That night, Simon had a great time and got more than a little drunk. Fortunately, though, he returned to the headman’s home alone, though there had been offers. He’d been propositioned three different times by a maid, a woman, and a widow for a more private celebration, but Simon had declined.
Still, even if romance was the furthest thing from his mind, over the next few weeks, his ambitions to keep pushing south slowly dissolved. This was purely for practical reasons. First, he had to make some new armor, which devolved into a series of hunting trips and a lesson in stretching and tanning. These were not easy tasks, and even when the hard work was done, and he scraped the buck hide clean and let it soak in a barrel of tannins before stretching it on a wooden frame, it would be weeks until it was done.
And just like that, he was no longer in a hurry. Oh, he told himself he’d leave soon. At first, that was as soon as the armor was finished. Then it became a few months. After that, he planned to beat the snows down to Abresse; he even told himself he was looking forward to the more mild temperatures, but that never materialized. Not when he was getting so much done here.
It started innocently enough. He was just helping the men of the town repair the homes that didn’t need to be torn down. Simon didn’t know a lot about carpentry, but he was eager to learn and helped with a few buildings. The heaviest damage was near the center of town, not the outlying farmsteads, where most people seemed to live in apartment-like flats that were typically one or two units per floor.
Simon enjoyed such arrangements, even if toilets and running water hadn’t been invented yet. After helping to refurbish a few, just like that, he was gifted one that had belonged to a childless widower on the third floor of a building that overlooked the market square. Tʜe source of this ᴄontent ɪs n0velfire.net
“You’ve been a fine house guest,” the headman explained as he gave it to Simon, “But you can’t do all this work and expect us to just take your charity. We’ve got more dignity than that.”
“But I don’t plan on staying too long,” Simon insisted.
“Well, then when you leave, someone else will live here,” the man shrugged. “Regardless, it’s yours until then.”
Just like that, Simon was no longer a wandering stranger. He was a new member of a community. At first, he promised himself he’d leave as soon as he could. Unfortunately, by the time he’d finished his armor, though, and had the best fitting leathers he’d ever worn in his life, he started on other projects. A new sword was followed by a replacement shield and a backpack. Then he’d need a better woolen cloak.
He didn’t learn how to card and spin wool, though. Instead, he traded his services as a hunter for it by hunting down a wolf pack that had been taking more sheep than the community could bear to lose. After that, he spent the coldest part of the winter studying his orb pictures, coming up with interesting magical experiments, and beginning a very tentative plan for how he would handle Ionar’s eruption problem.
His plan, ironically, was also an orb, though he supposed it could be any shape under the sun, and for a while, he considered making it a spear just because it would look cooler. That was inspired both by what he’d seen his doppelganger do to ignite the volcano and what he’d seen in the frozen village level so long ago. Though he didn’t have that orb or any pictures of it, he was sure that his doppelganger’s weapon was similar, and if two entirely different people could build something that could discharge a huge amount of cold or heat, then he was sure that he could too.
The real problem wasn’t even the runes to radiate cold. He was pretty sure that a gilded steel orb with clean silver traces could bear a greater greater word for at least an instant. In cold’s case, it might even be able to bear more than that since it removed heat from the equation.
Simon didn’t plan to start with that, of course. He needed to experiment with greater words on objects first and decide just how much stress steel could take before it failed beneath the weight of magic.
All of those considerations paled, though, in the face of the most important one. “Where does one get the power to shut off a volcano?” he asked himself every few weeks. For half the winter, this went without an answer.
As life in Ordenvale ground to a halt and the snows rose, he spent his spare time teaching a group of young men how to fight with wooden swords in a barn near the edge of the town proper. This became almost a social club, and even though it was ostensibly in case anything ugly came down from the mountains looking for something to eat, he did it for the mental break it afforded him.
Simon could only theorize about what certain patterns might mean or test out simple rune combinations on paper for so many hours a day before he lost focus. Dueling, he could do it on autopilot, and it was almost as good for his soul as it was for his body.
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Well, it was good for more than that. It was good exercise and socialization, more than anything. The last thing he wanted to do was start rumors about what kept his oil lamp burning at all hours.
Strangely, though, it was in the barn, trading blows with a young farmer, that he finally had his breakthrough. In fact, it was so sudden that he feigned illness and left almost immediately, even though he was wiping the floor with the lad, just because he didn’t want to lose his sudden jolt of inspiration.
