Through the Snow

Through the Snow

The officer received them at the gangplank. He stood rigid against the grey sea light, his dark Mechanum uniform immaculate, flanked by two armed guards whose crystal-lensed scopes tracked every movement on the pier.

“Citizen Anderix Velta.”

“Yes.”

“You will surrender your equipment for inspection.” The officer’s gesture was sharp, pointing toward the heavy canvas-wrapped pack slung across Anderix’s shoulder.

“After you confirm the conditions of Blena’s release.” Anderix did not shift his posture or unstrap the backpack.

“The conditions are stated.”

“They are incomplete.”

The officer glanced at Tajan, taking in her Solaryn travelling robes and the deliberate, quiet way she held herself beside the fugitive scholar.

“The Solaryn national may remain ashore.”

“No,” Anderix said.

Tajan looked at him, her eyes widening slightly at his sudden firmness.

The officer did too, his jaw tightening.

Anderix continued in the same measured voice, unhurried and precise.

“She accompanies me. She remains with me during the investigation. Her equipment is retained under supervised access, and both foreign nationals receive written permission to depart.”

“That is not within your authority.”

“My cooperation is.”

The officer’s gaze sharpened, his hand resting near the side mechanism of his belt.

“You are required to return.”

“You have sent a vessel instead of a retrieval party. You want something. You want information that only I know. If you intended to shackle me, your guards would have stepped forward before I reached the third plank.”

A paddle housing knocked softly against the hull as a sea surge lifted the dark ship.

Behind them, dockworkers, fishmongers, and curiosity-seekers had begun gathering along the harbour railing, whispering as they observed the tense standoff.

Tajan stood beside Anderix, matching his steady, resolute stance.

“I would also like those conditions in writing,” she said, her tone smooth and unwavering.

The officer looked between them, calculating the publicity of the crowd and the cost of delay.

Then he turned on his heel and went inside.

• • •

The Southern Electric Fields spread beneath a colourless morning sky, stretching outward in a stark expanse of industrialized wire and stone.

Tajan had expected rolling grass, but everywhere around her was the undeniable signs of massive energy being harnessed and natural life being constrained. Dense plumes of white steam billowed continuously from the exhaust vents atop multi-story metal buildings that rose impossibly high into the overcast haze. Sleek, angular vehicles glided smoothly along paved roads on quiet, rapidly spinning wheels without needing the push or pull of draft animals. Endless, uniform rows of iron lattice towers stood rooted across the pale, barren ground, linked together by heavy black wires that sagged beneath their own weight between tall ceramic supports. Deep blue light flickered rhythmically inside locked, fenced crystal housings spaced along the perimeter. The surrounding air hummed softly with a low, continuous electrical vibration that almost disappeared from notice…until a heavy iron perimeter gate groaned open and the pitch shifted sharply.

Farther south, long rows of low, windowless stone buildings pressed tightly against a jagged outcrop of dark, weathered rock.

Armed guards carefully inspected their documents at three separate checkpoint doors. An officer argued endlessly over Tajan’s special clearance papers, questioning what higher authority could have possibly permitted a foreigner so far into the secure heart of the crestrealm. Many of the border personnel had never even met a Solaryn before, pausing to stare in unmasked curiosity before snapping back to attention to resume their rigid civic roles.

At the very edge of the Southern Electric Fields…where jagged forks of silent blue lightning discharged almost constantly into the ground without rain or wind…..Subordinate-Leader Rolix waited in stiff silence.

Anderix stopped several paces away.

“I remember your office being higher,” he observed, looking past him.

“Your circumstances have changed,” Rolix replied coldly.

“So have yours, apparently,” Anderix noted.

Rolix shifted his gaze to Tajan.

She offered a pleasant, composed smile.

It did not help thaw the tension.

They were escorted into a stark room containing a long metal table, two quiet scientists, and no windows to the outside world.

The older scientist stepped forward and introduced herself as the director of the primary receiving laboratory.

“Your observations,” she requested directly.

“Blena,” Anderix countered flatly.

“She is currently being brought here,” the director replied.

“Then we will wait,” Anderix said.

Rolix folded his hands tightly behind his back.

Tajan pulled out a heavy chair and sat beside Anderix.

For once, his unyielding stillness was remarkably useful.

• • •

The heavy latch clicked, and the reinforced metal door swung open with a slow, deliberate groan.

Blena stood framed in the threshold between two stiff-backed Mechanum attendants. She was wearing unfamiliar, coarse grey clothing that seemed three sizes too large for her, and her face bore an expression Tajan had last seen directed at a particularly stubborn locked door during their misadventures in Roudoon—a mixture of fierce independence and sheer refusal to yield.

