The Helios Spire

The Helios Spire

The next morning, Kaelen roused his companions from the four homes in which the grateful villagers had lodged them. Alster was already outside the house where he had been billeted, crouching in its front garden and poking through the soil.

“Morning, Alster.”

“Good morning, O Great Leader!” Alster fired back.

“What are you doing? Pulling weeds as payment?”

“Not at all. This fine family, fifth-generation Solaryn by the way, has somehow grown a root vegetable native to the Verdant Expanse. How it arrived here is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it fell from a griffon’s foot.” He brushed soil from a white, knotted root. “Gernat root. A natural coagulant and an extremely useful plant.”

“We could have used that yesterday.”

“I am not sure they know what it is or what properties it has. None of them has ever left this village, so why would they?”

“Did you get breakfast?”

“Yes. A delightful local variety of soured gulather milk and a spicy pancake heavily fried in linkseed oil.”

“I was not asking for a review. I only wanted to know whether you were ready.”

“Right. Of course. Entirely ready. Let me wash my hands.”

“Where are Tajan and Blena?”

“In the third house on the left, the one with the merrypetals in front.”

Kaelen walked away muttering, “Do I look like I know what a merrypetal is?”

Then, much louder, he called back, “I will fetch them. Meet us here in .2 time.”

Once gathered, the company set out towards their best hope of understanding the magnetic pulse and the fluctuations within the ancient towers: the Helios Spire.

With the village safe and the most important meal of the day settling uneasily in their stomachs, they followed Tajan along the quickest route. She had learned it from their newfound friends, who spoke in strong local Solaryn so rapidly that even she had struggled to follow them. Alster claimed this proved the villagers had been discussing something exciting. Blena suspected they simply wanted the strangers who had brought a griffon and several dozen panicked reptiles into their lives to leave by the shortest possible road.

By late afternoon, the closest location marked upon Ruodoon’s star map rose above the trees.

The Helios Spire had stood for centuries and was believed to be the oldest solar observatory in Aethoria. Its golden stone tower narrowed as it climbed, encircled by vast mirrored rings and crystal lenses. The rings turned almost imperceptibly with the passing Day Star, gathering light and directing it into the machinery within.

Solaryn scholars prided themselves upon the science that carried their society forward. Places such as the Spire were both museums and living instruments, preserving ancient knowledge while continuing to test, measure and expand it.

Tajan stopped when the observatory came fully into view.

“That, my friends, is where knowledge is discovered.”

“Then they send it to libraries to die,” Blena said.

She had performed well enough in school, but believed most lessons improved considerably once they involved physical danger.

The company entered through tall brass doors and found themselves inside a bright, glimmering chamber. A Solaryn Observer immediately raised one hand and pointed upwards. He dragged a finger across his lips, warning them to remain silent.

They followed his gaze.

A Veylborn drifted among the enormous gears and wheels that guided the Spire’s exterior rings. Pale light trailed behind her as she moved, breaking into brief sparks around the turning machinery.

The chamber was cavernous. Every footfall, whisper and scrape against the floor returned from the walls as a softened echo. Above them, timber gears rolled and creaked against toothed brass rims. Thick ropes of braided metal disappeared through openings in the ceiling, while polished shafts turned with a slow, resonant moan.

Plants had escaped from clay pots arranged around the chamber. Roots split their containers and burrowed between the floor stones. Green and purple vines climbed the walls, wound around railings and sent out searching tendrils that seemed to lengthen as the company watched.

Another Observer stepped forward. Her eyes settled upon Tajan, the only Solaryn among them, and recognition brightened her face.

“Tajan! I am glad to see you. Were you sent to help? First the plants, then the Veylborn and now you. Extraordinary! Do you remember me from your second year? I was Teacher Biota then. Observer Biota now.”

“Observer Biota. I am surprised you remember me. There were thirty students in that class, and most knew far more than I did.”

“You were one of my doers, not one of my seers. You could wield the power of crystals most ably.” Biota clasped Tajan’s hands. “It warms my heart to see you, but what brings you so far from Helion if not our little infestation?”

“I have been rather busy travelling since I graduated from Helion Third Mage Academy. I will tell you about it when we have time.”

“No time? What are you doing that robs you of our most precious asset?”

“It is a long story, but boiled down to bones, a Veylborn directed us here.”

“Good. Then you are here to take care of this.” Biota pointed towards the vines overhead. “Any more growth and the gears will seize. If the rings cannot turn, we cannot follow the Day Star.”

Anderix had stopped listening. Biota and Tajan were speaking Solaryn, and the mechanism orchestrating the Spire’s daily movement had claimed his complete attention.

