The observatory was usually deserted during the day. With the sun up, any detail of Dasleight was almost impossible to make out, the whole sphere hazy and indistinct against the gray-blue sky. None of the dozens of people dashing around the ground floor of the tower seemed to care.
Pvau's usual job was in the bronze observatory dome itself, where he'd pull the handles and wind the gears needed to position the apparatus, or else help the watcher on duty with measurements and recordings.
This time when he climbed the spiral staircase, he did it dodging people coming and going in both directions.
When he reached the top, the usually empty chamber was filled with as many as fifteen people, conferring, looking at maps, even a couple of the town guards standing watch.
The local observatory didn't even employ this many people. Some of them must be from the town's administration, or visitors from the wider Observatory organization.
He spotted Ibeso, the head watcher he usually reported to, operating the apparatus at the edge of the dome.
The telescope itself was a huge copper sculpture, an owl's head, with a pair of forward-facing lenses fitted into its eyes. The rear of the sculpture was open, and when it was active a vastly magnified copy of what the sculpture was directed at would be projected into a misty sphere at the center of the room.
The owl sculpture was only part of the machinery in the room. There were articulated metal arms to position it, and hand-driven gears to moved the arms with great precision. There were also suspended glass jars containing focus items, which would be moved closer or further from the telescope to control aspects of the image.
Pvau made for Ibeso, who was standing by the projected image.
The telescope wasn't actually pointed up at Dasleight, Pvau realized. Normally it was the observatory's job to monitor the dark realm above them, watching for troop movements, suspicious infrastructure development, or even just for scientific study. Now, it was focused down at the terrestrial horizon. The projected image showed a fairly nondescript patch of forest.
It took Ibeso a second to notice Pvau, not that his eyes ever moved from the image.
"You're late," Ibeso said.
Ibeso was a man in his sixties, with dark skin and white hair, wearing a waistcoat cut in the modern style over a white shirt and tan pants. He wore a white stole over his formal clothes, a wide silk band embroidered with an owl under a black moon – the symbol of the Observatory organization.
Ibeso turned and pushed a suspended jar containing a carved wooden eye. The jar swung away on its articulated arm, and the forest faded away, revealing a nest of white shapes on bare ground.
"I'm sorry. It's my birthday. You said I could have the night off," Pvau said.
He was trying to sound genuinely contrite and not let his frustration into his voice, but he didn't think he'd succeeded.
"Seventeen?" Ibeso asked.
"That's right. My Inspiration was last night. I haven't had chance to do anything about it yet."
Ibeso hummed.
"Turn it," he said, "Three thousandths to the right, one thousandth up, and grab your sketching supplies."
Without another word Pvau darted for the handles that controlled the arm holding the telescope. He grabbed the handle for horizontal motion and began to turn it.
The equipment was sensitive. It was hard to get right and easy to overshoot a target. There were notches on the gear and printed guides with tables describing how far a handle should be turned to achieve a certain angle, but going by them would slow the process down to a crawl. Pvau had been working here for months, and by this point he could do it by eye.
He finished the horizontal motion and switched to the vertical wheel, nudging the telescope up a thousandth of a rotation.
Ibeso hadn't mentioned it, but the small movement increments probably meant they were looking at something beyond the horizon, so Pvau tweaked the wheel that compensated for curviture slightly, bending the path of the telescope's sight downwards to counter the upwards change in angle.
As he brought it into line and locked it in place, a new image resolved in the projection.
A town in flames.
Without being asked, Pvau moved to the wooden-eye focus and pushed it back towards the owl.
Trees appeared surrounding the town in the image, torn and ablaze. It looked like the fire had filled the town itself before spreading out, catching to the surrounding forests and fields.
"What happened," Pvau asked, his voice quiet.
The fire could have been an accident. It happened sometimes. A careless baker, a drunk vandal. But Pvau remembered the flash of light the previous night. That had been on the horizon to the north. The telescope was pointing north.
