And I thought my thirst for knowledge was bad. That man knows his weapons like I know the back of my hand.

The young arcanist collapsed in a chair next to the delvemaster, every last bit of energy sapped from her. The man had pulled out his logbook and had taken notes the whole time. Whether said notes were about the ash lance or not was anyone’s guess.

The pair sat in silence for a while, one writing and one simply staring at the artefact she’d brought into being.

“If we run into trouble in the week it’ll take us to get to Karzurkul, I want you on that thing,” Torval finally said, closing his logbook.

It took Talia a moment to process what the man had said. When she did, she frowned at him.

“What? Why? Wouldn’t it be better to train someone else? Someone with little combat training? I think I’ve proven that I can be an asset in close quarters, don’t you?” she snapped, partly hurt that he’d want to bench her like that.

It was an odd sentiment, one that would have been foreign to her before she’d fought the garbog. Now, she recognized it as a kind of pride. She’d been training her combat capabilities and didn’t want to be set aside in a safe position. She wanted to be on the front, fighting alongside the rest of the crew.

“Peace, Arcanist Talia. I’m not benching you. But you’re in the unique position of being able to use the ash lance to its fullest potential, especially given your particular…senses. In the chaos of a pitched fight, I don’t want this thing pointed in the wrong direction, you understand?”

Talia nodded her head slowly.

“I guess…” she replied.

Torval raised an eyebrow at her, mirth rippling across his aquiline features.

“I didn’t take you for a battle maniac. Has our battlemaster infected you?” he joked.

“What? No! I just… I want to be out front, doing my part, you know?”

Torval bobbed his head.

“Aye, that’s a sentiment I can understand. But this is probably the place you can do the most good. I also want you on the lookout for beasties and possible problems with your senses,” he said, “Not problems among the crew, not like before, I think Chronicler Calisto and I have neutered that issue pretty thoroughly during our time here. I mean anything resembling the ancient Crescian you encountered a few da—weeks ago. Things of that nature, you follow?”

Talia gave the man a worried look.

“You think that’ll be a problem?” she asked.

The delvemaster paused for a moment, tapping his fingers on the worktable beside them.

“No,” he finally replied, “But now that we know that such things exist… It never pays to be too careful. We all know the risks, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t minimize them.”

“Right…” Talia agreed, still put off by her new battle post.

Torval stood with a groan as a trio of identical gnomes followed Calisto back into the room, along with a pair of burly beastkin. He slapped Talia on the back as he went to join them.

“Bah, cheer up, with those wands in hand, I guarantee that the only people Darkclaw will want in close combat are those with medium to heavy armour. He’d probably have kept you out of close quarters anyway,” Torval explained.

Talia nodded tiredly and smiled at the man.

Maybe I am a battle fanatic. Eh, who cares? These are just precautions anyway. What are the odds that we run into deep dwellers right in the home stretch?