MiP B3 Chapter 10: Enchanting Demonstrations

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Mythril shimmered in the diffuse glow of the enormous workshop's magical light. Right next to it, adamantium drank in that light greedily, blanketing a small area in shadows so dark that the metal itself was barely even visible. The incredibly valuable magical metals, possibly worth more than the entire wealth of Lord Merchant Darmelkon, were just stacked up neatly in huge sheets as if they were just another crafting material. Strangely, mythril, the more common and cheaper of the two, was the smaller stack, with only 3 sheets compared to adamantium's 4.

With considerable difficulty, Carlos snapped himself out of staring in shock and engaged in analysis. With the dimensions of those stacks, that was… about a whole cubic foot of each of the two metals. Just how many wellsprings had been looted to accumulate such an exorbitant quantity? Or was it that the wellspring they'd found had held much less than average, or maybe they could be harvested repeatedly over time? Or, possibly, could there be some other source of these rare materials, perhaps even naturally-occurring minable veins of ore? Or was this just a showcase of how much dragons looted wealth from others and hoarded it?

Asking any of those questions of their host seemed unwise, so Carlos intentionally tore his gaze away from the awe-inspiring stockpile and focused instead on the enchantment experiments scattered nearby. "So, uh, Tilnaranrunerdar…" Hmm. This might not be a good time to ask about shortening his name, yet. "You know that runes can be a lot smaller than that and still function, right?"

Tilnaran chuckled and nodded. "Oh, of course I do. Engraving them that small is rather finicky work, though. For experiments that I'll just scrap when I'm done with them, it's much easier and quicker to work at a scale that's comfortable for me, and then I can reuse the same material in other experiments."

Carlos shrugged. "Sounds reasonable."

The dragon reached out with his right claw and picked up a slightly-warped enchanted sheet of mythril. "Plus, the extra metal carries the strain of heavy mana currents more easily. This one drew a surprisingly high amount of mana all at once when I tested it. If I had made its runes as small as I do for actual products, the entire thing would have been a total loss. Instead…" He presented it to Carlos. "See for yourself."

Carlos dutifully leaned forward to inspect it more closely. The sheet itself was visibly bent, if only by a small amount, and the engraved channels that had handled the main bulk of the damaged enchantment's mana looked a little melted, with soft edges that wavered inconsistently. As for the enchantment itself…

Amber took up her own line of questioning while Carlos thought. "Why are most of the experiments done with mythril? Adamantium can handle more powerful mana, and platinum is much cheaper. Is it just for a balance between factors?"

Tilnaran looked askance at her and snorted. "You have worked with adamantium yourself, at the very least in the making of that wonderful little trinket you showed me. Surely you have experienced how very much force adamantium takes to change its form even as little as by carving runes into it, yes?" He paused and cocked his head further when Amber didn't confirm it. He brought his head closer and peered intently, then pointedly looked sideways at Carlos for a moment, but Amber just shrugged uncertainly. Tilnaran drew back and fluttered his wings, and his aura suddenly focused on both of them much more intently than before. "Well, then. If you have a method of enchanting that does not involve physical engraving of the runes, then teaching that to me, by itself, would already be… valuable."

Carlos looked up, having followed the conversation with one of his minds the whole time. "We don't know yet if you'll be able to use our method. You clearly enchant things in a fundamentally different way than we do." He tapped a rune near the center of the experimental enchantment he'd been inspecting. "You obviously did not understand what this rune does, yet you made an enchantment using it that functions — however terribly wrongly — despite that. With our way, the knowledge must come first."

"Knowledge first, hmm?" Tilnaran waved a claw toward the distant back of the workshop, and a tiny object zipped over to hover in front of Carlos. "Do you mean in the manner of incantation spellcraft that this describes?"

The object proved to be not quite so tiny, now that it was right there within arm's reach of Carlos. It was a book; one with a very familiar title: Introduction to Magical Theory for Beginning Mages, the same book that Carlos himself had first begun to learn magic from. He stared for a moment, then looked up and nodded. "Yes, exactly like that. Do you…?"

"Do I have the soul structures it describes?" Tilnaran grinned. "As a matter of fact, yes! Is that what your method requires? It will be good to finally have a use for them beyond trivial curiosities."

"Yes, actually. So–"

Amber interrupted with a yawn. "Can we continue this tomorrow, please? It's rather late, we need to sleep, and we need to think about what we're willing to trade and for how much. We barely even had more advance notice about this than you did."

