Chapter 3

If you can get them, before they get you

With the sewer situation taken care of I cleaned everyone off with magic and Malachite asked- in no uncertain terms that the answer should be no- if we were leaving right away to head to the lair of the monster.

"My vote is no," I told him. "We're still not 100% because of last night, and we only have a vague idea where this worm is to be found. It's at least lunch time, do we want to leave in the middle of the day? Even flying, I'd say no. They can wait a day. I'd like to look the sword over, report what we found to the town so they can decide what to do about the water supply, and I'm still concerned about those two crystals we found. They were pretty far apart in the temple, is it even safe to have them so close together? Let's maybe find out. I want to look into the temple of the eclipse, now that we have an actual name for the place, and see if any historical record can be found of light and dark crystals. Let's take the rest of the day off. You three report in to the captain that the water should start to clear up, and report what we found down there. The town may want to send experts, given it seems at least part of our water comes from there and if it breaks down completely… You know. Clear the place out, open up the old rooms, reinforce the place? Whatever. Offer my help with stone shaping spells and telekinesis." Charging the town for magic? Yes please! "Meanwhile I'll head to the library, we can then meet up for lunch? Dinner? Something, and we can see about the sword and where we're supposed to go for the hobgoblins. I expect we'll need a bit better map than that ratty old thing they gave us."

"Actually, I would caution against contacting the city guard at this time," Hanz told us. "After we reveal the existence of the waterworks below the city the natural response would be to send experts to secure the place and begin any needed repairs. As they would have to pass through the territory now occupied by the hobgoblins, inciting violence against them would occur as a matter of principle. Our vanquishing of the dragon should not take long, thus freeing them up to depart under cover of darkness tomorrow. My recommendation is thus to wait until the way is clear, then inform them. The water will start to clear regardless, and we are not 'hard up' as they say for currency the matter can wait."

As long as another group doesn't get sent in the meantime I suppose. "That's actually a good idea," I agreed. "Okay, I guess you all head home then for the moment?"

"I'll probably just fall asleep back at the house," Malachite announced. "Wake me for food though."

"I need ta pose my skeleman!" Snarly added. "Thatth what I'll be doing."

"I will attempt to make sure the bomb is safe to have around, and see what I can do with the plasma cutter we acquired," Hanz decided. "So it seems we all have our tasks."

"Look over the sword first," I told them. "See if there's any mechanical component we should worry about." Get it out of the way, then I can do my magical examination.

"Very well."

We went our separate ways, and I spent some time in the library. I of course first took my bun form and went to get a cinnamon bun to satisfy my cravings. Finally, once again I was in my element after so long. Of course, me sitting around doing nothing but practicing magic and reading our family's books for a hundred years was what made me look as I did, covered with sharp bits of organic stone. But what can you do? I was currently disguised as an owl person, shifting on the way over, who better to want access to a library? My name would be Hootsifer, though I wondered if that was little too close to Lucifer for most tastes? That one was still wandering around somewhere to be sure, a little thing like the chaos moon showing up and then thousands of years of upheaval wouldn't change that! Eh, no one was really going to ask, I just wanted to have something ready just in case. I had books piled around me, trying desperately to stay on task and stick to only books that may be relevant; to that end insight into the Dagger Forest, the temple of the eclipse, eclipse magic in general, any sort of "cult" of the eclipse (as a long shot), magic infused remnants, light and darkness demons, magically infused crystals relating to darkness and light- Okay it was a lot I admit it! I found little of relevance. Namely three points:

1. The Dagger Forest was historically used to perform magical research and was home to various cults over the years. This made sense, as it was nearby to the town and heavily wooded, you could hide oh heck just to pull a random example a whole temple inside it with no one the wiser for years.

2. The place was far more active before and during the mage wars, magical experiments were done there. None specifically mentioned, of course, just a vague sense that it was used as a testing ground at one time.

3. Nothing on the temple itself, or eclipse magic or light and dark demons. This was perhaps telling, as maybe information on it was purposefully suppressed?

I was leaned back in my chair thinking about my next move. There was probably some sort of mage's guild presence here, as there were mages that did business in town. They would need to be properly regulated and taxed and whatnot, so contacting them about the crystals could be a smart move. They could in turn get more experts here, and with physical evidence of the Gloom cult (the ice elemental had all but shouted they were controlled by the Gloom) we could maybe get some more help here dealing with it. On the other hand, if I did that, they would no doubt vanish into some kind of vault and I would never see them again. Would that be so bad? We had already lost the ice orb, a similar crystal with cold properties, so I wasn't keen on losing these too before I had a chance to fully study them. But one person studying them was of course inferior to a whole group of people, and did my personal curiosity about them override the danger they posed if not properly secured? There were not dozens of elemental demons at the temple, so I didn't think they simply created more without some kind of impetus, but one never knew. I was scowling at nothing when I realized someone had sat down across from me, and perhaps some time ago. I blinked and looked them over, it was a wanderer.

