> The first carding (or ‘primary carding’ or just ‘primary’ in the common parlance) of an aspirant youth of quality is an integral event in their development, and must ideally be approached deliberately with the consultation of experts, employers, and/or parental guardians. However, a primary carding can come on at any time and the ideal conditions may be out of reach for even the most dutiful. Fear not! Even if this misfortune should arise, all is not lost so long as the exercises in this primer are recollected in a timely manner.

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> Excerpt from the introduction of “A General Discussion on Carding” by Alfrem Quillriq. Banned text.

In the peaked attic of a townhouse there is a quiet room. Usually the sounds below carry into it, the reassuring rattles, bangs, thumps, and thuds of daily life. But it has grown late into the night, and they have been silent for some time.

The occupant of the room missed the noises, and more-so what they represented. He missed making those noises himself, of being ‘a part-of’ instead of ‘apart’. But he has been occupied, he was surrounded by the strewn debris of focused hours: reports, letters, sums, and figures; to be analyzed condensed, framed, collated, and extrapolated.

He was tired, but he was doing what is necessary. He was chasing a miracle. He was trying to turn the hours, days, weeks, and months into a solution, into a primary carding. To make the work he's engaged in transcend the boundaries of possibility, and become something more.

Jack was bored of boredom.

Jack was even bored of being bored of boredom.

That feeling had come with a kind of nirvana, a sort of abstract interest that reflected on the higher dimensions of feelings about feelings about feelings. A stable oasis of engagement in a desert of disinterest.

However, even that novelty had worn thin some time ago, and he was beginning to suspect that he was about to grow bored of the boredom of being bored of boredom; and he worried that any additional layers of recursion would be... ca-caw!

The raucous call of a nightbird startled him out of his degenerate boredom spiral. He shook his head free of the muddling forces of tedium, helping his scattered thoughts coalesce back into a functional mind. A glance at his desk clock revealed a very welcome late hour: he could make his exit.

Jack pushed away from his desk, leaving behind his scattered papers—the evidence of hours spent on monotonous tasks. He’d worked late into the night, moving well into diminishing returns as fatigue took hold, but persevering anyway.

He was recently twenty, more than two years delayed from the average for his first carding. At first he’d been uniformly hardworking–committed to the strict schedule intended to maximize his chances of a card useful to the family. But as months became years, his diligence had become strained.

The extra hours that evening he’d spent on tedious drills were all to offset a night of running on the city rooftops and skywalks. The running was an escape—anticipating it is what made the weeks between outings bearable. By his figuring, if a few hours of action could keep him focused for the hundreds of tedium, it was a worthy trade.

He stepped lightly, making his way to the false back of his wardrobe. At the back, bundled surreptitiously in old clothes, he kept his nightblacks. The ‘blacks were a shimmery grey, capturing and releasing light in surreal patterns as he removed them from their hiding place. He wondered again at the transformation they would undergo when they were worn, when the cool night air opposed his body heat, and their true properties arose—total light absorption, giving truth to their name. With well-practised motions he donned the nightblacks, the time he’d spend checking his other gear would allow them to settle and activate their darkness trait. The gentle tightening of the material as it clung to him, drawing in to his heat, always struck Jack as uncomfortably alive.

The rest of his gear was quickly assembled: a trio of climbing pitons, for any sheer climbing that may be required; his flexible but tough running footwear; his rough-textured hide gloves, to both protect his hands and add an extra sliver of grip; and finally his concealing mask, he used a black carved piece of some wild creature’s carapace.

Many runners carried more for comfort, but he preferred to scrape off every gram he could. In the time he’d taken, his nightblacks had finished darkening. They clung tightly to his body, but their amazing elasticity left him feeling utterly unrestrained. He was ready.

Jack’s room was set over an alley, nicely discrete for his needs. His window swung open silently at a touch, oiled diligently for this precise moment, and he sprung up to make his exit.

Crouched on the sill, with one hand carefully gripping the frame of the window, he reached out and back over the edge of the eave and felt blindly for a moment before finding and flipping down the steel ring he’d installed for exactly this. The ring now hung visible, ready for his weight.

With his grip secured, he let his feet slip off the sill and for a breathless moment he hung suspended, held aloft by a single hand. Carefully, he began rocking his body back and forth, until he judged his momentum sufficient, and with an aggressive twist he hooked a foot onto the eave. Now secured by two points, the remaining scramble onto the roof was easily achieved.

Jack ascended to the peak of the roof, and the view of the city at night gave him pause as it always did. Calamut was a prosperous city at the edges of the northern frontier. Its industry had originally been supported by the raw materials brought back by wilding expeditions, even if in recent years those materials had become less essential to its growth.

The time when it had been a mere trading station was long past. But its legacy as a hub for expeditions into the wilds persisted in many ways. The censure on flammables this close to the wilds and the growing wealth had spurred the development of industries that could provide alternatives to burning fuels for heat and light. It was ultimately this reason that led to its other, unofficial name: Underwave.

