While the sylvani invented their coveted telecry artifacts, in response the dwarves did what they did best with magitech and created the Augmented Runecraft, Magitech and Communication Utility Sleeve, a wearable that any individual Mageborn or non-gifted could use to cast preloaded utility spells. The main function of the Armacus as it is popularly known is however, communication. While it did not necessarily threaten the [Relay Mage] class as an occupation, it led to a new trade war in information. As a result, then more than ever, the clamor for a reliable means of communication for those with means but lacking the aptitude for communication magecraft rose. Currently, while the sylvani do keep their artifacts to themselves or to those who they deem worthy of them, the dwarves have commercialized theirs. However, we were very shrewd, knowing that people would be willing to pay through the nose for long term gains. ”Excerpt from Valerith Quillworth’s, 'Alkerd: New World History.'

A dark cloud hung over the Sturmdrache estate that night At least that's what people thought; that's what they wanted people to think as they barred themselves in—that they’d gotten a raw deal.

The noble mage was licking his wounds, or so the teetotalers could be heard saying.

Inside the mansion; actually, several imperial weights worth of rocks below the foundations of the estate, three people sat around an artifact...waiting.

“Arthur…” Nora started. “Are you sure about this? I find it hard to believe we're basing our plans on her.”

“Look, Nora...I know you find it ridiculous. But she is not who or what you think she is. I can't believe you never took her words seriously.”

“Seriously?” Nora started, standing up as she slammed her hands on the table top. She'd shed away her glamor from the Pendant of Verwandeln and let her hair down. She looked menacing as her crimson irises glinted. “ I thought you only lost your memories , but to think even your common sense?!”

“Let the man speak Nora,” Elena butted in tactfully. “You can be very terrifying when you're angry, you know that right?”

Nora flinched, she hid her fangs as she sat back down.Arthur sighed for the umpteenth time that evening.

“Listen, you never did stop to ask what race she was. She revealed everything yesternight, I saw her for what she was. For Pete's sake, she might be the oldest individual in Aldmoor right now.”

Nora wanted to again stand up to protest he was not making any sense but Elena had the forethought to pull her hand down. For all the good a sylvani could do against vampiric strength.

“I did not merely adopt her out of pity, or because she might have had an accident like mine Nora. ” Arthur said. ”She exists because of an accident; and before you say anything...I had a problem seeing her as a child.”

”He's right Nora, if I didn't see it myself I would have believed it.” the sylvani woman remarked, voice visibly shaky at the end. She looked over her shoulder and flinched.

Arthur frowned, looking over her shoulders;the golems hadn't moved from their spot. He could understand why she's frightened of the golems, he was too when they'd come banging down his door in the morning looking like swamp…things.

“But that she's a what? the amalgamation of a dungeon shard and a human spirit? Even faerie tales are easier to accept,”Elena crossed her arms in indignation,“ I had a hard time accepting that Nora's a dhampir, a kin of nightwalkers,” she murmured.

“But don't get me wrong, I'm still grateful and all for everything...but, I think we should tell Orhill about her. What if she's evil? That she is an aberration already qualifies her to be put down post haste. The guild inquisitors should have been notified the first time it happened.”

Arthur ran a hand through his face. Elena was well within her rights to be paranoid about Arcis. Maybe he was the one who was desensitized to be readily accepting of Arcis. He could relate to the existence of a synthetic life that was not a golem, because; science fiction.

‘Yeah, maybe I'm the odd one here.’

“I think that's the worst idea. If news of what she is gets out, we can't guarantee the dwarves might not trace her back to us. The city is already on edge because mister whatshisface went and blabbed that we might be agents of the Void Syndicate.” Arthur said, throwing up his hands.

“So what then?” Nora asked, looking from Arthur to Elena. “We're running again?” she said, a sad tone evident in her voice. “I was just getting used to this…” she motioned her hands around her. “I figured I'd have a fresh start; I guess it was self-denial. I seem to have forgotten that Venera might still be on the hunt for us.”

”Wait...what?!” Arthur stood up with a start. “ Is she that vindictive?”

