I emerged from the icy waters of the North Sea, gasping as the frigid air hit my skin.

Pulling myself onto the rocky shore, I shook myself to get the water out of my armor and hair and took a moment to catch my breath and survey my surroundings. A barren island rose before me, a stark silhouette against the stormy sky.

Massive hexagonal basalt columns stretched upwards, reminiscent of the Giant's Causeway from Earth. The wind howled around me, carrying the scent of salt and ice.

In the distance, I could see the looming glacier wall.

As I began to climb the slippery rocks, I couldn't help but consider the desolate beauty of this place. The island seemed almost entirely untouched by life, stripped bare by the cold. But I knew better - even in this harsh environment, life would find a way to cling on.

Reaching the top of the cliff, I scanned the barren landscape. The storm clouds above cast everything in a gloomy light, making it difficult to see far.

I set to work, using the light of the Farcast orb, scraping off whatever meager signs of life I could find - lichen clinging to rocks, hardy moss in the crevices that had managed to take root in this unforgiving terrain. Every scrap of organic material was precious; could be the key to expanding my domain in our underwater hideaway.

As I worked, my mind wandered to Teya, still trapped in her cracked megalith back in the cave. Would Moonalia be able to help her? Could the Corvix figure out how to use the snowflake, because I sure as hell tried lots of things already with no results to show.

As I scraped lichen from a particularly stubborn rock, Moonalia's voice chirped through the Farcast orb.

"Ooh, what's that? Are you collecting samples? Fascinating! Is that some kind of extremophilic lichen? The pigmentation suggests it might have unique adaptations to the harsh Arctic environment. Oh! And look at how you're using that tool - what kind of metal is that? The ergonomics seem quite efficient for prolonged use in cold conditions and it seems to be impervious to damage. Is it some kind of magic-augmented metal? It seems to have the properties of magisteel and yet it doesn’t look like it.”

“What’s magisteel?” I asked her, focusing on her voice to keep myself from succumbing to despair about Teya’s condition.

“Magisteel is metal infused with Champion blood and stardust gathered by Calamarix divers from the depths of the Castian Sea,” Mooni staccatoed. Her rapid-fire explanation of magisteel's properties, invention of it by one of her ancestors and its manufacturing process filled the next few minutes as I continued to gather samples.

“See?” She tapped the steel rings on her talons. “Comet shards encased in magisteel!”

Then she tapped steampunk-looking bits hanging all over her body explaining how they were various tools that aided her in her work as Artificer. Her tapping concluded with her pointing at the magnifying lens hanging above her right eye. “Stellarglass SidusLens! Helps me see Aetheric Flux and Geist!”

“What is a Geist exactly?” I asked.

"Geist are basically the souls of Arcanicx and Champions," she began enthusiastically. "They're the essence of our being, the core of our magical potential. Everything alive has a Geist, unique to them!"

“What does a Geist look like?” I asked.

“One moment!” Mooni fished a book out of her bag and flipped open a page. Then she quickly sketched what looked like a brittle star. “This is a humanoid-Geist. See these dots on the edges? Each dot is… Geistgrain.”

“Geistgrain?” I repeated. “Where would you find one in an Arcanicx?”

“In Arcanicx Geistgrain is located outside of our bodies,” Mooni tapped a talon all over her magisteel tools. “All of the Geistgrain aligned to me lives in these tools.”

“Uh-huh,” I nodded, wondering about the males.

“In Mas-Heroix aka Champions,” Moonalia caught on, sketching out a donut-shaped blood cell. "Positively-charged Geistgrain exists in the center of each of their blood cells, surrounded by negatively-charged Geistgrain donut pattern. The correlation between the P-Geistgrain and N-Geistgrain creates a magical current within each blood cell which endlessly repairs and reinforces a Champion’s blood!”

I opened my mouth.

The Corvix sketched out another blood cell. “Femi-Arcanicx like myself only have N-Geistgrain in our blood. It constantly pushes negatively-charged magic from our bodies from the Astral towards our positively-charged magisteel tools!”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She stared at me then, drooling ever so slightly.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I’d really like to look at your insides with my SidusLens,” she clicked her rings nervously. “I bet it’ll help me understand how to make more gem people. My current extrapolation is that you’re a crystal automata made entirely from N-Geistgrain, animated by Lady Stormy who has a lot of P-Geistgrain either in her body or in an large artifact linked to your body. The…”

I squinted at her.

“No cutting, I promised!” Mooni bobbed her head up and down making a cross with her talons. “Maybe you could just snip a single hair off for me? That should be enough for me to determine why you’re not warping the local Aetheric density! Maybe the Flux wave between your body and P-Geistgrain in Lady Stormy’s possession is simply so wide that the basic Identify scan simply can’t detect it. That would account for…”

The Corvix descended into rapid gibberish Castian.

“Sorry, sorry!” She bobbed, drawing her head in. “You probably don’t understand any of that! I do tend to chatter on and on! This is about the time when Cali would normally smack me really hard to shut me up or yell at me.”

