BECMI Chapter 262 – A Mirror of One’s Past
Sama was holding his very life in her hand, one set of clenched fingers from killing him where he stood. The young nobleman, Dalvers Neeshabonai of House Neeshabonai, had never felt so helpless in his entire life as his pale blue eyes met that one lance-like gaze of heavens-blue that was spitting him like a transfixed butterfly.
“This one is coming with me,” Sama declared flatly, leaning in close to the staring noble’s stricken face. “When I am through with him, his noble family will tremble to see him coming.”
Dalvers Neebonshai had never heard such wonderful words in his whole life, and knew he would give anything and do anything to make it happen.
Captain Rossu just smiled hard, ecstatic for both his student and himself.
A good student is naught more than decent ore, he remembered the words she had said when he went to Siricil to learn from her. I am not some sneering fop of a maester demanding only nuggets of pure metal be thrown before me and bask in my glory and wisdom for my edification and minimal effort on my part. I am here to smelt, refine, alloy, forge, and polish the ore into a weapon. I only demand that it be ore, and not dross.
If you want to teach, the pure nuggets will always be problems, Rossu. The ore, the ore you can work with.
He had been a good chunk of ore himself, he’d been told, although there was so, so much refining to do, and in the end he had to return home before he’d been able to do more than tap the well of what the Grandmaster knew.
He had found her some good ore to work with. It was vindication of all his efforts, and by her words, where his talents truly lay!
“Stand by the wall,” he ordered Dalvers as Sama released him. “You are a student of the Grandmaster now.”
“Yes, Captain, Grandmaster!” Dalvers almost collapsed into the genuflection, staggering back to his feet and over against the wall.
“Calvin, step forward!” Captain Rossu called out…
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“High Delphans can be Forsaken, must mean Low Delphans, the Freir, can be as well,” I mused to Sama’s findings. Following her assessment of Brucall, then Russo’s student Dalvers, she had gone through the entire Royal Guard and identified another dozen potential Forsaken who hadn’t yet passed Seven. She had yoinked them away without ceremony and was putting them through induction with the Caers and Verdains… and some Greens as well, who were as interested in the non-magical side of things as their kin were the magical after they found out they couldn’t wield it.
Forsaken wasn’t a curse or a dirty word, it was extremely liberating in its own context. They weren’t deficient, they weren’t crippled; they were simply strong in a different direction!
The choice wasn’t even available among the native humans of Nown. If anyone was lacking, it was them, as their magical gene wasn’t tuned high enough to give them any benefits…
-It really does expand the pool we have to draw from,- Briggs /agreed, in the middle of doing some relaxing smithing and controlling his breathing. Morphed into a Shaping Hammer, Endure fell like a mountain coming down, and metal could only yelp and reform on the Anvil of Silent Thunder according to his desires and strength.
There was never, ever an end to the stuff that a high-level Smith could make, and as many a goggle-eyed dwarf watching was being forced to acknowledge, nobody mortal on this world smithed better than Master Briggs!
“Loyalty issues?” I had to ask.
He just /laughed. -Do you think Sama has any problems winning the hearts of warriors like us?- he /needled me, and I had to admit that was entirely true. They were given the chance to stand tall against the wizards of the world and become incredible physical combatants. How could they not leap at the chance and follow the woman who gave them the power to do so? -We’ve still not found any Sources or Voids, however,- he /added, the latter knowingly.
If there were Voids around, the land would’ve spontaneously Awakened them to deal with so much of the crap afflicting it. Needless to say, with so much of that the doings of Immortals, it was entirely possible they’d used their power to purge the very potential from any races here, and so it had died out.
No hyn Shadowknives passing judgment on Time fuckery. No Fireswords burning down abusive spellcasters. No Ancientaxes purging elder races preying on younger ones. No Mountainhammers laying low cthonic horrors that hadn’t had the grace to die over the eons. No Nightscythes reaping the undead as they wanted to reap the living...
Yeah, Void Brothers would have severely messed with the plans of the Immortals. Godscepters would have judged every single Immortal church in existence a blasphemy against the true gods, and gone through them like a scythe through wheat. The Immortals definitely would not have appreciated such bloody candor about their proper place in reality.
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Mortals didn’t judge them, they judged mortals!
“I was planning to take my long dive into Darkmoor, up to and past the Doom, soon.” It would help me manage the dispatching of the population of the North, and any worthy souls from further south in Iberon, and also make sure Darkmoor achieved the heights of power and glory that it was meant to.
That so much of what we encountered was going to be shuffled off to the future here was something the Immortals didn’t need to know.
