In Loki's Honor

We purposefully and intentionally missed King Hamilton's I coronation ceremony. People sent some [Bird Messengers] back and forth, the Perk apparently demoted to a general Perk now that Yznera was no longer restricting it only to her chosen. The conjured avians flew everywhere now, and fortunately the birds weren't blue. That was a remark Mom wrote on my pages one day while she was doing stuff with the [Shadow Workshop], of which I vaguely knew the context.

No, it wasn't the time to expose ourselves to the outside world. We had several issues to fix, one in particular of a very personal matter.

When death becomes a uncertainty and morphs into a revolving door, an escape to one's problems and a new shot at life, new adventures to be had, new people to meet. Instead of fearing the darkness of the void, my previous iterations welcomed death. Escape from the boredom, gift one's life to the betterment of their loved ones.

Rosewise Honorcoin was one such life. After spending most of her power to rebirth an entire nation out of whole cloth, quite literally as the people were made of silk, she withered into nothingness. Instead of regretting her sacrifice, she doubled down and used her own life to rid us of yet another curse. To break one fetter keeping us from reaching our full potential.

But she left behind someone precious. The guilt and regret her current incarnation felt now, given what that precious person suffered were too much for her. Rosewise chose to remain in Auvanini out of shame. Now, it was time for her to face the truth.

*

*

Barbara was outside the sitting room, fidgeting. I was on my rightful place by her waist, hanging from her shoulder in my silk holder.

"Are you sure that's what I should tell her?" She asked.

She nodded. In times like this, her natural sheepishness rose to her cheeks. Barbara's craving for adventure and wanderlust was always tempered by her timidity and consciousness, the fear of the consequences. It got worse when she unwittingly unleashed a cursed item that changed her life but now was tempered by experience.

With a hand steadied only by sheer willpower, she opened the door and walked inside.

From Halfling to Eleon. Estranged first-degree cousins, the Auvanini short folk was only a few inches taller and a couple broader but it showed. This close, it made Barbara look like a teen next to a full-grown woman.

Rose cast a long glance at the [Crystallomancer]. Her introduction betrayed her reticence, "Greetings, your —"

Barbara silenced her with a hug. "No formalities. Welcome home, Rose."

I could see the knot forming on Rose's throat. Her eyes glistening.

To convert the dragon [Archmages] puppeteering her former bodies, mom had to go all in on the memory transfer. She had to completely overwrite their minds with the full beings of her former incarnations. They had already gone 99% of the way to fool the System (if Tuisto could be fooled in such a naive way) but that last 1% was worth a whole lifetime of experiences.

This was not a mere golem or an animated corpse though it might be such and such, technically. This was Rosewise, if not in soul but in flesh, memory, heart, and spirit.

The two shared a long stare. Barbara let go and sighed. "They refused to tell me what all of this is all about," she confessed with an annoyed huff followed by a smile. "But I got the gist of it."

Rose sounded worried, "did you?"

"Yes. I know we were very close in a previous life. Back in Windemere. Something bad happened to me and you feel guilty about it even after all these centuries. After all these lives we lived in between."

The Eleon [Sorceress] covered her mouth with a hand and looked away, but she nodded. Barbara grasped her other hand, cupping it between hers.

"We suffered a lot. But that is in the past," she told Rose with a soothing voice. "I died and lived a couple of times at least from what I gathered probing your sisters. And Kasumi too."

If I had to guess, it was 75% Kasumi running her gossipy vixen pie trap and 25% the other six Aspects. Five, Apricot didn't gossip. Barbara glanced down at me and winked.

"If you cry, I'll cry," Barbara threatened when Rose didn't answer. Then she softened her tone and joked poignantly, "You don't want me to cry, do you?"

Rose put her free hand on Barbara's shoulder as she shook her head, "Never."

Barbara broke into a fit of titters. "You better not. I'm happy, Rose. I like this life. I'm here, with my parents, with my people. With Nethe and Nethe's mom and everyone else. There's no evil gods or dragons or impending catastrophe or anything threatening us."

Her welcoming warm grin was contagious. The innocence in them made me want to cuddle her and I wasn't the only one.

"May I hug you?" Rose asked.

"Yes!" Barbara almost shouted.

They did. Rose's hug was a bit too tight, a bit too warm and intimate but it didn't seem to bother Barbara.

