As Krahe made her way from Garvesh’s place and turned the corner, she heard a man’s footsteps nearby, just entering the same alleyway from the other end. Rapid, but decisive, not agitated. They were accompanied by a whistled melody. Though she never once glimpsed that stranger, she felt an unsettling sensation wash over her. She walked aimlessly for a short time, looking out for signs of someone following her or laying in ambush, but found no evidence of such a thing, and so continued on her way back to Gashward 94. Her intention was to replace her voidkey and reuse the miniature sarcophagus for Atomica. However, she still had quite a bit of built-up Isotope stored in her arm, so she decided to dissipate most of it first before she carried out a voidkey change. She had, after all, plenty of time to burn.
In the blink of an eye, several hours passed.
If only that were the case. In truth, Krahe could feel the blood pounding in her head and her eyes glazing over as she read the same strip of Yao’s scroll over and over. It was one of the few outright mystical sections, and was presented as such, with the scroll openly stating it was a riddle, a way of preparing the reader for other texts that were likely to be this obtuse in their entirety. She pulled the last dregs of Isotope into herself, lit up a cigarette, and decided to just wait it out, laying back on the sofa as she turned the shardkey over in her hand. She could have taken more purge pills to speed up the process, but besides being unpleasant at best, they were also caustic enough to threaten stomach lining damage with repeat dosage. This was not a problem when they were used as intended - to help purge minor curses.
As she felt the last of her Isotope scatter and fade, Krahe sat up, mentally glancing at her arm’s Isotope capacity - 20% full. Enough to do something with, not enough to be a problem. She conjured a talisman into her hand. One among the insights she had managed to glean from Yao’s scroll was a truly rudimentary talisman for easing the extraction of a “set” voidkey. It required no external power, only good ink and a steady hand to draw its symbol, a winding “spiral” of straight lines and right angles.
Extracting the Twin Serpent Key felt just as sickly-ticklish and unpleasant as it had been when she did it for the Black Sun Coupler’s test run. If she had to assume the talisman had done anything, she would guess it might have reduced the stress on the voidkey itself, or it might have sped up the fading of that sickly, wound-like sensation of absence. The Shardkey went in easily, but the moment it was seated, Krahe felt a faint wrongness. After mentally feeling around in the dark, a subtle mental pull clued her in on the culprit: her Wards were wrong. Or rather, they didn’t match the key’s embedded Ward design.
As she dispersed and began reconstructing her Wards, Krahe found that the Shardkey was guiding her. At first, she couldn’t help but feel as if her Wards were forming far too quickly, twice or thrice faster than normal, but it turned out to be only the first layer. Bit by bit, Krahe built up the multi-layered structure, and the reason for the term “Trinity Composite” became clear. A “padding” underlayer of homogenous, compressed pyroclast. A “flexible armor” layer of interlocking segments, serving as a smooth transition into the outermost, “articulated plates” layer, resembling obsidian in colour and reflectiveness. The Trinity Composite design was somewhere between antique full-plate and modern hardsuit armor… And Krahe still couldn’t quite tell why this worked, unlike most of her previous attempts. She well and truly hoped it was up to her own lacking understanding of how Wards functioned, rather than some glaring flaw in her thinking that she couldn’t perceive. After all, she had no clue how they didn’t get in the way, why they only showed themselves to protect their user, how they determined what was an attack. If she could grasp the fundamental nature of Wards, the ability to reshape her own as she saw fit would follow.
Frustrated, she finished reworking her wards, before placing Atomica in the stone box and storing it away. She immediately left for the Temple of Records, leveraging her access to restricted texts on Wards. She left with a total of three books, two being publicly available foundational texts while the third contained records of nontraditional Ward compositions, as well as various methods for embedding and extracting the ward composition of a voidkey. Their titles and authors read as such:
Armour of the Spirit
by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi
The Wizard’s Aegis:
A comprehensive history of personal wards.
by Audun Sorun
Record of Transcending Human Resilience: Chapter of Wards
translation by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi
original by Unknown
The Record of Transcending Human Resilience was the restricted text. While the others were typical leather bound tomes, this text was a scroll, with the translator explaining that he disliked scrolls and only used this form factor because the record didn’t work within a book format.
Krahe got as far as learning the most prevalent theory of Ward invention. This theory was based on countless historical accounts corroborating it, and itself stated that they were most likely invented as a defense against melee attackers, originally intended to buy a magic user enough time to create distance. At that point, as she was getting into the historical usage of personal Wards, Casus came into the safehouse.
A simple phrase followed with his entrance: “Ah. You are here. Good. We know where Semzar is and how to get to him.”
Those words were all it took for Krahe to stick a blank talisman paper into her book and jump to her feet. Just like that, a switch was flipped in her head, and she took the Black Sun Coupler from its spot in a hidden compartment under the kitchen stove. She strapped it to her waist, donned the supporting armor, and covered it all with a long coat - one of her articles of disguise. They spoke briefly as she did this, exchanging basic operational info and the plan of attack. It was a straightforward plan, but it made sense.
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