Chapter 37 — Turbulent Times
The old clock tower was a relic of Westreach’s earlier days. Almost a century ago, it had been a watchtower standing vigil in the center of a small outpost nestled at the mouth of the Easruth valley. Back then it was a defensive necessity, but it was not long before the walls and the soon to be city had outgrown it. But instead of demolishing the then obsolete watch tower, the citizenry of the time refurbished it into a grand clock tower with a belfry which was said could be heard all throughout the valley.
It became a beloved landmark that rang out the hour for decades, but it itself was not immune to the passage of time. Westreach refused to cease its growth, eventually becoming the metropolis it was today. And with this growth the city’s center and zeitgeist shifted, eventually leaving the tower behind and relegating it to the footnotes of history.
«... Nowadays it's apparently just a glorified storehouse, at least on the lower floors,» Rína wrote, raising the brim of her witch’s hat, looking up at the tower.
Night had fallen over Westreach an hour ago, but the city refused to go to sleep. As Rína and Yvette had made their way through the streets, every other block had some crowd of people loudly clamoring to get into one venue or another. It wasn’t until they finally reached the clock tower that things settled down and Rína could feel the still of night.
The tower itself was a monolith of stone masonry. It was dark and silent with both the backlit illumination of the clock faces and the once thundering belfry having long since degraded. Though, whether by the efforts of a dedicated hobbyist or the direct will of the gods, the hands of the clock still moved and kept the time.
«You are certain we won’t be disturbed?» Yvette asked as she adjusted the large crate she carried in her arms.
«Yeah, my friend Theo said people only come around here during the day, so it should be fine.»
«How did you even inquire about a place like this? I trust you didn’t tell him the truth.»
“Yeah, no,” Rína frowned, «I told him I needed to make some medicines, but the brewing process gave off some nasty fumes that would be bad for anyone without a face mask.»
«And I assume these fumes would affect anyone that approached within twenty meters of you?» Yvette asked, as she looked over the forty meter tall clock tower.
«Yup. Honestly, a tower seems like the perfect place in retrospect,» Rína wrote before furrowing her brow, «Wait, is that why all the mages in stories live in towers?»
Yvette bobbled her head, «I imagine artistic license plays a part in that, but yes, whether or not a mage chooses to actually live in one, towers are quite useful. I suppose we can only be thankful that the city has at least one with such poor security.»
As if to prove her point, Yvette walked the final few meters to the tower’s front door and, hefting the crate into one arm, placed her free hand on the door’s handle. Splaying her thumb against the lock’s keyway, Yvette sent flesh threads into the mechanism and a moment later a subtle click granted the two women entry into the tower.
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The view of the city at night was beautiful from this high up, even though most of the buildings were dark. In the low moonlight Rína could see the silvery reflection of the Easruth as it wound its way past riverside docks and beneath half a dozen bridges. Below her, she saw the various lights of nighttime venues that looked like isolated campfires floating on a lake of pitch. And rather fittingly, off in the distance, Rína could see the faint outlines of small towers and spires rising up from the mansions and estates that dominated the city’s upper district.
All this she saw from one of the clock tower’s small upper windows, and she had to pull herself away from the view as sightseeing was hardly why they had come there. No, they were there because Yvette had not had any better luck when she returned to the city hall following Sharad, nor was she successful the day after, nor the day after that. In total, it had been a week since they had arrived in Westreach and their extended stay had created some problems of its own.
The most immediate of which was the fact that Rína hadn’t been able to work on her magics. Sure, she had been practicing with her kinetic cantrip all week and the kinetic focused aether dynamics lessons were invaluable from a theory standpoint. But so far Rína hadn’t actually gotten the opportunity to apply any of what she’d learned; that is until tonight.
Turning away from the window, Rína joined her aunt as she set down the crate and took a seat on the floor of the defunct belfry.
“Do you need to review anything before you start?” Yvette asked.
“No, I think I should be good,” Rína mumbled as she reached into her satchel with a bit of kinemancy. She blindly applied a bit of force to where she knew the bag’s interior clasp was located, and a second later it opened up with a click. She then rifled through the satchel, past the pepper bombs, pulling out a notebook that she opened to a page covered in notes and scratchwork.
