Hinete knew that she needed to finish her project, but she could simply not focus upon it.

Across the table from Hinete, Isaac, the other who wore Sesako’s body, studied a pattern that a dozen of the enchanters had designed for him to construct, with a half dozen books of rune lore open next to him, that he would occasionally leaf through quickly.

Mostly when he was in control of Sesako’s body, Isaac had been working on enchantments. It had started because as a celestial he could imprint power into enchantments while stabilizing them in a way that allowed effects that could not otherwise be achieved.

However, he had proven to be a quick study, with an intuition for how runework ought to work. There was that something in masters of the art, like Hinete or her mentor Zichi that simply wasn’t there in most people who worked on enchanting.

Sesako didn’t have it, but Isaac did.

Isaac had suggested that maybe something about his training at getting automated machines to do what he wanted them to in his other world gave him an advantage in creating clever solutions to problems of designing runework. Perhaps that was the difference, but Hinete doubted it.

She thought that he was just good at it.

Hinete shook herself. She had to work.

Sesako would need this breastplate when he went to battle tomorrow.

His previous one had been wholly destroyed when he was struck from close range by a small hurler that had been hidden in a clever ambuscade.

Hinete closed her eyes again and stared at the glittering dragon scale. If she just bumped it slightly, the rainbow pattern of reflections from the bright light in the ceiling would completely change. It was impossible to make her mind and hands think of the next layers right now that she needed to start working on.

She was running a completely different set than any that she’d done before, which would quadruple the level of power flowing through the breastplate.

The crimson power allowed incredible things to be done defensively, and with the right runework he could project forward an automatic warding that would pull on the power in it to deflect aside anything, no matter how fast it was going, or how heavily enchanted the object was.

The trick was that it would need to be an enchantment that matched the momentum in the object with a sufficiently large amount of crimson power pulled out in a fraction of an instant.

But even with the dense crimson power, such a deflection would be incredibly difficult. It would work at most once… or if the hurler was powerful enough, even though the armor theoretically could project a ward to deflect it, it would not be able to.

And in the middle of a battle, Sesako would not be able to concentrate and press more of his power into the armor.

It was also, because of the many ways that it could kill a cultivator, one of the fundamental rules of enchanting to never create runework that tried to directly pull on the core of the cultivator that was using it.

Music played in the background. It was the song from the feast when her uncle had performed before the Great Ones. Three years ago, when all of them were happier.

This copy of the song was also the last magical device she’d enchanted with Sesako before the spies informed them that the emperor had set a massive island afloat, and that he was coming to destroy their Great Ones, their independence and… her hope.

The powerful tune rolled through her like a balm.

Poor, poor Ika.

Isaac had at first said when he heard the music that it was like the unhappy squawking of parrots. And then three days later, he’d decided that he really liked it.

She could close her eyes and just sleep. Except she wasn’t sleepy, and she would have nightmares of death if she slept.

There was some solution to the power problem.

She’d proven that such a solution ought to exist, it was just that while the scale itself was conductive, easily allowing spell work to be carved into it, and allowing power to be projected through it, it could not hold charge itself.

External batteries like the great power circles would not work. Only living bodies that were touching them could channel power into dragon scale.

“Hey,” Isaac poked her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. It’s time to take a break.”

While she’d been lost in her reverie, he’d systematically gone through and carved the desired runes into a stack of large heavy shields and charged each of them with crimson.

She shook her head. “I — I have to keep going.”

“Do I need to explain the research on creativity again? Also how longer work hours don’t help knowledge workers produce more?”

She smiled, shook her head, and rubbed roughly at her eyes. “Bleh. Fine. I’m pounding my head against a wall. Fine. I’ll just finish the lines the straightforward way once we get back.”

He grimaced, but then shrugged. “Good enough.”

He had a particular interest in how well she prepared the armor, her since it would be his body, not just Sesako's, that would be pierced, holed, thrusted, and blasted if the armor failed. Naturally he really wanted it to be able to survive anything.

When Sesako came back this morning after the nighttime raid they’d run on the emperor’s staging grounds, he’d just tossed his destroyed armor piece on the table, and then sat on the ground cross legged and stared at the floor.

He showed no concern about how close he’d come to death again. If that ball had hit him without the armor, even as a celestial he might have died.

What if another shot hit him after the armor was shattered?

Hinete had pretended not to care about that at all.

After a while Sesako smiled at her. He pretended to talk about happy things. They listened to music and ate during the twenty minutes he had before he went into his semi hibernation again.