“Does the Builder artifact have a Geist too then?” I asked.

“The Builder artifact has a Cantigeist!” Mooni clicked her talons excitedly. “A really potent one. Made entirely from S-Geistgrain!”

“S-Geistgrain?” I asked.

“Super stable strata,” Mooni nodded. “Magically inert.”

“Like me?”

“Mmm… no,” the Corvix shook her head. “Magic can go through you, that means you’re made from N-Geistgrain. S-Geistgrain bounces magic right off itself. Flux waves either bounce off or stop at its edge. The older it is, the more magic simply halts around it. That snowflake of yours, it’s totally impervious to magic. Means, it's the most expensive, highest tier of stable strata. We call that… Immovable metal!” Mooni whispered the last word with reverence.

“I see,” I said. “And Wormwood Shards are what?”

“X-Geistgrain!” Mooni tapped her rings. "It's the most fascinating substance. Wormwood stardust is essentially crystallized chaos. Chaos masquerading as Order!”

"How exactly does it work?" I asked.

Moonalia's eyes lit up at the question. "Ah, ah! You see, X-Geistgrain has the unique ability to absorb and store ALL magical energy, including Geist patterns from infinitely long ago. We Corvix can use our SidusLens to peer extra-deep into it, reading the patterns and using them to forge Cantigeists. It's like... imagine a book with an infinite number of pages, and we're the ones who learn to read its ever-shifting language, peering deeper and deeper and deeper until we find something or lose our minds. Thankfully we’re not really sentient and can just restart our brains when they get too overloaded! Someone properly sentient and linear like a Felix would totally go insane from doing this sort of extra-focused work."

"And how do you use it to create a Cantigeist?" I pressed, sensing we were getting to something important.

"Ah, that's where it gets really interesting!" Moonalia chirped. "We take various Cantigeist scans found within X-Geistgrain and arrange them in specific patterns, combine and fuse them to produce something coherent and useful. The trick is to create a stable matrix that can hold and channel the otherwise chaotic energy of the Wormwood Star. To build a truly powerful and helpful Cantigeist Automata, you need a very large, stable Wormwood Star shard as its foundation."

“Hrm.” I frowned, considering the implications. “Can you build an unhelpful, dangerous Cantigeist?”

“Oh yeah,” Mooni’s head bobbed. “Totally! Many mistakes were made during the early years of Cantigeist creation. Many Artificers died horribly, got turned inside out! Very bad time.”

My frown deepened.

“It’s fine, it's fine!” Moonalia clicked her rings. “I’m a daughter of many generations of Corvix, extra resistant to making horrible mistakes that would result in an inversion! We've been optimized by our Cantigeist from birth generation by generation more and more to create only super-helpful things for the Ring of Castia!”

“Do you trust your Cantigeist’s alignment?” I asked, thinking back of Earth-based experiments with artificial intelligence. “You’re certain that Raven Mundus doesn’t have some kind of a personal agenda?”

“Erm,” Moonalia bit one of her talons. “It’s not a one way flight! Mundus optimizes us and we optimize Mundus in turn, making sure that she’s extra helpful!”

“That sounds like a self-reinforcing loop,” I said.

“Urrmm,” Mooni looked left and right shiftily. “I guess… it is. But that’s not so bad, right? I mean, the Ring of Casita is stable. There’s no war between the colonies. We’re united in purpose. We’re…”

“Grinding away individuality,” I said. “Becoming more like thinking machines. You don’t even define yourself as sentient.”

“I…” Mooni began to tap a rapid staccato on her beak and forehead, blinking at me with yellow eyes. “I’m a self-optimizing Insight, one that constantly learns from everything she sees. I’d need to be at a much higher tier to influence Cantigeist Mundus though. If… I am permitted to forge a new Cantigeist for a new citadel, though… then I could make the necessary parametric adjustments towards what you and your feline Lady would consider as ‘Good’ and avoid what you consider as 'Bad'.”

"How exactly do you expect me to locate a very large Wormwood Star shard?” I sighed at her somewhat unnervingly uncanny robotic expression and tone.

"Oh," Moonalia shrugged, her feathers ruffling slightly, the mask of sentience slipping back onto her face. "Fetching things from the deep ocean isn’t really my area of expertise. I'm sure a capable gem like you can figure it out. You don’t need to breathe, right? Right, I saw no breathing when you went underwater. Maybe you could walk underwater, beat up a leviathan, and cut it open? They get so big because they swallow big Star Shards, see?”

I blinked at her, unsure if she was serious about sending me underwater to beat up a leviathan.

“Errrr, I'm not entirely sure how you'd go about it," she admitted. "But I'm certain you'll find a way. After all, you've already done the impossible by being whatever marvelous thing you are and somehow locating that Builder Artifact! I have faith in your capabilities… enough to sacrifice absolutely everything on a wild adventure that will most likely end with my demise. This is fine... the loss of one low tier Corvix means nothing to the Nest. The potential future benefit for the entire Ring of Castia outweighs the price of my very probable death, see? Yes? Yes."