Grist For the Mill I
Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2022 6:09 pm
E S T • I D O N E U M • B E L L O
Frost 35, 121 Age of Steel
War was coming to Karnor, its signs obvious to those who knew where to look. The tensions between Zaichaer and Kalzasi were as plain as day, but an uneasy equilibrium had lasted for ages with periods of mounting and cooling hostility. But this time was different, its traces written in ledgers and logbooks across both city-states. Supplies were purchased, provisions stored, fortresses manned, and the supply lines charted to ensure a constant flow of logistics from the heartland to the frontier. Purchases on the scale of states were rarely done in a way that any individual could notice until a conflict had actually been declared and all the resources of society bent towards the effort. Typically orders would be spread across so many workshops and suppliers that none would be flooded, and the requisitions could be mistaken for the typical tempo of resupply.
But most workshops were not Ale'Ephirum.
The pride of Sol'Valen, brought to the far north of Karnor - at least so the official line went - was no parlor of cheap tricks. It was an establishment, of the kind that could not only endure titanic amounts of work but would further ensure quality in each and every piece produced. As the junior most employee of the workshop, a young Lysanrin had been hired after them but the one armed man seemed to serve more as Lyra's assistant than a Scrivener, that left many of the simplest of requests to them. It was dull, rote, and monotonous work - and Avamande took to it with an energy that could almost be mistaken for energy unless one were to look at their utterly expressionless face.
Orders from the Sky Guard itself were taken with the utmost seriousness, and due to their relatively weak skills in comparison to the masters they worked alongside Avamande was only permitted to fulfill those that interacted with their own Runes of Negation and Traversion. Fortunately for them, or perhaps unfortunately depending on how one thought about work, a great deal of Scrivened scrolls were requested of both such magics. The vast majority of those were for the Regiment of Infantry and the Regiment of Rangers.
For the former, Avamande was tasked with making an indispensable part of any infantryman's kit: shields. The advent of caster shell based firearms, and the arming of entire regiments with them, marked a sea change in military tactics and strategy. With the ability to deal death at a distance, with enough penetrating power to pierce any mundane armor that a soldier could reasonably wear while still remaining combat effective, the only recourse would be to arm any opposing force in a similar fashion. Or, as Kalzasi had decided to do, provide them an appropriate countermeasure. The outfit of a Kalzasern infantryman was little changed from his comrades at the time of the city's founding: a sidearm such as a sword or spear, and a shield in their offhand to block incoming strikes and form up with their unit.
A normal shield of metal would be, of course, worthless against a volley of caster shells fired by dedicated Zaichaeri line infantry. Which is where Avamande came in. Each shield had attached to its rear a holster of sorts for a dragonshard and sheaf of parchment. The task was simple in both design and execution, Avamande was effectively being asked to write the instructions for a Negation ward in pictographs. Anchoring the spell to the shield itself simplified the process immensely, the Sky Guard having given Ale'Ephirum a test piece to model their work with. The preferred shape for such wards was a large curved plain, that extended out and beyond the physical object to cover the soldier's entire body as they advanced through the field. Tasking was similar simple, designed for the purpose of mass production rather than any nuance - these would block caster shells, and little else.
Simplicity granted power, and conserved aether. These were not the panoply of a mighty warrior or noble king, no artifice forged raiment, but instead the products of the industry of war. Resilience and reliability were the watch words, not to mention ease of crafting. The pictograph needed to be drawn thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, in order to fully outfit the Sky Guard. When the infantry advanced, the vanguard would activate the dragonshards embedded in their shields, fueling the nascent spell worked into the parchment, causing a Negation ward to flare into life.
The defense was temporary, and the power that a shard could bring to bear was limited, but it was the difference between being able to close the distance and being gunned down to a man. When the shields of the first rank began to waver, those behind them would activate their own, and the ones in front fall to the rear. On and on the infantry would have to cycle as they advanced, those who had retreated to the rear replacing the spent parchment and shard with an as yet unused Scrivened scroll and chunk of aetherite so that they would be ready when it came back to them. Only after crossing the treacherous distance, trusting in their arcane defenses, would they at last be close enough to charge and put Zaichaer's musketmen to the sword.
It resulted in slow, cumbersome formations that were easily flanked by more mobile forces - but then again, the Sky Guard had far more agile units of their own. What mattered was that it made war possible, that each completed sheaf of pictographs meant the difference between life and death for a soldier attempting to bring a sword to a gun fight. How could Avamande not find professional satisfaction in this? By their will alone the march of progress was not merely arrested, but turned back, and a marching anachronism made a threat to the very icons of technological advancement in Karnor. It was not due to any particular distaste of the cultish followers of reason that drove this, instead deriving their... well, pleasure was too strong a word, but positive emotion at the fact that they were holding back that which was held to be unstoppable by its adherents.
Perhaps if they were on the other side of the border they would just as fervently labor in support of the technologist's and their cause. These thoughts and others flitted through Avamande's mind as they worked, scrawling over and over again the same glyphs. The motions required were precise, but the pictographs simple enough to one as well versed in Negation as they. At least since being employed by Lyra they no longer had cause to worry for the state of their supplies, Ale'Ephirum's stores consisting only of the finest of reagents and materials. Minutely detailed dragonshard foci and rich spellwright's ink made the task far simpler than it might otherwise be, the Scrivener able to trust in their tools where they might otherwise have had to endure far more onerous labors.
A Mirror to draw in the the power of the dragonshard. Paths diverging out at the cardinals. Vortices at the corners. A simple, almost universal layout, for any craft done with time on the side of the mage. The shield required more advanced work, glyphs of Negation that contained the precise instructions to take the raw aether and anchor it to the physical shield as a true ward. Runes of inversion were required to take the raw stuff of magic and use it to form such barriers, a complication that would not be required had Kalzasi stores of abjinurium great enough to provide them to common troopers. In the grim calculus of military procurement, the loss of the city-state was the workshop's gain, as the per unit price only increased in light of the requirement.
They drew and drew and drew, a pile of completed scrolls growing next to them along with an equally impressive collection of empty vials of ink. As they worked, the absurdity of this entire affair began to grow in the back of their mind, along with distant dreams of clockwork. Kalzasi and Zaichaer were like boxers fighting with one arm tied behind their back each, one refusing to take full advantage of the old ways, and the other the new. Nothing stopped Zaichaer from fielding just as many scrolls, indeed they could make far more effective ones with their access to magebane. Instead they clung to the dictates of New Atheism as zealously as a follower of a faith. By the same token, it was only tradition and inertia that kept Kalzasi using swords instead of firearms. Or perhaps something darker. Maybe the Avialae had reason to keep their armies away from modern tools of war, when their own dominance rested so strongly on skill at arms.
Whatever the case, the thought of armies that combined both forms of fighting into one cohesive whole had infiltrated Avamande's thoughts. Looking over what they alone, a lone Scrivener had done, and knowing what the reality of those papers meant, what such a force could do, they froze. A singularly unusual emotion flooded through the mage's body, one that they had not felt in over a decade: fear.