Chapter 18 - The first blade of House Winterscar (Patreon)

Some long dead asshole was ruining my day.

In fact, if I had to put a word on the emotions I was feeling - well, this would be the time that you’d pull out the pretentious words kept high up in the drawers with the fancy silverware. Words like irate, wrathful and my favorite: tempestuous.

That was a good word for this. 

The object and focus of my malcontent was this single piece of scrap metal practically leering at me. Somewhere buried deep inside this ingot of metal forged in the bowels of hell itself was a fractal that if I so much as sneezed on would stop working.

Also I’d be down a small fortune, but that’s just par for the course.

Further experimentation over the last few days slowly confirmed my suspicions about how the warlocks had hidden their fractal. I could certainly be wrong about it, but the chances of that were more slim. The real issue is the next step forward.

I had no tools to derive an equation from an image, so if I happened to break even a small part of the pattern, I’d be left stranded topside with no ride home. There’d be no way to figure out what the missing piece was and I’d need to start over from scratch on a different blade.

I already had my work cut out for me here, but wait - it gets worse. See, the warlocks seemed to have figured that someone, at some point in time, would know about fractals and use that extra bit of info combined with real science analysis to crack their little secret.

Ergo, someone just like me.

So, clearly disturbed by the thought of anyone else having a slice of their cake, they’d made it a personal mission to put a stop to that. And they’d gone with all the stops possible.

First of all - Journey couldn’t eat the metal. Something about the forging process it went through made it more like mite-made material, which needed to be re-processed in some way first before it could be consumed. My one-hit wonder tool that I’d lovingly abused so far to cheat through every bit of power upgrades I could squeeze out? Worthless for this particular action.

I suppose I can’t fault the warlocks on this one. They knew about armor obviously. And everyone knows that armors eat material to repair itself. They also knew materials existed that armors couldn’t eat. Obvious in hindsight that they’d go out of their way to forge the fractal into something armors couldn’t touch. I’d bet that was the very starting point for picking out how to hide the fractal.

I had no idea how they did that, maybe pewter itself was a material relic armor couldn’t eat. They couldn’t eat the ceramic white plating machines had, so for all I knew there was a whole shopping list of odd materials armors didn’t like the taste of. Bad for their diet and all that, poor things.

Okay - that’s not too bad. I’d simply need to take my time and slowly file down the metal bit by flaky bit until I spotted something different in the metal composition. And on reviewing the video footage of the dispeate slices, I found they’d thought of that one too.

What’s better than burying a fractal all in the same metal? Why, burying a dozen randomly engraved patterns along with the fractal. And that’s exactly what they did.

The whole block is actually filled with random engravings, which causes heat deformities to appear at every slice, in every part. No way to know which bit is part of the fractal and which isn’t.

With the blade being made of all the exact same pewter composition, there weren’t going to be any clever solutions like heating it to a specific temperature, or using acid to eat away at some parts of the metal.

Now, I pride myself on finding the optimal solutions to challenges that come my way. By optimal, I mean the ones that involve the least amount of work and effort. This blade here is the anti-Keith. Every trick I could think of, they’ve thought of it too and planned for it.

The only viable solution I could think of was the single most effort and time intensive one left - filing away at the pewter one tiny layer at a time, and checking in between to see if I’d hit my target or not. I’d need to keep the blade lit and alive during the filing so that my prey could even be spotted. Fractals glowed bright Occult blue when they were active, that’s the only advantage I had.

In my sanctum I meditated on my opponent. There was one weakness that stood out. Something the meticulous warlocks didn’t seem to have any counter for: The soul fractal.

With the soul-sight I could detect faint traces of something coming from the center of that hilt. If I focused enough, I think I’d be able to peer through the pewter and get a better sense of distance. With that kind of info, I could easily grind away the layers right up to where the fractal would be and then take it more delicately, saving me days of work and reducing the whole ordeal to something that'll only take a few hours. 

Here’s the conundrum: The warlocks so far have proven to have plotted a counter to every possible tool I could use to pry that secret out of the pewter. Except soul-sight. That seemed really odd and out of character for them. 

There were three possibilities for this. The first is that the Warlocks actually didn’t know about the soul fractal and have only been using the common fractals up to now.  Maybe when they rediscovered the Occult this key fractal had been cut out or otherwise too hidden away. So naturally, they couldn’t come up with a counter to something they couldn't have know existed.

The second option is the complete opposite - they did know about the soul fractal and they did setup a counter to someone sniffing around with soul-sight, and the one who’s ignorant right now is me. I might be walking into a trap of some kind. This second option is why I haven’t really dove into the soul-sight and started using it. Something could be lurking inside there that I didn’t know about.

The third option is that they knew about the soul-sight and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to protect against. As in, if someone had all the tools to both discover their fractal and also the soul-sight to excavate it out, there wasn’t an option to stop that. Rather, they could be using this to recruit new members into their guild. Test by trail of some kind. And to be fair, whoever discovered their secret wasn't likely to go around telling others what could potentially be a quick and easy path to a luxurious retirement. Why make competition? 

