Prickly thorns, tender roses

Deepest desires

The following day was settled for inspecting the engine room, which Adrian said he would attempt to restore to functioning order. It was a bright day in the forest, half of which Ravenna spent amid the tomes of the Belmont Vault, searching for hints to investigations into the make and reversal of the process concerning night creatures. When finished, she met with her host before the main stairs of the great hall of the castle, and they began their ascent to the sought-for space.

Ravenna looked him over, more a quirk of her trade really, and noticed that despite his late night incursion Adrian appeared if only a little less burdened, his gait not as tense, the line of his mouth less set. Or perhaps it was her eyes playing tricks on her, weary of studying all those types of handwriting for hours under the artificial lighting.

"Here it is," Adrian said when they reached a high arched opening.

Her eyes went wide in wonder at the soaring narrow chamber, bedecked with ruined cogwheels, sprockets, and pinions of various shapes and sizes. Golden summer light flooded the enclosure through a great arched window, revealing destruction in all its ruinous splendor.

"Copper?" Ravenna inquired of the metal objects, receiving a nod from Adrian in response.

"It was the most conductive for the type of energy powering the mechanism," he said, approaching one of the smaller gearwheels.

Ravenna saw a large, hardened leather bag set on the floor, various utensils contained within.

He knelt and spread the tools one after the other. After this, her host produced a thin piece of silk string and tied his hair back loosely before rolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He usually wore white with black, she had noticed. Ravenna figured it was an aspect pertaining to his upbringing, which, judging by what she'd seen and discovered of him, had clearly been of distinguished ilk. A clinking sound brought her back, and she saw him taking a peculiar metal instrument with forked endings, reaching between two gearwheels with both hands.

The image of the previous night resurfaced, with him sitting so still and silent for hours, staring at the burning remains of his former friends. He was alone, in the truest sense of the word; it was all too much, too unfair for one so young to live through. Though Ravenna liked to scold her luck, she'd benefited from the great heart of a noble in mind if not lineage, who took her as his ward. With their qualities and drawbacks, her fellow apprentices at the University became her friends. It was the closest to a family Ravenna had ever known, but it was there.

As her thoughts changed and mingled with others, she peered closer, noting the damage on each of the metal components in the room. Some were in worse shape than others. It was as though they'd been heated close to a molten state, but the walls and all else looked unburnt, untouched. Thinking back to what Adrian told her of the Speaker magician, she assumed this was the outcome of elemental magic interference.

"When my companion turned her will upon the castle, its workings resisted and fought against the intruding force," Adrian supplied, now drawing measurements on the cogwheels with a wide, marked wooden utensil. "As you can see, this was the result." He followed her gaze to regard the ruined mechanism for likely the thousandth time.

"I presume you need to replace all of this and infuse the newly crafted pieces," Ravenna said while bringing a finger to her chin. "That is what you need my aid for," she looked back at him.

"Precisely, for them to be receptive to the steering, which is another matter altogether." He removed more rubble close to the space where he'd placed his tools. "But there's a little more to it than that. I need to dismantle the damaged parts first to assess which ones can be salvaged. The copper used in their making will also need to be of a specific level of purity. Metalworkers and smiths in the area are not so skilled in a task of this magnitude, and a trip or two would be required to see a few masters previously known to my father." He sighed. "I am far from that, though," Adrian finished, rising to stand from his bent position and wiping his face with the back of his hand.