Vacant Throne

Although she had agreed to not do anything that might draw the attention of angels to what they were doing, Irulon was not content to simply sit and watch the panels of the Endless Expanse like they were television channels. She had watched for a while. A good hour, even. Irulon could not see the angels—not even the massive wheel-like ones—but she had been able to see the Throne. Or it’s housing structure. The tall tower that was simply there from every angle.

She had commented on the shape of the structures, the materials she suspected they might be made from, the shifting nature of the entire world beyond—which she suspected related to Fractal magic in some way or another. Alyssa hadn’t been able to offer much commentary. She had already told Irulon basically everything she knew about the Endless Expanse. Which, sadly, wasn’t much. Adrael, Iosefael, and Tenebrael had all spoken quite a bit about the Throne, its nature, and some of the Endless Expanse as well. Yet despite all that, Alyssa felt like she knew nothing.

In reality, and upon further consideration with some helpful insights from Irulon, Alyssa was starting to suspect that it wasn’t just her who knew nothing. The angels didn’t have a good grasp on their own nature either. Adrael was trying to discover more. Or she had been before being imprisoned. As far as Alyssa knew, the archangel was still stuck inside Tenebrael’s black box.

It made her wonder if reconciliation was impossible with Adrael. Having someone dedicated enough to trawl through whatever archive the Throne had and bring back information would have been a good start toward getting a deeper understanding of things. Unfortunately, Alyssa doubted that would happen anytime soon. Adrael loathed Tenebrael. Even if her exploration into angelic lore had shaken her out of her need to follow orders, Alyssa doubted that loathing would go away anytime soon. And Alyssa had stolen the archangel’s staff multiple times.

No. Adrael probably would never willingly assist them. But maybe Tenebrael could convince Kenziel to fulfill the same task. Alyssa doubted that they would get the same results. From the one real conversation she had with Kenziel, Alyssa got the impression of a somewhat air-headed angel. She had appeared thinking Tenebrael wanted help only to be immediately cowed into complete submission. She didn’t have the drive that Adrael had, the drive that would have her seeking out answers when opposition reared its head. In fact, if anything did oppose her, she would probably change allegiances once again.

Next time Tenebrael showed herself, she would have to talk about that. Maybe it would be best keeping Kenziel off doing meaningless tasks. While Tenebrael had been inactive, she had apparently been trying her hand at the duties of a Principality by taking over Iosefael’s job on Earth while Iosefael filled in for Tenebrael on Nod. But if Kenziel could be more useful, that would be nice too.

As for Irulon and the Endless Expanse, her idleness came to an end with a sketch book. An hour of staring turned into an hour of drawing. Irulon sketched out basically everything that she could see. The spires. The ornate walkways. Even the sky, which seemed to have multiple planets or very large moons occupying it. Alyssa couldn’t really see them as the turning Ophanim were even larger.

“Don’t you have perfect memory?” Alyssa asked quietly, not really wanting to interrupt but still wanting to know.

“Might not always have perfect memory,” Irulon said, pen not slowing in the slightest as she spoke. Her eyes didn’t even break contact with the mirrored surface. “We’re really not absolutely positive how our solution to our issue will work out. We know the big picture of it, but the finer details are… difficult to pin down. It is an entirely experimental… treatment and we have no prior examples to work from nor do we have any test subjects to test things on before performing the experiment on ourselves. I’ve been taking precautions recently to ensure that my work is not lost should I… forget some things.”

Alyssa pressed her lips together. Irulon hadn’t said a word or voiced a single complain about how Alyssa was handling things, but she couldn’t help but feel a sick sensation in her stomach. She had promised Irulon that she would help to figure out a solution to her issue. So far, the work had all been done by Irulon. Alyssa had nothing to do but go about her usual routine. The only thing she could really do…

“I’m going to practice some more,” Alyssa said softly. The two hours spent watching the Endless Expanse had been a waste of time for her. An interesting waste of time, but a waste nonetheless. For some reason, despite objectively being more boring than a daytime soap opera, watching the Endless Expanse was enrapturing. If not for her phone’s clock, she would have hardly noticed the passage of time.

But she wasn’t learning anything from it. Nothing that she hadn’t already known, anyway. Irulon might be, but Irulon knew more than anyone how much time she could spend on side projects.

“I think I made a breakthrough last night,” Alyssa added. Irulon hadn’t said a word, only continued her drawing. “I managed to make a marble containing two different materials. They were mixed together chaotically, but I think I can get them organized. If I can get them evenly split down the middle, I think that will be a good first success. Maybe I can try shaping the creation after.”

“Good work. I appreciate the effort you’re putting into this.”

