For as long as Laurence could remember he was treated as an auspicious child. The fact that he was born on midnight of the New Cycle meant that most people of the village he lived in thought he was lucky. He didn’t mind it too much, but it annoyed him when people rubbed his head for good luck.
His father was always busy as the village doctor and priest, while his mother was most often seen looking after those who couldn’t look after themselves, namely the needy or the old. The Council often said the village would come to a halt without them. Laurence felt proud of his parents, as proud as a boy who was almost six could be.
On Laurence’s fourth birthday his father had given him a little red leather book to practice writing in, but the book looked so pristine that it would have been a shame for Laurence to ruin it, so he chose to write on bits of paper instead. It was Laurence’s favourite possession and he treated it like any other child would treat a stuffed animal.
Laurence was an inquisitive child. He often got into disproportionately large amounts of trouble because his floppy black hair and little red book were seen where they shouldn’t have been. Once he was caught peeking in on Mrs Haversham and her next door neighbour having sex. He just wanted to know who it was having so much that it could be heard two gardens away. Another time he was caught in his father’s study, looking at the big medicine book on the desk. When asked how he managed to get in the study in the first place he presented a wooden key to his father and proclaimed that it was a skeleton key able to get through any lock. His father just assumed that he left the door unlocked.
After the incident with the skeleton key, Laurence’s father decided to teach Laurence about medicine with the white book in his study. He hoped that by taking away some of the mystique about the areas in the house Laurence wasn’t allowed to tread in, the boy would be less interested by them. He was wrong. Laurence simply wanted to know about everything he set his sights on and so, when he wasn’t playing with the other children his age or learning about medicine and the body, he was still getting into places he shouldn’t and witnessing things no child should see. Laurence was often punished for being caught out by his elders, but more often than not it just made him wilier and more determined not to get caught.
Laurence’s fifth birthday was the day he noticed his special ability. He had a fever that day and dreamt strange dreams of artifacts, armours and bizarre weapons. Most of the things in his dreams he understood how to make but at the same time knew that the materials necessary for the creation of his dream objects were mythical. He woke up the next morning and saw a small hammer tattooed on the palm of his right hand. He wondered if everyone got tattoos after they had a fever so he asked his father, but his father frowned at him for a while and then said not to mention it again. Laurence trusted the best doctor he knew and left it be.
After that more odd things started happening. First there was the skeleton key incident where Laurence wanted to get into his father’s study so when he grabbed a stick and decided it was a key it worked like one. Then there was the incident where a group of soldiers came to speak to Laurence’s father. One of the soldiers set up a training dummy to practice his sword on. Laurence was obsessed with watching him, as he had never seen a soldier before.
Eventually the soldier saw the young boy watching and asked if he would like to have a go at fighting the dummy. Laurence was ecstatic and rushed to have a try. He held up a little wooden sword for training children and decided that the sword he was holding was a real, extremely sharp, sword. The boy had a few practice swings in the air to get used to the sword then stepped up to the dummy as his father came out to talk to the rest of the soldiers. Laurence swung the wooden blade as hard as he could,and tried to emulate the form of the soldier he was watching. His emulation was a failure, but he cut the dummy in half and left all observers lost for words. After that Laurence’s father made decided to keep an eye on him when there were visitors around like the soldiers.
The third incident was when Laurence saw his father’s herb bag and decided he wanted a bag that could fit lots of things in it. He went to his mother and asked her to make him a little pouch of his own out of fine leather. She sewed the bag together and gave it drawstrings so he could tie it round his neck if he so wished. It was a lovely little bag, just the right size for a little boy to keep all his little toys and his pens in. After a few days he left his red book in a barn just outside the village. He cried and cried until his father helped him find it but when he did he made up his mind not to lose the book again. So he put it in the little bag that was one third the size of the book. When his father saw this he asked how Laurence performed such a feat, but all the child could say was “I wanted it to fit, so it did”.