Nora nodded glumly. Elena seemed befuddled; it seemed she hadn't heard that part of the story. They'd only told her they'd been to a sylvani city; she couldn't believe them the first time until Nora had taken off her pendant.

“Right...that doesn't change what we have to do,” Arthur said, with a faraway look on his face as he sat down. Just then, the Psiphone chimed. The two women watched with rapt attention.

Transcribed message spells were a staple of Mage Guilds. However, they were written down on parchment as soon as the [ Message] arrived.

But to receive a message on a crystal of all things, letters uniform as if written by a master scribe or scrivener? The girls had a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept. And that was in spite of being told beforehand, even for Nora who'd seen a telecry in action. But telecry's did not send [Message] spells.

The artifact in front of them flew in the face of what they knew; which raised even more questions when the man did not bat an eyelid.

However, this time, Arcis did not communicate using her persona as Host-Mind, the women were already rattled as far as things went.

Nonetheless they had other things more important than questioning the veracity of the artifact’s inner workings. To begin with, the designs of house Phylandir seemed to pale in comparison to what Arcis had found out in her information gathering.

She had detected not less than five groups of unknown people tailing them through the town as they went to madame Apaxvn's.

She'd been eavesdropping on conversations in the guard barracks to find that some guards were in a private, undisclosed individual’s pockets which meant that a long-time resident was itching to bail out and tell them on Larissa. The woman would skin them alive for all she was worth.

Of course whichever skill Arcis used was subject to constraints just like any other; she was not omnipotent. In hindsight, it was not big of a thing to do with the golems patrolling within the vicinity of her holding room.

All she had to do was borrow their senses for moments at a time by using their susceptibility to [Farspeak] intrusions. Both women were again shocked at the ramifications of that; Arcis was akin to a high leveled spymaster and while her messages lacked the impersonality of [Host-Mind], they were no less serious in their delivery.

Her messages were too methodical to be the creations of a prattling child if you could get past the fact that she was casting [Message] like it was going out of fashion. For a [Mage] who specialized in [Message] at the nearest Guild, repetitive casts would’ve been limited by the length of the message and the capacity of their mana well.

When all that was said and done however, the crux of every [Message] that chimed was that they have been under someone’s watch for a while. Insofar as the information purported, it wasn't the dwarves, but that did not make their information any less precarious. An enemy they didn’t know was a deadly enemy.

The plan therefore, was to let Arcis gather more information while Arthur worked on the aership. The time-line had been moved up and that meant that the latter part would mean putting his nose to the grindstone. Arcis could have broken out alright, but that was inadvisable; they had to give the Aldmoorians the illusion of control if they wanted to avoid even more scrutiny.

‘They are not above using children to make parents work for them? By the gods, I hope I am the outlier,’ Arthur grimaced as he thought about it.

Also, the synth had to stay put to see if their fishy shadows would bite. Compared to Arthur’s part of the plan, it was laughable to compare the difficulty of the two. Arcis was locked behind a specialized containment for mages made of ebonite; it was a step up from null-steel and could nullify any active magic and prevent any from getting in.

“ How is she doing that?” Elena cradled her head. “ Those containment rooms are called null-voids for a reason. For Arcis though, it was easy to bore a pinkie-sized hole somewhere in the room’s interior wall. Ebonite was expensive after all, they couldn't coat every centum of the room with it; that and it was hard to work with.

However, the pinkie-sized hole was too small to allow a consistent [Far Speak] connection, that’s why she used [Message]. Also, doing so had tanked her mana reserves; the surrounding svartanite used to make the anti-magic wards constantly interfered with her connections . She’d need to eat her weight in food of arcanous origin but there was no way they were going to feed her that in there, were they?

And her wardens? They were the most no-nonsense cohort of the Guard that were seldom seen on the streets. They were a division that were former adventurers much as they loathed the profession. They had decent levels and skills, one was peak steel, three were silvers. They were a special squad that handled things when things got feisty in the streets and the subjects were adventurers, only an adventurer could handle another.

It was thus to Arthur’s dismay that he could not bring Arcis’s skills to bear. They would have been a help with working metals, joinery work,and heavy lifting through the golems. Nonetheless, that was quickly remedied with the Psiphone; trust an ancient entity to plan for deviations.

