"...Nightstalker Wyvern, D. nocteventoris- An elusive species of fairy wyverns. Its habits and habitat remain unknown. Unlike its counterparts, it is considered a nocturnal ambush predator and though it rarely attacks people, it can be rather feral when it feels threatened. Its dark hide is used to make gear suited for stealth because of the way it is attuned to the Nox and Locus affinities. It makes for good nighttime camouflage and during the daytime, its ability to leave afterimages when in movement makes the wearer elusive and hard to pin down…” from Philiarz Warnerskemander’s Bestiary for Adventurers: ‘Exotic Beasties and Where to Find Them.’

Arthur went to the workshop adjoining the forge to get the enchanting reagents and tools. The dragon, much to her ‘magnanimity’ had provided him with a dozen unenchanted leather bags the size of two fists that could only best be described as pouches. As all enchanting materials went, the leather pouches had some residual mana from the monster they were skinned from.

This, his mana sense was able to tell though faint, slipping whenever he brought his perception to bear. That was par for the course— it would not do to waste magically potent materials for something as trivial as beginners’ craft.

According to Dwomdaer Anvilfall, a half-dwarven enchanter specializing in creating bags and chests of holding, any first time [Enchanter] and [Artificer] worth their beard could fail three times out of five. This was according to his book, The Art of Artificing and Enchanting Volume I: A Prelude to Storage Enchantments. To no surprise of his, it was written in dwarven script. For that race, once again the Arthur’s bar had never been so low.

Before he knew it, he had worked from mid-morning to late evening. Out of a dozen trials, he only got two successful items. The spectacle of his failures pulling into themselves and bursting into a confetti of leather was a scene that made him glad he wasn't going to tinker with his mundane bag.

It wasn't even arcane leather; further reading revealed that he would sooner burn through the duffel bag before it held any enchantment as it was not magically attuned to let mana flow through.

As for the successful items, it was within his expectations. Their durability was not at par as the pouches would lose their enchantments in a few months. Satisfied that he’d made progress, he decided to grab some cold cuts of meat and turn in early because enchanting left him mana exhausted. Nonetheless, he went to sleep with a smile on his face—and for a good reason.

[Enchanter Level 7!]

[Mage Level 10!]

[Conditions Met! Affinity Acquired!]

[ Affinity- Locus Acquired!]

[Heritage Derivative Skill- Inventory Acquired!]

Tray’seday morning caught Arthur all by his lonesome in the Keep. Despite the previous day’s exertions, he was well rested and ready to break a sweat in the workshop. He found a note from Aeskyre letting him know that he had free rein of the Keep and not to go outside because the storm had yet to abate.

Also, it was rather dangerous for him now that a weyr of storm wyverns had come to roost on some of the aerlands. Grimly, he accepted that he was too underpowered to fend off one, let alone several of the creatures.

Between bites of a rye bread sandwich, Arthur reviewed his blueprints and marked off everything on the inventory list that Aeskyre had molded for him. There were old pitons and pulleys lying around the workshop, caked in aged dust.

Shaking off the detritus, he found several pillars and hammered the pitons four ways. With a corded cable of dwarfsteel he made a harness to hold the engine frame as he worked. Not that the engine was going to be heavy or anything, but there was only so much he could do working by himself.

Among the components molded were canisters and piping made from null-steel that would hold magicore and mana crystals temporarily like an engine’s gas tank and fuel pump system. From there mana would be conveyed to a rotor which provided rotational thrust. There were fan blades on the same shaft that connected to the outside to churn in Aer mana.

The fans were molded from blue mithril and he would later enchant them with mana collection runes. Those rune etchings would work like the collectors in the sail collecting Aer mana to recharge the Aertherite crystal, for a self-sustaining and reciprocating magical reaction.

Since the engine had a significantly larger mana collector and storage, he was hoping that, eventually his aership would be less dependent on mana sails. Behind the rotors was a small chamber where the Aer and Pyr would mix—the magical reaction chamber.

Like a conventional jet engine, the mana engine had a nozzle outlet for the resulting reaction that provided thrust. Unlike its mundane counterpart however, the mana engine had fewer internals courtesy of enchantments and mana conduits.

