Oliver sighed in relief as the last portion of bone he needed finally gave way into a powder.

  He'd successfully created three Metal-oriented wands, and a handful of incomplete blanks, the day before with one of the most hackneyed methods he'd ever used. But! Some test casting had indicated it should work for him.

  It just wouldn't be pretty.

  Still, just a wand wouldn't be enough unless he also had elemental Metal mana to manipulate. Fortunately, that was something he could do fairly reliably. That he was working with bio-sourced copper... actually, it probably didn't matter in this context. But in other situations, he would have been thrilled.

  Copper that had innate ties to Life or Beast elements could be quite useful in other rituals, but right now... all he needed was the Metal side of the copper. Besides, if this world had anything particularly interesting going on with its metal-incorporating beasts, he’d learn about it in due time. Metal, like luminescence and intelligence, was one of those things that showed up in all sorts of ways in all forms of life.

  Alyssa’s face had been pretty amusing when he’d just torn into the droopnose bodies with his sharpened-fang knife – whatever wood the vinebeast fangs were made of was much stronger and sharpened way better than the wood most of the trees around here were made of, nevermind stones – because apparently she’d gotten it in her head that he was some kind of shirking daisy who couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Sure, the insides were a bit more mushy than they normally should be thanks to the force that came with dropping onto water from five hundred feet up, but that wasn’t that much of a difference.

  He was an enchanter, and that meant you needed to know how to get your hands dirty. He’d cut still-beating hearts out of goats before and he’d do it again. Just because he got a little tetchy about getting injured didn’t mean he disliked biology.

  That had been only at the start of the process anyway. Most of the meat had gone to their cookfire, something that had officially moved outside for the time being what with Oliver's constant tinkering with the interior First Flame, but the bones... those were all his. He didn't know how much copper he'd gotten in total, that was something to investigate and get excited about later, but he didn't need much for what he was doing now.

  A startled scream snagged Oliver's attention, and he flicked his eyes up towards where Alyssa had just woken up. Ah. It looked like she'd woken up to a rather large spider-like thing on her face and panicked as a result.

  Fair enough, honestly.

  Oliver looked back at his pile of ground coppery bone, sitting as it was in a slight concavity on a mostly-flat stone, and assessed it to ensure it was consistent enough for his purposes. There were a couple clumps that he ended up taking his crude pestle to grind a bit more finely, but for the most part it was fine.

  "You'll probably want to not be here for this," he told Alyssa. She looked at him for a moment, then left the shelter, leaving Oliver alone.

  He scooped up the copper-bone dust in a decent-sized leaf, and carefully lowered it into the First Flame. He nearly burned his hands doing so, but he yanked his fingers out of the way before he could actually get injured. That did result in the dust being less evenly added than he wanted, but... he could adjust.

  Showtime.

  [Scrollcast]

  "Blood and Ash, Metal and Wood, hear me! For I am Oliver Smith the [Erudite Enchanter], and I call you unto task!" He brandished his wand with a flourish. His wrist didn't hurt whatsoever at this point, and he couldn't have been more thrilled. He actually had a second wand for use slightly later in the process, but right now he needed the flexibility in his off-hand.

  "Within these walls, I claim this as a shelter for order and progress, away from the chaos and stagnation of the jungle. Metal, bind and fasten. The blood of the stones, the nails of wood, be one with all this all." The fire began to burn green, and traces of Metal joined the normal Fire and Technology output of the First Flame. He'd also messed up his incantation, a bit of a tongue-slip causing his words to be redundant in a bad way, but the Metal wand, for all that it was just a fancy fragment of metallic bone shoved inside the hollow tube, made repairing his little mistake easy enough.

  "This is a bunker in the war of progress against nature, the beating heart from which humanity may live and thrive. With this foundation of metal I shall build such great things, a rod, a staff..." he hesitated as he sensed the threads of the Tapestry coiling in ways he didn't know how to predict. He didn't know what he'd messed up, but whatever was happening wasn't supposed to.

  Waiting usually didn't do much to improve unfortunate snags of mana, but this time the oddity seemed to subside as Oliver hesitated. The delay caused an unfortunate degree of meltdown within his first Metal wand, and he was forced to discard it into the fire while he drew his second wand. The mana buckled in the swap-over, and though the new wand handled quite differently from the last one, Oliver managed to hot-swap his foci mid-ritual.