The card-crafted stone of the city was awash in the gentle blue-green luminance of glowrock. Too dim to be visible in the day, glowrock veins were indistinguishable from the stone they streaked through until darkness fell. At night the absorbed light of the day was slowly released, rates shifting with changing temperature and humidity, creating a cityscape of rippling shadow and soft, ever-changing light.

Aestheticists employed by the Great Families had sculpted the city, adding tile murals to exterior walls and shaping the texture of surfaces to reflect and hold light to fit their grand designs. He’d been told that it was made to look like an underwater reef, a moment frozen in time but still eliciting the feeling of flowing motion. Jack had never seen the ocean; but when he climbed to heights such as this and could see as it was meant to be seen, he wondered if perhaps it was the ocean that wouldn’t compare.

Jack felt like an emptied vessel being filled once more by the vision before him. He let the feeling grow until it became restless tension, until it became something near overflowing, until he was nearly wretched with anticipation.

'Not yet.'

'Nearly... Now.' The coiled moment released, he sprung into motion and rejoined the city.

Whenever he moved into shadow his whole body would disappear, and not even his eyes could tell his body from the darkness. The only feedback then was through reading the pattern of the route, familiar footfalls and obstacles meeting his feet and hands in a blind dance of memorized steps.

This was the rush he loved, the mastery of a route to the point where he felt that vision was only holding him back. When he’d begun, still nervous and terrified by the prospect of the sport, he would venture onto the paths in the day to scout out new areas and get a feel for them; but the transparency and clarity of the daylit paths had quickly bored him. Now he could run near his home blindfolded, familiarity growing too faint only blocks away.

Jack felt the tension of the weeks he’d been cooped up lift from him as he caromed through the city. Soon he began to see the flicker of other night-runners as they interposed between him and the lights of the city; it was a subtle sign, easily imagined to be tricks of the light, but he could recognize the telltale patterns of his comrades.

All too soon he summited a tall building, and the first glimpse of his ultimate destination came to him. The Tangle, a bizarre ever-evolving sculpture that dominated the landscape around it.

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The Tangle sat central in the Springworks, and was highly beloved by the craftspeople of that industrial district. Whenever a spring failed to meet spec, or was irreparably damaged, it would soon make its way into the Tangle, added onto the complex and unstable structure by some arcane logic that somehow kept the thing standing.

In storms the whole edifice would flex and sway, rippling with such energy that all who saw it were persuaded to retreat to a safer location, ideally one that included several sturdy walls.

The sophisticated palates of the city hated it and so, attempting to minimize the profile of its clashing form with the attempted aquatic theme, they left it unlit.

An unbelievably hazardous structure of unstable construction and evolving form–plunged in darkness and isolated from the eyes of the upstanding folk of the city. Naturally, it was the meeting place of the night-runners.

Jack arrived at the Tangle, and was soon carefully picking his way through its lattices. Every grip needed to be thoroughly tried, pulled in multiple directions before it could be trusted to bear weight. Interspersed through the structure were small patches of black blobs, night-runners aggregating with their regular groups to share news and plot the evening’s escapades. Jack paused whenever voices travelled to him, taking a moment to discern if he knew them before continuing on.

A rumble of a voice eventually caught his ear, a familiar tone that drew him to their cluster of roosting shadows. Upon his arrival, he realized he was joining an argument that was already edging into futility.

“I’m tellin’ ya’s, it was a clean jump. Nah card for it.” The voice had a defensive whine to it, thick with a low-caste accent and diction. The speaker was a slight figure, who had taken a semi-central point in the mix of perching figures and was constantly spinning his head around to check on each of those around him, as if trying to see if they were persuaded.

“Racket, we’ve got rules for this. It’s not clean unless a tester runs it. We’re not doubting you, it’s just how it is.” The reply came from the deep and rough voice that’d originally drawn Jack in. The voice belonged to the biggest person there, and obviously he was the true nexus of the group as everyone had settled in such a way to ensure a clear view of him. However, his efforts to keep the peace were interrupted by the other combatant in the mix.

“Who’re ya ta say who’s doubting what? I doubts it! I saw that jump. He were fallin’, ready to make his mother weep, and then went up again. Tells me what clean jump has ya go up after the earth grabs ya huh?” This was a young woman’s voice, clearly baiting her target with a scornful tone. She was laying horizontal to the ground, lazily lolling across the springs while she stirred trouble.

“It’s wind, ya duffer! The wind catches and ya’s ride it right up. A clean jump!” Racket shouted a reply.

From there any semblance of order collapsed, until with a screech and tremble of metal the leading figure slapped the Tangle frame and, in the ensuing cacophony, both fell silent.

“Enough! I will not have you both at one another’s throats during a run. Racket, if there’s a tester, we can try your claim. Dart, stop sniping at him. Spend your energy on the run. We’ve got a sixth while you bickered, so we’re doing roll. Gravel here!” Gravel barked out, clearly straining to hold their temper.

“Dart.” This from the baiting lounger, casual as can be. Jack knew a little of them by reputation, that they travelled between groups but rarely settled anywhere for long. Clearly they had started coming to his usual crew in the months since he’d last appeared and their propensity to move around was, unfortunately, explained by their behaviour.

