12 Miles Below

Some long dead asshole was ruining my day.

In fact, if I had to put a word on the emotions I was feeling - well, this would be the time that you’d pull out the pretentious words kept high up in the drawers with the fancy silverware. Words like irate, wrathful and my favorite: tempestuous.

That was a good word for this.

The object and focus of my malcontent was this single piece of scrap metal practically leering at me. Somewhere buried deep inside this ingot of metal forged in the bowels of hell itself was a fractal that if I so much as sneezed on would stop working.

Also I’d be down a small fortune, but that’s just par for the course.

Further experimentation over the last few days slowly confirmed my suspicions about how the warlocks had hidden their fractal. I could certainly be wrong about it, but the chances of that were more slim. The real issue is the next step forward.

I had no tools to derive an equation from an image, so if I happened to break even a small part of the pattern, I’d be left stranded topside with no ride home. There’d be no way to figure out what the missing piece was and I’d need to start over from scratch on a different blade.

I already had my work cut out for me here, but wait - it gets worse. See, the warlocks seemed to have figured that someone, at some point in time, would know about fractals and use that extra bit of info combined with real science analysis to crack their little secret.

Ergo, someone just like me.

So, clearly disturbed by the thought of anyone else having a slice of their cake, they’d made it their personal mission to put a stop to that. And they’d gone with all the stops possible.

First of all - Journey couldn’t eat the metal. Something about the forging process it went through made it more like mite-made material, which needed to be re-processed in some way first before it could be consumed. My one-hit wonder tool that I’d lovingly abused so far to cheat through every bit I could squeeze out? Worthless here.

I suppose I can’t fault the warlocks on this one. Everyone knows that armors eat material to repair itself. They also knew materials existed that armors couldn’t eat. Obvious in hindsight that they’d go out of their way to forge the fractal into something armors couldn’t touch. I’d bet that was the very starting point for picking out how to hide the fractal.

I had no idea how they did that, maybe pewter itself was a material relic armor couldn’t eat. They couldn’t eat the ceramic white plating machines had, I knew that for a fact. So for all I knew there was a whole shopping list of odd materials armors didn’t like to munch on. Bad for their diet and all that, poor things.

Okay - that’s not too bad. I’d simply need to take my time and slowly file down the metal bit by flaky bit until I spotted something different in the metal composition. And on reviewing the video footage of the dispeate slices, I found they’d thought of that one too.

What’s better than burying a fractal all in the same metal? Why, burying a dozen randomly engraved patterns along with the fractal. And that’s exactly what they did.

The whole block is actually filled with random engravings, which causes heat deformities to appear at every slice, in every part. No way to know which bit is part of the fractal and which isn’t.

With the blade being made of all the exact same pewter composition, there weren’t going to be any clever solutions like heating it to a specific temperature, or using acid to eat away at some parts of the metal.

Now, I pride myself on finding the optimal solutions to challenges that come my way. By optimal, I mean the ones that involve the least amount of work and effort. This blade here is the anti-Keith. Every trick I could think of, they’ve thought of it too and planned for it.

The only viable solution I could think of was the single most effort and time intensive one left - manually filing away at the pewter one tiny layer at a time. Checking in between each scrape to see if I’d hit my target or not. Fractals glowed bright Occult blue when they were active, that’s the one of two advantages I still had.

I did mention that there were two advantages I had. Besides fractals glowing when powered, there was something else the meticulous warlocks didn’t seem to have any counter for: The soul fractal.

In my sanctum I meditated on my opponent. With the soul-sight I could detect faint traces of something coming from the center of that hilt. If I focused enough, I think I’d be able to peer through the pewter and get a better sense of distance. With that kind of info, I could easily grind away the layers right up to where the fractal would be and then take it more delicately, saving me days of work and reducing the whole ordeal to something that'll only take a few hours.

Here’s the conundrum: The warlocks so far have proven to have plotted a counter to every possible tool I could use to pry that secret out of the pewter. Except soul-sight. That seemed really odd and out of character for them.

There were three possibilities for this. The first is that the Warlocks actually didn’t know about the soul fractal and have only been using the common fractals up to now. Maybe when they rediscovered the Occult this key fractal had been cut out or otherwise too hidden away. So naturally, they couldn’t come up with a counter to something they couldn't have know existed.

The second option is the complete opposite - they did know about the soul fractal and they did setup a counter to someone sniffing around with soul-sight, and the one who’s ignorant right now is me. I might be walking into a trap of some kind. This second option is why I haven’t really dove into the soul-sight and started using abusing it. Something could be lurking inside there that I didn’t know about.

The third option is that they knew about the soul-sight and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to protect against. As in, if someone had all the tools to both discover their fractal and also the soul-sight to excavate it out, there wasn’t an option to stop that that wouldn't weaken the other methods. Rather, they could be using this to recruit new members into their guild. Test by trail of some kind. And to be fair, whoever discovered their secret wasn't likely to go around telling others what could potentially be a quick and easy path to a luxurious retirement. Why make more competition?

Option one and option three meant I would live if I used soul sight to pinpoint where the fractal was inside. Option two meant that I could outright die to something I had no idea was there. One in three chances of something going terribly wrong.

Well. There was a fourth option: I give up trying to get this done fast.

Instead I very slowly grind away the pewter one scratch at a time right from the start, turn the blade on and off after each scratch, and keep going until I uncovered something.

It really burned me on the inside, but ultimately I had to pick option number four. One in three chances to possibly die was not odds I wanted to gamble on. As for why I’m talking today of all days, that’s because I already had picked option four - almost an entire week ago.