He’d been going around and around with him for a few minutes before he noticed that the young man’s slightly rigid, unpracticed style reminded him of the skeleton knight he’d beaten so many times on level four. That had been funny, but even as their blades resounded against each other, Simons's thoughts drifted to the strange obsidian artifact that had been the Black Heart.
That’s when he realized that he knew what powered the thing. He didn’t think he’d known for a long time, but really, he did, and he had the notes to prove it in the mirror. The thing didn’t have batteries, he told himself as he hurried through the calf-deep snow. The thing was the batteries.
All this time, he’d thought that the greater words on the stone were for the aura it used to power the dead, but Gervuul had two meanings, greater and power. He’d dismissed the latter because he’d never even considered what he was thinking right now. The reason it's carved into crystal is because that’s how you store magical power.
In retrospect, there were other clues, too, mostly in Magi implements. He’d even seen crystals in the wands a few of the mages carried. He’d always assumed those to be decorative, but that had been a mistake.
As soon as he reached his home, he took off his ring to experiment with it, but he was already sure his instincts were right. He dug through his pouch and found a good-sized broach with an agate he’d taken off one of the road men months before, then he used a word of lesser earth to melt a couple coins into a tiny ingot that he hammered out into a strip. The families that lived above and below him might wonder what in the hell he was doing, but he didn’t care.
Instead of worrying about what anyone thought, he berated himself. “Why didn’t I put it all together sooner?” he growled. “I smashed that thing. I knew there was nothing else in it!”
Still, for all his recriminations, he was excited as he used a lesser word of earth to embed both of the stones into the ugly strip of silver. It didn’t look like much, but it gave him plenty of room to work. Then, before he carved in the runes, he brought up his sketches of the Black Heart and reviewed them.
“So stupid,” he mumbled as he reviewed the runes. “If I'd thought to take pictures of this instead of drawing it, I would have seen it long ago.”
Simon took a moment to study the power runes, then waved the mirror away, returned to the project at hand, and began scratching the runes for lesser life transfer on one side. Once that was done, he connected it to the runes of powering and then to the agate. That was followed by another set of runes, which seemed to complete the battery circuit.
Simon wasn’t sure about that part, and it might require more experimentation, but it certainly made sense. From there, the rest was easy. It was just a line to the symbols of lesser light and then to the citrine. It might have been the most simple and pointless magical item there ever was, but once he was sure that the lines were right, he burned another week of his life with another lesser word of earth to clean up his work and make the grooves deeper.
You could have done this with a chisel and a hammer. He chastised himself. That was true; he could have, and next time, he would, but right now, he needed to know. He needed to know if he’d been chasing his tail for decades on this when the answer was right in front of him the whole time because that’s what it felt like.
For a moment, all the problems that having a life force battery could solve flashed before his eyes. If this worked, he could make a weapon with at least a full word of draining, and if he could manage it, a word of greater draining and use those stones to power his spells instead of his own life force. He could figure out how to cast very large spells like he’d done with his youthful transformation without feeding a growing addiction in himself or despoiling the environment. He would be capable of so much more than he was now.
All of that caused a great deal of anticipation, and for a moment, that was enough to make him hesitate. While he was eager to, he feared disappointment. He needn’t have, though.
As he touched the rune of lesser transfer on one side of the strip, he felt the tingle of his life being drained very slightly. That wasn’t unexpected. That was what he felt whenever he used a blade powder with his own life. The citrine sprang to life after less than a second, glowing a warm yellow that wasn’t so different from a sunny day. That wasn’t the exciting part. A circuit would always glow the longer he powered it.
The question was whether it would keep glowing when he released it. Simon counted to ten, letting the thing bleed his life force slowly but surely. Then, when he took his hand away, he held his breath and waited, and to his eternal surprise, it kept glowing!
“Yes!” he cheered, remembering to silence himself just before anything incriminating was shouted out.
“I’ve done it!” he repeated in a whisper. “Now I can make whatever I want.”
While that wasn’t quite true because he lacked the proper facilities, and he still had no clear idea of how truly complicated circuits such as those that belonged to the magi worked, anything more reasonable was already in his grasp, and he rejoiced at that. It would have been easy to feel stupid about how long it had taken him to figure it out, but instead, he basked in the warm glow of his light as he enjoyed his victory.