The very first page of the notebook contained nothing short of a kinetic mage sight spell. Her aunt had supplied it to her, but unlike the cantrip, mage sight was too complicated for any kind of one-size-fits-all design. As such, what Rína was given was an abstracted kind of recipe that described different kinds of intent interacting in a certain way, producing a certain result. But the actual work of turning that into a specific design fell on Rína’s shoulders, especially since the recipe her aunt gave her seemed suspiciously short on details or guidance.
Regardless, page after page of the notebook was filled with her personal design work. It was mostly calculations and diagrams for a dozen different approaches she was mulling over, but Rína knew that there was still a missing piece to her work.
Aetheric engineering was a strange beast, regardless if someone was building a spell structure, an enchantment, or anything else. The culprit was the fact that the material—the aetheric crystal—was always going to be someone’s soul, not some inanimate chunk of wood or stone.
Rína had heard artisans talk about how this or that chunk of marble or clay or whatever had a personality that the artisan could feel and work with. They were clearly being metaphorical, but in the case of aetheric engineering, the medium’s personality was very literal. Not only that, but each person’s personality was obviously unique and could even shift slightly from day to day or even minute by minute along with the person’s mood.
The fact that aether dynamics was sensitive to that kind of thing kicked off a slew of questions from Rína when she first learned it. Most of them her aunt answered with “That’s a lesson for another time,” but Yvette did say that aether artificially crystalized onto a person’s soul—i.e. spell structures—was akin to a moment frozen in time and would function just fine even if the mage’s personality shifted.
Regardless, aether dynamics as a field of study still needed to somehow account for all these person to person discrepancies. As such, the mathematical models were filled with these pesky ‘Δs’ terms that were an unknown catch-all for said discrepancies. The first time Rína saw one in an equation she assumed that it meant someone could test out their soul structures’ behaviors, work backwards, solve for Δs, and create a kind of numeric profile for their own soul. But no, the variations within a single person’s soul were too noisy for that kind of method to be useful.
It really did just come down to a mage having a good intuition for how their own soul worked. The mathematics were still needed, but they only got someone maybe two thirds of the way towards a workable design, and that last third? That last third was, for better and worse, pure art.
That in itself gave Rína the biggest pause. Practicing with her existing cantrip, she thought she had a good enough idea of how her own crystal behaved, but she couldn’t be certain.
Part of her was tempted to just let herself stew in that uncertainty, to stress over it pointlessly in the hopes that a solution would miraculously fall into her lap; but Rína knew that the only thing to do was to just go for it and figure things out along the way.
“Here goes nothing…” Rína said, taking a steadying breath before breaking ground on her soul.
Her will turned a patch of her soul’s inert crystal to dust and a moment later Rína took a bite out the armlet’s enchantment. From the bite, a torrent of aether burst out, causing Rína’s aura to flare out wildly. It immediately reached almost twenty meters in radius and Rína knew for certain that if she had tried this at ground level she’d be battering the souls of gods knew how many people; but thankfully she didn’t have to worry about any of that from where she sat in the clock tower.
She soon wrangled her flared aura, sending it down to crystalize on the patch of exposed, malleable crystal—and just like that, she started building her spell structure.
When Rína first learned about mage sight as a concept, her aunt had framed the category of spell as a kind of inverse of a mage’s existing magics. At the time, Rína assumed that meant that mage sight spells were of about the same complexity as the rest of a mage’s spells, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
A typical spell was a bit of intent colliding into the physical, and once it hit the physical that was it, its job was done. But mage sight needed to hit the physical, and then somehow retrieve information about it. The way this was usually done was by creating spell aether with deliberately unstable intent. Ideally, when the spell hit the physical, and came into contact with the energy or matter that the mage’s magics interacted with, then the unstable intent would collapse into what was essentially pure information.
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And as it turned out, information and intent were two sides of the same coin. Information was just blasé intent that didn’t actually care what was happening; it just was. And intent was just the information of some kind of assertion—like how the intent of a pyromancer’s fireball asserted that the world be all fwoosh, BOOM, crackle, swhooo, pop, sizzle, and so forth.
Either way, the intent of the mage sight’s aether would turn into information, and so long as it was still connected to the mage’s soul, the mage would be able to feel the change and—hopefully—be able to make sense of it.
It was simple in concept, but actually building out a spell that could create aether like that was something else entirely.
