40 Ash, 122
Torin was not dreaming. He was not even asleep though, at times, in the warm glow of his blacksmith's forge, when the day was overcast so it felt like the only light and heat in the city It felt almost like sleep. His lids would relax and his mind slip to other places when he was working on something that did not require the use of his mind beyond telling his arm to rise and fall, flights of fancy or fighting, fears or festive joy would play out just behind his eyes and it would almost feel like a dreams.
The steel glowed on his anvil, white, then butter yellow, then orange fading to red and, eventually, the blackened color of metal that had shed carbon as it had shed heat. The smith loved the metal, and working it. It was a different relationship than the one he shared with the aether he also forged, but that did not mean it was not love he felt. His relationship with his human lover was complicated, more so than the one he shared with his elven lover, but that did not mean he loved Sivan less, or wanted him less. There was similarity between the two relationships, as there was between his two professions, but there was not comparison. Weighing one against the other to determine which was 'better' held no meaning. While many of the actions he performed were the same the results were wholly individual.
These were the sorts of thoughts that occupied him, moving like a conversation of one in the empty space in his consciousness where thoughts came to be heard, as he went about his work. The sky was dark with heavy clouds and the scent on the air told him it would rain before true dark fell that night. He would have been at the work had it already been pouring outside the shelter of his forge, but he would have been having different thoughts. Rain thoughts were things of preservation, of preparing the earth and the tools required to ensure one had all one needed, and those one loved did also. The faux twilight of a deep overcast held different idea, like those of true twilight, it was a space of transition, of chimerical thoughts that did not come at any other time. Due to the nature of the setting of the sun such thoughts were usually fleeting, but on days like today, when the storm clouds created a semblance of dusk that lasted long hours, or even days, Torin's mind became a place of dreams. Not in the sense of waking dreams, ambitions and hopes, but of sleeping dreams; odd and whimsical, never feeling quite of reality; quite solid whenever you concentrated on them but slipping away like fish down into the water when you glanced away for a moment.
So he was now, body working, hammer swinging with the precise percussion of years of practice, but mind journeying far afield. Ever since Aurin had carved Semblance into him the little nudging urges that he'd gotten when he'd spent a great deal of time around raw forms of magic had gotten stronger. At times he swore he could almost see... somethings flitting at the corners of his vision. Using Semblance actively didn't cause any beings to resolve, though he had become aware of hosts of little sprites and spirits that lived inside basically everything. The beings, if such a word could be used to describe something so tentatively existent, did not have thoughts, but they did seem to have desires, thoughtless feelings of want. Their wants were often simple, but, he had found to his confusion, just as often complex. Perhaps his standards for what was simple and what was complex were tainted by his experience of living. Perhaps the places and ways these aetherial beings experienced was different enough that, for them, all their needs were simple. Or complex.
It was complicated and difficult to think about. It made sense that his mind would only usually let him delve into them in the brief times between day light and night. Today was an exception though, and as his thoughts wandered paths twisting and unsure he began to sense one of the little aethereous thought-forms moving thought the forge space. It was not unusual that there should be one or more around when he was working in the aether forge, but it was for one to spend more than a moment floating through the blacksmithy. There was something different about this one, it seemed 'bigger' though they had no substance, physical or otherwise, so the idea of size for them was just that, an idea, a brush of feeling against senses that themselves did not truly exist in any measurable state.
Whatever the aether creatures were, they weren't actually made of aether, Semblance would have been able to see them if they were. It was more like they were created by the prolonged existence of raw aether in a physical form. He'd first noticed them when he'd began working with dragonshards, and that was mostly where he still encountered them, but, once in a while, there would be one that did not seem attached to anything and it made him wonder if, after a great deal of time, one sometimes grew to exist just enough to detach itself and explore. As his mind was occupied with its near-dreaming and his body with his work, the part of him that could sense the tiny creature also recognized it. He'd 'seen' it before, out of the runeforge; once in the blacksmithy and more than once as he'd worked with Sivan in the little Artificing room they'd set up above. That he hadn't made note of the thing wasn't surprising, Artificing took up enough of his mind that the tendrils of free thought that noticed such things were all pulled in and concentrating while he worked.
The knowledge of the little being took root in Torin's head slowly, filtering in so he didn't get the whole picture all at once. It was the way of such things and, though they fascinated him, he knew better now than to let his whole mind try and observe. Like how some stars disappear when you look right at them, and can only be seen from the sides of your vision, attempting to examine whatever the things drawn to (or created by?) concentrated raw aether was useless. One could only keep one's mind on other things and let the tiniest bits of thought gently touch over them. Anything else and they either disappeared or he stopped being able to sense them, there was no way to tell which.
