- Chapter 067 -

  Lasers

  The day before the funeral procession was a strange, muted affair. A quiet hush had fallen over Enceladus. The usual, rhythmic clang of the Artisans' quarter was softer, the boisterous shouts from the market square more subdued. It was a town holding its breath, waiting for the formal, choreographed grief of the Guilds to descend upon it. Eric Chambers, a man of status and ambition, would be given the full pageantry of a public farewell. Clyde Sampson, the Jade-tier specialist, the true power behind the threat, would be a quiet footnote, his passing unremarked and unmourned, a tool to be discarded and forgotten.

  Mark sat at his dining table, a half-empty mug of tea growing cold beside him. He wasn't grieving. He felt a clinical emptiness, the feeling of a hostile project finally being cancelled. The news of their deaths had been a strange, anticlimactic end to a conflict that had felt so personal, so immediate. He had prepared for a continued battle of wits, an endless war of paper and politics. He had not been prepared for such a brutal conclusion.

  His conversation with Deirdre the day before had been a necessary dose of pragmatic reality. He had found her in her shop, the atmosphere tense with the town's unspoken news.

  "It's a mess, love," she'd said, her usual warmth tempered by a grim seriousness. "But it's a mess that's over, at least for you. For now." She had pushed a small, heavy pouch of coins across the counter. "For the audit. Good coin for good work. There's a few more ledgers from another of the shops I'd like you to look at. Less stressful now, I'd imagine."

  He had asked her then, the question that had been weighing on him. "Should I go? To the procession?"

  Deirdre had given him a long, considering look. "Aye," she'd said finally. "You should. Let them see you. Let them see you're still here, still standing, after all of it. A quiet statement. It'll keep the other ghosts from thinking your door is an easy one to knock on."

  He had agreed. It was a sound strategy, a calculated move in the game he was now a part of. But as he sat there, the quiet of the house pressing in on him, the thought of attending the funeral of a man who had tried to destroy him felt... wrong. A performance he wasn't sure he had the strength to give.

  He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn't hear Dawn come down the stairs. He only registered her presence when she spoke, an incredulous crack in the quiet morning.

  "You can't be serious."

  Mark looked up. Dawn was standing at the bottom of the staircase, her arms crossed, her expression a mask of unadulterated horror. Her gaze was fixed, not on him, but on the object draped carefully over the back of a nearby armchair.

  His suit.

  The steam cleaner had worked a miracle. The dark fabric was pristine, the faint, lingering smell of the forest and the infirmary completely gone. It looked exactly as it had the morning he'd put it on for a normal day at the office, maybe even better.

  "You are not wearing that," not a suggestion, but a command. She pointed a finger at the suit, as if it were a venomous snake she had found coiled in his living room.

  Mark opened his mouth to reply, to explain, but she cut him off, a torrent of frustrated, panicked words spilling from her.

  "Have you lost your mind?" her voice rising. "I know Carl and Eric called you the Final Warden, but that was just an insult! It wasn't a suggestion! You can't actually go to a man's funeral dressed as a pantomime of the Oracle of Death! People will literally drop dead from the shock! Are you trying to start a panic?"

  Mark just stared at her, a slow, weary smile spreading across his face. He let her tirade run its course, a welcome storm of absurdity in the quiet gloom of the morning. When she finally fell silent, her chest heaving with a mixture of exasperation and genuine alarm, he finally answered.

  "I wasn't going to wear it to the funeral, Dawn," an amused counterpoint to her panic. "I'm not that insensitive." He gestured to the suit, an almost nostalgic look in his eyes. "I was just getting it ready to take to a tailor."

  The practical statement seemed to short-circuit her brain. "A tailor?" the word laced with confusion. "Why?"

  "Because it's mine!" The words were simple, but holding the weight of a quiet decision he had made in the long, sleepless hours of the night. "I'm tired of wearing a borrowed uniform. The blue tunic, the grey... they're not me. This," pointing towards the suit, "this is."

  He met her confused gaze with a new determination in his own. "I want to get something made. Something that melds the needs of my old life with the expectations of this new one. A way to feel like myself again, but also... like I belong here. A bridge between the project manager from Manchester and the civic consultant from nowhere."

