Chapter 38 — Eye Opening
There were a handful of fixes Rína would have to make to her dynamo, most of them being to the arcs of crystal that acted as pipes, feeding aether into the dynamo’s central column. Picking somewhat at random, Rína chose a particular arc that was a bit too short and connected to the column at too sharp of an angle.
Fixing it should be easy enough. Rína made a shallow cut in a kind of ring around the arc’s width. She was tempted to just cut straight through the crystal, but she knew that the arc’s core wasn’t inert, thus cutting too deep would probably cause her to black out from the pain. So she just waited for the newly exposed crystal to harden over before cutting into it as well. She repeated this a few times, gradually deepening the ring cut until the arc was finally cut in half.
Next up was adding the needed length between the two halves she had created, though of course there wasn’t enough room between them as it was. So similar to how she got her aura to move, Rína applied a bit of intent directly onto the arc halves, trying to move them away from each other and widen the gap. The crystal flexed a little, but not nearly enough.
Rína tsked, hoping that would have worked. She still thought the overall approach was sound; the only issue was that the crystal was too stiff, and the only solution she could think of wasn’t one she was particularly fond of.
Before she could agonize over it too much, Rína set about stripping both arc halves of their inert exteriors—almost as if the crystal was a carrot or potato she was peeling the skin off of. This of course resulted in all of that material—all those bits of her soul—falling away into the Deep Astral. Seeing this made Rína’s stomach twist into a knot, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Thankfully though, her approach worked.
Trying again to widen the gap between the halves, Rína found the crystal to be much more flexible. Part of it was just that the thinner an object was, the more flexible it would be, aetheric or otherwise. The other part was that the softer, interior aether crystal seemed more pliable than the hardened, inert crystal that normally covered it.
Between those two factors, Rína was able to separate the two halves with an act of will and move them into the rough orientation she needed. Doing so—or really just moving the ‘skinned’ crystal around—wasn’t exactly painful, but it was definitely uncomfortable, as if the halves were limbs that had been scraped raw and were right on the cusp of bleeding.
Regardless, Rína turned her attention to her armlet’s enchantment, taking another bite out of it, and pouring the resulting surge of aura onto the two arc halves she was working on. She crystalized new material on their severed ends until they met in the middle and fused back into a single, now longer arc. Next, she went about adding a bit of extra material to the arc’s surface to replace the crystal she had shaved off, and just like that, she was essentially done.
She still applied a bit of intent to keep the crystal in the correct shape as its exterior gradually hardened. And once it did, Rína sent a bit of her aura through the dynamo. Sure enough, along with the idea of Touch entering her aura, there was noticeably less turbulence and thus less blight around where she had just worked.
Rína indulged in a victorious grin after seeing it work, though of course there was still a lot of work still to be done.
She quickly fell into rhythm as she fixed up the dynamo’s other problem spots. It was generally smooth going, though she did run into slight bumps whenever she encountered an arc that needed to be shortened. The first such one needed to be shortened by a third, and of course ‘shortened’ would normally mean that the excess third would have to be thrown away into the Astral. But instead of feeding the abyss, Rína chose another route.
Nearby the to-be-shortened arc, there was another arc that needed to be lengthened. So Rína cut them both in half and then connected one half of the to-be-shortened arc to the to-be-lengthened one, and then cut the resulting hybrid arc such that the to-be-lengthened side came away with the third of the to-be-shortened arc’s length that would have otherwise been disposed of.
This kind of trick didn’t work for every arc that needed to be shortened, but the few times it didn’t, Rína still managed to avoid throwing away any crystal by slightly tweaking the dynamo’s design such that the arc’s length didn’t need to be reduced at all.
Going through all this hassle put a serious strain on Rína’s focus—either working on two arcs at the same time or doing quick redesigns—but she felt it was worth it. Not just for the sake of conserving crystal, which obviously was a plus, but mostly for her own piece of mind.
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Touch, Rína tested the dynamo again. She wasn’t sure how long she had been working on it, but the amount of blight the dynamo created was now practically non-existent. Rína could still feel a little turbulence inside the dynamo, but so far all her attempts to get rid of it in one place just caused more to crop up elsewhere. She simply didn’t have enough proficiency with spell building or aether dynamics to address it—at least not yet.
As much as she wanted to keep working on the dynamo and reach some impossible state of perfection, Rína forced herself to accept that it was as good as she was going to get for now and moved on.
