'Only three ingredients left…'
Kael glanced toward Syleena.
Even this close to the end there was no ease in his mind. If anything it was only more reason for anxiety. Refining a mote wasn't a straight line. It was more like climbing a mountain, where the slope was gentler at the start and you still had energy to spare.
He was near the peak now. The room for error was smaller than it had ever been. The first stretch of this refinement had taken hours, and Kael expected the last few percent to take no less.
The further into a refinement you got, the harder it became to seat new laws without disturbing what was already there. Like trying to introduce a new variable into an equation that already worked, and somehow keeping it functional.
Syleena stood with her arms crossed, staring into the darkness.
Kael couldn't let his focus slip at this stage. He moved his eyes to the next ingredient.
A leathery patch of skin from an animal hunted to extinction for its horns and hide. He moved the refinement orb onto it, guided his Will, and drew out the laws he needed.
'Would it be possible to modernize motes?'
The thought surfaced uninvited. It had been drifting at the edge of his mind for months now, less a bother and more a genuine problem he kept returning to. From the few recipes he knew, older motes seemed to call for ingredients from a different era entirely. Things that had been easy to obtain millions of years ago, now either extinct or close to it.
Which raised a question he couldn't quite let go of.
If ingredients disappeared, did the recipes that needed them disappear with them? Was that already happening? Were mote recipes quietly vanishing day by day, each one dying with the last of whatever it required? And if so, higher ranked motes would be losing ground even faster. They demanded far more ingredients than lower ranked ones, which meant more points of failure, more things that could go extinct.
It wasn't hard to imagine a curve where more recipes were being lost than created. The numbers alone suggested it. If one in a thousand Luminaires could produce a rank one recipe given enough effort, that number likely fell to one in ten thousand for rank two. Fewer creators, rarer ingredients, older knowledge. All of it pushing in the same direction.
He pulled the last law free from the patch and set it aside.
So was it really that strange of a thought?
If ingredients could be replaced with a substitute that carried the same law, you could modernize a recipe entirely. He knew he was still too inexperienced to find a definitive answer, but the idea amused him. If a mote needed the hardness of wood, couldn't that hardness be taken from something else entirely? Leather, for example. From what he could tell their density was close to identical. But that raised a deeper question. Was it the hardness itself the mote needed, or the exact structure of how that law was built within the wood? The blueprint, not just the property.
Kael shook his head and clenched his teeth.
'Focus, Kael.'
It took over two hours for Kael to fully work the law from the leather into the refinement orb. Beads of sweat dripped past it onto the dirt below, painting dark patches.
Kael let out a shaky exhale and summoned the next ingredient.
Syleena watched him in silence for a moment, then walked over, flattened her coat, and sat down beside him.
It was quite the sight, if you could see it. Two people sitting in near darkness with two giant coffins towering behind them.
"What are you refining?" she asked softly.
He was forced to take a small break anyway. He answered.
"An advancement refinement."
Syleena looked at him with genuine interest. "An advancement? We don't even get to attempt those until after five years of studying standard refinement." She leaned in slightly to study the orb. "And you're already at the hardest part… I never even managed to finish one myself, and I was only doing a rank one."
Kael summoned the next ingredient from the coffin. Something that looked close to an oily feather.
"I must be lucky."
Syleena closed her eyes and shook her head.
"Not really. The success rate at the final step is what it is, that part you can't change. But everything leading up to it depends entirely on the Luminaire. It's you that got it this far, not luck." She paused. "You're from the Refinement pathway, aren't you?"
Kael moved the orb to the oily feather in silence.
"You know… at first I really struggled to understand you. You had that golden rod and I couldn't even place what pathway it came from, but then you started taking refinement orders." She folded her hands in her lap. "I couldn't wrap my head around it. My first thought was that you'd gotten lucky and stumbled onto a useful mote." She shook her head. "It took me far too long to realise you had awakened with two Soulbound motes. Just like me."
Kael remained silent.
"Still… there are things I haven't been able to figure out. Why aren't you using that golden rod anymore? And what pathway does it actually come from?"
She waited a while for a response, but soon spoke herself.