A dark, yellowing bruise traced the hard line of her jaw, evidence of her sudden, violent arrival through the ring.

Her left wrist was tightly wrapped in sterile linen bandages. For a long, fragile heartbeat, no one in the room dared to speak; even the soft hum of the surrounding electrical conduits seemed to recede into the background. Then, unable to contain herself, Tajan crossed the room in swift, eager strides.

Blena caught her in a fiercely tight embrace with her good arm. “Oh, thank the Veylborn,” she whispered, her breath hitching slightly against Tajan’s shoulder.

Tajan held her carefully at first, mindful of the bandaged arm, but then held her with less restraint as Blena pulled her even closer, burying her face into her shoulder.

Anderix had risen from his seat, though he initially hesitated beside his chair, his usual rigid decorum holding him back. Over Tajan’s shoulder, Blena met his gaze directly.

“Well?” she demanded, a hint of her usual iron-willed spark cutting through her exhaustion.

Taking the prompt, Anderix immediately closed the remaining distance between them, wrapping his arms around Blena in a warm, uncharacteristically emotional embrace. Nearby, his father and every Mechanum officer in the room hastily cast their eyes downward, pretending not to witness such an unrestrained display from one of their own towards an outsider. His arms did not remain stiffly at his sides as they usually did during his more controlled, formal interactions; he held her tightly, as if confirming she was truly made of flesh and blood.

When they finally separated, Blena quickly pulled back and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

“If either of you dares to comment on the dust that somehow got into my eyes just now, I will deny it to all and sundry,” she insisted, her voice trembling slightly despite her best efforts.

Tajan’s expression sobered as she gripped Blena’s good hand. “Where is Kaelen?” she asked quietly.

Blena’s face changed instantly, the momentary warmth vanishing behind a shadow of profound distress.

“At the tower,” she murmured.

“What tower?” Tajan asked, her pulse quickening.

“Well, I hope he is not still in the Dereliction lands, north of the Sentinels in Ironroot Bastion where I left him—though in truth, he probably is,” Blena answered, her gaze fixing on the floor.

Anderix drew a sharp, audible breath.

Blena looked up at him, her eyes wide and haunted.

“We were leaving,” she explained, her voice wavering. “We had finally agreed to turn back and leave that place.”

Her voice thinned to a fragile thread around the last word.

She began detailing the surprising events at the ruins: the damaged stone ring, the heavy collar, and how her own sword had been used to warp and be bent into its metallic curve. She spoke of the ancient water channels suddenly surging beneath the floorboards, and how Kaelen’s blue power crystal was violently yanked from his grip into the central mounting.

“He stumbled as the floor shook,” she recalled, her words coming faster now. “I tried to steady him. My foot slipped on the wet stone.”

Her good hand clenched tightly around the edge of the metal table until her knuckles turned white.

“There was a sudden, blinding wave of blue light.”

Tajan sat back down beside her, taking her shoulder.

“And then?”

“And then I was falling. I landed flat on a drafting table in this very building—broke the frame entirely. Frightened a poor scholar who was drawing a gear wheel and a diagram that looked shockingly like the remains of the tower we had just been exploring.”

Across the room, the younger scientist shifted uncomfortably and dropped his gaze to the floor.

Blena noticed his gesture.

“Yes,” she added softly. “Him.”

“Kaelen did not follow through the ring?” Anderix asked, his voice low.

She shook her head slowly, tears brimming in her eyes.

“As the light collapsed, I could only see his hand reaching out.”

No one in the room spoke; a heavy, solemn silence fell over them all.

“I keep remembering that part,” she whispered.

• • •

Anderix spread the Alderat drawings across the table in front of some of the Mechanum Ascendancy's brightest minds. His father was among them but Anderix saw that as a form of Control rather than a promotion to his fathers position.

He explained the conduits first. Some with movement of heat in Lava tunnels, some with water as in Alfadin but all with methods of energy extraction.

Then the ring’s broken sections, its intermittent activity, the incoming voices and the repeated signal. Tajan supplied the pattern she had noticed. Together, they described the repeated signals they have determined were a response from the pulses of the towers. Then they mentioned the original investigation they were tasked with. To determine why Alfadin's power fluctuations were causing a decreased ability of Heartwell to recharge the crestrealm’s Primary Crystals.

