Chapter 24 — Dam Break

The Easruth River babbled its way through the valley as it carried the mountain’s snowmelt onward. It was relatively wide and placid near the beached log Rína sat on, making for an idyllic scene cast in the light of the setting sun. But this peaceful appearance was betrayed by the sound of thundering falls that could be heard even above the loud crunching that came from the forest behind her. As a lark, Rína shaped her aura into a rough model of the river and what she imagined the imminent falls would look like.

She considered her aura’s shape for a moment: it was just a bit too simple, and only three dimensional to boot, but there was a simple fix. Rína extruded her little model, using the fourth axis as a stand-in for time so that it was like a higher dimensional version of a flipbook. It was tricky, but at the end of the day it was only supposed to look like rippling water which wasn’t too far off what her aura would have looked like anyway. And now came the hard part…

The little waterfall through time shuddered as waves—that were certainly intentional—raced across its surface. Nonetheless it compressed, down to a little over half of its original size. And now came the even harder part: keeping it perfectly still for as long as she could.

Beyond simple practice, what she was doing didn’t actually accomplish anything, mostly she just needed a break. For the last three days she had been projecting hardened auras of increasing quality, molded around the armlet’s enchantment. She was definitely getting better but the monotony of forming the same shape over and over again had gotten to her, hence the little river diorama. She had also tried to take a few Astral Breaths, but actually moving around or changing the shape of a hardened aura was a bit beyond her capabilities at the moment.

Despite her focus on her aura, Rína spared a moment to glare at the loop of leather she wore around her upper arm. She had asked Yvette how compressed she would need to get her aura and for how long she would need to hold it to be able to attune the armlet, and Yvette had very helpfully replied with a… ‘No comment’. It annoyed Rína, but she could see the reasoning: without a prescribed point at which to stop, her only option was to just keep progressing, keep working on getting a denser, more stable aura. As for what else she would need to do before she could attune the damn thing, Yvette refused to say.

“She probably isn’t done yet…” Rína murmured to herself, “Eh, might as well have another go.”

Rína let her river diorama decompress and flow back into her soul. Then out again came her aura, to wrap and compress around the armlet’s enchantment, all while keeping a slight gap between the two. It was just as monotonous as the previous times, but she persevered as she held her aura in place.

The minutes passed as uneventfully as the waters of the river did. The only real limit on how long she could hold the hardened aura was the headache she would always get after focusing on the task for however long. And just like clockwork, she began to feel the headache creeping up on her.

Rína figured that was as good a spot as any to call it, so she decompressed her and—

She saw it.

She saw the enchantment. She shouldn’t have been able to, but when she pulled her aura back in, it brushed up against the enchantment. And in that moment, the enchantment bloomed into her soul sight. Previously when she had ‘seen’ it, all she was really doing was draping her aura over the enchantment and inferring the geometry from there. But not this time. This time she could properly see it, just as easily as she could her soul or aura. Well, no, that wasn’t quite right—she could see it, but it was… ‘dim’ or perhaps ‘out of focus’? In any case, it lacked the same clarity in her soul sight that she had of her own soul and aura.

The sudden perception had left her stunned, so much so that she almost missed her own aura slipping into the enchantment, like a smaller droplet of water joining a larger one. It was bizarre. And as she watched she realized that neither her aura nor the enchantment were fizzling against each other. In fact, her aura was treating the enchantment just like it did her own soul. All together, that could only mean…

“Holy shit,” Rína quietly cursed. A wide grin crossed her face that gradually turned into a cackle. She at once hopped off the log and ran into the woods that abutted the river, needing only to follow the sounds of crunching and splintering wood.

In a moment she came upon the source of the noise: the two oxen puppets casually taking entire bites out of trees as if they were made of soft fruit. As Rína watched, another tree was felled, but the bovines didn’t even pause as they continued to devour their meal. All around them were dozens more chewed tree stumps, the original trees of course nowhere in sight.

Rína made sure to keep her distance from the puppets, not only because of the falling trees, but also because their digestive systems were working in overdrive and were throwing off enough waste heat for them to be mistaken for furnaces. There was also the fact that the speed at which plant matter was entering one end was matched by the speed at which it was leaving the other.

Rína shielded her nose with the inside of her elbow as she looked for the wagon and quickly spotted it through the underbrush. She approached, still in high spirits, only to see Yvette physically sliding the entirety of a tree into what looked like an innocuous luggage compartment at the front of the wagon, just below the driver’s bench. As for where all that plant matter was going?

“Is something the matter?” Yvette said, looking up from her work, setting down the tree that must have weighed a few hundred kilos at a minimum.

