Canvas Town, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Sixthmonth, 1634 PTS

Yet again, Triezal thought, he had found himself in a bind. Several layers of swirling miasma flowed around him, emanating from the lesions that scattered the hangar’s floor. He rested in the center of the mess, pondering his next steps, though his options were few.

Before the Staiven had arrived, Triezal’s greatest concern had been the potential of Janottka returning in a decade’s time, but suddenly, he realized that he could not spare the time to worry. He was surrounded on all sides, and as the lesions continued to emit miasma, his own body was like a timer ticking down to Triezal’s demise. Triezal raised the blindfold that lay around his neck upwards, raising it to his brow to help wick sweat from his eyes.

There was little the Staiven could do to him without worsening their problems, of course. It was Pantheonic policy not to approach or fire weapons at a festering lesion. Instead, they quarantined the area and blocked off all approach, just as he had done to the restaurant by the docks. As Triezal had chosen not to leave the relative safety of the lesions surrounding him, they had constructed the prison around him.

Great walls of proprietary Staiven alloys had been set up, covering a quarter of what had once been the titan hanger. Now, it would be a base of the Justice Office, located right within the heart of Little Celah.

Idly Triezal wondered how much of the technology here the government would be able to salvage and reverse-engineer. Little if any, he would wager. The Heirs had countermeasures long prepared for this eventuality, failsafes to fry and melt all their secrets in case of raids by an opposing force. He would be surprised if none of the technicians had activated the failsafes before fleeing.

He could leave, could talk to the Staiven and lie, of course. Perhaps he could try to blame the lesions on the Redwater Sect, or the Hadal Clan, or any other actor he felt he felt he could foist the charges onto. But the problem was that the Staiven would undoubtedly know he was lying. Here they had found him, surrounded by lesions and holding the blade which had carved them. There was no way to escape from such damning evidence, not without funds far and beyond Triezals, or perhaps even the Heirs’ means.

But even if were able to escape, he would be hunted down and killed. The crime of forming lesions was not one that could be dodged, or the consequences forced onto others. Even now, he could possibly broker a deal with them. In exchange for the blade and information about the Epon, he would certainly be allowed to live. Undoubtedly, however, it would be a life spent in captivity. While the Pantheonic Government did not particularly care about justice in most cases, it was a different matter when the matter related to something the Pantheon itself had personally banned.

In a theocracy, the laws of the heavens outweighed the laws of the earth. If Triezal could not leave without being captured, he would need to remain here until he either came up with a feasible plan or in the worst case, until he died.

Just in case, he tested his glyph slate. If he could contact Deuvar, perhaps the man could assist him in some manner. Unfortunately, when he attempted to activate it, the slate merely sputtered, the glyphs on its surface contorting and flickering. The cause, Triezal realized, was clear. The miasma around him was disrupting the miasma within the device, and it was overloading. Triezal cursed, sliding the tablet away as it exploded in a puff of flickering miasma.

As he had suspected, it seemed he was on his own.

Moving carefully, Triezal’s hands roamed around his body, double checking everything he had on him. He had catalogued everything, every piece of equipment, every scrap of material. Everything that he could potentially use. The most important of which was, of course, his knife. If he did not have the blade, or had he been willing to leave it behind, Triezal would have long escaped, and would never have been captured by the Staiven. But he couldn’t do that. The blade had been entrusted to him, and it gave him options. In fact…

Before he had left Janaste, Triezal had worked in fabrication for a time, building the most precious components of starships, of titans, and scientific equipment. He had been considered to have a talent for it, but the career simply had not worked out. Perhaps if he had remained in that role, if the council had not taken interest in him… these were thoughts for another time, he thought. His past had given him the skills he would need to achieve his goal, and that would be enough.

If there was anything Triezal knew well, it was that a man could not live divorced from his past. It would always come rushing back to stare him in the eyes. The most hateful memories had a way of becoming an integral part of you, of changing you into the person you were. Triezal tried to live a life without regrets, but that was simply an impossibility.