  It was a struggle to keep the spell active, though. He only managed it thanks to some fairly tricky and contortionistic motions of his body and his Technology wand, which he'd grabbed right before its Metal counterpart had failed. With a chopping motion, he managed to drag some Nature-feeling mana out of the way, clearing the way for his Metal to surge forth once more as the new wand took charge of the spell.

  "This foundation I form of metal, it is a place for humanity alone. In due time, the winds shall bar anything not of Man, and the day itself shall yield to my authority in this place."

  There it was again. Under normal conditions, he might well stop, but he was in too deep to back out now. He waited again, and though the effectiveness of his copper-bone dust fell with each passing second, he could only hope it would still be enough. Infuriatingly, the Metal wand he'd just pulled out was also starting to fail. He'd designed it with the assumption that it wouldn't need to store much mana, and these pauses in the ritual were causing its lifespan to be absolutely devoured.

  He discarded it, too, into the fire. It gave it a burst of renewed power as the Metal drained away from the ritual, the coppery smoke escaping into the thin air as he was forced to wait for the magic to cooperate.

  By the time this new swell of mana eventually subsided, and Oliver began working again, he was worried about his third Metal wand as well. This was his last one, and losing it would mean the entire ritual had been wasted, and he'd need to start from scratch... not exactly, because the ritual would do something, and he'd need to figure out what it had done before he could even start from nothing.

  So he needed to be careful. He had a bit of a theory that something about his This, a word which could be literally translated as 'spellbook,' wasn't playing nicely with the Tapestry on account of the normal threads which knew how to handle 'signature spells' being underdeveloped. There were alternatives... but better to avoid it altogether. He truly couldn't afford to lose this last wand.

  "Wrought of copper in the heart of sacrifice, a First Flame blazes forth and claims its due. The light it casts bathes the walls around me with all that is needed to create such wonders, the foundations upon which defenses and tools shall be created."

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  It was a good thing he didn't need power for this ritual, because he was dealing with practically a whisper of Metal left. The greenish light of burning copper covered the interior of Shelter, and was diluted under the eternal daylight beyond that, but for all that it was weak... it was enough.

  It would have to be enough.

  The faintest traces of Metal remained, and Oliver did his best to weave them into the structure of Shelter and define the line that separated the protected area from the pond before it was too late. He just barely succeeded, and he was left panting from the magical exertion involved.

  But, the foundation was set. Now, he just needed to build the Mana-Smoothing Ward that everything else depended on. His plan had been to take this slowly and to properly assess what had happened with his Metal foundation... but he didn't trust what he'd done to hold up a couple of days without further reinforcement.

  He took a drink of water for his throat, grabbed his Arcane wand, and started his work.

  [Cogniprint]

  Immediately, he hit a snag as the magic rebelled beneath him, a lump of hard-to-identify mana... Wood, binding Air and Earth? It suddenly swelled up from the core of the recently-felled tree, bursting out of the internal mana patterns in an attempt to create a spherical lump right where he wanted to place a glyph.

  In response, Oliver spun up a [Scrollcast] in his right hand, forcing his fingers to painfully contort themselves into the right shape. It wasn’t a true spell, just a single motion that drew enough Fire mana from the nearby First Flame to between his fingers that he could ‘burn off’ the intruding Wood. Without that acting as a binder, the Air and Earth split apart harmlessly into a mere puff of dust.

  Oliver would have breathed a sigh of relief, but that would have disrupted his casting.

  “You have protected the forest with your sheltering branches, been a source of stability for the soil beneath you and the winds above you. You have granted shade and respite from the harsh light around you, your leaves blanketing the floor and your fruits feeding the creatures that come to you.”

  He was tracing a Shelter glyph with his wand when his hand slipped and accidentally severed a portion of the magical flow running up the trunk. The Technology and Arcane mana bunched up and coiled on each end, preparing to snap altogether in a way that would drag the seven glyphs he’d already placed completely out of order and interrupt his binding circle.

  “You stand here as a continuation of that, a new sentinel for the forerunners of humanity, a new breed of creature,” he tried. Some of the surrounding threads of mana strengthened in response, but the one he’d damaged wasn’t mending itself. That thread was… Binding and Light, maybe?

  “Your connection to the bright skies above stands unsevered,” he breathed a sigh of relief at the thread starting to mend, “And it is there which you will draw your constancy from. For just as surely as the light in the sky never wavers, so too will you never waver in your vigilance, a sentinel and bulwark against the chaotic darkness that is the forest.”