The Touch dynamo complete, Rína next needed… well she wasn’t entirely sure. She had a few different ideas of what might work, each of which using a different approach, but that old familiar decision paralysis for which to choose was creeping up on her.
Rína shook her head and decided to go with the absolute simplest, most brain-dead design she had, knowing full well that it probably wouldn’t work or at the very least would have to be iterated on. But whatever the result, she knew it would give her a better idea of what to do moving forward.
Rína reached her aura into the large crate her aunt had brought along with them. It was filled to the brim with bones whose arcanelles she had attuned earlier that morning, and she began taking bites out of the kinetic arcanelles just as she had with her armlet’s enchantment. The kinetic aether that flowed out from the bite briefly touched the physical, jostling the crate, but Rína kept it mostly under control as she began crystalizing it into a second dynamo.
Having now pentuple checked her math, creating this second dynamo went as planned with Rína half following the schematic she had drawn up and half just going with what felt right for her soul in the moment. Soon enough the kinetic dynamo was built, but it wasn't built directly onto her soul like the Touch dynamo was. Instead it was attached to the end of the Touch dynamo, with its aether inlet attached to the latter’s output.
As for the kinetic dynamo itself, Rína kept it small, as it was only supposed to apply a small amount of kinetic intent onto the Touch aether. And speaking of intent, as Rína crystalized the kinetic aether of the dynamo’s column, she also pressed the intent of a direction onto the aether—similar to how she added the idea of touch to her first dynamo.
Normally, when she used her regular kinetic cantrip, Rína had to manually apply the intent of some direction onto the liquid spell, otherwise the spell would apply force in a random direction. The fact that the intent’s direction wasn't initially defined meant she could easily choose the spell's direction of force on the fly, making it more versatile at the cost of requiring a little extra concentration to use. What Rína was doing now was baking in that directional intent right into the crystal itself so she wouldn’t have to manually specify it whenever she cast the spell.
As for what direction she chose? None at all.
Rína gave the double decker dynamo a test, pushing aether from inside her soul up into the base of the Touch dynamo, flowing first through it and then the kinetic dynamo it was conjoined to. The resulting aether had the feel of, unsurprisingly, both kinetic and Touch with the latter being kind of muted—or maybe shrouded—relative to the bare Touch dynamo. But the real test came when she sent the aether down to the physical. And when she did… nothing happened.
Rína frowned, why wasn’t it…?
Rína shook her head. The aether was touching the physical, yes, but it was touching the space in front of her that was just open air. In theory the kinetic intent should have interacted with the air itself, but Rína knew from practice with her cantrip that generic kinetic intent had trouble interacting with air. And according to her aunt, kinetic intent was actually a kind of ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ and had trouble interacting with anything at least compared to more specialized magics like geomancy or aeromancy.
Regardless, Rína lowered the aether of what she hoped would be her mage sight, down to where the floorboards of the belfry should be.
Rína could tell the instant the aether touched the wood. One moment nothing was happening, the next moment half of the kinetic intent in the aether began to dissolve. Specifically, the kinetic intent tried to apply a force to… nowhere. By design, there was very little kinetic intent in the first place, so even if it had applied a force, it would have been very small. But instead of doing anything, the aether tried to apply a directionless force, which seemed to have the same effect of trying to divide by zero. The result was the kinetic intent fizzling itself, leaving behind the now unshrouded Touch intent.
For the purposes of mage sight… it sort of worked. Judging by where the Touch was and wasn’t still shrouded by the kinetic intent, Rína had a three-d silhouette of the floorboards in front of her. The picture wasn't the clearest, but she could tell where one floorboard shaped silhouette ended and another began, as well as see what might have been an old termite tunnel going through one of the boards.
Rína grimaced. Did she create what was technically a mage sight spell? Yes. Did it allow her to see and feel in three dimensions? Sort of. Should she be proud of it? Probably. Was she just going to leave it at that, tell her aunt that she was done, and head home for the night? Definitely not.
She knew how her aunt literally saw the world, she knew what was possible with kinetic mage sight. And yeah, it probably wasn’t the best idea to compare her first attempt to what a three hundred year old mage could do, but damn it, the discrepancy showed her just how much room for improvement there was.