"Two three-thousandths up, two three-thousands right," Ibeso said.
Pvau jumped back to the controls, nudging them by the tiniest margins.
"Refocus. Bring us in closer."
Pvau jogged to the center of the room, grabbing a chain that hung down from a glass hawk-focus. He pulled it down, closer to the owl-head apparatus. As it got closer, the image in the projection expanded as the point of view slid forward.
"Stop."
Pvau released the chain.
The image projected at the center of the room showed the battlements of a white stone fort, the crenellations scorched and shattered.
A single figure was visible sitting on the edge of the wall, his feet dangling over the edge. A man of middle age, with wild brown hair and a red leather chestplate. A spiked mace lay on the stone beside him, and in his lap he held an open book, the size of two spread hands, bound in vivid yellow.
"Is he accumulating?" Pvau asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
"Pvau, sketch those tattoos. Erene. Where's Erene? Give me a draft of his face."
Pvau darted for the cabinet where they kept the office supplies, pulling out sheets of square paper and charcoal. He clipped the paper to a board and ran to the projection.
The man in the image had two small tattoos, one on each cheek. Both circles containing archaic characters Pvau didn't recognize.
As soon as Ibeso saw Pvau and Erene were in motion he turned and left the level, descending the stairs, probably heading for his office.
Pvau sketched out two circles and began drawing the characters inside them as faithfully as he could.
After a few seconds of drawing he looked up to check his work, and froze.
The man in the image was staring at him. He couldn't be looking directly at them. He had to be over twenty miles away. There wasn't even a straight line between him and the observatory that wasn't blocked by the ground, but the man's amber eyes seemed to be looking straight into Pvau's own.
The man smiled, and a second later chaos broke out in the observatory. The paper Pvau was sketching on caught fire, yellow flames exploding up like oil thrown on a bonfire.
Pvau dropped the board with the sketch, stamping on it to extinguish the flames.
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The sound of breaking glass came from above, and Pvau looked up to see the jars holding the focus items starting to crack.
He dashed to the control wheels and spun the horizontal lever, causing the telescope head and dome to whirl around in a quarter rotation, forcing the people standing around in shock to duck and jump out of the way of the moving apparatus.
The man was gone from the image, which was now showing a blurry rockface. The damage to the focus jars had stopped, and Erene had managed to put the fire on her board out with a glass of water. She'd salvaged a partial sketch of the man, the rest burned away.
Pvau picked his board up and did his best to draw the tattoos from memory. It would have been easier if he'd recognized the words, but hopefully he'd remembered enough that someone with a better grasp of the archaic alphabet could make sense of them.
He looked around the dome of the observatory, giving a last check that there was no ongoing crisis, then left the top floor, heading for Ibeso's office.
Pvau knocked on the wooden door, and stepped in without waiting for a response. The man was sitting at a meticulously clear desk, writing a letter with an inkpen.
"Put them on the desk, please," he said, not looking up.
"Something happened after you left," Pvau said, laying his sketch down on the end of the desk. "The man we were watching turned and faced us. It was like he could see us through the telescope. I think he attacked us somehow. There were fires, the equipment started breaking."
Ibeso finished a line and looked up from the parchment.
"Yes, I saw. You handled it."
Pvau bowed his head. Ibeso went back to writing.
"I, uh- I was wondering if I could have the rest of the day off?" Pvau said. "If you don't need me, I mean."
Ibeso finished writing the letter and set it aside to dry before he looked up.
"We do need you," he said. "We have another eight sites to check before dark."
He picked up Pvau's sketch and held it up, reviewing it.
"Who was he?" Pvau asked.
Ibeso peered at Pvau over the top of the paper.
"Have you ever heard of a soul artist?"
"No?"
Ibeso lowered the sketch and wrote another line onto the bottom of his letter.
"He was a bandit," he said, not looking up.
After a minute Pvau realized Ibeso wasn't going to expand on that, and turned to leave.
