The wind sang low across the dunes of Arrakis. It was dusk now, the desert cast in long shadows of burnt ochre and flickering crimson. Alaric crouched near a low rock outcrop, one knee down in the sand, his cloak drawn tight around his shoulders. Even after weeks of being here on and off, the cold of the desert night still felt like betrayal after the furnace of midday.
But that wasn't why he was out here.
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a bundle of folded cloth. Inside, wrapped with near-paranoid care, were strips of rune-marked parchment, thin crystal discs, and a tightly wound chalk stick infused with soul power. He laid them out slowly, methodically. There was no room for haste in what he was about to attempt.
"Time to start harvesting."
The spice — melange — was the whole reason this world mattered. He hadn't even touched a grain of it directly yet, too wary of the consequences. But he had studied its effects. Read through fragmented data of similar enhancing materials, matched symptoms across worlds. It amplified perception. Prolonged life. Enhanced cognitive function. Maybe even spirit energy, if aligned correctly.
And now, he would attempt to collect it.
Not by scooping. Not by crawling on his knees with a sieve like a desperate prospector. No — he would draw it.
Quite literally.
He began tracing.
The circle was wide — nearly three meters in diameter, carefully drawn in the sandstone, right at the transition to sand, using chalk laced with micro-thin threads of charged copper. Not magical in and of itself, but hyper-conductive. Every twenty degrees, he placed a crystal shard etched with a different rune: flow, filter, containment, attunement. All runes he had lifted from various arcane schools in the Silver Cities and stitched together with his own logic.
In the center, he drew a spiral. Clockwise — not for aggression, but collection. Spirals that drew, not scattered.
He paused. Calming down before starting was essential.
The formation wasn't a traditional spell. Not elemental, not even reactive. It was a passive absorption matrix — meant to be placed near a patch of spice-saturated sand and left to gently pull the spice from the sand particles through resonance and collect it in the containment crystals. It was based on the fact that spice was naturally lighter than sand to do so. After all it came up to the surface and was even flying trough the air in small doses. Big enough though, that the Fremen all became blue eye colored.
The goal was subtlety.
No explosions.
No dramatic reactions that would wake the sandworms, alarm the Fremen or worse – give a noticeable signal to whoever currently ruled over Arrakis.
He activated the outer glyphs one by one. The crystals shimmered, humming faintly. No glow — not here. He had dulled the light spectrum of the formation's output. Any visible glow could be seen from miles away. And on this world, being seen meant being hunted.
The sand near the circle began to shift — faintly. Almost imperceptibly.
Alaric lowered himself to a seated position beside the array and waited, observing the sand and checking for problems in the formation.
Ten minutes passed.
Then fifteen.
And then it came — a shift in scent. He barely noticed it through his breathing cloth, but it was there: cinnamon. Spice. Real. Unrefined. Raw.
He glanced at the crystals. The containment rune etched into the central three had begun to make the crystals absorb a faint reddish glow — not enough to activate, but enough to gather trace amounts of melange without disturbing the ground structure.
He allowed himself a smile.
"It works."
James, cloaked and inert beside him, stirred faintly as Alaric tapped a signal through their minor link — a glyph code he'd inscribed just for this moment. The golem stood and approached, carrying a small reinforced satchel.
"Preparation successful, sir?" the mechanical voice whispered.
Alaric nodded. "Collection at 0.5 grams per minute. Crystals aren't overheating. No sign of deep vibrations."
"Risk of worm disturbance?"
"Negligible. It's slow enough not to trigger surface tremors."
He stood and circled the formation, checking for instability. One of the side crystals buzzed erratically. He quickly etched a stabilizing rune next to it, muting the effect. The Vault flickered, then pulsed again — a small confirmation of theoretical success.
"This," Alaric whispered, "is how we harvest without being eaten."
He let the spell run for another hour. By then, the crystals had gathered enough raw Spice dust to last him a month of microdosing experiments — assuming he filtered it properly and didn't die from improper intake. Always a risk.
As he deactivated the circle, the spiral collapsed inward, drawing the last of the energy back into the central ring. The sand settled again, indistinguishable from its surroundings.
Alaric knelt and packed the crystals away in lead-lined compartments. The circle? He wiped it with a simple motion, then triggered a null-glyph to unravel all traces of his magical presence from the location.
Nothing remained.
No trace.
No signature.
Even the Vault went silent again.
Back at his outcrop, Alaric stared at the first containment crystal he had filled — swirling faint red, like a storm caught in amber.
"Tomorrow," he said to James, "we begin tests."
The golem nodded.
Alaric leaned back, watching the stars of Arrakis twinkle into view.
This world whispered secrets through its sand. And now — he was beginning to understand the language.
The night deepened around them. Cold now, in a way that seeped into the joints even with layered clothing. Alaric didn't care. His mind was already moving, already sketching formulas on the backs of his thoughts.