-One project. The enhanced Mirror. We can’t fab off the glass to make the larger version, it has to be done the old way to take Enchantment. If you can get that up and running before you go, we’ll be in ideal position to move around larger volumes of material via Innspot.-
“Oh, ho, I have just the thing…”
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We wanted a BIG Mirror of Mental Prowess. Not for the Scrying power, although that could and would be useful. No, it was for the ability to make Portals to wherever we were Scrying stuff that was really important, in effect a mobile and elusive Portal network and Teleportation Circle effect that could move people and objects around REALLY quickly if needed.
The main problem was that the one we had was the size of a normal mirror. Kind of a bottleneck if you really want to move a lot of people, and we had needs to move lots of people and cargo, really exploiting our magical advantage that way.
No need to ship stuff off incredible distances if we could bring the final products right where we wanted by relaying it through Innspot, right?
Furthermore, the Mirror itself was portable. It was in Innspot because that was a secure location, secret and unknown right in the heart of the Bleaklands in the middle of nowhere, protected now by illusions even True Sight couldn’t see through without ramping it up.
I could effectively make a Mirror that was nigh-indestructible just by working into and attaching it to the Inn’s temporal indestructibility. All I had to do was ‘connect’ it to the Inn, and if destroyed, it would simply be rebuilt the next day.
I put it around the back in the back yard, mounting it on the exterior wall as I expanded that wall ‘past’ the Mirror, effectively giving it its own extension in and out.
Warehousing above and below ground was quickly put in place as I made the Mirror itself out of Dirty Sky Crystal.
It took ten cubic feet of gold to make five cubic feet of the stuff that had made Orbus’ peerless scrying table back on Terra, which was much less Crystal than we’d used for him, but we didn’t have boulders of the stuff laying around after a crashed piece of Luna came down around a Planetary Great Seal, either.
The crystal forming was nonesuch, a random thing that likely couldn’t be duplicated accidentally if we tried, but True Creation, sacrificing twice as much goldweight in value as the raw material desired, could still make the stuff if you happened to know exactly what it was made of.
Aelryinth knew exactly what it was made of, and if he hadn’t been able to duplicate all of the energies Energizing it from my copy of his memories, he knew what they were and how it could be done.
Unlike him, I had access to IX’s+1, and I could totally Energize the crystal, although it took a bunch of those Valences to do so!
Space, Time, Void, Ether, Dimension, Nimbus, Plasma, and Cosmic were all highest-order Energizing Infusions, and had to be done correctly and with great balance.
On top of that, the thing still had to be Shaped, which was a bit more problematic. I solved THAT by finding out the Rune for the stuff.
I first made sure it wasn’t in the Twilight Libraries, which it wasn’t, because the stuff had never existed in the past, and the Rune of Time went kind of bonkers at just the idea of making it inside a fixed history like ours. So I had to research a Rune of a substance that did not appear naturally here, but still existed, with no references save a LOT of sidereal research into the Isotopes and their natures that made up the Dirty Sky Crystal.
There WAS a lot of research into those substances, because that was exactly what Cryptomancers did, research new Runes! Some of my Sims had spent thousands of years doing nothing but researching ever more precise and powerful Runes, with some actually leaving Cryptomancy and changing to specialized Elements just for bonuses to Rune research within that Element, enabling further studies to expand the libraries!
A Fire Elementalist researching Runes associated with Fire had prodigious bonuses to do so, after all. It was what was written all over the tomb of Lady Firerose, for example!
It took a spot of time, about a month all told, similar to discovering a Truename Rune for someone. I was running experiments on disparate Isotopes, bringing them together, synthesizing ever more complex Runes out of the joined versions, a devilishly complex process that took a lot of marvelous brainpower and focus to juggle and work through, quantum physics, materials sciences, and profound geometry getting in on magical fields and thaumic resonances of the most complex kind.
Dirty Sky Crystal was considered a planetary treasure back on Terra-Luna, all known supplies of it extracted and stored under tight secrecy for a damn good reason. It would never be found again, only made at incredible cost via Valences that were not yet possible on Terra-Luna.
But it was possible OFF Terra-Luna.
Shaping and molding the stuff into more than rough forms, making a massive ten-foot single pane mirror out of it that would then be Enchanted and tied to the Thisbean Inn and its Portal, that was best done with a Rune instead of just trying Shaping, given its artificial origins.
Effectively, if the Rune of Dirty Sky Crystal worked on it, it MADE it real and natural by doing do.
So it was with remarkably little fanfare that I burned an IX+1 Valence, fed it into my basic Rune skill, and invoked a Rune of Dirty Sky Crystal to control the lump of it sitting on the ground before me, with a half-dozen of my interested Sims and some very interested Artificers and Cryptomancers all watching as the highest levels of arcane magic were on display.
There was a moment of hesitation, as if I had made a Rune for something that didn’t really exist in the universe, and nature was wondering just what the heck I was trying to do. Then, lo, there was something resonating with it right there, the universe perked up in absolute shock that it existed, and suddenly Dirty Sky Crystal was as real as anything else, courtesy of its own Rune!