This particular one seemed to be examining his tools, but he had no idea if it was actually doing that. It brushed up against them, but kelp in the sea brushed against things in ways that could seem intentional. It stuck around longer than most did, moving in slow, lazy motions that looked as though dictated by a tide or the wind, though the wind was coming in gusts from the north and not lazily at all. When, after several hours, it came close to Torin himself, seeming to almost-investigate him as it had so much else in the room, he let it. Carefully, as delicately as he had ever done anything, he pushed out a tiny instance of his own aether, so small as to barely be there at all, and brushed it over the thing. It froze, but did not disappear, which caused a leap of excitement and emotion in the smith that he had to force himself not to express in any way.
Over the next hour or more, as he heated and worked the steel, heating it again when the color dulled, the thing floated close around him. Different parts of him, for different lengths of time, but most of him got some form of attention that showed no signs of actual attention being paid. Just as the light filtered through the gloom was beginning to dip deeper toward true night the little thing moved to one side of his head; hovering just above his shoulder. In that moment he was trying to get the fold of the blade he was crafting just right, so his mind was wholly distracted, not spending any thought on what the wisp was doing, so he heard it, perfectly clearly when it said,
Build me a form.
To say he was shocked would not have done his feelings justice. He could not speak whatever aetherial language he'd just had pushed gently into his mind, and the creature did not speak any languages at all. Yet, he knew what it wanted.
It was a good thing that he'd had the importance of not allowing distractions to mar his work drilled into him from the earliest moments of his memory, else he would have slipped, losing both hours worth of work and likely the creature. He kept folding, finished it and, by the time he had completed the set of motions, decided to keep working entirely. Stopping to give his attention would be a mistake, so he just kept at it. After a time little pieces of information that were almost images began to come into his head from a source outside it. They were not themselves pictures, more like signals that caused his mind to pull up the closest it had to what was being given. His Artificing plans swam though him, toys with vaguely human shapes, children's dolls, one of IX but with the feeling of being smaller somehow superimposed over it. They kept coming, slowly but steadily, till he grew to understand. He hadn't puzzled it out, it had just come into being in his head as a tree split from its seed and became.
When it stopped, the little being moved away, floating up like a dandelion puff on the air, till it was through the ceiling and, presumably, back into the Artificing room. Torin brought himself out of the trance-like state he'd kept himself in most of the day just as slowly as he'd sunk himself into it. He felt dazed, mentally so tired he genuinely wanted to crawl himself up stairs to his bed and take a nap. But when his full capacity for thought came back on all desire to sleep vanished and it was all he could do to cool the metal properly and put his tools away in their places before he scrambled into a shirt and coat and headed for Sivan's house.
Torin was not dreaming. He was not even asleep though, at times, in the warm glow of his blacksmith's forge, when the day was overcast so it felt like the only light and heat in the city It felt almost like sleep. His lids would relax and his mind slip to other places when he was working on something that did not require the use of his mind beyond telling his arm to rise and fall, flights of fancy or fighting, fears or festive joy would play out just behind his eyes and it would almost feel like a dreams.
The steel glowed on his anvil, white, then butter yellow, then orange fading to red and, eventually, the blackened color of metal that had shed carbon as it had shed heat. The smith loved the metal, and working it. It was a different relationship than the one he shared with the aether he also forged, but that did not mean it was not love he felt. His relationship with his human lover was complicated, more so than the one he shared with his elven lover, but that did not mean he loved Sivan less, or wanted him less. There was similarity between the two relationships, as there was between his two professions, but there was not comparison. Weighing one against the other to determine which was 'better' held no meaning. While many of the actions he performed were the same the results were wholly individual.
These were the sorts of thoughts that occupied him, moving like a conversation of one in the empty space in his consciousness where thoughts came to be heard, as he went about his work. The sky was dark with heavy clouds and the scent on the air told him it would rain before true dark fell that night. He would have been at the work had it already been pouring outside the shelter of his forge, but he would have been having different thoughts. Rain thoughts were things of preservation, of preparing the earth and the tools required to ensure one had all one needed, and those one loved did also. The faux twilight of a deep overcast held different idea, like those of true twilight, it was a space of transition, of chimerical thoughts that did not come at any other time. Due to the nature of the setting of the sun such thoughts were usually fleeting, but on days like today, when the storm clouds created a semblance of dusk that lasted long hours, or even days, Torin's mind became a place of dreams. Not in the sense of waking dreams, ambitions and hopes, but of sleeping dreams; odd and whimsical, never feeling quite of reality; quite solid whenever you concentrated on them but slipping away like fish down into the water when you glanced away for a moment.
So he was now, body working, hammer swinging with the precise percussion of years of practice, but mind journeying far afield. Ever since Aurin had carved Semblance into him the little nudging urges that he'd gotten when he'd spent a great deal of time around raw forms of magic had gotten stronger. At times he swore he could almost see... somethings flitting at the corners of his vision. Using Semblance actively didn't cause any beings to resolve, though he had become aware of hosts of little sprites and spirits that lived inside basically everything. The beings, if such a word could be used to describe something so tentatively existent, did not have thoughts, but they did seem to have desires, thoughtless feelings of want. Their wants were often simple, but, he had found to his confusion, just as often complex. Perhaps his standards for what was simple and what was complex were tainted by his experience of living. Perhaps the places and ways these aetherial beings experienced was different enough that, for them, all their needs were simple. Or complex.
