Prospectors came for the resources in the mountains of the Giant’s Spine, academics and historians came to see if artifacts still remained from warring tribes. Explorers and thieves would seek for treasure, hidden deep in some deep dark vault, which was half-true - Efrain didn’t know how they planned to lug ingot after ingot back with them over the passes without him catching them.

Of course, then there were the warriors. They came, with their pronunciations and sharpened steel, so determined to slay the evil that lay within the northern lands. In theory, they were the ones for whom the traps were set. Efrain could tolerate explorers, maybe even welcome scholars, but he had long lost his patience with warriors a long, long time ago. Efrain did not entirely understand why they even made the effort.

It wasn't as if he threatened any major settlements and he had stopped raiding over a century ago. It wasn’t as if he was seeking attention, in fact he’d chosen this remote location to be left alone. It was perhaps 100 years ago, maybe slightly less, when he had first heard rumours of the “Baron of the Vale”. He’d been in disguise at one of the public houses in Muphestfelm at the time, and after he had confirmed the exaggerated details with the owner, he had left in complete disbelief.

He had done little and less to deserve all the ridiculous stories, but alas, every time another adventure didn’t come back from the Vale, it was another stick on the fire. Few if ever had seen the undead he created, fewer still had seen him personally. Most didn’t even come within the borders of the Vale except to speak to the natives, but fear of the unknown persisted. Even when he pulled back, limiting his contact with the outside world and kept the undead strictly within his castle, the rumours only grew. As loath as he was to admit it, it seemed that further isolation had done his reputation little favours.

His gaze brushed over the dark mass of trees, following the line of the valley until it disappeared around a craggy bend. Somewhere, deep within, there one of a handful of passes through the Giant’s Spine. That may have been why this place has been selected for such a castle, even though it lacked most redeemable qualities save for the view. Efrain’s finger bones tapped on the stone walls, letting his mind wander out into the moonlight night. He wondered if perhaps he should take the opposite tact - perhaps build a road, collect a little toll, nothing too big. He didn’t need townsfolk and the merchants coming after him.

But even if he did that and smoothed over all the reputation he had inadvertently created, it wouldn’t stop the church. The last time he’d been anywhere near the holy capital, they had already deigned to expand westward and eastward. He hardly imagined they had stopped anytime soon, and judging by the visitor he had received a day ago, it’s rabid anti-magical teachings still persisted. That was another thing he should investigate - he needed more concrete information than the bare snippets he’d picked up from the natives.

He turned away from the valley and toward the hatch over stair well. As his gaze drifted over the coverings on the telescope, table and chests, he briefly considered staying - it was a good night, cloudless, moon subdued and not enough snow to reflect light. Euphreteies, Faneszia, Plurnes, they’d all be constellations he could seek out tonight.

He felt a pang of regret as he lifted the hatch and stepped down below. If he was going to ignore the pile of administration he had to do, he might as well do something equally ‘productive’. Following the tower steps down to the bottom, he stepped into the crossroads and took the northern exit, careful to avoid the shallow dip of the ceiling. Rather humorously, it had already taken the life of one towering brute, who had fallen to smash his head on the floor. Efrain was not keen to repeat that mistake, as piecing together bone fragments was an exceptionally tedious task.

Following the darkened hallways through a series of smaller store rooms, he finally turned into the doorway of his personal quarters. It was intentionally ambiguous and unimportant looking - all the better to discourage potential glory or treasure seekers. Producing another triangular key, he inserted it into the lock and slid back the bolt.

His personal rooms were relatively small and sparsely furnished. The bed, which saw little-to-no use at all, was a posted mass of soft grey curtains, not too far off in colour from the mouldy remnants of cloth he’d found in the ruins. The only intact piece of heraldry he’d managed to find was a tattered and faded gold-purple banner which, to his chagrin, had not included any symbol.

Indeed, the only thing he usually came back for was the closet filled with various outfits and costumes that he had collected over the years. Although there was more efficient locations for them to be, he found a sense of connection to his past life by having them in a ‘proper’ place. As he slid off the robes he wore, folding them carefully and hanging them over one of the many hooks.

