“Desire is at the root of all things. It is what guides us to our greatest triumphs and our lowest defeats. Some argue that to be free of desire is to be enlightened. Those who argue that, are wrong. Without desire, without hunger, we would stagnate. If our ancestors had never looked with avarice upon the stars, we never would have known the glory of creation.”
—The Necessity, Valtoris Blackstar
To Sylvas immense and immediate surprise he woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. The whole of the previous day felt like some sort of fever dream, and he should really have been more concerned about the fact that he was still covered in slowly spreading bruises, or that two of the teeth Vaelith had clumsily grown back were fused together, but the first night’s sleep without nightmares since the death of Croesia overshadowed all of that. He rose and dressed before Chul’s usually wake up call and when the knock came at his door, he was ready to lift, run and generally hurt himself in pursuit of another slight uptick in his scrying stats.
It came as something of a letdown that when he opened the door, Chul wasn’t there. It was Bael. “Good morning to you, my erstwhile companion. It has been too long since we spent time in one another’s company so I thought it might please you to journey down into the dungeons together rather than navigating the dark stairwells in solitude.”
“Dungeons?”
“I am being facetious of course, in referring to the lower levels of the temple tower complex in such terms, but the truth remains that you and I have been summoned to hold court with Instructor Sagran, and a few moments in good company might just offer the respite that we both need after our arduous schedules of late.”
“I’m meant to be meeting Quartermaster Chul at…”
“My belief is that the rotund madam means to meet you at the forge also. Though I am of course receiving my information second hand.”
“Right. Uh. Okay.” He slung his coat on, and they stepped out.
“My own work with Instructor Sagran this hell-week has been quite productive so far. Though it seems that you’ve had considerably more luck in finding viable equipment to suit your own affinity to date.”
Sylvas had completely forgotten about the eye-piece, pouch and boots, all visible to anyone passing by. “They’re not exactly useful in terms of combat. But…”
Bael picked up the train of thought. “But there is certainly more to the life of a naval mage than getting down and scrapping in the dirt.”
“What have they had you doing this week? Other than making gear for yourself?”
“Oh the usual nonsense, much like they’re inflicting upon you I imagine. Pushing towards the next circle, as ever. Expanding my catalogue of spells. Some adjustments to my paradigms to maximize their effectiveness and make me even more dazzlingly intelligent.”
“Surely you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns there.” Sylvas quipped back. Falling into this easy back and forth just like he used to do with Mira. Though Bael lacked the edge of a teenage girl, his jibes were too playful and not nearly cutting enough.
“The wooden spoon requires less polish than the silverware, or so I hear.” Bael looked delighted to have someone to have this sort of banter with. In a strange way, he was just as out of place here as Sylvas, and with a term behind him already, there was probably a lot of compounded loneliness to erode away.
Sylvas did his even best to play along, even if all the word games now had painful echoes from his past. “The wooden spoon is used every day and the silverware is only brought out for special occasions. What an apt metaphor.”
Bael mimed as though he’d just been struck in the heart, but the smile on his face was inescapable. They carried on all the way across to the temple complex, swapping witticisms and saying very little of substance. They had probably spent too much of their friendship on substantial things already, serious planning and battles when they should have been trading jokes. Sylvas felt like he had permission now, to relax a little, to laugh when something was funny. He even got in a few twists of the verbal knife that he felt like Mira would have been proud of herself.
He hadn’t even been able to think about her before today without feeling like crying.
As he had been told, Chul was waiting for him, alongside Instructor Sagran, and a slate that took up almost the full length of the workroom where the dwarf’s designs were being displayed. He slowed his approach to try and take them all in. Devices he couldn’t even conceive of the purpose of, laden with tiny snippets of familiar spell-work leaving him tantalized at the possibilities of how everything would come together.
“Staff will work better for you than a stave, especially if you’re planning on throwing your weight around.” Sagran launched into her spiel without even waiting for him to be fully in earshot. “You’ve got the height, Chul says you’ll put on the muscle. We build for tomorrow, not today.” She said the last bit in a strange little sing-song, as though it were some reference she was repeating that they all should have understood.
With a slap to the slate, the information of all the other designs skidded along, leaving behind the blueprint for Sylvas’ new staff. It looked shockingly simple on the surface, just a cylindrical length of plain metal that twisted at each end to leave an opening like he’d seen in the wrought iron wand.
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“It isn’t going to unravel like…”
“Built to purpose, for gravity affinity mana. Either end can serve as a focus, and we’ll be copying over the enchantment from a pair of your orbitals to each end so you can recoup it if lost.” The image on the slate-wall blew up larger to show where the enchantment would be housed, at the slightly bulbous point where the twisting of the metal began.
Sylvas opened his mouth to ask further questions but was cut off by the old dwarf launching into the next part of her speech. “The real clever stuff is on the inside. Liquid metal core.”
“Wouldn’t that make it scalding hot?” Bael asked, only to be fixed with a glare by the dwarf, who until now didn’t seem to have noticed him.
Her eyes narrowed, making them vanish entirely amidst the wrinkles. “You finished your piece yet?”