“Racket.” One muttered, obviously discontented. A familiar character to Jack, he was easily riled and constantly had to be reminded to lower his voice when over residences. In Jack’s experience he had always been sincere, just inclined to forget himself.

“Mouse.” A near whisper from the smallest figure there. Jack was glad to hear them, Mouse had begun night-running at near the same time as him, and they remained friends even as Jack was pulled to other obligations.

“Slip.” Slip was, ironically, one of the most skilled runners Jack knew of. They were a reliable Spotter for others, likely drawn in by word of a new, untested route—that Racket had undoubtedly spread.

Jack waited for everyone to call out, readily spotting an opportunity for drama that he would not decline to exploit. After a moment’s silence to build anticipation, knowing that they needed a tester if the new jump was to be tested, he answered.

“Canary... tester still.” Jack called out to the waiting group.

“That’s mah birdboy! A tester fer life!” Racket was quick to cackle in delight at Jack’s continuing uncarded status.

The others were quick to greet him as well. Dart merely grunting, and Mouse going so far as to reach out an open palm in welcoming.

“Canary, it’s good to have you back for a run. Could you repeat it to me now?” Gravel spoke with careful elocution, incongruous to his rough voice.

Jack knew that Gravel was priming a truth-telling card of some kind, and so repeated his status again, knowing the step was necessary for any confirmed tester.

With Jack’s lack of carding confirmed, Gravel was quick to call a run to the site of Racket’s new jump as the next destination. The order of runners was Racket first; as it was his claim to be tested, he would lead. Followed by Gravel, carefully positioned as buffer from the next in line, then quarrelsome Dart. Then Mouse, who snuck glances back at Jack. He made a note to take some time with them, recognizing their shy invitation for what it was. Jack was behind them. Slip brought up the rear, mindfully close to the member without any cards should they fall.

Testers were highly valued to the night-runners–their safety prioritized. There were only a few years in which a runner could be at peak skill and also lack any card effects. But they were necessary to determine the baseline of what was possible. After the sport had grown beyond the ranks of couriers, who made their living running on the roofs and skylanes of the city and were carded to such a trade, interest had grown in running without the aid of cards to see the limits of true human ability. Routes were ranked based on the strength of movement aiding cards required to run them, but if they could be done by a tester, they were considered legitimate for claims that their traversal was ‘clean’.

Bragging claims of routes taken without cards were sources of lively debate and argument, but no one really trusted the competitive boasts of others unless it was run by a tester.

Jack was one of the oldest testers among the night-runners, and for that reason also one of the most skilled. When he completed a route, everyone knew it was achievable by baseline humans, and worth pushing themselves to achieve without cards.

Jack lost himself in the running. He followed Mouse without thought, copying their approach to each obstacle, like a laggardly shadow struggling to keep pace. By letting them do the thinking he reduced his own load, letting his mind push any lingering thoughts of the day aside; dropping the figures and numbers of the day and the tension of hours cooped up in an increasingly stifling room, until all that was left were his senses and the world.

The muffled thump-thump of his stride. The intermittent warmth of his breath pooling within his mask on every exhale. The sway of the skywalk paths, shifting on their shock-springs at his footfall.

They entered a district of the city Jack hadn’t visited in over a year. He turned a corner, and a masterpiece rose into his vision, one he didn’t recognize. A mural of some strange and sinuous sea-thing, made of what must have been hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of glowrock. He could see the common blues and greens, but also the much rarer reds and purples accenting its form. As he ran, it seemed to swim in space, flowing so smoothly Jack felt it could surge from the rock at any moment. Captivated by the vision, his stride broke and he came to a stumbling halt behind the stationary Mouse.

Broken from his reverie, Jack looked around to see that all the runners had paused to admire the work as well.

“He made it for us, you know.” Mouse’s hushed voice rose from the darkness.

“Huh?” Jack replied intelligently.

“The night-runners. The muralist made it for us. The city commissioned it, but they just see the still thing. You can only see it swim if you run on the heights.” Mouse clarified with a shrug. “So it must be for us.”

“How did he do it? How did he make it move? I’ve never seen anything...”

“He carded a method to shape prisms, the optics behind it, I don’t think anyone understands but him. He embedded them in the stone, tens of thousands of prisms that shape the light so anywhere you stand you only get one image. What I see standing here is different from what you see.”

“So when you move, it moves with you.” Jack bobbed his head to see the slow shift of the effect.

“He can’t even walk, did you know that? He can’t see it move, he just imagined it, and made it so.”

By the end Jack thought he heard a slight quaver in their voice, but it was gone too soon to be sure, and after that outburst they lapsed back into their usual quiet way.

“It’s amazing. I think if he made it for us, he would be glad to know it stops us in our tracks.” Jack finally said.

Mouse was silent for a moment, but then turned to him and spoke in a hurried stammer. “I missed y-, I mean, I’ve missed running with you while you’ve been gone. Don’t make it so long next time, okay?”

Jack tried to devise a reply, but Mouse had already turned and bolted away, provoking the entire group to resume their journey.