Not that she needed an external comparison to see areas she could improve on. The two biggest shortcomings of her… prototype spell were that the kinetic intent either tripped or it didn’t, hence the silhouettes, and the aether had no way of resetting on its own, so something like a moving object would just create a smear of tripped aether across her mage sight unless she was constantly replacing it was fresh, un-tripped aether. And a distant third shortcoming was that she could still feel touch from the un-tripped aether, albeit to a lesser degree, where idealing she shouldn’t be feeling anything.
Rína bit her lip as she flipped through her notes to some of the more… involved designs she had been mulling over. They were all rather rough, but as she looked over them a new idea came to mind, one for the kind of spell aether that should—in theory—be exactly what she was looking for.
The only question was how in the hells was she going to build a spell structure that could actually create a spell aether like that. None of her existing designs could do it, but some of them included components—that she designed to fit with her soul—that she might be able to repurpose…
Yeah… Yeah, if she grabbed the—for lack of a better term—‘centrifuge’ component and piped that into a… but then she would need to equalize the flows heading through the… which she could do with a ‘condenser’, but she’d still have to get the two intents paired together without them collapsing… a daisy-chained ‘percolator’ would do the trick… and of course she’d need a ‘smokestack’ for the final outflow… and… yeah, that might do it.
Now all she had to do was to make the thing.
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Rína was vaguely aware of her body complaining about something, but she put it out of her mind for the moment as she just needed to make one final tweak to her spell structure and then she’d be done. The tweak itself was just her slightly tapering of one of the components’ outflows by a fraction, which she did by slowing abrading off material from its edges. Afterward, Rína sent a little test aether through the spell structure and sure enough it flowed through the crystal ever so slightly easier. Now she could comfortably say that her work on her mage sight was complete… though there was still that one part of the secondary intake manifold where the aether was a little too sluggish than she’d like…
She might as well do another ‘final tweak’, after all she’d been doing one ‘final tweak’ after another for gods knew how long now.
A handful of minutes later her mage sight was improved by a fraction of a fraction of a percent and she was now well and truly done…
Although… if she just—
“Rína,” came her aunt’s voice, “It will be morning soon.”
“What? But it’s only…” Rína began as she opened her eyes, and saw a dim streak of golden red creeping in from the tower’s window, “Oh…”
This wasn’t the first time Rína had accidentally pulled an all-nighter while working on a project, but it was definitely the first all-nighter she spent sitting cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed. The only thing she could point to to explain it was the fact that all the work she had been consumed by regarded her soul. Whenever she had pulled an all-nighter in the Andreou apothecary or at the wagon’s chemistry setup, she necessarily needed to use her body to get any work done and so she couldn’t fully ignore it—but clearly that wasn’t the case when working on her soul.
Rína turned her head to look around and was immediately met with an avalanche of cracks coming from her neck. Rína groaned as she tested out the rest of her body, finding its previously muted complaints now screaming in her mind. She noticed she was pretty hungry and a bit dehydrated, but that paled in comparison to her lower body. Starting from her lower back, every joint—and her knees especially—seemed to be locked in place and about on the verge of staging a mutiny.
“I guess I kind of got carried away,” Rína grimaced, “Sorry for keeping you here all night.”
Yvette wavered her off as she closed the book she was reading, “I was in no hurry to leave and did not wish to interrupt you. However I recall you mentioning that this tower was frequented during the day, so I believe we should be leaving sooner rather than later.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Rína croaked as she began the arduous task of uncrossing her legs.
“Did you at least find the night productive?” Her aunt asked.
An impish grin spread across Rína’s face, despite her discomfort, “Yeah, yeah you could say that…”
“Oh? May I see the results?”
“Go for it,” Rína said as her aunt’s familiar aura washed over her soul, taking a bit longer than usual as it flowed through all the nooks and crannies of her newest spell structure. Her version-two mage sight looked like nothing short of a cluttered mess of chemistry glassware. The larger components Rína had made were arranged nearby each other somewhat haphazardly, with the smaller ones snuck in wherever they could fit, and around it all was a rat’s nest of crystal pipes, transporting various kinds of aether every which way.
Most of the clutter was because Rína hadn’t been entirely sure how large some of the components needed to be, and on more than one occasion she literally built herself into a corner—requiring her to commit crimes against good organization to get herself out of it. But at the end of the day—or rather at the end of the night, in this case—it worked, it sure as the hells worked, and there was nothing that could take away Rína’s pride in that fact.
A laugh slowly bubbled up from Yvette after her aura had finished its inspection of the spell structure.
“Wh-What’s so funny?” Rína asked hesitantly, “Wait, is something wrong with it or…?”