Testing would be dangerous. Not because of the spice directly — though that certainly posed risks — but because the line between experimentation and addiction was one often crossed without noticing. And Alaric, despite his years of planning and self-discipline, was still a child. He knew that. Which was why caution had to be baked into the design from the start.
He removed a separate vial from his bag. It was no larger than his thumb, made of obsidian-glass, and lined with silver filigree. A prototype containment ward for volatile substances. Inside, he deposited three filled crystals of spice collected from the matrix.
Three.
That was all.
He sealed it with a breath-triggered glyph, watching the lines of the ward pulse once before turning inert. Locked. Safe. For now.
James stood silently behind him, acting like a sentry.
"Tomorrow, after school, we'll go back to the silver cities," Alaric muttered. "I want to know what kind of mutations this stuff causes in humans."
"Understood, sir," the golem replied with its usual calm intonation.
He rose, brushing off his cloak. The dunes no longer shimmered with heat; they lay still, vast, uncaring. And yet, he felt them watching — not with sentience, but with consequence. This world remembered footsteps. It punished arrogance. Even a whisper too loud could summon death from below.
Alaric had no intention of repeating history.
He turned away from the collection site, eyes darting once over the terrain. Satisfied with the erasure of evidence, he and James moved swiftly and in silence, returning toward their sheltered alcove.
The following day began early, a math lesson falling out because of a sick teacher.
A private labor, nestled within the base of the lowest part of the potion division, was cool and silent. Here, the walls were lined with gear — scavenged, traded, or built. The lab had cost him three entire days of favors and one significant enchantment lesson traded to a greedy merchant-mage from another flying city, who gave him the place in exchange.
Worth it.
Alaric sat cross-legged before the alchemical bench, James nearby in standby mode. The sealed obsidian vial lay before him, still untouched.
He inhaled deeply, centering himself.
He began by drawing a minor sigil of filtration — meant to catch and isolate impurities without interfering with magical qualities. Then he carefully uncorked the vial using a glyph-inscribed rod, letting the scent hit slowly.
Cinnamon. Sand. Something else. Something underneath perception — like an echo, or a memory you couldn't quite place.
He extracted one grain onto the plate.
Just one.
Then he cast a shallow pulse of mana across the surface of the testing glyph.
The result was immediate.
His own magical energy, stabilized and trained through months of Silver Cities tutelage, reacted. Not wildly. Not violently. But it bent — just slightly. Like gravity being distorted by mass.
He blinked.
The Vault pulsed.
Beneath his skin, he felt it — a stretching sensation in his thoughts. Not in a bad way. Like the space around a puzzle expanding to reveal a few more pieces.
Alaric wrote it down instantly.
First reaction: cognitive expansion. Subtle. Detected increase in ambient mana processing capacity. Notable sensitivity spike in surrounding magical threads.
He stared at the single grain.
"Then what about two?"
It was reckless.
He did it anyway.
The second grain went onto the plate.
This time, when he cast the mana pulse, the reaction curved back toward him. The magic knew he was there. Not intelligently. Not sentient. But aware. As if the spice had created a bridge between his casting and the field around him.
The Vault pulsed — and twisted, ending with a click.
Alaric's mind filled with a shape — not a word, not an idea — just a rotating, fractal glyph. One he had never seen before. It didn't belong to any school of magic he knew. It didn't correspond to logic gates or known runes.
He felt pressure in the back of his mind.
He snapped his fingers, breaking the flow.
The glyph vanished.
His heartbeat was too loud.
"Okay," he whispered, blinking the tension out of his neck, "maybe that's the limit."
By midday, Alaric had documented twelve minor changes to his casting grid sensitivity and one hypothesis:
The spice creates a secondary frequency in mana perception — possibly allowing dual-thread casting or near-instant spell branching. Future testing with containment wards and projection sigils advised. Risk of hallucination: moderate. Risk of addiction: high. Risk of breakthrough: unknown.
He leaned back and closed his notebook.
James handed him a cooled glass of water with a slice of lime, unprompted. Alaric accepted it with a nod, having discovered that lime was a new favorite of his.
The wind whistled faintly outside the window.
"This stuff is dangerous," he muttered. "I'll need to build a mental filtering matrix before the next dose. Something that keeps the Vault's feedback from overlapping with my own."
The golem said nothing.
"Also," Alaric added after a moment, "remind me never to dose before a duel. Pretty sure I'd start predicting my opponent's footwork before they move and then forget how to cast lightning."
"Understood, sir."
He looked at the vial. Resealed. Still dangerous.
But useful.
In the right hands?
Maybe more than useful.
Maybe transformative.
And in his?
A weapon.
A lens.
A key.
A building block for a great amount of power.
Alaric stood and tucked the remaining crystals into a shielded pouch.
One step at a time.
That's how the world was made.
And how, one day, he might unmake it too — with knowledge, not fire.
But if fire was needed?
He'd know exactly how to light a flame.