“No, well uh—you know it can wait until you’re done,” Rína said, desperately trying to only breathe through her mouth.

“Are you sure?” Yvette said without any strain in her voice.

Rína eyed the similar heat haze rising from its faux chimney and the large steaming piles the wagon was leaving behind.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

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Night soon fell, and under the cover of darkness the oxen pulled the wagon into the river. The spot that Yvette had chosen was wide and relatively shallow, but as the oxen began to swim, Rína could feel the slight swaying of the wagon wading through the water—its wooden, spider-like legs hidden just below the surface.

“Congratulations on your first attunement,” Yvette said with a warm smile, sitting at the driver’s bench.

“Thanks,” Rína said with a grin of her own, “But was there any reason you couldn’t have told me that just wrapping the thing in aura was all it took?”

“I could have,” Yvette conceded, “But I was hoping to witness you making the realization for yourself.”

“What, as some kind of prank?” Rína scowled.

“Oh no,” Yvette shook her head, “No, it was simply for its own sake. Should you ever take on a student of your own, you will understand that those moments are something worth cherishing.” Yvette said, softly nudging Rína’s shoulder with her own, “Now as far as attunement goes, I would imagine that you would like the ‘why’ now that you have the ‘how’.”

“Uh, yeah…” Rína faked a cough, “that’d probably be good to know.”

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“Well,” Yvette began, “I am sure you have noticed that after a compression, you will have slightly less aura compared to when you started.”

“Uh, no?” Rína said sheepishly.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I mean, whenever I’m done practicing, I just pull the aura back into my soul,” Rína said, “I haven’t actually checked or anything. Although now that I think about it, I guess a few of those practice sessions had me feeling like I was a little low on aether after them… How would that work, though? I thought compression took energy, not aether?”

“And what happens to non-gaseous aether when it no longer has energy?” Yvette asked.

“Uh, it can’t hold itself together anymore so it turns gaseous…” Rína said, nodding, “Ok, so then as I compressed my aura, the aether the energy was coming from was, what, evaporating? Why wasn’t I able to see that?”

“By definition, that aether would not have been able to maintain cohesion with the rest of your aura.” Yvette said.

“...So it wasn’t in my soul sight… Oh!” Rína’s eyes went wide, “Ok, so then when I wrapped a compressed aura around the thing, it was getting smothered in evaporated aura—aura that didn’t have any energy so it couldn’t fizzle against anything. And because the enchantment was all wrapped up, that was the only aether it could grab, which…” Rína paused, furrowing her brow before her eyes relighted, “Right! You said it takes energy for aether crystals to break down non-self intent, didn’t you?”

“That I did.”

“So then it would have been using up all its energy on that, and once it was all tapped out, it would have just started blindly absorbing my aura and getting its attunement changed because of it.”

“Quite right,” Yvette beamed as she nodded.

“Huh, but wait, if the enchantment ran out of energy wouldn’t it have boiled off—or sublimated, or whatever—into gaseous aether?”

“In time, certainly,” Yvette said, “But similar to a starving organism, not all functions halt at once—there seems to be a prioritization for what energy is expended on. Observing the inner workings of a soul or other aether crystal may as well be impossible, but we can infer that sanitizing the intent of incoming aether is of a lower priority than maintaining the integrity and cohesion of the crystal as a whole.”

“Makes sense,” Rína murmured, “But you know, that makes it sound a lot like enchantments are living things.”

“I suppose they would be—for the more generous definitions therein,” Yvette conceded, “but even then, a single cell would have a better claim. Regardless, I believe it is time for you to try to break down a piece of it.”

“Hmm,” Rína considered, “It still sounds a little weird… But alright, how am I gonna do this?”

“To start with, you will want to break off as small a piece as you can manage, from the side of the enchantment opposite its anchor. As for the ‘how’,” Yvette gave an impish grin, “I shall leave that as an exercise for you.”

“Oh come on,” Rína groused, “Is that really necessary?”

“Not strictly, no,” Yvette said, “But like I said, consider it an exercise.”

Rína opened her mouth to continue her objections, but she stopped herself, shaking her head. Yvette wouldn’t have given her some impossible task, therefore Rína could figure it out.

Her first guess was that it had something to do with a hardened aura. If she could get hers dense enough, and then maybe form it into a spike or something, she could break a piece off the enchantment. The only problem was that aura flowed into crystal, it didn’t impact it. Then the problem became preventing her aura from flowing into the enchantment so she could get a good impact. To do that, maybe she could—

She was doing it again. It felt so natural to break down a problem into constituent parts and solve it from there, and in her defense, nearly everything in chemistry and medicine benefited from such a mindset. But during her attempts to compress her aura, she learned that that wasn’t always the best approach when it came to aether, and she had a hunch that this would be another such case.