Well, maybe there was one thing that could take away Rína’s pride.
Yvette waved away Rína’s concerns, “Oh no, nothing of the sort,” Yvette said with a wide grin as her laugh fading to a titter, “I merely suspect that we may skip ahead and accelerate our aether dynamics lessons. Would you care to walk me through your design?”
Rína breathed out a sigh of relief, “Uh, sure. So I got the main idea from this glassblower I saw. They had set up one of those artist stalls for Sharad and they had this one piece made of a bunch of panes of glass. Each glass pane was covered in random splotches of color, but if you looked at the whole thing from a certain angle, the splotches would turn into a picture. Or more like, the closer you looked at it from the ‘right’ angle, the more the colors came together and the more it looked like a picture.”
Yvette nodded, “I assume you used this as a template for your signal?”
“My signal?”
“The intent you used to represent the information from your mage sight.” Yvette explained.
“Oh yeah, I just went with the idea of touch for that, but separating it out into different ‘panes of glass’ was kind of a…” Rína smirked, “It was kind of a ‘pains of ass’.”
Yvette gave a snort as Rína continued.
“I used this bit like a centrifuge,” Rína flexed her aura around a crystal component, brushing against her aunt’s to point out what she was talking about, “But instead of using gravity to separate out the different bits, I used the crystal’s intent, sort of like a reverse dynamo, to make the different intents that made up the input to flow out in different directions based on how alike they were to the crystal’s. It was really finicky trying to get the input stuff to soften enough that the intents would separate without being so soft that they were just overwritten like a regular dynamo.”
“Yes, I imagine it was…” Yvette said, “This manner of component is usually called a ‘discriminator’ amongst most mages, but it is rarely seen in the spells of Initiates such as yourself.”
“Really?” Rína furrowed her brow, “Why not? It seems like it’d be pretty useful for a lot of stuff. Also, I’m sorry, but ‘discriminator’ is a terrible name especially when it’s, you know, definitely a centrifuge.”
Yvette snorted, “I certainly agree on the matter of the name, but I doubt too many mages have ever been in the same room as a centrifuge. As for its use?” Yvette said, a look of pride on her face as she met Rína’s eye, “Creating a functional version is generally too difficult for Initiates.”
“Oh…” A moment of silence hung in the air before Rína faked a cough and continued her presentation, “Well, uh, I used some sorta mental background noise kinda intent for the centrifuge so that the bits that came out of it also felt like background noise and wouldn’t grab my attention like Touch intent would. But with a bit of will I was able to get the ‘glass panes’ to ‘line up’ and feel like regular Touch intent again, at least so long as I was concentrating on it. And that kind of act of will I was able to package as the intent of this bit of crystal,” Rína indicated a different component with her aura, “and then I just tied that bit into the kinetic intent that would trigger it all.”
“I imagine that is what all of this is for?” Yvette asked, indicating a series of spell components that constituted nearly half of the entire spell structure.
“Yup. It was pretty tricky getting the the kinetic stuff to partially trigger the intent that lined up the glass panes—instead of just fizzling out and needing to be replaced—but I was able to sort of tie them together with this bit,” Rína indicated another crystal component, “And that’s it.”
Yvette nodded along before her posture hitched. She looked Rína in the eye before continuing with a careful tone, “Pardon, but did you say ‘partially trigger’? Implying a gradient of activation?”
“Hm? Oh! Sorry,” Rína shook her head, “Yeah, that’s actually what most of the kinetic stuff is for. I wanted my mage sight to have a kind of smooth gray area between triggered and not that would show different densities inside an object—you know so I could actually pick out different internal bits. I got the idea for how to do it from your lesson on nerve endings: where each individual nerve ending either fires off a signal or it doesn’t, but if you have a cluster of nerves, each with a different sensitivity, then together they sorta simulate a single nerve that can output on a smooth spectrum.”
“I see…” Yvette said uneasily, “That would certainly explain the relative complexity of these components.”
“Yeah tell me about it,” Rína continued, “Instead of just making a bunch of different dynamos with different sensitivities, I used this big bit to make some kinetic intent with random sensitivities. And I mean, it mostly works, but as you can probably guess, the stuff attached to its output is my best attempt at trying to keep the relative sensitivities mostly consistent. I still needed to add this bit in case there was too much of a certain sensitivity; it pipes any overflow back in to be re-randomized. It’s definitely hacky, but it works. Then I entangled the result together so it acts like a single bit of intent, spread it out as thin as I could get it to try and reduce its weight, and then I piped it into the rest of the spell, and presto.”
