Blackness stretched out all around, but in the distance, she saw yet more iridescent flows like this one, like veins stretching out throughout a living thing, only… This particular river was disturbed, she felt something had driven it into this frothing rage, and she wagered she could guess what - or rather, who - was the culprit.

Whence the earthly spirits surrounding them had been blinding masses before, now they were no more than colorful stars amidst a sea of their kind, barely even perceptible.

“It… Appears we’ve made contact,” uttered the norseman as he glanced around at the gaping nothingness that enveloped their surroundings. Bright light pulsed throughout his body paint, a vortex-like tendril of iridescent light rising up from the great leyline river just behind him. “The spirits of the land will use me as an intermediary, for they sense their kind in me. Do not try to find too much meaning in what I say, it will merely be the spirits’ fundamental alignment filtered through my own knowledge and beliefs.”

The tendril slowly approached Jorfr from behind, to which he gripped the edges of the altar and stared down into the puddle, his icy grip freezing it from without while his breath heated it from within. Even as the tendril plunged into the back of his head and that iridescent glow poured forth from his eyes, he kept speaking in a perfectly calm tone.

“There is a secondary purpose to this ritual, and I would feel remiss were I to deny you the opportunity to make use of it. Should you ask a specific question, the spirits will answer, and I will interpret - do not mistake this for a seance, as I will still be in control of my faculgh-” he explained, only to be cut off halfway when a noticeable swell in the great leyline’s flow met them, sending a surge through the tendril which connected him to it. A cough grasped him, and he spat out a glob of whirling, iridescent metallic liquid. Of the elemental representations on the secondary altars, three seemed to have attracted particular attention from the land’s spirits: The hunk of metal, the bottle of viriditas, and strangely, the puddle of water.

A bitter laugh echoed from him, “I’ll give that fuckin’ elf an earful about this, perfectly safe my ass. What was I… Oh yeah. The last two times I did this, I learned nearly as much as the person I was doing this for. Knowledge you glean in this manner may prove a vital key to harnessing the spirits which bind to you.”

The glow had spread throughout his entire body now, dimly bleeding through his pallid skin while his body paint glowed almost as brightly as his eyes, casting a psychedelic illumination on everything that shifted with every slight movement of Jorfr’s body.

”Here it comes,” he said with anticipation, tightening his grip on the altar as the glow from within him intensified. “Just don’t ask more than three simple questions, lest we risk the ritual wearing out.”

Yet another pulse surged through the tendril and into the norseman’s head, the lights in his eyes drowning out everything, yet amidst the bright light, his irises were still clearly visible.

“Who- What are you?” Zel asked, and Jorfr slightly raised his head, the searchlights of his eyes snapping between the secondary altars within sight until he reached the piece of metal. It took on a glow and began to emit a subtle ringing, bluish spirits swarming towards it and seemingly raising it into the air as it visibly shuddered and changed. It then fell back to the altar, emitting the telltale ring of cold-iron.

Then, with a smile, Jorfr turned back to her, and spoke with a chorus of innumerable voices, that self-same empyrean glow issuing from his mouth as he spoke. His eyes snapped from one spot to another, but never sat on Zelsys for more than a moment.

“We are one cog within the eternal machine which defies the eternal march of entropy.”

“We are that which grants the beast upon thine back its fangs.”

“We are the foundation of all greater artifice.”

“We are one of the many ways through which man pursues permanence.”

“Permanence?” a question slipped out before Zelsys could consider it. Or rather, she didn’t worry about the question limit enough to stop herself.

“Alone, the Mundane is mutable.”

“Alone, the Arcane, too, is mutable.”

Jorfr raised a hand, and with a ringing noise and a bluish glow from his hand, the chunk of cold-iron flew into his grasp. He placed it on the central altar, gazing at it. A flash of particularly bright rainbow light caused its surface to suddenly grow tarnished as rust spread across it, cracks spreading from which rainbow light shone, until it was split down the middle, revealing a clear distinction between the faux-cold-iron surface and core of mundane, rusted-through metal. Even the shell crumbled into rust, becoming merely a pile of wetted decay.

“It fails, for its change was effected through arcane means alone. Our work may only be done in concert with the mundane, be it the mundane processes of nature, or the mundane tools of man.”

He went on to pick up the starmetal knife, planting it tip-first into the rust pile. Another flash of rainbow light, yet the knife did not rust. The light splashed off it as if it were a liquid, split by its edge as the blade let out an angry ringing.

“Through union and understanding, entropy is defeated and permanence - immortality - is achieved. The persistence of identity through absolute change.”

“We are that which the mutable world knows as the spirits of metal. We are one of the cornerstones upon which the world of Man has stood since time immemorial, even before Man knew how to extract our creation from the earth, for it is through us that this world is shielded from the ravages of the outer realms.”

“You, who would forge a covenant with the earthly spirits; speak your meaning, that we might come to an accord. In other words: What is it that drives you?”