The day when everything changed for Laurence was not long after his sixth birthday. His father had shown him the Herb Garden and explained how the Garden itself was a map. The boy was enthralled by the idea of an object that showed the surrounding regions and decided he would make a map of the area surrounding him. So Laurence grabbed a pencil and looked for a piece of parchment to draw on. He had already decided to make the map out of paper rather than something like plants or a block of wood, simply because he didn’t see the point in making something that showed you where you were if you couldn’t see it when you wanted to.
Laurence looked up and down but couldn’t find any paper that felt right for his creation. He was about to give up when he had a thought. What if I made the map in my book? I have it with me often enough. He looked for something else that might work for another hour but the thought stuck with him. Eventually the little boy brought out his most treasured possession and moved pencil to paper.
I must be really careful about this. Laurence thought as he began his work. He knew that he might ruin his favourite thing if he messed this up so he focussed more intently than he had ever done and drew. In his mind’s eye Laurence saw everything around him in a large circle. He drew the things nearest to him and slowly the map spread out. He added the chairs and tables around him, the plants (with their names and uses), the animals and eventually all the people within 100 meters of where he was kneeling, and only when the boy decided that he had added enough details did it truly come into its own. The very moment Laurence completed the map it burst into movement.
People and animals were drawn and began moving around the map as they would in real life, Laurence could see the dot with his mother’s name next to it moving round the garden with his father’s dot, he could see the dog owned by the tailor lying in a bush outside, he could even see the plants in the garden sway a little. If Laurence had been paying a bit more attention he would have even seen one of the doorways in his home labelled ‘to Babel’, but he was too proud of his new creation to notice this. Any other person would have been lost for words at this creation but Laurence didn’t know any better. This was becoming a frequent event for the boy.. It didn’t happen every time he tried it or even every five times, but every-so-often if he willed it enough or got lucky it would work.
Laurence closed his book and noticed immediately that something was different. The front cover was no longer plain red leather, instead it had a hammer embossed on it and was exactly the same as the one on Laurence’s palm. It was an odd mix between a war hammer and a smith’s hammer, with its thick hammer-head and long shaft. Laurence was shocked. Did I do this? His making of the map seemed to have triggered the change in some way, but had no idea how.
He opened up the book again, looking at the pages after the map. No longer were they blank and clean, instead they were covered in a spidery cursive script. The first half of the book was some sort of guide entitled The Art of Making while the second half was full of pages and pages of schematics dictating the method and process of making a myriad of artefacts, all under the title of Godly Machinations. Almost all of the book went over Laurence’s head but his boundless curiosity got the better of him. He had to understand the contents of that book, so he pushed back his long brown fringe and began at the beginning.
This book contains the acts and processes of understanding a dimension of The World’s Form the young boy read. A lot of the words Laurence had never come across before, but for some reason he still understood what the writer of this strange creation was attempting to get across. It was as if the process of reading the book instructed him in a way beyond words. It was instructing his entire being, not just his mind.
Laurence continued reading the book, sometimes having difficulty with the words but never the concepts within. Eventually he had to go to bed, but the moment he woke up the next day he began reading again. Like clockwork he did this every day, devouring the contents of page after page within the book. He learnt how to smith and how to fletch, how to sculpt and how to build, how to craft and even how to sew. In the space of a single year the boy learned not only how to produce any sort of tool or object, but also began learning how to refine his odd power with the use of runes and glyphs. On reading the book Laurence found out that the glyphs on any magic object didn’t have to mean something, they just had to represent their intention to the maker. The standardisation of the glyphic concepts was simply a formality to help artificers at a later date work out what was going on with any object in question.