The great exterior rings rotated upon a plane of interlocking wooden gears. Their teeth had been cut with remarkable precision and reinforced at the points of greatest strain with brass. At the centre of the chamber, a crystal larger than Anderix’s torso hung within a cradle of curved metal straps. Braided cables descended from it into the floor. Sunlight entered through the lenses above, refracted within the crystal and emerged from a lower facet as a concentrated column of golden-white light.

“Remarkable,” Anderix said in Common Tongue. “How long has this machine been operating?”

Biota turned towards the unfamiliar voice. Her eyes widened when she saw the metal surrounding his eye and forearm.

“Hello, my boy. Are you from the Mechanum Ascendancy?” She looked him up and down, then leaned closer to inspect his eye augmentation. She tapped on his lens gently. Remarkable.. you mysterious neighbors, like us but not at all like us. Old accounts describe Mechanum mages sharing knowledge during the earliest construction of the Spire. You did not hear that from me, though. What brings you to Solaryn?”

“I am with Tajan.”

“Oh.” Biota smiled. “Congratulations, Tajan.”

Tajan froze and ran the conversation backwards through her mind.

Blena looked from Tajan to Anderix and then towards Drue. “Oh, he is, is he?”

Tajan flushed. “No. That is not what he meant. Common Tongue is his second language.”

“Third, actually,” Anderix said. “My second language was Thalorian. We were required to select one in lower school.”

Blena could not help herself. “Tajan, you would think you might know that sort of thing about the person you are ‘with.’”

“Will you stop?” Tajan hissed.

She turned quickly back to Biota. “He means that we are all working together on behalf of the High Council of Kefar.  Then to get things moving, back on track and away from the awkward movement as quickly as possible she continued without pause. “We are investigating anomalies in crystal energy. We encountered a Veylborn at the tower on Ruodoon, where the crystals were fluctuating.”

“Really?” Biota’s amusement vanished beneath professional interest. “Go on.”

“Since the tower awakened, vegetation has grown out of control and displayed ethereal properties,” Tajan explained.

“Actually,” Alster added, stepping towards a cluster of green and purple leaves, “there were plants much like these inside the tower. Obviously they were not arranged in pots, but the growth and colour were similar.”

“They are clogging our equipment,” Biota said. “Whenever we cut them back, they return stronger.”

Kaelen immediately offered the assistance of the entire company. Biota accepted before anyone else had an opportunity to object.

“Wait,” Kaelen said as the Veylborn above them entered a clearer phase. “Is that Gertina?”

Everyone looked up. Some squinted, trying to bring the wavering figure into focus.

“Who is Gertina?” Anderix asked.

Alster recognized her first. He cupped his hands around his mouth.

“Gertina! What ails you?”

“How do you know something ails her?” Tajan asked.

“I don’t. Look at the way she is moving and flashing in and out of view. Does she look happy to you?” Alster gestured upwards. “You are welcome to question her. What would you ask the floating woman made of light whom we met in the Argent Isles and who is somehow now here? These things make the hair on my head stand up.”

His agitation stripped the humour from his voice. They could tell that he was genuinely afraid.

Gertina stopped.

Her head turned towards Alster.

She plunged from the machinery in a streak of white-green light and halted a few centimetres from his face.

Alster’s breath caught. Every hair upon his head and arms lifted as though drawn towards her.

Gertina spoke in fragments, each word arriving at a slightly different pitch.

“Light enters...sher.... The Crystal receives a resol.... Then Ground channel alignment carries partic.....”

Her eyes flashed gold, then violet.

“Magnetic returns..... unstable. Harmonic ...bio.....saturation is..... Moderator of .....path.....absent. Pulse...stru... exceeds vessel.”

“Which vessel?” Kaelen asked.

Gertina’s hand passed through the air beside Alster’s cheek. Sparks jumped between her fingers and the leaves climbing the wall.

“Crystal lattice .....cannot hold excess....... Energy seeks .......channel.... Living patterns........ accepts flow..... Root to Leaf..... Root. Leaf. Too fast.”

The vines around them trembled. New shoots uncurled from their stems.

“What is causing the pulse?” Tajan called.

“Light calibrates to ........crystal . Crystal focus to ground modulati....magnetic......Then .....ground to life. Return broken. Flux without measure. Channel without moderation. Overload becomes growth. Growth becomes collapse.”

“There are words in there that I recognize,” Blena said quietly. “I do not enjoy what she is doing with them.”

Gertina’s energy appeared to flow into and out of the plants. Wherever her light touched a stem, leaves unfolded and roots pressed farther between the stones.

Anderix struggled to follow the exchange.

“Is this what a Veylborn looks like?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

Kaelen answered, remembering that Anderix had not joined them during the first expedition to the Alfadin Tower.

