"And in so doing, I guide the lifeblood of civilization in towards a foundation of the future," Oliver continued, his voice growing steadily drier, but he was so close to the end and didn't want to deal with splitting his casting session in half. The copper had long since hardened and stopped spreading easily, but there was enough Technological mana around that he could still coax it out bit by bit into the final few places the array needed it.

The point of a tower, when you truly came down to it, was to create a place that a wizard could practice their magic at its most potent. For Oliver, that meant it absolutely had to count as sufficiently Technological that he didn't have to ward the Nature out. Yes, he'd be warding the Technology in, but the difference was more important than it sounded at first. It was a bit like a clean room having higher air pressure than the surroundings, so that any leaks meant the inside got out, not the other way around.

But, if he wanted any hope whatsoever of achieving a surplus of Technology in his tower, then he needed a really, truly solid source of it. That, in turn, required material that was as minimally Natural as possible, and clay and wood simply weren't going to cut it. The fact that it was a metal specifically made it even better – which was to say, brought it into the realm of plausibility – because of just how well Metal and Technology worked together.

Already he was sensing the benefits of his array, with motes of Technology around him that he hadn't directly created, which in turn made finishing the array easier, and…

Oliver had felt like he'd been running up a waterfall for a while now, but now he was finally getting toeholds to boost himself just that much further. How great would the tower be when it was finished?

"Within this site, a pillar of industry is to be raised. With this copper as a foundation, the chaotic wilderness shall be the fuel upon which the pyre of savagery is burned. Come, you winds of change. Come, you currents of discord. Come, and break yourself upon the bastion I raise."

Oliver took his hammer and tapped the final bead of copper, slowly extending it out into the wire he needed it to be. Just a few more inches, and the circle would be complete.

"Join with your kin, now. For as with all things, you are strongest when together, strongest when whole. Just as fire was stolen, so too do I steal the powers beyond me and seal them below me, the footstool and foundation for the spear which pierces the heavens in my name. For this tower shall be a spear, a weapon and tool for all of humanity to break that which is above us and crush that which is below us."

With a shiver in the magic, the circle was closed, and Oliver stopped his chanting. He still kept his movements very carefully measured, of course, because the circle was still fragile, but he no longer needed to keep building it, unless he made some kind of movement that-

Oops. [Scrollcast]

"Look to the sky, coil and join together. Buoyant inflammable metallic swordfish."

Oliver hated having to cast with incoherence, but sometimes it was necessary, especially when he made a rough enough mistake and had to hard-correct. And mistakes were annoying but inevitable, because just too much of casting was spontaneous adjustments to unforeseen circumstances.

For example, it was basically impossible to predict that while being withdrawn his hand would pass through a motion that meant 'rend' that in turn disrupted some of the still-building mana. The first part of his spell had been to fix that particular mistake, and the second part was to smooth out some of the ripples his combined error and fix had done.

Once he was outside of the defined magical circle, Oliver slumped in relief and gratefully downed a jug of water prepared for just this purpose.

"Did everything go as you expected," Henrietta inquired, causing Oliver to startle slightly. He'd forgotten she was watching.

"Yep! Yes. Mostly. There were a few snags as I was establishing an upwards mana-flow that I wasn't expecting. Apparently, the updraft around here that's pulling the Air along with it tops out basically level with the pillar, after which it starts to run parallel to the ground. So I had to fight that and effectively extend the updraft to not cause undue strain on," he had to stop to cough, and croaked out a final, "the tower. Also there was more."

"Just focus on your water," Henrietta told him.

"Right," he took another gulp, then remembered his manners. "Oh, and thanks for the save earlier, with the ink."

"Just filling my role," she replied, only for a tremendous crash to distract both of them.

"OH UNBOUND GODS," Alyssa yelled from near the crane, "Are you alright?"

With a shared glance, both Oliver and Henrietta scrambled to their feet. Henrietta obviously outpaced Oliver, and he arrived panting a few moments later by the crane and peered over the edge – hands firmly gripped on the reed structure of said crane, of course – to see Clark and Jacob far below, and the smashed remains of their platform and several broken bricks around them.

"What happened?" Oliver asked to the air, gasping for breath.

"It fell," Alyssa quickly replied, "Something down there broke and the whole thing just dropped. Too many bricks I think, I don't know what broke?"

Oliver sighed, but before he headed to the ladders that he might be able to climb down and fix whatever had broken at the bottom, Henrietta cut him off. "Are you still up to working on the tower, or is your Mana exhausted?"

He shook his head, then realized that was inaccurate and nodded. Then he realized that was ambiguous and spoke up, "Most of what I was doing towards the end was fairly mana-light, and my Generation is higher than my Capacity anyway. I need to take some measurements and possibly do some adjustments, but…."

Henrietta waved him off, "Go do what you need to do. We can figure out what happened on our own."

He acknowledged the direction and began to head off, only to pause, "Oh, and don't forget I'll need some wet clay too?"

"I know, Smith. This one is my duty, and potentially a good example as to why the planned stations were."

Henrietta's voice faded as Oliver gained distance and the wind whistled through his ears. Was it stronger than normal right now? He thought it was just his imagination, but he wasn't certain enough to entirely dismiss the sensation.