Triezal glanced outwards, trying to check whether the Staiven would be able to watch his actions. But the miasma from the lesions only continued to flow. The air slowly grew more chaotic, more painful. But it was also growing more occluded. To a Staiven’s senses, the field of lesions might as well have been an foot-thick wall of lead. Perhaps they might not even be able to tell whether Triezal was alive or not.

Perhaps they had sealed him in here with the intention to make the hangar become Triezal’s tomb. How long had it been, he wondered? Minutes, hours? Triezal’s skin burned, his flesh quivered and squirmed as if it were snakes worming their way beneath his skin. He carefully slid the blindfold down to cover his eyes and muffle his ears.

Triezal was resistant to ashatic effects, but he was not immune. The machines inside his bones were helping to keep him alive, preserving his mind and body for as long as possible. But if he stayed inside the field of lesions for much longer, Triezal knew that he would either die or mutate into a tumor. If he had to choose between the two, Triezal would probably have picked death.

Triezal carefully raised the dagger, sculpting in his mind’s eye exactly what he planned to do. He paused for several moments, calculating how to design the pattern. Then he slammed the dagger into the floor, carving a deep gouge into the metal. The knife then slid across the ground as he carefully drew a curved line, before lifting the blade to carve another.

This was the secret of the Epon’s unique technology, the proprietary technique that had maintained their monopoly, as well as the status of their peoples. The secret to controlling flickering miasma was to use lesions. By carving them in the correct manner, one was able to produce akatar, the true essence of flickering miasma. The true essence of chaos itself. And from that chaos, order could emerge, if it were managed properly.

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The Epon fabrication facilities in Janaste had utilized a sealed room and mechanical limbs to perform the task, in order to separate the Magister from his craft. It was far safer and allowed for mechanical precision. Now, however, the seals were gone, and there was no intermediary. Only Triezal and a blade that was who knew how many years old.

His predecessors, the Magisters of the distant past, had also done this themselves. It had been the purpose of a Magister. They had constructed the foundations of an entire discipline of technology on their own, one that as far as Triezal knew might never have been replicated in all of history. They had carved their aspirations into the world around them with the strength of their own hands, had used it as the foundations to create the strongest superpower that their world had seen since the fall of Epon Celah.

He carved glyph after glyph into the metal floor, scraping shavings from the surface with ease, and embedding the lesions within. The structure he was forming was organized in three dimensions, an extremely complex design that almost appeared like the scribbles of a madman. It almost felt more like a ritual than a manufacturing technique.

In Triezal’s opinion, miasmic engineering was equal parts science and religion. Perhaps that was why the Epon insisted that all miasmic manufacturing be performed by Magisters. An instructor of his had once claimed that their manufacturing process was undoubtedly a science: it was an observable and replicable process with consistent effects. The problem was that they did not have an effective theory to explain it, or if they did, it had not been shared with Triezal.

There was one distinctly odd attribute of lesions, one which had long frustrated the scientists of the other races. If a lesion was a tear in spacetime, why did a lesion on a planet or space station remain on the moving object? Were they remaining in place according to the reference frame? Were they affected by gravity?

According to the Epon’s theories, the lesions did not move at all. Instead, it was Telles that was shifting around them, warping to match the flows of higher dimensional geometries.. A matter of frames of reference. The universe was not limited to a mere four dimensions, after all. Many of the mechanics of such motion remained a mystery to Triezal, the physics beyond the limits of the education he had received. He was not a physicist, he was a fixer. Ultimately, Triezal was a man of the underworld, and it was in that realm that he had dedicated most of his training. He was a practical man, and his interest had always been focused on applications rather than mere theories. This was simply a skill he had trained in, and now, just like his ancestors, Triezal would be putting it to use.

He only hoped he did not make any mistakes. If he did, he would not even realize he was dead. The practice had limitations, and while Triezal knew a sufficient amount of theory for his purposes, his experience in performing the process in this manner simply did not exist. Within his lifetime, perhaps nobody in all of Telles had practiced the ancient arts in this manner. To take the risk of messing with lesions at all, much less in the Pantheonic Territory, one would either need to be suicidal or desperate.