Musings complete for the moment then, they "said."

Always weird hearing one of their kind talk. "Yes, was there something I could do for you?" I asked.

Have you already forgotten our bargain? they asked, tiny mouth forming a bit of a smile.

"Bargain- you told me about the temple!" I realized.

They gave a small bow. One and the same. How did the meeting go?

"Ugh, poorly. Wait how did you recognize me?" I asked. I felt around, my disguise magic was still going, and Boline sat invisibly at my side.

How could I fail to? they asked, seeming genuinely curious.

"What?" There's a lot we don't know about these people. Just like that crazy lady we gave the ice orb too. Maybe they don't see the world like we do? Or they can see through illusions? That's a scary thought. "Never mind. It went poorly. The place was corrupted and a couple of the people that went in there got killed. Whatever purpose there was in the tokens and getting people to meet there on the eclipse is over. Sorry."

This is most distressing. Please, can you elaborate?

"Sure." I told him of the token lighting up and leading us to the temple when the eclipse started. How the dwarf rushed into the place, trying to get first access to whatever it was inside. How he got killed, scaring off the others. Then we went in, hatching a plan to take the crystals we found, as well as the chest with the ring of healing in it, and avoid the crazy remnant that was going nuts down there from all that magical energy surging through them. They were quiet while I told the tale, and looked concerned.

This is all most concerning. And I take it you do not have these 'crystals' with you at this time? They looked me over a bit. I would love to at least see them.

"No, they're locked up at home. I need time to study them more, not that I know what more I'm going to get out of them with my limited divination magic." And the temple may be the key, with that strange alter we saw. But it would mean disabling that remnant, and quite frankly they scared the crap out of me!

Perhaps, one such as myself could tell more about them?

He did translate the coordinates. Got me there on time. Is this being actually more tied up with this than I first thought? "With all due respect, until I find out if they can be used for evil, they're staying locked up. For all I know you touch them and simply vanish, leaving me with nothing."

I take your point. But be careful for cannot the most innocuous healing spell be used for evil with a proper application?

"I suppose," I admitted, thinking back to slaying that odd muck creature with just a cleaning spell. What is a contaminant anyway? What's dirty? Could even that spell be used to somehow harm with the right mindset? "If they can be used for both good and evil it will be up to me to find a person who can safeguard them and be trusted to look them over. Is that person you?"

It would hardly convince you for me to simply say yes.

"Quite right. I'll think about it. I can at least ask questions about you."

Of course. If it will help you come to a decision.

"Say I do decide to let you borrow them, at least. Will you mysteriously pop up like you just did, if I hang around someplace and need you to?

Who can say what the future holds? they replied with another slight grin and a shrug.

"Then you better give me some way to contact you."

No need, I'll be around and I'm sure we'll run into each other sooner or later. They got up and pushed their chair back in. Good luck with the research.

"Thanks." So do they simply not want to seem to eager, or do they not really care, or do they have a way to find me? Maybe they just take a relaxed attitude towards things, like elves. I could hardly say.

And they were gone.

I headed back to the house, I had things to think about.

"Ah, you have returned," Hanz announced as I walked in. "I will now provide the latest updates."

"Go ahead," I told them.

"I have secured the bomb, and Snarly has stepped out for the moment. Malachite has also departed, separately, and said he would be back later. I have been looking over the crude map provided by the hobgoblin leader and have plotted a course that should result in our finding the location with little effort. The blade is here if you wish to investigate it, there is no mechanical component in evidence." They indicated the table, where the sheathed blade rested. "I have also used the time to convert the charging port of the plasma cutter into a form that can accept power from my systems, giving it an unlimited runtime in conjunction with your spell."

"You've been busy!" Or was I just lost in books, which has been known to happen from time to time, for longer than I thought?

"I hope your time has been just as fruitful?"

"Not really," I complained, frowning. "Just more questions. I saw our friend the wanderer again, who gave us the time and place for the temple of the eclipse. They were fairly interested in what happened, and wanted a look at the stones we took out of there. Naturally I have turned them down for the moment."

"A logical choice, as you do not know if you can trust them."

"Agreed. Now, let's get this sword worked out and see how much trouble we're in."

"If you don't mind I'll watch?"