  The thread was still a bit fragile, but it was stable enough that Oliver felt confident enough in moving on, and he traced the appropriate glyphs into the wood to match what he’d just weaved into the enchantment. Just because it hadn’t been planned from the outset, and only was integrated due to his screw-up with the enchantment didn’t mean anything. That particular invocation of Light and Binding was now distinctly part of the enchantment, and he couldn’t take that back. So, to keep the enchantment stable, he also needed to make sure it was reflected in the glyphs he was imprinting.

  Unfortunately, that threw off the glyphic pattern he had planned for, but he could adapt. It wasn’t actually disharmonious for a mana stabilizer to include Binding.

  “Within your shade, you will be the guidepost by which all magic flows. The Tapestry is tied to your branches, and the same solidity that you brought to the creatures that called you home will now be granted to the magic worked within your shelter.”

  Suddenly, the magic in the tree went absolutely wild. Oliver wasn’t entirely certain what had happened, but he allowed his instincts to guide his incantation as he redirected his focus to his hands, attempting to manually weave the strands back together.

  There was a thread of Dark mana, and it had gotten tangled with Light somehow, and now they were rejecting each other?

  Oh dang it. That had probably been because of his invocation of Light to fix the severed thread from before. By officially tying it into his enchantment, he’d also tied it into the concept of shadow, which had Associations to elemental Dark, and the way he’d tried to weave them together hadn’t gone well. They’d passed through one another in one spot and were rejecting each other like magnets in another.

  With his right hand, Oliver carefully drew the tangled knot of mana out of the tree branch, then carefully poked his wand through the gaps in his fingers to tease the threads open and re-weave them.

  With his right hand he ‘held’ the threads apart, separating the light from darkness by very painfully holding his thumb at the bottom of the ‘v’ between his little and ring finger, then wedging his pointer finger underneath his thumb and keeping his middle and ring finger as straight as possible held tightly next to one another. His hand trembled, and his wrist screamed at him, but he only needed to hold it long enough to 'remind' the Light that the Dark was its complement, present in all the places it wasn’t, and that the Dark did not need to be anywhere the Light was. It was technically a technique to get elemental Shadow, not Dark to cooperate with Light, but it was the first thing that came to mind so he was making it work!

  “...Breathing in the air of eternity and casting down roots into infinity,” he finally started paying attention to what he was saying again, cast his mind back enough to remember what new runes he’d need to include alongside his Light-and-Dark cooperation glyphs, cast them into the tree trunk, and kept going.

  The bottom of the tree was starting to glow a purplish-blue, and golden embers were beginning to spark off his wand, so even without relying on his arcanoception Oliver knew he didn’t have long left to get the enchantment working. His mistakes had cost him a lot of time, and now he needed to wrap it up.

  “With this blessing I bestow upon you,” he truncated a lot of nuance, but changing the angle between two of his written glyphs could help jury-rig the ending. “I grant you the authority and the responsibility to be a home for myself and my compatriots, the foundation upon which all our future success shall be borne from, the roots from which we will grow and blossom to fill out the entire planet.”

  He had more to say, mostly minor additions to help with the longevity and tweaking the ways in which the mana-stabilizer would work, but he could feel that the wand was not going to last very long, so he had to cut it short and hope that it was good enough.

  “This is my bind and my charge. Rest and be sturdy, be stable for me and hold for all eternity, a bulwark against your past leading into your future.”

  He finished the binding circle, and as soon as he did so, threw the wand as far away from himself as possible, into the pond. The moment it glanced against the water, a blue-gold silent explosion of lightning and flowers erupted from the wand, leaving the water steaming slightly in that spot.

  Oliver sat down with a sigh. That was too close, but it seemed like it worked? It would take some time before the enchantment came into full effectiveness, as it needed to fully settle, then essentially infiltrate the surrounding Tapestry and route it through itself, and even then it might take some time before there was actual stability rather than just slightly dampened turbulence, but he didn’t spot any critical errors made on the enchantment itself.

  The stones he was laying on felt warm, though. So very warm. And surprisingly comfortable. And for all that it called to him oh so very powerfully to just close his eyes and sleep to recover... he still had work to do.

  Oliver grunted a bit as he got to his feet. There was still so much he needed to do before this place was properly ready to make the kind of staff he'd need, and he couldn't stop yet. The question was, what would be next...

  An insect buzzed close to his ear, making him flinch, and though his instinctive flailing didn't kill it, he knew what was next up on his to-do list.

  Air conditioning.

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