She spread her aura out to span the gap between her soul and the enchantment. Just as before, the moment her aura touched it, the entire aether crystal appeared in her soul sight, clear as day. Well, no: it was still somewhat out of focus and…

“Hey Yvette, quick question: why does the enchantment look, I don’t know, sort of blurry?”

Yvette raised an eyebrow, “Quick answer: every aether crystal has a unique lattice that goes hand in hand with one’s intent of self. Attuning a crystal, and thus foisting a new intent of self upon it, is like replacing wagon wheels with grindstones or vice versa—it will work, but not nearly as well. The lesser clarity is merely the least consequence of this.”

“Hm,” Rína nodded, her question more of an idle one. She returned her attention to the enchantment, specifically to the spot opposite its anchors that Yvette had mentioned.

So she needed to oppose the crystal’s integrity, just like an inverse of how she opposed her aura not wanting to compress. Her will and ‘intent of dissolution’—for lack of a better name—fell upon the targeted spot. But instead of a piece of the crystal breaking apart, her aura around the spot frothed and heaved as if a small bomb had gone off inside it. Rína immediately stopped the flow of intent, but even in just that single moment large chunks of her aura were broken apart into small droplets and lost to the Astal.

Rína winced as she replenished her outward aura with the stores still inside her soul. But because she had spent most of the day practicing aura compression, this loss was just enough for her to start feeling the headache and lightheadedness of being low on aether. It was minor and shouldn’t affect her too much, but it did mean she would have to be more careful.

So that wasn’t the answer… or was it? In that brief moment before her aura broke apart, Rína swore she felt her aura putting up a resistance just like it did when she compressed it. So maybe was doing the right thing, but just to her aura, and not the enchantment.

Rína chewed her lip as she tried a second time. She tried focusing only on the enchantment, with the explicit exclusion of her aura. Then, slow and steady, she started drip-feeding a small amount of intent of dissolution to the target spot on the enchantment. She immediately felt resistance, but thankfully her aura didn’t break apart, though it did visibly shudder. Rína still felt like she was on the right track, so she readjusted, taking a deep breath, and trying to put anything that wasn’t that spot on the enchantment out of her mind.

Carefully, she again pushed with her will. Like stray thoughts, bits of her aura flitted into her focus, but at the risk of those bits falling into the Deep Astral, she forced them from her mind. She couldn’t fully ignore her aura of course as she still needed to have at least some amount of it connecting her soul to the enchantment. So instead, hers was an unsteady, split focus.

Gradually she was able to increase the intent of dissolution without it leaking over into her aura. She didn't know how much time had passed but her gnawing headache had turned to biting and now splitting. She should probably call it for the night and try again in the morning, but it felt like she was so close; maybe just a little more and—

The spot turned to dust. One moment the small patch of crystal was whole, the intent of self holding it together in defiance of her will. The next moment it broke apart into a small cloud of crystal dust, leaving behind a small crater in the enchantment. And the moment after that, the flood came.

A torrent of aura erupted from the small wound in the enchantment; more aura than Rína had ever held at once. Chunks of it immediately began falling into the Astral and on reflex Rína did everything she could to keep it anchored to the physical, but it was just too much. Her aura control had improved since the solstice, but even then, she now had more aura on her hands than she could ever control at once.

Distantly, Rína was aware of part of her blaring aura disintegrating against what must have been Yvette’s own, but she couldn’t pay that any mind, not right now. No, now she only had one option. Rína began pulling all of the aura into her soul.

At once the nagging headache and the lingering sluggishness of her thoughts disappeared. Her mind cleared and she found herself more able to manage the aether. The torrent of aura was quickly slowing down, but it was still overwhelming. She kept drinking in the aether, not wanting a single drop to fall into the abyss, and she soon felt… different.

The torrent stopped moments later, and Rína was left with an aura of a comfortable size around her soul, but not because she had chosen to stop drawing it in, but because her soul couldn’t hold any more.

“Gods…” Rína whispered to the world; the world that now seemed so much clearer than it ever had. There was no physical change to her sight or such, merely her very thoughts felt… alive. No longer did one thought stumble into the next, but… but she felt like her mind was a dancer, flowing from observations to ideas to conclusions with ease and grace. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small change, but so too was the righting of a crooked picture frame—just that small change was enough to feel like everything was suddenly as it should have always been.

“For the record, you managed that much faster than most mages with your level of training,” Yvette said with a look of motherly pride, “It is quite the feeling is it not?”

“Yeah, uh…” Rína stammered, “It definitely is.”

“Well, I know it is late, but would you care to try your hand at making your first soul thread?”