Querit took the news that I’d plundered his homeland’s most valuable artifacts better than I’d expected him to, if only because my modifying the rune scheme through multiple layers of mysteel without damaging any other part was overshadowing any offense he might take. What remained to be seen was whether those modifications had worked.

Querit scrambled all over the pillar, even climbing to sit on top of it at one point, as he cast a series of divinations to peer inside. “I would say this was impossible if I wasn’t standing in front of it,” he said when he was done. “These aren’t supposed to be movable. Just the act of relocating them alone should have turned them into scrap metal. To pull that off for not just one pillar, but the entire network, and then to hunt down and modify the location-dependent portions of the script… I cannot wait to see if they work.”

“It all looks right to you?” I asked.

“It does, but I feel like I need to tell you that I wasn’t involved in their creation. Professor Velder worked as part of a team of a hundred master mages building this whole system, and that was all done before he created me.”

“But you’re familiar with his methodology,” I said.

“I am,” Querit agreed. “And this all looks right, according to everything I know.”

“What if it’s not? What are the risks of feeding this network enough mana to activate it?”

“Minimal. There are plenty of safety redundancies built in. If something goes wrong, the mana will be wasted, but I don’t foresee any explosions or feedback issues, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s always a risk when this much mana gets concentrated into this small of a space,” I said. “Even if it’s held in mysteel.”

“For the central pillar, I can confirm the safety runes are still intact,” Querit said. He jumped down from overhead, landing with a hard thump that would have required a bit of mana to handle without getting injured for a normal person. His morphic body just took the shock without so much as flinching. “Let’s go look at the others?”

We flew through the forest, not because it was a long trip, but because it gave Querit a chance to practice lossless casting while I observed him. His technique was still shaky, but he was starting to figure things out. About a quarter of the mana he used got pulled back in, and he compensated with an ambient mana draw that only worked here in my demesne.

“I’ve been focusing more on adapting the technique to enchantments at the moment,” he admitted when I remarked on his progress. “So far, I’ve been able to get an enchantment to recycle about ten percent of the mana used, but in a different way. It’s kind of like how we’d build part of the enchantment to make it self-sustaining through the environmental mana it could harvest, except it’s sort of harvesting from itself as the mana cycles through it.”

“Sort of an efficiency upgrade,” I said.

“Kind of the same principles, except it’s not scaling down the mana being used, just reclaiming it before it can disappear.”

“Wouldn’t that increase the total amount of mana the enchantment needs to function in the first place?” I asked.

Querit nodded eagerly. “Exactly! It’s reclaiming about half the mana used, but it costs so much more to begin with that the actual net savings is only a fraction of that. I’m trying to figure out a way to boost the reclamation amount now.”

“Because if we can get it to one hundred percent, then it won’t really matter how much it costs to do it,” I finished for him.

“Assuming the initial cost doesn’t become prohibitive, yes.”

“I like it. It’s a good line of reasoning. Have you started trying to apply the process to inscriptions or alchemical work yet?”

“Not yet. I considered enchantments to be the most viable discipline for experimentation, and also the most useful.”

“Inscription is better now,” I said. “Without ambient mana, enchantments run a risk of starving and breaking easily.”

“Hmm, yes. I hadn’t thought of that,” Querit said with a thoughtful frown. “Still, I think the same principles should work, and enchantments are easier to work with. Once the process has been refined, I can draft a rune script to do the same thing and start testing how to integrate it.”

“How much faster would this all go if you had your research frame?” I asked.

“Immensely,” the golem told me. “I’ve been making some simple tools by hand, but it’s a tedious process and it doesn’t give me even a fraction of the versatility a full frame would.”

I debated whether or not to introduce Querit to my crucible. If there was anyone who could learn to use it quickly, it’d be a golem designed to be a lab assistant. It would be useful, no doubt, perhaps even to the point that it allowed him to recreate some of his frames if we could find the right material.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

It came down to a matter of trust. Querit had asked for it, and so far, he’d done nothing to abuse what little I’d given him. If anything, he seemed eager to please. But I’d learned from bitter experience that a person could act perfectly trustworthy for months or years until they finally wormed their way into a position to properly betray me.

As soon as he figured out lossless casting to the point where he could operate indefinitely outside the petrified forest, I’d lose a massive amount of leverage over him. That was probably the point where I’d find out how trustworthy he really was. If he disappeared in the night, well, I’d have my answer. I doubted he’d try to destroy anything on his way out, but not being able to use any sort of mental magic to read his thoughts did make it harder to predict his motivations and plans.

