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Iodessa Avanin finished sweeping up pieces of the broken vase from the wood floor right as Simi finished wiping gunpowder residue from his worktable. She dumped the previously expensive pottery into the garbage with a sigh, then looked back at the gnome, a grin on her face.
“Maybe next time you should test that outdoors instead of in your house. I’m surprised you haven’t set the place on fire yet.” Simi scoffed at her suggestion.
“If it had worked like it’s supposed to this wouldn’t have happened—”
“That’s what a test is for, Simi,” Iodessa interrupted. “Outside is always a good option, even if you think it will work. Also, you’re testing a mortar! It’s made to be explosive.”
“Yes, except this one is supposed to be incredibly precise. Eh, maybe testing outside would be less strenuous on my belongings. . .” As Simi trailed off, he looked at the grandfather clock across the room that had miraculously escaped destruction. “Oh, dear me, I’ve kept you late. Go on home, I’ll finish cleaning up on my own.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind staying longer.”
“No, no,” the gnome replied. “I’m lucky enough that you choose to spend your days off with me. Go have dinner with your family; I’m sure your sisters wish they could see more of you.” At the mention of her sisters, Iodessa’s grin faltered, but she complied with Simi’s wishes. She said her goodbyes and exited the shop, normally closed for patrons on this day of the week, which is why Simi decided to test his new inventions.
Simi’s shop was a disgrace to architects everywhere. The building was an amalgamation of assorted styles of architecture, woods and roof shapes, as if each individual room had been added on as it was needed. Simi lived on the floor above his shop, which was just as chaotic as the rest of the building. Simi’s shop, as well as Simi himself, exactly fit the stereotype of a mad gnomish artificer. Iodessa was an artificer herself, though she hoped she had more style in her artifice than Simi did.
While Iodessa was proud of her skills as an artificer, as well as her prestigious research position, Iodessa’s sister Lysithea did not approve of her choice of career. Lysithea was the head of House Avanin and, for the sake of her position as the face of the house, would have preferred her sister to pursue a different line of work. Their brother Verren had been gone adventuring for fifty years, so Iodessa alone drew her sister’s scorn for her lesser career.
“Adrastae’s a wizard!” Iodessa had said, speaking of the third Avanin sister. “That’s not so different from what I do.”
“Adrastae wants to be a professor at the Academy. That’s more than reputable.”
“Being an artificer is reputable!”
“Io, you’re a member of House Avanin,” Lysithea said, using her sister’s child name. “And you’re an elf. You have the incredible privilege of fey ancestry, you’re part of the summer court, yet you want to degrade your magic with this practice?”
“Who cares if I’m an elf? I get to find new uses for magic we’ve known about for centuries. Problems Austalfur has had for years could be solved with artifice.”
This argument, though it had happened years ago, was why Iodessa still spent her days off with Simi instead of at home. Her relationship with Lysithea was still strained, and she would rather spend the smallest amount of time possible under the gaze of her sister.
Iodessa left Simi’s shop behind and headed home. Fresh snow that had fallen during her time with Simi crunched underfoot, and a sudden breeze whisked her dark blue hair from behind her pointed elven ears. She was glad to see the residents of Austalfur were beginning to decorate their homes for Winter’s Crest, and looking at the garlands, ribbons, and eternally burning candles being set up was a welcome distraction for Iodessa as she walked. She reached the Arteshalda, the enormous circular temple at the center of Austalfur. The Arteshalda was a circle of enormous Ionic style columns, each nearly ten feet in diameter, that reached hundreds of feet into the sky. The newly installed lift in the center of the Arteshalda reached the ground just as she arrived, the repulsor stone slowing it to a stop. She walked on with the rest of the crowd, all relieved that they no longer had to take a dozen flights of stairs to get back home.
Iodessa had helped her master Aramis Dayereth, an enchantment wizard, and Simi to design the lift. She thought that designing the lift would be a project Lysithea would approve of for once, but she was sadly incorrect.
“A lift? In the Arteshalda?”
“The stairs are bad enough that the two parts of Austalfur never interact—not everyone owns a griffin. A lift will connect the Court of the Four Seasons with the rest of Austalfur.”
“The Arteshalda is sacred! It’s been the same for centuries.”
“Change isn’t always bad, Lysithea,” Iodessa had said before storming out of the house for Aramis’s laboratory.
It was a short walk from the Arteshalda to House Avanin. The front gates were still open when Iodessa got there, and she took the time to walk the winding path through the garden to the front door, unlike her childhood self that would have beelined for the door through the flowerbeds. Despite the cold weather, a couple of plants were still in bloom, including a small poinsettia bush. Eventually Iodessa made it to the front door, and she walked into her childhood home.