“Rintaron believed Gertina could use her connection with the natural world to communicate through living plants.”

Gertina rose from Alster and flickered around the chamber, phasing in and out of view. Plants spilled from every pot. Their roots filled gaps between stones, while purple leaves opened, darkened and fell almost as quickly as new ones replaced them.

Anderix turned a dial on his eye augmentation. Its lenses rotated, trying to focus upon her.

“Is she a projection or some form of photonic being?”

No one answered.

Gertina, who had ignored most of their conversation since alarming Alster, stopped again.

“Photonic,” she repeated.

She appeared beside Anderix with no transition between one place and the other. Only half of her body was visible. She had no legs, and one arm moved in and out of sight as though an unseen surface divided it.

“Not photonic,” she said.

“Then what are you?” Anderix asked.

Gertina studied him, or perhaps studied the machinery attached to him.

“Your sight follows surface. Length. Breadth. Height.”

She drew a glowing circle in the air.

“Place sphere through flat world. Flat ones see point. Then circle growing. Then circle shrinking. Then nothing.”

The circle widened until it surrounded Anderix’s head, then contracted into a spark and vanished.

“Sphere remains,” Gertina continued. “Flat sight receives only crossings.”

Anderix stared at the place where the light had disappeared.

“Are you saying that we see only the part of you crossing through us?”

“You see boundary. Not an entirety you're....missing the whole.”

For the first time since entering the Spire, Anderix had no immediate reply.

Gertina turned towards the central crystal. Her shape stretched into several overlapping forms before drawing together again.

“Channel floods. Moderator does not answer. Light descends. Ground returns. Root absorbs. Vessel empties. Vessel fills. Pulse. Collapse.”

She released a low groan that seemed to vibrate inside the crystal rather than in the air.

Then she faded from view.

Kaelen leaned towards Alster. “And yet again, we understand less and less.”

Gertina’s voice echoed from somewhere inside the chamber.

“Understand.”

Kaelen frowned. “Oh, certainly. They can understand us, but...”

He did not finish. Alster, who had begun examining the roots, interrupted him.

“These are all one plant. Look.”

He pointed to a crack in the floor where several root systems had fused into a single thick strand before disappearing into the stone.

“Well, they were not one plant originally,” he added, “but they are now.”

“What lies beneath the observatory?” Tajan asked.

“Machine rooms for the reticle, sextant and astrolabe,” Biota replied. “There are also storage chambers, staff housing, student rooms and washrooms. That is about it.”

“Mind if we take a look?” Kaelen asked.

“Please,” Biota said. “Anything you need.”

The stairs beneath the Helios Spire were worn into shallow curves where generations of feet had fallen. Kaelen could not help thinking of the great Observers who had descended them as students. Even with a task before him, he felt the privilege of entering the hidden workings of one of Aethoria’s oldest scientific instruments.

“Do not step there,” Alster warned. “It looks slippery.”

Kaelen lowered his foot and saw green and purple residue coating the stone.

Alster crouched beside it. “The entire life cycle of these plants has accelerated. They are growing quickly, but they are also dying and decaying at the same rate.”

Black, green and purple biomass covered the lower chamber. Porous roots had broken through the ceiling and appeared to be drawing the decaying matter upwards. In the centre of the room, a crystal as long as a person’s arm pulsed with rapid white light. Thick roots converged upon the soil packed around its base.

Tajan turned to Biota. “Is that the power sink for the astrolabe and the observatory crystal above?”

“Yes,” Biota replied despondently. “It has never behaved like this.”

Alster repeated “power sink” and “astrolabe” in an exaggerated scholarly tone while waggling his head at Blena. She covered her mouth, but not before a laugh escaped.

Kaelen leaned between them.

“At least Tajan knows what they are for,” he whispered.

He left them with the stern look of a father reprimanding unruly children, which only made Blena’s shoulders shake harder.

The roots around the crystal joined into one swollen mass. Every pulse of white light travelled through it, briefly illuminating veins inside the stems above. Whatever the plant had once been, it was now feeding upon the accelerated crystal.

Blena looked from the root to the others.

“Not sure what to do? Solve the immediate problem, then move on to the next one.”

She drew her sword.

“Wait,” Alster began.

Blena hacked through the base of the root.

Everyone stopped.

Drue looked towards the ceiling in case the basement was about to collapse. Anderix listened for changes in the machinery above. Alster looked as though he might cry.

For one long moment, nothing happened.

Then the severed roots recoiled from the crystal. Their inner surfaces flashed white before darkening. Cut off from the soil surrounding the power sink, the plants above were left with only the meagre sustenance available in their pots. The crystal’s frantic pulse slowed.