By the time he made it back to the construction site, he'd either adjusted to the increased wind or his imagination had subsided, so he put it out of his mind and began looking at the tower's foundation.

A magic circle some three meters in radius, carved into hardened clay and with some portions filled in with copper was the primary section, but Oliver's oh-so-leveled and flattened foundation of dry clay extended well beyond that comparatively small area. Off to one side, a pile of reeds for scaffolding and a stack of bricks waited for Oliver to begin placing them, and his tools were laid out carefully on the other side.

The site brought a strange mixture of emotions to Oliver's mind. Pride, because the site was as level as was possible to get given his available tools. Annoyance, because even that wasn't as level as he wanted, something that he'd only been able to confirm because of the adjustments he'd needed to make to the circle to compensate for it not being perfectly flat and level.

Also, the circle was apparently slightly lopsided. It didn't matter that the stake-and-string method was essentially the exact same method Oliver used to scribe circles larger than a compass made practical, it seemed like everything here just worked slightly worse.

The circle itself wasn't anything too special, as far as foundation-circles went. Just a standard monofocused thrice-recursive design in Parengelic, the most exciting innovation being the way he'd needed to utilize some Discoric glyphs around the edge due to the all-pervasive Nature mana he was handling. It wasn't large enough to handle some of the really cool stuff – not that Oliver had the ability to make any of them with mud and sticks – but it had the important things.

The central subject for the array had been the tower itself, which Oliver had chosen to translate with a modified Spear glyph. Nizah, the specific one in use, technically had associations with spears and weapons, and while when used to refer to towers usually indicated that the tower was as part of a fortress, it felt apt here, and was why he'd tested it to begin with. Ultimately, it had provided the effect closest to what Oliver had been looking for, and so it had stuck.

It wasn't always possible to figure out why an enchantment or spell insisted on the use of a particular glyph, motion, or word, but Oliver's divination training meant he was pretty good at figuring out what it did insist on. He wasn't sure if he'd call himself superstitious, and he certainly wasn't religious, but even though the Tapestry didn't have the deepest secrets of life and the universe hidden within its folds didn't mean that it didn't know what was best for it in smaller-scale situations.

The flip side to that was that you had to know when to overrule the Tapestry, because it didn't always 'want' the same thing you wanted from it, but for the little details it usually was better to weave in concert with reality than opposed to it.

So, the Spear was carved at the very center of the circle, cast in copper for stability and solidity. Around that innermost circle were the first-order modifiers, the primary nexus which distributed directions to the enchantment around it. While Spear defined the overall direction of the enchantment – literally in this case, as it pointed to the heavens – it was this first ring that was the true heart of the enchantment. While sloppiness and carelessness could never be allowed in any enchantment, every single glyph in the first ring had to be measured and considered by every angle to work.

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Did neighboring glyphs accidentally clash, like putting a rune associated with Passion directly next to one associated with Peace? If so, that could cause anything from a clog to a broken circle. In the best-case scenario, the entire circle wouldn't work. In the worst-case, it would work long enough to gather up enough power to explode.

Did a glyph have no particular Associations with its neighbors, but its two neighbors did have Associations with one another? In that case, the glyph might be entirely 'skipped over,' its presence effectively ignored as the tangle of mana resulting from its neighbors interacting washed out its contribution to the circle, bypassing huge portions of the enchantment as a result.

Would the innate actions of one glyph interfere with the actions of its neighbor? An Ice-associated Erruz - Snowbank - glyph might physically cool down, which could cause problems with a neighboring Wood-associated liakil - Tree - glyph. Or the Tree might prove to be stronger, 'thawing' the Snowbank. But, then the Snowbank might reassert itself, freezing the Tree and inadvertently turning the Snowbank and Tree into a Season-associated Iceleaf glyph.

Were two glyphs with very similar associations on opposite sides of the circle? Did the entire circle form a meaningful statement on its own outside of the ways they conjugated the spear? Did any of the ways those statements could be read not mesh with the overall goal of the circle? Did the glyphs form an anagram of some kind? Did they bear any resemblance to a demon-summoning circle if read backwards or inverted? Did the number of glyphs involved have any inherent associations itself? Did he leave enough leeway in his design for natural or unnatural shifts in the Tapestry to not rip the entire thing to pieces?

It wasn't like those weren't considerations in every enchantment, but for a foundational magic circle he needed to worry about all of it so much more than normal. No ignoring the Arcane feedback from having the entire circle operating, no ignoring the Rune echoes from so many glyphs in one place. And that was on top of making sure the angle of each glyph was accurate and that each glyph was perfectly drawn, because the order of strokes made for a glyph could make the difference between two glyphs, with no visual way to tell them apart afterwards. Given he was doing his best to remove glimmers of mana from the circle before it was completed, that meant it would be really hard to tell the difference between the two magically as well.

For a circle of this complexity, of course each glyph utilized in the inner ring also had an outer ring tuning its precise definitions, which had their own inner rings, and some of those even had a third-level remote conjugation. By the Gyazian Standard, that technically made this a third-circle spell, but by Callorin Standard it was only a first-circle on account of only having a single truly primary effect in the form of his Spear.