Neither of her sisters had arrived home yet, so Iodessa had her food sent to her room. She had always had the habit of forgetting about her food when she was working on a project, too engrossed in her work to remember to eat until she ended up eating cold risotto or warm gazpacho. This night was no different. She had been working on her own design of a magic, portable, autonomous mortar that the user could control from a distance, and by the time she realized she was hungry, the chicken on her plate had already gotten cold. She ate it nonetheless, and as she was getting ready for bed, she heard voices below her, evidence that her sisters had finally arrived home.
The next morning, Iodessa walked the short distance to Aramis’s laboratory, excited to continue their research. Aramis’s laboratory was, like House Avanin, also in the summer court, a perk of Aramis being the cousin of the summer Duke. Iodessa pushed open the heavy oak door to find the familiar room just as she had left it—full of bubbling potions, half-finished magic items, blueprints spread on tables covered in burnt-out candles and jars of ink. Iodessa entered as Aramis was coming down the stairs from his office, gloved hands holding an intricate metal box.
Aramis was one of the few elves who was able to grow a beard, so he took advantage of this trait by growing a short, scruffy beard that didn’t match the rest of his elegant appearance. His long black hair reached the middle of his back, and being of a taller set of elves, he was nearly a head taller than Iodessa. Despite constantly working in a lab, he still chose to wear the formal, traditional elven style of clothing almost daily.
“Iodessa, perfect. You’re just in time. It looks like our other projects are going to need to wait for us to finish something else.” Iodessa was intrigued.
“What’s in the box?” she asked, knowing he was waiting for the question.
“That’s what we need to find out.” He set the box on one of the clearer tables, and once Io had also put on her gloves, opened it. Inside was a glowing orange crystal in the shape of a tetrahedron. The crystal, about the size of an apple, was encased in a glass sphere. It looked like the crystal might be melting into the air, yet it still kept its shape. The crystal also floated just an inch above the surface of the box.
“Is that-”
“The ritual focus of the Gith.”
“No. They found it?”
“Right where we said it would be.”
Iodessa had been helping Aramis with his search for the Gith ritual focus for decades. The government of Austurvatn had been interested in finding the crystal for ages, and they hired Aramis to do the job, as well as ensuring he would get to study the crystal if he were the one to find it. They had studied all surviving documents about the Gith and their magic, the remnants of their magic items, and eventually had sent a team of archaeologists to Bolwerk. Bolwerk was old for a city of humans, but brand new in the timespan of elves, and it sat right on top of where Aramis and Iodessa thought the Gith might have kept their focus. And now, after decades of work, their research had come to fruition. They would finally get to study the powerful artefact they had been searching for.
Aramis tied back his black hair while Io set out the collection of spell books to useful pages and put on her reading glasses. The crystal was carefully set on a pedestal in the center of the room, and the pair began their research. They started by conjuring a transparent barrier in the shape of a cylinder to house the crystal and keep it separated from possible contaminants, as well as pairing the barrier to a control panel so the barrier could easily be removed if needed. Then they remotely removed the glass cylinder to begin testing the properties of the crystal.
Over the next week, Aramis and Iodessa conducted multiple experiments on the crystal, exposing it to the different schools of magic and observing the effects on the object. Both Evocation and Abjuration magic had had zero effect on the crystal. Illusion magic actually did its job. Conjuration, Enchantment, and Transmutation magic, however, had unexpected effects on the crystal. No form of teleportation spell would move the crystal, yet when they tried to make the crystal switch places with a non-magic object, the non-magic object would still disappear, as if it had switched places with nothing.
This same experiment caused the most interesting effect on the crystal. After the non-magic object disappeared, the property Iodessa thought she had imagined about the crystal melting into the air intensified. The crystal seemed to liquify, still while floating, and then would regain its original tetrahedral shape. It seemed like the crystal might have swallowed the other object somehow, but there was no way to prove that. The crystal’s mass always remained the same. The amount of energy the crystal emitted, except in short instances like with the teleportation spell, remained constant. There was no change in color, no permanent change in shape, no change in the distance the crystal would float off the surface of its pedestal. Until, however, Iodessa noticed something strange.
The same strange liquid quality she had noticed upon seeing the crystal the first time seemed to be getting slightly more intense. She no longer thought she might be imagining the melting sensation of the crystal—she could see that something was happening, clear as day. Upon noticing the phenomenon, Iodessa immediately mentioned it to Aramis.
“Oh, no.” That meant really bad news coming from Aramis. He returned from a bookshelf with a book that contained a few passages on the history of the Gith. The book, spine well worn, turned to exactly the page Aramis had been looking for, as if he had been worrying about this possibility a lot.
“This passage mentions that the crystal sometimes had periods of instability. No other passages we’ve found have mentioned this, but all the other mentions of the Gith in this book have information that has been repeated elsewhere.”
