8:00 AM.
NEXUS Academy — main transit bridge.
The transit bridge from the academy island to the mainland city took eleven minutes on foot at a moderate pace and seven at a practitioner's extended stride. I did not use the extended stride.
I had time, the morning was cold and clear, and the bridge gave the best view of the island's exterior architecture — the old Foundation stonework running along the base of the main building, the wind erosion patterns in the eastern tower's facing, the way the morning light caught the mana-field shimmer that the academy's ambient cultivation environment produced at the surface level.
I had walked this bridge roughly twice a week since the second month of semester. The city of Aldenmere — the mainland city that served the island academy as its commercial and residential base — was not large by continental standards, but it had the specific quality of a city that existed in relation to something significant.
Every major institution of the Denmud Empire produced a city like this around it: not just a city that happened to be nearby, but a city that had grown in the specific shape of the institution's needs.
Aldenmere had three artificers' workshops, a restricted-text copying house, six establishments that catered specifically to practitioners' dietary needs, and a postal branch that ran twice-daily express routes to the capital, Solia, and the three major regional hubs — Rainfield to the northeast, the border fortress city of Denmori to the south, and the coastal trading port of Vel Harran in the west.
I had started noting the geography on day fifteen and had been building it into the notebook's appendix section ever since, because I had — in my original world-building — sketched the continent's geography in broad strokes and left the specifics undeveloped, and discovering what the specifics actually were was one of the more interesting ongoing revelations of living inside the world I had made.
Some of it matched the sketches. Some of it didn't. The discrepancies were the most interesting parts.
I had a shopping list this morning.
Items:
One: ink for the documentation notebooks. I had gone through four standard bottles since October and the academy's supply store stocked a grade that bled in cold conditions and was not acceptable for field documentation.
Two: the Eldonian small-format map case that had been on back-order at the cartography supply shop since week seven and was apparently in this week.
Three: an appointment with Taros Blackthorn.
The first two items were straightforward.
The third one was the reason this trip existed.
Taros Blackthorn was an artificer — one of the three in Aldenmere — who had operated a workshop in the city's eastern quarter for approximately nine years.
He was also, per the research I had done through Seraphina Von Solaris's family contacts, the specific kind of artificer who occasionally accepted commissions outside the standard product catalogue. Not illegal commissions.
The distinction mattered: Taros was not a black-market dealer.
He was a craftsman of significant technical skill who found the standard product catalogue limiting and accepted non-standard projects from clients he considered credible.
Seraphina had sent him a preliminary inquiry through the Solaris family's commercial channel two weeks ago. His reply had been: "Available for consultation. Present credentials."
My credentials were: one Solaris family commercial referral, a project description that specified a passive mana-recording device suitable for evidence collection in a controlled indoor environment, a specific notation that the device needed to operate below detection threshold for standard practitioner senses, and the name of the specific void-mana infusion technique I needed it to detect.
He had replied to the project description with one line: "Come Thursday morning. Ask for the back workshop."
Thursday was today.
I had been thinking about this commission for three months.
**
9:05 AM.
Aldenmere City — Blackthorn Workshop, Eastern Quarter.
The eastern quarter of Aldenmere was the oldest section of the city — the streets here were narrower and the buildings leaned in toward each other with the specific proprietary quality of architecture that had been built on either side of a walkway by different families who both wanted as much of the walkway as possible.
The shop fronts were small and the signs above them were the kind of sign that expected you to already know what the business did, which meant text rather than illustrations and small letters at that.
The Blackthorn Workshop's sign read simply: T. BLACKTHORN — ARTIFICER. MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION. BY APPOINTMENT.
I knocked on the frame of the open door.
"Back," said a voice from inside.
The front room of the workshop was a showroom of finished products — the standard catalogue, arranged in glass cases with labeled price tags.
There were mana-amplification crystals in three grades, standard-issue wind and fire technique supplementation tools, two kinds of light-generation devices for practitioners who worked underground, and a single glass case at the far wall that contained three items with their price tags turned face-down, which was either a stylistic choice or a statement about relative cost.
I went through the door at the back of the front room.
The back workshop was the real space.
It was approximately four times the size of the showroom, organized in the manner of someone who had a very specific system that would be incomprehensible to anyone who didn't share the mental model behind it.