The scientists asked increasingly precise questions seeking details, some of which Anderix had a rudimentary understanding of and others of which he had only a witness account. Anderix stopped midway through explaining the inner contact channels.

“You already know what this symbol means.”

The director glanced at Rolix.

Anderix laid down his pencil.

“You have known throughout this discussion.”

“We have a provisional interpretation.”

“Based on what?”

“Restricted observations.”

Tajan leaned forward.

“He has just told you everything we risked our lives to learn.”

Rolix spoke.

“Foreign access to this work is exceptional.”

“So is arriving through your wall,” Blena said. “Yet here I am.”

The director studied Anderix’s drawings.

Then she turned one towards herself and touched the ring.

“We have one.”

Anderix did not move.

“How long?”

The director’s finger remained on the page.

“Years.”

• • •

The receiving chamber occupied the oldest, most deeply buried part of the underground complex, built directly into the bedrock of Old Mechanum.

Modern, high-pressure steam pipes and heavy conduit lines crossed a vaulted ceiling of ancient black stone, sweating condensation into the cool air. Steel walkways suspended by thick iron cables surrounded a floor worn completely smooth by forgotten footfalls long before the Ascendancy had erected stone walls around it.

At the very centre of the sunken floor stood the colossal artifact: a massive circular ring of dull metal. Braided bundles of copper wires, each thicker than a grown man's legs, hung down from the ceiling rafters, connecting directly into the ring's outer housing like thick industrial tendons.

Its interior surface did not hold air; instead, it shone with continuous, shifting bands of liquid light that hummed with a deep, chest-vibrating resonance.

Within the aperture of the ring, framed like a living window, a distant room appeared in staggering detail.

It was a bright, expansive space, impossibly deep, containing rows of slender, polished machines and unfamiliar figures passing silently beyond the edge of view. High above a central work surface, something vast with many jointed, brass-tipped arms turned and adjusted itself with fluid precision.

At three angled wooden desks arranged along the upper platform, observers drew furiously, their charcoal pencils scraping over heavy sheets of drafting paper.

One observer called out a precise numerical measurement to his neighbor without raising his eyes from his work.

Another cleared his surface, set down a fresh sheet of paper, and immediately began tracing the outline of a moving joint visible in the projection.

Tajan stopped beside the rail.

“You have been watching this?”

“Continuously,” the director said. “In shifts for a number of years.”

Anderix approached a desk.

The papers held six drawings of the same mechanism from slightly different angles. Beneath them, calculations had been crossed out, rewritten and crossed out again.

“So you cannot ask what an item does when you observe it being used?”

“No.”

“And you cannot examine it other than closer visual observation.”

“No.”

“You watch someone use their machines and live their lives in that image and attempt to reconstruct the principles.”

“Yes.”

He looked towards the ring.

The device inside turned. One of its small hydraulic arms folded into a shape he recognised from his own eye petal assembly. His hand rose unconsciously to the leather strap that held it in place.

Tajan saw.

The director led them past cabinets containing scorched fragments of unfamiliar metal.

“These came from a cave in Old Mechanum. Tools, we believe. Components. Most were incomplete when recovered. They gave our predecessors something physical to test against the observations.”

“How much?” Anderix asked.

She looked at him.

“How much of our work began here?”

“Much of our advanced development.”

He stared through the glass.

“All those explanations about our superiority.”

“We built functioning machines from glimpses,” the director said. “Do not mistake the source for the work.”

“I am not.”

His voice was quiet.

“I am asking why we tell everyone else that they have nothing to teach us.”

Rolix remained beside the door.

“The source is a strategic asset. Disclosure would allow rival Crestrealms to close the technological gap.”

Tajan looked from the illuminated ring to the copied drawings.

“And when the gap is large enough?”

Rolix did not answer.

Blena did.

“Then they will find another reason.”

Inside the ring, a figure lifted an object.

Every observer bent towards the image.

Anderix watched them.

People building the future one hurried sketch at a time, forbidden to admit where they had first seen it.

“Until recently, it carried only light and sound,” the director said. “We had never received matter.”

Blena folded her arms.

“You are welcome.”

“The energy rose sharply before your arrival, the spike emptied our reserve in less than .01 time. Then the image vanished. The opening acquired depth and a new image of the tower we now know was in Ironroot Bastion appeared.”

“And this image now is of somewhere else in Aethoria, like a tower we don’t know about?,” Tajan asked.

“We don’t believe so. It is a workshop in a place and perhaps time we don’t understand. Our tests have included attempts to prompt items into the ring to see if they are absorbed or accepted but no item pushed into it meets the chamber beyond. Our instruments continue to detect incoming signals, but nothing we introduce is transmitted.”