As Rína concluded her presentation, Yvette gave her a considered look. Then she frowned and crossed the belfry to take a seat next to Rína.
“Would you care to test the accuracy of the final result?” Yvette said, producing a palm-sized cube of wood from a pocket beneath her shawl and presenting it to Rína.
“Sure,” Rína said, taking the cube into her own hands, “What’s the test exactly?”
“It is merely to use your mage sight to read as much of the contained text as possible.” Yvette explained.
Rína gave a wordless shrug as she began casting her sight. Compared to her cantrip, it took far longer for the raw aether inside her soul to work its way through all of the spell structure’s twists and turns. But a few seconds after she had begun, the first of the spell aether was produced from the structure.
The spell aether was heavy with intent, nearly as heavy as her regular aura, but as she was manipulating it close to her body—or rather, close to her soul—its weight didn’t pose any immediate problem. The aether itself had a mostly kinetic feel, though a bit off from her regular kinetic cantrip, and with a slight quiet kind of background noise to it that was easy for Rína to ignore. However as she sent the spell down to the physical, to about where she assumed the wooden cube was held in her hand, that background noise of intent suddenly snapped into Touch.
The little wooden trinket bloomed into her perception, and not just its surface, but its entire three dimensional glory.
Rína saw that the cube was hollow, only about a centimeter thick, with letters of decreasing sizes embossed onto its interior walls.
“Uh, the biggest embossed letter is A, and the next biggest are M, Q. Then it’s E, V, H; L, W, Y, U;…” The letters themselves started pretty large but quickly shrank. She got through most of them but started having trouble once they got to what she thought was only a few millimeters tall, “...and then I want to say, G, D, X… M?”
“Close: G, O, X, N.” Yvette corrected.
“Damn,” Rína tsked, “Alright, then for the inside ones… U; J, T; F, C, B;...”
Rína continued reading, not the letters embossed on the interior walls of the small cube, but instead written inside the walls themselves.
The cube’s wood was only dense enough to partially trigger her mage sight, or rather, it fully triggered only a fraction of the individual kinetic ‘nerves’. The effect was that the intent of Touch was only partially brought together, as if she were viewing the panes of glass close enough to the ideal angle to see that there was some kind of picture hidden in the noise, but not quite close enough to see what it was.
But within the walls there were other, denser kinds of wood that made the intent of Touch feel much more, well, dense—more there. And naturally these denser bits wrote out letters with each subsequent letter being slightly less dense, slightly closer in density to the surrounding wood and thus harder to read.
“... Z, Y, A, W; H, R, I…” Rína trailed off as her attention was caught by something strange. She only created about as much spell aether as she thought she would need and focused it on the cube itself, but as she shifted slightly, her spell brushed up against something that was as alien as it was familiar.
A hand.
Her hand.
The one holding the cube.
Throughout the process of making her mage sight, she only really tested it on the wooden boards that made up the floor in front of her. At the time she felt the only alternatives were either the mostly homogeneous stone of the tower’s exterior or the similarly boring metal of the clock’s mechanisms. But wood? Between tree rings, knots, scars, rotten patches, and insect damage, there was a lot more detail she could probe for.
But in all of her creative fervor, she hadn’t once thought of turning her mage sight onto her own body, which was a shame because even just her hand had an order of magnitude more detail than any old chunk of wood. And not only that but it was alive, she was alive. She could see her heartbeat being mirrored in the faintly pulsing blood vessels interwoven through all the layers of tissue and atop all the little bones that made up her palm and fingers. She could see the cartilage between the bones of her hand, and see in real time how it acted as both a cushion and a hinge for the surrounding bone. She could see the root of her fingernails. She could crack her knuckles and see the instant when small air bubbles were created and then collapsed inside the joint’s cartilage. She could see the muscles at the base of her palm flexing, and if she looked closely she could…
“Rína?” Came her aunt’s concerned voice, “Are you alright?”
“What? Yeah of course. Sorry, I just got… distracted,” Rína said, her attention already returning to her hand, to the tendons that were anchored to her fingers, threaded down the back of her hand, through the base of her wrist and up to her forearm muscles…
Without a shred of conscious thought, Rína continued looking more and more into the body she had previously assumed she was familiar with. But the more she looked, the more she saw… and the more a corpse was staring back at her.