“Does it mention what the instability is caused by? Or what the crystal might do when it’s unstable?”
“There’s nothing about what causes the instability, but. . .” Aramis paused to read the passage again. “The only consequence it mentions is that during one of the unstable periods, the crystal’s keeper disappeared. They were never confirmed dead, but they were also never seen again. And after the keeper disappeared, the crystal returned to its usual state.” Aramis took off his gloves and paced in circles around the crystal, thinking. Io took the time to read the passage for herself. Just as she had finished, Aramis spoke again. “I think we should finish early today. And take a break tomorrow, don’t come here. This crystal might be more dangerous than we think it is. I’m going to bring this up with my cousin, ask what we should do.”
Naturally, Iodessa was disappointed she wouldn’t get to study the crystal for a while, but she understood Aramis’s concerns, and she probably would have made the same call if she were in Aramis’s shoes. She replaced the spell books and put her gloves away, then she went home, leaving Aramis to ponder the possibly dangerous nature of the Gith crystal.
Iodessa didn’t hear from Aramis for the rest of the day, or even the next day. Right before she was about to leave for his lab the next morning, a message arrived from him. Wait one more day before coming back, he said. Iodessa instead left the next morning, and no message came to stop her.
Aramis was waiting for her, spellbooks back on the table.
“Are we continuing?” she asked.
“It looks that way. I talked to my cousin, and he sent my concerns to the other Dukes. Despite how both of us know more than anyone else about this crystal, if we decided studying it were too dangerous, the crystal would just fall into the hands of some less experienced researcher who might have not even heard of the it. Either we continue, or someone else with a higher chance of getting hurt will do it for us.”
“This is their decision? Do they know about the source than mentions the consequences of the instability?”
“I mentioned that as well. Even though the source has proved reputable so far, since this is the only source that mentions the instability, they think it’s worth the risk to keep studying the crystal.”
“They don’t think anything will happen?"
“None of them are wizards or artificers, but no, they don’t think so.”
Aramis and Iodessa got back to work studying the crystal. It seemed that after a break from being experimented on, the crystal had settled back into its calmer state. The pair spent another week trying new and more specific experiments on the crystal. At the end of the week the crystal seemed to have become unstable again, so they planned to leave it alone for another few days to rest, which seemed to have worked before. After their last planned experiment for the day, another teleportation spell, Iodessa started cleaning up the workspace.
She paused to look out the window. Winter’s Crest was this weekend, and even the stiff residents of the Dais of Seasons were cheery and celebrating as they passed by. It had just started to snow again, the gentle flakes a beautiful finish to the gorgeous scene out the window. Before Iodessa could finish taking in the joy of the scene, Aramis called her name.
“Io! The crystal-” He had never used her child name before. Something was going on that made him lapse enough to shorten her name. She turned around to look at the crystal and saw that the edges were starting to deform, even more intensely than the last time. Aramis was already scribbling notes down on the papers that still hadn’t been put away.
Iodessa was suddenly hit with a wave of vertigo. It wasn’t just in her head, though—it seemed like her whole surrounding was suddenly not entirely solid anymore, like the crystal seemed to be. She couldn’t stand anymore and collapsed on the floor, still trying to support herself with a table. Aramis looked like he had also been affected by vertigo, but less so than Iodessa. He was still standing, although also using a table to support himself.
“Aramis!” she shouted at him. “What’s going on?” As she said this the crystal began to glow brighter.
“I’m not sure. But I think. . .” he trailed off. With a sudden rush of strength, he grabbed his wizard’s staff for support and pushed himself across the room towards the crystal. “Io, you need to let down the barrier.” She was confused as to what was going on. Her brain felt like mush and the crystal was nearly blinding at this point. But Iodessa gathered up her strength and crawled to the control panel. She was just able to reach the lever, and the barrier disappeared. There was a brief respite from the vertigo, but it came back at full force as if the crystal had realized its newfound freedom.
Aramis continued towards the crystal, and Iodessa was confused. They needed to leave. Why was he getting closer? She couldn’t think of any spells he could use that needed touch to calm the crystal, and she didn’t think he would be dumb enough to touch the crystal. Then, the crystal cracked. It was a small crack, but the sound was loud enough that it hurt her ears. The brightness of the crystal continued to increase, light spilling out of the crack.
The crystal kept cracking, but it was still all one piece. Despite the state of the crystal, and despite what Iodessa knew to be his best judgement, Aramis grabbed hold of the crystal with one hand. He hissed like he was in pain, but also grabbed with his second hand. He looked over at Iodessa, sadness in his eyes, like he knew what was about to happen.
“I’m sorry, Iodessa.”
“Aramis, no!”
The whole room was engulfed in a bright light. Io felt like she was torn away from her body, and the last thing she remembered was an endless world of blinding white.