Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.

28 February 1019
Rue Thomas, Toulouse

My dearest cousin Armand,

Such news I have for you!

Not about our researches into the ley lines of the Old Lands, I am afraid, for we will not resume our survey until spring. I will have more to say on that heading below.

Nor have I any news to speak of about the Iturians and their autocratoria, for I seem to have exhausted the pertinent scholarly material. And yet, I remain singularly unenlightened.

There was not much to study, in all honesty, hardly enough to fill a shelf, and those volumes filled with wild conjectures (where they do not simply repeat each other). “It is not a large field,” as Dr. Nicollier has repeatedly said to me.

We know the Iturians existed, for we have a variety of artifacts scattered across the Old Lands that bear their stamp. We know that the Iturian autocrator was lord of all he surveyed. (Maximilian notes that we ought to be using the term “surveyed” in both its senses: the autocrator ruled as far as Iturian eyes could see, and we believe those eyes they surveyed that entire landscape in the geometric sense in order to bind it with ley lines.) And there we have remained.

Mind you, there is certain quantity of non-scholarly material about the Iturians, all of it was written long after the Iturian’s demise, some by romancers and novelists and the remainder by charlatans and rogues of the esoteric persuasion. I have hesitated to immerse myself in this material, for it seems most unlikely that there is a pearl of great price to be found at the bottom of the middens.

Once spring has begun we will continue our survey. We intend to map the lines along the edges of the Land of Provençe and then move outward, doing the same with all neighboring Lands. Maximilian has suggested that we take time while doing so to visiting their sites of learning, for there is no reason to think that all available sources been concentrated at the University in Toulouse. Who knows what might be lurking on a dusky shelf!

In short, I expect we shall be gone for many months; my letters will accordingly be delayed.

But back to my news! Between Maximilian’s knowledge of Cumbrian wizardry and Jérôme knowledge of forming, the pair of them have made a breakthrough: they have produced a formed object capable of powering a spell, as the stone under King Guy’s Fundament powers the adjacent ley lines here in Toulouse. The object is not much to look at: it appears to be no more than a short, slender peg of wood. But it gathers effort, like your warming blocks, but turns it into wizardly power instead of warmth. It was the work of but a few minutes, once Jérôme had determined the trick of it; he says he awoke one morning last week with the solution quite clear in his head. The solution was not quite right, as it turns out, but he fixed its defects by the end of the week.

The first spells a Cumbrian wizard learns, I am told, are based on a simple array of nodes called Moresby’s Mirror. The wizard—or prospective wizard, for Moresby’s Mirror is most often used to test for wizardly ability—pours his power into the nodes, which reflect it back and forth from one end of the array to the other and back again.

On such spell is Moresby’s Glow: the activated array produces a soft, warm, steady glow, quite bright enough for one to read by, should one choose. Or at least, it is if the creator has any business attempting the spell in the first place! We might easily use Moresby’s Glow to light our homes instead of candles and oil lamps, save that the glow lasts only so long as the wizard turns his attention to it, and who would wish to have a wizard following them about the house? (Other than myself, of course.)

But by using Jérôme’s pegs as the nodes, Maximilian can produce a self-sustaining glow! The spell must be initiated by a practitioner, but it seems it will go on quite happily on its own after that. Maximilian has christened the result “Moresby’s Lamp”; and I am writing this letter by its light.

There is still much to work out to make an arrangement like this practical. Jérôme’s pegs are simply greedy, unlike your warming blocks; I should be worried for the formed cookware in our flat if we had any. That must be fixed, to begin with. But there are many more things to try. The two of them built Moresby’s Mirror using the pegs for every node; it may well be that we only need one or two. (Maximilian thinks two should be sufficient, one at each end; we should know in a few days.)

None of this helps us to know what the Iturians were after with their ley lines, whatever guesses we might make; and were we to scale up Jérôme’s pegs to power the ley lines the result would be likely to destroy every hardened object within the Old Lands.

But still, it is progress of a sort; and the light is so steady and even.

Your much enlightened if soon to be wayward cousin,

Amelia

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