Option one and option three meant I would live if I used soul sight to pinpoint where the fractal was inside. Option two meant that I could outright die to something I had no idea was there. One in three chances of something going terribly wrong. 

Well. There was a fourth option: I give up trying to get this done fast and instead very slowly grind away the pewter on scratch at a time until I uncovered something.

It really burned me on the inside, but ultimately I had to pick option number four. As for why I’m talking today of all days, that’s because I had picked option four almost two entire weeks ago.

Since then, my life has been steady and uneventful. Early mornings with Cathida and Kidra. Once I’d shown my sister the basics of the technique I’d come up with, and had Winterscar inscribe the soul fractal on the inside of her helmet, Kidra had been good to go. A few days of practice and getting the new movement down, and she was now a menace to all the houses with dreams of competing for the position of First Blade.

I didn’t know if she was going to compete for the position, Atius hadn’t yet announced he was looking for a replacement. Father had been the youngest first blade in history so far, but Kidra could possibly be the second-youngest with this new technique.

Coincidentally, she gave it a name. The Winterblossom technique.

She made a pretty good case for this. The majority of the soul remained inside the soul fractal that had been etched inside the helmet, forming the blossom, while small bits of the soul would be woven back inside the body at just the right spots, forming a root-like shape. Hence why Kidra suggested that as the word for it.

It kind of stuck and was better than what I had been thinking of naming it, if I’m honest, though the words will never leave my lips.

After morning training, I’d usually have a day of doing chores for Winterscar. Once my responsibilities were done, officially I’d be off duty and allowed to do anything I wanted. Unofficially, what I really did was slink back into my sanctum, and continue to grind away at the small pebble of metal that was left.

Today, I think I was going to finally get it. A few days ago, I’d grinded away through the hilt until I hit the first bits of Occult light. I’d been lucky since I hadn’t started grinding straight top down but instead at an angle - which ended up giving me some extra wiggle room. 

The fractal had sharp points, lines almost. One of those lines had been setup to purposefully point straight up where the most obvious point of grinding would come from. The result is that the moment someone ground at the line, a small section of it would be cut - which meant the line was no longer at the exact length to fit the pattern and so the whole thing would lose cohesion before even the grinding tool was lifted off.

Since I’d come from an angle, I hadn’t grinded out much of the X or Y axis, only a tiny bit of the z-axis which isn’t critical in a two-dimensional rune. That had been a really happy day for me, as it let me re-orient the grinder to be exactly even with the direction of the pattern and made it easy to grind away the remaining chunk until I got close to the excavation.

From here it had been back to meticulous grinding. Bit by bit, the fractal became exposed as I delicately removed the excess pewter. The closer I got to success the slower I became, being far more cautious. I could have reached the end of this days ago, instead I’d taken the safe route at all possible times.

See, if the fractal winks out of life before I had fully uncovered it, there was absolutely no way to tell what parts of the pewter were the remainder and what parts were the false trails leftover. So all my work would instantly get iced.

Today I was filing away the last glowing trail of a line that still showed signs of being hidden away.

Scrap by scrape, it was taking hours just to remove what would be a small cloud of dust. The whole time I remained focus on the task, keeping my mind in the present.

Eventually, there wasn’t any part of the fractal that seemed covered up by pewter. I unscrewed the ingot from its mooring, lifted it up and examined it, searching through the pattern for any missing trace. Nothing.

Honestly, I was so out of it after hours on hours of tedious grinding. This moment should have been my crowning moment of glory... and all I wanted to do was verify that it worked and then go to sleep.

“I think I’m done.” I breathed out, to nobody.

“Only took you forever. Having a hard time sitting up yet? Bones aching yet? That’s the first thing to go. Next you'll sprout a cane and then a need to yell at people. Trust me, I know all about it.” Cathida grumbled out. 

She had liked the process as much as I had, by which I mean we both hadn’t at all. It was utter suffering that the warlocks had pulled me through, but in the end I was the one holding their precious little fractal, all revealed and excavated.

I didn't even have the heart in me to quip back, instead going all business. “Journey, take a snapshot of this image and let’s give it a whirl.” 

There was a tiny metal rectangle I’d already setup at my side, ready for this moment. Reaching down, I brought that up and Journey’s spirit floated by, swirling around the surface before retreating.

I brought the metal piece up, to the light. “If this doesn’t work…”

Well. If it didn’t work, I’d just dip my head back and try to figure out what else was missing. Possible that there was a second fractal that needed to be dug up. Or worse - what if there were three, and the third one was sandwiched between the two? Maybe that’s why the warlocks hadn’t bothered protecting against a soul-sight solution, knowing it would be practically impossible to excavate three different fractals inside.

My mind was a spiral of doom and gloom, already expecting the worst to happen. That all my work had been for nothing, that the secrets of the warlocks had run deeper than I had anticipated. 

So, it was a great surprise then, when the stolen fractal lit up brightly on the surface on my command to Journey. 

And then all four sides of that piece of discarded scrap metal began glowing a bright Occult blue.

• Next chapter - Meaning of life (T)