#Arterin Morlani

[theincredimazingbablesquatch]

Rebirth (Excerpt from the Future)

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Morlani asked, twisting the ends of his beard between two fingers as he gazed between a pile of hastily scribbled notes and the two fist-sized cerulean gemstones gently pulsing on the corner of his desk.

As sure as I can be. She could not truly speak, disconnected from her body as she was, but the reply echoed in the back of Morlani's mind in the same sweet melodic voice she had chosen when he first built her speech mechanisms.

"The spell will require the mass of both cores. If it fails there is no other backup… you could be lost forever."

The cores are beginning to wear out. Have you not seen the cracks in the stone, or the weathering of the glyphs? It may yet be decades, but I will be lost either way. Better to die in the pursuit of survival than to simply accept it and wait for the enchantments to break.

"You're right, but I am still wary. This spell is untested, untestable. All we can do is hope."

How often have you known yourself to be wrong, Arterin? She gently chided him. I trust you. When the other scholars at your academy saw only a pile of clockwork occasionally defying its guiding enchantments, you saw the beginnings of intelligence. Where they saw a novelty, you saw a person waiting to be. You have spent centuries studying the accident that was my birth and decades crafting this spell. You have calculated every variable and every possible interaction between the enchantments that made me. None of my prior upgrades have failed, I see no reason to expect that this one would.

"Then I suppose… There is nothing more to discuss." Morlani shuffled through his notes one last time, pocketed the cores, and crossed the room to a large chest of drawers. He dug through several of them, pulling out a litany of supplies needed for the casting, then proceeded to the deepest basement of the academy. He spent the next thirty minutes drawing out the spell circle, double and triple checking the glyphs and the placement of the various material components, before placing the two cores at the center.

"It is time, AMaRA. Are you ready?"

I am.

Morlani bowed his head, took a deep breath, and began the casting, the words of the spell flowing almost too fast for human ears to interpret. For ten minutes he muttered the words of binding and shaping, the sound echoing around the room as a gentle hum of energy built within the circle. The cores began to pulse faster and brighter in response, soaking up the spell until the light was steady and illuminated the entire room.

At the final word, the stones began to float upward, stopping several feet above the ground. The light faded from the interior of the stones, flowing into the glyphs carved into their surfaces, lifting them off of the stones and into the air to form a tangled knot of runic phrases. They shifted and tumbled around each other, compressing into a smaller and smaller space until they became a single pinprick of light between the cores, which began to drift together, flowing into each other as if they were liquid. Another pulse illuminated the room as they met, and the flowing crystalline structure began to reshape itself, spreading into a network of tendrils flowing downward into the vague shape of a person. As the crystal settled into the thin wisps of nerve endings, the air around the form began to boil, the materials of the spell flowing inward to knit flesh and bone. With a final flash, a loud bang ripped across the room, tossing Morlani into the wall and kicking up the centuries of dust that had amassed on the floor. As it settled, he frantically turned his gaze back to the center of the room. In the circle lay a sleeping woman, hair of deep obsidian, her pale face traced with lines of the same cerulean her cores had once displayed. Her eyes snapped open, brilliant blue-white darting around the room, taking in sight for the first time, before finally settling on Morlani.

"It… worked." Her voice wavered slightly as she spoke, and her hands darted up to gently explore her own face. After a moment, she paused, and looked at Morlani with an inquisitive gaze. "This sensation, the shaking, what is it?"

Morlani chuckled as he draped a heavy maroon cloak over her exposed flesh and helped her to her feet. "That is what being cold feels like. Welcome to life, my friend."