Now that the circle was… not exactly active, but at least complete, and mostly steady, Oliver could go over the construction much more productively. He could easily sense what each area was doing, and he could compare that to his notes mental and physical – inscribed on a clay tablet – alike. Some portions were still too complicated to assess at a glance, and he'd have to debug them once their effects became more apparent, but he liked what he saw so…

Spoke too soon.

The inner ring's Tree was behaving oddly. He wasn't able to quite figure out what was wrong, per se, but it was wrong enough that it was fighting the rest of the magic rather than working in concert and amplifying the rest of the circle. The glyph itself was definitely working, it just wasn't behaving in concordance with the overall thing, and if he didn't fix it it would damage the overall circle, sort of like how a rattling part in a high-power engine could cause catastrophic failure if left untreated. He could sense the magic flowing through it, being passed to and from its subsidiary circle… was it something there?

Tree could probably be more comprehensively translated as 'Towering Tree,' with extant associations to Wood, Air, and Primal. It also obviously had fairly obvious associations with Shadow, but in the way he currently had it conjugating the Spear that particular association would be suppressed. To compensate, his subsidiary circle tried to drag the Shadow association back into primacy.

So, Oliver circled around until he got to said Tree subsidiary circle, trying to figure out if he'd messed up something with the re-adjustment there. He wasn't… seeing any issues. He could quite easily trace out the full logic of the circle… hm, should he have swapped the position of the inner circle Preeminence and Memory glyphs there? The way he had them, could it potentially imply that the tree was the one with a shadow being cast on it?

He referred to his design notes. Okay, it seemed like that was at least an intentional choice, but why had he done it that way? The whole point of drawing on the Shadow associations of Tree was to reinforce the aspects of Spear pertaining to leaving a lasting impression. That was because he really, really needed the tower to be notable enough on its own that it could naturally generate the Significance needed to power the System node that would be on top of it.

It was… debatable, how much the optimization was really needed at the level he was operating at, but simultaneously he needed to optimize his enchantments as much as possible because he really didn't have the margins to risk non-optimization. The simple fact that he wasn't undergoing full ritual cleansing and attunement all the time still stood a solid chance of screwing something up, it just hadn't yet.

Hmmm. Did he want to change it? Was that inverted pair possibly having more of an impact on the overall enchantment than he'd initially thought it would? Of course, if he were to adjust the position of those two runes, he'd also need to redo their feeder circles. Eh, he could make it work without fully redoing, but he'd definitely need to adjust. The spatial orientation would also shift, and that could cause further cascading changes, and that sounded like an enormous pain to do on a live enchantment.

Oh, wait no, I'm just being stupid. Of course he wanted the implication of the Tree having a shadow cast upon it, he wasn't making the tower level up. The tower was simply the platform upon which they would reach greater heights.

Okay, so that pair shouldn't be changed, but that didn't really help him figure out what did need to be changed. Nothing else was jumping out at him from the secondary circle, and even though he couldn't get a particularly good look at the tertiary circles supporting the Tree circle, nothing in his arcanoception jumped out as being incorrect.

Did he just have a design flaw? Was Tree not, actually, the right choice for this branch of the enchantment? He didn't think it was a matter of the glyph acting wildly different on this world... for all that there were a lot of trees around here. But... maybe?

His gaze wandered back to the center of the enchantment, where the primary Tree glyph sat in the Spear's inner circle. Which, from this angle, it really, really looked like it just… wasn't connected into the overall enchantment correctly. Like it wasn't in the inner circle, but was a second-circle glyph modifying its neighboring Snowbank glyph. He was trying to emphasize the gradual buildup applications of Snowbank, because this tower would be built in layers and the foundation needed to account for that. But an errant modification from Tree might skew it towards the direction of being something that already existed, and make it mean something more like 'ice cores made out of snow fallen at the dawn of time.' That would be in contrast to most of the enchantment with its theme of building something new from scratch, and might cause the problems he was seeing.

The only question was, why did the Tree not count as being in the inner ring?

"After all," he muttered, "It's right there in the ring, and it's perfectly centered between Snowbank and Telescope, so that can't be it. The glyph doesn't look malformed. Sure, it's not my best handwriting, but that just means it… damnit."

It swooped outwards a bit more than it probably should. If he were to guess, that slight additional swoop pulled the glyph 'out of bounds' of the inner ring, despite theoretically still being in the ring. But it was half a millimeter or whatever too far from the center, and as a result was applying itself in the completely wrong context. He had been worried about Tree and Snowbank combining into Iceleaf, and while they certainly remained separate glyphs, they'd still ended up modifying each other anyway.

"That's definitely it," Oliver groused to himself.

Now, he just needed to modify the glyph in an active enchantment to pull it within a bounding circle… and he couldn't shut the enchantment down without risking his ability to create something similar in the future. Too much of the structure was built on the idea of creating something brand-new, restarting the enchantment would inherently undermine that.

Oliver cracked his knuckles. A thousand generations of wizards at his back, a whole new world in front of him. Decades of training and months of dedicated preparation had all led to this moment. He definitely got this.

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