Chapter 737: Doing the Maths

For three hundred years, Kelda of Clan McCallum’s sanctum had been silent. For three hundred years, her laboratory had been dark. For all those many years, no living soul had walked its floors.

But no more.

In recent days, it had stirred, coming to life with activity.

When Birger wasn’t busy with other tasks, he’d be cooking meals in the unremarkable, galley kitchen that was equipped with enough stoves, ovens, and hearths to make meals for eleven people at a time.

Through a door at the end of the galley, was the panty; a narrow, deep room loaded with food supplies; dried beans, ground grains, rice, oatcakes, flour, salted meats, dried fish and an array of hard cheeses. A glyph—emanating, preserving magic—was etched in the ceiling, letting the staples last for all this time.

A magical fountain provided water, continuously pumping and circulating clean water into a barrel shaped vessel.

Across from the fountain, stood Birger, towering over the stove, frying salt cod and beans for a simple, but filling breakfast. The kitchen lacked spices—except for pots of ground salt—which meant meals were bland, but what they lacked in flavour, the giant made up for in quantity. No one would go hungry if he had anything to say about it.

When he’d finished his preparations, he scraped the meals onto three tin platters, picked them up, and floated—thanks to Alex’s flight magic—to a portal at the end of the galley, across from the pantry.

He drifted through the portal, emerging in the laboratory.

Bjorgrund was there, hard at work.

The young giant was moving across the floor, carrying heavy equipment from one end of the lab to the other, placing it on a spot Alex had outlined in chalk.

He exhaled, wiping his brow, looking up at his father and nodding. “Breakfast time already?”

“I thought you might be hungry by now,” Birger said, looking over the lab. “This place looks a lot different.”

Kelda's machinery—which had been thrown into disarray by the disaster that claimed her soul and those of her assistants—was mostly rearranged. When the trio had first found the sanctum, the lab was in chaos, frightening in some ways—with strange looking, mysterious devices scattered about, lying haphazardly around the room—but all of that had changed.

As Alex went over Kelda's notes, he’d made up a floor plan, and Bjorgrund rearranged everything according to that plan. Now, those strange devices were organised—with plenty of room to manoeuvre around them—even for the giants. It definitely didn't make the room feel homey, but it did make it feel less like a torture chamber.

They’d made other practical changes as well. Originally, the only doors leading from the lab, led into the eleven bedrooms. Now, dozens of portals had been created in the walls, each one leading to a different room within the sanctum. One led to the entrance chamber, with its twin goddess statues and the defaced statue of Uldar. Another led to an armoury filled with leather and metal armour, but very few weapons, while others took them to various trapped rooms throughout the sanctum. The traps were still inactive, all were controlled from the same place: an area where Alex now sat, reading and taking notes.

The young wizard was bent over a desk crafted of thick stone, wide enough for three or four people to sit at. Numerous metal handles protruded from the stone, each one labelled in the Traveller’s secret language. By holding one of the handles and channelling Hannah’s power into it, Alex could control how fast, where the sanctum moved in the world, the portals between the complex’s many rooms, and whether or not the traps were active.

There were maps of each floor of the sanctum built into the control desk. Three circles of light shone on the map on the desk—indicating the three figures of Alex, Birger, and Bjorgrund in the lab.

The spot representing Alex hadn't moved; the young wizard had been working at the desk for hours.

Around him, a swarm of Wizard’s Hands were busy taking notes, recording the information on parchment as Alex muttered, mentally performing calculations. Finally, he sighed and took a deep breath, finishing the last of Kelda MacCallum’s notes.

In front of him were two books: the first was a copy of Uldar’s notes, the second; notebook number twenty-two, the final notes Kelda had made describing her process. He’d taken his own notes and calculations as he’d read, sometimes crossing things out, sometimes circling them.

All across the pages were sketches of the Fool’s and the General’s Marks, with observations about names, the nature of the soul, and deities.

The Fool of Thameland paused, scratching his now thick beard, then continued his note taking.