"You're welcome to." I pulled the chair out and settled into it, drawing the blade and looking it over. "But it's going to be mostly me just sitting here and touching the thing." Now that I had a moment, and some better lighting, the blade glittered and looked brand new, as if freshly forged. You don't think… I opened my awareness to any magic in the area and glared at it. "That can't be right," I mused.

"What it is?" Hanz asked, somewhat concerned.

"One second." I raised my hands. "Let my skill be augmented!" I cast, drawing on ambient mana as usual. My awareness of magic increased, and I sat staring at the blade for a moment. "No, it's the same-" I whirled around. "Hang on, what's that?"

"What's what? I'm afraid you're not making much sense at the moment."

"What's in that direction?" I pointed. The workshop is over there, it's not my spell tokens I'm feeling. It's not my magic anyway, it's something different.

"My room?"

"What? Do you mind if I take a look?" I got up, scowling into the distance. "There's something magical over there, close by, that I haven't sensed before."

"I don't have much in there, you are welcome to."

We headed over there and I looked around the room. Mainly just the stone furniture met my eyes, but one other thing. "The ax," I breathed. "I never did look it over, did I?"

"You did not," they agreed. "I believe I acquired it before you learned the technique of 'reading' magical items?"

"So I never circled back and checked it out," I agreed, going over to where it was placed on the table and looking it over. Ugh, need some kind of auto updating quest log. Wonder if there's magic for that? "With my senses enhanced it seems magical all right. Give me a moment." I dropped the spell and put a hand on it, relaxing and working out what the effect was. "Interesting," I finally decided. "It's more of a blessing than a spell, I've really never felt the like."

"Blessing?" Hanz prompted. "As in from the Heavens?"

"Yes. This ax will be slightly more effective in harming the undead than an ax of similar construction."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Who would have thought? Well, back to the sword. I must be right but it's crazy to think that much magic can be contained in one blade. It's almost… unreasonable. But I'll have to spend some time with it."

"Whatever you have to do."

I enhanced my ability to read magical items, may as well get some more use out of the spell, and sank into the blade. The easiest thing to do was 'read' how many magical effects an object had, and my eyebrows (such as they were) shot up when the answer came back.

"Impossible," I breathed, jerking my hand back.

"What is it?"

"This sword has five separate enchantments. It's unheard of. It's bizarre. It's… gross is what it is." Well, I suppose the sharpness and toughness could have been done at the same time making it only four but at this point, who's counting?

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I. This will take a while..." I put my hand back on the sword and took a deep breath.

It was a half an hour later that I finally came out of it, shaking my head. It was ludicrous, the amount of magic contained in this blade. I saw Snarly and Malachite had returned, and blinked my eyes against the light.

"Welcome back," Malachite told me. "Hanz said not to disturb you I hope we were quiet enough."

"I thought you were ina coma!" Snarly announced.

"I didn't realize you were here at all, it's this sword, I simply can't believe what I'm feeling from it. I kept going back over it but the results didn't change. I can hardly even fathom it."

"So what ith it?"

"Basically? The most poisonous thing in existence. You so much as scratch someone with this sword, and they're dead."

"Really?"

"No joke, stay away from it. I don't even want to sit this close to it. Someone very carefully sheath it again and yes, Malachite it will slice you in half easily so please be careful." I got up and let Hanz, who was probably immune to it having no organic bits to poison make it safe again. I breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay, with that done, let me lay it out for you and give you some context. Be right back." I headed to my room and got out my book of magic, whirling to look at the fur lined cloak that was draped across my bed now. It was a rich purple, fur lined, and looked fairly new. When did- what- One thing at a time, Orchid. I thought something was different about this room but… Sword. Right.

"Okay, sword," I said, opening the book. "I know the theory behind fabrication and imbuing from my magical studies but I never took it up. For two reasons. Fabrication requires great strength, while imbuing requires sacrifice. Let me explain. To imbue something you're basically creating magical pathways inside an object that maintain a spell forever. But the only thing that can direct magic is a mana core, and obviously objects do not have mana cores."

"Thus the difficulty my people had with becoming magic users," Hanz spoke up.

"Exactly. So, one step in the imbuing process is sacrificing a portion of your mana core and attaching it to the object. You then have to essentially cast the spell many times along that feature, until it becomes self sustaining. You do this while further sacrificing physical objects that represent what you want the spell to do, ultimately weaving the whole thing together and finally you have your magical object."

"Sounds like creating magical circuitry," Hanz mused. "What a fascinating parallel."