Sensing that discretion was to his advantage, the elf beat a hasty retreat to one of the workbenches arrayed around the forge, just about as far away as he could get. Sylvas had no doubt that he’d still be listening in with those incredible pointed ears of his.
“The room-temperature liquid metal core means the weight in it will always shift with momentum, maximizing impact force in close combat with your embodiment. Reinforced materials mean that it shouldn’t bend or break under the forces that you’re exerting, but it may need further upgrades as you increase your strength.” A flick of her hand on the slate brought up detailing of some clunky looking metal additions that would be made to the staff later, if he ever got to grips with using Tidal Shift without breaking all his bones.
“Ideally we’d find a way to synchronize it to your orbitals, but they’d need to be rebuilt from the ground up to use gravity affinity mana.”
“They already use…”
“Magnetic affinity tech with gravity affinity mana is close enough for them to work, but if you want them to sing, or synchronize with the staff, they need to share mana types.”
“I take it I’m going to be working on this today, instead of our fitness training?” He finally asked Chul after staring up at the designs for a moment longer.
The fiend looked him up and down and nodded. “Vaelith said she trashed you.”
Sylvas couldn’t help but chuckle. It wasn’t an inaccurate description of his physical condition, but he had no intention of going to the infirmary and risking a psych evaluation. Who knew how long that would take, and he didn’t want to miss out on a moment of the opportunities for advancement that this week had brought him.
He stopped dead at that thought. Just yesterday, he wasn’t even thinking about progression, and now it was back to the forefront. The desire to grow stronger, to get better, he had thought it was some artifact of his troubled childhood or the cult that raised him; the constant drive to prove himself worthy, but even though he felt like he’d tackled that, the desire still remained. Strange.
Sagran, Chul and Bael all turned to their own work after Sylvas had been delivered to his own workbench. His task for the day was to copy across the enchantments from his orbital spheres, and then work out how it would be converted to gravity affinity magic. Despite having come into his affinity just a few weeks back, he was already one of the foremost experts on the subject. Mostly because it was so rare nobody else ever bothered to learn much of anything about it, rather than because of his habit of studying constantly. Saying that he knew everything didn’t mean he knew a lot, just that there was so little to know it hadn’t taken him long to absorb it all.
Mental note: Settle down and write a “how to gravity mage” book when you’ve finally worked it out so that the next unlucky bastard doesn’t get stuck with an equally terrible education.
As everyone had pointed out, the affinities of magnetism and gravity were incredibly close to one another. His magic latched onto the mass and weight of the magnetic metal at the center of each orbital, while a magnetic mage would presumably have touched the magnetic field that they produced. But regardless, it all still worked. Sylvas supposed that replacing the magnetic core with whatever happened to be the densest was the best option, but he was damned if he could work out what that might be without assistance. At least the actual magic part of the creation of the device seemed easy enough, there was a lot of complex aion script to transliterate and tweak, but having the freedom to actually do so was a relief after so long having to rigidly follow the officially accepted spells to the letter.
To his immense surprise, once he had finished all of his work he discovered a smile had made its way onto his face. He’d always loved magic, not just for what it could do, but as a sort of hobby and interest, and this was the closest he had come to crafting a new spell since Croesia.
Sagran waddled by at one point to check over his work, while he himself had been shunted onto material selection, trying out different samples to see what attuned best to his affinity, and what he thought would be the best option for the staff itself. Meanwhile, all of the details for the enchanting of an arcane focus were scrolling past his left eye and being committed to memory for later reference. The overall spell-script that would run along the internal length of the staff would be more or less the same regardless of the affinity of mana being channeled, but there were key points that he had to stay focused on if he intended for the whole thing to hold together, crossing points in the lines of script and structure that had to be taken into account, and adjustments that had to be made so that when it was infused with his magic, it would function instead of melting itself from the inside out.
It wasn’t entirely unlike forging a circle of magic to progress, albeit this didn’t make him bleed.
The liquid metal options were proving hardest to choose between, he couldn’t get any real sense of how they’d behave once they were integrated into the staff, and he wasn’t allowed to interact with them directly because they were poisonous. It left him at a bit of a loss until Sagran dawdled by and snatched one canister off the table. “Taking too long. Use what you’ve got.”
With all of the pieces assembled, Sylvas was now ready to start construction. Which was of course when the white shield of Instructor Vilmander appeared beside him. “Lecture hall F. 10 minutes.”
Sylvas dropped the length of pipe he’d been examining with a grunt of frustration, it bounced on the table and rolled to the edge before he had to step in and catch it. He was being silly, and he knew it. Life was not just a playground full of things for him to tinker with to his heart’s content.
Glancing to Sagran, he was about to try and convey that he was being summoned elsewhere, but it was to no avail. The dwarf paid him no mind whatsoever. He left his materials gathered as neatly as he could make them on his workbench, summoned his orbitals back to his pouch, and left a message with Bael for the old dwarf, if the other man ever managed to get a word in.
“Good luck on your future endeavors, wooden spoon.” Bael called after him, and Sylvas did his best to conceal a grin.
That had been almost sharp enough for him to feel it.