Near the front the menagerie of colours, fabrics, and styles were his ‘work’ garments - a thick, rugged, stained chemise, as well as long rubberized glove that had cost a premium, and a thick leather apron. A helm with a veil of chainmail protected his skull from the more exciting parts of his experiments. He fastened and secured the items to him with leather strips, and slipped on a pair of boots. Once he was done making sure there was no gaps where something could splash, he left and locked the door behind him.

Once more he set out through the series of hallways, to finally emerge in the western-most room. It was large and wide, a lower floor strewn with a variety of equipment and workbenches. A second floor was cornered by a series of balconies that ran around the edge of the room, each wall lined with bookshelves filled to bursting. At the western end, the second floor extended out past the walls, providing a view on the darkened walls of the valley. Far above, a series of glass panes let in the starry skies, as well as the moon.

Efrain walked down the stairs to the main floor, emerging out near a desk stacked with scribbled-on papers. To an outsider, the workshop might appear to be terminally unorganized, but if one looked close enough, they might notice certain patterns - a stack of papers in a different parchment, perhaps some piles at certain angles.

It was Efrain’s way of making some attempt at order from the constant chaos of his experiments. He’d long ago abandoned any aspirations to some beautifully organized laboratory. Instead, he opted for functional, if fairly unsophisticated and certainly messy methods. He approached the corner pile on of several desks, and thumbed through the sheets until he found the notes he was looking for.

One included elaborate diagram of a crystal, cross-section of layers that were extensively labelled. Another was a sheet of equations and calculations, rough notes of concentrations and weights. On the other side, he retrieved a notebook filled with sheets of tables. Placing some pencils in the pockets of his leather apron, he walked over to the project bench.

The line was a series of tanks, tubs, wires and pipes, all going from the eastern side of the chamber, all the way to the western exit to the veranda, the ice cells beyond. The first was a great container filled with a mass of purified quartz sands, a valve at the bottom allowing careful dispensation. It had been a logistical nightmare to co-ordinate to the necessary specifications with craft lords in Karkos, but a generation of contractors later, Efrain had all the raw material he needed.

Next to the container of sand, a series of great stone wheels studded with crystals, emptied the powder into a second container beneath it. From there, it was run through a separate series of tanks and ovens, constantly washing and drying the quartz with a variety of different caustics and chemicals. By the end, he had exceptionally pure quartz powder, through trace amount of impurities remained in the very core of the crystals.

This had been a problem that had plagued the process. The curious nature of pure crystals’ interaction with magic had been well known for centuries, but unfortunately, very little could be done with anything other that the purest crystals. Uneven structure caused by impurities could cause cascades of magic that would destroy the crystal and shred the offending mage with shrapnel. As such, pure crystals had be keep under jealous guard, carefully maintained and stored to prevent damage. This was largely the reason for the chain veil he wore, though he hadn’t had an explosion in some time.

The secret, he had found over decades of experimentation, was that some of the impurities managed to sneak past the surface into the grains of sand itself. He suspected, in relation to Meitner theory of ‘elemental spheres’, that certain elements managed to actually suffuse into crystal lattice. To combat these ingrained impurities, he had a device of his own design.

It wasn’t a particularly pretty thing, a mass of spherical sphere chambers, with several dials indicating a wide variety of conditions. Pipe stuck out of the vessel at all angles, tightly bolted together and wrapped with damp clothes as insurance. Below there was a forge which blazed with light as it heated the mixture. But even that, with all the expense of its installation and maintenance, was not the most important piece of equipment.

At the right end of the ‘line’, past several more tanks filled with dissolved purified quartz, there was a series of glass spheres in cased within each-other. More pipes, copper instead of steel, laced around it, along with several similar gauges to the purifier. Inside the glass spheres, there was a metal ring suspended above a cloudy fluid, the barest sliver of crystal beginning to grow off the shining metal.

This was the principle project that had occupied him for some time now, day-in, day-out. Even that sliver of crystal had taken days to produce, layer of magic and quartz stacked on top of one another. It would take weeks to grow to a size he could use in further experiments, limited even further by the lack of light needed. There’s no time like the present, Efrain thought as he removed his gloves and placed his finger on the ten candracul inserts that intersected between the glass spheres. The bones began to buzz as he let the magic flow through them and felt the crystal respond.