There were three workbenches, two of them occupied with active projects in various stages of assembly, and a series of shelving units along the far wall that held materials in a progression I couldn't immediately parse.
The air smelled of heated metal, lamp oil, and the faint mineral quality of processed mana crystals.
Taros Blackthorn was sitting at the center workbench.
He was around forty, with the build of someone who had spent significant time doing physical work but had not been formally trained as a practitioner — solid, but without the mana-integration quality that gave trained practitioners their characteristic density. He had reading lenses pushed up onto his forehead and a small tool in each hand and was looking at a half-assembled object about the size of my palm with the focused expression of someone conducting surgery on something that couldn't express pain but would stop functioning if he made the wrong incision.
He didn't look up.
"Solaris introduction," he said. Not a question.
"Yes," I said.
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"Academy student."
"First year."
He set down one of the tools and held up the half-assembled object at an angle that let the light from the workshop's high windows catch its interior geometry.
Whatever it was, it had a mana-conduction lattice inside it that was extraordinarily fine — I could see the structure from three meters away and even without Author's Sight it was clearly precision work.
"You're the one who found the grid problem," he said.
I was quiet for a moment. "I submitted a report to Imperial Security. Yes."
"The infusion sessions."
He set the object down and finally looked at me. He had the quality of someone who formed assessments quickly and updated them slowly, which was the craftsman's temperament — you built a thing right the first time or you built it wrong and spent twice as long fixing it.
"You need to capture a void-mana infusion session on a recording device that operates below detection threshold for a B-rank practitioner."
"Yes."
"Passive operation only. No active mana output. No signature. Captures mana-type differentiation alongside standard acoustic and visual data."
He listed these as if he had been thinking about the project for two weeks, which he had. "Do you know what that requires, technically?"
I thought about this honestly. "No. I know what I need it to do. I don't know how to build it."
He looked at me with something that was almost appreciation.
"Good answer. Most people who come in here with unusual commissions want to tell me how to build it too. You're the first one in a while who admitted they don't know."
He pushed the reading lenses down from his forehead onto his nose and opened a notebook on the bench beside the half-assembled object.
"The core problem: passive mana recording in the void-adjacent frequency range requires a crystal substrate that doesn't interact with standard ambient mana. Otherwise the recording medium itself produces a signature as it captures. You need a null-response lattice."
He drew something in the notebook — fast, the way people who think in diagrams drew. "I have two in stock. The lattice grade I'd use is expensive."
"How expensive?"
He named a number.
I had prepared for this. Seraphina had estimated the cost range in advance and the Solaris family's research fund — which had been set aside for exactly this kind of operational expense — covered it.
"That's acceptable," I said.
Taros looked at me for a moment. A seventeen-year-old student, in a school uniform, telling an experienced artificer that a significant amount of gold was "acceptable."
"Solaris family money," he said.
"Research fund," I said. "With family authorization."
He looked at me for one more second. Then he went back to his notebook. "Turnaround: twelve days."
"I need it in ten days."
"Why ten days?"
"The event I need to document is scheduled before the fourteen-day window. The device needs to be in place before then."
Taros wrote something in his notebook. Then he looked up with the expression of someone doing a revised calculation.
"Ten days is difficult."
"Yes," I said. "I know."
"Fifteen percent surcharge for the accelerated timeline."
"Acceptable," I said again.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he closed the notebook.
"You're seventeen," he said.
"You're the second person to say that to me this week," I said.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but the precursor to one. "All right, first-year. Come back in ten days. The device will be ready. I'll have it cased in a standard storage container so it doesn't flag during transport."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me," he said, which was exactly what Instructor Brennan had said three days ago, and I thought there might be something in the professional culture of people who produced things for other people that led to the same reflex response to gratitude. "Come back in ten days."
I went to pay the deposit at the front desk, collected the notebook and map case from the cartography supply shop on the way out of the eastern quarter, and bought ink from the specialist supply store that the academy students used — the proper Eldonian grade, in the dark grey that didn't bleed in cold and dried fast enough for field notes.
Then, because it was past eleven in the morning and the commission had gone longer than expected, I went to find somewhere to eat lunch.
*******
To Be Continue