"I'm sorry I made you worry. What happened was not your fault," Barbara whispered inches from Rose's ear. "I still have no clue as to what happened or who I was back then but from the depths of my soul, I forgive you for anything and everything. Let it go, Rose."

They didn't resist and let their emotions flow down their cheeks.

*

*

We spent several months crafting an airship. It wasn't an easy task.

Making something float anchored to a point in space was very different from making something that floated with three degrees of movement along the spatial axis. We didn't want to rely on moonstone. Though the greenish rock indeed had buoyancy, it was too risky. What if the saturation of Divinity increased and caused the vessel to go up into space, or cut abruptly and let it plummet into the earth's embrace?

Our island was currently experience upward net forces but even if the Divinity vanished suddenly, mom had installed enough immovable rods, tens of thousands of them, each self-sustaining regarding to Mana generation to sustain the whole weight of the place.

The one who brought us the answer we needed was Barbara. We were in her workshop, only the two of us, in her castle at the heart of Clovehaven. It had workstations for gem cutting, enchanting, alchemy as well as a decent-sized library. The books there were real but almost only for show. The [Lost Sage's Encyclopedia] was too convenient as it could collate, cross-index, and search anywhere in its vast collection of books, much more than could possibly fit even in a book that large. No, seriously, it was ridiculously huge especially for a Halfling.

Anyway, she was sitting by her desk, watching a contraption that was basically a tiny merry-go-round with moonstones floating inside and making the wheel spin on its own as they shifted inside the mechanism.

As an aside, we knew very well that each chunk of moonstone we kept from the skies hinders Nenandil and Pandora's task. But what were a few tons of rock missing when a moon weighed literally tens of thousands of trillions of them? That was ten to the nineteenth power in kilograms.

"My light spell makes the crystals float," she said. "If we can dissect the diagram and extract the part that moves and controls the crystals, we may make it into an enchantment and place it on big chunks of crystal inside the ship. I think the moonstone gave me an idea. Can you help me?"

Barbara had [Enchant Crystal] as one of her Class Proficiencies. Regardless, I inherited the efforts of my predecessors.

We took days studying mom's immovable rods, one very naughty, erm, massager, she made for knowing ladies that could move back and forth, and Barbara's signature spell. We tried to merge the three ideas into something that could create something that could not move around on command but exert upward force against the gravity gradient while still letting things move around.

In the end, we settled on two designs. One resembling mostly the immovable rod that didn't anchor the enchanted item in space but created enough upward force to cancel the weight of anything put on top of it, up to a limit. It wasn't absolutely stationary but had this cushioning effect when over its limit. Put it up in the air and the object would float in place. Try to push it and it would put up some resistance against that movement.

That was not good. Floating was one thing but we wanted to use it on a vehicle. It was like trying to drive a wagon with the brakes on. This iteration was still very useful if one wanted to set a temporary anchor in place. But not what we wanted.

We went back to the drawing board and changed the enchantment. I searched flying spells on mom's book, and it gave us the inspiration we needed. Now it only offered resistance on the Z axis, or up and down. The prototype crystals could be moved along the cardinal directions effortlessly but it took a lot of force to change their height.

"This is amazing," Barbara said. "We can make carriages without wheels."

"Which will get stuck on the first hill it has to climb," I retorted.

The solution to that second prototype was to separate the enchantment in two parts, with the drive part creating the vertical counterforce with varying strength, and a control slash power supply part that could modulate and fluctuate said counterforce. It added complexity to the design but we needed something we could control. The sliding crystals floating around the workshop, moving left and right, north, and south on a whim of the wind, bouncing on the walls, and coming back were not the answer no matter how pretty they were.

Barbara relied heavily on her signature spell for that. She separated the enchantment in two parts, a "control shard" and the "drive prism". She also made it so the drive prism could also move on the X and Y axes. it was basically a remote-controlled flying prism at this point.

If we got enough of these to support the weight of a vessel linked to the same control shard, we had our airship.

*

*

With the basic enchantment in mind, we set a crystallization vat to grow some crystals from seeds. An enchanted rectangular tank of water, with several chemical and alchemical compounds dissolved, with tubes on the far end connected to canisters with dissolved salts and minerals. We would put a tiny shard of whatever crystal we wanted to grow in the middle of the enchanted array inside the vat and then open the mineral feeds while running Mana through the enchantment.