When Isaac gained the body again, he looked at the armor, nearly vomited, and his hands shook for ten minutes as he repeated to her how close the two of them had come to death. “Insane. Insane. One of those tunnels the emperor dug. And three of his profound cultivators were there. It was Calimpal who hit me. The other two missed, but there were more hurlers there. We got out fast.”

As they walked to the communal mess in the high tower Hinete glanced at Isaac. It was odd how completely and easily she had come to separate the two in her mind.

Sesako was Sesako.

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She loved him, she understood him. She knew him.

She had been his apprentice for six years, and during that time she believed she had helped him as much as he had helped her. For at least three of those years, she had known that she loved him, but a reserve between them remained.

She wondered sometimes if she ought to have kissed him once. But he was a great man. He was a man who was fully absorbed with his work, and it was not her place to distract him.

And Isaac?

She supposed what she felt was what a woman who had fallen in love with one of two identical twins would feel — they looked the same. They even sometimes acted the same. But in fundamentals they were not the same.

At this point it was simply obvious in tiny mannerisms, ways of movement. Isaac hung his head, and slightly slouched, while Sesako was also as straight as if he had a rod inserted in his spine — all sorts of little things. He was not Sesako.

This was before accounting for the wholly different way that he spoke and thought.

Hinete liked Isaac, and even at times admired him, but she did not love him, and there was no confusion about that point.

“I hate being useless, every single day,” she commented to him as they entered the eating hall.

“You are doing something that is not replaceable — if you were on the battlefield, ten thousand others could fight as well as you can. But here, working as you do, there is nobody else who can replace you. Your duty is not to do the bravest, or scariest, or most impressive thing. It is to do the thing that makes the biggest difference.”

“I know that! But I don’t like it. I feel guilty, scared. Doomed.”

The great hall where they ate dinner had six levels and it had a vast set of windows whose casting had involved powerful magic. The huge window looked down into the valley of the dragons, and at the tiny herds of cattle and sheep thousands of feet below. On the mountain across from the hall the silver scaled dragon, the eldest daughter of the matriarch sunned herself, the massive wings spread far out. Beneath her the matriarch herself lay, the long darker colored belly exposed.

A delicious smell filled the room.

Rather than a sophisticated kitchen, the mess hall was served by dozens of stuffed stasis boxes, and ovens where the food that had been placed in stasis devices could be reheated. The fortifications around the dragon’s aerie were too high up for those who hadn’t awakened and developed their magic to survive without becoming deathly ill.

Even those with a foundation became ill very quickly. This provided an extra defense, in that an attack on these towers — on this valley — depended upon enough cultivators of the golden rank or higher to manage every function.

But it also meant that there were no servants, janitors, or anyone who did not generally consider themselves an at least somewhat important person present among the thousands who were now living here.

While those with only their foundation established could briefly ascend to these heights without dying, only cultivators with a half developed golden core could sleep or work in air that was this thin — though it was not comfortable for them — and not very many cultivators were used to cooking for a large number of people.

When Isaac and Hinete sat down, several other enchanters came over to join them too. One of Hinete’s mentors, Ziche tapped her on the shoulder, and then dropped her platter on an empty spot in the table, practicing her magical control by making it settle without a single sound. She asked, “How is this new armor going?”

Hinete shrugged.

She used her knife to cut the beef, and then stuck a big piece into her mouth.

“Well enough.” Isaac said, “Not very well — but well enough.” He shook his head. “Maybe there is some way to feed the armor’s enchantment directly off of your body?”

“No!” Ziche exclaimed.

Hinete chuckled.

The sound and feel had become strange to her.

It was easy to forget that Isaac didn’t have the full set of instincts and knowledge beaten into him that anyone who made a focus on enchantments would before they were twenty.

Zichi said to him sharply, “Never, never do anything that directly calls on the power in the body without charging it.”

Isaac raised his hands. “Okay, okay — I won’t. Not unless you, or at least Hinete tells me that my scheme might work. But what is the problem.”

“It is too similar to enchanting a human directly with a tattoo or cuttings into the skin.”

“Okay, but… something about power drain? But I have an enormous core, so something that pulls on the yellow magic ought to be safe. At least if the charging level is less than my native level.”

“And what would be the use of such a weak charge?” Zichi exclaimed. “You just do not do that. I’ll have you, celestial or no, swear you won’t experiment in such a way, or else I’ll have it recommended that you have nothing to do with runework.”

Isaac had that expression that said that he was about to burst into a rant about evidence, open mindedness, and the like.