“ Golem remote control?” Arthur could not contain his mirth. They would definitely get through that. Elena looked at him as though he’d grown horns.

Dead. The room was dead, there was no magic in that place. It might have been overkill that such a room was used to contain a child but there was another reason that she was there. It was only a temporary holding cell; even they didn't have the stomach to keep a young girl in there for more than a few days at most.

What they were holding her for, was so they could starve her purported, obfuscation enchantments of their magic. They couldn't find them. Little did they know she had none.

Their inspection spells failed time and again to penetrate her aura, which was about hair thin mind you, her body was magic incarnate and that meant that it naturally kept magic very close to her skin. Not even the grandest of mages could best her at such fine control; however, she was not conscious of it.

It was simply because her body was the way it was; celestial quartzite was a very strange material. It was simply magestone that had what? Been inundated with so much mana so much it turned into a liquid that behaved like a solid? They weren’t going to get through to her anytime soon and she could play this waiting game just as well.

Did they try to bribe her? Use compulsion skills? Yes, nothing except for torture was off the table. They did not have the gall to take a pair of tweezers to her nails, or threaten her. It was absurd to even think of it in the first place.

She barely flinched away from the adventurers outside her room, mean-faced as they were. To them, she was an enigma. To her, they were just pieces on a board. She’d been in, one month now, her internal clock counted time to units smaller than casions.

All the while, she’d watched their movements, trying to catch the one who’d been responsible for moving things in the background.

How could she tell? She’d watched one too many movies from that smartphone she’d consumed, took the bytes right out of the memory chip and added to her own.

While much of the material was fiction, there was nothing out of reach she couldn't do with her abilities. Well, maybe she could not cast spells outside of her own body.

With a supercomputer’s equivalent of a brain, successfully transitioned to her head so she could stop thinking with her heart it was not so hard to arrive at a conclusion.

No, literally, [Host-Mind] was the original tenant of the dungeon shard before [Spirit-Body] drifted from the gods, knew where and activated their key prompts, it was not meant to happen but it did. And now, the two entities, one part of the whole, were slowly coalescing into the collective called Arcis. They, became She.

That she even had skills was thanks to spirit body. The spirit she’d used for the template was the bridge between the body and the World that doled out abilities. It was the spirit stored this information, and altered the body accordingly

However, since her body was not made of flesh, it was essentially an unattuned humanoid sized focus, it could store matrices but not release them.

The incongruity of a spirit in an inorganic vessel was why she could not do external workings, only contact and internal magic. The last of the three was what was simply known as augmentation.

Arcis knew because while she had no books, she would against, Arthur’s judgment, send secret messages to an Elder called Volemhir.

She had his mana signature. But the elder did not know it was her asking the questions. In fact, neither Arthur nor Volemhir knew about it; the Elder was too fleeting of mind to keep track of things.

That, coupled with his highly intelligent mind was reminiscent of a certain condition she knew from Earth. To her however, it was a boon.

The elder was a treasure trove of magic and rune craft and her instinctive nature from a dungeon shard made her want to hoard more and more of it. The only impediment would have been the telecry’s inability to receive [Message] directly, the user had to be in contact with it to receive them.

With the elder as a sounding board, soon enough she realized if she could in essence, create another focus separate from her, she could work external magics. The only hurdle left was to get the materials.

Consequently, she found a way around her inability to cast spells outside of her own body and many ideas bloomed in her mind. Gun shaped staves, pyrethrite bombs that could be detonated wth a telepsychic pulse from [Far Speak], magical spell cannons on the Stormbreaker; the world was going to be her oyster.

Without [Spirit-Body]’s childish inclinations to dampen the wayward delusions of a megalomaniac dungeon consciousness, Aldmoor would have been rubble by then.

“Uhm, Orborne, did you feel a chill and a feeling like Danger Sense wanting to go off? ”

”Nah, yer just thinking it yer slackhead”

What two of her on duty watchers saw was a well-behaved girl who did as she was told. The reason for her capture, or alleged capture, was that her father was being 'investigated' before her adoption papers could be drafted, so they had to keep her doubly safe. And of course she nodded like a dumb rock.

