Gregory returned four days later, dust-caked and hollow-eyed, three of Hollowvale's men riding beside him looking considerably worse for the journey than he did.
"I made it to Newtown," he said, dropping heavily onto an overturned barrel in the fortress courtyard, "and told the whole council exactly what was coming. Stood there in front of men in silk who've never once smelled a battlefield and told them a hundred thousand Orcs were marching on the eastern border, and half of them looked at me like I'd wandered in off the street to waste their afternoon. They didn't send anyone. The King wouldn't authorize it. I don't even think most of them believed me until word of the actual siege caught up on its own, days later, from three other directions at once."
"What changed their minds, in the end?" Leo asked.
"Nothing changed their minds," Gregory said, bitter in a way Remus hadn't heard from him before. "We just stopped needing them to have one."
"We managed without them," Remus said, and left it there, watching some of the tension go out of his brother's shoulders at the confirmation that the wait hadn't cost anyone their life after all.
"You look like hell," Gregory said, studying Remus properly for the first time since dismounting. "All of you do."
"We've had a full week," Andrea said, which was, Remus thought, about as close to an understatement as she was probably capable of producing.
With the immediate danger past, Remus turned his full attention to the project he'd been sketching in stolen minutes between watch rotations for the better part of the siege, the design he'd promised Leo weeks ago back in that alley behind Dinolfo's shop, a machine that could finally give Leo's theory of aetherspores something no amount of argument ever could: proof.
He worked through the design in the fortress's ruined keep, refusing sleep for two full days and nights, stopping only for food and water Andrea brought him without being asked, sketching and revising and sketching again until the shape of it finally resolved itself the way a stubborn assembly always eventually did, late, exhausted, and all at once.
"Identify," he said, to the finished sketch, on the morning of the third day.
Design Acquired: Aetherspore Microscope!
Materials Required: 1/2 x Gold; 1/4 x Platinum; 1/8 x Palladium; 1/2 x Iron; 1/4 x Carbon; 1 x Basilisk Eye; 1 x Light Crystal.
"Andrea," he called, and she appeared in the doorway within seconds, looking rather more awake than a woman who'd been keeping the same watch rotations he had had any right to look. "The gold, platinum, and palladium. Do you still have them?"
"I always carry them," she said, producing three small, heavy pouches from somewhere inside her coat without further explanation, the ancient, comfortable habit of someone who had learned, long before Remus had been born in either life, never to travel anywhere without something valuable enough to buy her way out of trouble.
Items Saved in Inventory: 2 x Gold; 2 x Platinum; 2 x Palladium.
He fed the salvaged fortress iron and a measure of good charcoal into the tally alongside them, added the intact Basilisk eye Octavius had recovered from the poisoned Orc camp, and, finally, a small, dull stone he'd identified days earlier among the dead adventurers' scattered gear as a spent light crystal, its glow long faded but its raw material intact enough to serve his purpose.
"Craft."
Craft Successful: Aetherspore Microscope!
The finished instrument sat on the keep's central table looking almost absurdly delicate against the ruin's rough stone walls, a brass-and-crystal eyepiece mounted over a slide plate no larger than a coin, and Leo, when he finally saw it, went very quiet in a way Remus hadn't heard from him yet.
"How do we know it actually works?" Leo asked, once he'd found his voice again.
"We need a control," Remus said. "Someone with no magic at all, to compare against. Octavius, would you mind?"
"I've minded far worse things this week," Octavius said, holding out his arm without hesitation.
Remus drew a small sample from Octavius, then from Leo, then from Andrea, sealing each carefully, and three days later the four of them stood together at the base of the Archive's tower, climbing the same windowless, winding staircase Leo had climbed once before as a failure and was climbing now as something considerably less certain, but no longer entirely without hope.
High Lorekeeper Pompey received them without ceremony, an old dwarf in a red cap who clearly regarded niceties as a category of small talk he'd retired from decades ago.
"Present your research," he said. "I haven't got all day."
Leo swallowed once, glanced at Remus, and began.
"My thesis concerns the fundamental particles that underlie all magic," he said, steadier than Remus had ever heard him. "I call them aetherspores. I have, this time, brought objective proof."
"Not this again," Pompey said, though something in his tone had shifted slightly from the flat dismissal Leo had clearly been bracing for. "What proof."