“And no crankshaft on this baby,” was Arthur’s thought on the fact.

For a layperson, unless in possession of an advanced [Enchanter] or [Artificer] class they would not be able to tell what half of those components did. At most, they would have to be a [Magitech Engineer] to tell the inner workings.

Arthur planned to write a manual for this type of engine in the foreseeable future when it powered his aership’s first flight. But even that was a couple of Erythean months away; at most he would only have a bare aership without the bells and whistles by then.

While there was no way that would fly with him, he fancied himself a creature of comfort and likewise did not like doing things in halves.

Thus, Arthur toiled away. For five days he labored in the workshop, so deep in his work that he was barely coming up for air. He etched enchantments, finely welded together parts without defacing any of the rune work and riveted both the null steel insulation and the external engine nacelle.

Once the engine frame was completely covered excluding the service port, delicately, he screwed in the nullsteel canister containing the volatile Pyr generating Pyrtherite crystal. It was a cylindrical container the size of his wrist, but the Pyrtherite crystal housed within was only a thumb sized gem; he had to carefully handle the sample like he would a piece of radioactive isotope.

After balancing and greasing the rotary shaft, making sure it had nary a squeak, on Octis’day, an Erythean week after the Mark One was made, the mana engine was completed.

Arthur was haggard from the drudgery of technical work and skimping on meals. There were bags under his eyes; his lips were chapped and his hands were rather sooty from welding. His leather overalls were mired in deeper shades of brown and pockmarked by smudges of lava worm grease and underneath, his outer clothing felt ripe from old sweat.

Arthur really needed a bath like yesterday. He could barely stop his hands from trembling yet he was still determined to test the engine before the day was through.

‘Now for the test’ Arthur deliberated as he picked up a slate of magestone that he’d etched the control runes. It glowed softly from the mana circuits within which ended in command runes for ‘start’ and ‘stop’—nothing too complicated, just a testing mechanism.

A cable made of red mithril connected the slate to the engine. Arthur offered a prayer to whichever Erythean gods were listening in and infused some of his mana into the slate.

In the dim workshop, the slate flickered brightly for a moment, bathing Arthur’s careworn face in magical light. Following hot on its heels, a roar that an Erythean native would not have associated with an inanimate object rumbled through the workshop. The engine’s fan blades went from rest to a loud whirr that devoured the air in the workshop while ejecting it through the nozzle in a loud whomp of sound. Various odds and ends behind the nozzle were punted against the walls in a staccato that peppered the walls with their impacts.

The exhaust, originally only invisible air, transformed into mana-charged cyan coloured flames that licked the air, bathing the workshop in a warm glow of caressing heat. It was another resounding success—The magical reaction was deemed self-sustaining as long as there was enough Aer mana.

Arthur whooped, waving the mage stone slate in the air as cathartic tears welled up in his sleep-addled eyes. It had been done! However—

At first glance everything seemed to be working perfectly. If you were a native of the aerlands surrounding Sturm’s Keep though, you would have had the experience to tell that spells and mana around those parts tended to behave anomalously.

If one went one step further and assumed they were a [Weather Mage], they would have seen that the occasional mana storms that ravaged the archipelago were anything but ordinary storms. They were mana dense regions which left even the most well informed of researchers baffled.

The bottomline was, such regions birthed storms on performance enhancing drugs. But Arthur was unaware of that and the only native of Sturm’s Keep was absent. He couldn’t foresee that something unanticipated would occur. Truthfully, if Aeskyre were here to use her mana sight, she would have had a forewarning that things were about to get dicey.

The first sign that something was amiss came from his [Mana Sense]. His perception honed in on a sudden spike in mana levels in the workshop. One of the things that lay-people tended to gloss over was that mana sometimes had an uncanny behavior to follow physical laws even though it could bend them just as well.

As the concentration of mana dropped inside the workshop, mana from elsewhere phased through the walls of the Keep to plug in the rapidly expanding void. The mana engine kicked up a furor as it greedily drank in more essence than it knew what to do with.