Sweating profusely as his implants continued to hold him together, Triezal drew the final lines. He had been moving slowly, and perhaps thirty minutes had passed and he carved the incredibly fine lines into the structure. The machines inside of him were perhaps the only reason he was able to avoid twitches and tremors. From the lesions he had drawn into existence, akatar blazed forth, the pure essence of chaos that was necessary for the ritual to take effect. For a long, brilliant moment, the world was filled with a bright orange radiance, a sickening hue that stunned the senses and left him woozy to be so near. Blood spurted out from Triezal’s nose as he felt light-headed, stumbling to remain on his feet.

But it had worked. All around him, Triezal could feel the shifting currents of miasma, and it was clear that the lesions had moved. Like the snaking tendrils of flesh beneath his skin, the lesions shifted from side to side in a chaotic, uneven motion that left him needing to step out of the way. As he did so, he promptly shoved the knife into the remnants of some of his bronze-alloy armor, forming a makeshift sheathe. It was best if the knife did not cause any further problems during the subsequent stage.

Triezal lacked senses of the soul, and he knew better than to remove his blindfold within an area that was so oversaturated with light and color. Still, he carefully waited, hoping for the effect he had spent so much effort to achieve to function as intended. He was not disappointed.

Within moments, Triezal could feel a heavy wind as he heard a loud booming noise. A fast wave of miasma collided into him, almost knocking Triezal’s body over as he felt parts of his skin try to droop and slough off of his body. Even without his sight, he could tell what had occurred. The lesion had unspooled, extending outwards to tear through the flimsy metal barriers the Staiven had set up around it, and eviscerating all guards within its path. Triezal smiled as he heard the shouts of surprise and horror emerge from the Staiven throats in their final moments.

As expected, he thought, they had remained manned in this place, guarding the lesions. As far as they were likely aware, these were the first of the chaotic wounds to be formed on the station, and were thus acting pointlessly needy.

Triezal dashed forward, keeping himself directly within the wake of the shifting strands. Leaping through the broken wall, he saw the shocked faces of the surviving guardsmen, as well as what remained of their . To the senses of their souls, this must have been something incomprehensible, something they had yet to ever experience. A lesion in motion must have looked something like a snake, striking towards its prey..

Triezal raced after the lesions, allowing them to be his battering ram and his shield as he searched for a way out.. He would not have another opportunity to escape, so he would have to make the most of this. The spiral dove through metal and rock, tearing its haphazard route as it steadily unspooled, slowly growing longer and thinner, until it once again reached an equilibrium.

The concept behind his tactic was simple. If lesions formed as contorted, draping through the countless fields and boundaries of the physical world, it would undoubtedly be possible to untie the knot and ‘release’ them, snapping them back into a new equilibrium. It was not in reality the lesion he had moved, but rather Telles itself, warping to release the pressure under his direction.

Triezal dodged a hail of bullets from behind, noting that this squad of soldiers had recovered quite rapidly from the sight before them, and knew well the importance of his identity. As the lesion’s path finished, Triezal activated his boots, one of which miraculously seemed to still be functional, and skidded awkwardly down the floor, receiving a heavy impact in his left shoulder from one of the guard’s firearms. Triezal gritted his teeth. Just a bit further and he would be done, would be free. Once he made it back into the city, he could hide, could blend in to the best of his ability. The Staiven would know who he was, but in a city of millions, hiding might perhaps be possible.

Triezal finally reached the aperture that had allowed for the titan’s egress, and leapt through, catching the railing and promptly swinging himself back towards the stack to drop to one story below. Rolling, Triezal quickly returned to his feet and broke out into a run.

If he wished to escape, Triezal would need to create as much distance between himself and the area as possible. With just one further glance backwards, Triezal dashed off, in hopes of blending into the crowd and finding a safe location to heal himself. After that, he would have a lot of planning to do.

Magisterial Ritualism: [It is said that prior to their destruction when the city of Opportunity fell, the Order of Magisters practiced a unique form of ritualism involving the production of lesions. The purpose of the rituals is unknown, but they involved glyphs being carved into surfaces by a naeratanh blade. Though many scholars doubt the veracity of this record, lesions formed in this manner were said to never form tumors. It is rumored that these practices were tied to the Magister’s religion, but no records of the details of their faith are known to still exist.]