11 Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8: Severance

Months quickly turned to years. Four years passed as the Ash Keep grew considerably in depth and size underneath the mountains of Odbrane. Having Arkyn running repairs throughout all hours of the day made the process continue at a considerably smoother rate.

He was the peak of human intelligence plugged into a body that required only magic to run. Once he learned each golem to its finest detail, he only had to glance at a problem and fix it without looking at an Assembly Manual after just two years.

On one ordinary day, Kresha was busy for quite some time in her drawing room, wanting to make some critical changes without being interrupted.

A stack of papers were piled beside her as she drew up sketches that were early drafts of golem making. Some papers had rune sequences, others were kinematic designs of the machine parts.

She was currently remodelling some designs for another automated sorting golem that would help divide out minerals and ore before hearing a quiet knock at the door.

"Arkyn?" She asked while not stopping her pen from gliding along the paper.

"Yes madam, do you have a moment?"

"What do you need?" She was still preoccupied doing the mental math of its final dimensions for several ball joints.

Arkyn opened the door and began explaining his reason for visiting.

"One of the mining golems had been repeating the motion of swinging its heavier arm back and forth on a loop, no matter where it was. The issue didn't resolve after using the usual procedural steps of repair, so I went further into the problem."

"Uh huh."

"I disconnected the mana crystal's pathways so it would stop moving and tried to rewrite the golem's runes to act as a hard reset."

"Okay"

"In the process of infusing my energy with the chest plate's runes, it activated and brought an iron pickaxe through my arm."

"I see, you should know we share . . . Hold on, what did you-" Kresha was going to start lecturing him about what he did wrong, but stopped after fully digesting his statement.

She finally looked away from the paper to find Arkyn was still standing at the doorway, holding his own severed arm. At the shoulder, there was a large tear at the socket from where the pickaxe cut through.

He was wearing a dirty tunic and pants of grey cloth, covering most of his body. The sleeve portion of his shirt was still attached to the shoulder, but there was a clear exposure of the metal material beneath the mimicking skin.

It certainly startled Kresha visually, but all Arkyn did was stare at the limb confused at what to do next. He was accustomed to administering repairs and fixing problems, this time he was the one needing maintenance and was stumped at a solution.

He wasn't made of bolts, plate, gears, or any sort of moving part; his whole body was a solid piece of liquid metal.

Kresha shook her head and stood up from her desk, taking the arm from him and inspecting the break.

"Is the psionic tether still connected?" She asked after careful contemplation.

Arkyn stuck out his still attached arm and flexed the finger back and forth, meanwhile the segment she was holding was doing the exact same thing in unison. She would have found the act humorous, but if the ethereal connections were broken, then she would have a much bigger issue to fix.

"Good, if you broke the psionic energy between your mind and then I would have to reset it for you. Instead, just drop the human look and go full size for me."

Arkyn did as he was told, dropping all the human features. His arm did the same thing, the section where it was cut rippled constantly, as if it wanted to reshape itself but was missing the remainder of his body.

With an exertive grunt, Kresha hoisted the arm up to his exposed shoulder and just like magnets with opposing polarities, they snapped together with a sudden pull.

Arkyn shifted his stance as his center of gravity turned back to normal. He gave Kresha a bow of thanks after a simple flex test of the reattached limb and changed back to human. She was surprised to see he had actually smiled at her assistance.

Over the last few years, he had always been monotone and conveyed as much emotion as a doornail. Now it seemed there was a hint of something more to his body language.

"Now two things you need to know." She said while putting a mental note of his expressions in her back pocket.

"You may possess the mind and functions from another body, but you are still operating on runes I wrote, connected, and empowered. The magic energy you use to manipulate elemental energy through these runes are technically still mine. The only difference is you recharge from the big crystals sitting in your chest instead of naturally collected energy from flesh and blood.

We share the same frequency and wavelengths of energy, so trying to rewrite them just temporarily repowered the golem's still problematic state."

"Understood, everything in the Keep shares the same frequency then?"

"Yes, though there might be a few miscellaneous things buried around here that might hold a few other mana frequencies. Something more interesting to note is that because we operate under the same precision of energy, we can do stuff like this."

She held up the dull metal baton he saw her carry around the very first time they talked. At the end, she emitted a wips of smoky energy from the end, which quickly combusted and transformed into a small flame.

Being in an underground space with no wind to affect it, the orange and yellow flame stood upright and almost perfectly bulb-shaped. It only danced when Kresha brought it closer, and told him to do the same.

Arkyn pooled a couple strands of flowing red energy into the tip of his index finger. An orange crack split between the flesh and his nail, sounding like a faint kettle whistle that evolved in pitch until bursting into a small flame at the peak tone.

"Now watch this."

She touched the two flames together, Akryn assumed they would be amplified to a slightly larger flame, but was surprised to see the results.

The two bulbs touched and almost seemed to wrestle and twist into some form of multiflame. They intertwined with one another as the height of it tripled to only a few inches passed their faces. Neither flame overtook or cancelled out the other, they simply resonated against one another.

Arkyn was mesmerized at such a sight, amplifying the output to see the spiralling twin flames coil and bounce around. He was so caught up in the strange pattern that they didn't continue the conversation until Kresha pulled her energy away.