Alyssa winced, but couldn’t actually detect any sarcasm in Irulon’s tone or words. Simply choosing to nod her head, Alyssa slid over to the bed to let Irulon carry on in peace while she tried making new materials. The princess didn’t seem to take notice of her movement in the slightest.

She got started practicing right away. The first hour, she didn’t have any repeats of her success with two materials in a single item. None leaked, which were the ones that Alyssa considered the worst failures, but they were all solid metal or glass. Ten minutes into the second hour, she managed to do it. Another swirled ball of metal and glass. Even though it wasn’t what she had set out to do, it was more of a success than she had managed for a while, so she was happy with it.

“How much do you know about what you’re doing?”

Alyssa blinked, looking up from the swirled marble in her hand to find that Irulon had managed to tear her eyes away from the Endless Expanse. “What do you mean?”

“Do you understand the difference between this try and the previous?”

Frowning, Alyssa slowly shook her head. She had said the same things both times, clasped her hands together in the same way, and thought about the same thing. There might have been minor differences in her posture, how she held her arms with her hands together, or how quickly her hands moved apart, but… except maybe that last one, she didn’t think they mattered all that much.

“Did you notice something?” Alyssa asked.

“How well do you know those materials you are creating?”

“Uh… I’m not sure what you mean. I mean, iron is a natural element and glass is like… silicon? Probably with other stuff mixed in.”

“Sand and wood ash. Heated to the point of melting and allowed to cool. Iron, when forged from raw material, undergoes a similar process. It is heated, shaped, and cooled. Keep the materials used to make up the material in mind as well as the process said materials undergo during formation. I think that might help you out.”

“But I’ve made several marbles of only iron and only glass,” Alyssa said, gesturing toward the litter she was leaving on Irulon’s bed. “Without thinking about that stuff,” she added, just in case Irulon didn’t get why she was questioning the advice.

“Indicative of the magic allowing you to not fully comprehend every element of the process. But I believe that the more complex your intended outcome, the more of its baseline components you’ll have to know and understand. Did you not say that Tenebrael Herself had to list off elements of a human body in order to create doubles of those you brought from Earth?”

“Well, yeah.” Tenebrael said a lot of things. Still, she supposed it couldn’t hurt to look into the idea a bit more.

Advice dispensed, Irulon turned back to the Endless Expanse.

Alyssa just about started trying to make more marbles before pausing as an idea occurred to her. Pulling out her phone, she ran a few searches. The molecular structure of iron was apparently a few hexagons all connected together by lines. She didn’t understand it at all and just about set down the phone on the spot. But a glance toward Irulon steeled her will. She took a breath and doubled down.

She spent a good hour just trying to understand what she was looking at. There were tutorial videos on the internet about making sense of chemical structures. It had to do with how various elements bonded together. Which raised a new concern that she had looked up something incorrect earlier. Iron was an element and didn’t have a molecular structure in the same way that glass did. Glass was apparently silicon and oxygen in a fairly chaotic pattern. Both silicon and oxygen, along with iron, were clusters of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

It went deeper than that. She had taken high school level science classes and had seen the table of elements before. But then it got into quarks and leptons and other nonsense that almost seemed to be theoretical according to what she was reading. Already feeling mindflooded, that was where she had to pause. Maybe Irulon could make sense of it. But Alyssa wasn’t sure she needed it anyway.

When Tenebrael had been creating the body in the alley on Earth, she had listed compounds and elements. Water. Carbon. Ammonia. Lime. Other things that Alyssa was forgetting at the moment. If Tenebrael didn’t need to get down into particle physics, Alyssa wasn’t sure that she needed to either.

Impromptu science lesson over for the moment, Alyssa decided to start practicing again. She felt like she learned something, but whether or not she could apply it to the iron and glass mixed ball was just something she would have to test out on her own.

Her first ten attempts over the course of a half hour were failures. Three of them were even those leaking messes that she still wasn’t sure why they happened. They all went into a bucket Irulon had fetched the previous night after one such failure.

But the next three attempts in a row were all successful. All the swirled mess, but all still successes.

That trend continued. A few successes followed by a few failures. She tried a few different techniques to get the half-and-half solution that she wanted. For one, she tried changing from thinking only of metal to thinking only of glass halfway through. It was a tactic that she had tried a few times in the past, expecting to wind up with an iron core and glass outer shell, but like all those previous failures, she wound up with a leaking lump in her hands instead.

She really hoped those things weren’t toxic.

Glancing to Irulon, Alyssa almost asked if she had any further advice before getting an idea on her own.

Although looking up the composition of metal and glass seemed to have helped with the consistency of being able to make swirled marbles, it hadn’t been exactly what Irulon had spoken about. Irulon had mentioned the materials, yes, but she had also mentioned the forging process along with it. Metal, sand, and wood ash heated to a melting point and allowed to cool.

