A soft wind blew into a tower’s topmost room, carrying the cultivated syringa smell inside. Within the brick building a hundred strides across and four times as tall dozens of humans mingled, each following strict outlines learned over decades under the tutelage of one of the greatest mages of Gilmoss, all working together to accomplish one of the greatest feats of magic in recent memory.

People scurrying from bookshelves to flat crystalline surfaces in their respective rooms and arranging the final ledgers for optimal absorption. The culmination of work that had taken the better part of a year. Then there were the books, journals, and dissertations analyzing every facet of the mana concentrations and distributions in Gilmoss over the last hundred years.

Ralia Ostprim, responsible for the tower’s current buzz, was having one of the worst days in recent memory. Worse than that one time when one of her students created a dung bomb instead of a dung cleaner.

The cursory analysis and extrapolations that she had gone through the last few hours revealed what many had feared. The barrier was failing, incursions really were becoming more common. Greater surveillance and surveying over the last fifty years had managed to catalog all the Tenebrae on a global scale. In that time, the amount of Tenebrae had roughly doubled.

Now, with dozens of shelves filled with tomes, each containing hundreds of pages filled with observations of mana density, spatial fluctuations, and thousands of other parameters. Data points that would be impossible to correlate under normal means.

That’s where Ralia Ostprim came in. Her trait that had initially been considered useless was one of the most valuable for any scholarly endeavor in Gilmoss. Crystallin Analytics absorbed whole data sets the size of entire libraries into crystals and helped analyze the inputs according to several categories she set.

Even though she tried to stay calm, every fiber of her body grew tense as the sun’s apex approached.

Sometime later she looked up – realizing only now that she’d chewed off the nails of half her fingers – as a usually softly white glowing hole in the corner of the room began blinking with a light-yellow light.

She sent a pulse of mana out towards the crystalline control structures that permeated the building and a person rose through the yellow hue.

“Sapienter,” the newcomer greeted in a bow.

“Rise and embrace the dawn, Varis,” Ralia responded. “What news do you bring?”

“Most of the parameters are as anticipated, and even the Tenebrae off the coast is negligible,” came the reassuring response in a tone that brought light back into Ralia’s heart. “The requested personnel arrived just a few degrees ago. The capital sent three Mana Generators.”

“Oh, so many?”

“The passions grow tense in light of the recent incursion close to Barthuum. Your servant came to ask how we should use the third.”

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“Are any of them a threat?”

“Not as far as we can tell. And none is to you.”

On other days she would have smiled at the compliment. Today it wasn’t even enough to bring her tense old heart to calm for a single beat. But Varis was not wrong. There were few in the Kingdom that could reach her flame, and even fewer that could do so, in a place surrounded by so much crystal. Most of her skills might be based on information gathering and analyzing, but she had a few that stuck out from her arche-type.

“Bring the strongest one with an ability like Shared Pool up here. I have a good use for them. Take the light with you.”

“Keep it in your heart, Sapienter.”

Varis bowed before stepping into the light and spoke one more time.

“Good luck friend. We’ll see each other on the other side.”

###

Ralia hadn’t left the room in the two hours since Yana was sent to her room. Though now she was sitting in a chair made from crystal next to a pillar made from the clearest quartz anywhere on the continent. Tendrils of varying sized reached throughout the room encompassing various bookshelves, tomes, and ledgers, or left the room through one of the hundreds of designated openings.

Yana, the Mana Generator was sitting calmly to her side and waiting for her work to start. Calmly outwardly. Ralia felt the woman’s mana churn inside, preparing for a mana release that would usually compare to siege magic. Some small talk with the woman had told her all she needed to know. She and the remaining eight of her kind had all been woken from stasis.

Ralia was not the only one who suspected foul play from the other nations.

The sun shifted degree by degree as the two women sat in silence. Undisturbed by hundreds of people all throughout the tower, finishing the last preparations, shifting books in certain positions, rotating mirrors, or turning sun collectors.

With each moment the room grew brighter.

“It is time Yana,” Ralia spoke, tension straining through her voice. “Please share your mana.”

“Yes, Sapienter.”

A veritable flood of mana, exceeding her total capacity by several folds flooded into her soul. With just eye blinks to spare she sent the energy through the crystal, along the light that the sun shone into the tower and crystalline tendrils.

Each book, each page, parchment, and letter, and every single piece of information that was deemed credible regarding the mana of Gilmoss was illuminated and seen by the Sapientipotentia of the third Mage Tower. Numbers, dates, diagrams, and illustrations flowed through the singular crystal that made up half the mass of the third tower and into Ralia’s mind.

Before she could become overwhelmed the information flowed out of her disappearing into the quartz once again. Slightly changed and with a different flavor.

She felt her quartz become invigorated – almost growing a mind of its own – as two more sources of mana and dozens of crystal-related traits hit the artificial gemstone.

Time stopped for her, losing all meaning. With her trait, she experienced everything the crystal could perceive at a speed directly correlated to the size of the clear mineral.

With a building headache, she got to work, combining and correlating entries of different regions, periods, seasonal variations, and the weather for any data point available. Differentials in mana concentration and change rates of mana types.

She labored for subjective days, though the sun only shifted by a few degrees over the course of the magic. At some point one of the mana flows from further down stopped, but they weren’t needed anymore, having supplied enough to conclude this divination. Now the Mana Generators would just charge future divinations. Allowing Ralia to save a bit of her own time and effort in the future.

With the heavy work stemmed by her trait she managed to sort and correlated enough data points on her own to see a picture brewing. One she had feared but not expected.

The issue came from the throne of Issar.

There was little doubt that war was brewing.