  Dawn stared at him, her expression a mask of pure, uncomprehending bafflement. The pragmatic mind of the huntress was clearly struggling to process a problem that had nothing to do with tracking or survival, and everything to do with... fashion.

  "But... it looks like the Final Warden," she insisted, her voice tight with a frustration that was rapidly bordering on panic. "You're not him. You're not even a Warden's Assistant. You're not even a half-dead spirit caught between our world and the next!" She threw her hands up in a gesture of complete exasperation. "You're just... Mark!"

  Mark just smiled, an unshakeable calm settling over him. He had spent a week processing a brutal, messy murder and his own part in it. A debate about his wardrobe was a welcome, almost therapeutic, return to normalcy.

  "That doesn't mean the Oracle of Death is the only one who gets to look good, does it?" he countered, his voice laced with a gentle, teasing humor. "It's just a style, Dawn. A framework. I'm going to have something new designed." He leaned back in his chair, a creative spark in his eyes as he began to sketch the idea in the air with his hands. "Something similar, yes, but different. Better. Probably in blues and greens. Something that says 'competent professional' and not 'herald of the apocalypse'."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  He paused, a final, non-negotiable point of personal identity solidifying in his mind.

  "But I'm keeping the tie," he declared, a flicker of his old, stubborn self returning. "The tie is non-negotiable."

  Dawn just let out a long, frustrated huff, the sound of a woman who has completely and utterly lost control of the conversation. She shook her head in weary defeat. "Fine," she grumbled, turning away as if the very sight of the suit was a personal affront to her. "Wear your death-shroud. See if I care."

  She started walking toward the kitchen, then paused, a new, more personal frustration clouding her face. "Now I have to go and dig my formal gear out of storage," sounding bitter. "The set I wore with Finnian. I hate it."

  She shuddered, a genuine, full-body tremor of sartorial revulsion. "It's so stiff," she continued, her voice filled with the venomous disgust "So constricting. A man could be bleeding out at my feet and I wouldn't even be able to bend over to help him." She balled her hands into fists, providing a final damning assessment of the outfit's profound impracticality.

  "I couldn't stab anything in it."

  Before Mark could even begin to reply to Dawn's deeply practical fashion critique, the front door groaned open. Carl strode in, not bothering to knock, a key held pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He had, apparently, been upgraded from occasional visitor to resident grump.

  "Morning," he grunted, his gaze immediately falling on the immaculate, dark suit draped over the chair. He stopped, his brow furrowing as he took in the scene, completely missing the first half of the conversation but seizing on the most obvious, and most absurd, visual cue.

  A wicked grin spread across the gemsmith's face. "Well, now," he said, his voice a low, theatrical rumble of mock-seriousness. "It's good to have goals, Mark. Ambition is a fine thing." He walked over, circling the suit as if it were a museum piece, his expression one of exaggerated gravity. "But even for a primitive, don't you think you're setting your sights a little high? To aim to become an Oracle... and out of all of them, you pick Death?"

  He couldn't hold it. The serious expression shattered, and he burst out laughing, a loud bark that filled the quiet room. Dawn, who had been sulking by the kitchen counter, cracked a reluctant smile.

  "Then again," Carl continued, wiping a tear of amusement from the corner of his eye, his gaze sweeping over Mark's seated form with a critical, appraising eye, "perhaps you could aim for the Oracle of Lust. But I don't think you've got the... flair for it." He stroked his chi. "Gardening, perhaps? The Oracle of Over-Watered Houseplants? That seems more your speed."

  Mark just let out a tired sigh, a quiet island of sanity in a sea of his friends' cynical humor. "Hilarious," he responded with a deadpan counterpoint to Carl's laughter. He gestured to the dining table, his expression shifting from weary amusement to all-business. "Now that you've had your fun, we have things to discuss."

  Carl's laughter subsided, but the amused glint remained in his eyes. He pulled up a chair, the earlier camaraderie of their shared joke settling into a more focused, professional quiet. Dawn, her own brief moment of amusement over, remained by the counter, a silent observer.