Remus set the microscope on the old dwarf's own worktable and demonstrated it himself, first with a sample of Octavius's blood showing nothing but a dull, uniform grey under the lens, then Leo's own sample flaring into a faint, distinct color that hadn't been visible to the naked eye a moment before, and finally, at Pompey's own insistence, a scraping from a pair of bone fragments the old dwarf produced from a drawer with the air of a man setting a genuine trap.
"Eagle and phoenix," Pompey said, "and I've forgotten which is which myself. Let's see if your little machine can tell me something I don't already know."
The first sample showed a clean, white crystalline pattern under the lens. The second bloomed into a swirling red and green that made even Pompey lean in closer, his earlier skepticism visibly draining out of his posture the longer he looked.
"This is the finest evidence I've been shown in a century of sitting in this tower," he said finally, straightening. "Lorekeeper Leo. The title is yours, properly earned, and I don't say that lightly."
Leo's composure finally broke, just slightly, just enough for Remus to see how much the moment actually cost him to receive after everything it had taken to get here.
"Remarkable little device," Pompey added, half to himself, angling the eyepiece toward the tower's own high window to catch the light. "A century in this chair, and I'd resigned myself to dying without ever seeing proof of the one theory in this whole Archive worth actually proving. You've cost me a very comfortable certainty, boy, that nothing new was left to find. I don't say that as a complaint."
"I'll need to keep this instrument," Pompey said, already turning the microscope over in his own hands with open, undisguised hunger. "For further study."
"I'll trade it," Remus said, "for something I need in return."
"Name it."
"The process for creating a magic sword," Remus said. "Not an enchantment bolted onto a finished blade after the fact. The real process. Whatever the Dwarves of Eragbor actually do."
Pompey studied him a long moment, some calculation passing behind his eyes that Remus couldn't fully read, before he finally nodded and disappeared into the stacks behind his own desk, returning with a heavy, dust-caked leather tome that looked older than the tower itself.
"I stole this from my own father's library, over a century ago, when I left my people against their wishes to come study here instead," he said, setting it down with a weight that seemed to carry more than the book's own physical mass. "The forging comes before the enchantment in the true method, not after, the way every human smith in this kingdom does it backward. I doubt a human mind can follow it. I'd be curious to see you prove me wrong."
Remus pressed his palm flat against the tome's cover.
"Identify."
Design Acquired: Magic Sword!
He closed his hand around the confirmation the way he'd have closed it around a finished contract back on Earth, feeling the particular, specific weight of a problem that had just become solvable instead of merely interesting, and looked up to find Leo watching him with an expression that had, somewhere in the last week, stopped being purely anxious and started being something closer to genuine trust.
"What now?" Andrea asked, from the doorway, arms crossed, watching the two of them with the patient, unhurried attention of a woman who already suspected the answer wasn't going to be restful.
"Now," Remus said, tucking his charcoal stub back behind his ear, already feeling the next problem take shape somewhere behind his eyes, "I learn everything else this book expects me to already know."
They left the Archive tower as the afternoon light was going long and gold across Oldtown's rooftops, the same slanted light that had seen them off through the western gate a little over two weeks before, though nothing about the four of them walking back down through the winding stone stairwell felt quite like the people who'd left. Leo carried his new title the way a man carries something he still isn't entirely sure won't be taken back if he holds it wrong, one hand resting, more than once, on the tome tucked under Remus's own arm, as if touching it kept the whole last week from having been a dream. Gregory walked half a step ahead of everyone else, restless in the way he always got once a fight was over and there was nothing immediate left to throw himself at. Andrea said little, watching the streets the way she watched everything, patient and unreadable, and Remus caught himself, more than once, wondering what she was actually adding up behind that calm, and deciding, for now, not to ask.
Whatever waited for them next, the Southlands' harvest was in, Hollowvale's survivors were resettled and breathing, a hundred thousand Orcs had marched home instead of forward, and somewhere in the leather satchel at Remus's hip sat a design that no bladesmith in the Kingdom currently knew how to read. It was, he thought, watching Oldtown's crowded, familiar streets swallow the four of them back up, about as good a place as any to have gotten to, two weeks and one small war after walking out through that same western gate not knowing whether any of them would be walking back through it again at all.