It was the day before Laurence’s seventh birthday when he finished the final page. He put down the book and felt a warm sensation all over his body. It was a tingling rush like he had been dipped in water that was slightly too warm, but not painfully so. Laurence just lay in his small bed feeling the sensation for about ten minutes before it went away. He felt completely refreshed and invigorated, so he got out of bed, put his book in his bag and decided to get dressed. As he pulled on his trousers he noticed that they were coming a bit too far up, but that wasn’t really news. He had been growing quite quickly over recent months and now he seemed to have broken a meter and a quarter. He grinned and thought “I’m going to have to make myself some new trousers. I can show mother how good I am at craftsmanship that way!” but that was a game for another day. It was the day before his birthday and he felt incredible, he had finished reading and comprehending the red book, he had even kept up with his medicine and fighting lessons that his father gave him.
Laurence loved the lessons with his father as he always learnt something new. More and more he was realising how a lot of forms of self-defence just applied his medicinal knowledge but in reverse, and that meant he had even more fun working out which pieces of knowledge connected together. The boy was insatiable, but his thirst for learning was the pride and joy of his father. He would often be bragged about by his parents in town council meetings, how he was learning the art of medicine and battle from his father while he seemed to be picking up his artistic flair from his mother. In their eyes Laurence could literally do no wrong.
He walked downstairs into the kitchen and ran into his father holding a box full of things from around the time Laurence was born. “Daddy, can we do some fighting today? I feel really active before my birthday!” He idolised his father, the strongest and smartest man in the village. It was everything the young boy sought after, and adding to the fact that the man was over two meters in height he often seemed like a giant from some fairy tale. Laurence knew that if he could even become one tenth of the man his father was then he would be happy.
“Of course, Law, I’m just putting some of the baby things in the attic and we will begin. Get yourself ready in the courtyard okay?” His father and mother would often refer to Laurence as Law when they were busy. As his father walked upstairs one of the books that Laurence had read to him when he was a baby fell down the stairs, so the boy put it in his bag of holding to give to his father later.
He walked to the courtyard mulling over his bag of holding, on the outside it was barely twenty centimeters across. Now, thanks to the descriptions in the red book Laurence had stabilised the dimension inside the bag and it was a solid twenty five meter cube of space that he could store his belongings in. He did not think that such a distance was big, but then he had nothing to compare the bag to. The red book only told him how to make the bag, not how common the sizes of bags actually were, but if he had spoken to his father about it, he would have been shocked to discover that his bag was quite rare. The fact that the bag was stable was not enough for Laurence though. He wanted to turn the bag into an even smaller object so it did not seem like he was carrying anything on him at all, but the book said that it would take a large amount of mana to do so. Unfortunately Laurence still had no real way to regulate his mana, or even the knowledge of what mana really was.
The boy was lost in his thoughts when he noticed a kind of pulsating feeling coming from behind him. He could feel the sensation coming from the altar in the main hall of the church and he wanted to know what could cause it, but he resisted the urge, his sparring with his father was more important to him for the moment. He had a new creation in his bag that he had to show his father, it was his first proper piece since the map and he was proud of it beyond belief.
Eventually his father arrived and they put on their padded armour so they were unlikely to really hurt each other, then picked up staves. Laurence’s father insisted in teaching Laurence the staff. He claimed it was the most versatile tool in combat and that its myriad of styles could be applied to most melee range weapons.
Over the last three months Laurence had been shown three forms of combat as his father called them. The first was an attacking style called Orion’s Chest which involved striking the meridian line of the enemy from various angles. The second was a defensive style called Orion’s Belt which involved striking from the meridian line to force the enemy weapons away from your body. The third and final form was a movement style called Orion’s Feet which was formed from a series of straight line movements to attack and defend. The three styles were extremely simple in concept, and worked perfectly together as a form known as Orion’s Hunt. The form was simple enough for Laurence to understand, and succinct enough for him to pick up easily. Because of this he had moved on to sparring with his father, and today was their tenth day of spars.
They met in the middle and Laurence dove straight for a strike to the chin. The rules were simple. If Laurence could either land a strike once or defend properly for thirty seconds he would win. If neither happened then he would lose. As the pole came towards his father’s face, He struck the side of Laurence’s weapon diverting it just enough to miss and then swung his pole down towards the crown of Laurence’s head. Laurence jumped backwards, tapping the pole above his head out of the way. He had learnt early on that it was easier to move the tip of a weapon than the base. His father smiled and they shifted back to their starting position.