Carlos's eager grin instantly changed to a look of sympathy as he turned his head toward Amber and gave her a side embrace with his right arm. "Right. Thank you, I was getting a bit unwisely carried away, wasn't I? T–" He hesitated before addressing the dragon again. "Your full name is… unwieldy in our language. Do you mind if we call you something shorter, perhaps 'Tilnaran?'"

"Hmm." Tilnaranrunerdar considered the question for a few seconds. "From the two of you, I will accept that. And yes, you may go for now. Return here at dawn; I am eager to resume. Oh, but do not try to teleport into or out of any part of my lair. My extensive wards will react to that… aggressively."

Carlos called out across the cavern, "Come on, Trinlen. Time to go."

The young mage, standing bent over something in a whole other section on the opposite side of the cavern, straightened and put his hands in his pockets. "But Boss, this is all so interesting! Do I really have to just leave it all? How could you possibly expect me to be able to sleep, with all of this on my mind?"

Carlos laughed and yelled back, "That's not entirely my decision to make! Are you up for asking our host, too?"

"Uh…" Trinlen stepped forward and bowed low. "Lord Tilnaran, your, um… magnificen–"

Tilnaran let out an amused huff as he turned his whole body to face Trinlen. "I don't recall giving you permission to use a shortened form of my name."

Trinlen bowed even deeper. "A thousand apologies, Lord Tilnaranruner… er… Um." After a moment of awkward silence, he stood back up to face the dragon. "Right. So. Ahem. The fullness of your name seems to have slipped my mind. I think my best move now is to point out that eating me would endanger your chances of making the deal that you're so eager for. Boss did swear an oath to return my loyalty in kind, after all."

Tilnaran gave a full-body laugh, then settled onto the floor. A flick of his tail urged Carlos and Amber toward the exit while he spoke with Trinlen. "You amuse me, little mage. Few humans have the audacity to speak to a dragon like that without having the power to personally fight on the dragon's level." He gave a long look toward another section of the cavern, then shook his head. "My work that was interrupted can wait. You may stay for a while longer. Let us speak of magecraft. You do know more than that book describes, right?"

Carlos and Amber quietly left them to it, with a quick mental reminder to Trinlen to not tell any house secrets.

___

The next morning, Amber shook Carlos awake when the pre-dawn glow was just starting to lighten the sky. He grumbled briefly, but quickly surged to full wakefulness when he remembered what was waiting for them. Somewhat surprisingly, he noticed that Trinlen actually had returned to camp and gone to sleep at some point, rather than spending the entire night in the dragon's workshop. Maybe Tilnaran had gotten tired of him and kicked him out.

Regardless, the academy mage's mana was moving especially sluggishly in his sleep, and Carlos resolved to let him sleep off his exhaustion. Then an earsplitting racket erupted from within Trinlen's tent, and he bolted upright and hastily dismissed his alarm spell and scrambled out of his tent. His slightly bloodshot eyes fastened onto Carlos and Amber and he ran over, completely ignoring the mess of his hair and the rumples in his clothes. "Ah, good, I'm not too late. You'll let me come along again, right?"

Carlos dropped his forehead into his palm and rolled his eyes while trying very hard to suppress an amused grin. "Sure, Trinlen. But if you fall asleep in the middle of Tilnaran's workshop, I will not wake you back up." He paused. "And I will dismantle any wakeup spell you try to set for yourself. If you need to sleep that badly, then you will sleep. Got it?"

Trinlen vigorously rolled his shoulders, rubbed his hands together, and hopped from one foot to the other repeatedly. "Yup, Boss. Got it! You can count on me!"

Carlos gave him a hard look, but decided that trying to argue or question the overeager young man really wasn't worth it. He cast Flight and led the way back to Tilnaranrunerdar's hidden tunnel and workshop. Now that he knew to look for it, the subtle illusion on the tunnel entrance was effectively a beacon for him.

The workshop's door was already open when they arrived, and Tilnaran was there, sitting on the floor and working on something. He looked up as they entered and casually beckoned them in with his front left claw. "Punctual, I see. Excellent. Let us begin."

Carlos analyzed what Tilnaran was working on while he approached. It was a mythril sheet from the stack they'd seen yesterday, and runic shapes were engraved on it in the form of an enchantment, but it had no essence imbued into the runes and no source of mana connected to power it. The magic inherent in the mythril itself still let him feel its shape, though. "Begin with what, exactly? That feels like an unfinished basic Light enchantment, there?"