  Mark took a slow, steadying breath. He had spent most of the previous night not just transcribing the stolen knowledge from Clyde's mind, but trying to find a pattern, a starting point. He had a library of impossible schematics in his notebook, but he needed a Rosetta Stone, a single, verifiable piece of data to begin the process of translation.

  He looked across the table at the gemsmith, the master craftsman, the innovator. "Before I make a complete fool of myself," Mark began, his voice quiet and serious, "I need to ask you something."

  He met Carl's curious, expectant gaze.

  "What do you know about lasers?"

  Carl's expression shifted, the cynical humor replaced by a pure, academic interest. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table, the craftsman in his element.

  "Lasers," he mused, the word familiar but clearly not a common topic of conversation. "Simple enough. Cheap to make, easy to maintain." He gestured vaguely with a calloused hand. "It's just focused and refracted light. You take a low-tier crystal, usually a quartz, cut it to a specific angle, and you can focus a beam of ambient light into a single, high-intensity point."

  He shrugged, a gesture of professional dismissal. "It's a neat trick. Good for lighting a tinder bundle from a distance, or leaving a scorched spot on a piece of wood as a marker." His tone became more critical. "But it's completely impractical for any real work. It doesn't scale well. The power required to make it do anything more than singe something is astronomical. You're better off with a simple cutting tool or a proper heat ward."

  He took a sip of his tea, a definitive judgment in his eyes. "It's a novelty. Not really used. Heart magic is simply more efficient for any job I might need to do."

  The principles were the same. The science, at its most fundamental level, was the same. They had the components, they just hadn't put them together in the right order.

  Mark's mind raced, a project plan of dizzying complexity and exhilarating possibility beginning to form. He reached for his notebook, the one filled with his own thoughts, not the stolen schematics, and flipped to a clean page.

  "So," his voice taking on a new, focused energy that made Carl's eyebrows shoot up. "If I were to give you a set of specifications... a very precise set of specifications... could you guarantee the result?"

  He began to scribble, his pencil flying across the page. He drew a simple diagram, a series of lenses and mirrors, a focusing array. He added notes in the margins, calculations for focal length, for beam intensity, for a power source that wasn't just ambient light, but a pulsed, directed burst of energy.

  He pushed the notebook across the table to Carl. "I'm not interested in cutting stone," he explained, his voice a low, excited murmur. "Too slow. Too much effort. But what if, instead of a continuous beam, you used a series of extreme high-intensity pulses? To etch."

  He didn't say the words 'laser engraver'. He didn't need to. He just let the concept, the raw, beautiful potential of it, settle on the page between them.

  "You're a gemsmith," his gaze direct and intense. "You cut facets. You shape crystals. So, can you make lenses? And mirrors? Highly polished, perfectly angled mirrors?"

  Carl stared at the drawing, his earlier, dismissive attitude completely gone. His eyes, the eyes of a master craftsman, traced the lines, absorbed the calculations. He wasn't looking at a doodle. He was looking at a blueprint. A slow, incredulous smile began to spread across his face. It was the smile of an innovator who has just been handed a problem so new, so interesting, that it was a gift.

  "That," Carl breathed, his voice a reverent whisper. "That would be... grand." He looked up from the notebook, his eyes shining with a creative fire Mark had not seen before. "But with what money?" the cynical craftsman reasserting himself. "Your little audit for Deirdre is nice, but my work... a project of this complexity... it isn't cheap."

  Mark met his gaze, and offered a slow, predatory smile of his own. The project was moving to its next phase. The stakeholders were being brought on board.

  "That," Mark said, his voice calm and utterly confident, "is why we need to discuss the terms of a contract." He let the word settle, a piece of familiar, powerful magic from his own world. "A formal contract between myself and the Artisans' Guild." He paused, delivering the final, crucial piece of the proposal. "With you, Carl, as the project lead. And my main point of contact."

  Carl, who had just taken a large, triumphant gulp of his tea, choked. He coughed, a wet, sputtering sound, his eyes watering as he stared at Mark in pure, unadulterated shock. He had come here for a social call and a bit of light mockery. He was leaving with a sales pitch for what could be a revolutionary new project.