Apprentice Craftswoman

"Loali, tomorrow I'll take you aboveground to see the Violet Moon."

"Really?! I get to go up?!"

"In a few weeks your father and I will be taking you to Boundary City with us, so we would like to accustom you to the surface beforehand."

I was five at the time, and I was still too small for the adults to give me permission to go to the surface normally, so I proudly told my friends that I’d get to go early. A few of the bigger kids tried to describe what it was like to me, but I didn’t really understand the concept of it. A place without stony or earthy walls, a place with light that wasn’t coming from rocks, mosses, or people, a place where you couldn’t hear monsters digging through the earth as a warning they were coming, all of those details painted an incomprehensible picture that left me terrified. My parents forced me to go up with them anyway, encouraging me all the while.

My first time seeing the village from the surface, and seeing the Violet Moon in all its glory, left me stunned. In the next moment I imagined the same light in different colors, as I’d already been taught that people kept track of the nights of the week by the color of the endless sky. I was left to wonder afterward about the veracity of claims that the Luminescent Domain somehow had a brighter sky, as I could hardly imagine more light than that in that moment, but then I remembered that supposedly there was one day a year where it was just as bright here. Before I could linger on that thought too long, I was distracted by any number of other things about the surface that were new to me.

Learning that the world consisted of more than tunnels had been eye-opening for me, as was the idea that the tunnels I’d lived in my whole life thus far extended in many directions for long, long distances. That was how we made our way to Boundary City, and as we passed individuals who resembled neither myself nor the feathery or scaled people I’d known my entire life, I was filled with questions. My parents’ faces cycled between smiling and grimacing as they diligently answered each one I posed.

Soon we reached our destination, an underground portion of Boundary City known as the Tantine District, and I was briefly left to Itelber and some of the night phoenix who’d accompanied us as my mom and dad went to do their work. I found out from Itelber that he, Illose, and my dad were all from Tantine, and that they’d all come to Kogen together a long time ago.

While I could recall plenty of bits and pieces about what Tantine was like, much of it was overshadowed by my first experience visiting the workshop where Itelber used to be an apprentice. I was eager to potentially encounter magic devices I’d never seen before, ones unlike the mundane heat generators or water spouts used in Kogen.

The ones in my parents’ stories that heroes and fiends might possess could supposedly summon storms or discern someone’s true desires, but I was disappointed to find that none of the devices they made were capable of those sorts of things. That disappointment didn’t stick with me for long, though.

"Here you'll see a device that cuts trees like butter, all you gotta do is aim." Before my eyes a wooden dummy was split at its waist with barely a sound, just as the man said, and as its torso crashed to the ground I jumped in place out of excitement.

Itelber’s master, after they'd shared a few words, led me item by item through the store talking about their uses, though he didn't allow me to use any of them myself. His booming voice and gesticulations held my attention like no one before and I remember his mucosal, bouncy, reddish-orange body most prominently of anyone I met at that age.

The workshop had devices capable of making plants grow rapidly, freezing items on the spot, amplifying sounds, and even recording someone’s likeness in motion. At one point my attention was drawn in by a spear I saw resting behind the master’s counter, but before I could try to examine it his semi-transparent arm blocked my hand.

“That’d give you a shock if you touched it.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a self-defense measure, and it’s electrified.”

“How?”

“Ah, I can teach you a bit,” he went on to introduce me for the first time to the way different magic affinities could create different types of devices, and subsequently the potential of electric magic devices. At the time that was just one of the little things I could focus on in a sea of new information, one which I re-explored from time to time after I forced Itelber to take me on as an apprentice on the way back to Kogen.

Compared to learning about magic devices, my first time going to the surface in Boundary City felt underwhelming.

I had been back to Boundary City a few times since then, each time choosing to stay underground and spend time with Itelber’s master and the apprentices to learn new things to take back to Itelber’s workshop. My entire life from that first visit on had started to revolve around magic devices. I had found my sense of purpose in craftsmanship and experimentation, and nothing could tear me away from that focus.

When I heard that monster attacks and sightings were growing more common in the outer villages, I only continued my efforts. In the next few years, I heard that Freslen and Ophlin, two of the few villages farther away from Boundary City than ours, had been abandoned entirely after facing attacks by monsters they couldn’t handle. I understood that eventually that problem would become ours, too, if things continued to progress as they were, but I was told several times that that was a future I didn’t have to worry myself over. I was told that all I needed to do was focus on making magic devices. Itelber and his wife Fridle, my teachers, assured me on several occasions that I was good enough to become an apprentice craftswoman anywhere, and I was clever enough to understand why they kept telling me that even though they didn’t state it outright. Despite knowing, though, all I could do was simply continue my work as they’d told me, and spend as much time as I could on experimenting with new devices that I hoped could offer some kind of help.

When one day a boy suddenly appeared in the village, Itelber was the one to gather me and my parents and introduce him to us. He couldn’t say much about him at first, except that he was clearly a child from somewhere outside of the Night Domain. That alone had gotten me excited to meet him, as I knew people from the Luminescent Domain used plenty of different magic devices that I’d never encountered.

“Have you asked him about any of the magic devices they used in his home? Maybe some of the things he knows could help us create new devices that could help our village’s defense or-”

“Loali, you need not focus on that right now. Consider your greetings, instead.”

Mom told me not to say anything to him about our problems, as Itelber mentioned that he seemed to be working hard just to keep himself together. I agreed, since I understood that I shouldn’t start interrogating someone who’d apparently just been torn away from their home, but after he started to speak I found my self-control dancing away from me.

Danny described one after another things I’d never imagined before. Large self-propelled machines one could use like carts to traverse long distances and, depending on the design, were capable of not only moving an entire family but potentially massive objects from place to place? Other machines that could crush stones, and perhaps monsters, with ease? Boxes that could show moving images with sound, but from practically anywhere in the world and all the time, that were not limited to one or two recordings that only lasted for as long as the recharges were done properly? And all of these things powered by forms of electricity that were created themselves by the work of machines and nature?

How many things does he know about that he hasn’t yet described?

If he has the mind and patience for it, what could Danny create with our resources? What could he, or I, do if we took those ideas and tried making them as magic devices? What if we could create a way to generate electricity to recreate the things he described, or create electronic versions of typical magic devices? What could we accomplish by combining them?

If he knew about our own circumstances would he be able to, or want to, help me make things that could protect us?

I need to know what he knows.