The chosen crystal would then grow at breakneck speeds. I mean, at breakneck speeds when compared to the natural formation processes, the geological processes, which took, dunno, millions of years?

The best thing about these vats was that they could grow almost any crystal. Here comes the shocking part. A lot of things were crystalline even if we didn't think of them as crystals. Gemstones? Crystals, most of them. When one thought about crystals, the mind immediately recalled diamonds, rubies, emeralds, quartz, and so on. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Solid salts? Crystalline. Graphite? Crystalline. Sugar cubes? You bet. Obsidian? Unfortunately, no, and neither was glass crystalline either. Most rocks and minerals were an amalgam of crystal and amorphous matter, even moonstone, they were also out but what else could Barbara make with these vats? Bronze. Steel. Most forged metals were crystalline. Heck, even Adamantite was crystalline but we couldn't grow it in the vat because the damn blue magical steel alloy couldn't be manipulated with magic.

However, even if we were to grow diamonds in the vat, it wasn't cost-effective. it took time, dedicated machinery only Barbara could handle. The raw resources were the least expensive member of this equation. Most crystals were valuable not because of their constituent parts. Diamonds, case in hand, shared the same composition as coal.

The cost analysis tanked even without considering the valuation of commodities in this magical society. Mundane diamonds were nice and stored enchantments really well but the king of "gemstones" in this world was both magical and organic in nature. Monster Cores. No matter how many Enchantment points diamond could hold, it was a pittance if compared to monster Cores. They were hard to work with, truly, but for the "national treasure" kind of high-end artifact enchantment, Cores were the go-to material.

We could grow Cores in the vat too but it took a heinous amount of magic and time. We could get ten times more Cores if we delved the Labyrinth and that came with Exp and levels too. For these more mundane materials, though, letting the vats work their magic while attending other matters was very convenient.

One last thing was that the growth arrays could direct where the crystals went as they grew, making it perfect to grow them in odd shapes even a [Grandmaster Gem Cutter] would have trouble crafting. Want a diamond dove? No problem. Ruby phoenix, lifelike and in flight? You got it.

Barbara was abusing that notion. She set the arrays to grow the crystals into ordinary hexagonal prisms but with the enchanting glyphs already carved into the facets. She was making, you guessed it, diamonds.

The hexagonal shape was for our convenience. We would stack several of these prisms in a honeycomb pattern inside a metallic case, and these crystal-filled girders would become the main airship drives. They could be placed horizontally along the bottom of the hull and replace the masts. If we made the cases strong enough, they could also double as the frame for the airship.

We also made sure the prisms were self-sufficient regarding Mana generation and storage. You could run them dry by going too fast but they wouldn't stop working once they ran out of Mana, just slow down. If left stationary, they would even recharge on their own. But physics gave us a break here. The prisms burnt energy only to create acceleration, not to maintain speeds. Inertia alone was more than enough for that. We were aware of air resistance, wind speeds, and we could even put sails on the masts to take advantage of the winds and save on the crystals' Mana.

But why did we make it look like a seafaring vessel? Not only to take advantage of the winds but also for aesthetic and popular acceptance purposes. As things were right now, we could make a UFO like those people imagined back in mom's world. Or any of the hundreds of spaceships designs the [Lost Sage Encyclopedia] showed us from her memories.

We made a toy boat, a ship resembling a four-mast galleon. It was imposing and regal, and it sailed around the workshop as the person holding its control shard willed. It wasn't fast by any measure and wouldn't probably outrun most flying monsters.

"Another advantage of having sails is that we can translate the skills of sailors from the water vessels to the flying ones. The principles of sailing either on the wind are the same."

"What if they fall from the vessel?"

"We can make smaller prism canisters and put them together in a life vest around the sailor's waist. Heck, we can make flying suits."

I remembered reading something in mom's book about power armor. Knight armor that could fly around and fight in the air.

"We could also have [Mages] with wind spells on board to blow on the sails," Barbara conjectured. "Some luxury ships use them."

"And fight back. I don't doubt that a few centuries down the road, sky pirates will become a thing," I added.

"We could make crystals that shoot light beams, you know?" Mount them on the ship where ordinary cannons would be and let the crew fight with them."

We set out to brainstorm and design ways we could use this new invention to conquer the skies.