Since then, my life has been steady and uneventful. Early mornings with Cathida and Kidra. Once I’d shown my sister the basics of the technique I’d come up with, and had Winterscar inscribe the soul fractal on the inside of her helmet, Kidra had been good to go. A few hours of practice and getting the new movement down, and she was now a menace to all the houses with dreams of competing for the position of First Blade.

I didn’t know if she was actually going for the position, Atius hadn’t yet announced he was looking for a replacement.

Coincidentally, since she was the undisputed master of it, she's the one that came up with a fitting name first. Behold, the Winterblossom technique.

Kidra made a pretty good case for the name. The majority of our soul remained inside the soul fractal that had been etched inside the helmet, forming the blossom, while small bits of the soul would be woven back inside the body at just the right spots, forming a root-like shape. Hence why Kidra suggested that as the word for it. It by no means had anything to do with her fondness for flowers or anything. The 'winter' part should be evident, what good is a secret technique if we weren't going to stamp our name on it? That's just not done.

It kind of stuck and was better than what I had been thinking of naming it, if I’m honest, though the words will never leave my lips.

After morning training, I’d usually have a few hours of doing minor chores for House Winterscar. Once my responsibilities were done, I’d officially be off duty and allowed to do anything I wanted. Unofficially, what I really did was slink back into my sanctum and continue to grind away at the small pebble of metal from hell that was left.

The part that cost me the most time was dealing with their angle shenanigans. The fractal could have had sharp points, lines almost. One of those lines had been setup to purposefully point straight up where the most obvious point of grinding would come from. The result is that the moment someone ground at the line, a small section of it would be cut - which meant the line was no longer at the exact length to fit the pattern and so the whole thing would lose cohesion before even the grinding tool was lifted off.

So, I’d been grinding away at an angle instead of straight down, the choice of which drastically increased my difficulty. It was impossible to grind sideways on a lit blade - the occult edge would out-grind the grinder. I had to keep turning the thing on and off and checking my work each time to see if there was any glowing signs from the pewter.

A few days ago, I’d grinded away through the hilt until I hit the first bits of Occult light and my hunch turned out right. The big thing that I was holding my breath on was if I'd picked the right angle to come at it from. There was a case where I'd be grinding in the single worst possible direction. For that, I only had hunches and guesswork to rely on. A lot of 'If I were a slimy warlock, where would I angle the fractal to maximize suffering while minimizing my own?'

Turns out, I'd been right. I wasn't sure if I should feel proud that I could put myself in shoes of these sneaky bastards, but if I got a working blade out of it, I wasn't going to complain too much.

Since I’d come from a good enough angle, I hadn’t grinded out any of the X or Y axis, only a tiny bit of the z-axis which isn’t critical in a two-dimensional rune. That had been a really happy day for me, as it let me re-orient the grinder to be exactly even with the direction of the pattern and made it easy to grind away the remaining chunk until I got close to the excavation.

From here it had been back to meticulous grinding. Bit by bit, the fractal became exposed as I delicately removed the excess pewter. The closer I got to success the slower I became, being far more cautious. I could have reached the end of this days ago, instead I’d taken the safe route at all possible times.

See, if the fractal winks out of life before I had fully uncovered it, there was absolutely no way to tell what parts of the pewter were the remainder of that fractal and what parts were the false trails leftover. So all my work would get instantly iced, and I'd probably rip a lot of expensive things in blind fury.

Today I was filing away the last glowing trail of a line that still showed signs of being hidden away.

Scrap by scrape, it was taking hours just to remove what would be a small cloud of dust, taking pictures in between each, just on the case everything shut down on me anyhow.

Eventually, there wasn’t any part of the fractal that seemed covered up by pewter. I unscrewed the ingot from its mooring, lifted it up and examined it, searching through the pattern for any missing trace while it was turned on. The blade on the hilt had become a thin warped thing, shrinking down with each layer I scrubbed away.

This moment should have been my crowning moment of glory... and all I wanted to do was verify that it worked and then go to sleep. Honestly, I was so out of it after hours on hours of tedious grinding.

“I think I’m done.” I breathed out, to nobody.

“Only took you forever. Having a hard time sitting up yet? Bones aching? That’s the first thing to go. Next you'll sprout a cane and then a need to yell at people. Trust me, I know all about it.” Cathida grumbled out.

She had liked the process as much as I had, by which I mean we both hadn’t at all. It was utter suffering that the warlocks had pulled me through, but in the end I was the one holding their precious little fractal, all revealed and excavated.

I didn't even have the heart in me to quip back, instead going all business. “Journey, take a snapshot of this image and let’s give it a whirl.”

There was a tiny metal rectangle I’d already setup at my side, ready for this moment. Reaching down, I brought that up and Journey’s spirit floated by, swirling around the surface before retreating.

I brought the metal piece up, to the light. “If this doesn’t work…”

Well. If it didn’t work, I’d just dip my head back and try to figure out what else was missing. Possible that there was a second fractal that needed to be dug up. Or worse - what if there were three? And the third one was sandwiched between the two? Maybe that’s why the warlocks hadn’t bothered protecting against a soul-sight solution, knowing it would be practically impossible to excavate three different fractals inside.

My mind was a spiral of doom and gloom, already expecting the worst to happen. That all my work had been for nothing, that the secrets of the warlocks had run deeper than I had anticipated.

I lifted that little rectangle of scrap, gave the order to pass a current through it, expecting nothing to happen.

Instead, all four sides of that scrap metal began glowing a bright Occult blue.

Next chapter - Meaning of life (T)

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