Placing her hand briefly on his arm to stop him, Hinete said, “Even very weak charges can prove dangerous. We have many stories in the archives about how during the early experiments even spells that ought not have caused any problem killed a cultivator when he was in a fight, or had cast an unexpectedly powerful spell — and the way it pulls on the core acts whether the cultivator has exhausted himself or not, and therefore…”

That moment of epiphany would stick in Hinete’s mind for her whole life.

Isaac, the body he shared with Sesako bruised and with a mulish expression.

Zichi glared at him, as though if she looked at him with enough intensity, he would understand how bad an idea it was.

The ivory handle of Hinete’s cutting knife.

The silver of the spoon. The soup bowl. A scent of beef and tarragon. The rough wood of the table. The way the sun glinted through the windows. The deep green of the valley beneath them. The silver scaled daughter of the Great Ones sunning upon the opposite peak.

The light glittered into ten thousand rainbows as it struck against her endless lines of scales.

Hinete’s breath caught. She slowly smiled.

“But would it actually work?” She wondered aloud.

“Hinete!” Zichi shouted at her. “He isn’t big enough. You will kill the celestial pair if you —”

“No, not him.”

She stared at the dragon.

So many scales.

Each scale could support the transmission of any sort of magic and power. There was vast power present in the dragons. For generations upon generation, they had taken in the power from the ley lines, cycled it through their bodies, refined it and then allowed the refined power to slowly waft out once they had used it to strengthen their foundations.

She had no idea how big the matriarch’s magical core was, but it was at least thousands of times the strength of Sesako’s or the emperor’s. And it was all filled with crimson power.

Isaac’s mind was faster than Zichi’s, or at least his mind was more attuned to Hinete’s own way of thinking. He followed her gaze and nodded. “They are vulnerable simply because any physical material can be punctured and destroyed by the sort of force produced by a powerful hurler.”

“And they can’t change direction fast enough… but would it actually work? — How many scales would need to have the enchantment carved into it?”

Zichi now grasped what they were talking about. “No! No! The Great Ones?”

The reverent awe in her voice showed a sort of purity of belief in them.

“Do we have any better ideas?” Hinete asked. “And more importantly: Would it work? Zichi?”

“You can’t…” She trailed off. “What about Kartilever backlashes?”

Hinete shook her head. “You are just suggesting a problem without asking whether it is likely — something might go wrong. But can we afford not to try?”

“What if we killed one of the Great Ones ourselves? Without even requiring the emperor to do it for us. That would be—”

“There is no safety.” Isaac said. “When every option is dangerous, we cannot simply focus on avoiding risk. Not doing anything is just as much a choice as doing something. Inaction is not special; it does not make us blameless for what happens. Our goal is not to be able to say that the death of the Great Ones was not our fault — our goal is to stop them from dying.”

“But —” Zichi swallowed. “But what if we are wrong?”

“Perhaps if we do this, we will regret it enormously, but this is the only pathway that has been suggested that might let us win.” Isaac frowned. “Even this is not enough for victory — it is like a siege of a city. If we have no way to defeat the emperor’s armies, everything is a delaying action.”

“She can then help us fight,” Hinete said. “Or —”

“The Great One will not kill. Not to save her own life.” It was odd to hear Isaac refer to her this time as ‘The Great One’, he always referred to them as dragons.

“But that is —”

“It is a fundamental line that she has chosen.” It was at these moments of determined speaking that Isaac and Sesako seemed most similar. “I will not challenge her in that — but no matter what, we will be better off than before if we can improve the dragon’s survivability.”

He looked out thoughtfully at the two Great Ones sunning upon the peak.

Hinete felt a swell of intense emotion, of tenderness, patriotism, and a connection to the whole of Yatamo that tingled from the top of her head to the bottom of her toes. She shivered.

What if they could succeed? What if their lives had not been thrown away in vain?

“I think…” Zichi muttered. “That it would work. It is a passive spell that only becomes engaged when the ward is triggered by a dangerous attack. But… I am not sure.”

“I am.” Hinete rose from her seat. She shoved aside her forgotten food. “I can see the patterns in my mind — how to tie everything together, since each scale with a defensive point will need to support the others properly for the runework to manage very heavy stones.”

And then suddenly that weird transformation came over the face of Isaac-Sesako. And suddenly, even before he spoke, from how he held his hand and moved his eyes, Hinete knew that Sesako had taken control of the body again.

He had a vicious light in his eyes, a sort of delighted glow that made Hinete sick to see it.

“I also see it! And we shall win everything. Finally, finally! And this time he’ll not stop me from taking my revenge.”