Tilnaran nodded. "Precisely. You asked to assess what I already know, and there is only so much you can assess by inspecting completed works. I prepared this to show you the process of how I make enchantments work. My sources, those that even knew anything on the topic, all said that this is the critical step that your guild monopolizes."

Carlos looked to Amber, who confirmed it.

Tilnaran looked down at his engraved mythril sheet. "However, I want to begin getting something in exchange. Let me observe your method in action, just as you observe mine." He breathed a narrow jet of mana-filled flame that burned into the sheet in such a thin and straight line that it amounted to a cut, and the sheet split cleanly into halves. He tossed the half he hadn't engraved toward Carlos. "Here, you can use this for the material. Any enchantment is fine, just let me watch."

Carlos caught the half-sheet, which was still a huge amount of the rare metal, with Telekinesis. He shrugged. "Sure. Fair warning, though: just observing it won't be enough to learn it."

He waited only for Tilnaran's acknowledgement before silently triggering the `enchant` command. He might normally have needed some time to consider which enchantment to make, but this time there was one really obvious choice. Mana and essence poured forth, carved precise channels in the mythril, and imbued themselves into those channels. In about 20 seconds, it was done, and the enchantment activated. The sheet glowed brightly, bearing an exact copy of Tilnaran's unfinished Light enchantment, except with runes a fraction of the size he'd used.

Tilnaran looked it over carefully for a minute, then set it aside. "You were correct; I have no idea how you did that. All I am certain of is that you interacted with the enchantment system in some manner, and that studying the end result will tell me nothing of how to duplicate the process. Now, my turn."

A small hole opened in the wall of the far end of the workshop, and a square-foot section of adamantium sheet flew out from it, borne swiftly to Tilnaran by the workshop's enchantments. The sheet was enchanted, but the enchantment on it barely even technically qualified as an enchantment at all. It had an operational power source, packed full of mana, but it powered… nothing. The enchantment circuit it was connected to had only the bare minimum of required structure, with no actual effect at all. It was the equivalent of a computer program that just closes itself.

Tilnaran's mana and essence poured out and probed the power source, flowing to brush against it in an endless cycle. As the mass of magical power rotated, it gradually took on aspects of the existing power source. Most obviously, it formed into the same shape, with a solid shell of essence containing a fluid reservoir of mana. The impressions of purpose that Carlos sensed from it also changed, however, incorporating concepts of constrained flowing, empowering, and more.

It took a few minutes to finish, and then Tilnaran embedded the new power source into a specific spot on the mythril sheet. Another portion of essence extended out from the power source and imbued the runes, following the pre-engraved lines as guides. Then, finally, mana flowed through the enchantment to make the sheet glow.

Carlos watched the sample power source fly back into its storage place with a raised eyebrow. "So… You don't actually know how to make an enchantment power source. You have to copy one that you already have."

Tilnaran sighed deeply and lowered his head to the floor. "Yes, that is among the drawbacks of my method, compared to yours." He stared wistfully for a long moment toward where the power source had gone back into storage. Then he turned back to Carlos and perked up. "But now I get to learn yours! It needs no soul structures other than the basic ones from that book, correct?"

Carlos nodded. "That is correct. You will have to learn each enchantment in the same manner as incantation spells, though."

Tilnaran snorted and waved a claw dismissively. "Bah, a trifling concern for the magnitude of the benefit. Your method is even better than I expected, and your apprentice was most helpful in expanding my knowledge of incantation principles last night. For teaching me that method, alone, I will trade you enough aether from my wellspring to advance both of yourselves by 2 levels. In fact… I'll throw in half a sheet each of mythril and adamantium as a bonus for its excellence. How's that for a deal?"

Carlos hesitated. "You know how much aether that will take for our tier?"

"I do."

Carlos glanced toward their camp, outside, and shared a look with Amber. "We want the same amount of aether for our dungeon core as well. And this is just the start; we'll want all the aether we can absorb. We can negotiate later how much each other secret is worth."

Tilnaran looked in the same direction, then back at them. "That implies some fascinating things. Hmm…" After a few seconds, he nodded sharply. "Very well, and I absolutely agree on wanting to continue for more. In fact, if you still have more to teach when you reach the limits of my wellspring, I will gladly trade my assistance to make deals with other dragons, too."

As they got down to the business of teaching, Carlos reflected on how things were going. At this rate, they might be ready to return to Kalor Kingdom much sooner than he'd thought. He might have to hurry up on discussing governance matters with Lornera.

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