"Sure, if you say so. Now, all this is no big deal, right? Wrong! This sword has been imbued three times. It has three separate mana cores, and three 'magical circuits' to use Hanz's metaphor. It's dense with them, I'm surprised it's not shaking itself apart with how much magic is in there. But that's not the worst part. Each successive thing you do makes the next thing you want to do harder. You have to weave the magic into a smaller and smaller space, so you have to be more and more accurate. Touching the spell 'threads' you already have in the object with the 'threads' you're trying to put into the object can cause either or both to interact and either outright explode, have a completely random effect, or even backlash into the creator and outright kill them. We're talking about poison spells here, maybe it would poison a whole town, if you messed up the magic that badly. That's why most things just have one function. This sword has three. Three! Someone seriously skilled or just plain insane made this thing! Or maybe they just spent half a year on the project?" That would help, moving very, very slowly...

"Did you not say five, or am I malfunctioning?" Hanz asked.

"It was fabricated first, then imbued," I explained. "Let me write some numbers down." I got out the tables from my book, I had copied them of course just in case I ever for some bizarre reason thought I should start learning this stuff. The tables would swiftly debase me of that notion again. I began to write. "Now first the blade was made magically sharper," I explained. "Such that it could pierce dragonscale, of course." I consulted the chart and made some notes. "So the base amount of time for that part is 30 hours, and the rule of thumb is you spend at least half again as much time refining it because you only want to do it once and not mess it up. So we're up to 45 hours of work and 350 embers to do that. Because fabrication also consumes material as you're pushing the magic into it. Now we add the first spell, grade 3, to accelerate the effects of poison on the target. It's been fabricated at this point so you're already looking at a huge increase in difficulty. Rule of thumb here is twenty hours of work per grade of the spell, so maybe twenty four hours of work to overcome that? So we're up to 117 hours of work and 650 embers. Now you put the second spell in there, to make your target more susceptible to poison. That's grade 4, we'll use the same basic assumption of twenty four hours, so add another 100 hours so we're now looking at 217 hours of total work. That's another 400 embers by the way so we're up to-" I pointed to Hanz.

"One thousand, fifty embers," they calculated.

"Great. One more effect to go! Elemental strike, aspected to poison. It's also grade 3, it's the same spell I use only mine is aspected to magic. Never mind. This is where it becomes very, very tricky. Rule of thumb doesn't apply anymore, no really. The item is now saturated with magic and one wrong move blows the whole thing sky high. I'll give it 50 hours per grade because really, why rush it at this point? It's already obscenely difficult so I'll let the maker take their time here. So add another 150 hours, that's-"

"Three hundred sixty seven hours of total work," Hanz announced as I snapped my fingers. "Working 8 hours a day that would come to 46 total days. And if another 300 embers our grand total is now 1,350 embers. I assume this does not take into account the material cost of the sword itself?"

"We're ignoring that," I agreed. "This amount of time is also what I consider the most risky, unless you had decades of experience doing this, or were very, very pressed for time because a dragon was prophesied to attack your town, you would take your time and maybe double that number."

"So a total of 6 suns, 15 moons. Or about a half of what we bought this house for."

Malachite and Snarly both whistled.

"Don't be too impressed, that's if I was doing it myself," I warned them. "That's just material cost. Not labor cost. Remember, you can totally blow yourself up or worse doing this. If I was making this sword for someone, well, the payment would easily be more than this house is worth. Especially to make up for the risk. And you know how greedy the guild is about this stuff, just casting a spell costs people an arm and a leg. When I started wandering around and was 'gently introduced' to the guild policy of 'no good deed goes uncharged' they told me the ratio but as I figured I never would do it I didn't write it down. I would have to ask again what the 'recommended' hourly rate is for this sort of thing. It's not suns, but it would probably be close."

"Well, this does all assume you did nothing else," Malachite agreed. "So you didn't earn any other income those forty six days. You would need to make up for that, so I can see charging at least a moon a day. It's a specialized skill after all."

"Exactly," I agreed. "So, there you have it Snarly. Or not, because I haven't even asked my magic if someone is going to be coming after you once they learn you have their heirloom quality blade. I have to assume it's stolen, those hobgoblins didn't make it."

"Oh no!" he exclaimed.

"Yeah. You want someone rich or crazy enough to carry this thing around to come after you because they think you stole it? I don't. Give me a minute."

I asked the universe "Has this blade by stolen from someone we should be worried will come after someone at this table?" and the answer was a surprising;

No

"I guess you're in the clear?" I exclaimed, totally surprised. "Where in the heck did this come from then?"

"Lookth like ith mine then!" Snarly decided, snatching it up. "Now I jeth need to figure out how tho sthab a dragon with it without dying mythef!"

"We can talk strategy," I assured him. "But for now, I seem to have a cloak in my room to investigate. If you'll excuse me?"