“Do you think he’ll even hear us when we call him for breakfast?” Birger asked his son.

“I doubt it,” Bjorgrund said. “Seems he's in his own world.”

“I can hear you just fine,” Alex said, though his eyes never moved from the books. “I'm just working on the last bit of the problem.”

“What problem?” Bjorgrund asked.

“Why Kelda’s process failed,” Alex said.

“I suppose that's indeed a great mystery,” Birger sighed.

“Actually, it's not, I think I know why she failed. Exactly why, and it's a damn tragedy,” the Fool said grimly.

The giants looked at each other, then Birger quickly put the tray down and rushed to the young wizard.

“Wait, if you know why she failed…” the old giant paused. “Does that mean her process can be fixed?”

At last Alex looked up, sadly meeting Birger’s gaze. “I think I’ve already fixed it. All I'm doing right now is trying different mathematical simulations, to see if I made any mistakes with my calculations. I'm not going to know for sure without trying the process…but things look really promising.”

“What are you talking about? Mathematical what?” Bjorgrund said.

“There's an arithmetic when it comes to some kinds of magic and alchemy,” Alex said. “Mana input and mana output. How a magical circuit’s engineered will usually let you predict what it does. It means that if you know enough of the variables, you can do some maths to try and figure out what a device might or might not do. Basically, I'm drawing schematics for her magical devices, doing some mental adjustments, and seeing what the result might be.”

“That all went over my head,” Birger admitted.

“It's kind of like building a small model of a wagon before you build the full size one, so you can get a better idea of how it moves, but the idea’s a little more obscure, I suppose. Just doing the maths is nowhere near as good as being able to do actual experiments, but we can't really do that with something like this.”

“Alright, whatever you say—I'll trust that you know what all that means—so you think you fixed it?” Birger asked. “So fast? You fixed the thing that killed Kelda?”

Alex sighed sadly. “Yes.”

“Well, what was it that killed her, then?”

“It's a bit more complicated than what I'm about to tell you…but these are the basics. “He took a deep breath, preparing to explain what had destroyed the only Fool that nearly escaped the Mark. “Let me just start by saying she was absolutely brilliant.”

He tapped on a pile of her notebooks in front of him. “When she started, it’s obvious she didn't really have much knowledge when it came to magic, divinity, or alchemy. The notes in her first book…how can I put this…were a bit basic. It was like seeing someone just starting a journey, and not having all the gear they need to make it all the way. Over time though, her notes got a lot more complex with lots of interesting insights: she gathered together some brilliant minds around her, and also taught herself a lot of magical theory. The crazy thing is that she couldn't cast a single spell: she didn't have any magical background when she got the Mark—and she didn't have the mana pool needed for wizardry—so she couldn't use any spellcraft her entire life.”

Birger nodded. “She’d often ask me to show her magic, because she couldn't do it herself.”

“And yet, she absorbed magic lore like a dry sponge sitting in a bowl of water. She learned certain theories about divinity, and different philosophies about the soul, she learned about alchemy as well as how her own power—Hannah’s power, could be used to its full potential.”

He clapped a hand on his right shoulder. “Combining the theories together with her research on the rune-marked, she came up with a pretty inspired solution to change the Mark. It's actually shockingly simple if you break it down to its basic components.”

Alex looked at a machine, the one resembling a cage that had a table, arms, and blades inside it. “What she figured out is that Uldar places the Mark on a person’s soul. The Heroes’ Marks are basically a fusion of magic and divinity that embeds in the soul. They change the soul, granting new powers—or in the case of a Fool—new limitations. Kelda figured that out when she examined the rune-marked.” He nodded at Bjorgrund. “Your runes and my Mark work kind of similarly.”

Bjorgrund touched his chest. “Maybe that's why the runes glow through clothing. They're on our soul, not just our flesh.”