Unfortunately, there was no limiter on the engine since the only commands on the magestone tablet came from the ‘start’ and ‘stop’ runes. It might have been an oversight on his part or he was so simply exhausted that he forgot to add in the limiter in the first place.

And so the Mark Two meted out more thrust, overshooting its tolerances well on its way to tearing itself apart. If it weren’t for the dwarf steel cabling that held it aloft, it would have gained enough power to reach the workshop’s ceiling. Like a beast chained, it bucked against its restraints making them creak ominously.

The pitons securing the pulleys shook loose as dust and other detritus flaked and fell from the pillars. Our observer was almost enthralled but he caught himself and remembered to issue the stop command, which did zilch for the situation.

“ Feck it! Why won’t it work?” he yelled in alarm. Arthur cursed the gods. Before he could blink, a piece of the service port ripped off its hinges, pirouetted through the air and narrowly avoided clipping him in the face.

Narrowly, because, were its aim a little further to the left, he would have been dead before his body hit the floor. However, mercies were still small even as the near-death experience transfixed him where he stood. His body hadn’t registered the stump that remained of his right arm as it had happened so swiftly he hadn’t even managed to cast [Wind Shield] in time— do anything really.

The canister containing the Pyrtherite crystal became an incendiary, ballooning into a conflagration like a [Fire Ball] spell gone wrong. The cascading explosion blasted Arthur off his feet, carrying him into the wall and knocking him out cold. His saving grace was the [Wind Shield] that cushioned him from the worst of the blast and its resulting shrapnel.

Perhaps fate was a kind mistress. Aeskyre happened to have returned from her excursion and not a moment too soon to have caught the tail end of the incident.

“Arthur Tyrell! What in Aeris’ name happened to you!?” shrieked the normally bold as brass draconic woman as she flew to his side. Arthur was battered and soaked in his own blood. Nearby, the twisted frame of the now defunct mana engine lay smoking on its side.

Despite all her magic, Aeskyre was not a good healer, moreso, when dismembered limbs were involved. She had to choose between reattaching the maimed arm and healing it wrong or closing up the mortal wound and leaving him disabled for life.

Time was running out for Arthur, his pulse was growing weaker while Aeskyre fussed over him. Vainly she went with the first option, reattaching his arm and using a Potion of Greater Heal which restored his arm.

But a Potion of Greater Heal was no Potion of Regeneration and could not be expected to replenish lost blood. Copious amounts of it still pooled on the floor drenching the hem of Aeskyre’s sundress while Arthur remained comatose and in hypovolemic shock.

“Aeris take me!” Aeskyre cursed out when she realized the potion would not pull him from the brink. There was no time to go through her hoard for another potion or artefact to remedy the situation in front of her.

Her draconic mind flew into overdrive, weighing other alternatives in the span of one breath. She latched onto one idea even though it was one that would have made a [Healer] blow a gasket.

Nonetheless, if it had a chance of saving Arthur, no matter how minute, she would take it. Aeskyre bit her claw, puncturing through with her sharp canines to induce bleeding. She got down on her knees, irrespective of the blood, and eased her bleeding claw towards Arthur’s lips—and she dribbled her lifeblood into Arthur’s mouth.

Simulacras were magic made flesh and some powerful beings like Aeskyre occasionally used them to take on hominid forms. They usually used their user’s preferences as a template. Be that as it may, the blood that carried their magic was inherently immutable.

Even in this manifestation, it carried some of their potent abilities, like [Greater Regeneration] for example. What Aeskyre was doing had the potential to induce spontaneous combustion of Arthur’s body because there was only so much dragon magic an human body could sustain

Therefore, Aeskyre took control of all the excess mana coursing through him and burned it out of him in an expulsion of lightning magic to give him a good enough margin to regenerate his own blood without turning into a human incendiary.

The workshop shook as lightning radiated from within Arthur’s flesh and bones. The discharge grounded onto all and any worked metal and raw ore strewn around the workshop. It scoured divots on the walls and melted some parts into incandescent slag wroth with nature’s unfettered power. Aeskyre prayed that the World would be kind enough to look Arthur’s way.