Yao proceeded to carry out a feverish series of hand-signs and gestures that incorporated her whole body, taking a few methodical steps, each ringing out with a loud CLACK. With each sign, the rotational speed of the talisman rings grew, each at a different rate, as did the intensity of their glow. Soon the room was bathed in blinding light and a loud thrumming sound. It lasted, by Krahe’s reckoning, for nine seconds, at which point it flickered out and died in an instant. When her sight returned to her, the Hexkey floated over Yao’s left hand. Between two fingers of her right hand, she grasped a hair-thin, cylindrical piece of the Hexkey; about a centimeter wide and twice as long. A complex cluster of glyphs shone both on and beneath its surface, the faint reddish glow fading with each passing moment.
“Done,” Yao breathed. Her good eye was twitching, sweat trickled down her forehead, and her chest heaved with laboured breaths. She held out the cylinder of removed material. “Here. You might be able to find Shang’s tomb one day. He is bound to have left treasures for himself.”
Krahe took it, knowing all too well that Yao would be involved in such an endeavor more likely than not. This was a simple show of trust.
“Now…” Yao began again, taking a moment to catch her breath. “...We can move on to the simpler, yet more laborious part. I shall begin preparing the ritual circle whilst describing its properties, feel free to interject at any point. It is not a delicate operation, so modifications can be as crude as we need them to be.”
They spent the next half-hour or so preparing the ritual, while the battle in the sky raged on. Krahe learned more about ritual circles and ritualism in general in that half-hour than she had from most of her reading combined, but she also spent most of that half-hour kneeling on the ground, building. An icosahedral framework, entwined through and through by tendrils of Tar impregnated with anathema-reflective particulate to form a sphere; it was a larger, sturdier version of the Daemon Core’s reflector shell. The most obvious issue was maintaining the construct-matter, but Yao wasted no time in lightening this burden; in moments, she created six new talismans and bound them to the sample chunk of human charcoal with spectral threads of golden light. Tehreafter, she suspended the coal chunk above the dome and placed the talismans on the inside of its perimeter. With each one placed, Krahe felt the burden lift and saw the coal chunk flaring more brightly with crimson flame. It shrunk moment by moment. By the end, only a small hole was left in the shell, large enough to insert the hand and hexkey.
“It will hold for a few minutes. Long enough,” Yao said, regarding the shell with a critical, yet satisfied eye before glancing Krahe’s way. “Once it begins, the ritual’s own energies will feed my stabilization talismans. I could have achieved the same effect with lesser ink, but better to waste it than to have the shell burst open. I shall take hold of the shell for a moment, it must be you who inserts the material.”
And so, Krahe did. After emplacing the Hexkey into the Astrocite Hand’s grasp, she wrapped its wrist with a tendril and carefully inserted both into the shell’s center, wherein it became weightlessly suspended. Thereafter, she sealed the shell, and the both of them examined the whole assembly with a final pass, both inspecting their own parts.
“Is there anything we are waiting for?” Krahe asked.
“No, I do not suppose there is. We do require an incantation, however. I have my own, but you are the primary ritemaster in the end. I am only here to ensure everything proceeds correctly. The incantation can be anything phrase; grasping for it should be no more difficult than grasping for a theurgic sigil. It must have an initiating and a finishing component; I can signal for the latter when the time comes, but I do not expect you to need it.”
An incantation to set off a ritual such as this; the complete transmutation of a voidkey via what was effectively a crude reactor. Krahe chuckled to herself as a memory floated up. In her time, she had seen many things she was not supposed to. Technologies that were said to be vaporware for decades after their invention, because someone powerful didn’t want them in the open. For this reason, she had just the speech to parrot as an incantation. She took a few moments to mentally shift gears, calling back the words and muttering a Japanese tongue-twister to get her mouth used to speaking that language again.
Meanwhile, Krahe mentally returned to a time and a place far removed from here and now. Her eyes saw what was before her and her body was fully present, remaining aware of her surroundings, but the majority of her attention turned inward. Megacity Gamma. Sector 8. The observation deck of a hidden, highly illegal research facility. She had infiltrated the place as part of an investigation, and though it ended up being a dead end, it at least gave her this precious memory. Once she felt that she wouldn’t stumble over her own words, she held out her hand to the ritual circle, with Yao doing the same in response. Krahe began reciting: “Neptunius Heavy Industries experimental atomic transmutation reactor ‘Solomon’ v7.9.108 Test No. 66, ready to proceed. Reaction mass in place. Estimated transmutation ratio: 87%. Preliminary computations loaded. Biocomputer array reads as operational. Hypercomposite capacitor arrays operational.”
Blending with her intent, a thread of Thauma flowed out to connect with the ritual circle. It was the simplest thing: She just had to build up enough pressure to set off the reaction, keeping in mind the general intended course of the ritual. No more and no less than the consumption of the Astrocite Hand for the transmutation of the Hexkey into its final form. Floating about a meter off the ground, the reflector shell began rotating clockwise. A quartet of talismans from Yao followed after it, followed by another, and a third, each forming another ring that, in turn, revolved at different speeds and in different directions, once more like an armillary.
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