“I am glad you knew what to do,” Alster said.

Blena cleaned her blade. “What I did worked. That is not the same as knowing what to do.”

When they returned upstairs to assess the results of Blena’s botanical pruning, the change was already visible. Tendrils withdrew from the moving gears. New leaves opened more slowly, and several roots loosened their grip upon the railings.

Biota ordered the Spire’s rings held in their current position while Anderix examined the central cradle and Tajan compared the rhythm of the upper crystal with the power sink below. Alster collected samples from the living roots, fallen leaves and decaying residue. Kaelen recorded their observations. Drue and Blena kept the vines away from the machinery, though Blena was forbidden from cutting anything else without permission.

“An unreasonable restriction,” she said.

“A necessary advancement in botanical science,” Alster replied.

By evening, the company of investigators sat around a fire outside the observatory. Kaelen had called a reflection meeting to put together what they had learned and they could soon see a pattern had emerged.

Sunlight entered the upper crystal through the Spire’s lenses. The crystal changed that light into an energy that travelled through the cables into the grounded power sink below. From there, channels beneath the tower were meant to carry it onwards or return what the system did not use.

Something within that crystal had stopped regulating the amount of energy moving through it and based on a reflection on what Gertina had said they determined magnetic waves had something to do with it. Anderix had helpfully reminded them that they had no tool for proving that as the waves were invisible but that Mechanum scientists were using magnetic metals and objects to experiment with this that could show that it is a real power. He then went on to share what he knew about energy.

“Energy does not simply disappear when a crystal cannot contain it,” Anderix explained, drawing a series of arrows across one of Kaelen’s pages. “It moves into whatever channel remains available. In this case, the roots entered the soil around the power sink and became part of the circuit.”

“The plants drank the excess,” Alster said.

“That is imprecise.”

“It is also understandable.”

Tajan tapped the final arrow. “The light moved from the Day Star into the upper crystal, then into the ground and from the ground into the plants. Without something magnetic moderating the flow, every stage received more power than it was meant to hold.”

“Which explains the growth,” Kaelen said.

“And the decay,” Alster added. “Their entire life cycle was being forced forward. More life in less time does not mean longer life.”

Drue glanced towards the observatory windows, where the last sunlight had begun to fade and it began to reflect the light of their fire. “Would that feeling of the energy wave we felt above the village be the cause?”

No one answered immediately.

“It could be connected and part of the cause but this has been happening for a long time,” Anderix said at last.  “Like a year?” suspected Kaelen Anderix went on, “A system releasing excess energy might produce a magnetic disturbance. But we have one observation and no measurements from the village. We should not call it a conclusion.”

Kaelen looked at the crowded pages in his journal. “A working explanation, then. The ancient sites collect and move energy. That energy must be moderated. When it is not, the imbalance spreads into whatever channels are available.”

“Towers, crystals, plants, the ground itslef,” Blena said. “Anything else?”

“Probably,” Alster replied. “But let us not invite it.”

They agreed to remain at the Spire for two more days. They would observe the crystals through a complete cycle of daylight, measure the rate of the pulse and determine whether the severed plant attempted to reconnect with the power sink. Biota had offered them rooms normally reserved for visiting scholars and promised access to the observatory records.

The next day Kaelen sat at a long table beneath the turning gears and began drafting a report to the High Council.

He wrote one sentence, crossed out half of it and stared at the remainder.

“We have learned something,” he said. “I am simply not certain how to explain what it is.”

Anderix pulled up a chair. “I will help draft the technical sections.”

Alster looked over Kaelen’s shoulder. “And I will translate Anderix’s technical sections back into Common Tongue.”

“My Common Tongue is entirely adequate.”

“You introduced yourself by telling people that you were ‘with Tajan.’”

Tajan covered her face with both hands.

Blena leaned across the table. “The report is simple. Plants attacked important machine. I attacked plant. Important machine survived.”

“That is not a report,” Kaelen said.

“It has cause, action and result.”

“It also makes you the central figure.”

“Then it is accurate.”

Drue laughed from beside the window. Above him, the mirrored rings of the Helios Spire resumed their slow pursuit of the Day Star’s final light.

Kaelen looked around the table at the ink, plant samples, diagrams and exhausted faces. Their explanation was incomplete, but it was measurable. For the first time since leaving Kefar, he possessed more than rumours, warnings and fragments of ancient speech.

He dipped his pen again.

“Working theory,” he said. “We begin there.”

Thy Quest: Beyond the Surface
Gertina compares her existence to a sphere passing through a flat world. Create a labelled diagram showing what a being on the flat surface would observe as the sphere passed through its world. Use that to explain what Gertina may mean when she tells Anderix, “You see boundary. Not whole.”