There were a lot of ways she could have approached the build—which in and of itself had given her a fair bit of decision paralysis. But she decided to start with something that could turn her aura into information since she knew that would definitely be needed regardless of whatever else she did.
And that was why she was starting off her build with a kind of structure called a ‘dynamo’. A dynamo produced aether of a specific intent and was just about the simplest kind of spell structure component. It usually consisted of a single column of crystal—consisting of the desired output’s intent—that had arcs of regular crystal that fed liquid aether into its base. The arcs would come in at slanted angles which would create a kind of rising whirlpool within the solid crystal. And the more forcefully the liquid aether was sent through crystal that didn’t share its intent, the more the liquid aether’s intent would ‘soften’, gradually shifting towards the surrounding crystal’s intent. Eventually the liquid of the rising whirlpool would reach and exit the column’s opposite end, providing a supply of modified aether to whatever needed it.
Dynamos of one kind or another were used just about everywhere. Their only real drawback was that they struggled applying intents above a certain complexity, with any attempts to do so producing a garbled mess. As such dynamos were usually used as subcomponents of more complex spell structures, with their only standalone use being in cantrips or similar.
At the thought, Rína’s attention drifted over to her kinetic cantrip. When her aunt first showed the schematic to her, Rína had no idea what she was looking at besides that it looked sorta like a closed flower bud. Now that she knew what she was looking at, it was clear that the pistil looking thing at the center of the flower was just the column of a kinetic-intent dynamo and the ‘petals’ that wrapped around it were actually layers of ‘pipes’ that delivered aura into the dynamo.
Rína still had to get around to optimizing the cantrip for her own soul, but that’d have to wait for another day.
Putting thoughts of cantrips aside, Rína continued building her dynamo; her dynamo not of kinetic intent, but of touch.
As Rína sat on the dusting belfry floor, she focused on all the sensations of touch she was feeling at that very moment. She focused on the slight discomfort from her backside as she sat cross legged on the hard, dusty floor of the belfry. She focused on the feeling of her hair brushing against neck. And she focused on the friction she felt between her fingers as she rubbed them together in an idle fidget. All these feelings she brought to the forefront of her mind while trying to scrub them of their individual contexts, leaving behind only the idea of touch.
And in the same way that Rína would press the intent of motion or compression onto her aura to get it to do what she wanted, Rína pressed the intent—the idea—of touch onto her aura along with the intent of crystallization as she gradually built up the dynamo’s central column.
Trying to press two intents at once onto her aura was threatening to give her a headache, but soon enough the column was tall enough for at least some preliminary testing. She quickly crystallized a few ordinary arcs of crystal to act as aura pipes to feed the dynamo, and then gave it a go.
She pushed some of her aether from inside her soul, up through the base of the dynamo and…
Touch.
It was the strangest feeling. The aether that came out of the dynamo was fully her and not some spell aether. And yet it was somewhat off; it had the feeling of, well, feeling—of some half remembered sensation. It was like she was having an intrusive thought, but instead of the thought originating in the abstract ‘back of her mind’, she could feel that it came from right there, right where the dynamo’s aether still drifted in her aura.
Rína cracked a smile at her little success. True, it wasn’t all too useful on its own, as just being able to create a bit of information aether was about as useful as saying hello to the Astral, but it was a solid first step that she’d be able to build—
A prickly, itching feeling made itself known in force, first in the dynamo before spreading out across her soul. It was blight, and a hells of a lot of it for what little aether she had just made.
Rína tsked. This was a solid first step… that she would have to clean up before she went any further.
Rína looked over the dynamo but didn’t see anything immediately wrong. She sent a small trickle of aether through it again, paying close attention to the feel of the aether as it moved through the crystal. And sure enough, though the dynamo’s internal whirlpool was perfectly stable for the first half, somewhere around the middle the so far laminar flow broke down into a turbulent mess.
And of course turbulence was the problem—turbulence was always the problem.
A mage’s aether crashing into another bit of their aether usually wasn’t a problem, but under the conditions present inside a dynamo or similar—where the intents were being forcibly changed—those kinds of collisions could distort the respective intents in unpredictable ways. As such, turbulence inside a spell structure always reduced the spell’s output of desired aether, forcing a mage to expend more aura for a given effect; it reduced a spell’s intent of cohesion, making it harder to control and limiting the its precision; and worst of all, turbulence was the main source of blight—the damaged, broken aura—that would disrupt a mage’s soul after a while.