“Exactly…ish. The runes seem to be designed to glow through clothing, they don't just do that naturally. Thankfully, Uldar didn't make his Marks do the same thing…or I would've been in deep trouble. Anyway, that's not the point, the point is, Kelda realised that in order to change the Mark, she had to separate it from her soul.”

He pointed at some of the other devices in the lab. “She got her hands on some very rare materials—things I've never heard of before—and when they come in contact with the soul, it enters an energised state…kind of like running a current through a piece of wire. Now, since souls are a source of immense power, energising one would be very dangerous. When the soul has that much energy going through it—according to her notes—you're in great danger of it breaking down or…causing a kind of backlash that…well also creates a massive burst of energy that destroys souls, even those near it.”

“Like what happened to Kelda and her assistants,” Birger said solemnly, glancing at the glass coffins in the back of the laboratory.

“Exactly. You might be wondering why she would need to energise her soul in the first place. Normally, you wouldn't be able to tell what's the Mark and what’s the soul if you're examining it…but by energising the soul, it makes your natural spiritual essence resonate. And the soul resonates from Uldar’s Mark… which allows you to actually see the difference.”

He pointed at the cage. “Once you can see the difference, you can start to cut it away. It seems she’d examined her Mark by energising her soul many times and figured out that it had been changed. With runes, though, each one is a single magical…object. One solid piece. But with the Mark of a Fool…it's like a Mark stitched on top of another one. A patch. So what she tried to do was energise her soul so that the Mark would be ‘visible’ inside her spiritual essence.”

Alex nodded toward the bane knives. “She then planned on using those knives to release ‘stitches’ on the Mark’s ‘patch’. Afterward, she was going to use the Traveller’s power to basically teleport the detached patch off of the original Mark, reverting it to what it once was.”

“So, what went wrong?” Birger asked.

The young wizard held up two fingers. “Two things stopped her. One, she didn't have Uldar’s notes, which meant she basically had to guess which parts of her Mark were the new ones that had been stitched onto the old version. One small mistake would damage the whole framework, and start a chain-reaction that—with her soul being energised—well you might be able to guess what happened next. The second thing that got her…might have been even worse.”

His jaw clenched. “Birger, Bjorgrund…the sad truth is that she never had a chance. When it comes to souls and spirits…names are critical. You have to know what something is called if you are to truly know it. The trouble is, she knew that the Mark of the Fool was patched…but she didn't know what the old version was called. As a result, she was basically transforming it into nothing…so nothing is what she became. Without knowing what she would become…there was no hope of the process working. Not ever.”

“It was all in vain…” Bjorgrund said sadly.

“No, she went down fighting,” Birger said sternly. “And sometimes that's what counts.” He looked at Alex. “But still, it's better if her sacrifice had helped. You sound like you have the things she didn't have.”

“I do,” Alex said. “Her process was nearly there…it didn't take a lot of modification to turn it into something that I think will work.”

“Then…what's stopping us from doing it?” Bjorgrund asked.

“Normally, I’d tell you there has to be a whole bunch of safety procedures…the need for experimentation to test the hypothesis before we went onto working with a human subject, and so on…” Alex said. “But I am literally the only person in the world that could serve as an experimental subject…and I don't know how much time we have for strict safety procedures and waiting.”

“So that means…” Bjorgrund began. “That we could start real soon?”

“Now, preferably,” said Alex. “I've lived with this Mark for a long time; it’s been causing a lot of suffering for a lot of people, including taking Kelda's life and soul, and the lives and souls of her assistants. We have bloodthirsty people hunting us, and the Mark of the Fool will just allow them to kill us because I can hardly defend us from them. It's time for this to end. Get ready for soul-surgery, gentlemen, it's time for the General of Uldar to return to the world.”

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Author's Note

Hello thirty-seven cool fools, almighty chosen, wise sages, and mighty champions! Thank you for your support!

IT IS TIME. IT IS TIME. IT IS TIME. IT IS TIME.

WELCOME BACK, PARTY PEOPLE.

Cya tomorrow :)