While her warden saw a bored girl staring against the wall, Arcis was also listening to them talk outside her confinement.

They were still not bought on her golem whisperer appellation and so stationed one right outside her confinements. She bounced telepyschic signals via the [Far Speak] matrix off that golem and another, then several others. There was one conversation she was concentrating on.

“Listen to me Eugene, it was foolish to move the Guard for this kind of thing,” went a female voice. It was the eye-patched woman from the council.

“Yeah, what if he has a benefactor? A gruff voice reiterated. “ Maybe he's giving us the illusion of complying then one day out of the blue their patron comes and sees what we've done to him—”

It was a Silyvre talking. Only three of them were in the office, presumed warded for privacy. But for the golem watching over them, they might have well talked in front of Arcis.

“Hah!” a snort. “What benefactor? He's only toeing the line to save face.”

“This has gone on too far Eugene,” the woman chastened. “ I know you wanted to get at them for a declined invitation; I had to take that course of action so that we too could save face and show a united front. You're making this harder every day”

Then there was the sound of footsteps receding and the door closed.

“Hmph, cowards!” Eugene remained alone. There was the sound of fumbling, jingling of coins and then Edel started talking, seemingly alone. Arcis recognized it for what it was, a stored [Message] spell.

“[Message]: I don't know how long I can hold back the council, better make your move while you can. I have washed my hands off this nasty business with the golem-whisperer”

Even with her capabilities, Arcis could not intercept the [Message], nor glean anything from the scroll that burst into motes as soon as it was used up.

Besides, piggybacking on the golem was not a dependable method of surveillance. She could only hear, not see what the golem saw. The only way she was even hearing that was because the golem let her.

Sentient golems could not be made thralls of and she had no such skills for it. Her modification of the [Far Speak] matrix only attached a remote and bastardized version of the spell which bounced sound around. It was like a magical sniffer, non-intrusive that the golems would barely notice it.

Arcis smiled; now she knew the point of contact. It would've been so easy to write off Eugene as not being a mastermind. Because of his sloppy schemes, vindictive behavior,and unlikable demeanor he was a very convenient red herring.

“Ah, Miss Sturmdrache?”

Arcis opened her eyes. She stared at the teenaged freckled intern of the guild who was equally curious about her. He was the only person she talked to.

Naturally the Sturmdraches were not ones to take Aldmoor's actions lying down. They too could bring their connections to bear somewhat, those that were already in the open for all to see; the Guild.

The Guild repaid their favours in kind. For Arthur's sake, they allowed his Guild liaison Nevine to check on Arcis. Of course the council could not shoot that down seeing as the Guild was a neutral party to the whole debacle.

It was even understandable that the Guild could go so far for one person because he'd helped them with the dungeon incident. So therein, lay another part of the plan that even Arthur was not himself aware of.

Outwardly, the Guild liaison was just someone who did courtesy calls in lieu of Arthur, because there was no way they could allow the man himself to do so.

It might have been paranoia, but they were justified because both Arthur and Arcis were unknown quantities. They were being prudent.

As for the concerned party? They didn't know what to make of the girl.

“Nevine,” Arcis replied. “What did you bring me today?”

“The usual, letters from your father. No luck with the books I'm afraid. ” Nevine said. Ever since he'd begun coming around, as part of Guild interests on the matter, the girl's room had barely changed. It was utilitarian, a desk, chair and a bed.

There were no windows in the containment room, because why would there be? There was a self contained washroom on the side; even the Guard were not as barbaric to deny such basic comforts. Unless one was a serial escapist then they would only get a privy.

“However, I have a few books. I didn't come empty handed...also, while they can't let me bring in anything remotely close to a spell book, it doesn't mean they can stop me from trying to tell you what's in my head. You like magic, yeah?

”Because my Papa is a mage?” Arcis harrumphed, nose in the air. “How droll…” he face went flat

Ah, ” Nevine came up short, flustered. He thought the girl had taken offense from the deadpan expression. The. She broke into a sunny smile.