“And Blena changed that?”

“Briefly.”

Blena looked at the ring.

“It was unintentional but since I was the first we should probably call it the Blena Ring?.”

• • •

They gave Anderix a workbench beside the observation rail.

His equipment was returned piece by piece and they returned a copy of his ledger to his hands. “I have a friend in Voltaris that is studying electric signals from crystals he would be very useful to us right now.”

“He arrives tomorrow and his clearance has already been approved.”

Tajan stood beside him while he compared their recorded pulse with the laboratory’s timing sheets. Blena sat close enough to see the ring without having to face it directly.

“Your reception cycle changed when Alderat woke,” Anderix said.

The director bent over the papers.

“Yes.”

“And again when the Dereliction ring completed its circuit.”

“That is the event we recorded.”

“Three sites,” Tajan murmured.

Anderix nodded.

Blena lifted her head.

“So it knew where to put me?”

“It may have established a destination,” he said.

“And it just happened to be in one of the friendliest places in Aethoria.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him, surprised by the absence of qualification.

He was already attaching a lead to the instrument.

“Can you reach Kaelen?”

“I can test whether there is an outgoing path.”

“That was a very careful answer.”

“It is the one I have.”

She nodded.

“Then test it.”

Tajan drew her chair beside the bench.

They were adjusting the final contact when the light in the ring changed.

The bright room vanished.

Snow appeared.

Tajan’s fingers stopped on the wire.

Beyond the circle stood three stone steles beneath a hard mountain sky.

Two peaks rose behind them.

“No,” she whispered.

Blena stood so abruptly that her chair struck the floor.

The image shifted.

A younger Kaelen stepped into view, moving until the mountains aligned between the stones.

Tajan heard her own voice.

“That line on the first stele lines up with the angle on Pinault…”

Her skin went cold.

There she was.

Standing in the snow.

Beside her, Alster turned his head.

Blena approached the rail.

“Those are the Alfadins.”

Anderix looked from the ring to their faces.

“Our first journey,” Tajan said. “The message on the stones.”

In the image, Rintaron came towards them, breathless from the climb.

Tajan remembered the cold. Her fingers aching inside her gloves. The small, fierce satisfaction of seeing the carved line meet the mountain.

She remembered what came next.

The image shuddered.

Snow became white streaks.

Then Kaelen stepped between the stones again.

The same movement.

The same lifted head.

“That line on the first stele…”

Blena gripped the rail.

“Why is it doing that?”

No one answered.

Behind them, an observer began a fresh drawing.

“Stop writing,” Blena snapped.

The pencil froze.

She leaned towards the light.

“Kaelen?”

The younger Kaelen looked at the mountains.

“Kaelen!”

Anderix touched the contact.

His crystal brightened.

A needle rose on the sending instrument and remained motionless on the laboratory’s receiving gauge.

Tajan bent close to the small speaking diaphragm.

“Kaelen. Blena is alive. We have her.”

The ring flickered.

For one dreadful, hopeful instant, Kaelen’s face turned.

Then Tajan’s younger voice spoke again.

“That line on the first stele…”

Anderix adjusted the contact.

The receiving gauge did not move.

He tried the next setting.

Then the next.

Blena stood with her wrapped wrist pressed against her ribs.

“He will think he let go,” she said.

Tajan looked up.

“He never had my hand. He could not reach it. But he will remember it as letting go.”

Anderix stopped adjusting the dial.

The only sounds were the hum of the ring and the younger voices speaking through the snow.

“At present,” he said, “this apparatus only receives.”

Blena looked at him.

He could not improve the answer.

Tajan laid her hand over his above the instrument.

On the other side of the rail, their friends gathered again beneath the mountains, following a message whose arrival they had never understood.

Blena drew a breath.

“Tell him once more.”

Tajan pressed the contact.

Anderix kept his hand beneath hers.

“Kaelen,” she said. “She is here. She is with us.”

The crystal shone between their joined hands.

No instrument registered an answer.

Thy Quest: Text to World — Who Gets the Credit?
Mechanum’s scientists build working machines by observing knowledge from another place, while their leaders claim that Mechanum has nothing to learn from outsiders. Connect this to a real-world example of people building on someone else’s ideas—in science, technology, music, art or everyday life. How is your example similar to or different from Mechanum’s situation? Use one specific detail from the chapter and one from your example. Explain how people can deserve credit for their own work while still acknowledging what they learned from others.