Their second round of attacks was quicker. Laurence went for a strike to the abdomen, but just as he was about to be blocked he thrust the pole up at an angle. The two staves collided and Laurence’s pole almost struck his father throat. Laurence’s father leapt in the air and struck towards Laurence’s feet. The boy realised what was happening a fraction of a second too late and his legs became tangled round the pole, causing him to fall over.
And with that the fight was over. Laurence had lasted less than ten seconds with his father, but he was dripping in sweat. He stood up, bowed and then began taking off his gear.
“You did well,” Laurence’s father began, “But you stopped watching my hands. You can tell where someone is going to move and how they are going to strike based on just their shoulders and hands”. He began putting the tools away. “Eyes can lie, but the body cannot. Other than that, you did well. Your form was good and your attacks sharp, I was really impressed with the way you forced me to move your stave into another weak point”.
“Thank you Daddy. I have another thing I want to show you”. Laurence said, barely able to hide his grin. Today he would blow his father away in shock with his skill. “I made this over the last year. What do you think?” He pulled out a thin bronze sword bound with strips of cloth and leather at the hilt. The sword could only just be described as a short-sword, as the entire thing was less than a meter in length with an edge on either side of the blade. The sword was stunning, the brass gave it an incredible colour, and the form of the sword itself was beautiful in its simplicity. It was Laurence’s pride and joy.
“You made this?” Laurence’s father was astonished. “This looks like a weapon made by a master smith! How?”
“You haven’t seen the best part yet Daddy!” Laurence said handing the sword to his father. “Strike something with the sword as hard as you can”.
Laurence’s father shrugged and swung the sword against the side of the house watching it shatter in dismay. “Oh no! I’m so sorry Laurence!” He said turning round to see his son’s beaming face.
“It’s okay daddy! Just hold the sword in the sunlight”. Laurence replied, grinning ear to ear. His father held the sword in the air and watched the blade re-form itself from the break upwards. Within seconds the sword was completely reformed, and even tougher than before.
Laurence’s father truly did not know whether to laugh or cry. The young boy in front of him had created an incredible artefact and it could only mean one thing.
“Laurence how did you learn to make this?”
Laurence answered immediately, his father sounded scared and Laurence had never seen his father scared before. To Laurence fear was for other people’s parents, not his. “My red book showed me. I have been learning The Art of Making for the last year. This is my final product that I constructed just before finishing the book”. His father’s jaw dropped. “I finished reading the book this morning, I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot!”
Laurence’s father couldn’t believe it. A seven year old child had completed the first step on his own, and not only that but within a year. His son was easily equivalent to a golden child of the great clans. This was not something he had ever intended. “Laurence, please listen very carefully”. His father bent down and looked him in the eye. “You cannot tell anyone about the fact that you made this, and you should never mention your red book. If you make something else and anyone other than me asks where you got it, you must say that as a golden child of the Absolution clan you earned it”. He paused. “Have you got that Laurence?”
“Yes Daddy”. Laurence thought for a moment and said, “Daddy, is that why our last name is Absolution? Because we’re from that clan?”
“Yes, I am a member of the clan, so my wife and child are too”.
With that they both went inside. Laurence gave his father the sword to keep and began thinking about his next project. It was hard as since he first noticed it the throbbing sensation coming from the altar had become stronger. It didn’t happen constantly but it was becoming more regular. The throbbing bothered Laurence all through dinner and the evening. It kept him awake until long after his parents had both gone to bed. Finally at around one in the morning Laurence broke. He walked into the rectory with his bag and inspected the altar. The throbbing was coming from behind the great black stele, what Laurence finally realised was a door. He opened the door, revealing an endless abyss beyond and walked in.