Alyssa spent a few minutes looking up videos more in line with that. From iron ore to a cleaning and refining facility to another facility that threw it all into a large crucible to form it into large ingots. For thoroughness, she checked out a few similar videos, even delving into steel production. Huge swaths of the actual production process were simplified or skipped entirely. Most of the videos that she had found seemed to be the kind of things they would air on weekend morning television. It had to be just interesting enough to hold the average viewer’s attention without boring them to death.

She hoped that it would be enough to fill in the gaps.

Feeling slightly more prepared, Alyssa tried once again. She didn’t expect her first attempt to be a success. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t a complete failure, but the swirled marble was no longer what she was aiming for. Setting it aside, she tried again, focusing specifically on the manufacturing process of both glass and iron. Her second and third tries went in the same way.

The eighteenth, however… Alyssa opened her eyes expecting the same result, only to feel the marble break apart in her hands. It was the first one to actually fall apart. She just about tossed the pieces to the side in disappointment only to notice that they had fallen in two distinct halves. A metal half and a glass half. They weren’t fused together and there wasn’t any glue. So without the metal and glass swirled together keeping them one piece, they couldn’t stay together. But… It was a success, right? She had created metal and glass in the same casting of the spell. The two sides being apart was an engineering error, not a manufacturing error.

Setting the two halves aside in their own section on the bed, Alyssa tried to replicate her feat. It didn’t work right away. She had to put a few more swirled marbles on the bed before she got another split one. From there, she managed to get five in a row. Though she would have to do more tests to be absolutely certain, it seemed as if the harder she concentrated on the manufacturing process, the more likely she would get what she wanted.

Which gave her yet another idea.

Alyssa pulled out her phone once again. This time, she started searching for manufacturing process of sunglasses. From a machine that bent wire into the shape of the eyeglass frame and fused on the nose and temple pieces to the shaping and molding of glass to fit inside. It seemed like a lot of glass was actually plastic, which she knew beforehand—her old sunglasses lenses had been plastic—but Alyssa hadn’t even started looking up plastic manufacturing processes. From what little she knew of petroleum refining, she had a feeling that plastic would be far more complex than glass, which had been around for centuries before plastic had even been invented. It was why she had chosen to use metal and glass in the first place. For the time being, she decided to stick with glass.

She had to wonder if she was jumping the gun a bit. It was a large leap to go from a sphere to sunglasses. But there was nothing to lose from trying.

So Alyssa closed her eyes and clasped her hands together. Most of her previous attempts, she had started the spell almost instantly. This time, she waited. There was a whole lot more to concentrate on now. From the manufacturing process of iron and glass to the formation of lens frames and glass lenses. She tried to keep it all in mind without being distracted by any outside thoughts.

Opening her eyes this time, Alyssa wound up with a tangled mess of wire and glass. She had to grin at it. While it wasn’t glasses, it was close. Some of the wire was bent in the shape of eyepieces. The glass were almost the right shape and thickness. A few wires did go right through the glass, but presumably that would be solved if she could get the frame right.

Figuring that she must have been focusing too much on the glass and not enough on the metalwork, Alyssa set the fragments aside and tried again.

An hour of attempts later and Alyssa finally had something serviceable. The lenses didn’t start in the frame, but Alyssa managed to pop them in with little effort. She had eyeglasses. Not sunglasses and it wasn’t her smooth sports sunglasses that she had before, but perhaps she could look up ways to at least tint the glass later. For now, Alyssa sat back and admired her handiwork. And all the scraps of metal and glass that came of her failures.

“I did it,” Alyssa whispered. More to confirm to herself that she actually had made progress and had created results.

Irulon still heard her. “It’s far from what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“This was the design that I looked up the manufacturing process for. Perhaps with more practice I’ll be able to tweak it, but I’m… not content with this, but pleased with it nonetheless.”

“Hm. So discovering the history and materials manufacturing techniques worked?”

“Honestly, I presume so given that I was able to do this after looking all that up, but it could have just been pure practice.” Alyssa set the glasses on her face. They were a bit too big for her and the lenses did have some minor refraction going on. Like prescription glasses. Not ideal, but something she could work on for next time. Taking off the glasses, she handed them over to Irulon for inspection.

As Irulon turned them over and over, tried them on, and bent the frame enough to break the brittle iron, Alyssa had a thought.

“Oh. Oh no.”

“Hm?”

“If I have to know the process of creation…”

“Ah… Well, a living body is created through—”

“I know how a baby is formed,” Alyssa cut in with a glare, noticing a slight smile tugging at the corners of Irulon’s lips. Taking a deep breath, she sighed. “But I suppose I’ll have to do a bit more in-depth research into the topic.”