“Well? Did you bring them?

“I managed to get a few through today, ” Nevine sighed. Like her father, he didn't seem to get a read on her. Sometimes the things that came out of her mouth made his skin crawl, sometimes she was a harmless naive little girl.

“Oh?” her face fell a little. But for her, it was still a win in her books; a few monster cores would hardly make a change in her mana reserves. And she had two of them.

Nonetheless, she picked the five marble sized orbs from the boy's hands and looked at them like precious gems. It was the first time the Guild liaison had managed to get something remotely magical to her.

Several weak monster cores were no head turner, in fact the Adventurers turned guards did not even look at them twice. Their mistake. She smiled impishly as the motley of burnt orange, smoky amethyst and turquoise gems ever slowly became dull.

“Wha—” Nevine sputtered. Before he could get another word in, Arcis had already blurred in front of his face, cold palms enclosing his mouth.

“Sshhh, can you keep a secret?” Arcis whispered. Ceruleans had turned into a prismatic swirl that swam in her irises. Nevine's hands could barely budge the one hand holding his face hostage, he bit back a scream knowing the girl could crush his jaw from the grip strength. When Arcis saw his reluctance,she sighed and tossed him a bone.

“I'll tell you about the Antecessors if you do,” she grinned. The hair at the back of Nevine's neck stood on end. He nodded frantically. Another part of her plan was now in place; Nevine had been roped into her schemes.

Unlike his adopted daughter, Arthur was definitely not kidding around. Not like he had any choice in the matter though; he was essentially like an mage on call. His contracts were all over the place as if to keep him on his toes.

He had to assist the Guard with checking for magical contraband; they had blood hunds for that really, human intervention was required. It felt like working at an airport check in.

Then he had to check on their enchantments, on the walls and around the Guardhouse, because that is what they called their headquarters. He even had a little office where Guardsmen with enchanted gear could bring it for a periodic appraisal for flaws and such things.

He ought to have been befuddled by the council wanting to make him the resident public enchanter because Volemhir's medallion only showed his class as [Aeromancer].

Maybe in hindsight, the thing with the Lalilabs might have been the sell-out because mages had secondary classes; enchanter was the closest assumption.

Despite all that, he still had energy for the aership project that was going well. While his gold reserves had taken a tank, they'd held up well. He was still moving materials through the Lalilabs. They were a reputable business so he got discounts and all that stuff.

He was not doing it covertly, but neither was he trying to hide it. Everyone knew he was an enchanter. The problem though, was the quantity written in the books while there was no visible structure to show for it—Or so people thought.

In the Lalilabs backyard was a green house coming up—that was enough misdirection to hold on for a month or so. Surely Edel's wife could look the other way if a couple of building materials disappeared ?

After all they bought in bulk, lots of wood gets wasted all the time, more so the hard to work with iron wood. It would've seemed extravagant to build a greenhouse that could survive a hurricane, but with mana storms, you could never tell what would happen to your plants

That would also be the only way he could move a lot of glass without being seen. And speaking of glass; he thought to ask for advice from the Elder concerning the best type of glass he could use. Only the strongest would suffice, what with bird strikes being a common thing in Eryth's mostly untamed skies.

The conclusion? Obsiderite had been the second best thing as he thought as per the Elder's instructions. Obsiderite had a certain magical tolerance; It could stop skill empowered arrowheads just fine; Arthur knew it first hand.

It's downside however, was that it could soak up magical missiles to a certain degree before it cracked. Unless you drew away the mana before it became saturated.

It was doubly hard to enchant because it became resistant to rune craft the more matrices were added onto it. It was understandable because all materials had to have an upper limit for how much mana they could pass through their structure.

Arthur had designs on how it could work though, he'd simply curve collector conduits like he did with the mana sails. That would need a glass specialist apparently. Top of the line, that is, if he wanted the best of the best, he'd have to go with the exorbitantly expensive diamond glass.

Therein, he had to use his last boon to get a connection to a certain someone at the Kingsfell Higher Institute for Crafts and Inventions. It was costly but it was still a good investment—more connections. On the other hand, the aership was coming along nicely.