As for what caused the turbulence? Rína gave the dynamo another trickle of aether and saw that the problem was that the whirlpool inside the dynamo had started rotating. Now, did Rína want the liquid aether inside the dynamo to be rotating? Well, yes and no: yes along the liquid’s first plane of rotation, but no along its second.
Most of the time when Rína was thinking about four-d geometries, she just defaulted to calling them by the name of their three-d version. Mostly it was because the actual higher dimensional names were either lazy portmanteaus or absolute mouthfuls—so ‘spherinders’ became ‘columns’ and ‘hecatonicosahedroids’ became ‘pentagon parties’.
This usually didn’t matter, especially since most four-d phenomena had some kind of three-d equivalent, but the fourth dimension’s double rotation had no such lower dimensional equivalent.
At first Rína thought an object’s rotation was just described by its axis of rotation, and higher dimensions only meant that that single axis had more fun directions it could point in. However her aunt quickly disabused her of that notion.
No, an object had a single point of rotation—usually its center of mass—that was intersected by its one or more, two-dimensional, fully perpendicular planes of rotation. And in the fourth and fifth dimensions, there was enough room for two planes of rotation, i.e. a double rotation. And of course triple rotations could happen in the sixth and seventh dimensions, quadruple in the eighth and ninth, and so on.
When Rína had first started practicing with her aura and saw firsthand what a double rotation looked like, it gave her a splitting headache. It took time, but she eventually came to terms with it by thinking about rotation from the ground up:
In zero dimensions, i.e. a single point, rotation is impossible since there’s no geometry to actually rotate.
Working up, that zero-d point can extrude into a one-d line made of zero-d points, but rotation is still impossible; the individual points on the line have no way to move past each other.
Extrude the line into a two-d circle and suddenly you’re in business: points on one side of the circle can get to the other side by side stepping through this new second dimension, i.e. they can rotate through the first two dimensions.
Pop the circle up into the third dimension and it becomes a sphere and its zero-d point of rotation becomes a one-d axis of rotation. Now along this axis there will be circular cross sections, parallel to the sphere’s plane of rotation. These cross sections might be rotating in the first two dimensions, but they are still locked in place along the third—along the axis—since they’re boxed in by the cross sections on either side of them.
However, similar to the advent of the second dimension, a fourth dimension allows each cross section—each point along the axis of rotation—to sidestep past each other, i.e. to rotate in the third and fourth dimensions independent of the rotation in the first and second.
The phenomenon was objectively mind bending, but at the moment Rína wasn’t feeling any sense of awe or fascination towards it. No, instead she was just feeling annoyance because what should have been a simple dynamo was now chock-full of double rotating eddies bumping into each other like a bunch of drunk toddlers intent on turning all her aether into blight.
Rína sighed in frustration as she opened her eyes. Yvette had brought a small bioluminescent lantern along for Rína’s sake, something she was grateful for as what little moonlight filtered in from outside was barely enough to read by.
She chewed her lip as she looked over both her notes and her witch’s hat’s cheat sheet. Eventually Rína pulled out a pencil and did a few calculations. The math was messy at the best of times, but for a column of a given length, intent, and diameter having its laminar flow decomposing around halfway through… Rína was able to work out more or less what she had done wrong.
It was a simple mistake in the calculations she had made before coming to the clock tower. The good news was that all she should have to do was tweak a few of the flow rates and incoming angles of the pipes that fed the dynamo and that should stabilize things. The bad news however was that, by the way it was looking, she’d have to cut off non-trivial amounts of crystal—amounts of her soul—and let it all just fall away into the Astral.
There was of course a chance she had done some part of the math wrong, after all she had still only brushed the surface of aether dynamics and still using the simpler aether models. Having her aunt check over her work was of course an option, but from where Yvette sat on the other side of the belfry, idly reading a book, Rína could feel the woman giving off a ‘You’ll have to struggle and figure this out for yourself’ kind of feel that was oh-so common during their chemistry and pharmaceutical lessons.
Rína grimaced. She still hated the idea of any part of her falling into that infinite abyss, but there really wasn’t anything to do about it except triple checking her math in the future. So for the moment, all she could do was steel her nerves and get back to work.