As he opened the door to go, Ibeso spoke up.
"Pvau, wait one minute."
Pvau closed the door and turned around, folding his hands behind his back.
"You did good work today. I'm glad we have you."
"Thank you, sir."
"Do you like it here at the observatory?"
Pvau hesitated. This was dangerous territory. It obviously wasn't a question a person could answer freely when it was their supervisor asking it, but as Pvau assessed his feelings, he found he did like it. He liked the technical aspects of the equipment, he liked being good at operating it. He loved seeing distant places, watching the stars, the dark moon, imagining what it would be like to stand there.
"I'm very happy here, sir," he said.
"Good," Ibeso said. He sat for a minute, obviously weighing something in his mind. "You're in need of a first page formation, aren't you?"
"Yes sir," Pvau said.
Mainly because you stopped me from searching for one.
Ibeso stood and walked to a cabinet at the far corner of the room. He stooped and opened the door, revealing a steel lockbox hidden in the bottom cupboard. There was the sound of a latch unlocking, and when he stood he was holding a tightly rolled scroll.
"Normally we don't offer this before the second year of service, but I think you have a future here. This is the first formation of the Observatory's legacy. It was developed by our own researchers, and refined by a century of use in the field. It's your next step in the organization, if you want it."
Ibeso held the scroll out, and Pvau took it gingerly.
The way Ibeso had phrased it, the scroll wasn't just the property of this specific observatory, a relatively small facility in a border town. He'd meant the Observatory, as in the nation-spanning organization they both technically worked for.
The scroll felt like vellum, and it felt old.
He unrolled it carefully, wincing as the paper cracked as he straightened it out, casting his eyes over the interspersed text and diagrams that covered the scroll.
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Three-Phase Dark Moon Eye
A perception talent of three parts.
By directing their intent towards the relevant sign, the Inspired may enhance their vision in one of three ways.
Far Sign
With the Far Sign, the Inspired may see at greater distances with increasing clarity, even through disguise and deception.
Memory Sign
By holding the Memory Sign, the Inspired may commit the target of their vision to memory with increasing detail and perfect recall.
Heart Sign
When holding the Heart Sign, the vision of the Inspired will be led towards the target of their curiosity.
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Pvau looked up from the scroll. Ibeso was looking at him expectantly.
What was this? He'd never seen a page template or formation like it. There were no figures in the text, so there was no way to quantify what it actually did. There would be no way to easily check gains from accumulation, not even a level indicator. Some of the wording was ambiguous. What exactly did the vision of the Inspired will be led towards the target of their curiosity mean in real terms?
On top of that, the formation tried to combine what were effectively three spells into a single page. There were examples of packed formations, single pages that enabled many small effects, but the school had explained that trying to pull a page in different directions diluted the power of each effect.
Pvau trusted that the formation had been tested, and so it probably wasn't incoherent, but he wasn't sure it was his best choice.
He could see how the memory sign portion of it would be useful to his work at the observatory, but the former was unnecessary when he had access to the telescope, and the latter was just confusing.
Ibeso must have seen something of Pvau's scepticism in his expression.
"I know it seems old fashioned. Formation culture has become all about hard rules and mathematics, but there's a lot to be said for the old style."
"It's split into three effects," Pvau said. "How can any one of them be effective when they're diluted like that?"
"Simply, with a shared theme, and careful wording," Ibeso replied. "Sensory enhancements need less power to be effective to begin with, and these have been heavily refined. They're useful at every stage of development. I have a page with this formation, and I have no regrets."
"I'll think about it," Pvau said.
He was fully intending on finding something better in the library later, even if it meant passing up this shortcut to promotion at the observatory.
Ibeso held out his hand for the scroll, and Pvau handed it to him.
"Come back to me if you change your mind."
Pvau nodded, bowed, then left the office, forcing himself to climb back up to the observatory to continue his shift.
If he didn't have the day to himself, he'd at least be able to see what was happening at the surrounding towns.