"Did you know…" she started, "...when noble families nurture their heirs, they choose two main pathways to focus on, hoping the child awakens with two Soulbound motes. It's considered a sign of great potential. Information pathway second, Blade pathway first. Those were the two I was set to study from birth."
She watched Kael guide the laws.
"But as you know, I awakened as a Mind pathway Luminaire. Two Soulbound motes, yes, but both from the same pathway." She sighed, though there was no real disappointment behind it. "It has its advantages and disadvantages. The rare few who awaken with two Soulbound motes are considered geniuses, and usually it's because they carry exceptional talent across two separate pathways. Two pathways they can advance through without the normal drawbacks of lacking talent. But both of mine came from the same one." She paused. "Which means I have twice the natural talent in Mind pathway, and nothing else to show for it."
She looked at him.
"So I have to ask. Are both of your Soulbound motes from the Refinement pathway, Kael?"
Kael closed his eyes and focused even more intently on the refinement.
"If both actually originate from the Refinement pathway, it wouldn't be a stretch to say you're perhaps the only one in known history to have done so." She added.
Another hour passed before Kael managed to seat the second to last law inside the refinement orb. Taking the break, he finally responded.
"Syleena. What are you really doing here."
She snapped out of her daydreaming and turned to him.
"I told you… I'm waiting for someone."
"If you're here to kill me, do it now. Don't make me torture myself through this refinement for nothing."
Syleena raised an eyebrow. "If that's what I wanted, I would have killed you the moment I saw you."
"Then why hand over the ingredients and mindstones?"
"Well… you promised to refine my order later, didn't you? A vocal agreement, if you will."
Kael scoffed under his breath. There was no way Syleena actually believed that. She knew him, probably better than anyone by now. He would never follow through and she knew it. So her reasoning made no sense.
Moving to the last ingredient, Kael took a deep breath and crushed a mindstone in his hand.
This was by far the stage that demanded the most attention. What Syleena had said wasn't necessarily a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either. Under normal circumstances the final stage of a refinement was fixed. Unchangeable. For most.
But Kael wasn't most.
When a refinement reached its final stage and the orb was retracted, it was almost as if the mote entered a trial. Not one set by the Luminaire, but by something else entirely. At that point there was a fixed chance the laws would truly align and produce something new, as though the heavens themselves decided whether it deserved to exist.
Up until the last ingredient, whether the refinement collapsed or not rested entirely on the Luminaire. But at the final stage it came down to luck alone. A rank one mote carried around a fifty percent chance of being finalised. By rank two that had already fallen to thirty. An advancement refinement to rank three? Kael didn't know the exact figure, but he was certain it was higher than creating a rank three mote from scratch, and equally certain it didn't climb above fifteen percent.
This was where the Obsidian Shard came in. Through study, trial, and error he had confirmed it: the shard could influence that percentage. Raising it from fifteen to eighteen. On its own that number didn't sound like much, but in the world of refinement, it was enough to take your breath away.
"Don't distract me now." Kael said and moved the orb to the final ingredient, a water rock.
Syleena rested her chin in her palm and watched.
The last ingredient was always the hardest, naturally so. With so many laws already seated in the mote, there was almost no room left to work with.
Kael took a deep breath and moved his Will. Carefully.
It moved in slow, unhurried sweeps around the rock, entering through invisible seams, rolling inward the way a wave climbs a shore. Law after law stretched and pulled its way into the orb.
Then Kael's vision suddenly blurred, and the world around him exploded.
A harpoon drove into his lower back and tore straight through his stomach, ripping open his abdomen before exploding out the other side. It kept going, dragging everything in its path with it before burying itself into the ground ahead, kicking up a burst of dirt and rock. The chain that followed tore open everything that remained.
Kael collapsed forward, catching himself on one arm, holding the refinement orb above the ground desperately. His mouth swelled and a wretched sound broke from him as he vomited blood. It poured from every opening. His ears. His eyes.
"KAEL!"
A man's voice cracked through the air, filled with hate and something else.
Syleena watched it all unfold without a change in expression.
"Ah… He's finally here."