How much damage could Querit actually do? He could betray the location of my demesne to Ammun’s forces and possibly sabotage the mysteel defensive array on his way out. He didn’t know about New Alkerist or my family there, so they were safe for the moment. My private workshops and labs were still unknown to him, and my wards would have alerted me if he’d been snooping around looking for them.

If I gave him access to the crucible, that was something valuable that could easily be broken. He probably already suspected its existence, given how quickly I’d fabricated that controller frame for him to use, but he didn’t know where it was, which made it safe. However, if it turned out that Querit was a long-term ally that I didn’t need to worry about betraying me, the sooner he was able to make the tools he needed, the sooner he’d produce the results I needed.

I wasn’t the kind of person who liked to take unnecessary risks, but then, this wasn’t really unnecessary. I was competing against Ammun and an entire tower of resources and staff. What he’d almost accomplished in those eight facilities would have taken me a decade to do if I’d devoted my time to nothing but manufacturing those pieces. He’d managed it in barely two years, and there was no telling what else he was also working on at the same time.

The simple truth of it was that I was never going to be able to keep up, and if I was going to fight against Ammun and win, I needed to advance my core to stage nine as quickly as possible. Querit could help me do that, at least for the moment. Right now, gaining access to a mana resonance point was the bottleneck. That was what I needed to focus on, and the sooner Querit fixed his own issues, the sooner he could work on mine.

“I can help with your tool issue,” I said. “After we’re done here, I’ve got something to show you.”

“Oh? Do you have some cache of ancient tools you also recovered when you found me?”

“Not exactly.”

The golem gave me an inquisitive look, but I ignored him and landed at the next pillar. “We’ll talk about it later,” I said. “One project at a time.”

* * *

“Ah! A crucible. And… not the most advanced I’ve ever seen, but it should work for what I need,” Querit said as he circled around the rune-covered pillars. “Where did you find this?”

“I made it about six years ago, then transported it here after I settled in this valley.”

“You really do have all the best toys,” Querit told me. “I cannot wait to see your alchemy equipment.”

“Let’s see what you can do with this first,” I said. “What kind of raw materials do you need to start fabricating your tools?”

“Can this thing cut steel?”

“Easily.”

“Then lots of that. Maybe a bit of copper spooled as wire.” Querit paused to think. “Tin sticks. I imagine those will be easy to transmute. I wouldn’t mind a bit of living stone to experiment with, but I understand if you don’t want your demesne damaged.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to give the mysteel system a test run. You should probably be on standby to assist with that in case anything goes wrong.”

“I can do that. I’ll just start sketching out the rune scripts for a few of the tools I need while I wait.”

“I’d love to see those when you’re done,” I told the golem.

Perhaps he was naïve, or perhaps he was just putting on an act, but he nodded eagerly. If total transparency in his work was his play to keep me trusting him, it was a good one. It would be harder to sneak anything potentially disruptive into his crucible work if I oversaw everything he did.

“Alright, get ready for the test run,” I said as I left the room.

I activated the pillars, allowing each to pull mana from my demesne. They took far more than any simple ward stone could hope to match, so much so that the ambient mana grew thin and I briefly wondered if I’d find Querit a lifeless doll on the floor. But then they reached minimum capacity and started up. A divination field extended out over the valley, one designed to give the system an early warning and conserve mana until it was needed.

I spent the rest of the day measuring the mana draw before powering the system down. Even functioning at bare minimum, it was just too expensive to keep running indefinitely. If I knew an attack was incoming, I could reactivate it as a defensive measure, which was better than nothing, but not what I’d been trying to achieve.

No matter how much my capabilities grew, I never had enough mana to do everything I wanted. Hopefully, Querit’s experiments would prove successful, and I could streamline the enchantments on the valley to completely negate the load on the ember blooms powering them. Even that would only be a step in the right direction, but I’d long since given up turning the valley into a new Night Vale. I couldn’t even get the original ember bloom to drop any sort of seeds so that I could make an attempt to grow more of them, though I suspected that was at least in part because this really wasn’t the environment it was supposed to grow in. The cuttings I’d taken had worked as a substitute, but they weren’t exactly healthy and robust.

With my experiments concluded for the moment, I spent the next week working closely with Querit to speed up his own progress. At no point did he ever do anything suspicious or have an explanation for his actions that didn’t make sense. It seemed more and more foolish to continue to distrust him, but I couldn’t make myself let go of that feeling, and he could tell.

Neither of us brought it up, however. We just kept working, every step bringing us closer to a complete solution to his mana issues. Then, one day, almost by accident, we figured it out, and Querit was able to exist indefinitely on a set amount of mana.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

“Well, about that…” he began. “How would you feel about helping me out with something?”