It was complicated and difficult to think about. It made sense that his mind would only usually let him delve into them in the brief times between day light and night. Today was an exception though, and as his thoughts wandered paths twisting and unsure he began to sense one of the little aethereous thought-forms moving thought the forge space. It was not unusual that there should be one or more around when he was working in the aether forge, but it was for one to spend more than a moment floating through the blacksmithy. There was something different about this one, it seemed 'bigger' though they had no substance, physical or otherwise, so the idea of size for them was just that, an idea, a brush of feeling against senses that themselves did not truly exist in any measurable state.
Whatever the aether creatures were, they weren't actually made of aether, Semblance would have been able to see them if they were. It was more like they were created by the prolonged existence of raw aether in a physical form. He'd first noticed them when he'd began working with dragonshards, and that was mostly where he still encountered them, but, once in a while, there would be one that did not seem attached to anything and it made him wonder if, after a great deal of time, one sometimes grew to exist just enough to detach itself and explore. As his mind was occupied with its near-dreaming and his body with his work, the part of him that could sense the tiny creature also recognized it. He'd 'seen' it before, out of the runeforge; once in the blacksmithy and more than once as he'd worked with Sivan in the little Artificing room they'd set up above. That he hadn't made note of the thing wasn't surprising, Artificing took up enough of his mind that the tendrils of free thought that noticed such things were all pulled in and concentrating while he worked.
The knowledge of the little being took root in Torin's head slowly, filtering in so he didn't get the whole picture all at once. It was the way of such things and, though they fascinated him, he knew better now than to let his whole mind try and observe. Like how some stars disappear when you look right at them, and can only be seen from the sides of your vision, attempting to examine whatever the things drawn to (or created by?) concentrated raw aether was useless. One could only keep one's mind on other things and let the tiniest bits of thought gently touch over them. Anything else and they either disappeared or he stopped being able to sense them, there was no way to tell which.
This particular one seemed to be examining his tools, but he had no idea if it was actually doing that. It brushed up against them, but kelp in the sea brushed against things in ways that could seem intentional. It stuck around longer than most did, moving in slow, lazy motions that looked as though dictated by a tide or the wind, though the wind was coming in gusts from the north and not lazily at all. When, after several hours, it came close to Torin himself, seeming to almost-investigate him as it had so much else in the room, he let it. Carefully, as delicately as he had ever done anything, he pushed out a tiny instance of his own aether, so small as to barely be there at all, and brushed it over the thing. It froze, but did not disappear, which caused a leap of excitement and emotion in the smith that he had to force himself not to express in any way.
Over the next hour or more, as he heated and worked the steel, heating it again when the color dulled, the thing floated close around him. Different parts of him, for different lengths of time, but most of him got some form of attention that showed no signs of actual attention being paid. Just as the light filtered through the gloom was beginning to dip deeper toward true night the little thing moved to one side of his head; hovering just above his shoulder. In that moment he was trying to get the fold of the blade he was crafting just right, so his mind was wholly distracted, not spending any thought on what the wisp was doing, so he heard it, perfectly clearly when it said,
Build me a form.
To say he was shocked would not have done his feelings justice. He could not speak whatever aetherial language he'd just had pushed gently into his mind, and the creature did not speak any languages at all. Yet, he knew what it wanted.
It was a good thing that he'd had the importance of not allowing distractions to mar his work drilled into him from the earliest moments of his memory, else he would have slipped, losing both hours worth of work and likely the creature. He kept folding, finished it and, by the time he had completed the set of motions, decided to keep working entirely. Stopping to give his attention would be a mistake, so he just kept at it. After a time little pieces of information that were almost images began to come into his head from a source outside it. They were not themselves pictures, more like signals that caused his mind to pull up the closest it had to what was being given. His Artificing plans swam though him, toys with vaguely human shapes, children's dolls, one of IX but with the feeling of being smaller somehow superimposed over it. They kept coming, slowly but steadily, till he grew to understand. He hadn't puzzled it out, it had just come into being in his head as a tree split from its seed and became.
When it stopped, the little being moved away, floating up like a dandelion puff on the air, till it was through the ceiling and, presumably, back into the Artificing room. Torin brought himself out of the trance-like state he'd kept himself in most of the day just as slowly as he'd sunk himself into it. He felt dazed, mentally so tired he genuinely wanted to crawl himself up stairs to his bed and take a nap. But when his full capacity for thought came back on all desire to sleep vanished and it was all he could do to cool the metal properly and put his tools away in their places before he scrambled into a shirt and coat and headed for Sivan's house.
